A report by the House Ways and Means Committee claims that the IRS is “doing less with less”—intentionally cutting its customer service budget in order to “punish” taxpayers for IRS budget cuts: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has blamed the IRS’s “abysmal” customer service on congressional budget cuts — funding is down $1.2 billion from its […]
Continue reading →Many individuals are being ticketed for feeding the poor in their cities. The story from San Antonio of Chef Joan Cheever is an illuminating example: On the night she was ticketed, Chef Joan Cheever’s menu included fresh vegetable soup, lamb meatballs over wheat pasta, braised Southern greens, and a salad with roasted beets. She plans […]
Continue reading →Many commentators have noted the police brutality angle of the Walter Scott shooting, but fewer have mentioned the reason that Walter Scott ran from the police in the first place. He was avoiding child support. Walter Scott had already been to jail for not paying child support, and he had lost his job when he […]
Continue reading →We have a lobbying problem in Congress. Beginning in the early 2000s, the amount of money being spent to lobby Congress exceeded the amount of money taxpayers were spending to fund Congress: Corporations now spend about $2.6 billion a year on reported lobbying expenditures – more than the $2 billion we spend to fund the […]
Continue reading →Abortion activists are causing quite a stir about a recent Montana law that requires unborn babies to be anesthetized before any post-20-week abortion procedure. Activists claim this law is based on junk science: But to state Sen. Fred Thomas, who carried the Montana fetal anesthesia bill, the new laws are about updated and accurate information, […]
Continue reading →The Log Cabin Republicans agree with conservative principles on most every issue but one—homosexual marriage. It was this particular belief that got them disinvited from the Western Conservative Summit: The Western Conservative Summit, a gathering of some of the most influential newsmakers on the right, created a firestorm this week when it uninvited a gay GOP […]
Continue reading →Judith Curry is a scientist who has been hard at work unraveling what she calls the wicked problem of climate change. In this particular case, she doesn’t use the word wicked in a moral sense, though her detractors almost always do. In the midst of the UN hearing on climate change, Curry’s testimony was a […]
Continue reading →After Rebecca Francis posted a picture of herself lying next to a bull giraffe she had killed, comedian Ricky Gervais responded with an inflammatory tweet that elicited a huge amount of condemnation for Francis from animal rights activists. Gervais wrote: “What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a […]
Continue reading →Today is Tax Day, and you’ve probably noted a few different narratives swirling around concerning taxes. One narrative is that the top earners in the US pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. This is known as a progressive tax rate. But other commentators have noted that the progressive tax rate applies for Federal income taxes […]
Continue reading →In a recent report, it was found that most recipients of welfare have jobs. But those jobs just don’t pay enough for people to survive: The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working […]
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