Over at Tax Research UK, Richard Murphy offers a simple test to distinguish between tax planning and tax avoidance. As he told a journalist, “That is easy. It’s getting legal opinion.” With tax planning, Murphy says, you decrease your tax risk. “There are obvious examples: paying money into a pension, for example, does not create […]

Also via the New York Times comes an article on NSA versus the internet giants like Google. I haven’t a clue (other than skepticism and ‘how does that work?’) as to what it actually means. Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest […]

In my last post, I discussed one of the most important sets of questions regarding any proposed economic development subsidy: How much does it cost? Is that too much? The answer, assuming that we are not going to overhaul our broken subsidy system overnight, was that we see if we’re paying too much by looking […]

(Update: the numbers in the above Table represent the present payroll gap. That is an immediate increase in FICA equalling any negative number would fund its respective program over that given period under that set of assumptions). (Update 2…a quirk in the comment section preventing viewing the chart on landing page is fixed…Dan) The standard […]

[Michigan Republican Senate candidate Terri Lynn] Land, a Byron Center Republican, had defended presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s anti-bailout position two years ago and noted that GM had become known as “Government Motors.” She declined to revisit the topic Wednesday during a brief exchange with reporters, which she cut short following the forum. “I’ve always supported […]

Via Economist’s View comes this note on ‘Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession’ From the NBER Digest: The authors find very little interaction between UI benefit eligibility and SSDI applications, and conclude that SSDI applications do not appear to respond to UI exhaustion. While the authors cannot rule out small effects, they conclude […]

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism lists posts and links to documents on private equity agreements well worth taking the time to read through and comment. The list is extensive so best go there. Dean Baker weighs in today as well in the Wall Street pension scam via Truth Out. We anticipate that some of you […]

Readers of my AB posts know that a recurring theme of mine is the right’s cooptation of the word “freedom” to disembody the word from actual physical freedom–e.g., from imprisonment–or from personal choice, and to instead define it as a Reagan-era Conservative Legal Movement checklist.  And that these folks achieve this by declaring it mandated by the Constitution’s […]

That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.) We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns: …the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few […]

I’m encouraged any time government functions. We’re a very philanthropic society. We always want people to have safety nets. Medicaid is meant to be a temporary measure to provide benefits for people who are in difficult circumstances. It’s not meant to be going on forever. — Scott Brown, when Politico reporter Kyle Cheney asked him […]