Income Tax | featured news

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's call for a flat income tax rate will tie his Republican presidential campaign to a contentious issue that excites many conservatives but has repeatedly failed to win the embrace of mainstream America....

It’s easy to gripe about the rich manipulating the rules to lower their tax rates, but sometimes it’s better to simply borrow a few pages from their playbook. Although finagling a low tax rate on income — as Warren Buffett talks freely about — is difficult for regular salaried workers, there’s another area where modest taxpayers have something to learn from the wealthy: minimizing estate taxes.

Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday.

America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000. Their tax hike doesn’t apply to income from investments. It doesn’t apply to any wage income in excess of $106,800 a year. It’s the payroll tax that they want to raise — to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent of your paycheck, a level established for one year in December’s budget deal at Democrats’ insistence. Unlike the capital gains tax, or the low tax rates for the rich included in the Bush tax cuts, or the carried interest tax for hedge fund operators (which is just 15 percent), the payroll tax chiefly hits the middle class and the working poor.

Countries such as the United States are avoided by large technology companies because of their high income-tax rates. The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35%, while the U.K.'s is set at 28%.

The IRS says 1,470 millionaires paid no federal income taxes in 2009.

Suppose that wife does not work in 2010, or that she works but has enough income tax withheld and remitted to taxing authorities to cover income tax on here income. Husband, on the other hand, has $400,000 of self-employment income in 2010. Having paid no estimated taxes, husband now owes $160,000 in Federal and State taxes on his income.

Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem....