Group items tagged

The president's student aid reform plan will save tens of billions over the next decade. We'll use these savings to make college more affordable for the next generation of engineers, teachers, and scientists who will become the backbone of the new economy. The House has passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. This legislation will end bank subsidies and invest in students directly. The Senate is still working on its bill. The House bill will increase Pell Grant scholarships to $5,710 in the next fiscal year. It will guarantee that Pell Grants keep pace with the rate of inflation. It will eliminate unnecessary questions from the financial aid forms, making it faster and easier for students to qualify for federal grants and loans. This legislation also promises an historic investment in community colleges, helping these essential schools take Americans from all backgrounds and equip them to succeed. Finally, it will improve the quality of early learning programs, which are critical to America's educational success. All of this will be possible by eliminating the student loan subsidies. We will end the loans under the Federal Family Education Program and make them directly to students -- just as economist Milton Friedman proposed 50 years ago, and just as the Department of Education has been doing since 1993 through the Direct Loan Program. For future lending, we have hired experienced companies to service all new student loans and collect them for us. We selected these companies through a competitive process. The shift is underway, and it is proving to be a remarkably smooth transition. In the past two years, our Department has issued more than $50 billion in student loans. Over 2,300 colleges and universities participate in the direct lending program -- an increase of 1,300 over the past three years. It's time to do what's right for taxpayers -- move our money from bankers to students.

Stack was upset that §1706 did precisely what it was designed to do: Deprive him of the chance to exploit independent contractor status to avoid paying taxes through non-filing or through the understatement of income, overstatement of deductions, and avoidance of income tax withholding. In spite of the overwhelming advantages attendant to employee status, Joe Stack desperately wanted to be treated as an independent contractor for one simple reason: It would have made his tax protesting easier.4 Footnotes: ¹  We have met many taxpayers who worked as independent contractors for years without so much as a peep of protest until they realized, ex post facto, that it might have better for them to have been treated as employees. In our experience, workers tend to be content with their independent contractor status until one of the following happens: They get fired or quit They get hurt on the job They get sued for something they did while on the job They need a bank loan (and employment verification)  ²  If Stack had been an independent contractor and was subsequently “fired” by his principal, my hunch is it would have taken him less time to file a claim for unemployment compensation than it takes Apolo Ohno to finish short track. ³  Indeed, §1706 was included in TRA ‘86 because the CBO had estimated that the government was losing up to 30% of taxes because independent contractors were either not reporting all of their income on their tax returns or were claiming fraudulent or questionable deductions against that income. 4   Like all tax protestors, Stack knew that once the IRS had collected his taxes through payroll withholding it would never give it back to him based on previously refuted tax protestor arguments. Consequently, his only chance of avoiding taxes was to control his own tax payments and then use his frivolous arguments to evade or at least defer paying taxes.

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators. As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising. Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad heredap('&PG=NBCMSN&AP=1089','300','250');The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.