This video is an outstanding presentation of the Western movie and television stars like The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and dozens of others. As a young boy in Yakima, Washington I often spent Satuday going to two double feature movies at the Roxy and Avenue theatres. The cost was 50 cents total for the four movies. The fanciest theatre in town was the Capital and it cost 35 cents admission to see a movie and a live vaudeville show.

I enjoyed watching this video very much. So join in for a nice trip down memory lane.

http://oldfortyfives.com/thoseoldwesterns.htm

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Posted by It’s Only Money Blog April 02, 2009 20:02PM

Categories: Taxes

If you were looking for a job in 2008, you might be able to deduct the expenses against your taxable income. But you must itemize deductions and there are other limits. Read on for the details.

The IRS considers many job-hunting costs to be “unreimbursed employee expenses” (Line 23, Schedule A). That includes the money you spend preparing a resume, traveling to a job interview or using an outplacement firm, according to IRS Publication 529.

You CANNOT, however, deduct job-search expenses if:

You’re looking for work in a new field.

You’re looking for your first job

You’ve taken a “substantial break” between jobs.

IRS senior tax consultant Kathy Howell points out: “We don’t really define what a substantial break is.” Most likely, she added, the IRS would consider a substantial break to be taking a year off to go back to school.

You can only deduct job-hunting costs if you itemize deductions using Schedule A and Form 1040. Normally, you itemize if the costs of such things as mortgage interest, real-estate taxes, state income or sales taxes, charitable contributions and high out-of-pocket health care costs exceed your standard deduction. The standard deduction in 2008 for a married couple under 65 filing jointly is $10,900. For singles or married couples filing separately, it’s $5,450.

Also, you can only deduct the amount of your job-hunting and other employee business expenses and other “miscellaneous deductions” (your accountant’s fees, the cost of your safe-deposit box, etc.) that exceed 2 percent of your adjusted gross income, Howell notes. Again, see lines 21 through 27 on Schedule A. For example, a person with an adjusted gross income (Line 38 on Form 1040) of $50,000 would need to spend more than $1,000 on those job-hunting and miscellaneous expenses.

More tax-savings tips here, on Kathy Howell’s Tax Q/A Blog and from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Famous American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – 2006), said: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Wonder what Galbraith would have said about our current financial crisis? Or did he predict it with the following statement:

“…the process by which wants are now synthesized is a potential source of economic instability. Production and therewith employment and social security are dependent on an inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation. This may one day falter.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith