Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Today’s debate will center around this tweet from a political analyst: Everybody always writes columns about why Democrats or Republicans should pay more attention to issue X. It would be actually way more useful if people wrote […]
Al Capone was busted for tax evasion. Leona Helmsley was, too. But gangsters and entitled millionaires aren’t the only ones who hold something back from the tax man. Each year, Americans of all stripes underpay the IRS by hundreds of billions, aided by the fact that the agency lacks the resources to catch all the […]
Last spring, FiveThirtyEight commissioned a SurveyMonkey poll that aimed to glean the views of voters who cast their ballots for President Trump but did so unenthusiastically. We called them “reluctant” Trump voters; they were crucial in Trump’s victory, and we’ve been keeping tabs on this voter demographic over the year, including a new survey conducted […]
In reading coverage of the Republican tax bill, which passed the House on Wednesday and is ready for President Trump’s signature, I was reminded of this famous clip of the 1992 “town hall” presidential debate between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, in which a voter asked the candidates a question about the “national debt” […]
H&R Block’s shareholders endured a rough patch in early November, and the initial draft of the GOP’s tax overhaul appears to be at least partly to blame. On Nov. 2, Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Speaker Paul Ryan unveiled the original version of the House bill, kicking […]