Flu mania seems to be winding down a bit. At least on the morning U.S. television talk shows and the front pages of the major newspapers.

Is it complacency? A feeling that it can’t hit you? Or just plain flu fatigue? Whatever the case, the slowdown of interest in the deadly new strain of flu comes just as global health officials gear up to declare a full-stage pandemic.

The morning news shows focused first on the severe weather pummeling the United States, and only after went on to talk about flu. The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Richard Besser, said the spread of the deadly influenza is not much worse than the average seasonal flu.

But he urged against complacency: “The bottom line though is that people need to stay the course in terms of hand washing, covering their coughs and staying home if they’re sick,” he said on NBC’s “Today Show.” “We are by no means out of the woods.”

President Barack Obama, who spoke to his Mexican counterpart about the flu over the weekend, will likely discuss the issue with Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan before a Cinco de Mayo event the White House today.

But Obama’s main event of the day is to announce a new set of proposals on international tax policies aimed in part to crack down on international tax avoidance.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Mark Blinch (Woman walks through financial district in Toronto)

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi (Microbiologist tests samples for H1N1 flu virus at the Dallas Department of Health and Human Services laboratory)

Today is tax day, one of the least favorite days on many Americans’ calendars. Expect long lines at the post office and lots of grumbling.

Anti-gummint types are staging  anti-tax “Tea Parties” around the country, including one in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 10:00.

Another prominent day on the tax calendar has already passed. Tax Freedom Day, the day in which the average American has earned enough to cover his tax burden for the year, ocurred on April 13 — the earliest date since 1967.

The early date is thanks to tax cuts included in the stimulus package and reduced tax collections due to the recession, says the Tax Foundation, the think tank that runs the calculation. Guess there’s a silver lining to all this economic gloom and doom after all.

President Obama will attempt to gild the lily at noon, when he talks about “restoring fairness to the tax code and providing tax relief to working families,” according to the White House.

In other news, Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain rescued from the clutches of nefarious Somali pirates, arrives back in the United States at Andrews Air Force Base late in the evening. No word on whether he’s getting an IRS extension.

photo: REUTERS/Phil McCarten (Anti-tax activists march in Santa Barbara, California, on April 4.)

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U.S. budgets can really bring out the passion in people. So much so that it’s no wonder it’s hard for anyone to agree on how Washington should tax and spend.

When it was released on Thursday, the budget President Barack Obama unveiled sparked a war of words all over the capital. The disagreements were so profound, it’s almost as if people were looking at two entirely different documents.

Take the impact of Obama’s budget on small businesses which, like many in the United States, are reeling from the deep economic recession.

“It is not just misguided, but dangerous to raise taxes on small businesses and families that can’t afford to pay,” warned Eric Cantor, the number-two Republican in the House of Representatives.

His fellow conservative, Representative Mike Pence agreed. “The administration’s budget raises taxes on almost every American. America’s hard-working small businesses, family farms…,” he said.

Obama’s budget calls for raising taxes on those with annual incomes over $250,000.

But Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said not so fast. 

“This budget is very good for small business. The claim that it hurts small business…is often repeated but inaccurate.”

Greenstein cited data that only nine percent of people with small businesses have incomes over $250,000 a year. And most of those people, he said, “are wealthy investors who invest in the businesses, not those who operate them.”

Instead of reeling from Obama’s budget proposals, Greenstein said small businesses will fall in love with it.

Among benefits he cited: around 90 percent of small business owners would benefit from Obama’s proposed middle-class tax cuts and they also would revel in the elimination of the capital gains tax for small businesses.

Greenstein also said small businesses would benefit from Obama’s plan to expand health insurance to those who cannot afford it.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Stelios Varias (Copies of Obama’s budget outline.)

WASHINGTON - Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were unapologetic on Friday after not a single one of them voted for the $787 billion economic stimulus package.
 
The Democratic majority pushed the spending and tax cuts measure through the House 246-183 at the urging of Democratic President Barack Obama, who had courted Republican support.
 
Republican leaders insisted the plan may do more harm than good by expanding government and not doing enough to create private-sector jobs.
 
Representative Virginia Foxx went further. “I think it’s a cruel hoax on the American people that they have been led to believe that by passing this bill that there are suddenly going to be millions of jobs out there, particularly for blue collar workers that have lost their jobs,” she said.
 
Through weeks of debate, the two parties stuck to their ideologies, with Republicans favoring tax cuts and Democrats leaning toward government spending.
 
Republicans may be hoping their lock-step opposition will help vault them back into majority status in the House. They look longingly back to 1993, when every House Republican voted against a balanced-budget plan by then-President Bill Clinton that accomplished its goal.
 
Nonetheless, Republicans took control of the House in 1994 elections.
 
Asked whether Republicans risked looking bad if the U.S. economy does recover in the near term, House Republican Leader John Boehner said: “I think standing on principle and doing the right things for the right reasons on behalf of your constituents will never get you in trouble.”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Boehner holds a copy of the stimulus bill, following the passage in the House of Representatives of the stimulus package)

Tom Daschle doesn’t want to be a distraction. Nancy Killefer doesn’t want to be a distraction. Timothy Geithner has already been a distraction.

What these three high-profile nominees to President Obama’s White House have in common, besides not wanting to be distractions, is that they apparently don’t know how to do their taxes. Daschle, the former senator and Obama’s choice for health secretary, and Killefer, a former assistant Treasury secretary and nominee to oversee the government’s budget, have withdrawn their nominations because of tax indiscretions. Geithner has been confirmed but his path to the top of Treasury was also marred by tax troubles that some fear may come back to haunt him.

Besides begging the question why do smart people not know how to do their taxes, it also throws a shadow over Obama’s quest to have a fast, smooth transition to power.

The real question is whether nominees should withdraw their nominations when tax troubles surface. If the transgression isn’t enough to throw them in jail, why should they lose the opportunity to serve in the White House?

WASHINGTON - Republicans in the House of Representatives say they appreciate Democratic President Barack Obama’s efforts to win their support for the economic stimulus bill, which is now approaching $900 billion. But they have made it clear that the partisan divide remains extremely hard to bridge.

“He’s sincere. I think he’s passionate,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said on Thursday at a retreat for House Republicans at the Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia.

“When he spoke to House Republicans, it was clear to me his sincerity and passion about the level of debt,” he said. “Clearly, we disagree on the economic stimulus effect of the government spending.”

Obama met with the House Republicans on Tuesday but failed to win a single vote from them on House passage of the stimulus plan the next day. With the fight over the legislation now focused on the Senate, Republicans have insisted on a greater emphasis on tax cuts and less on federal spending to reverse the deepening recession.

The House Republican plan includes cutting the lowest income tax rates, expanding tax breaks and incentives to small businesses and eliminating most of the spending House Democrats have put forward.

“It seems to me it’s more either  ideological, or it’s just power politics in Congress and spending money on pent-up constituencies that haven’t had a ton of spending for a long time,” said Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican.

Ryan, who is the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said that while a bipartisan deal on the stimulus package is probably elusive, Obama “did a good job of laying the groundwork for the future collaboration on other projects by coming to us.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (House and Senate Republican leaders speak to reporters after meeting Obama at the White House.)

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama may be in the lead in the polls, but he’s leaving little to chance especially among younger voters.

He went on MTV to answer questions from young voters ranging from student loans and taxes to gay marriage and whether ordinances should be passed prohibiting sagging pants — yes sagging pants.

“I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq,” Obama said.

But he added: “Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on.”

MTV said his Republican rival John McCain was offered a similar opportunity to answer questions from young voters, but he declined.

Obama also tried to explain his remark about taxes and spreading the wealth around that came out during his conversation with Joe the Plumber and was lampooned by McCain.

He argued that he proposed returning tax rates back to what they were in the 1990s for those making over $250,000 a year, a move of about 3 percentage points, and that would not limit their success.

“Back in the 1990s, we created more millionaires, more billionaires, because the economy was growing, everything was strong, at every income bracket, people were doing well,” Obama said. ”So this idea, that somehow everybody is just on their own and shouldn’t be concerned about other people who are coming up behind them, that’s the kind of attitude that I want to end when I am president.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama arrives at a rally in Jacksonville, Fla.)

Sarah Palin’s $150,000 clothing allowance from the Republican National Committee raises questions about whether John McCain’s vice presidential pick will have to pay federal income taxes for the items she bought with the money. 

Maybe, according to one congressional tax expert.

The McCain campaign says the clothing, which according to Politico.com was purchased at stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks, will go to charity after the campaign.

If everything is handed over to charity once the last ballot is cast, Palin could argue that she never actually owned the clothes and that they were more like costumes or uniforms used for work, the tax expert said.

But anything she keeps would be considered a payment and its value could be taxed as income.

Generally clothing required for work that cannot also be used outside the workplace, such as a nurse’s uniform, is a deductible expense. Any clothing that can be used off the job as well as on the job cannot be deducted.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Steve Marcus (Palin at a rally in Henderson, Nevada Oct. 21)

(Corrects third paragraph to say Joe about to buy a business) 

Joe the Plumber was the surprise star of the third and final presidential debate, getting no less than 13 mentions in the opening minutes.

So who is this guy? His full name is Joe Wurzelbacher, and it turns out he had a close encounter with Barack Obama a few days ago. John McCain adopted Joe’s cause as a way to tar his opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal.

The apparent problem is that Joe is about to buy a company that makes a little over $250,000 a year, and under Obama’s proposal that would put him into a higher tax bracket. Obama told Joe that he wasn’t trying to punish his success, only to spread the wealth around.

“Joe wants to buy the business that he has been in for all of these years, worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes,” McCain said.

“Joe, I want to tell you, I’ll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and be able — and I’ll keep your taxes low and I’ll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees,” McCain said, staring straight into the camera.

McCain got a little caught up in the moment and muddled in his message to Joe by saying at one point that “fifty percent of small business income taxes are paid by small businesses.”

Still, Joe the Plumber has become a bit of Internet celebrity and Republicans quickly latched onto his plight, issuing a statement saying his comments to Joe showed that Obama would “tax to death” the American Dream.

Obama’s response was that Joe the Plumber needed a tax cut five years ago, and Obama wants to “make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now. And that requires us to make some important choices.”

As for Joe himself, directory assistance had no telephone listing for him in Toledo, Ohio. If you’re listening, Joe, we’d love to hear how you’re handling fame!  

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Gary Hershorn (McCain makes a point at the presidential debate)   

 NEW YORK  - As presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama sparred over competing tax proposals on Tuesday, their top economic advisers debated similar issues of  what changes in fiscal policy will help boost the U. S. economy.

Taxes took center stage as Doug Holtz-Eakin, senior policy adviser to McCain, and Dan Tarullo, economic adviser to Obama, compared their candidates’ platforms at a Deals & DealMakers executive conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal.

Their remarks came as their respective Republican and Democrat presidential candidates staked out starkly opposing stances on taxes, with McCain promising corporate tax breaks and Obama pledging tax increases for many.

Obama, in a television interview, said he would increase taxes on the wealthy and on stock profits to pay for a middle-class tax cut of $1,000 a year.  He said he would raise taxes on Americans making $250,000 a year or more and raise the capital gains tax for those in higher income brackets while exempting small investors.

McCain vowed to maintain President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, lower corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent, allow companies to expense new equipment and technology in their first year and keep capital gains taxes as they are now.

While McCain said he would cut government spending, Democrats argue not enough cuts could be made to pay for his plans, which Obama said would total $300 billion.

Obama thinks it is important “to explain where he would get the revenues to do the things that he thinks need to be done in this country,” Tarullo told the conference.

“Whether you are a person in the middle class or a bond trader, you don’t want to be contemplating a very big corporate tax cut and a very big personal tax cut for upper income people and hoping against past experience that this produces the kind of growth that’s going to more than compensate for a massive federal deficit,” he said.

McCain sees easing tax pressure as a means to promote jobs creation among small businesses, in research and development and on the corporate level, Holtz-Eakin responded.

Hand-in-hand with lower taxes is reining in federal spending, the McCain adviser said.

“He’s committed to changing the culture in Washington so we don’t spend a lot more,” he said. “We actually review programs say no to things that don’t make sense and address the real issues on the spending side, which is where our problems lie.”

“No one has paid attention to what we spend on, and that’s going to change,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/ Lee Celano (McCain); Jason Reed (Obama)