Tax reform may be moving to the front burner of Congress this year, if two powerful committee chairs get their way, according to Politico. Should this happen, get ready for a fierce battle over the charitable tax deduction, a large and obvious target for reformers looking for revenue. The Congressional Research Service has estimated that the U.S.
China's environmental tax policy is moving in an interesting direction. It was announced yesterday that a new set of tax polices focused on preservation, rather than use, will be introduced, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. While the specifics have not been released, the government intends to collect environmental protection taxes, instead of pollutant discharge fees. China is also looking at taxing energy-intensive products, such as batteries and private aircraft, and increasing coal taxes.
If tax reform goes forward this year, as some leaders in Congress hope, one thing is certain: It won't be an elegant exercise in representative democracy. Think more interest group feeding frenzy.
During the first half of the Twentieth Century, as America became an industrial power, the most important battles for labor rights unfolded at steel plants, coal mines, oil refineries, and at manufacturing plants around the country, particularly in the auto industry.
Harsh, an IT professional from Tuscola, Illinois, is 62, around the age at which a lot of people start actively planning to retire to a white-sandy beach with a frozen margarita in hand.
Harsh's debt snuck up on her as she helped her two daughters with college and living costs. She went back to school after a divorce and dealt with unexpected expenses such as big dental bills. Now she has about $300 a month in minimum payments, spread across three credit cards, and the balance never seems to go down because of all the interest she is paying.
If you consider yourself part of the middle class, you could be forgiven for not standing at the ready after President Obama called for you to be reignited.
In the wake of President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour, critics of the proposal are repeating the familiar point that it is mainly teenagers and part-time workers who earn the minimum wage -- groups that supposedly don't need much of a boost in their wages.
Is that true? A succinct answer comes from a recent blog post by Doug Hall and Natalie Sabadish of the Economic Policy Institute. Here's what they wrote:
Gretchen Morgenson’s New York Times article on the New York Fed’s ongoing bailout of Bank of America is a much needed reminder of the tar baby embraced by the government in 2008 when it decided to save the banks in their current form rather than changing the system fundamentally.
Homeless families in New York City seeking relief from the extreme cold used to be supported by the city’s Code Blue policy, which requires homeless shelters to admit anyone who comes to their doors in below freezing temperatures. Since late 2011 however, the Bloomberg Administration has quietly changed the policy to a version in which only those who can prove they have no other alternatives are allowed admittance into shelters.
Dear Acting Director Mesenbourg,
We are writing about the consequences of the Census Bureau’s policy of tabulating incarcerated people as residents of prison locations, rather than at their home addresses. We write as organizations with an interest in ensuring fair and equitable representation for all people and communities.
President Obama's proposal last night to raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $9 (from $7.25) is sure to rekindle the perennial debate about whether such an increase will stall hiring for low-skilled workers, or whether small businesses will be able to sustain their payrolls with higher wage requirements.
President Obama came out strongly for tax reform in his State of the Union address, casting this challenge as crucial for raising for new revenue and avoiding harsh cuts. Obama argued that the U.S. could:
save hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and well-connected. After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? How is that fair? How does that promote growth?
One of the best proposals to come out of the State of the Union was the President's proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour, phased in over three years, and tie it to the cost of living so it automatically adjusts. If anything, the proposed minimum wage is still too low. If the minimum wage had kept up with the rate of inflation, it would now be over $10.
Easthampton, MA – Today, more than 200 civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice organizations sent a letter calling on the U.S. Census Bureau to seize a timely opportunity to research alternative ways to count incarcerated people in the decennial Census.
State tax systems, according to a new report from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, take a far larger share of income from their lowest income residents than they do from the wealthy, exacerbating income inequality within and between states, encouraging the wealthy to move to low tax states, and even worse, threatening the effectiveness of federal and state programs designed to ease the tax burden for the poorest families.
Obama gave the country a glimpse of his new pre-K initiative in last night State of the Union address—and reason to hope that he’ll bring the rest of the country toward the national models set by states such as Georgia and Oklahoma.
