Archive for the ‘taxes’ Category
2009
“Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate jets by companies receiving taxpayer funds…
…The congressional shopping list goes beyond what the Air Force had initially requested as part of its annual appropriations. The Pentagon sought to buy one Gulfstream V and one business-class equivalent of a Boeing 737 to replace aging planes. The Defense Department also asked to buy two additional 737s that were being leased.
Lawmakers in the House last week added funds to buy those planes, and plus funds to buy an additional two 737s and two Gulfstream V planes. The purchases must still be approved by the Senate. The Air Force version of the Gulfstream V each costs $66 million, according to the Department of Defense, and the 737s cost about $70 million.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Department of Defense didn’t request the additional planes and doesn’t need them. ‘We ask for what we need and only what we need,’ he told reporters Wednesday. ‘We’ve always frowned upon earmarks and additives that are above and beyond what we ask for.’”
source: wsj.com
“To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a ‘This Week’ exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, ‘We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.’ Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.
‘We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,’ Geithner told me. ‘And that’s going to require some very hard choices.’ ‘We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will be not strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,’ he said…”
source: abcnews.com
“The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a presidential spending bill that overturns a longtime ban on taxpayer-financed abortions in the nation’s capital.
For decades the District of Columbia has prohibited using public dollars for abortions, but President Barack Obama inserted a measure to reverse the ban in his new federal budget request and Congress has obliged…
Since 1976, the U.S. government has banned (Hyde Amendment) the use of federal money to pay for abortions but some states use local dollars to fund the procedures. Because the Constitution gives Congress legislative authority over the District of Columbia, Congress also determines whether local tax money can be used to pay for abortions.”
via judicialwatch.org
“…CIT needs time to strike deals with bondholders to reduce debt after the U.S. declined to give the firm a second bailout. CIT, which reported $3 billion of losses in the last eight quarters, received a $2.33 billion rescue in December after converting to a bank holding company to be eligible to sell bonds backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
We still think it is a losing effort in the intermediate term although some bondholders may end up better than others with this structure,” said David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York. “The wholesale model is dead and creating a branch deposit system from scratch is too expensive for CIT and takes too long to build to help any time soon…’”
via bloomberg.com
“The Internal Revenue Service has stepped up scrutiny of offshore accounts and foreign income, an enforcement campaign that could sweep up tens of thousands of taxpayers.
The push to recover some of the billions of dollars lost each year to offshore tax evasion goes beyond the government’s high-profile effort to force Swiss bank UBS AG to release the names of 52,000 American account holders in order to nab tax evaders.
The IRS is using a once-obscure tax form called the Foreign Bank…”
via wsj.com