President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state.

Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4.
Continue Reading

His energy development firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.

Republicans argue that it’s inappropriate for the Obama campaign to raise money from a donor who has benefited directly from the Recovery Act.

Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith compared the situation to the Solyndra affair, in which the Obama administration reportedly rushed federal support to a green-energy firm that subsequently collapsed.

President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers.

A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president's proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.

Obama is going to call it the "Buffett Rule" for Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained that rich people like him pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers.

Buffett wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last month that he and his rich friends "have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress."

President Barack Obama sent his jobs bill to Congress on Monday and proposed paying for it by eliminating $467 billion in tax breaks for richer Americans and companies, meeting immediate resistance from Republicans.

The White House objective is to put lawmakers in a tight spot: Support Obama's jobs package or risk being portrayed as doing nothing to improve the economy heading into presidential and congressional elections in November 2012.

The U.S. economy, the world's largest, is mired in 9.1 percent unemployment and flirting with another recession as Europe's debt woes compound fears over the global outlook. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will attend part of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Friday in Poland.

The president’s Labor Day speech in Detroit featured an assertion that contained a number of warning signs that it might be an errant fact: “biggest middle-class tax cut in history.”

First of all, anytime a politician claims he or she has done something historic, watch your pockets. That’s usually a dubious claim.

Then, “biggest” can mean all sorts of things. If we are talking about dollars, then are they inflation-adjusted or measured against the overall economy? Raw dollar figures are essentially meaningless without that context.

Finally, the “middle-class” modifier. What’s the definition of “middle-class”? There are many ways one could slice and dice that classification.

President Obama called on Congress Wednesday to pass a transportation funding bill that includes an extension of the federal gas tax, claiming the move would protect about 1 million jobs.

At issue is the renewal of a transportation spending bill that expires Sept. 30. The president, speaking in the Rose Garden, said a failure to pass the bill by that date would result in the government losing needed money and construction workers losing needed jobs.

"That's just not acceptable. It's inexcusable," he said.

Though the president describes the proposal as a transportation bill, its key component is the federal gas tax, which has been 18.4 cents per gallon for nearly two decades. The money is used to fund road construction and repair, as well as other projects -- the tax costs Americans an average of $100 a year.

The call for renewal comes as gas prices remain high -- the national average for a gallon of regular is about $3.62, a dollar more than a year ago.

D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan has accused a District HIV/AIDS service provider of spending nearly $330,000 in federal tax dollars to open a strip club.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Nathan said Miracle Hands Inc. promised the city it was using the cash to renovate a warehouse in Northeast for use as a job training center for residents with HIV/AIDS. Instead, the warehouse was turned into the Stadium Club, a strip club that continues to operate, the suit says. Miracle Hands shares an address with the club, according to the company's website. Nathan asked in the suit that the city be awarded at least $988,959 in damages.

D.C. Councilman David Catania requested in a February letter to Nathan that the attorney general open an investigation into Miracle Hands and its relationship with Stadium Club.

"I am pleased that the attorney general has decided to take action regarding this egregious impropriety," Catania said Tuesday.

Taxing millionaires and billionaires more – a position advocated by billionaire Warren Buffett and President Barack Obama – won’t make much of a dent in the national debt or the record federal budget deficits, a new study finds.

“Even taking every last penny from every individual making more than $10 million per year would only reduce the nation's deficit by 12 percent and the debt by 2 percent,” the non-partisan Tax Foundation’s David Logan writes.

“There's simply not enough wealth in the community of the rich to erase this country's problems by waving some magic tax wand,” said Logan.

President Obama launched a Midwestern bus tour devoted to the economy Monday by again calling for tax increases and accusing Republicans who oppose his plans of failing to put the “country first.”

“You’ve got to send a message to Washington that it’s time for the games to stop,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of about 500 at a campaign-style event in a sun-splashed park. “It’s time to put country first.”

The president referred to the “debt debacle” that he just concluded with congressional Republicans, calling out Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, by name for resisting the president’s efforts to raise taxes as part of a proposal to cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.

“I put a deal before the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that would have solved this problem,” Mr. Obama said. “And he walked away. His belief was we can’t ask anything of millionaires and billionaires and big corporations. Think about that. I mean, that’s just not common sense,”

Reporter Matthew Boyle discusses how Senate Indian Affairs Committee Democratic staffers are billing taxpayers for their trip to Maui for a field hearing.

President Barack Obama awoke today to furious reaction to his last-minute debt deal, with experts slamming the agreement as a cruel means of hitting middle classes with tax hikes 'through the back door'.

The President and congressional leaders last night finally announced an agreement on emergency legislation to avert the nation's first-ever financial default.

But while the dramatic resolution briefly lifted a cloud that had threatened the still-fragile economic recovery, critics said in the long run the middle classes would bear the brunt of the country's massive debt, with increased taxes set to cover for the White House's reluctance to cut public spending.

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign ran off the rails today when GOP leaders refused his last-minute demand for $400 billion in tax increases, instead announcing their intention to negotiate a plan with Senate Democrats.

This fallback option may only be a short-term plan to avoid a default by raising the limit on the nation’s credit card; it could be coupled with modest budget cuts of a few hundred billion dollars.

But it is not likely to be be the “big deal” that Obama had sought via closed-door negotiations in the final few weeks before a default.

Obama’s favored approach, had it been approved, would have boosted his claims to swing-voters that he is a consensus builder in Washington, and that he is a political moderate willing to approve modest spending cuts.

A mayoral candidate's plan to reduce violence in Baltimore includes a "bullet tax" that he said will increase the cost of committing a crime.

Otis Rolley said he would, if elected, propose a $1 per bullet tax on all bullet purchases in the city. The idea was part of an overall crime plan he unveiled Tuesday.

Rolley also said, according to I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller, that he's willing to touch what she called the third rail of Baltimore politics -- the police budget.

"This is not a revenue enhancement tool," Rolley said of the tax idea. "It's a 'make it difficult for you to buy bullets in the city' tool."

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Instead, Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes, primarily on families earning more than $1 million year, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The Washington Post.

With debt-reduction talks under way between Obama and congressional leaders, Senate Democrats are unlikely to adopt the blueprint. However, it has gained broad support among those eager to chart a path to solving the nation’s budget problems without making politically painful cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

President Barack Obama’s proposal to end a tax break for corporate jet owners, a repeated refrain in his news conference yesterday, would achieve less than one-tenth of 1 percent of his target for reducing the federal deficit.

Changing the provision would put $3 billion into the Treasury over a decade, said two congressional aides familiar with the proposal. Democrats want to require companies that use jets for business purposes to write off the cost over seven years, instead of five years allowed under current law, said a congressional aide and a White House aide. Airplanes used for charter or commercial flights already must be depreciated over seven years.

Reported New York City mayoral wannabe Alec Baldwin changed his “legal residency” from the Big Apple to the Hamptons as part of a tax avoidance scheme.

That revelation was made by the actor himself in a 1989 chat with Interview magazine.

Baldwin, who has been registered to vote in the Town of East Hampton since 1991, told Interview that he had changed his legal residency to Amagansett specifically because, “I didn't want to pay any New York City income taxes, and not just because I wanted to save the money.” Baldwin added, “I thought, ‘Why should I pay another set of taxes to a government that isn't doing what I want it to do with the money?’”

The Senate’s top watchdog on government waste, in a new report Thursday, said taxpayer money has gone to fund such programs as Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole, testing shrimp’s exercise ability on a treadmill and a laundry-folding robot, all funded by the National Science Foundation.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he identified more than $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF, ranging from questionable studies to exorbitant operating costs, and in some cases duplication by the science agency of operations performed by other agencies.

At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate.

Thousands of companies that cashed in on President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package owed the government millions in unpaid taxes, congressional investigators

The Government Accountability Office, in a report being released Tuesday, said at least 3,700 government contractors and nonprofit organizations that received more than $24 billion from the stimulus effort owed $757 million in back taxes as of Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the budget year.

The report said the tax delinquents accounted for nearly 6 percent of the 63,000 contractors and grantees examined, and it cautioned that the real number might be higher because the known tax debt does not measure such factors as income underreporting.

Among the examples was an engineering firm that received a $100,000 stimulus act contract but owed $6 million in taxes. The IRS called it "an extreme case of noncompliance." A social services nonprofit that received more than $1 million in stimulus funds owed taxes of $2 million.

The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 authorizes a $7,500 tax credit for qualified first-time home buyers purchasing homes on or after April 9, 2008 and before July 1, 2009. The following questions and answers provide basic information about the tax credit.

A study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday backs up the view that undocumented immigrants sap more tax dollars than they provide, especially in education, health care and law enforcement. The study pulled together reports from the pa

An elderly Louisiana couple remains in danger of losing their home in a bizarre battle over an unpaid $1.63 tax bill the pair never received.

Last year, Mexicans in the United States sent an estimated $20 billion to Mexico – mostly to family members. Rapid Cash allows Chase checking account customers to make three free transfers - as much as $1,500 each - per monthly statement cycle.

Tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars soon could be flowing into the National Council of La Raza, an organization that advocates for civil rights for Hispanics and has connections to groups that advocate the separation of several southwestern states f