Taxes | featured news

Follows are nine tips that parents might want to keep in mind while toasting champagne glasses preparing for back to school.

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.

News flash: Congressional Republicans want to raise your taxes. Impossible, right? GOP lawmakers are so virulently anti-tax, surely they will fight to prevent a payroll tax increase on virtually every wage-earner starting Jan. 1, right?

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.

The tax holiday is over for U.S. airlines. Many carriers dropped fares Monday as federal taxes were added back into the total ticket price for travelers after a 16-day Federal Aviation Administration shutdown. Most U.S. airlines raised base fares last month when taxes were suspended, pocketing the money that would have gone to the government and swallowing the potential price break for consumers.

The government is likely to lose more than $1 billion in airline ticket taxes because lawmakers have left town for a month without resolving ...

Finally, good news from the gridlock in Congress. Or maybe not. The federal government Saturday stopped collecting taxes on airline tickets, so flying suddenly got cheaper, right? Wrong. Many airlines just increased their airfares to match the tax drop.

President Barack Obama offered strong praise Tuesday for a deficit reduction plan put together by a bipartisan group of senators, calling the measure's mix of tax hikes and spending reforms "broadly consistent" with his own approach to the current debt ceiling crisis.