Friday, February 16, 2001

Malcolm X Conference Audio proceedings of the conference Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and Legacy of Struggle May 1990, Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City http://www.murchisoncenter.org/malcolm/

Under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving particular attention to returns filed by the working poor�
Rate of All I.R.S. Audits Falls; Poor Face Intense Scrutiny The chance of an individual tax return's being audited last year was less than one in 200, down from one in 112 in 1999 and one in 60 in 1996, new data and revised figures for last year show. Even those figures significantly overstate the risk of an audit for most taxpayers. That is because, under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving particular attention to returns filed by the working poor who apply for a special tax credit. Such returns accounted for 44 percent of all audits. Among taxpayers who did not apply for that credit, the audit rate last year was just one in 370. For taxpayers who make more than $100,000, and who pay 62 percent of all individual income taxes, the audit rate last year was slightly less than one in 100, down from one in 50 in 1998 and down from one in 9 in 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/business/16AUDI.html?pagewanted=ally

Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Dozens of Rich Americans Join in Fight to Retain the Estate Tax Some 120 wealthy Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and the father of William H. Gates, are urging Congress not to repeal taxes on estates and gifts. President Bush has proposed phasing out those taxes by 2009. But a petition drive being organized here by Mr. Gates's father, William H. Gates Sr., argues that "repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet." The billions of dollars in government revenue lost "will inevitably be made up either by increasing taxes on those less able to pay or by cutting Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection and many other government programs so important to our nation's continued well-being," the petition says. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14ESTA.html?pagewanted=all

Tuesday, February 13, 2001

Medical Industry Lobbies to Rein In New Patients Privacy Rules Just weeks before far-reaching new rules to protect the privacy of people's medical records go into force, the health care industry is lobbying the Bush administration to delay, change or kill the regulations. Hospitals, insurance companies, health maintenance organizations and medical researchers said the rules, issued in the final weeks of the Clinton administration, would impose costly burdens. But members of Congress said the privacy protections, while they went further than many lawmakers expected when Congress asked to have them written, were immensely popular with consumers and would be hard to reverse at this point. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12PRIV.html?pagewanted=all

Some Fault Bush Tax Cuts for Lean Days in Texas While President Bush is lobbying Congress to pass his $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal in Washington, lawmakers in his home state are struggling with budget problems that some critics are tracing to tax cuts Mr. Bush passed here as governor. For the last week, state legislators have grown increasingly testy about budget projections showing that the state will have little, if any, money to spare. Lawmakers in both parties are talking of possible cutbacks after the projections showed that the state's once-healthy surplus might be nearly erased by budget overruns, particularly from health care costs like Medicaid. "There's no doubt in my mind that George W. Bush's tax cuts have put us in the situation we're in right now," said State Senator Mario Gallegos, a Houston Democrat who regularly criticized Mr. Bush in the presidential campaign. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12TEXA.html?pagewanted=all

Census Officials Ponder Adjustments Crucial to Redistricting Census officials have been tight- lipped about what the panel will recommend, though some experts have said they expect it to find that the net undercount in 2000 will be smaller than in 1990, when it was put at about 1.6 percent of the population. The experts suggested that fewer members of minorities, especially Hispanics and to a lesser extent blacks, were missed in 2000 than in 1990. But both of these trends may be overshadowed by a larger than expected number of people � mainly whites � who were counted twice. Census officials have been concerned for some time that last year's census may include a large overcount, perhaps even bigger than the more than four million people who were counted twice in 1990. Those who are counted twice tend to be children of divorced parents, college students living away from home whose parents list them on census forms and who also fill out census questionnaires on campus, and people with two homes who have received census forms in the mail at both of their dwellings. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12CENS.html?pagewanted=all