Taxes

What the media like about President Obama's budget proposal over Rep. Paul Ryan's are the former's insistence on tax hikes, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told the audience of Friday's "Fox & Friends." "That's the part of deficit reduction they like" but "anytime anybody proposes any cut of any wasteful spending, the media are the first ones there to talk about the sky falling and…

Charles Krauthammer had quite a battle this weekend with "Inside Washington" host Gordon Peterson and fellow panelist Mark Shields. The fireworks began when Peterson quibbled about how we haven't raised taxes to pay for the wars we're currently waging leading Shields to call them unpatriotic as a result (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Call me a cynic, but I've been dubious about just how accidental were President Obama's supposedly "hot mic" remarks about his budget negotations with the Republicans. Does a president who has been frequently criticized for a lack of toughness really mind being "caught" sounding muy macho? My skepticism was sharpened by GMA's report on the matter this morning.   The graphic referred to…

Details, details. Wisconsin Democrat state senator Lena Taylor really hates those $142 million in tax credits for businesses and the wealthy passed by Gov. Scott Walker and fellow Republicans in the legislature. So much so that Taylor couldn't elaborate on any when asked during Ed Schultz's radio show yesterday, a rebroadcast of the program from a theater in Madison, Wisc., on Wednesday (…

On Tuesday's Morning Edition, NPR's Tovia Smith promoted a homosexual activist's campaign protesting the inability of same-sex couples to file joint federal tax returns. Smith played sound bites from the founder of the campaign, as well as two other supporters of same-sex "marriage," but omitted any from opponents. NPR also highlighted the tax-related "complications" of a specific same-sex…

Yesterday afternoon, the Bloomberg financial news service picked up on a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers showing that U.S. companies pay the sixth highest effective corporate tax rates in the world. "The tax rate for the largest U.S. companies between 2006 and 2009 was 27.7 percent, compared with a non-U.S. average of 19.5 percent, according to the study," reporter Richard Rubin noted. "…

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) demanded an answer to a question today that the MRC has been asking for years: why do so many journalists refuse to ask President Barack Obama tough questions? On the April 15 edition of MSNBC's "Martin Bashir," Walsh pressed the anchor after which the program is named on why he and his colleagues are such Obama sycophants, pointing to the media's unwillingness to…

Asked to comment on the partisan budget speeches Barack Obama delivered this week, NBC's David Gregory asserted the Democratic president is finding his "groove" by criticizing "crazy" House Republicans. "I think he's finding a groove where he can both speak to the Left but really court the independent voters we talk so much about," posited Gregory on the April 15 edition of MSNBC's "Morning…

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has an absolutely must-read op-ed in Friday's Washington Post. What follows is just a tease, as readers are strongly encouraged to review the entire marvelous piece:

It certainly isn't a surprise that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was far more pleased with the deficit reduction plan proposed by Barack Obama this week than the one unveiled by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) last week. In Friday's New York Times column "Who's Serious Now?" the unabashed liberal declared the President's proposal "really serious" and the Congressman's "a sick joke":

Now that President Obama has put tax increases on the table in order to balance the budget, his media are going to put even more pressure on Republicans to comply. A fine example of this happened on CNN's "John King USA" Thursday when the host actually asked Sen. Rob Portman (R-Oh.), "Should Republicans now have the open mind and the courage to maybe lose their jobs like President Bush did…

CNN's Ed Henry and Ali Velshi both think taxes should be raised in order to help reduce the deficit. However, neither gave any credence to the notion that raising taxes is detrimental in the current economic conditions on Thursday's "American Morning." CNN's senior White House correspondent Ed Henry, reporting on the President's deficit-cutting proposals, remarked that in order to trim…

Conservative author S.E. Cupp must have felt like she was getting tag-teamed Wednesday when she opted to go on the "Joy Behar Show" along side Jerry Springer. The trio debated a number of issues including the Bush tax cuts, but the debate really got heated when the host brought up the Republican desire to defund Planned Parenthood (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joined the “tax me, please,” brigade in his Thursday column that is sure to win him new fans the day before tax day: “Raise America’s Taxes.” President Obama in his speech on Wednesday confronted a topic that is harder to address seriously in public than sex or flatulence: America needs higher taxes. That ugly truth looms over today’s budget…