Taxes

MSNBC's Chris Hayes celebrated Tax Day by standing up for the IRS as the "cornerstone" of the federal government and lambasting Republicans for trying to gut the agency. "Conservatives recognize that one of the only things standing between us and a genuine plutocracy are thousands of anonymous bureaucrats doing the basic work of enforcing our nation's laws," Hayes said, painting a homey…

Tax Day, April 15, is a perfect day for a news organization to publish stories about tax reform debates, including the notion that perhaps we should do away with a national income tax and replace it with a national sales tax. Perhaps instead we should have a flat tax with very few, if any, deductions, credits, and all kinds of other exemptions which gum up the tax code. A sensible news…

On Monday, all three network morning shows found time to worry about IRS budget cuts meaning fewer audits and longer wait times for taxpayer assistance, but not one mentioned the ongoing scandal embroiling the agency, including Congress issuing a criminal referral for former IRS official Lois Lerner. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] On ABC's Good Morning America, news…

On Friday's World News, ABC's David Kerley pressed I.R.S. Commissioner John Koskinen about taxpayers who are unable to "get an answer as to how much they're supposed to pay," due to long wait times on the agency' help line. However, Kerley didn't bother to ask Koskinen about the House Ways and Means Committee's Wednesday vote to refer former IRS official Lois Lerner to the Justice Department…

Dalton Conley is a professor at New York University and author of the book “Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask.” With his son – Yo Jeremijenko-Conley, a high school student – he has written a piece for the Sunday Outlook section on punishing good parents if they’re rich. The article is titled "Were your parents rich…

As I noted on Saturday, the idea that a state with about $6 billion in overdue unpaid bills would choose to raise taxes and apply the money to new spending is appalling. But when it comes to describing a state's finances, "appalling" and "Illinois" have belonged in the same sentence for so long, it's hard to remember when that wasn't the case. Part of the reason that such proposals gain…

All three network evening newscasts on Thursday found time to cheer the JFK Library Foundation announcing former President George H. W. Bush would the 2014 recipient of its annual Profile in Courage award. So what specific accomplishment did the organization cite from the Republican's decades of public service? His decision to hike taxes in 1990 that cost him re-election and paved the way for…

One of the odd things about the weekend pot-stirring by Matt Drudge over his stated inclusion of one-quarter of his estimated 2014 "Obamacare penalty" tax for not carrying health insurance coverage this year — calling it a "liberty tax" — is that few if any of those who criticized him seem to have bothered to consult with a tax practitioner for an expert take on the matter before what we now…

I would say "Only in Illinois," but I suspect that other states have similar problems and would propose "solutions" just as nutty as the Democratic state Speaker Michael Madigan and his party have chosen. The state has an unpaid bills backlog of $5.8 billion, meaning that vendors are going months before they get paid. We're supposed to be thrilled that this total is down from $8.8 billion…

You reap what you sow. Most MSNBC hosts have excitedly touted ObamaCare over the past four years, despite warnings that the law would increase costs for businesses. Well, now we are beginning to see the natural consequences of what the health care law is doing to businesses, and at least one MSNBC host is upset by it. On Saturday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, Ms. Witt was incensed that Gator’s…

At this rate, Ruth Conniff may not last much longer as political editor of the Progressive magazine, a venerable left-wing periodical. Last week, for example, while a guest on Ed Schultz's radio show, Conniff became quite possibly the only liberal in America willing to acknowledge the obvious -- that President Obama's much-ballyhooed executive order to raise the federal minimum wage in…

If liberals have their way the State of the Union will be all about income inequality. That kind of speech would be cheered by many in the press, including several hypocritical millionaires who love to complain about the one percent. The broadcast networks already took up this banner, promoting left-wing complaints about inequality and arguing for liberal solutions, in recent years. Well-paid…

Is Joe Scarborough taking tips from NY Governor Andrew Cuomo? Cuomo recently declared that conservatives who are pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and opposed to gay marriage "have no place in the state of New York." On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took things a step further, telling rich people who shield money abroad to reduce their taxes "you're not welcome in the United States of…

Even as he hailed Bill de Blasio's "progressive revolution," The Daily Beast's Michael Daly sought to downplay fears that the newly-sworn-in mayor was a radical leftist intent on soaking the rich. Instead Daly practically painted a picture of the Democratic politician as a drum major leading the "march" to a more "equal" New York. While noting de Blasio was a "leader speaking much the same…