When banks have been in trouble, they come to you and me, the taxpayers, to be bailed out. Aerospace companies depend on contracts paid for by you and me, the taxpayers, for their bread and butter. Oil prices are kept low by government subsidies and when an oil company messes up and a spill happens, a good deal of the money for clean up comes from you and me. Yet these are the companies that pay the least taxes.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, points out for us the top ten tax dodging companies, and let me tell you I for one won't give ANY of them a penny if I can avoid it.

From Bernie Sanders:

Sanders compiled a list of some of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders:

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.  read more »

Here in NYC the Teabaggers are planning a protest on Tax Day. They will be holding their little whine fest outside the Main post office (cause you know, post offices are BAAADD, I guess) on Apr. 15, 7 PM. Wonder if Carl "Palomino" Paladino will show. And if so, will there be some counter protesters giving him a rousing "Neigh" chorus?

But that is beside the point. The point is the Teabaggers, with or without their little Palomino friend, are in their actions displaying their amazing ignorance, selfishness, and hypocrisy. To begin with, they are using the image of the Boston Tea Party as a way of opposing taxes in general. Which is, in about every way, stupid of them. There is nothing in our founding documents or in anything said by our Founding Fathers that opposed fair taxation.  read more »

So the New York Post wants to stir populist outrage against mobile phone carriers with this bit of "investigative journalism". From PHONE TAXES ARE CELL HELL:

Eleven federal, state and city levies add as much as 33 percent to the cost of New Yorkers' cellphones, a Post analysis found.

A typical cell plan costing $49.99 a month comes with a total tax bill of $10.59 -- a 21.18 percent tax rate that helps give New York the fourth-highest cellphone taxes of any state.

And cheaper plans favored by the frugal and poor are taxed at higher rates.

In GOP-bootlicking fashion, they only are saying a half truth. Why? Because they won't say that mobile phone carriers are passing on their tax responsibilities onto us. From CNet| Supreme Court rejects cell-phone tax case:  read more »

A deal has been struck among New York State legislators and Gov. Paterson to tax some higher income New Yorkers at a somewhat higher rate. See also the report in the New York Daily News. and the Albany Times Union

In my opinion this is a good deal for New Yorkers and a great victory for the complex coalition of labor unions, community organizations and social service agencies which lobbied for months. The irrational, unplanned and wildly harmful budget cuts proposed by Gov. Paterson will largely be avoided. The increased tax rate will produce about $4 Billion dollars which, while greatly needed is not quite enough.

The worst part of the deal is that the two-step rate increase expires in three years which means we will have to re-fight this fight then.

The coalition, One New York: Fighting For Fairness, will now have to face our Billionaire Mayor who proposes taxes on low and moderate income New York City dwellers. Mr. Bloomberg refuses to tax the personal income of higher earning City dwellers -- preferring instead much higher and very unfair sales taxes.  read more »

We think of progressive taxation, if we think of it at all, as a ten-dollar term for making the rich pay more of their fair share. But Thursday at Noon NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn Member David Yassky, advised by the Drum Major Institute, give it a newer twist: let lower income New Yorkers pay less . Is Ms. Quinn finally turning from the darkside of the Bloomberg Empire?

There are, as it turns out, almost 225,00 very low wage households in New York City in which workers are paying NYC income taxes even though they’re exempt from NY State and Federal tax (because they fall below the State and Federal, but not the NYC, tax minimum.)

Speaker Quinn will propose today to eliminate the income tax on NYC’s lowest income workers at the fairly modest cost to the City of $72 million. This will put, I am told, $321/year on average into the hands of families. That money will be spent immediately, creating a mini-stimulus, and easing the daily life of the most hard-pressed workers.

DMI explains:  read more »