Media

Regardless of whether you think taxes should be increased or decreased, there is one point in which most people agree: Our current tax system is too complex and in desperate need of reform.

If you have listened to conservatives talking about taxes -- oh, for the past 30 years -- you might think the number one complaint Americans have about taxes is that they pay too much.

Wrong. In fact, past polls have often shown that Americans are more irked by the sense that the tax system is unfair.

The Office of the Taxpayer Advocate was established in the 1996 by Republicans in Congress who wanted a watchdog within the IRS that would look out for ordinary taxpayers.

So it is interesting to hear what the current Taxpayer Advocate, a woman named Nina Olson, has to say about how today's Congress is treating taxpayers.

The unemployment numbers for November and December were good enough to encourage predictions of a stagnant or even slowly growing economy for 2012. It's nice to get good news, even if the bar is set at eluding economic disaster.

Class conflict is now the biggest source of social tension in America, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center -- bigger than racial conflict or tensions around immigration. Two-thirds of Americans now believe there are strong or very strong conflicts between poor people and rich people, a 19-point jump from two years ago.

Regardless of whether you think taxes should be increased or decreased, there is one point in which most people agree: Our current tax system is too complex and in desperate need of reform.

David Brooks writes today in the Times about how few Americans identify as "liberal" -- noting that twice as many Americans now identify as conservatives -- and concludes that over the last forty years, "liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share."

Yesterday, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver posted an open letter in protest of growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines.

The Montana Supreme Court in Helena stands just off the main drag, dramatically called Last Chance Gulch Street. The picturesque setting is fitting for an institution that has just challenged the U.S. Supreme Court to a legal showdown on the enormously important question of whether corporations should have an unfettered right to dominate elections or whether citizens have the right to adopt commonsense protections to defend democratic government from corruption.  Get the kids off the streets, because this could be an epic confrontation.