Reporting from Washington
With enactment of his signature healthcare law, President Obama has also made good on another major campaign promise: to ease the tax burden on middle-class Americans and pay for his domestic agenda by raising taxes on the wealthy. And for upper-income taxpayers, the tab for healthcare is just the beginning.
Families earning more than [...]
Facing a struggling economy, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., turned to the tax code to help get it, and us consumers, moving again. Most of the tax changes were part of the stimulus package enacted last February, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. There are seven new tax laws you should know, and some [...]
A new congressional report released Friday says the United States’ long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama’s grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted by [...]
As the night follows the day, VAT follows health-care reform.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when [...]
Cash-strapped states are hitting smokers hard in the pocketbook, raising cigarette taxes to help plug budget shortfalls.
So far this year, legislators have voted to raise cigarette taxes by $1 per pack in Utah and 75 cents a pack in New Mexico. At least a half dozen other states have been considering increases, including tobacco-growing South [...]
Tax cuts were the biggest individual component of the Recovery Act. Even though only half of taxpayers have filed so far this year, tax refunds are already up nearly 10% from last year due to the Recovery Act.
As you file your 2009 income taxes, you may qualify for a series of new tax cuts that [...]
President Barack Obama said on the campaign trail in October 2008 that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” With Obama on the verge of signing sweeping health-care overhaul legislation, he’s about to do just that.
High-income investors would pay higher Medicare taxes, tax breaks for out-of-pocket medical deductions would be curtailed, and it would cost [...]
Love it or hate it, one thing that is indisputable about the Democrats’ big health care legislation is that the cost figures are going to come out right where President Obama said he wanted them.
When the president finally came forward with an outline of his own proposal, aimed at bridging differences between the House and [...]
This morning in Washington, President Obama was in the Rose Garden trying to make the jobs bill he was signing sound like a big success, chief economic adviser Larry Summers was at the National Press Club trying to make the administration sound tough on financial regulatory reform — and a critical bunch of economists, policymakers [...]
Forget about your 2009 tax return for a minute. If you didn’t file one for 2006, you might be missing out on some money from back then. But you’re quickly running out of time to claim it.
Three years ago, more than 1.4 million individuals apparently decided they had better things to do than file their [...]