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]

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.

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]

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]

Okay, maybe the crazy right-wingers who think the health care reform law will bring about the end of civilization have a case after all:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year… [read more]

This article almost, but not quite, made it into a publication that shall remain nameless. Kill fee in hand, I now make it available to you here, free of charge.

On the scale of recent Albany misdeeds - Client 9, a legislator expelled for playing Freddy Krueger with his girlfriend’s face, rival state senate factions facing off with separate gavels - the state legislature missing its budget deadline last week wasn’t especially egregious. It wasn’t even novel: In all but two of the last 26 years, the budget has been late, making this a beloved New York tradition.

This year’s Albany stalemate, though, has higher stakes…

My first article for the relaunched City Limits, about the doomsday budgets proposed for New York city and state, is up. (It’s actually the second article I wrote for them, but is running first — I blame the suits at Fox.)

Economists say the nation’s recession is technically over, but whether or not the economy is actually on the mend, the recession’s impact on New York City and state budgets is only just beginning. Over the last three months, Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have mapped out a set of austerity budgets that would slash billions in spending – with many of the reductions coming from education and social services.

This year marks a watershed for both City Hall and Albany, but for different reasons, says James Parrott, chief economist at the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, which earlier this month issued extensive briefings on both the state and city budgets… [read more]