Billionaire Jeff Yass, who is one of the largest megadonors to right-wing causes, has managed to avoid at least $1 billion in taxes via “trading strategies that reduce his tax burden but push legal boundaries,” ProPublica reports.

“There’s lots of buzz about a possible reconciliation deal between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Discussions are ongoing, although there’s no deal yet, and there won’t be one this week,” Punchbowl News reports.

“What’s in a potential Democratic reconciliation package – and when it could come together – are enormously important. And of course, none of this is decided yet.”

“Yet we want to note this as well – we’re not entirely sure the reconciliation package being discussed on the Senate side could pass the House. Provided it gets through the Senate in the first place.”

“A congressional deal for billions of dollars in additional coronavirus funding appeared all but dead Thursday after Senate Republicans accused the White House of being dishonest about the nation’s pandemic funding needs,” the Washington Post reports.

“Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who brought the Senate close to a bipartisan $10 billion covid funding deal in March, said the Biden administration had provided ‘patently false’ information about its inability to buy additional vaccines, treatments and supplies.”

“The United States isn’t at risk of breaching its more than $31 trillion debt limit until at least the third quarter of next year,” Politico reports.

“That deadline is expected to be a major stress point in the 118th Congress, likely shaping other fiscal negotiations, with more Republican sway following the November midterm elections.”

Politico: “The Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday it now expects federal revenue this year to jump by a whopping $800 billion — equivalent to the Pentagon’s annual budget.”

“That translates to a 19 percent increase, the biggest one-year hike in more than 40 years, and it comes on top of an 18 percent increase last year.”

“Total receipts will amount this year to 19.6 percent of the nation’s economy, CBO says, which would be the most since 2000 when the Treasury Department was swimming in cash thrown off by the dot-com bubble.”

Oregon taxpayers are on track to receive a record $3 billion, personal tax kicker, in 2024 powered by “unprecedented” income tax returns, the Salem Statesman Journal reports.

New York Times: “A combination of flush state budget coffers and rapid inflation has lawmakers across the country looking for ways to ease the pain of rising prices, with nearly three dozen states enacting or considering some form of tax relief, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank.”

“The efforts are blurring typical party lines when it comes to tax policy. In many cases, Democrats are joining Republicans in supporting permanently lower taxes or temporary cuts, including for high earners.”

“But while the policies are aimed at helping Americans weather the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years, economists warn that, paradoxically, cutting taxes could exacerbate the very problem lawmakers are trying to address. By putting more money in people’s pockets, policymakers risk further stimulating already rampant consumer demand, pushing prices higher nationally.”

“President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that the federal government will pay down the national debt this quarter for the first time in six years,” ABC News reports.

“His remarks on economic growth came ahead of the Federal Reserve announcing a hike in interest rates Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to manage soaring inflation.”

Said Biden: “Bringing down the deficit is one way to ease inflationary pressures in an economy, where a consequence of a war and gas prices and oil, food, and it all – it’s just a different world right this moment because of Ukraine and Russia.”

New York Times: “Unlike the New Deal, however, this $1.9 trillion federal investment in American communities has barely registered with voters. Rather than a trophy for Mr. Biden and his party, the program has become a case study in how easily voters can overlook even a lavishly funded government initiative delivering benefits close to home.”

ProPublica: “There are many differences between the rich and the rest of us, but one of the most consequential for your taxes is whether most of your income comes from wages.”

ProPublica reveals, for the first time ever, who makes the most income in America —and what taxes they pay.

To make it into the top 400, you needed to earn $110 million per year on average. A typical American making $40,000 would have to work for 2,750 years to make what the lowest-earning person in this group made in one.

Washington Post: “The IRS’s unprecedented backlog last winter of 24 million returns and taxpayer correspondence for the 2020 tax year was propelled by colliding crises: the pandemic decimated its workforce atop years of budget cuts and attrition, new stimulus measures added to the workload, and the agency remained crippled by the way it does business, processing the millions of returns it still receives on paper each filing season with red pen edits, manual data entry and clunky computer software that dates to the 1960s.”

“With technology upgrades on hold for now, the men and women gathered here off Interstate 15 represented one agency’s effort to reboot after a public health crisis that has left major functions of the federal government in disarray, with uncertainty about when it will return to a pre-pandemic normal.”

New York Times: “Overall, Democrats brought home considerably more money for their states than Republicans, some of whom boycotted the process. Democrats secured more than $5 billion for their states, compared with less than $3.4 billion for Republicans. Just over $600 million of earmarks were bipartisan, secured by lawmakers in both parties.”

“The states that received the most money — California, Alabama, New York, South Carolina and Missouri — were either large and well-populated or had influential senators in leadership or on the committee that oversees spending.”

Josh Barro: “People will point at the burden of one specific tax — like Sen. Rick Scott complaining about the large fraction of Americans who don’t pay federal personal income tax — and use that observation to make a claim about how fair the whole tax system is.”

“Federal personal income tax only makes up about 30% of all the taxes collected by federal, state and local governments in the US. So, if you want to assess whether the overall system tax system is fair, you have to place that tax in context with all the other taxes that provide the remaining 70% of the tax revenue.”

“People in the bottom income quintile (that is, with household incomes less than $26,000) pay about 15% of their income in taxes, mostly to state and local governments. The largest chunk of that tax burden comes from sales taxes. People in the top 1% pay closer to 36% of their incomes in tax, with by far the largest component being federal personal income tax.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) “shot down President Biden’s new plan to raise $360 billion in revenue by imposing a 20 percent minimum tax on billionaires,” The Hill reports.

Manchin said he doesn’t support taxing unrealized gains: “You can’t tax something that’s not earned. Earned income is what we’re based on.”

But he added: “There’s other ways to do it. Everybody has to pay their fair share.”