Picture this scenario: Suppose you are a habitual spendthrift and have great difficulty putting money aside for savings, so you ask a trusted friend to hold money for you. Each month for a year, you give this friend $200 a month, which you cannot borrow against or ask to be returned to you until the end of a [...]
The president recently spoke to a group of UPS workers in Nevada, where he expressed his wants and desires for the economy. Referring to his SOTU speech, he told the crowd, “…where we’re making stuff and selling stuff and moving it around and UPS drivers are dropping things off everywhere.” Last time I checked our [...]
I watched last night’s State of the Union address in hopeful anticipation that all taxpayers, from individuals to small business owners to multinational corporations, could look forward to a fairer, more simplified system. No such luck. Much of the speech was spent pointing out who or what is to blame for the sluggish economy, income [...]
President Obama finally said something that many tax reformers have long advocated for: millionaires should pay the same share of their income in taxes as the middle class. Sounds very akin to a flat tax, doesn’t it? Sadly, it is all talk, with no serious consideration for reform. Instead, the President has proposed a “surtax” [...]
The latest poverty numbers were released this week. According to a U.S. Census Bureau press release: “Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median. The nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 ─ the third [...]
I always find it interesting when people complain about the lack of fairness in income taxes, often referring to a general income group that is paying too much or too little: “The rich don’t pay their fair share…” “The poor pay nothing but receive all the government benefits…” “The middle class is [...]