What is it with the chickens?

First Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden thinks that it would be a good idea to pay for health care by bringing a chicken to the doctor.

Unfortunately it appears that we would be short about 443 billion chicken for covering US health-care costs in a chicken-based health-care system.

Then Evo Morales blames homosexuality on transgenic chickens.

The poor chickens just can't get a break...

Falange charges too crazy for Varela

I wonder if he is having second thoughts about working with a bunch of insane fascists.

In a letter to Falange and Manos Limpias, he tells them to tone it down and only include charges that they have any hope of actually proving.

The Falange's rambling charges accuse Garzon of a being a notorious leftist and injuring the honor of certain families by suggesting that crimes against humanity occurred.

Otherwise he says he will be forced deny their prosecution. Perhaps he is annoyed at the fact the he wrote a perfectly good indictment himself, and for some reason Falange was too stupid to just put their name on it and file it.

He gives them 24 hours to correct the charges.

Inheritance tax in Spain

Something to keep in mind when living (even temporarily, but as a resident) in Spain is that Spain has a very weird system of inheritance taxes. From a political policy perspective, I'm generally in favor of inheritance taxes, since the incentives don't tend to be too disruptive (it's not like people will stop dying) and it reduces overall inequality in society by taxing what is essentially unearned income for relatives of rich people.

However, in Spain, when a husband or wife dies, any assets of the dead spouse are subject to inheritance tax by the surviving spouse. Any assets that are owned jointly, are considered owned 50% by the dead spouse and are taxed accordingly. The rates are actually quite high, which I assume means that the wealthier families in Catalunya has already figured out a way around this, but this requires structuring your assets with the help of a good lawyer. Alternatively, it's probably cheaper just to buy life insurance to cover the tax (for us for example, it's a couple hundred euros a year, which is much less than a good lawyer would charge).

Joint real-estate is also taxed, but according to its catastral (property tax) value, not the actual estimated value (which tends to be much higher, at least for now). If you have a mortgage, this gets deducted off the value.

In addition, upon the death of a joint account holder, all bank accounts are frozen until the appropriate taxes are paid. This would suggest that each partner have at least a small account only under their name with some emergency money to pay the rent, mortgage, etc.

In theory, assets worldwide are subject to this tax as well, although until now the authorities have not made much effort to track them down.

The specifics of the law are actually controlled by the region of Spain you are living in, for example, in Madrid, they've gotten rid of taxation for spouses. In Catalunya they didn't eliminate the tax, but they did lower the rate significantly in 2008 (apparently all the rich couples just registered themselves in Madrid to avoid this situation).

This is a good blog entry regarding one of the various schemes touted to save on inheritance tax.

One avoidance technique I found particularly amusing was just to lie low and wait for 5 years until the statue of limitations for paying taxes has passed.

How Garzon pissed off the Supreme Court

Interesting analysis on Garzon and some of the reasons why he is despised by the majority of the Supreme Court.

One particularly amusing episode happened in 2008 when Garzon ordered an extremely thorough closing of the Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV). In his ruling, he froze their bank accounts, seized their subsidies, and cut their water, light and phones for good measure.

Later that same afternoon, the Supreme Court was to hear a parallel case appealing the banning of the ANV. The attorney for the ANV didn't even bother to showing up to the hearing, since there wasn't anything left for the Supreme Court to shut down. Garzon got the headlines and the Supreme Court felt humiliated.

Reminds me of a video...

The Iceland volcano and American health care

According to our friend Rush Limbaugh, the recent eruption in Iceland is due to God's anger about the passing of health care reform in the US.

Apparently this is not God's first geography mistake, after mistakenly ordering the invasion of Iraq in response to a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis flying planes into buildings.

If anything, maybe the Norse gods are retaliating against the UK for their attempt to impose ruinous debts on Iceland.