Every year, tax expenditures--Uncle Sam's myriad credits, exclusion, loopholes and breaks--cost the U.S. Treasury over $1 trillion a year. To put that in perspective, that figure is greater than the cost of Medicare, Social Security and national defense. Much larger than this year's projected budget deficit of $642 billion, tax expenditures equal roughly 30 percent […]

On Monday, Congressional investigators revealed that Apple has side-stepped billions of dollars in U.S taxes "through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen." Nevertheless, Tuesday's hearing before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations turned into an Apple love fest, with CEO Timothy Cook insisting […]

Revelations that IRS civil servants used biased criteria to target conservative groups seeking tax exempt status is rightly drawing bipartisan outrage. President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) voiced their strong support for probes of what Obama deemed the "outrageous" […]

Two years ago, Congressional Republicans took the unprecedented step of holding the debt ceiling hostage in order to extract draconian spending cuts. Now, the GOP's willingness to sabotage the American (and global) economy may be about to take an even more dangerous--and obscene--turn. House Republicans are suggesting they will not support an increase in the […]

"It's never been easy for House Republicans to raise the debt limit." With that opening sentence, Jake Sherman and Steven Sloan of Politico provided air cover for the GOP's unprecedented--and dangerously irresponsible--debt ceiling hostage-taking. After all, Republicans in both houses of Congress had no problem raising the debt limit until Democrat Barack Obama became President. […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously lamented to President Bush in 2006, "has a well-known liberal bias." It is conservatives' perpetual fear that the truth will not set them free that is the driving force behind two House Republican proposals announced this week. For starters, Lamar Smith (R-TX), the GOP chairman of the House Science, Space and […]

Friday's news that U.S. gross domestic product grew by only 2.5 percent came as a disappointment. After all, that performance not only fell short of the consensus expectation of three percent GDP growth, but was aided by a one-time bump for inventory expansion deferred from the last quarter of 2012. And while the strengthening housing […]

Two weeks ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his state would forego billions of dollars in expanded federal Medicaid funding that could help provide health insurance for 1.5 million of his lower-income residents. Rejecting an estimated $90 billion over the next decade for his 46th ranked health care system, Perry declared that "Texas will not […]

Just in time for Tax Day, President Obama released his 2012 return to the IRS. And right on cue, conservative commentators blasted the President for paying only 18.4 percent ($112,000) of his $609,000 in income to Uncle Sam. Predictably, while CNN's Erin Burnett slammed Obama's payment to the Treasury as "pretty low and frankly almost […]

Despite slashing the national debt by an additional $1.8 trillion over the next decade, President Obama's proposed fiscal year 2014 budget was received with two predictable talking points by Republican leaders. House Majority Eric Cantor, who previously complained about being called a "hostage taker," protested that "we ought to do so without holding [entitlement cuts] […]