Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Tax cuts for jobs. NOT! Another tax cut that is not paying out

First a qualification. I am basing the following on info I found on the net. If the info is wrong, then I stand corrected as to who is or is not paying but not as to what happens when a large entity does not pay. The specific city and company are used purely for example […]

Defining Rich VI: 1936 tax tables

Today we are continuing to look at the historical tax tables to see how we viewed and possibly defined rich. I introduced this idea with my post: Defining Rich III.   I found a source for all sorts of historical data from the Census Bureau. You can down load it or the better way is […]

Defining Rich IV: Corporate vs Personal Tax collection patterns 1934 to present

When I left this series in September, I had introduced the idea of looking at past tax tables as a means of understanding how We the People define rich. One specific note from history was a surcharge on top of themarginal tax rates to pay for the Great One (WWII). Obviously, that aspect of our […]

Robert Reich’s After Shock and Corey Robin’s Freedom Arguments

by Linda Beale In earlier posts on ataxingmatter (here and here), I reviewed Robert Reich’s 2010 book, After Shock, and wrote about his suggested cures for the problems made most visible in the 2007 crash and the Great Depression that followed. The gist of the book is summed up in the following quote: “[L]eft to […]

David Cay Johnston on Stiffing the Working Poor

by Linda Beale David Cay Johnston on Stiffing the Working Poorcrossposted with Ataxingmatter David Cay Johnston, former New York Times tax reporter and now a columnist at Tax Analyst’s Tax Notes, writes this week about  the way both the Obama White House and the Republican party conspire to provide every-increasing benefits through the tax system […]

Mark Cuban Makes the Key Point

Ken Houghton remembers that Warren Buffett famously groused that he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary. Or the person who will come up with an actual cure for a cancer. Mark Cuban takes this one step further, pointing out the obvious: if we want to promote investment, “we should […]

Wyden’s Proposal for taxing oil and gas speculators

Ron Wyden, Democratic Senator from Oregon who serves on the Senate Finance Committee and the Energy Committee, is generally considered a liberal, though with a mixed bag of positions that hardly qualify on all grounds. He is against the estate tax and favors lowering rates of capital gains taxes, neither of which makes sense, from […]