Tag: Internal Revenue Service

Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today. _____________________ • President Trump declared that he was “not happy” about the bipartisan compromise on border security, but said he did not think the government would shut down on Friday. The deal includes just $1.375 billion for new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, much less than in the proposal he rejected in December. Here are five takeaways. • A number of women are running for president, but Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is the only one making feminism the central theme of her candidacy. • A government audit found that because of the recent shutdown, fewer taxpayer calls to the Internal Revenue Service were answered, wait times grew longer and the processing of 87,000 amended tax returns was delayed. The issue was especially acute since it followed Mr. Trump’s tax overhaul, which left many people with questions about filing their returns. • Tens of thousands of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were exposed to toxic substances from open-air trash fires, which some believe caused long-term health problems. • The acting defense secretary, Patrick M. Shanahan, arrived in Baghdad for an unannounced visit, amid questions about whether some of the American troops slated for withdrawal from Syria might be sent to Iraq. He said that if the two countries were close to a deal, he could let the issue “slide for a little while” and not impose higher tariffs on Chinese goods.

Vice-president Mike Pence said Donald Trump has yet to decide whether he will declare a national emergency over his demand for a wall along the southwest border – the key sticking point in negotiations over the partial government shutdown that has affected 800,000 federal employees. White House counsel is reviewing whether the president has the ability to declare a national emergency in the current situation, Pence told reporters at a media briefing on Monday. Trump threatens national emergency in 'next few days' over wall and shutdown Read more “What I’m aware of is that they’re looking at it and the President is considering it,” Pence said during the briefing alongside homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Office of Management and Budget acting director Russell Vought in Washington. But asked whether Trump has made up his mind on declaring a national emergency as a way to bypass congressional approval and move ahead with spending public money on construction of the wall, as the president has repeatedly threatened in recent days, Pence replied: “He’s made no decision on that.” Such a move would all but certainly invite legal challenges. As the shutdown stretches into its third week, the Internal Revenue Service announced on Monday that it would process tax returns beginning 28 January 2019 and would provide refunds to taxpayers despite the shutdown. The agency said it would be recalling some of its furloughed employees to process the filings. It is not yet known which part of the 1,989-mile border, which crosses four US states, Trump plans to visit or what he plans to do there. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the wall “immoral” and refuses to budge on providing taxpayers’ funding for it. As a first act, the newly-empowered House Democrats passed legislation last week to re-open the government while congressional leaders and the administration continued to debate border security. Senate Democrats are, meanwhile, threatening to block any legislation that does not reopen the federal government as a way to pressure McConnell to bring up a government funding bill for a vote in the Senate.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press WASHINGTON — America will get its first taste of divided government under President Trump this week when a Democratic House tries to wrest control of the political agenda from Mr. Trump, who appears determined to keep the focus on border security, immigration and his “big, beautiful” wall. “Border Security and the Wall ‘thing’ and Shutdown is not where Nancy Pelosi wanted to start her tenure as Speaker!” he said Tuesday on Twitter. But their first order of business will be reopening the government, as Ms. Pelosi said Tuesday on Twitter in response to Mr. Trump. The Democrats plan to pass two bills on Thursday. With the plan facing a shaky future in the Senate and an intransigent president, some rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties are suggesting that a deal to revamp the nation’s immigration laws, pairing border security and protections for some undocumented immigrants, may be the way out of the stalemate. “Democrats, come back from vacation now and give us the votes necessary for Border Security, including the Wall. That bill passed the Senate with 68 votes but did not make it out of the House. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the new chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said in an interview on Tuesday that Democrats would not again broach immigration before the government is reopened. “However, it’s impossible to have a mature conversation about comprehensive immigration reform in the midst of a reckless Trump shutdown sparked by his desire to build a medieval border wall.” Democrats have not forgotten that a year ago, when they talked to Mr. Trump about DACA, he promised to work with them on a “bill of love,” only to back away, prompting Mr. Schumer to declare that negotiating with Mr. Trump was like “negotiating with Jell-O.” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said the challenge lies with the Republican majority in the Senate. “If you want to get a bipartisan immigration bill in the coming months, you’re going to have to have Republican senators willing to work across the aisle to get things done,” Mr. Van Hollen said.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, has asserted that Democrats would not cave on the issue of wall funding. Erin Schaff for The New York Times WASHINGTON — House Democrats are putting forward a proposal to reopen the federal government by severing funding for the Department of Homeland Security and border security from other spending bills that enjoy bipartisan support — a gambit aimed at forcing President Trump to negotiate or to shoulder the blame for a protracted shutdown. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who is expected to be sworn in as speaker on Thursday, challenged Republicans in a joint statement on Monday. “If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans refuse to support the first bill, then they are complicit with President Trump in continuing the Trump shutdown and in holding the health and safety of the American people and workers’ paychecks hostage over the wall,” the statement said, adding that rejecting the bill would be “the height of irresponsibility and political cynicism.” Mr. Trump continued to dig in on New Year’s Eve, venting his frustrations in tweets and in a Fox News interview as the shutdown stretched into its 10th day and as furloughed federal workers were about to miss their paychecks on Wednesday. “He’s not going to get a wall,” Ms. Pelosi said in a recent interview. The Democrats’ two-pronged plan will also complicate life for Mr. McConnell, who has said he will not bring up any measure that does not have the president’s support. Once the bills pass the House, as expected, Mr. McConnell will have to decide whether to put one, both or neither on the Senate floor for votes. The Senate is not going to send something to the president that he won’t sign.” By passing only a short-term funding extension for the Homeland Security Department, Democrats would effectively prolong the divisive debate over the wall — and potentially open a path for a broader immigration overhaul. It also includes the stopgap measure for the Homeland Security Department. In several instances, the bills rebuff funding cuts proposed by the administration and instead pour more funds into programs Mr. Trump either suggested reducing or eliminating.

Two bills aimed at holding IRS employees accountable for misconduct; reaction and analysis from Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as…

SIMON: The first week of the Manafort trial - let me ask you. Prosecutors say Manafort made tens of millions of dollars working for foreign politicians, including some who were friendly to Moscow. He goes on trial as soon as next month, I believe, too. Another trial in a separate federal court on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent when he was working for these foreign governments. The Koch brothers, who, of course, have been major donors to many Republican causes and candidates - not President Trump, it must be said. They said they're going to be a little more choosy in the future with their money. SIMON: Before we move on, we want to note - the Koch brothers have contributed to NPR. President's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh - we keep hearing he's a shoo-in, so why hasn't he been shooed in already? That's nearly a million pages of documents. SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has introduced a bill (H.R. Predictably, Washington Post writer Matt O’Brien instantly dismissed the idea as “Trump’s new plan to cut taxes for the rich.” O’Brien relies on a two-page memo from John Ricco which yanks mysterious estimates out of a black box – the closed-economy Penn-Wharton Budget Model. Another Washington Post article said, “Researchers have estimated that the top 5 percent of households in terms of income hold about two-thirds of all stock and mutual fund investments, putting wealthier Americans in the position of benefiting much more than others from any changes to capital gains rules.” But the capital gains most likely to be seriously exaggerated by decades of inflation are not gains from selling financial assets, but from selling real assets. When the top tax rate on realized gains was 28-40%, very few gains were realized – particularly among top-bracket taxpayers. When the top tax rate fell to 20% in 1982-96 and 1997-2000, and to 15% in 2003-2007, inflation-adjusted real revenue from the capital gains tax soared for several years (market crashes in 2001 and 2009 overwhelmed taxes, of course). This is just one reason static estimates of the alleged revenue loss from indexing are not credible: The elasticity of realizations is extremely sensitive to the tax rate and indexing is one way to reduce that tax rate (and raise realizations) for assets held for a long time. The rush to sell before an increase in the capital gains tax in 1987 meant a third of all “income” reported by Top 1% taxpayers in 1986 was from bunching the realization of capital gains. It is certainly true that people who have not yet accumulated much capital – which means most young people regardless of their current income – have also not yet accumulated capital gains. When it comes to political arguments for high capital gains taxes on capital gains, the redistributionist left has never grasped that the people who are most fearful of high capital gains taxes are not “the rich” but seniors. The table, from the CBO/JCT study, shows that net capital gains accounted for only 1% of income among those age 35-44, 3% at age 55-64, and 6% for taxpayers 75 or older.

(CNN)The "Abolish ICE" chorus overtaking the immigration debate has Democrats and liberals scrambling to respond to a base of supporters angered by the country's immigration service while at the same time trying to project that they support a secure border. "I don't think ICE today is working as intended," New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a potential 2020 candidate for Democrats said Thursday night on CNN. "I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues." Calls to re-imagine and shrink the US government usually sound from the other side of the political aisle, and there have been a lot of them in recent years. Rick Perry wanted to trim three departments from the federal government -- so many that he once famously forgot the names of all the departments he'd end. Let's see ... commerce, education," Perry said. And the passage of tax reform by Republicans in Congress won't stop people like Cruz from trying to make the tax code even simpler and trying to "abolish" the IRS. In June the Trump administration suggested a large-scale reorganization of the federal government, which would merge the Education and Labor Departments and replace the Department of Health and Human Services with something new that would also include administration of food stamps, a massive program under the Department of Agriculture. Former President Barack Obama wanted Congress to give him broad authority to reform duplicative government agencies, but they didn't do it. People who want to abolish ICE aren't complaining it is duplicative, or that it's performing a function the federal government should not, but rather that deportations are out of control.