Just when you thought taxes and patents could not get any worse: Bush’s Top Economist Seeks Patent on His Own Tax Strategy (9/13/2007) reports on a patent application for a System And Method For Multi-State Tax Analysis, which claims:
“A method, comprising: creating one or more alternate entity structures based on a base entity structure, the base entity structure comprising one or more entities; determining a tax liability for each alternate entity structure and the base entity structure; and generating a result based on comparing each of the determined tax liabilities.â€
So let me get this straight: the state already taxes us, though there are various hoops we can jump through to lower those taxes. The state also grants patent monopolies that others can use to restrict your actions, or demand a fee for it. So here we have a crony of the guy whose policies will cost us trillions of dollars in taxes enforced by the state, getting from the same state a monopoly privilege on a method to legally reduce those taxes, unless you pay him a royalty for this privilege.
