Any update on the extra tax refund Bush is supposed to give out this summer?

What’s your opinion about Bush and the tax refund?

Am I going to recieve a tax refund from Bush?

LouTube: the Bush tax refund is crap

How will you be given your tax relief money?

Will the IRS Stimulus check be refunded every year?

Energy Taxation: Principles and Interests

Energy policy is an important subject these days, as Americans become increasingly aware of the costs of what President Bush has called “our addiction to oil” and the environmental costs of growing world consumption of fossil fuels. Although some foreign oil comes from friendly and politically stable countries, the world price of oil depends heavily on output in potentially hostile, war-torn, and politically unstable regions. Policy changes can help us adjust over time to an economy that uses less oil and generates less greenhouse gas emissions. This article discusses some tax policies, including energy taxes and energy tax incentives, that can be crucial components of an energy policy that addresses global warming and energy security concerns.

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How Far Would $50 Billion in Taxes on the Rich Go? : The Government We Deserve

Democrats at Congress’s helm are discovering what Republicans learned by the end of President Bush’s first term: they have little leeway to do anything. But, you say, isn’t Congress going to try to rescind some of the Bush tax cuts? Most likely, yes, but not enough to make much headway against many problems that each entail annual shortfalls of hundreds of billions of dollars. By contrast, the tax changes being considered might, at best, add $50 billion a year in increased revenues.

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Some Ignored Costs of Bonus Depreciation

As part of the recent stimulus bill, Congress and President Bush decided to try to grant businesses bonus depreciation allowances for new purchases of equipment. For each $100 spent in 2008 on equipment expected to last at least five years, businesses would be able to deduct the vast majority of costs in the first year $600, versus $240 under the old law. At a 35 percent corporate tax rate, for instance, corporations can get checks from the IRS for $210 instead of $84 in the first year for each $1,000 invested. There is one catch: They must have $210 of taxes already due to get $210 back, or $600 of profit against which to take a $600 deduction. Otherwise they will have to delay taking the deduction which is the world they were already in.

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CBO’s Rosy Scenario

CBO just posted its latest budget update. The headline number is a $1.2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2009. That’s indeed alarming—especially considering that it excludes the $750 billion or so in additional stimulus that president-elect Obama promises.

But beyond the next couple of years, things don’t look that bad. The economy recovers, the Bush tax cuts expire, and by 2018, the budget deficit weighs in at a svelte $188 billion.  Admittedly, this is still a big reversal from previous forecasts, which held out the promise of surpluses (not to mention the actual, real surplus on the books when President Bush took office). But a sub-$200 billion deficit doesn’t look too scary compared with the current situation.

The only problem with this sort of good news is that the projection is based on the wildly implausible assumption that nothing changes. The Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. The AMT consumes the middle class. The dozens of perpetually extended expiring provisions, like the hugely popular research and experimentation tax credit, are allowed to disappear. And the trillions in tax cuts and new spending that president-elect Obama promised just  fade into memory.

CBO is not cooking the books. It’s required to assume current law actually plays out as written. But it also provides a very useful supplemental table (Table 7) that shows alternative scenarios. Suppose the Bush tax cuts, the AMT patch, and all the other expiring provisions are extended. Under these assumptions, the rosy scenario turns into a harbinger of doom.  By 2019, we’re running trillion dollar deficits again, despite a healthy economy, and the deficits are growing fast.

President-elect Obama understands this parlous arithmetic and has said all the right things about wanting to avoid this dismal fiscal future. However, his campaign insisted that “current policy” (something like the red line in the figure) was the more relevant policy benchmark, and its claims of fiscal responsibility measure up only in comparison to that reckless yardstick.

Let’s hope that while his economic SWAT team attends to the current crisis, it’s also plotting a plausible strategy to avoid the long-term fiscal calamity. A good place to start would be to forget most of his campaign promises.

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