March 2010 Archives
Over the past several weeks, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have pursued a strategy of enacting several small pieces of legislation to address joblessness. While lawmakers might find this strategy easier than passing one great big bill, it does make it a bit difficult for those of us who are trying to keep track of which tax provisions Congress has passed and which provisions are still being debated. This report simplifies this task by summarizing recent activity on jobs bills and describing each bill and the tax provisions included.
U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Citizens for Tax Justice released a joint statement on the lack of legislation from the Senate to close the "carried interest" loophole. The loophole allows managers of buyout funds and hedge funds to pay taxes at a lower rate than middle-income people.
It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Paul Ryan has met that daunting challenge. This analysis makes obvious that Congressman Ryan’s budget plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget, but has everything to do with creating a system that takes more from the poor and less from the rich.
A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice examines the Medicare tax reform included in the health care plan recently put forward by President Obama. The report concludes that this reform would affect only 2.3 percent of taxpayers in 2014. The richest one percent would pay about 84 percent of the resulting tax increase, and the richest five percent would pay virtually all of the tax increase.



