Outside the Beltway

Taxes on wine, beer, and spirits vary wildly from state-to-state and even within each state.

A wealthy alumnus has given Harvard $400 million, sparking a heated debate.

The N.F.L.’s league office is giving up its tax exempt status, but that means far less than the headline implies.

The costs of more than a decade of war are far higher than many ever thought, and we’re still paying the price for the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush Administration while they were being fought.

A Federal Judge has dismissed lawsuits filed by Tea Party groups over the IRS targeting scandal.

The idea that the N.F.L. “doesn’t pay taxes” is largely false.

The announcement of a potential merger between Burger King and Tim Horton’s has led to much moral preening from the usual suspects.

Yet more adventures in bad records retention policy at the IRS.

A supposed conservative calls for massive increases in taxes on alcohol.

Republicans are winning with voters on the issues they say they care the most about.

An award for breaking a campaign promise.

There’s a potentially fatal legal argument looming out there for the PPACA.

Would you trust the men and women in this building?

The outlines of a possible new GOP proposal are emerging. Can it go anywhere?

The IRS will allow all married gay couples to file joint returns, but that still leaves couples in most of the country with more hoops to jump through.

Looking for a quick overview of recent developments in the IRS Tea Party Scandal? Here are two links to help.

A new round of documents from the IRS, that aren’t really new, doesn’t really change the basic narrative on the IRS “targeting” story.

A new theory circulating on the right asserts that IRS targeting of Tea Party groups had an impact on the 2012 elections by diminish the Tea Party’s effectiveness. It’s mostly nonsense.

Today is the deadline for Darryl Issa to respond to a request from Elijah Cummings to defend a decision not to release IRS interview transcripts. What happens if Issa doesn’t respond?

Without full transcripts, the excerpts released by the House Oversight Committee are worthless.

The TIGTA audit reveals the BOLO “Tea Party” list was right 81% of the time. But does that change anything?

Tax analyst Martin A. Sullivan finds that 1/3rd of “potentially political applications” approved by the IRS were from non-conservative groups.

Just about all of the substantive information in the excerpts was already revealed in the TIGTA audit.

Apparently, some people don’t want to let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

When does politics become the “primary activity” of a 501(c)4?

Inside the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration investigation into the IRS scandal.

The US Senate wants to know why Apple and other big technology companies are paying so little into the US Treasury.

Almost no one can confidently explain, let alone define, the specifics of the 501(c)4 designation.

What happened at the IRS looks a lot more like deliberate political bias than simple incompetence.

Partisan targeting by the IRS should not be permitted to stand.

For several years, Tea Party and other conservative groups have contended that they were being targeted for investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and it turns out that they were right.

The days of tax-free online shopping are coming to an end.

The American tax code contains perverse incentives and barriers to getting out of poverty.

The new $450,000 income threshold is a political fiction.

Kevin Drum argues that, “We Don’t Have a Spending Problem. We Have an Aging Problem.”

You can’t always get what you want.