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

WaPo's Samuelson Needlessly Freaks Out About Social Security

Jan 10, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Robert Samuelson bashes his generation in today’s Washington Post: Shame on us [baby boomers]. We are trying to rob our children and grandchildren, putting the country's future at risk in the process. On one of the great issues of our time, the social and economic costs of our retirement, we have adopted a policy of selfish silence. *Sigh* What is Samuelson so exercised about? He’s huffing and puffing over something that may or may not happen 33 years from now.

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Watcher: January 9, 2007

Jan 10, 2007 by Matt Lewis

House Begins Session with New Process Rules Will Congress Stick with PAYGO?

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Collender: WH Balanced Budget Bid a PR Ploy

Jan 9, 2007 by Dana Chasin

We commend to readers today's National Journal article by Stan Collender entitled "Budget Debate Gets Off to a Bad Start," which succintly reprises the charade involved in President Bush's pledge last week to balance the federal budget by 2012. It is reproduced in full below: The FY08 debate got off to the worst possible start last week when President Bush announced he was going to balance the budget by 2012. Pledging to balance the federal budget in five years is a tried-and-true White House public relations ploy. That is the case here as well: The short-term deficit likely will be rising, with the FY07 and FY08 deficits higher than what occurred in FY06.

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Taxpayer Advocate Says AMT Top Priority

Jan 9, 2007 by Matt Lewis

The taxpayer advocate service (TAS), an independent office within the IRS, put out the taxpayer advocate's annual report to Congress today (click here for the executive summary). The TAS decided that the most important issues facing taxpayers this year is the alternative minimum tax, followed by the "tax gap." Its top legislative priorities: creating a special procedure for IRS appropriations, and repealing the IRS privatization program. There's a summary of the top legislative priorities after the break.

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Will Congress Stick with PAYGO?

On Jan. 5, the House took a significant step in the direction of fiscal responsibility, adopting pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budget rules by a 280-152 margin. PAYGO rules bar consideration of legislation including tax cuts or entitlement expansions that would have the net effect of increasing the deficit. While a necessary step toward putting the country back on the right fiscal path, PAYGO rules may make fulfilling the policy goals of the new Democratic Congress significantly more difficult to achieve.

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Pelosi Pellucid: Tax Hike for the Wealthy on the Table

Jan 9, 2007 by Dana Chasin

The Democrats are at great pains not to confirm the hysterical GOP midterm warnings that Pelosi & Co. would tax-and-spend like there was no yesterday. But commentators like Robert Kuttner and Paul Krugman, and others have urged a re-examination of ways to raise revenue for domestic needs Democrats have promised to address, raising the dread specter of tax increases. To the surprise of many, Nancy Pelosi declared on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that she too is considering raising revenue by repealing tax cuts on taxpayers making over $500,000 a year:

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House Begins Session with New Process Rules

On Jan. 5, the House approved new rules covering civility, legislative process and fiscal responsibility, the second of two rules packages in as many days that the Democrats passed since taking over the chamber. The new rules should help restore some transparency, fiscal responsibility and fairness to the legislative process in the House and represent an important first step in restoring faith in the congressional process. But further reforms are still warranted.

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CBO Reports Lower Deficit

Jan 9, 2007 by Matt Lewis

CBO has released the budget numbers for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007. The deficit was $85 billion, $35 billion less than the first quarter of last fiscal year. Temporary events, not structural factors, mostly explain the difference between this year and last. Hurricane Katrina drove up federal spending last year, and record corporate profits and big gains for high-earners have been pushing up revenues this year, though most analysts expect that surge to end soon. House Budget Chairman Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) commented on the news in CQ ($).

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2001 Tax Cuts' Passage Relied on AMT Revenue Increase

Jan 8, 2007 by Craig Jennings

Prompted by Sen. Charles Grassley’s (R-IA) comments on Friday, I started digging into past political debates in LexisNexis about the AMT, and I came across this Washington Post article from May 27, 2001*. Written just a few days after the Senate passed its version of the $1.35 trillion 2001 Bush tax cuts, this excerpt indicates it was pretty clear then that the 2001 tax cuts had set up an AMT debacle that Congress will have to face in the coming years.

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Stating The Obvious

Jan 8, 2007 by Matt Lewis

Today, the NYT reminds us that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 disproportionately benefited the wealthy over the middle class, the super wealthy over the wealthy, and the wealthy-beyond-your-imagination over the super wealthy.

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