Coverage of the national budget and your taxes.
By David Sherfinski - The Washington Times
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Monday that President Obama is holding down interest rates and that the Federal Reserve is "obviously not even close to being independent." Published September 12, 2016
A federal judge has ordered the IRS to finally clean up the tea party targeting mess, giving the tax agency less than a month to decide on a handful of applications that are still pending more than three years after officials first admitted they were targeting the conservative groups and subjecting them to intrusive scrutiny.
President Obama and Congress suffered a massive budget relapse over the last year, sending the deficit soaring by a staggering 34 percent in fiscal 2016, according to the final numbers released Friday.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said Donald Trump's plan is more generous to taxpayers than Hillary Clinton's but does far more damage to federal revenue.
U.S. employers added 156,000 jobs in September, a decent gain that reflects a healthy economy but also a sign that hiring has slowed from its robust pace last year.
Indian police have arrested 70 people and are questioning hundreds more after uncovering a massive scam to cheat thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars by posing as U.S. tax authorities and demanding unpaid taxes, a police officer said Thursday.
Seeking to right his struggling campaign, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump defended his tax history Monday, blaming politicians for writing laws he used to avoid hefty tax bills, and vowing to put that financial wizardry to use in the White House.
The Obama administration said Monday it can start developing better ways to detect the Zika virus and knock out mosquitos that carry the disease, while forging ahead with a vaccine trial that began in August, now that Congress has broken a months-long stalemate and posted $1.1 billion for the fight.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden slammed Donald Trump Monday for not paying federal income taxes, seizing on a report that the Republican nominee may have taken advantage of a loophole to avoid tax payments for 18 years.
Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, said Monday he hopes Mr. Trump sues The New York Times "into oblivion" for publishing a story over the weekend showing Mr. Trump reported a nearly $1 billion loss on a 1995 tax return.
An Iranian-designed bomb on a route south of Baghdad shattered Patrick Hanley's arm, skull and life on March 29, 2008, sending the Army soldier to shifting addresses on a grueling tour of military hospitals and mental health centers that strive to make service members whole again.
Hillary Clinton is threatening to raise their taxes, but wealthy Americans don't appear to mind — they've given to her presidential campaign at record rates.
Hillary Clinton keeps bashing the Trump tax plan as "Trumped up trickle down economics." This class warfare card has become the standard and tired response to every Republican tax plan reform for 30 years. No wonder we haven't cleaned out the stables of the tax code since the Reagan era. Democrats have no interest.
Donald Trump's team said Sunday that he wasn't just smart but a "genius" after a leaked tax return from the 1990s showed a nearly $1 billion write-off that likely got him out of paying taxes for years, but it also buttressed accusations by Hillary Clinton that he has avoided taxes.
President Obama signed a short-term spending measure Thursday afternoon to keep the government funded through Dec. 9, averting a potential shutdown that would have occurred Friday.
Hillary Clinton on Thursday doubled down on her claim that Donald Trump has paid no federal taxes in recent years, telling an Iowa crowd that her Republican foe sets a poor example for the rest of the country.
Barreling into a thorny election season, Republican leader Mitch McConnell said America's decision to entrust the Senate to his party in 2014 been a resounding success and should continue in the new year.
The White House on Tuesday ridiculed Donald Trump's assertion that Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen is playing politics in her management of the central bank by keeping interest rates low during President Obama's tenure.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Tuesday that the first presidential debate showed Republican Donald Trump lacks the "moral center" to lead the nation.
Greed: A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed. A continual lust for more.
The White House warned Friday that President Obama might not sign a spending bill to keep the government running beyond next week unless Congress changes current law and requires corporations to disclose campaign donations.
With negotiations stalling, Senate Republicans offered a plan Thursday to keep the government open on stopgap funding through Dec. 9 -- but Democrats said they'll oppose it, setting up yet another shutdown showdown next week.
Immigration is a massive drain on the government, with immigrants taking as much as $296 billion more in benefits than they pay in taxes, according to a new authoritative study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which found the record level of newcomers is straining the country.
He admitted that the IRS bungled tea party applications and that he gave wrong information to Congress, but Commissioner John Koskinen told lawmakers Wednesday he didn't mean to mislead anyone and said ousting him from the troubled tax agency would stall the progress he has made in cleaning things up.
Despite slow growth in the global economy, some countries -- most notably China -- are producing large amounts of steel. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimated that global steelmaking capacity last year exceeded global demand by approximately 700 million metric tons
Donald Trump promised to usher in a new era of economic prosperity, saying Thursday that his plans for tax cuts and new trade deals could pave the way for 4 percent annual growth and 25 million new jobs over the next decade.
House GOP leaders will hold impeachment hearings on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen next week, conservatives announced late Wednesday, just hours before they were poised to force an impeachment vote on the chamber floor.
House conservatives pulled the trigger Tuesday on the process to begin impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, rejecting appeals from fellow Republicans and from the commissioner himself to set the matter aside.
President Obama is meeting with the top four leaders of Congress Monday afternoon to negotiate an election-season agreement to keep the government open beyond Sept. 30, including the likely addition of more than $1 billion to address the Zika crisis.
Congressional Republicans are squaring off against the Obama administration's proposed $1 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, which lawmakers say will embolden Riyadh with enough firepower to continue its brutal intervention in the ongoing civil war in Yemen.
An easel and a chart or two just weren't good enough for Rep. David Jolly of Florida on Wednesday, who brought a jar of about 100 mosquitoes to the House floor on Wednesday to highlight the perils of the Zika virus in his home state.
While President Obama was promoting his stalled free-trade deal in southeast Asia Tuesday, two major consumer groups announced their opposition to the agreement and urged Congress to reject it.
Despite formidable opposition across the political spectrum, President Barack Obama is using his final months in office to fight for congressional approval of a 12-nation free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
It was in 1916 -- 100 years ago this year -- that America made a big, big mistake that has done significant damage to our economy and the fairness of our tax system for an entire century. We are talking about the estate tax, more popularly known as the death tax.
Hiring downshifted last month as U.S. employers added a modest 151,000 jobs, about half the blockbuster gains of the two previous months.
President Obama on Wednesday named seven people to a board set up by Congress to audit Puerto Rico's finances and rescue the U.S. territory from $72 billion in bond debt it cannot pay.
The IRS has discovered more than 1 million Americans whose Social Security numbers were stolen by illegal immigrants, but officials never bothered to tell the taxpayers themselves, the agency's inspector general said in a withering new report released Tuesday.
White House aides said Monday that President Obama will try to convince U.S. trading partners on his upcoming trip to Asia that he can still win congressional approval for a free-trade deal, despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's vow that the pact is dead for the rest of Mr. Obama's presidency.
Stocks rose in morning trading Friday following two days of declines after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave an upbeat assessment on the U.S. economy.
The IRS is still holding up three tea party groups' applications, Commissioner John Koskinen admitted in a letter to Congress last week -- but he insisted he agents are finally about to begin processing them.
Seeking to paint rival Donald Trump as an ally of Wall Street and Democrats as champions for the middle class, Hillary Clinton on Wednesday touted an economic plan that relies heavily on tax increases for major U.S. companies, Wall Street firms and rich Americans.
The White House predicted Friday that the federal government's budget deficit for the current fiscal year will hit $600 billion, an increase of $162 billion over last year's and a final sour note on President Obama's watch.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday to put a measure on the November ballot asking voters whether marijuana businesses should pay a tax to be used toward combating homelessness.
The Obama administration ignored its own advice and forged ahead with Obamacare payments to insurers without permission from Congress, House Republicans said Thursday in a scathing report that says the White House dismissed the Constitution's separation of powers and swiped $7 billion from taxpayers.
President Obama called on Congress Friday to break a partisan deadlock over funding to fight the Zika virus before lawmakers start their summer break later this month.
Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania says it would be wise not to underestimate presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and that Mr. Trump is tapping into the concerns of working class voters who feel like they've been left behind.
Virginia Rep. David Brat said presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump could have a tough time delivering on his pledge to protect entitlements without increasing the national deficit if he is serious about not making any cuts to the programs.
Saying nothing has changed at the IRS, House Republicans took the first steps toward impeaching agency Commissioner John Koskinen on Wednesday, with the Oversight Committee voting to censure him for thwarting the investigation into tea party targeting.
The House took a concrete step Tuesday to neuter the IRS in the wake of the tea party targeting scandal, approving legislation that would stop the tax agency from being able to request the names of major donors to nonprofit organizations.
The House Oversight Committee will vote this week on a resolution censuring IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over his handling of the tea party targeting scandal, panel Chairman Jason Chaffetz announced Monday.
The Supreme Court on Monday struck down Puerto Rico's attempt to restructure debts at its insolvent public utilities, meaning the island territory must wait for Congress to rescue it from its swirling fiscal crisis.
The IRS's computer hack was worse than previously admitted, and the tax agency failed to alert thousands of people that their information was stolen, and didn't give credit monitoring assistance to nearly 80,000 others who were targeted, an inspector general said Wednesday.
House Republicans unveiled a plan Tuesday to attack poverty "at its roots" by rewarding work, improving school programs and tailoring benefits to individual needs, although questions about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump threatened to overshadow their plans once more.
More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet.
The last time President Obama signed on to a plan to save Social Security, nearly five years ago, he agreed to a proposal that would have reduced the growth of benefits.
The head of the Democratic National Committee reversed course Friday and backed the Obama administration's bid to rein in "payday" lenders, after prior support for House legislation that would have blocked those very regulations threatened to deepen a rift between her and the progressive wing of her party.
The U.S. government spent more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars to study the question of whether cheerleaders appear more attractive when they are grouped together in a squad, according to a report released by Sen. Jeff Flake.
The way Congress' chief watchdog describes it, the government's plan to set up a new catfish inspection process is one of the clearest examples of wasteful spending in the federal budget.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has declined to testify in his own defense at a congressional hearing Tuesday, but insisted in a statement that his bungling of a subpoena doesn't rise to the level of "treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors" needed for him to be impeached.
The House's chief investigator introduced a resolution Wednesday censuring IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and calling for him to resign or be fired, saying he misled Congress and even tried to thwart a subpoena seeking former agency employee Lois G. Lerner's emails.
By Friday the House will have passed 18 bills to stake out a bigger federal role in fighting the nationwide opioid epidemic -- but as with so much else in Congress these days, the effort is turning into a spat over money.
When politicians insist on "reforming" some program they mismanaged and destroyed, they always turn to the average American and begin explaining the "sacrifice" we have to make in order to save it.
Flawed and cumbersome tax laws afflict taxpayers everywhere, but few are as irksome, as silly and as constitutionally dangerous as Maryland's "stormwater remediation fee," also known as "the rain tax," including whatever penumbras and emanations that followed. Gov.-elect Larry Hogan, a Republican, vowed during his campaign to free taxpayers from the overreaching state law that claims to protect the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways from polluted runoff, flooding and erosion. Together with others, he argues persuasively that it amounts to little more than a weather levy, with accompanying clouds.
The lame-duck Congress that will meet after the Nov. 4 election could lay a few golden eggs that will hatch into a new flock of crony capitalist ducklings. The gold would actually come from taxpayers. The politically well-connected are especially eager about an $18 billion giveaway to wind farms, a tax credit that benefits mostly millionaires and billionaires.
Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida recently laid out their vision of tax reform. They are right to push for reform. Our burdensome tax code is one of the major obstacles holding the economy back from reaching its potential. In the process, it is denying countless American families the opportunities they deserve.
If you pay people not to work, what do you think they will do?
A tobacco reduction conference hosted by the World Health Organization, the United Nation's public health agency, took a hostile and alarming turn on Monday when the public was kicked out of the meeting.
