If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
I found myself saying, "I can't believe we have to send that much of our money to the government."
OK, we understand that this is garden-variety election pandering to the Tea Party base and all of that, but we feel duty-bound to offer up a little garden-variety ridicule to go with it.
Nancy Pelosi just moved the $250K tax threshold up to $1 million. That is, she wrote: "Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire..." That is a very big, very bad deal.
The DOJ gave states new revenue sources, saying that they could add other forms of gambling online so long as it didn't include sports betting. Poker, slots, blackjack -- all fine. And, like last weekend's Preakness, states are off to the races to see who can be first across the finish line.
Let's talk about the fiscal cliff -- you know, the one everyone's all wound up about? Well, the Congressional Budget Office just released their analysis of its potential impact on the economy and it ain't pretty. Add up all the stuff that's scheduled to turn into fiscal pumpkins at midnight on December 31, and you could get a serious impact on the economy. Unemployment would reverse course and start rising if that fiscal scenario remained in place -- but that's a big, important "if." All of the estimates assume we go off the cliff and don't climb back. But if, as Gail Collins imagines it, there's a bungee jump instead of a cliff dive, we can avoid the worst of this. One hopes that Congress can hammer the kind of compromise that has eluded them thus far -- the one that adds tax revenues to any agreement -- before the end of the year, or early next.
People talk a great deal about free trade. But for better or for worse the real world that we live in is more a mercantilist world than it is a free markets and free trade world.
Many Americans will be getting tax refunds from the government, and tax refunds are "found money" -- money you forgot was yours. It's as if the government lifted up your couch cushions and found a few hundred dollars.
This is a pressure point that smart Democrats may want to exploit as there is talk about tax fairness and raising Social Security rates and retirement ages as we go into yet another election cycle.
Today, the Coalition on Human Needs sent a letter making these points to every senator. May 16, 2012 Dear Senator: Today you will have the opportun...
A better way to work towards a larger refund next year is by taking advantage of all the tax credits and deductions that you may be entitled to, but are often overlooked.
Just in case you had been suffering delusions that Republicans have improved on basic arithmetic or responsible governance, House Speaker John Boehner and presidential aspirant Mitt Romney on Tuesday made sure to disabuse you of that notion. As both men pandered to the base on deficit reduction while foreswearing tax increases, they reinforced the central Republican narrative of our age: Somebody else can pay for the mess we made.
America is having the wrong conversation about corporate taxes. The problem isn't that corporate tax rates are too high, or that these rates are rendering us uncompetitive. This all-too-common story is simply untrue.
Just ten years ago this country was running huge surpluses and paying off its debt. But then we elected Obama and all hell broke loose. Oh, wait...
The school district announced that it was moving to a four-day school week. Children in the county will now get an inferior education -- something that will hurt them later in life, and hurts businesses in the region that need an educated workforce.
Big Business' managerial performance in the 2008 financial crisis isn't an inspiring endorsement of advice from, or the managerial competency of, America's largest corporations.
Should those degrees we spend tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on should maybe focus less on forcing freshman to take sex ed and Bio 101 and instead provide us with courses on how to do our taxes?
