Taxes

San Francisco and Los Angeles must be having a competition to see which California city is most committed to passing inane liberal legislation. Given the move by Los Angeles County today to ban plastic bags and impose a paper bag tax, I'm going to have to go with L.A. The Los Angeles Times' L.A. Now blog has the story:

For the second time in two days, Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday lobbied for tax increases, wondering why it's "okay" for the "wealthiest Americans" to continue to receive a tax cut. The GMA host pushed Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to accept a deal in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts. After the conservative leader expressed skepticism about extending…

During Monday's12PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer helped promote the network's "Green is Progress" week by demanding greater government intervention to force people to follow an environmentalist agenda: "Until government says these are the standards that everyone has to aspire to, we're not really making progress." Brewer made the comments while interviewing Practically Green CEO…

Every week, we receive more bad news about the American economy. Last week was no exception. The Fed began monetizing the national debt, while China's gross domestic product for the third quarter expanded 8.9 percent from the previous quarter, Dagong (the Chinese quasi-government ratings agency) downgraded the credit rating of the United States, and billionaire George Soros expanded his…

Former top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos on Monday pestered his old White House colleague Erskine Bowles on the need to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The Good Morning America co-host also touted the critique of liberal columnist Paul Krugman in opposition to a panel calling for deficit reduction. Stephanopoulos pushed Bowles, the co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal…

As a Monday morning treat for NewsBusters readers, here is a sampling of the quotes from the latest edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter, a compilation of the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. All of the quotes, plus past issues going back to 1988, can be found at www.MRC.org. Forget What Voters Said, It’s Time for Higher Taxes Host Christiane…

Despairing that the current income tax rates will be extended for all income levels, on Sunday’s This Week, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus declared: “I think that the conversation right now is deranged” and “crazy.” In measuring the long-term “cost” of keeping the Bush rates for those below $250,000 versus for all, she argued: I think that the conversation right now is deranged. We…

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Krugman tries to clarify what he said. Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget. In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit…

NBC's Matt Lauer and MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan last night found themselves just two of the targets in the latest "Media Mash" segment on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" show. NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the November 11 program to dissect NBC's biased coverage of former President George W. Bush's new memoir, "Decision Points," an ABC News puff piece on Michelle Obama's fashion…

Time Magazine is having some problems with very basic issues of logic. First, it doesn't seem to understand the difference between correlation and causation. The notion that debt is equal to income minus expenditures also eludes the folks at Time. A blog post on the magazine's website on Wednesday alleged that the Tea Party will cause hyperinflation. If that seems counterintuitive, take…

Food-filled winter holidays will soon arrive. But the liberal news media have already spent recent days comparing soda to an illegal drug, promoting a toy ban in kid’s Happy Meals, and generally bashing fast food companies for giving customers exactly what they want. CNBC’s Erin Burnett outdid food police groups on Nov. 8, when she compared soda to cocaine in a segment discussing a “fat tax…

Despite 9.6 percent unemployment nationally, with some areas of the country suffering far worse than that, the New York Times editorial board believes state governments must raise taxes to balance their budgets:

Now that we have new representatives, it's time to advance immediately on them and address the issue that can both rebuild our economy and relieve us of government oppression: tax reform. As I began to point out in last week's article, Congress' plan to subsidize all its outrageous borrowing and spending will demand far more than the tax man's just collecting on expired Bush tax cuts. There…

On Monday's CBS Early Show, political analyst John Dickerson discussed President Obama's strategy against Republicans in Congress, particularly on tax cuts: "[He] said there's got to be a way to pay for it, again trying to put pressure on Republicans to say if you want to spend $700 billion, you've got to find the cuts, make them own those cuts, which are painful and might be quite unpopular…