Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration began pushing the IRS to share taxpayer data to aid in identifying undocumented immigrants. Leaked documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that an automated system is under development to share data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite the […]
Summertime means hitting the beach and enjoying the open ocean. For taxpayers in Los Angeles County, these activities incur a substantial financial cost. Recent reporting from Open the Books, a watchdog group, found that total compensation for 134 of the county’s 1,500 lifeguards reached $70.8 million in 2024. Of this total, 34 earned $300,000 or […]
When Donald Trump climbed onto stage at a Nevada campaign rally in June 2024 and pledged “no taxes on tips,” his proclamation was brushed off by many pundits as the usual Trumpian stump speech improvisation. Just over a year later, what was once dismissed as farcical has now become the law of the land with […]
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t forget to eat those July 4 leftovers, it’s probably the last good day for them. I’m away on vacation, but I’ve got a great interview for you to read about sports and local politics colliding over stadium subsidies. But don’t sleep on the links this […]
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last week, reduces the federal tax on transfers of firearm sound suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns from $200 to zero. That tax, originally imposed by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), was meant to be prohibitive, amounting to about $4,800 […]
Here we go again. This week, the Senate unveiled, honed, and passed its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it’s a fiscal monstrosity. What was already an oversized mess in the House has been supersized into a $4 trillion ode to unseriousness. This isn’t tax reform. It’s a bipartisan piñata stuffed with […]
Fraud in the food stamp program is already a huge problem that costs federal taxpayers around $10 billion annually. The Senate might have just made that problem worse. A provision included in the major tax and spending bill that senators narrowly approved on Tuesday could give states a powerful incentive to make their food stamp […]
Hours before he cast the tie-breaking vote on a major tax and spending bill in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to reframe the debate over the legislation. Instead of thinking about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) as a matter of fiscal policy that’s primarily aimed at extending the 2017 personal income […]
Imagine that you’re renting an apartment and the terms of the lease require paying your landlord $2,000 every month. Now, imagine that the lease expires at the end of this month. Here you sit, on July 1, with no lease signed for the month of August. Congratulations, you’ve now got $2,000 extra dollars that you […]
Interest rates may have fallen this year, if not for the uncertainty and higher costs created by President Donald Trump’s tariff schemes. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told a House committee on Tuesday that the central bank likely would have “continued cutting” interest rates during the first half of 2025, but decided to hold rates […]
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