Tax Cuts

1 . The stimulus didn't create jobs. A year after Obama signed the bill, the percentage of the public that believed it had created jobs was lower than the percentage that believed Elvis was alive. But at its peak, the Recovery Act directly employed more than 700,000 Americans on construction projects, research grants and other contracts. That number doesn't include the jobs saved or created through its unemployment benefits, food stamps and other aid to struggling families likely to spend it; its fiscal relief for cash-strapped...

RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II promotes his plan to cut $1.4 billion in personal and business taxes in a television commercial to be released Monday. The ad — the Republican gubernatorial candidate's second, and the race's third overall — features Cuccinelli talking up his plan to cut taxes and close tax exemptions and loopholes. "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy," Cuccinelli says, speaking directly to the camera and standing in what appears to be a hardware store.

Rhino- and hippo-like beasts and other large mammals roamed the Arctic 53 million years ago in a climate that reached 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and they basked part of the year in a warm midnight sun and stayed put when the sun dropped below the horizon for months at a time, new research indicates. Based on analyses of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the fossil teeth of three species, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded that during the dark months, the creatures shifted their diet radically.

JERUSALEM — Israeli police say protesters are marching in Tel Aviv over proposed tax hikes and benefit cuts. Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said about two thousand rallied Saturday night. Protesters are angry over the proposed decrees by Israel's new finance minister Yair Lapid who started his job several weeks ago. Lapid ran in January's election on a ticket vowing to help the middle class. The proposed budget hits that demographic deep in their pockets with raised taxes and slashed benefits.

THE REPUBLICAN presidential candidates claim to abhor debt, yet propose tax cuts that would add trillions more. Yes, trillions. The case for continuing the George W. Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $3.7 trillion over 10 years (including interest), is shaky enough. The cuts for the wealthy alone, which President Obama would end, would cost with interest about $1 trillion over the next decade. But the GOP candidates want to continue all those cuts — and add many more, the vast bulk of which would again go to the wealthiest taxpayers.

THE LOOMING expiration of the Bush tax cuts offers an opportunity that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress seem determined to squander. No one is proposing allowing all the tax cuts to expire as scheduled, on Dec. 31, 2010, nor should they. But a rational discussion of tax policy would include thoughtfully weighing which tax cuts to keep in place, which ones to pay for and perhaps even which taxes to increase. It may not surprise you to learn that this not happening.

HONOLULU, Dec. 28 -- President-elect Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan will include an immediate tax cut for middle-class families, and the incoming administration hopes to enact permanent tax cuts soon thereafter, a senior adviser to Obama said Sunday. David Axelrod said the stimulus package will be implemented soon, given the worsening economy, and could cost $675 billion to $775 billion. The massive recovery plan will seek to create or save 3 million jobs, he said in appearances Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation.

Editor's note: We bring you this column as part of our RePosted feature, where we dig through our archives to find opinion pieces that shed light on current events. This column was originally published on March 25, 2003. Do the leaders of Congress really want to make their branch of government look foolish? The attention of Americans is focused on the war in Iraq -- the successes, the sacrifices, the capture of American fighting men and women, the march on Baghdad. Congressional leaders should not exploit this moment...

The Obama campaign's attack ad about Bain Capital presented a simplistic picture of a complicated reality. Private-equity firms can play a crucial role in keeping companies competitive. And although some firms have engaged in some bad practices, on the whole the industry has grown so large because it performs a useful function. But the worst part about the ad was that it had little to do with America's challenges or Obama's policies. By contrast, Mitt Romney's first major ad is substantive — and wrong.

AT A TIME of soaring deficits and growing needs, the Senate is weighing whether the wealthiest of wealthy Americans should get a tax break worth some $250 billion over 10 years. The Senate today could take up an amendment to the budget resolution proposed by Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) that would shield the first $10 million of estates from taxation and lower to 35 percent the tax on amounts beyond that. This would have been outrageous even before the current economic and fiscal mess.

Charles Dickens's " A Christmas Carol " is a gooey confection of seasonal sentiment. It also is an economic manifesto that Dickens hoped would hit with "twenty thousand times the force" of a political tract. It concerned a 19th-century debate that is pertinent to today's argument about immigration. This week, a disagreement between two conservative think tanks erupted when the Heritage Foundation excoriated the immigration reform proposed by a bipartisan group of eight senators.

RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II said Tuesday that if elected governor, he would cut business and individual income taxes by $1.4 billion a year and build on Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's "Bob's for jobs!" slogan. "My name doesn't rhyme with ‘jobs' like his did, but the focus is the same," said Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate in the race to succeed term-limited McDonnell (R). Cuccinelli, who unveiled his "economic growth and Virginia jobs plan" at a frozen-yogurt shop in Richmond, offered the...

I understand that David Ignatius is fond of his former teacher, retiring Bank of England Governor Mervyn King [" Britain's heir to Keynes ," op-ed, April 25], but I must disagree with Mr. Ignatius's assertion that Mr. King's career has followed in John Maynard Keynes's intellectual footsteps. Mr. Keynes's most important idea was that government should use tax cuts and public-spending increases to boost aggregate demand in a recession, even though this would result in temporarily higher budget deficits.

The curtain closed just a week ago on this year's session of the Maryland General Assembly, but House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) is already thinking about something he would like to do next year. And it might surprise you: cut taxes. "I'm an optimist, and I believe the economy is going to improve," Busch said in an interview on Monday. "If there's an increase in revenues that results, hopefully we can return some of that to the taxpayers. " Busch, who helped usher a major gas...

Steven R. Weisman, author of " The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson — The Fierce Battles over Money and Power That Transformed the Nation ," is editorial director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "I paid my income tax today!" So went one of Irving Berlin's lesser-known patriotic jingles. "I never felt so proud before/To be right there with the millions more/Who paid their income tax today!" Few share Berlin's enthusiasm, as grumbling about taxes reaches a crescendo on April 15. Let's topple some tall tales...

Regarding Charles Krauthammer's March 22 op-ed column, " The 50 percent solution ": I would not call increased revenue "fattening the Treasury. " Most of the tax revenue coming in to the federal government goes right back into the economy. When people talk about revenue-neutral tax reform, they really mean reform that does not reduce the deficit. President Ronald Reagan may have achieved revenue-neutrality with the 1986 tax reform, but what he got was a tripling of the national debt during his eight years in office, thanks...

The Post asked readers to craft plans for putting the federal government on a path to fiscal health. Submit yours in 250 words or fewer at letters@washpost.com. Every American got us into this budget mess, so everyone should be a part of the solution. My deficit-reduction plan uses equal spending cuts and increased revenue to stabilize the debt at 60 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, using the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's budget simulator . Throughout the process, I have shielded the most...

"We said working folks deserved a break, so within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, putting more money into your pockets. " — President Obama, Sept. 5, 2011   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.

The tax plan embedded in the House Republican budget would cut taxes by $5.7 trillion over the next decade, with the benefits flowing disproportionately to very wealthy households, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year would benefit the most from the GOP tax plan, the analysis shows, reaping an average $400,000 tax break that would send their after-tax income soaring by nearly 20 percent. Meanwhile, taxpayers...

Okay, middle-class taxpayers: Listen up. Our national government in Washington is whacking you again. This time the whacking involves the way that two new income tax surcharges, supposedly designed to affect only the "rich," will reach deeper and deeper into the middle class unless something is done now to rein them in. I'm talking about the 0.9 percent tax surcharge on the amount by which ­individuals' "earned income" — such as salaries and...