Thanks to obstructionist Republicans in Congress and their perpetual campaign to kill the estate tax, the United States Treasury stands to lose billions in revenue in 2010. And as the New York Times reported this week, a large chunk of it won't be coming from a single family. The heirs of Texas pipeline billionaire Dan […]

If creating new jobs is Job One for the Obama administration, then the past 24 hours have been a mixed blessing. Thursday brought good news of a continued if slow decline in first-time jobless claims, while a drop in the productivity rate suggested businesses are poised to expand hiring. But today's word that the 431,000 […]

"You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that's our target market." Judging from the rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, that's the Republican mantra when it comes to the Obama recovery package. Nine months after Boehner wrongly decried a "stimulus bill that didn't create any jobs," his web site […]

Desperate to change their miserable present, Republicans are traveling back in time to rewrite the past. And so it is with President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Hoping to block President Obama's stimulus program designed to prevent the next Great Depression, right-wing authors, pundits, and politicians insisted FDR failed to cure the first one. […]

In 2009, only 1 in 500 American estates paid taxes. But thanks to the obstructionism of Senate Republicans led by Arizona's Jon Kyl, the estate tax temporarily lapsed for 2010, a hiatus that could portend massive windfalls this year for the heirs of the largest fortunes in the United States. Now as Congress moves to […]

For almost a year and a half, furious Tea Party protesters have been chanting "Taxed Enough Already." But as it turns out, "taxed enough" actually means "at the lowest levels since 1950." That's the word from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which found that Americans paid the smallest overall tax bill since Harry Truman was […]

Even as the European Union and the IMF unveiled a $160 billion bailout package to avert a fiscal disaster in Greece, the New York Times documented one culprit behind that nation's fiscal woes: tax cheating. But while the $30 billion Athens loses annually to tax fraud and evasion proportionately far exceeds the $345 billion illegally […]

In just a matter of days, the Republican effort to protect predatory Wall Street bankers has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Last week, Mitch McConnell endlessly parroted Frank Luntz' "permanent bailout" talking point - the day after meeting with financial executives in New York. Then on Thursday, Sarah Palin warned that "financial lobbyists […]

In a rare moment of Republican candor, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker debunked the talking point at the center of the GOP's campaign to protect predatory Wall Street bankers. Bucking his party's leadership, Corker defended reform provisions charging banks to create a resolution fund for winding down failing institutions, calling it "anything but a bailout." In […]

As Tea Party favorite Karl Marx once said, historical events occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. And so it is with the Tea Party "Contract from America." But rather than following Newt Gingrich's gimmicky 1994 path to retaking control of Congress, the Tea Partiers sound more like Ronald Reagan circa 1980. After all, […]