Blog Profile / Business in The Beltway
| URL : | http://blogs.forbes.com/beltway/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Business & Finance | |
| Posts on Regator: | 312 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.7 | |
| Archived Since: | February 28, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
The Real Story On Apple’s Tax Avoidance: How Ordinary It Is
While it added a few interesting twists, Apple cut its taxes with the same tools multinationals have been using for years to minimize their worldwide tax liability.
Congress Should Get The IRS Out Of The Business Of Regulating Political Speech
Congress and the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision threw the IRS into a lose-lose situation. And the agency has lost. Why are we surprised?
The IRS-Tea Party Scandal: Many Political Groups Should Not Be Tax-Exempt
This unsavory episode shines a light on the need for Congress to change the law that gives tax-exempt status to political groups of all ideological stripes that do not deserve it.
Taxpayers Could Foot Bill For Fannie Mae Fraud Settlement
The giant housing finance company has received billions of dollars of taxpayer support. Its half of a $153 million settlement with investors may be the latest insult and injury to taxpayers.
Why Finding Immigration’s Goldilocks Number Is So Impossible
Immigration policy poses an unusual challenge for the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. If Congress allows more people into the United States, our population, labor force, and economy will all get bigger. But CBO and JCT usually hold employment, gross domestic product (GDP), and other macroeconomic variables constant when making their [...]
The Next ‘Killer App’ To Cut Health Care Costs: Getting Patients To Take Their Meds
This guest article is by Aaron McKethan, senior vice president of strategy at RxAnte and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution. Billions of dollars in venture capital is being poured into new innovations to improve health care. Devices remotely monitor patient health; smart phone apps help patients manage their exercise and schedule appointments with [...]
Taxing Millionaires: Obama’s Buffett Rule
From the start of his 2008 campaign, President Obama has called for raising taxes on the rich. He got much but not all that he wanted in the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) earlier this year. Now his FY2014 budget takes another couple of bites at that apple. The first repeats his proposal to cap [...]
Obama And GOP Are Fighting Over Couch Change When It Comes To 2014 Revenue
A close look at the points of agreement in the budget proposals from the White House and Congress show that the battle is over spending, not taxes.
Same-Sex Couples and Taxes
The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was not primarily a tax law but it certainly affects the federal taxes that same-sex couples pay. In fact, taxes are the basis for the second of the two cases concerning same-sex marriage that the Supreme Court will hear this week. Although the federal government generally recognizes state [...]
Don’t Hold Your Breath For A Budget: House, Senate Aren’t Even Trying To Reconcile Bills
As long as House Republicans hold to their position that no tax increase of any size under any circumstance is acceptable, there will be no final budget resolution for 2014.
Senate Budget’s Bad Math: Axing Tax Breaks For Rich, Big Business Isn’t Enough
The fiscal plan promises to raise taxes on big business and the rich by $975 billion over 10 years by eliminating preferences. Fat chance.
Paul Ryan’s Budget: Fact, Fiction And The Hole The House GOP Has Put Itself In
The political response to the Tax Center’s analysis of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) fiscal plan was predictable, and mostly based on caricatures of what TPC actually concluded. To review: TPC found that tax cuts similar to those described in the committee’s plan would add $5.7 trillion to the budget deficit over the [...]
Numbers Gap Between House, Senate Budgets Is Bridgeable. The Ideological Chasm Isn’t.
Think of the federal budget as an expression of government priorities described by numbers and words. This week, we’ve seen two widely divergent views of the federal role in people’s lives, one from the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee and the other from the Democratic-controlled Senate Budget Committee. When you look at the numbers alone, you [...]
Taxes and Paul Ryan’s Budget: What’s Clear, And What Isn’t
House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) has proposed a controversial plan to balance the budget in 10 years, entirely by cutting planned spending by $4.6 trillion. While Ryan includes lots of specific spending cuts, his tax agenda is far less clear. In some respects, the former GOP vice presidential candidate mimics the tactics of [...]
Sequester Shows Why States Should Be Wary Of Feds’ Medicaid Expansion
States trying to decide whether to expand their Medicaid programs to cover more low-income uninsured might want to take a look at the fate of a more obscure federal program—cash subsidies to state and local governments that sell certain kinds of bonds, especially Build America . If they do, they’ll see what happens to a [...]
GOP-Advocated Fix For Social Security Would Have A Funny Side Effect: Higher Taxes
Changing the way government adjusts spending and taxes for inflation is one of those issues that continues to hang around the edges of the budget debate. Republicans and many economists argue for shifting to a more accurate inflation measure, called the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). President Obama would support a version as part of a [...]
10 Reasons To Be More Optimistic About Broadband Than Susan Crawford Is
Co-authored with Berin Szoka. Susan Crawford thinks she sees the future of the Internet—and it isn’t pretty: Cable companies monopolizing broadband, charging too much, withholding content and keeping speeds low, all in order to suppress disruptive innovation. Show More Summary
Sequester, We Hardly Knew Ye
I suspect that by early next week, the sequester will be old news. We’ll be on to the next crisis—the impending government shutdown scheduled for just a month from now. And there may be good reason for that—any deal to avoid the shutdown will almost surely replace the effects of the sequester, at least for [...]
What If The Outrage Over Excessive Welfare Extended To The Tax Code?
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has created quite a stir with his estimates that every household below the poverty level receives an average of $168-a-day (or about $61,000-a-year) in government welfare. Sessions’ calculations are extremely controversial and overstate the amount of government assistance for those in poverty. Show More Summary
Congress May Not Rewrite the Tax Code in 2013, But They Can Make It Simpler
As regular readers of Tax Vox know, I don’t believe there is much chance President Obama and Congress will agree on individual broad-based tax reform in 2013. Without a deal on how much this new tax system should raise, talking about a big rewrite is futile. However, Obama and Congress still have an opportunity to do something very [...]