Lerner’s explanation that the reviews were not the result of political bias seems wildly implausible. She cannot possibly expect Republicans or the public to believe that the officials in Cincinnati decided to target any group affiliated with the Tea Party for nonpolitical reasons. Lerner’s credibility is also damaged by the AP’s revelation that IRS leadership knew about it but continued to deny it.
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U.S. multinationals often give the impression that they are taxed more heavily than multinationals based in other countries. That's not what I heard at the American Bar Association's Tax Section meetings last week.
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New York State’s comptroller says giving $2.8 billion in tax breaks over five years added more than a million jobs, which would be great news except that the state lost jobs.
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Do you know what a use tax is? Most people don’t. Ever paid a use tax? Most people haven’t, in part because they don’t know what it is. Typically, states impose use taxes when they can’t force a seller to collect sales taxes and then, typically, never collect the use tax.
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Good Jobs First recently published the second edition of a report entitled “Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us?” The purpose of the report is to examine various business climate indexes, and prove that they are “corporate-sponsored, pseudo-social science” studies that have no predictive value of a state’s “business climate” and should not be relied upon by states as they make tax policy decisions.
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The big idea of the last week was a dramatic tax reform proposal in Maine. The idea is big and bold. Big and bold usually means a measure has no chance of passage. State legislators from both parties are not exactly profiles in courage.
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The looming debate over the federal debt limit is a depressing reminder that we're living in the Age of the Manufactured Crisis. And it encourages a sort of political nostalgia – a yearning for that bygone era when tough lawmakers made the tough decisions that kept federal debt at manageable levels. Well, sorry to tell you, but there were never any fiscal heroes.
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The already grinding gears of immigration reform slowed again last week when Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) angered conservatives by suggesting that his committee extend to roughly 40,000 binational same-sex couples the same rights enjoyed by other couples to sponsor their spouse for a visa to enter the US. If the Supreme Court has not declared DOMA unconstitutional before the Finance Committee turns to individual income tax reform, same-sex marriage also will have to be addressed in that context.
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There's a public opinion poll for just about everything these days. I recently stumbled across a U.K. poll on corporate taxes and morality. The results are fascinating.
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