When it comes to touting bogus presidential endorsements by foreign leaders, candidate George W. Bush is in a class by himself. But while Governor Bush was (easily) duped by a Canadian comedy show into proudly accepting the backing of mythical Prime Minister Jean Poutine, Mitt Romney's misrepresentation of his private conversation with actual Australian foreign […]

With the year-end expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the looming "sequestration" of $1.2 trillion they agreed to during their debt ceiling hostage-taking last summer, the message from Republican leaders is the same as it ever was. Taxes (especially for the rich) must not go up, defense spending must not go down, and the […]

Even at a time of record income inequality, the lowest federal tax burden in 60 years and plummeting effective tax rates for the top one percent of earners, it is often difficult to put a face on the yawning chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. But now we have six. New data from the […]

As he continues to stonewall requests to release more of his tax returns, Mitt Romney is quickly turning the 2012 presidential campaign into a game of "Hide and Seek." Americans are left to speculate what dark secrets or advantages unattainable for most people lurk in those papers. Did Romney pay any taxes at all in […]

At a $1.7 million fundraiser in Jackson, Mississippi, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney declared that the GOP is not "the party of the rich," insisting instead that "we're the party of people who want to get rich." Sadly for Romney, there are two small problems with his assessment. For starters, Mitt's proposals (like those from […]

Four years ago, then vice presidential candidate Joe Biden was pilloried by Republican politicians and their media water carriers (for example, here and here) for telling wealthier Americans "it's time to be patriotic" by paying the slightly higher tax rates of the Clinton boom years. But with the renewed debate over ending the Bush tax […]

The GOP response to the President's call for higher tax rates on upper income Americans came fast and furious. His proposal, Republicans warned, was "class warfare" and a "job killer" which will "kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession" and still "not give you deficit reduction." As it turns out, the […]

With the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 once again set to expire at the end of this year, President Obama on Monday once again proposed temporarily extending them only for families earning less than $250,000 annually. Predictably, his Republican rival Mitt Romney called the return of upper-income tax rates to their slightly higher […]

With the Affordable Care Act having passed constitutional muster, Republicans are once again targeting the Internal Revenue Service in order to deny funding for the ACA's implementation. Hoping to repeat the GOP's successful 1990's war on the agency, Republicans like Maine Governor Paul LePage are resurrecting terms like "the new Gestapo" to slander the IRS. […]

In February 2009, President Obama delivered what Steve Benen rightly described as the largest two-year tax cut in American history. Nevertheless, the New York Times asked in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" What happened, of course, was the Democrats' drubbing […]