In The News

IPI's Bartlett Cleland says the Marketplace Fairness Act would compel businesses to comply with every single tax code in the nation if they want to sell their goods everywhere. And noncompliance could mean a costly audit from the states where sellers are sending their products.

Rep. Rene Oliveira has filed a bill to make sure that Texans can do whatever they want with tickets they buy for live events -- and that ticket sellers and venues can't restrict the resale or gifting of tickets. Now is the time to address the issue, said Tom Giovanetti.

As options for watching movies ave expanded and become more sophisticated, so have attempts to pirate the content, leaving studios seeking new ways to discern the impact on their bottom lines.

From their publication in 2006 through the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act that ended early last year, the film industry frequently has cited the findings of a study by IPI that found film piracy was costing the U.S. economy $20.5 billion annually.

The U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has been ratcheting up its use of some questionable methods for determining hiring or pay discrimination, amounting to a perpetual witch hunt of manufactured culprits to harass in order to justify their own existence—and budget.

While some conservatives admire Obama's $100 billion initiative to map the human brain, IPI's Merrill Matthews warns: "We also have to remember that doing so requires the government to allocate the research funds. And as we saw with Solyndra and several other now-defunct companies, this administration hasn’t always made good choices.”

A bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen has inadvertently called attention to the fact that those "special tax breaks" just for the oil and gas industry don't exist. Mr. Van Hollen proposes to create some very special punishments instead. Regardless of the bill's fortunes on Capitol Hill, it has already performed a public service by illuminating the fallacy behind assaults on the industry.

Nearly a half-dozen tax proposals affecting Internet operations are expected to appear on the congressional agenda, with many of them affecting broadband and cable services.

Tom Giovanetti testified before state legislators in favor of the tax break for cable customers, saying there was a “gross disparity” in the taxing of satellite and cable. “We want the winners to be determined by who has the best product offerings, not by some historical quirk or glitch in the tax code that no one got around to fixing because it was hard.”

It appears that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) will slip under the Affordable Care Act’s threshold for qualified coverage—although just barely. And given the fact that HSAs, and similar high deductible health insurance options, are about the only type of health coverage bending down the health care cost curve, they may even thrive.