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.
Call it vote-buying if you want, but when a government effectively buys the votes of 80 or 90 percent of the population, I call that government of the people, by the people, for the people.
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.
Who won in the fiscal cliff deal? The lawyers, the doctors, the dentists, the middle managers, the advertising executives, the whole MBA crowd.
For a small business, a tax is a cost like any other. It’s important to keep costs down. But it’s even more important to keep costs lower than your competitors.
Romney went to the trouble of filling out a Form 4684 (Casualties and Thefts) to report losses of $39. One can only wonder what was broken or stolen. I like to think that the $39 were lost in the world’s smallest shipwreck. I guess it’s just the romantic in me.
We can climb down the fiscal cliff in three steps: let the “temporary” Bush tax cuts for the rich expire on January 1, let military spending fall as the war in Afghanistan winds down, and wait for the economy to improve.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, nor even a reduced-price lunch, when it comes to educating our children.
Europeans must decide whether their societies are to be governed by the people, for the people or by the market, for the market.
Austerity is a political decision, not an economic one. It benefits the few at the expense of the many.