If your fear of getting caught for tax fraud starts to spike in the next few weeks, it’s probably by design. The Internal Revenue Service appears to deliberately ramp up publicity of its tax fraud cases just before Tax Day, a new study finds.

Tax Freedom Day will arrive on April 9 this year, the 99th day of 2010, according to the Tax Foundation's annual calculation using the latest government data on income and taxes. Americans will work well over three months of the year—from January 1 to April 9—before they have earned enough money to pay this year's tax obligations at the federal, state and local levels. Listed above is the national average, and the... More

With tax filing day around the corner, it's time for a look at who pays taxes. Last year The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution,  released a report estimating what percentage of all federal taxes (income, payroll, corporate, estate) are paid by people in all five income quintiles. The study also breaks down the top income quintile to show how much those in the top 5... More

As the U.S. income tax code grows ever more complex, the size of the instructions booklet that filers must wade through to complete their 1040 forms grows longer. Here is the size of the booklet used by most individual taxpayers as it has grown over time, according to the National Taxpayers Union.

The highly anticipated introduction of the new Apple iPad is projected to give the economy a shot in the arm. How big? Well, a study by researchers at the Personal Computing Industry Center at the University of California at Irvine attempted to quantify the economic impact of another Apple product, the highly successful iPod product. The paper estimates annual payrolls linked to iPod in three job categories in the United... More

Recently released figures show that per capita personal income declined in 2009 in the U.S., the first such slump since the government began tracking the data forty years ago. Wages and unearned income, such as dividends and interest payments, slumped, while transfer payments, principally government subsidies, increased by 12 percent.

An interesting bit of information about business start-ups has been lurking in the details of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Business Employment Dynamics data on gross job flows. If you look at the share of jobs created by opening businesses—as opposed to jobs created from expansions of existing businesses—that share has actually risen through the middle of 2009 (these data come with an... More

Okay, I've seen a lot of whoppers in my time, but the Cash for Clunkers legislation takes the cake. And the most recent CPI report reiterates the net welfare-reducing impacts of CFF on the economy.

College sports have become a big business. But what if we ranked universities based on the success of their graduates in the marketplace? The brackets for the NCAA tournament would look quite different. Payscale, which collects salary data, has done just that. And the winner is...

The table here  compares the profit margins for all of the sixteen separate industries in the health care sector, and shows that Health Care Plans (health insurance companies) ranks #10 out of 16, behind nine other more profitable health care industries, including four drug industries, medical... More

Tax Day, April 15, is looming for the nearly 142 million Americans who will file a tax return for income earned in 2009. While most taxpayers worry about paying the correct amount and even pay for professional assistance to make sure they do, many millions of tax filers will be "nonpayers," according to a new Tax Foundation study. A nonpaying tax return is one filed by an individual or couple who, thanks to legal credits... More

Early retirement programs in many European nations have led to low levels of employment for  those 55-and-over. The problem is most acute in some nations currently struggling with steep fiscal problems because pension costs eat up much of gross domestic product. This chart traces the European countries with the lowest levels of employment among those 55-and-older and compares that to the European average and the rate in the... More

The stores and malls seem busier, as the slowly recovering economy may be returning consumers — and their pent up demand — back to some of the prior consumption. At least, that is what the data seems to be showing.

Is Internet use another reliable indicator of national wealth? Looking at this map by the BBC which charts Internet penetration by country since 1998 certainly suggests a high correlation between wealth and online use.

A sizable minority of children in rich countries live with just one parent — a parent who is likely to be female, and also likely to be working.Those are some of the takeaways from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s recent coverage this week of women in the world.

The CBO has now estimated the budget effects of the President's proposed policies, and indeed the CBO forecasts larger budget deficits. The CBO's total deficit projected over the decade-long budget window is $1.2 trillion larger than the administration's estimate.

Global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years. The question now is whether final demand for this increased production will materialise or whether consumer spending, especially in the US, will remain weak, causing the increase in production to go into inventories,... More

Local government may be shedding workers, but the federal government is growing.

A new Field Poll offers a look at how voters think state officials should deal with California's projected $20 billion deficit.

The figure to the left shows the relationship between per capita Recovery Act grants awarded and unemployment across states, which shows that stimulus aid was not particularly well matched with need.