Stock buybacks are a form of economically useless, business-starving financial engineering that makes rich people much, much richer. Read the rest
Tax lawyer Jed Bodger has publised an analysis in the journal Tax Notes detailing the expected gains for superheroes under the Trump tax plan. Read the rest
When Donald Trump announced that he would "drain the swamp" by filling his cabinet with lobbyists, billionaires, and political operators, we all braced for an onslaught of rules that benefited the fattest of cats at the expense of everyone else, but Gary Cohn outdid himself. Read the rest
Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, Russian exile Masha Gessen's essay Autocracy: Rules for Survival swept the internet, offering both hope and caution for the years to come. Read the rest
Until the GOP tax plan came along, rich people who donated to religious schools only get partial tax write-offs for their gifts, because the constitutional principle of separation of church and state obliged them to use special scholarship funds that were not under direct state control. Read the rest
The Republican tax plan -- more than a 1,000 pages covered in last-minute scribbled annotations and pastebombs, passed without any substantial debate or analysis -- is a fucking mess. Read the rest
The new GOP tax plan slashes the taxes on real estate investment trusts (REITS) by a quarter, dropping the rate from 39.6% down to 29.6% -- a move that will put tens of millions of dollars in the pockets of investors in America's notorious private prisons. Read the rest
Steve Mnuchin is the gilded age cartoon villain that Trump put in charge of the Treasury where he served as one of the architects of the catastrophic Republican tax plan, so naturally someone sent him a giftwrapped box of horse manure with a tag reading "from the American people." Read the rest
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan -- who inherited the most scandal-haunted bank of them all this year -- reassured his investors in a CNN Money interview that not one dime of the tax savings the GOP will deliver to his company will be reinvested or used to increase wages: instead, it will all go to buy-backs and dividends. Read the rest
The GOP tax plan is a thousand-plus-page dog's breakfast of last-minute additions, giveaways, and complexity larded upon complexity, making it nearly impossible to parse out (so much for simplifying the tax code!), but the nonpartisan, Brookings-backed Tax Policy Center's new analysis goes a long way to untangling this ugly mess. Read the rest
