One theory is that his advisers don’t want Bush to collect too much money too soon and risk being perceived as being in the pocket of the uber wealthy. Another theory says Bush may be playing mind games with his GOP rivals. “I don’t want to say it’s a bluff, but he may be trying to kind of bolster up his support, and make it appear as though he’s going to be far and away the frontrunner and the leader,” said professor Lara Brown.   read more

JPMorgan Chase has earned the distinction of being the largest bank among those deemed too-big-to-fail for the sake of the U.S. financial and economic systems, according to a new government report. The federal Office of Financial Research ranked 12 U.S. financial institutions based on their “total exposures.” Rounding out the first half dozen banks were Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.   read more

The video chats provide less privacy for visitors with picture and sound being recorded and often reviewed by jail officials. In-person visits were usually in a separate room, but the video chats often take place in the dayroom of a jail. Sometimes family members watch while fights break out behind their loved one. Attorneys are also troubled by the lack of privacy.   read more

The leader is IBM, which has received $4.9 billion from DHS, most of it for automatic data processing systems and services. (And DHS isn’t even its biggest federal customer. That would be the Department of Defense, which pays IBM more than $6 billion). Right behind is Integrated Coast Guard Systems, which makes radio navigation equipment, at just about $11.5 million less than IBM. They are followed by Computer Systems Corporation at $4.1 billion and Lockheed Martin at $3.9 billion.   read more

The Oakland, California, regional office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) stuffed 13,184 benefit requests, some dating back to the 1990s, into a file cabinet where they were discovered in 2012, partially processed and then promptly lost. Two records selected during a random sampling of unprocessed informal claims found they missed out on $3,904 in benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder and hearing loss, respectively.   read more

According to the Social Security Administration, in 1983, about 11% of all income escaped being taxed by Social Security. By 2012, that number rose to about 17% of all income. The liberal Center for American Progress argues that policymakers should consider changing Social Security taxation to apply to 90% of earnings in order to put more money into the dwindling trust fund. Such a change, had it been implemented in 1983, would have added $1.1 trillion more into the trust fund by 2013   read more

JPay Inc., the largest such money-service provider, has contracts in 32 states to facilitate money transfers for prisoners from their relatives. The service has become quite lucrative for JPay, which made more than $50 million in 2013. To send money to an inmate in Oklahoma either online or by phone, a family member must pay a fee ranging from $4 to $12 per transaction. In some cases, the fee can represent as much as nearly 40% of the deposit amount.   read more

Leading the way among those physicians is Dr. Thomas Burdon, a specialist in thoracic surgery based in Palo Alto, California, who makes $402,462 a year. The next highest paid is Dr. Thomas Cacciarelli in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who makes $873 less. Government Executive reported that more than 16,900 federal employees made more than $200,000 in base salary last year. The database does not include the salaries of Department of Defense personnel   read more

GOP Governors Paul LePage of Maine, John Kasich of Ohio and others are considering raising so-called consumption taxes, such as those imposed on sales of cigarettes and gasoline, to generate more state revenue. At the same time, they want to slash income taxes, which would mostly benefit the wealthy. But increasing sales taxes usually hurts lower income earners more than the wealthy because the former has to spend more of their earnings on food and necessities.   read more

The $5.8 billion that the IRS paid to fraud perpetrators in 2013 represented just 20% of all the phony returns it received, according to a report (pdf) by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In other words, the agency caught and rejected about 80% of the returns sent in by identity thieves.   read more

The Obama administration has sent incorrect tax information to 800,000 customers of Healthcare.gov, the federally run insurance exchange, and is asking those people to wait to file their taxes until they get corrected information. About 50,000 of those who received the erroneous forms are estimated to have already filed their 2014 taxes.   read more

Burger King and Canadian doughnut company Tim Hortons have merged. The upshot for Burger King is it is no longer a U.S.-based business. By renouncing its U.S. citizenship, Burger King stands to avoid paying between $400 million and $1.2 billion in U.S. taxes over the next four years. But moving to Canada won’t mean it is pulling its lucrative franchises from the U.S., where it currently has 7,155 restaurants. It will still make more than $8 billion annually in sales from American consumers.   read more

A breakthrough in treating hepatitis C costs almost 300 times more in the U.S. than it does in India, a disparity made all the more outrageous by the fact that the U.S. government helped fund the research for the drug. The cost to produce it is in the range of $68 to $136. “In other words, the U.S. price-cost markup is roughly 1,000-to-1!” said Jeffrey Sachs. Sovaldi was developed with grants from the National Institutes of Health and support from the Department of Veterans Affairs.   read more

Benefits for those with the lowest levels of income, such as unemployed single mothers with children, have been reduced by about 30%. Many of these cuts went into effect as part of President Clinton’s effort to “end welfare as we know it.” “Most observers would think that the government should support those who have the lowest incomes the most,” wrote Moffitt. “But that is not the case.” The assumption is, he added: “If you’re not working, the interpretation is that you’re not trying.”   read more

Big corporations, those with 500 or more workers, employ 51.6% of U.S. workers according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. That number has gone up since 2004, when 49.1% of Americans worked for large companies. The numbers for 2012 showed about 60 million Americans work for “large enterprises,” while 20.4 million count on mom-and-pop businesses, or what the Census Bureau calls “very small enterprises,” with 20 or fewer workers.   read more

“Georgia’s ineptitude in making errors and delay in discovering them is confounding, but does not justify permitting the federal government to keep the $90 million in credits to the detriment of Georgia’s 1.89 million Medicaid recipients,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote. Kessler explained that Georgia’s poor shouldn’t suffer because of a mistake of state employees.   read more