Revenue & Spending

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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more news

Press Views on Budget Resolution Off-Base on Offsets?

Mar 14, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Center on Budget's Statement on the Senate Budget Committee Plan today scolds commentators for scolding Committee chair Kent Conrad (D-ND) for failing to specify the offsets for program expansions and tax-cut extensions assumed in his budget resolution mark. This reflects the press'

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Latest Data on Income Inequality

Mar 14, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Via Brad DeLong, this from income trend expert and Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez The IRS has released yesterday the preliminary stats for year 2005 which I have used to extend my [and Thomas Piketty's] series [on the top income share by tax return unit] to 2005, posted at: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2005prel.xls

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Preview of Sen. Conrad's Budget Resolution Mark

Mar 14, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad (D-ND) provided reporters with some details yesterday about the budget resolution draft that his committee will mark up today and tomorrow. Some features are good news:

priorities -- Conrad's draft provides a $16-18 billion increase in domestic appropriations over Bush's proposal for FY 2008, with substantial increases in education, veterans, and community policing programs, and, on the mandatory spending side, $50 billion for SCHIP over the next five years

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OMB Earmark Site Fails to Meet its Own Standards

Mar 13, 2007 by Dana Chasin

We were quick to praise OMB for setting guidelines and a deadline -- per a January 25 memo from Director Rob Portman -- for a website to provide details on all earmarks funded in 2005. The deadline was yesterday. The website was launched on time. But it contains no references to specific earmarks, only aggregate agency and account funding data.

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Call-In For The Right Federal Budget

Mar 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Your voice is needed now to support a budget with the right priorities for all Americans. The ECAP coalition (read this Watcher article for more on ECAP) is mobilizing to promote a FY08 budget resolution that doesn't allow tax cuts for the wealthy and that makes enough room to fund programs for children, workers, education, and nutrition and housing issues. Let your representative know what you think about these programs and policies. They need to hear that their constituents will support them if they make the right decisions on the budget.

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Citizenship Requirements- Backdoor Budget Cuts?

Mar 13, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Quick comment on Robert Pear's article yesterday on Medicaid- a must-read, by the way- that demonstrated that falling caseloads may be in part due to new "proof of citizenship" requirements. Medicaid costs, too, have been going down. Supposing these two trends are related, and it would seem they are, citizenship documentation seems nothing more than a high-handed way to cut budgets and deny people (the vast majority of whom are citizens) health care. Let's remember this if the President ever decides to boast of the cost-containment his policies have achieved.

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War Supplemental Bill Becoming a Budget Bomb

Mar 12, 2007 by Dana Chasin

Congress and President Bush have been taking turns adding to what what started out a $99.6 billion supplemental appropriations package. This weekend, Bush formally requested an additional $6.3 billion in spending (mostly for 4,400 new troops to be deployed in the "surge"). This amount, C-Span reports, Bush wants "offset by cuts ... from domestic appropriations made in the fiscal 2007 continuing resolution."

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6 Degrees of Privatization

Mar 12, 2007 by Matt Lewis

The contractor at Walter Reed who's taken much blame for the wretched conditions there is tangled up in IRS privatization, too. Unbossed has the story.

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Why the Bush Health Care Plan Won't Work

Mar 12, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe has a good post on health care costs. His most topical point is that the Bush health care tax package, which is ostensibly intended to reduce health care costs through financial incentives for health care consumers, is hopelessly misguided and beyond repair. Most health care spending occurs among a small minority of spenders who receive very expensive, intensive care that they likely see as not being optional. Incentives one way or the other probably won't make much of a difference.

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White House Blocks OMB Earmark Website Launch

Mar 12, 2007 by Dana Chasin

In an embarrassing reversal of its promise (reported here) to have a full searchable database of all FY 2005 earmarks on line by today, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has announced that it will release information today only on the aggregate number and cost of earmarks from that year.

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