Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The Internal Revenue Service is giving a quiet head start to millions of taxpayers this year, effectively opening a back door to file before the official start of tax season. Anyone who earned $89,000 or less in 2025 can use the agency’s Free File system to submit a return early, potentially locking in a refund…
Tax season is arriving fast, and the Internal Revenue Service is not whispering about it. The agency is urging taxpayers to act now so they are not scrambling at the last minute, missing key changes, or leaving money on the table. If you want to avoid delays, surprise tax bills, and security headaches, there are…
Indiana lawmakers are racing to align state tax policy with President Donald Trump’s promise of a “big, beautiful bill” that wipes income taxes off tips and overtime. The question for workers is simple but high stakes: will this copycat move at the Statehouse actually leave Hoosiers with meaningfully bigger paychecks, or just a slimmer state…
The Internal Revenue Service has quietly locked in the rules that will govern how much of your 2026 income goes to Washington, and the changes are big enough to shift some families’ tax bills by thousands of dollars. Whether you come out ahead depends on where your earnings fall inside the reshuffled brackets and how…
President Donald Trump is signaling that the next frontier in his tax agenda could be the family home, hinting that a lucrative business write off might soon be available to ordinary homeowners. By floating the idea of letting people depreciate their primary residences, he is effectively inviting voters to imagine a world where the tax…
President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, often touted by him as a “big beautiful bill,” reshaped the tax code in ways that can still shower the middle class with cash if used strategically. I will walk through six specific provisions that remain central to household tax planning, focusing on how they cut…
Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries have chosen the World Economic Forum in Davos as the stage to deliver a blunt message to political and business elites: tax us more, and use that money to repair the social contract. Their open letter argues that extreme wealth is not a private achievement to be…
President Donald Trump has signed a new law tightening the rules around IRS “math error” notices, forcing the agency to show its work and giving taxpayers a clearer, enforceable 60-day window to push back. The change turns what used to be a confusing, high-stakes form letter into a more transparent process that taxpayers can actually…
For Americans 65 and older, the 2025 and 2026 tax years are unusually generous. A new senior-focused deduction stacks on top of already elevated standard deductions, creating a chance to shield tens of thousands of dollars from federal income tax. The challenge is less about finding tax breaks and more about understanding how they interact…
Wealth league tables promise clarity, ranking countries by how fairly they share prosperity. Yet when those scorecards label the Netherlands and the USA as outliers, they often obscure more than they reveal. I argue that the way we measure inequality, and the stories we tell around those numbers, misfires badly in both places. Instead of…