Open, Accountable Government

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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Drug Manufacturers See $3.7 Billion Medicare Windfall

Jul 25, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The law that created the Medicare drug benefit, or Medicare Part D, mandates that Medicaid beneficiaries who were also eligible for Medicare ("dual eligibles") receive their drug coverage from the Medicare drug program rather than Medicaid. So, rather than be allowed dual eligibles to choose between two programs, when the new Medicare law went into effect, it shifted Medicare-eligible Medicaid beneficiaries into the new program. As it turns out, drug manufacturers benefited handsomely from the switch.

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Minimum Wage Increases Minimally

Jul 24, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The federal minimum wage will increase to $6.55 per hour today, the second bump that is part of a law passed last year to increase the wage to $7.25 by next summer (see this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). As the AJC correctly points out, the increase will have a significant impact in Georgia, but for more than half the states, it won't do much because the federal government is woefully behind the curve:

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America Continues to Drown in Debt

Jul 23, 2008 by Adam Hughes*

Those wacky legislators in Congress are at it again. Democrats have added language to once again increase the national debt ceiling, or debt limit, which is the maximum amount of debt the federal government can issue. Democrats added language to a housing relief bill increasing the limit by another $800 billion to an astounding $10.615 trillion (that's trillion with a "t").

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JEC Ranking Member Highlights Troubling Trend in Income Inequality

Jul 22, 2008 by Craig Jennings

Joint Economic Committee ranking member Jim Saxton (R-NJ) musters moral fibre to stand up for the downtrodden richest one percent among us to lament the growing burden that increasing shares of income are placing upon this voiceless group. It's true: According recently-released IRS data, while the richest one percent of taxpayers (as measured by adjusted gross income) saw their share of income grow from 20.8 percent to 22.1 percent from 2000 to 2006, they also saw their share income taxes climb from 37.4 to 39.9 in that same time.

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House Decides Saving E-mails is a Good Thing

The White House has threatened to veto an already weak bill targeted at preserving electronic records, despite legal action and recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the need for such accountability. On July 9, the House passed the Electronic Communications Preservation Act (H.R. 5811) by a veto-proof margin of 286-137. While targeted at the White House, this legislation will have an impact throughout executive branch agencies.

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White House Climate Change Policy -- Delay, Delete, and Deny

The Bush administration continues its strong efforts to censor climate change information that reaches the public and Congress. Recent reports indicate that the White House pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make changes to its regulatory process regarding climate change and that Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for suppressing key sections of the congressional testimony of a high-level official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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EPA and Union Agree on Process for Reopening Libraries

In response to a federal arbitrator's decision in February, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) recently signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) establishing procedures for the reopening of recently closed EPA libraries and bringing the union to the planning table for any future changes to the library network.

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Claims of "Magical" Tax Cuts Continue

Jul 21, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released a new report discussing the oft-cited, and completely false claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. Even though this statement has been refuted many times, by CBPP, by outside academics, and even by President Bush's own Treasury Department, the claim continues to float around. CBPP does a nice job hammering home the facts again about the impact of tax cuts in a very digestible brief:

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New CBO Report Shows Dire Consequences of Bush Tax Cuts, AMT Patching

Jul 17, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The CBO has released a report detailing the effects of indexing the the AMT to inflation (i.e. "patching" it so that fewer households would pay it than otherwise anticipated) and extending the 2001-2003 Bush tax cuts without offsetting the revenue loss.

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Average Earnings Down for All Workers, Median Earnings Also Down for Full-Time Workers

Jul 17, 2008 by Craig Jennings

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a pair of data sets indicating that workers are still not seeing real (i.e. inflation adjusted) increases in pay. Yesterday's Real Earnings report, based on data from the payroll reports of private nonfarm establishments of earnings of both full-time and part-time workers holding production or nonsupervisory jobs, shows: Real average weekly earnings fell by 0.9 percent from May to June after

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