Neil deMause: The Website

I went to a city hearing on giving tax breaks to an alleged union-busting firm for new office space, and more or less lived to tell the tale:

Meetings of the Industrial Development Agency - the city agency in charge of approving discretionary tax subsidies to local businesses - are generally sleepy affairs. Unless sports teams are involved, the monthly board meetings typically attract a handful of business executives and policy wonks but little public attention.

This morning’s monthly IDA hearing, though, was widely anticipated for a different reason: One of the items on the agenda was $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials to Thomson Reuters, the news-and-information-services giant created when the Canadian firm Thomson bought the wire service Reuters in 2008… [read more]

New York’s farmers markets and farm share co-ops are spreading like crabgrass, but if you rely on food stamps for your shopping dollars, many still remain out of reach:

Sometime in the last year, New York City reached a milestone: More than one-quarter of its adult residents are now receiving food stamps. Thanks in large part to the outreach efforts of the Bloomberg administration–with an added boost from the crappy economy–1.7 million New York City residents are now receiving food stamps (or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, as they’ve been officially known since 2008), up from 800,000 at its low point in the final month of the Giuliani Administration in December 2001.

Finding places to effectively spend those food stamps is another story… [read more]

Programming note: I’ll be on WTOP radio in Washington, D.C. this afternoon at 2:20 pm Eastern time, to talk about the Great 1099 Tax Form Mess. Tune in via webstream here.

I went to the laundromat today to find that the cost of using the large washing machines had been lowered, from $3.50 to $2.75. Somebody warn Krugman!

(Okay, I’m not actually going to drive the economy off a cliff by saving up all my dirty laundry in hopes that prices will fall even more. Still, it seems pretty remarkable, given that the last time I can remember this happening is, well, never.)

With the Great Blizzard of 1099s still looming (if 2012 counts as “looming”), there could be a white knight riding to the rescue … would you believe the IRS?

With a new mandate looming that will require business owners to file millions more tax forms, the Internal Revenue Service has begun the daunting process of figuring out how to turn the law’s sweeping demands into actual rules for taxpayers.

The new regulations, which kick in at the start of 2012, require any taxpayer with business income to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year. That promises to launch a fusillade of new paperwork: An estimated 40 million taxpayers will be subject to the requirement, including 26 million who run sole proprietorships, according to a report released this week by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson… [read more]

I know this title makes it sound like a Spencer Johnson sequel, but it’s actually an investigation of how the U.S. news media has largely bought the line that the growing federal deficit is a sign that Americans have been splurging too much and need to tighten their belts — or have them tightened for them via new taxes. Yet this neatly overlooks the fact that pretty much the only people benefitting have been a tiny percentage of rich people, whose tax rates even under Obama remain at historic lows:

No sooner had the unemployment rate dipped from its January high of 10 percent than the media drumbeat began: What will the Obama administration do about looming deficits?

The danger, it was made clear, was both imminent and mammoth: The federal deficit, warned the New York Times (2/2/10), was on pace by 2020 to “equal 77 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest level since 1950.” The Times (1/26/10) even alluded to “perceptions that government spending is out of control” as a cause of Obama’s falling poll ratings among independents.

The “out-of-control spending” theme, in fact, dominated news coverage of the deficit panic, with numerous news outlets drawing parallels between the government’s rising debt and individuals’ irresponsible spending. “We’re going to talk, this morning, about what happens when you put off paying the bills,” began an NPR report (3/5/10) on the deficit… [read more]

It’s not every day I get plagiarized by Glenn Beck disciples, let alone get written up in the Daily Kos for it, but apparently yesterday was my lucky day.

First, the Cincinnati 9/12 Project — part of Glenn Beck’s campaign to re-establish core American principles, which apparently require belief in a male God — posted a blog item that might seem somewhat familiar to anyone who read my May 5 article on new tax reporting requirements for CNNMoney.com.

I first got wind of this last night, around about the same time that Coleman Kane of the Daily Kos noted it on his blog. Unlike the 9/12ers, though, who apparently fell for the fiction that my article was written by a CPA named “Wayne,” Kane actually did his research, Googling me to find out my resume. As he then wrote:

Notice how, save for some superficial changes to wording, they are almost identical? Even the idea flow and paragraph breaks match up! In fact, the major changes to the article were solely to remove the citations from other sources, which include opposition to and support of the new law changes, as well as comments by a legislative aide involved in the legislation.

What’s more — Neil’s a writer for CNN and many other publications, including NYC publications such as The Village Voice and City Limits. So the Cincinnati 9/12 Project plagiarizes an east-coast Ivy League writer to make their point (badly).

For the record, I’m not Ivy League — I went to Wesleyan, where our only connection to the Ivies was that Yale kept stealing our best professors by offering them decent salaries. But it is pretty remarkable that the Beck followers can take an article on a clumsily written piece of tax legislation — one that was inserted into the health care bill, incidentally, by a conservative Democrat and a Republican — and reach the conclusion that “only a bunch of leftists could write legislation that consists entirely of thousands of poison pills and call it ‘health care.’”

Though I probably shouldn’t get too upset, given that the Cincinnati 9/12 Project is based in Ohio, which isn’t a state anyway.

UPDATE: I emailed the Cincinnati 9/12 folks to note the plagiarism, and organization president Karen Best promptly wrote back apologizing and saying the post would be edited to correctly attribute the article and link to the original story, which has now been done. So presumably the blame here goes not to them, but to the mysterious “Wayne”…

And yet another look at the Great 1099 Kerfuffle, albeit this one mostly a rehash of the first one:

An until-now unnoticed provision of the new health care overhaul law could change the way U.S. businesses—including freelance workers—prepare for tax day, causing an avalanche of additional recordkeeping and reporting… [read more]

I’ve been plenty critical of the media’s promises to pay attention to poor people since the economy collapsed, so I should give credit where it’s due: The New York Times has a front-page story today by Peter Goodman on people facing the hard choice between welfare and low-income work — and it goes way beyond the usual “poverty sucks” platitudes to actually focus on a serious policy concern: the lack of affordable child care that makes it nearly impossible for many low-income Americans, especially single parents, to escape poverty.

The story leads with an irresistable narrative hook: Alexandria Wallace is a 22-year-old single mom who wants to work, but can’t because her home state of Arizona has cut subsidized child care to any families not under the supervision of child protective services or on welfare. She had arranged a child-care swap with a friend, but that fell apart, leading to a crisis that will be all too familiar to anyone who’s tried to hold down a job while being a sole caregiver at the same time:

Her first month, she brought home about $500. She felt confident her clientele would grow.

Then, her friend canceled the swap, forcing Ms. Wallace to bring Alaya to the salon, where she tried to keep her occupied with cartoons in a back room.

Soon her car broke down, forcing her to rely on family and the public bus to get to work, which did not always happen.

Her boss had been kind, but patience wore thin.

“She was like, ‘Your baby sitter bailed on you, your car broke down. What do you have left?’” Ms. Wallace said. “She said, ‘If you can’t get something worked out, I’m going to have to let you go.’”

If there’s a flaw in the story, it’s that it only profiles two welfare recipients — Wallace and another single Arizona mom who lost her job for lack of child care — both of whom were working up until the state cut back child-care funds. But as the article notes in an easily missed aside, even back in 2000, only one in seven children whose families were eligible for subsidized child care were getting aid.

Also, Wallace in particular is counterposed to the regular poor people she’s suddenly forced to join on public assistance — the “lazy people who con the system,” as the Times describes her impression of welfare recipients, while she herself worries that she’ll “fall back to — I can’t say ‘being a lowlife.’” Without any portrayal of those who went on welfare when child care was only partly inaccessible, readers could still be left thinking that the problem is that child-care cuts are forcing the deserving poor to hobnob with the undeserving.

Meanwhile, over at Business Week, Bloomberg News reporter James Warren takes note of another poverty issue, puzzling over the falling welfare rolls in many states despite rising unemployment. “Something doesn’t compute,” he concludes, before noting that a March Government Accountability Office report blamed “rules mandating job-related searches; declining cash benefits, which ‘have not been updated or kept pace with inflation’; and sanctions tied to the search process.”

All of which is great for Business Week to be paying attention to, but it would have been nice if someone had noticed, oh, thirteen years ago when these trends first became apparent. But accepting “better late than never” is an American tradition — except, of course, when you’re trying to explain being late for work because the babysitter didn’t show.

Still more on those changes to 1099 tax form filings for small businesses and the self-employed:

The massive expansion of requirements for businesses to file 1099 tax forms that was hidden in the 2,409-page health reform bill took many by surprise when it came to light last month. But it’s just one piece of a years-long legislative stealth campaign to create ways for the federal government to track down unreported income.

The result: A blizzard of new tax forms that the Internal Revenue Service will begin rolling out next year… [read more]