Taxes | featured news

...there are potentially legitimate reasons for parking large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we don’t know which if any of those legitimate reasons apply in Mr. Romney’s case — because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal to come clean suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.

The elderly and other vulnerable homeowners are losing their homes because they owe as little as a few hundred dollars in back taxes, according to a report from a consumer group....

Can the Internal Revenue Service police President Obama's health care mandate while simultaneously collecting all the taxes for running the federal government? The question is being renewed in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision upholding most of the 2010 Affordable Care Act as a tax issue rather than one of interstate commerce.

Romney, by receiving much of his income in capital gains and dividends and giving millions of dollars to charity, is certainly able to keep his effective tax rate relatively low, especially compared to a wealthy person who earns much of his or her income in salary. But, even so, Romney still pays an effective tax rate that is higher than the tax rate paid by most Americans.

President Barack Obama's campaign and top Democrats on Sunday called on Mitt Romney to release more personal tax records and raised questions about his offshore assets that the Republican challenger's campaign condemned as an "unseemly and disgusting" character assault.

White House chief of staff Jack Lew repeatedly said today that the penalty for failure to buy health insurance is not a tax, no matter what people are saying about last week's Supreme Court decision. "This is a penalty," Lew said on CNN's State of the Union, one of three talk show appearances he made today. "It's something that only 1 percent of the people who could afford insurance -- (and) who choose not to get it -- will pay."

The Supreme Court's finding that the centerpiece of the health care law -- the individual mandate -- is valid as a tax has become Plan B for Republicans.

Bill Clinton said Thursday that he's "very sorry" for comments he made days earlier that appeared to undermine President Obama's position on extending certain tax rates, chalking it up to a misunderstanding over when lawmakers needed to act ahead of a looming "fiscal cliff."

The amount of federal debt held by the public is projected later this year to surpass 70 percent of the nation's annual economic output, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday in a report that spotlighted the stark choices policymakers face on taxation and government spending.

To see where the presidential candidates stand on taxing the rich, just look at how they'd tax themselves. To see where the presidential candidates stand on taxing the rich, just look at how they'd tax themselves. Under his own proposal, Mitt Romney would pay half what he would under President Barack Obama's tax plan. For a man of Romney's means, that could save almost $5 million a year.