When I read the news yesterday that two pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return were sent to reporter David Cay Johnston and shown on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, I immediately wondered if this was a false flag operation. The whole thing was just too contrived. Especially when the White House immediately verified the […]
Republicans are trying to ram their Obamacare replacement bill down the throat of Congress as quickly as possible. The bill was only introduced on Monday, and already the House Ways and Means committee was kept up until 4am (that’s 18 hours) so they could approve the bill. Which they did, even though the Congressional Budget […]
Even though Donald Trump promised to release his tax returns that were not under audit, he never did. We can easily surmise that they are full of conflicts of interest, or worse. But what we didn’t realize is that legally, Congress actually has the power to obtain individual tax returns and even disclose them publicly, […]
It turns out that when we were calling the Trump Foundation a charity, we were being extremely charitable. Because it turns out that our presidential candidate who claims to be a genius businessman didn’t even bother to file the paperwork to register the foundation as a charity. Or file any of the reports required of […]
According to the NY Times, in 1995 Donald Trump declared on his taxes that he lost $918 million. How can someone claim to be a good businessman when they have lost almost a billion dollars in one year? Second, because our tax code is tilted toward the rich, this almost certainly meant that Trump didn’t […]
It looks like Donald Trump was using his Trump Foundation as a giant slush fund to pay off legal problems, buy gifts for himself or his businesses, and other non-charitable uses. So far, the Washington Post has found about a quarter of a million dollars of other people’s money (contributed by donors who thought they […]
I guess the media got what they wanted — a horserace. They breathlessly report story after story about how the Clinton Foundation might have the “appearance” of impropriety (despite admitting that there was no actual impropriety), while at the same time pretty much ignoring two smoking guns of real illegal activity with the Trump Foundation. […]
© Jonathan Rosenberg We need to keep up the heat on Donald Trump to release his tax returns. That worked on Mitt Romney. One way to do that is to speculate on what could be in them that is so horrible that Trump would be afraid to release them. Trump likes to claim that he […]
© Phil Hands People are tired of politicians who will say anything to get elected, so they pick someone who will say anything to get elected, but who isn’t a politician. Doesn’t that make sense? UPDATE: Trump not only leads PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” brigade (a stunning 76% of his statements are Pants on Fire, […]
There was an article in Politico last week titled “Bankers for Bernie“, about bankers and financiers who support Bernie Sanders. Frankly, there should be many more of them. After all, if you know anything at all about finance and economics, you should know that they are not a zero-sum game. As they say, a rising […]
Part 1 covered how much each presidential candidate’s tax plan would affect the top 0.1% of households. But in part 2, let’s get personal. How will each candidate’s tax plans (if they are enacted) affect the taxes that you pay? Vox has created a simple widget to calculate this (if you can’t see it immediately […]
Recently the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center published an analysis of the tax plans that each current presidential candidate has promised to enact (note that John Kasich has not published a tax plan). Mind you, it is Congress, not the president, who sets tax rates, but the president does have a fairly powerful bully pulpit from […]
© Ruben Bolling This comic is brilliant. And it doesn’t even mention the military propaganda pre-game shows that are paid for by the military using your tax dollars. Or the sports stadiums that are heavily subsidized by local governments (when those same local governments were broke). It also doesn’t mention that conservatives seem to love […]
The business owners in downtown Columbia Missouri hatched a plan. They wanted to make improvements, but they didn’t want to have to pay for them through property taxes. So they got the city council to create a local “Community Improvement District” (CID) that would have the power to levy a half-cent sales tax in the […]
Preparing your tax returns can be, well, taxing. Unfortunately, some of that difficulty may be on purpose. H&R Block was able to get language added to the bill funding the IRS that instructs the agency to add a bunch of questions to the form for the Earned Income Tax Credit. How many questions? Enough to […]
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