Discount At The Pump, Cyber-Shame Lists, Salary Bump For New Mothers

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Why She Doesn't Pay Taxes Expecting a long wait and a large tax bill, Sonia Figueroa walked into the New York Food Pantry's temporary tax preparation site in West Harlem with a fully charged iPod, two magazines and a profound sense of dread. Workers had set up folding metal chairs in a ginned-up waiting area in what's usually the food pantry's dining room. A West Village restaurant dishwasher, reading the sports pages of El Diario La Prensa, New York's oldest Spanish-language daily, was next in line. A few rows back, waiting her turn was a Jamaican-born housekeeper who since the recession has cleaned for sisters with adjoining Park Avenue apartments. A volunteer ushered Figueroa, a full-time call center operator who last year earned $10.55 an hour before taxes, toward a seat, where she became number 14 in line. Before Figueroa left, she had a solution to a tax problem and claimed two of the nation's mostly common refundable tax credits: the earned income tax credit for low to moderate income earners with children, and the child tax credit, an option for almost anyone with kids. Figueroa will get every penny back she paid in federal income taxes last year in a substantial IRS tax refund check. Why You Could Soon Be Getting A Discount At The Pump Amex, Cantor Fitzgerald And Pamela Anderson Land On Cyber-Shame Lists Of Tax Delinquents New Mothers Get Surprising Salary Bump Illinois Mega Millions Winner Could Face 'Lottery Curse' How To Get Free Stuff On Tax Day BLOG POSTS Sarah Damaske: Equal Pay Day: In the Wake of the So-Called "Mommy Wars" Renewal and Partisan Attacks on Equal Pay Bills Calling this past week's maelstrom a renewal of the "mommy wars" dodges the real issue: Caregiving, whether done unpaid in the home or for pay outside of it, is not particularly valued in this country and women (whether in the labor market or not) suffer the brunt of this. Jared Bernstein: What's Fair? Five (or Six) Principles of Tax Fairness The wealthy have been paying a larger share of federal income taxes not because their tax rates have gone up -- in fact, they've gone down. It's because they've been collecting the lion's share of the growth for decades. A key factor here has been the large decline in the rate of taxation on asset-based income, like capital gains, and the much increased concentration of that income among the wealthiest families. Those changes are related -- once you advantage a particular income type, you're going to see more of it. Mark Steber: Big Changes Ahead for 2013 Tax Season! With the tax deadline now here, many Americans are enjoying their tax refunds, putting them to use to pay bills, buy something special or add those dollars to their savings. That's the good news. The bad news? Well, this moment of elation may be short-lived. Ted Harro: 7 Kinds of Smart You Need to Look for When Hiring It's easy to be imprecise about what kind of "smart" we are looking for when hiring. Asking, "is someone smart" is a simple way to screen a candidate. Just be sure that you're not going from being simple to being simplistic. Know what you need and where you need it.

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