Word: taxed
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...certainly didn't accomplish this by cutting spending--federal expenditures are up 19% since 2004, to a projected $2.7 trillion in fiscal 2007 (on the whole, this has been the most spendthrift Administration since Lyndon Johnson's). The deficit is shrinking, instead, because tax receipts have risen almost twice that fast. The President has offered a simple explanation for this welcome bounty: A strong economy, spurred by tax cuts, has driven up incomes and thus revenue. "Low taxes mean economic vitality," he said in February, "which means more tax revenues...
Unfortunately, government "zeal" infects a lot of prosecutions for financial wrongdoing. Threats of prison give prosecutors enormous leverage, says Larry Ribstein, a law professor at the Uni- versity of Illinois, and they don't shy from using it in cases involving "common business practices" like structuring tax shelters, in which "the line between merely wrong and criminal interpretations of the tax code are hazy." And if a crime occurred, "you need to know who up the line had responsibility," he says, "and that is extraordinarily difficult to determine in the context of a large corporation." Especially in a criminal case...
...crime the accountants stand accused of is peddling iffy tax shelters, arcane financial deals that shield income from the IRS. Shelters are O.K. if they serve a true business purpose, and the KPMG gang insisted that its did. Yet over the past four years, the accountants have taken a prosecutorial beating. A Senate subcommittee publicly grilled them. The Justice Department suggested they blab without their lawyers present. KPMG, bending to government pressure, stopped covering its employees' crushing legal bills. And all this happened before any court ruled the tax shelters improper...
Consider KPMG. From 1997 to 2001, the firm sold four types of shelters that helped clients avoid taxes by doing things like putting income temporarily in a tax-exempt entity. The transactions were so complex, it was hard to see a purpose other than skirting taxes. Although the IRS ruled them potentially improper in 2000, experts disagreed about their legality...
...Business to get elected. In an interview with TIME last fall, Calderón conceded that he needs to "reduce the power" of monopolies and create "more competitive market conditions." But as President, he has yet to offer anticipated legislation to fix problems like the country's feckless tax system or its antiquated, state-run energy infrastructure...