Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The U.S. tax code already contains tools designed to prevent adversarial nations from benefiting financially through American taxpayers, but gaps in enforcement and scope continue to draw criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The tension between maintaining a globally competitive tax system and ensuring that hostile regimes cannot exploit deductions or credits…
Massachusetts State Auditor Diana DiZoglio has turned a series of state government accountability fights into a direct confrontation with the Legislature, one that could reshape how taxpayers track public spending. Her office identified $12,322,688 in public benefit fraud in a single fiscal year and flagged serious contracting failures in the state’s emergency shelter system. When…
The wealthiest people in the United States, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and George Soros, have paid zero federal income taxes in certain years, despite holding fortunes that dwarf the lifetime earnings of most American families. The mechanism behind this outcome is not some shadowy offshore scheme but a structural feature of the U.S. tax…
The IRS is sharpening its tone for the 2025 filing season, and two tax credits are in the spotlight: the Fuel Tax Credit and the Employee Retention Credit. Both are real, technical tax breaks, but they have also drawn aggressive promoters and outright scams. The agency warns that taxpayers who chase easy money on these…
Billions of dollars that Congress already approved are no longer sitting safely under President Donald Trump’s thumb. After months of legal challenges, judges and state attorneys general have begun to pry open what had looked like a locked vault of frozen grants, education aid, and infrastructure money. The emerging pattern is not just a series…
California’s long running “Water’s Edge” tax regime has quietly shaped how multinational corporations report profits and how much they contribute to the state budget. A new proposal from Assemblymember Damon Connolly would scrap that framework, forcing companies to bring more of their global income into the state tax base and potentially reshaping who pays for…
Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are turning a once‑in‑a‑generation tax overhaul into a powerful financial lever, shrinking their federal bills even as profits and capital spending surge. The combination of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and a breakneck build‑out of artificial intelligence infrastructure is letting these companies convert data centers and research labs into immediate tax…
President Donald Trump is promising a banner year for tax refunds, with his signature cuts poised to fatten checks for households that have already weathered years of inflation and higher borrowing costs. Yet the very agency that has to deliver those windfalls is heading into filing season with fewer workers, a growing backlog and a…
The Internal Revenue Service is quietly tightening the rules that decide how fast your refund hits your bank account. If anything about your return or your payment details looks off, the IRS can park your money for weeks until you prove who you are and where the refund should go. The one document that increasingly…
President Donald Trump’s $10 billion legal clash with the Internal Revenue Service has already turned a technical tax dispute into a political brawl. Now a Democratic lawmaker is escalating the fight with a provocative proposal to strip Trump of any personal windfall if he prevails, effectively daring Congress to decide whether a sitting president can…