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Recent weeks have seen corporate leaders and investors mobilize publicly and privately to oppose President Biden’s proposed overhaul to the tax code

But this political calculus belies the truth of Biden’s plan: eliminating tax loopholes for major multinational corporations would actually put corporations that operate in the United States, and American workers, in a more competitive position compared to their international peers. 

The current US corporate tax rate is 21 percent, but, as recent headlines of dozens of Fortune 500 companies paying zero dollars in federal income taxes last year attest to, there are many ways for major corporations to avoid paying that much.

Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, said Tuesday that he does not support the two gun safety bills the House passed earlier this month and instead is still pushing to pass the more narrow Manchin-Toomey compromise bill that he developed with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey -- but failed to pass -- after the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.

Manchin's opposition underscores a major divide among Democrats over how to tackle gun control -- a key priority for their voters -- even as the party now controls Congress and the White House and faces intense pressure to take action in the wake of a massacre at a Colorado supermarket that left 10 dead, including a store manager and a police officer.

The chances the Senate could pass any gun legislation remain highly unlikely given that would require significant Republican support to overcome a filibuster.

Every three years the Fed, with the help of NORC at the University of Chicago, asks at least 4,500 Americans an astonishingly exhaustive, almost two-hour battery of questions on income and assets, from savings bonds to gambling winnings to mineral rights. One of our all-time favorite sources, the survey provides our best measure of America’s ghastly wealth disparities.

It also includes a deep dive on inheritance, the passing down of the family jewels (or whatnot) from parents (73 percent in 2022), grandparents (14 percent) and aunts and uncles (8 percent).

The average American has inherited about $58,000 as of 2022. But that’s if you include the majority of us whose total lifetime inheritance sits at $0

In fact, as Apple executives tried to point out at the Senate hearing at which their tax strategies were detailed, they could have chosen to pay much less in American taxes than they did.

“Apple’s basic structure and planning described in the memorandum appears to be appropriate corporate tax planning in today’s environment

It had been common knowledge that private equity firms had found ways to have most of the money earned by partners taxed at low capital gains tax rates, through what is known as carried interest. What came out last year was that some had found a way to treat all of their compensation that way.

Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little-Known Loophole Read this article and then share with your friends.

There will be many people who clicked share on this post because of its headline. They may not even click to open the story. They will never actually read these words. Ironically these are the folks who need to hear it the most.

If we could all take these simple steps our society would be a better place. We all have opinions and leanings. There is nothing wrong with that but could we at least all come from a starting point based on facts and reality?

in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law.

French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week,

Mr. Macron, an economic centrist, told Parliament that the 35-hour rule had for too long painted France as “a country which no longer wanted to work,” sending a negative signal to foreign companies wanting to invest here. Given France’s economic challenges, Mr. Macron said, the 35 hours “should no longer be put on a pedestal.”

Senate rejects gun control amendments offered following San Bernardino shooting

The Senate on Thursday voted down two gun control proposals put forward by Democrats in response to this week’s deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in a series of votes that highlighted the intractable party divide over how to respond to gun violence.

Feinstein’s amendment was identical to legislation she previously filed on the same topic, while the expansion of background checks for gun purchases mirrored language championed by Sens. Manchin and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2013, following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago this month.

“Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”

Connecticut to Ban Gun Sales to Those on Federal Terrorism Lists

While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.

how do campaign donations that appear to be connected with Boeing manage to avoid violating this law? The answer is a loophole, cemented in the law in the 1970s, that permits government contractors to set up “separate segregated funds,” or political action committees, to make political contributions using money typically pooled from the contractors’ executives and major shareholders. Such funds are legal even if the parent company pays for their operating and fund-raising costs. This exemption — whose ostensible justification is the free-speech rights of contractors’ employees — is why political action committees like Boeing’s can exist.

The corporate PAC workaround is “clearly bad, policy-wise,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog

Boeing’s PAC is a “major player” Mr. Fischer said. The sum of its contributions is three times larger than the sum of any independent individual contributions from its employees

“If there’s anything that unifies Republicans, it’s tax reform,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell assured reporters on Tuesday who were wondering if President Trump’s latest feud with a GOP senator would threaten his top legislative priority.McConnell is undeniably correct. Tax reform, even more than repealing and replacing Obamacare, is the GOP lodestar. But the reason Republicans haven’t unveiled a tax bill, much less held a vote on one, is that they haven’t figured out how to pay for their ambitious economic plan. And on that score, the president isn’t making their jobs any easier.

In each case, the president was probably playing good politics, as none of these proposals would be broadly popular. The BAT would have hit retailers who might have passed the cost onto consumers with higher prices. Millions of Americans in states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California benefit from deducting their high local taxes off their federal bill. And tens of millions more take advantage of 401(k) plans, which allow employees to accrue investment earnings that won’t be taxed for decades to come.

There have been plenty of indications over the last few months that Trump and Republican leaders in Congress would have different answers to that question. For years, Ryan and his allies in the House have talked up the idea of a “once-in-a-generation” reform that would simplify the code, cut rates both for businesses and individuals, and pay for it by eliminating exemptions, deductions, and other loopholes that taxpayers use to their advantage. Implicit in that goal is the need to make difficult political choices; every loophole is someone’s prized and essential tax break, with a team of highly-paid lobbyists fighting to keep it. “We will not wait for a path free of obstacles because it does not exist,” Ryan said in a speech in June. “And we will not cast about for quick fixes and half-measures.”

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right

An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

Yesterday, Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla was found guilty in a Manhattan courtroom for a range of financial crimes. His dramatic trial revealed that tens of billions in dollars and gold moved from Turkey to Iran through a complex network of businesses, banks, and front companies.

Here’s what Zarrab testified: The scheme began in 2010, when Iran began to feel the squeeze from U.S. sanctions for its nuclear drive. Zarrab said that around 2012 the Iranian government gave him explicit directions to conduct these illegal transactions.

Despite the headlines generated by the gold trade and leaked report, the Turkish government insisted that everything was above board. The Obama administration seemed to echo this sentiment, saying that the gold trade had slipped through a legal loophole (a loophole the White House inexplicably left open for an additional six months, even after the problem was flagged)

1. A bigger tax cut for the middle class

Is there a big loophole in the plan?

The Tax Policy Center projects that taxpayers exploiting this potential loophole could reduce the taxes the government collects by $2.6 trillion over 20 years. That is more than half as much as the main component of the individual plan, the reduction in rates on ordinary income. The lower rates are forecast to cost $4 trillion over the same period.

As muddled and broken as the individual income tax system may be, the rules under which the government collects corporate levies are far more loophole-ridden and counterproductive.

Unlike individuals, multinational corporations can shuttle profits — and sometimes even their headquarters — around the globe in search of the jurisdiction willing to cut them the best deal on taxes (and often other economic incentives). Much of this occurs under the guise of “transfer pricing,” the terms under which one subsidiary of a multinational sells products to another subsidiary. The goal is to generate as high a share of profit as possible in the lowest-taxed jurisdictions.

subsidiaries of United States corporations operating in the top five tax havens (the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda, Switzerland and Luxembourg) generated 43 percent of their foreign profits in those countries in 2008, but had only 4 percent of their foreign employees and 7 percent of their foreign investment located there.

There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm

Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars.

19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.

Using allowed deductions and legal loopholes, large corporations enjoyed a 12.6 percent tax rate far below the 35 percent tax that is the statutory rate imposed by the federal government on corporate profits.

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations

the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

rom the outset, the Volcker Rule was the product of compromise. The Obama administration declined to favor legislation forcing banks to spin off their turbulent Wall Street operations from their deposit-taking businesses. At the same time, it did not want regulated banks, which enjoy deposit insurance and other forms of government support, trading for their own profit. That business, known as proprietary trading, had long been a lucrative, albeit risky, business for Wall Street banks.

Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve who served as an adviser to President Obama, urged that Dodd-Frank outlaw proprietary trading. And over the objections of Wall Street, the administration inserted into Dodd-Frank what became known as the Volcker Rule.

The rule, however, does not ban types of trading that are thought to be part of a bank’s basic business. Banks can still buy stocks and bonds for their clients — a practice called market making — and place trades that are meant to hedge their risks.

Ireland has long had one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe; it’s currently 12.5 percent.

it did a lot more than simply offer a low corporate tax rate. It set itself up as a kind of European tax haven, so that companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others could, in effect, buy an Irish address to which they could transfer a great deal of their intellectual property and route profits accrued elsewhere through the Irish subsidiary. This is called transfer pricing. Companies could also take advantage of other loopholes in the Irish tax code to get their tax bill considerably lower than 12.5 percent.

In 1991, Apple essentially negotiated how much tax the company would pay. It did so after it had explicitly “mentioned by way of background information that Apple was now the largest employer in the Cork area with 1,000 direct employees and 500 persons engaged on a sub-contract basis,” again according to Almunia’s letter. Apple also acknowledged that it had “no scientific basis” for the amount of tax it was willing to pay. The deal was then “reverse engineered” so that Apple’s profits would wind up in the range that would yield the suggested taxes.