Washington Post’s attack on Maine’s millionaire tax ignores the facts • Maine Morning Star Mainers don’t take kindly to outsiders telling us what to do. The Washington Post’s editorial attacking Maine’s new millionaire tax is no exception. Misdirected and devoid of facts, the editorial boar...

Maura Pillsbury of the invaluable @mecep.bsky.social dissects the WaPo's screed here:
mainemorningstar.com/2026/04/15/w...

Opinion | Maine’s race to the top on taxes After opposing similar tax hikes in her state, Janet Mills is supporting a millionaires tax for Maine as she runs against Graham Platner in the Senate primary.

Really dispiriting to see how far the @washingtonpost.com editorial board has fallen. Casual insults, totally misleading use of IRS migration statistics. The obv question is, what craziness would the WSJ editorial board say on this topic that the Post hasn't?
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Fair point. And I have a couple dozen years on me since the last time I lived in a place when I needed to raise a spade in anger.

If this was an even slightly sane review the headline would be “Just Use a Flat Shovel you Sick F***. Spending Will Not Save You.”

S**t like this almost makes me want to embark on an experiment parallel to “Super Size Me” where I just buy every single thing Wirecutter tells me to for a year, and buy it on Amazon just like they tell us to and just see what kind of human I become. It would be gross. Peak consumerism here.

The $700 million in cash-on-hand Yum had at the end of 2025 could never have produced the "Mountain Dew Baja Midnight Pie." Such a delicacy requires the hothouse treatment that only a federal subsidy can provide.
Hell, without feeding at the federal trough Taco Bell might not even have desserts!

Now that they've revealed their 2026 Taco Bell menu additions, I can see I was flat wrong. It's not just that the world is a better place for having the Creme Brulee Crunchwrap Slider: it's also crystal clear that unfettered market forces could never have created it. ktla.com/food/taco-be...

Yum! Brands’ Recipe for Tax Avoidance: Trump Tax Cuts with a Dash of Malta the fast-food multinational that owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut reported this week that it made $1 billion of pretax profits in the U.S. last year—and didn’t pay a dime of federal income taxes on ...

It's important to admit when you're wrong. And I was wrong to express skepticism about the Yum! corporation's use of $86 million in R&D tax breaks last year. At the time, I didn't appreciate just how innovative the fast-food giant could be with their new menu offerings.
itep.org/yum-brands-r...

The potentially good news is that if Seaboard is using those R&D dollars to find less utterly inhumane strategies for processing pork-- the main thing for which the company is known-- that's not the worst use of those dollars. They have a bad track record tho.
www.humaneworld.org/sites/defaul...

The company's federal income tax bill on that $56 million of US income? Zero. Same for its nationwide state income tax. This is mainly attributable to R&D: they saved $27 million in tax using the Trump administration's new R&D expensing provision, and $6M in R&D credits.

To save $38M using the Bahamas (which has no corporate income tax but did introduce a Pillar Two top-up tax last year, a US-based company must have at least 38/21%= $181 million in income there. That's three times the $56 million the company reported in U.S. income in 2025.

While the term "corporate welfare" has thankfully gone largely out of use, Seaboard's latest 10-K shows the company still ready to pack its bags at any time for tax breaks. Income tax reconciliation shows Seaboard saved $38M by booking income in the Bahamas last year.
www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Arch...

The Seaboard Corporation became infamous in the '90s as an early example of "corporate welfare" run amok. While many have forgotten the scathing Bartlett & Steele coverage of their "dine and ditch" use of tax incentives, Seaboard is still up to the same old tricks.
time.com/archive/6734...

2025 Certificates of Competency for Nominees to be Chiefs of Mission - United States Department of State

There's a whole rabbit hole one could go down looking at the "certificates of competency" the administration has promulgated for other positions, but I'm not going there except to note that they found a (quite competent)nominee for ambassador to Vietnam named McNamara.
www.state.gov/2025-certifi...

Missouri’s Billy Long apologizes after joking Iceland should become 52nd state • Missouri Independent Billy Long’s was forced to apologize for saying Iceland should become a U.S. state, with him serving as governor.

His nomination's been hung up for months. Unclear whether the sticking point is his utter lack of qualifications-- seriously, read the credentials-- or the January episode where he joked that Iceland would become the 52nd state and he would be its governor.
missouriindependent.com/briefs/misso...

Long, William - Republic of Iceland - November 2025 - United States Department of State REPORT FOR THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS UNITED STATES SENATE SUBJECT:                   Ambassadorial Nomination:  Certificate of Demonstrated Competence — Foreign Service Act, Section 304(a)(4)...

For all those wondering "what ever happened to Billy Long, the shortest-lived IRS Commissioner in US history," he's now the unofficial ambassador to Iceland. Feels like there should be an "if you know what I mean" in there, but there is not. His official credentials:
www.state.gov/long-william...

Offshore Haven Considers a Heresy: Taxation (Published 2009)

Ugland House is the same building then-President Barack Obama referred to as "the biggest tax scam on record" as a candidate. A 2008 GAO report found that over 18,000 business entities appeared to be based in that one building.
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/b...

Google Maps Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

Unlike Halliburton, Wynn is willing to admit to its shareholders that it has a subsidiary there: WM Cayman Holdings Limited I. The mailing address for this entity is Ugland House in George Town, the Cayman capital. www.google.com/maps/place/U...

Ametek also says that it *reduced* its taxes by $36 million due to "treaty exempt earnings" in Luxembourg last year. But we can't know whether the treaty meant a full or partial exemption from tax, and it's not 100% clear what the baseline tax rate used for Lux is. This is smoke but not fire.

The US-based instrument maker Ametek, for example discloses paying $17.3 million in Pillar Two taxes to Luxembourg last year. Since this is a 15% tax, this must mean the company booked at least $115 million in this known tax haven last year. Could be more, can't be less.
www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Arch...

New Income Tax Disclosure Rules Mean Halliburton Can No Longer Conceal Its Offshore Tax Avoidance The company’s latest annual report throws the doors wide open once again on Halliburton’s penchant for offshoring its profits to tax havens, thanks to terrific new disclosure rules introduced by an ob...

A short ITEP brief talks about how the new FASB tax disclosures can shed some light on the amount of income US multinationals are booking in tax havens. This one focuses on Halliburton because the math is really simple. But there are cases where it's more complex. (1/2)
itep.org/new-income-t...

Hopefully the AI bots that just replaced half of Block's workforce can be programmed to enjoy Dorsey's next house party....

Block spent ~$68 million on an event for employees last quarter, as the stock gets crushed in early trading Jack Dorsey, Block Head, is hoping that bitcoin can invigorate growth at the fintech company in two ways: selling bitcoin mining rigs, and enabling...

Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, the guys who wrote up the 10-Q description discreetly chose not to reveal exactly how much the aforementioned company party cost. Other sleuths have estimated it was a $68 million party tho.
sherwood.news/markets/bloc...

Good news for Block CEO Jack Dorsey: the next raging office party he throws won't cost so much. The company's 3rd-quarter report cites a single company event as the main reason why Block's "facilities and other expenses" grew so much.
d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-00015126...

The company racked up half a billion in tax breaks using the research expensing provision enacted by the GOP Congress at President Trump's behest last summer. That alone was sufficient to wipe out the nearly $350 million tax bill Block should have paid to the federal gov't on last year's earnings.

The electronic payments company Block, best known for its Square credit card processing software, avoided paying even a dime of federal income tax on $1.5 billion of U.S. income last year. Yes, this is the same Block that just laid off half its workforce.
www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Arch...

Corporate Tax Avoidance With earnings season now underway, dozens of huge corporations have disclosed paying single-digit federal income tax rates thanks to tax…

Check out @itep.org 's running tally of 2025 corporate income tax disclosures here:
itep.org/corporate-ta...

D.C. residents saw Pepco bills skyrocket this winter The cold weather is only part of the story.

For DC residents wondering why their electric bills are so high this winter, it's not because of taxes. PEPCO's parent company, Exelon, made $3.3 billion of pretax profits last year and paid a federal tax rate of just 3.6 percent.
51st.news/dc-pepco-bil...

6-12 months? That's older than parts of Larry Ellison.

Hard to look at the steady stream of 162(m) disclosures and not conclude that if the goal of the $1M cap was to stop companies from doling out lavish pay packages, it's not succeeding.
Of course, 162(m) was enacted in a 1993 law designed to reduce the deficit, so from that view it's doing great.