Fixing SS Is Simple

To Fix Social Security, Some Democrats Want To Lift Wage Cap : NPR:

...But that does not seem to faze Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Democrat has gotten a lot of attention for a speech defending Social Security that she delivered last month on the Senate floor.

"With some modest adjustments, we can keep the system solvent for many more years, and we could even increase benefits," Warren says...

A Tax Break Busts

Breaking: Federal District Court Declares A Religious Income Tax Exemption Unconstitutional | The New Civil Rights Movement:

A federal district court judge has declared “unconstitutional” a portion of U.S. law that allows “a minister of the gospel” to not pay income tax on a specific portion of their compensation...

Pierce Talks Drug War

Annie Dookhan Gets Off Easy - The Incredibly Silly "War" On "Drugs" - Esquire:

The one thing we cannot have in our ridiculous ongoing modern prohibitionist state is a criminal justice system that punishes the criminals in law enforcement as harshly as it punishes those at whom the laws are aimed, and on whom the law principally falls. Congresscritters get nabbed with some blow and it's off to treatment. Cops skimming the profits from drug dealers -- or, even more heinous, the ones that use the preposterous civil forfeiture statutes to shop for some new wheels -- get slapped more lightly than the dealers from whom they skimmed. There is an essential corruption at the heart of the enforcement of the drug laws that rots the whole legal infrastructure of those laws from the inside...

States Rights For Reefer

Bipartisan Marijuana Bill Appears To Have One More Big Supporter In Its Corner: The NAACP:

A bipartisan bill advocating for states rights on marijuana appears to have one more big supporter in its corner.

Marijuana Majority said Saturday in an email that the NAACP's Board of Directors passed a resolution last month in support of H.R. 1523 -- the Respect States Marijuana Laws Act. Introduced in April by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the legislation is designed to protect both medical and recreational pot users from federal prosecution for following state laws...

Bustin' Tax Evaders

Secret Swiss Bank Accounts Have Cover Blown - MainStreet:

The Internal Revenue Service gave the largest whistleblower reward ever to UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld in September 2012. He received $104 million for tipping off the federal government to UBS's secret Swiss bank accounts. UBS paid a fine of $780 million and provided the names of more than 4,900 American taxpayers who held offshore accounts...

Bill Calls On GOP To Help With ACA

Good luck, Mr. President.

Bill Clinton calls for GOP to improve - not repeal — Obamacare - Jason Millman - POLITICO.com:

Former President Bill Clinton, recruited by the White House to explain the misunderstood health law, is looking to play Obamacare peacemaker.

In a highly-anticipated speech from his presidential library, Clinton challenged Republicans to finally work with Democrats to improve on President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement instead of constantly trying to undermine it...

The Stupid Summary

The 8 dumbest things Republicans said — in the past week alone - Salon.com:

Noblesse Oblige Updated

Millionaires to Washington: More Taxes, Please! | Mother Jones:

A pack of millionaires descended on Washington, DC, Wednesday to tell Congress to take more of their money. The Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group formed in 2010 to push Obama to allow the Bush tax cuts on millionaires to expire, are back, and lobbying for the same thing as Congress faces the looming fiscal cliff...

Business Finally Catching On?

Comeback: Why the US Sits at the Brink of a New Boom | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS:

...The true costs of outsourcing often don't show up on earnings statements. For example, when General Electric, a pioneer of the original offshoring movement, began moving its appliance manufacturing back from China, they discovered how badly their designs had stagnated. With their production and design teams in the same plant and speaking the same language, they realized a 20 percent overall savings over their Chinese costs on their first "reshored" appliance by making big reductions in material and labor inputs...

Crazy In NC:Taxing SS Edition

RALEIGH: Social Security tax bill could be political minefield for NC Republicans | State Politics | NewsObserver.com:

...As Republicans continue to work behind the scenes to strike a tax deal, Social Security is one major sticking points between the House and Senate bills – and a thorny political problem.

Senate leaders, in an unusual step, sent the tax legislation tentatively approved last week back to a committee Wednesday while they negotiate with House lawmakers and Gov. Pat McCrory to find a compromise measure before the end of session.

The Senate bill puts a state tax on Social Security income for some seniors with other sources of income. The House plan doesn’t touch it. And the governor has expressed concerns about the Senate approach...

Tax Cheaters Database

Offshore Tax-Haven Data Made Public As Companies Brace For Scrutiny:

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Friday made public what it calls the most extensive collection of records on offshore accounts in history, encouraging sleuths to ferret out possible tax evasion.

The online portal, called the Offshore Leaks Database, contains hundreds of thousands of records showing corporations set up in so-called "tax-haven" countries, gleaned from the contents of about 2.5 million emails and financial documents that ICIJ said it received in early 2012. Over the past year, the data have been used by journalists around the world to detail alleged tax evasion by billionaires, oligarchs, emirs, princes and multinational corporations on nearly every continent...

The Fiscal Sky Is Not Falling

The Geezers Are All Right - NYTimes.com:

...But haven’t all the great and the good been telling us that Social Security and Medicare as we know them are unsustainable, that they must be totally revamped — and made much less generous? Why yes, they have; they’ve also been telling us that we must slash spending right away or we’ll face a Greek-style fiscal crisis. They were wrong about that, and they’re wrong about the longer run, too.

The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and Medicare, while not great, actually isn’t all that bad. It’s time to stop obsessing about how we’ll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and focus instead on how we’re going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans in the here and now.

The Real IRS Scandal

Heilemann Calls Out Priebus for Trying to Involve Obama in IRS 'Scandal' | Video Cafe:

...Never mind as they noted that the IG's report found nothing of the kind, and as Lawrence O'Donnell has been pointing out over and over again, the real scandal here is that any of these organizations doing political activities have been given tax exempt status as "social welfare" groups.

We Have The Scientists

...but not at minimum wage.

Business ruined science in this country | The Confluence:

...Anyone who thinks that all you need to make good science is cheap, well educated labor should really give it a whirl sometime. Let me know how you’re doing after a decade of lab work and half a dozen restructurings.

The idea that we need to import more foreign engineers when American engineers can’t get work here and have to go work in Canada and Japan is just beyond cruel and stupid.

As Colin McIlwain says, the idea that there is a shortage of well educated, technically proficient and experienced American scientists is something the business community conjured up in order to push wages down. Congress is either willfully ignorant or completely bamboozled if it seriously thinks that we need more foreign STEM graduates...

All You Need To Know About Taxes

Bible Says Cut Food Stamps

...and the Devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes.

Food Stamp Cuts Backed By Farm Subsidy Beneficiaries:

House Agriculture Committee Republicans who vocally supported billions in cuts to federal food assistance are big-time recipients of government help in the form of farm subsidies.

Reps. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) and Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) both cited the Bible last week to argue that while individual Christians have a responsibility to feed the poor, the federal government does not...

Issa In On IRS Scandal

Republicans Knew About IRSgate Too, Will Now Have To Investigate Themselves:

...Oh MAN. When Rep. Darrell Issa finds out that some of his own knew about this IRS thing since last summer, he is going to be so steaming mad, he’ll just start investigating everyone and then — wait, what? What’s this?

In a letter dated July 11, 2012, the man who conducted the investigation – IRS inspector general J. Russell George – wrote to Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, telling him that he was investigating the issue and offering to keep him updated as the investigation progressed.

“The Oversight Committee knew about the audit because it requested it,” an Issa aide told ABC News. Issa released the letter, along with his own letter dated June 28, 2012 requesting the investigation, last week..

Evil Apple: Tax Dodging Edition

Apple’s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds - NYTimes.com:

Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday...

He Ain't Tricky O

Obama may be facing scandals, but he’s no Richard Nixon - The Washington Post:

STANDING BEFORE reporters Thursday, President Obama declined an invitation to compare the recent scandals weighing down his administration with those that forced President Nixon to resign in 1973. So allow us to do the work for him: There is no comparison.

Nixon, in a series of crimes that collectively came to be known as Watergate, directed from the White House and Justice Department a concerted campaign against those he perceived as political enemies, in the process subverting the FBI, the IRS, other government agencies and the electoral process to his nefarious purposes. Mr. Obama has done nothing of the kind. Nor is there much to support a lesser “unifying theory” of this week’s scandals, which is that together they prove Mr. Obama guilty of a grand overreach of federal power...

Who Gets Audited?

The Truth Behind our IRS Audit | Greenpeace:

Last September, Greenpeace welcomed a new addition to our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. - an IRS auditor. After a three month-long investigation, we passed the audit and maintained our tax-exempt status. As the Wall Street Journal reported on March 21, the real story is what prompted the audit - a recommendation from Public Interest Watch (PIW) - a self-proclaimed "watchdog of non-profit groups" funded by non-other than ExxonMobil...

Update: The Salon link has a very good summary of the alleged scandal, noting that no actual scandal has been uncovered.

Salon--Where's the IRS "misconduct"?

...The IG’s report offers evidence of much confusion, poor training, unclear directives and what seems to be pretty lousy, or, at least, extremely ineffective management at the department of the IRS tasked with approving or rejecting tax-exempt status for 501(c)(3) “charitable groups” and 501(c)(4) “social welfare organizations”. Members of Congress, as well as government watchdog groups have long argued that many of those tax-payer subsidized organizations have abused the privilege and violated the legal restrictions on political activity by such groups. The abuse has been particularly widespread, they argue, in the wake of the Citizens United decision and the flood of largely unrestricted, often completely anonymous money funneled to those types of groups for often purely-political purposes...