Tax Lawyer's Blog

In a recent post titled Snow, Budgets, and User Fees, Professor James Maule, to drive home a point, regales us with a bit of rhetorical brinkmanship:
[I]f the anti-tax crowd continues to influence the unwitting and uninformed by appealing to emotional distaste for taxation, it might persuade the entire nation to eliminate all taxes and user fees.
What must be understood [...]

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This guy makes me ashamed my name is Pete.
Fortney Pete Stark (D-CA) is the new Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee and in one fell swoop has become one of the most powerful men in Congress. If you are queasy about this prospect, ponder these Starkisms. They’ll send you straight to the vomitorium:
Stark slanders a sitting President of the United States [...]

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Walter Alarkon of The Hill reports that House Majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md) says that the U.S. must increases taxes to curb the deficit:
Tax increases may be necessary to rein in $12 trillion in federal debt, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday.
“No one likes raising revenue, and understandably so,” Hoyer said in an address [...]

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Paygo isn’t a new idea, but Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institute makes a renewed demand for Congress to take it seriously (emphasis added):
There are many paths out of the fiscal swamp, but one in particular should be considered: paying for tax cuts.
From 2001 to 2003, Congress reduced taxes for just about everyone. Most of these changes [...]

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Conservative talk show host and political muckraker Glenn Beck has minor tax problems and, therefore, should shutup when Obama administration appointees charged with upholding federal laws violate the tax laws.
This, folks, is the tortured reasoning of Politico’s Kenneth Vogel:
Paul Caron has the story:
Politico reports that Glenn Beck, who has been on the front lines in criticizing various “tax cheats” nominated [...]

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“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
- Winston Churchill -
David Goldman of CNN.Money tells us of yet another way Democrats have take property away from successful and productive Americans:
A growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers and liberal economists are [...]

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What if we legalized marijuana and taxed it?
Here’s a graphic from Sloshspot that shows the costs of enforcement of anti-pot laws and the amount of potential revenue each state would receive if those laws were repealed:
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I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these numbers, but they certainly are food for thought.
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CSPAN reports that the House Ways & Means Committee is investigating fraud in the homebuyer credit program,
The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing looking into the IRS examination of over 100,000 suspicious claims in the first-time homebuyer tax credit. Rep. John Lewis  (D-GA), Chair of the House Subcomittee said he is pleased the program is working, [...]

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Jeanne Sahadi of CNN Money.com reports today that,
In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks.
The ranks of those whose [...]

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Welcome to the second installment of our series Politics and Taxes.
In our last edition we included links to articles written about the Tea Party movement’s opposition to President Obama’s economic stimulus plan and tax increase proposals.
Today, we have another topic of great contention between Democrats and Republicans: Cap and Trade.
So where’s the tax angle, you ask?
Well, since [...]

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