On Thursday, CBS This Morning offered a scant 26 seconds on a Wall Street Journal story about nearly 1,600 IRS employees having evaded taxes over a ten-year period, with co-host Norah O'Donnell noting: "Workers improperly claimed dependents, repeatedly failed to file timely tax returns, and claimed a tax credit for first-time home buyers when the IRS worker didn't buy a house. Most of the IRS employees were not fired. Some received promotions, raises, and even bonuses." Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America made any mention of the latest scandal to plague the agency.
Taxes
By Tom Johnson | April 30, 2015 | 6:06 PM EDT
Apple Inc. is not merely a tech company; it’s also a destroyer of right-wing doctrine. That was the main argument of a Tuesday blog post by Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas.
Kos asserted that the huge success of the California-based Apple refutes the “conservatives [who] bray incessantly about the Golden State's ‘high taxes and burdensome regulations.’” He also lauded the company for supporting gay rights (“unlike conservative orthodoxy, tolerance and respect for people's private life are good for business”) and “tak[ing] global climate change seriously.”
AP's Crutsinger Ignores Recession Red Flag, But Has Obsessed Over Potential Recessions During GOP Administrations
By Tom Blumer | April 24, 2015 | 10:52 PM EDT Today's Census Bureau report on durable goods orders was like a poorly made cake with delicious frosting: tasty at first, but awful when fully experienced.
The frosting in today's report was that overall orders increased in March by a seasonally adjusted 4.0 percent. The trouble is that an important, widely recognized element of that report — what the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger vaguely described as "a key category that serves as a proxy for future business investment" — came in with yet another minus sign. That category's 0.5 percent decline, though noted, had far more significance than Crutsinger gave it.
By NB Staff | April 24, 2015 | 10:35 AM EDT
The Washington Free Beacon has made another terrific clip compilation – this time, on the MSNBC hosts who owe large chunks of tax money thumping a tub against tax avoidance and in favor of civic-minded taxpaying.
One precious clip is Melissa Harris-Perry proclaiming “I don’t get to opt out of paying taxes once we’ve kind of made a collective decision.” David Rutz offered a summary:
By Tom Blumer | April 22, 2015 | 3:00 PM EDT
So when is a recession not a genuine recession? Apparently when it's "technical."
Unfortunately, the term "technical recession" appears to be well on the way to devolving into what has long been considered the real definition of a recession for the purpose of discounting its validity.
By Jeffrey Meyer | April 22, 2015 | 8:18 AM EDT
According to the National Review, MSNBC’s Touré Neblett, who serves as co-host of The Cycle, reportedly owes more than $59,000 in back taxes.
By Tom Blumer | April 20, 2015 | 10:54 PM EDT
Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Jackie Crosby's writeup on how "Minnesota has been losing residents to other states" since 2002, and that it's especially troubling because "young adults are leaving in the greatest numbers," contained an enormous blind spot.
The Gopher State, aka the Land of 10,000 Lakes, is also sardonically known as the Land of 10,000 Taxes by many residents, and with good reason. Yet the only time the word "tax" appeared was in a sentence discussing the need for "robust tax rolls."
By Matthew Balan | April 16, 2015 | 4:53 PM EDT
Al Sharpton isn't the only MSNBC host who has a problem with paying taxes. Michael Hewlett of North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal reported on Wednesday that Melissa Harris-Perry and her husband owe "about $70,000 in delinquent taxes, according to a notice filed in Forsyth County Hall of Justice earlier this month." The IRS placed a tax lien on the couple as a result.
By Tom Blumer | April 14, 2015 | 2:01 PM EDT
Late Monday afternoon, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger produced a typically dodgy dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement. The Treasury Department released the March version of that report covering the first six months of the current fiscal year early Monday afternoon.
The odd thing is, while it has been published elsewhere at the web sites of certain of its subscribers, a search on "budget deficit" (not in quotes) at the wire service's national site indicates that it's not present there at all. The national site's only mention of March's deficit is in the sixth of 13 listings at a "Business Highlights" summary. It reads as follows (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Lefty Blogger Paul Waldman: Tax-Cutter Arthur Laffer Is to Economics as Jenny McCarthy Is to Vaccinations
By Tom Johnson | April 10, 2015 | 10:03 PM EDT Vaccine skeptics have a well-deserved reputation for not caring about facts, but according to American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, many right-wing anti-taxers resemble anti-vaxxers in terms of their shaky grasp of reality.
“All the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post. “This is the rough equivalent of doctors seeking to lead the American College of Pediatricians competing to see which one can win the favor of Jenny McCarthy…Laffer's theory has been as thoroughly disproven as phrenology or the notion that the stars are pinholes in the blanket Zeus laid across the sky.”
By Tom Blumer | March 31, 2015 | 1:57 PM EDT
So Harry Reid knew he was lying about Mitt Romney not paying taxes for ten years when he made the claim in 2012 from the lawsuit-free zone known as the floor of the U.S. Senate, but didn't care.
That's what one must conclude from Reid's response to CNN's Dana Bash about that statement. Asked on the network's New Day program if he regrets what he said, Reid responded: "Romney didn't win, did he?" Rather than question Reid's outrageously cynical "end justifies the means" mentality, Bash's edited interview moved on to another topic.
By Clay Waters | March 30, 2015 | 12:07 PM EDT
Adam Davidson of National Public Radio lumped people who oppose illegal immigration with racists and homophobes (like his grandfather) in the New York Times magazine:
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather -- my dad’s stepdad -- struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”