by Peter Dorman (from Econospeak) The Lesson of Carrier: America Needs a Real Socialist Agenda I just finished listening to the video clip that has been making the rounds, in which a spokesman announces to the assembled workers at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis that their jobs will be moved to Mexico. It’s embedded in […]
by Linda Beale Senate Finance Committee cuts tax return preparer regulation As most tax practitioners realize, many people who hold themselves out as “tax return preparers” actually know nothing about the tax laws and may even assist their clients in cheating on their taxes by inventing home offices, travel-away-from-home expenses, or other fictional deductions. The […]
by Linda Beale Another Right Wing Propaganda Tank Piles On Tax Complexity Bandwagon As noted in my last post, part of the fanaticism that is surging in the current obstructionist Congress relates to taxes (quel surprise…). The JEC ran a hearing on Wednesday targeting “complexity” in the tax code as a source of humongous problems. […]
by Kenneth Thomas New OECD tax agreement improves transparency — but the US doesn’t sign and the US press won’t tell you UPDATED Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the […]
by Linda Beale Should simplicity be a primary goal of tax reform? I was at a housewarming party last Saturday and talked to quite a few people I didn’t know. One was an economics professor at a regional school. Naturally, economists and tax professors gravitate towards talk about the economy and tax policies, so it […]
by New Deal democrat Consumer Expenditures Survey: incomes rose sharply from June 2014-June 2015 A major piece of data came out last week that has been totally unreported in the media and econoblogosphere: the Consumer Expenditures Survey (CES) for June 2014- June 2015. This is the first CES report to include the period of rapidly […]
by Kenneth Thomas Breakthrough in Kansas-Missouri Border War Via @goodjobsfirst, we learned Friday that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback had made a major response to Missouri’s proposed jobs truce in the Kansas City region. As regular readers may recall, studies have shown that more than $200 million has been spent moving jobs back and forth across […]
by Peter Dorman (from Econospeak) Pet Peeve: An America that Sees Only Itself This is a small but typical example: the New York Times today ran a story about frictions in the switch to embedded-chip credit cards. The process has been bumpy, and retailers think the banks and payment processors have been exploiting them, while […]
by New Deal democrat The best measure of labor market recoveries: March 2016 update In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans are doing in an economic expansion isn’t jobs, and it isn’t wages per hour. Rather, it is real aggregate wage growth. This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for […]