NewsTrust - Taxes - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

Rep. David Obey Warns President Obama of Afghanistan War Surtax

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

ABC News - By Jonathan Karl - Nov. 23 (Interview) - The powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee has a stark message for President Obama about Afghanistan -- sending more troops would be a mistake that could "wipe out every initiative we have to rebuild the economy."

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How to boost fuel efficiency? Raise taxes, executives say

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Reuters - By Scott Malone - Nov. 06 (Opinion) - While politically unpalatable, gasoline that costs at least $4 a gallon would have a far greater effect on American fuel usage than Washington's $25 billion loan program meant to spark investment in new technologies

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With tax break, a big carbon footprint

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Edward L. Glaeser - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - ENVIRONMENTALISTS who are worried about global warming should pay attention to the congressional debate about extending the home buyers tax credit. Federal tax policies toward housing have long encouraged Americans to emit more carbon. President Obama could do the country, and the planet, a service by either refusing to sign the extension of the $8,000 credit or by insisting that it be accompanied by offsetting reductions in the home mortgage interest deduction.

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The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ezra Klein - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results." It's perhaps no surprise that the patently unreliable results were all in the tobacco industry's favor. He who pays the piper names the tune, and all that.

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The Empire Strikes Back

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kevin Drum - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - AHIP, the insurance industry trade group, has apparently decided to hop off the healthcare reform bandwagon. After months of claiming that they were on board, they released a report on Monday claiming that current proposals would raise insurance costs for middle class families by about $4,000 more than otherwise projected over the next decade.

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Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance

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Insurance industry fights back with PriceWaterhouseCoopers report

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Hot Air - By Ed Morrissey - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Until now, the health-insurance industry has mainly held its fire against the ObamaCare proposals in Congress, hoping that its givebacks would be enough to sate the Democratic class warfare that erupted this summer. Now, however, they have apparently taken off the gloves with a new analysis by accounting firm PriceWaterhouse Coopers. The study predicts that the Baucus plan would increase premiums for an average American family by $4,000 per year, a breathtaking increase from a plan that purports to save costs

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How GOP can manage Tea Party

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By John Freehery - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - While the Tea Party movement presents a threat to the Obama administration, it also presents a challenge to congressional Republicans. After all, many of the protesters have as low a regard for the GOP as they do for the Democrats, and they hold the previous administration in as much as contempt as they do the Obama White House.

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Charlie Rangel Hides Income and Assets

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Aug. 28 (Opinion) - Charlie Rangel wins the personal lotteryWhen normal people happen to "find" their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you're Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.

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Cohn-Bendit Advocates "Revolutionary" Carbon Tax

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Pierre-Alain Furbury, Lucie Robequain - Jul. 31 (Interview) - Michel Rocard, president of the Conference of Experts on the "climate-energy tax," must hand in proposals to Christine Lagarde and Jean-Louis Borloo. The former prime minister envisions the establishment, by 2010, of a carbon tax on fossil energy, but also on electricity. The cost would be 32 euros per ton of CO2 emitted next year and 100 euros as of 2030.

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Health Care Reform and the Unpopular T-Word

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Leonhardt - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - The many-headed Hydra, with breath poisonous enough to kill, is one of the more gruesome beasts in Greek mythology. In Hercules’s great clash with it, he would cut off one of its heads, only to have two more appear. No matter what he did, he couldn’t keep up. You can think of Congress’s efforts to pay for health reform as being a little bit like a battle to slay a many-headed Hydra.

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How the Ultra-Rich Are Trying to Kill Health Reform

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By David Sirota - Jul. 28 (Opinion) - Cash payoffs made, re-elections purchased, the absurd story somehow goes that because blue-collar constituents in Flyover America like guns and love Jesus, they must also reflexively adore politicians who defend 1-percenters' bounty. That fantastical fairly tale, of course, couldn't exist without the Millionaire Media -- the elite journalists and opinionmongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or are themselves extremely wealthy. Ignoring all the data about inequality, they legitimize the assertions of the 1-percenters' first two battalions, while actually claiming America's fat cats are unfairly persecuted.

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Raise the Gas Tax

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Jul. 27 (Editorial) - It's taken a whopping budget deficit to prod D.C. officials into considering a step they should have taken years ago: increasing the gas tax. The proposal, still in a fledging stage, should be vigorously pursued. Not only would the District get a desperately needed windfall of as much as $4 million, but, more important, higher gasoline prices would encourage energy conservation.

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The Great Tax Con Job

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Op Ed News - By Thom Hartmann - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - A very small niche of America's uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions - and will continue to be.

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How Should Government Spur Small Business Innovation?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Robb Mandelbaum - Jul. 23 (Opinion) - With health care reform and economic recovery sucking up so much of what little oxygen circulates in Washington, you’ll have to forgive The Agenda for only now turning to the Small Business Innovation Research program, which is set to expire on July 31st unless Congress acts to reauthorize it.

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To Save the Republic, Tax the Rich?

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - in today’s brave new world of high technology and global commerce, many blue-collar and white-collar jobs can be done more cheaply through computerized automation or by low-cost overseas labor than by American middle-class workers regardless of how much retraining they get. So, whenever the current recession ends, many Americans who lost their jobs or had to take severe pay cuts are not likely to make up lost ground. Unemployment and under-employment are almost certain to stay high, and those lucky enough to have jobs will have to work harder, faster and longer than before.

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America's health-care plan: Soak the rich

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jul. 16 (Editorial) - After weeks of wrangling among the three different House committees with partial jurisdiction over the matter, the House has pipped the Senate to the post. On Tuesday July 14th Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, unveiled a grand strategy for health reform that is so far to the left of American political discourse that even moderate Democrats in the Senate (never mind the incensed and irrelevant House Republicans) held their noses.

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Replace state property tax with carbon tax for climate action

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Bruce Flory, Todd Myers - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - One sign of progress comes from right next door. Voters in British Columbia recently re-elected Premier Gordon Campbell, the driving force behind BC's carbon tax. By 2012, the tax will reach about $30 per ton of carbon dioxide, or about 30 cents per gallon of gasoline. Money from the tax is used to reduce other taxes in a "revenue-neutral tax shift," and voters showed their support by backing Campbell and his right-of-center party for a rare third consecutive term.

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No gain but we avoid a lot of pain

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Michael Hiltzik - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - Whether the government's novel venture into industrial ownership will save the economy, or whether it's even a necessary component of an economic recovery, are questions certain to be widely debated in the coming months while GM hares its way through an expedited bankruptcy reorganization.

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Panama wrong choice for Obama's first trade deal

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By David Batker, Stephanie Celt - May. 27 (Opinion) - Panama's "comparative advantage" is tax evasion. The more money multinational companies shift to hokey Panamanian subsidiaries, the fewer taxes they owe in the U.S. And secrecy in the Panamanian banking sector secures foreign investment of another sort. The U.S. State Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency have identified Panama's financial sector as a primary repository and conduit for Colombian and Mexican narco-trafficking cartels.

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Proposed Tax Changes on US Oil and Gas Producers

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Oil Drum - May. 21 (Opinion) - Last week, the government released a lengthy document, General Explanations of The Administrations 2010 Revenue Proposals, which includes a 12 page segment titled "Eliminate Oil and Gas Company Preferences". I've excerpted some of these below the fold. It strikes me that the authors of these rules do not grasp that oil has peaked, and we can't continue business as usual nor pay back our financial debts by importing 70%+ of our oil. My thoughts follow the excerpts.

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Don't worry, be happy, pay lots of taxes

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Andrew Leonard - May. 15 (Opinion) - Is it really all that hard for small, mostly culturally and racially homogeneous nations, some of which are endowed with disproportionate access to valuable natural resources (I'm looking at you Norway!) to get majority buy-in from their populations for extensive social welfare systems? In the U.S. it ain't so easy. Our class disparities and social diversity make it far harder to reach the kind of widespread consensus that comes so easily to Swedes and Danes and Norwegians. And I'm not just talking about the evil racist nonsense spread by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who wants us to believe that higher taxes pushed by the Obama administration are really a sneaky form of "forced reparations." Right here where I live, in Berkeley, Calif., the diversity of race, religion, class and culture is phenomenal. Getting everyone to agree on anything is monumentally arduous.

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Obama bites rich hands that fed him

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Jeanne Cummings - May. 06 (Opinion) - Beyond the obviously wealthy voters, people who in many places are no more than upper middle class find themselves targeted to pay for a wide range of Obama policies aimed at leveling the economic playing field.

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Why Obama is Taking on Corporate Tax Havens

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Talking Points Memo - By Robert Reich - May. 04 (Opinion) - It's unfair that some wealthy Americans are avoiding taxes altogether by parking their fortunes abroad. But, hey, these have been true for decades. So why take them on now, when the President is also taking on universal health insurance and global warming, and trying to get the economy going again?

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Pollution taxes work

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Charles Komanoff - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - The Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp threw down the gauntlet to carbon taxers in the Wall Street Journal last month: Environmental taxes have worked well to raise revenue, but without a cap they inevitably become a license to pollute in unlimited amounts. No air pollution problem has ever been solved except by imposing a legal limit on emissions. (emphasis added) This is a little like the Pope complaining that sex isn’t enough fun: how would he know? Pollution taxes have seldom been tried. But in the few cases where they’ve been tried, they’ve worked rather well.

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