Right now, there are more than 1.3 million lawyers practicing in America. (How’s that for a scary opener?)
At the same time, the United States Supreme Court accepts just 100-150 cases per year.
That means most lawyers never get within sniffing distance of arguing in front of the nine justices. For those who do, it’s usually the honor of a lifetime. They leave the building with handcrafted souvenir quill pens the Court gives to lawyers who appear before them.
Three hundred sixty-four days out of the year, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is a sleepy one-horse town of 5,800 souls, nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians 84 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. But on that other glorious day of the year, it’s the center of the universe. On February 2, a mangy groundhog named Phil dons a top hat and comes out of his hole to look for his shadow. If he sees it, we’re doomed to six more weeks of winter. If not, spring is on its way.
Who wouldn’t want to join the 21st-century equivalent of those old-school clubs where stuffy men sit around in leather chairs reading the Wall Street Journal while white-jacked waiters keep them stocked with gin-and-tonics? But make no mistake about it, American Express is a business, and a profitable one at that. That means, behind the scenes, they sometimes cut a corner or two, including a little light tax fraud.
On January 3, 2009, an unknown figure calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto “mined” the first Bitcoin and launched a modern-day Gold Rush. Fifteen years later, there’s still no significant use case for cryptocurrency; wild price swings have failed to establish it as any sort of store of value, and a rogues’ gallery of actual rogues has hijacked, rug-pulled, swindled, and scammed millions of hapless “investors” across the globe. Most famously, crypto whiz kid Sam Bankman-Fried is arbitraging cans of tinned mackerel in the same prison where Epstein didn’t kill himself, while he appeals his conviction on federal fraud charges.
Someday, accountants will be cool. I don’t just mean in the “Oh, you’re majoring in accounting, that’s cool” sense. I mean Steve-McQueen-cruising-through-Rome-on-a-Vespa cool. Someday, little kids who dream of growing up to be accountants will collect bubblegum cards with Big Four partners’ pictures on one side and detailed career stats on the back. (Tax dollars saved, by year! Endorses checks: right-handed!) When they get to high school, they’ll be as popular as the quarterback of the football team and the Homecoming Queen. (56.8% of CPAs are women.) Someday, cool college kids will skip fraternities to party with the Accounting Club.
2025 promises to be a big year for taxes. Right now, the individual provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 set our current standard deductions and tax brackets. Those rules expire, like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight on December 31. At that point, if Washington hasn’t extended them, taxes go up for as much as 80% of Americans. That’s an unacceptable result for Democrats and Republicans alike. And it promises a bruising effort ahead as Congress weighs continuing the cuts against a $36 trillion national debt.
