Do American taxpayers really have to line the pockets of billionaires — and Wall Street banking giants — to help states and localities improve their infrastructures? Of course not. But they do. And this generosity toward America’s richest is costing Americans billions every year.
America’s top corporate executives love lecturing the rest of us about ‘fiscal responsibility.’ They want us to expect less from government. But they expect more, and a new report on the chief executives campaigning to “fix the debt” shows exactly how they’re getting it.
How can sales of super-luxury cars grow at super-fast rates during a recession? The answer is simple: it’s not a recession for everyone.
Do you know how much the cuts in Social Security benefits now getting debated in Congress will end up ‘saving’ America? Not nearly as much as a massive — and longstanding — tax loophole that benefits the wealthy and the insurance industry is currently costing America.
The uproar over the future Social Security benefit cutbacks in the new White House budget proposal has overshadowed a little-known retirement tax break that, unlike Social Security, really does need trimming. The stakes with the Roth IRA? They run over $1 trillion.
Today’s conventional wisdom in Congress on taxing America’s wealthy — that tax rates on income at our economic summit have gone as high as they can sensibly go — has no real evidence to support it, details a new Economic Policy Institute and Century Foundation study.
The current European revolt against CEO greed, if successful, might leave Corporate Europe looking just like Corporate America — in the 1950s. Back in those years, top U.S. execs faced a heavy tax load on both their corporate and individual earnings. Top executives today face no such burden.
. . . we would have a fascinating, first-hand history of the roller-coaster first century of the modern federal income tax. Industrialist Frederick Peabody started building this manse of his dreams in 1913, the same year the federal income tax started biting into the nation’s highest incomes.
All those millions that CEOs and hedge fund managers have grabbed over recent decades? Our newly revised tax code won’t let us grab them back. The stiff taxation of inherited wealth that U.S. Presidents like Theodore Roosevelt have advocated is melting away.
The George W. Bush years gave America’s rich new and unprecedented preferential treatment at tax time. The fiscal cliff deal enacted in the early moments of 2013 leaves that preferential treatment in place. The tax law now blesses a permanent discount for corporate dividend income.