Phil Kerpen

Phil Kerpen and Joe Calomino
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Aug 10, 2010 @ 12:01 AM

Gov. Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame-duck session. Thus, Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on Election Day will — barring a disputed election result — be seated for a lame-duck session in December.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan argued in federal court that the last two months are such a short period of time that elected representation is unnecessary. Judge Diane Wood and a majority of the Seventh Circuit disagreed — and it’s a good thing because Congress may, during that time, convene for what Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota has called “one of the most significant lame-duck sessions in the history of the United States.”

May 27th, 2009 5:15 PM Eastern

By Phil Kerpen
Policy Director, Americans for Prosperity

In today’s Washington Post, the White House floats a really scary trial balloon—a new national Value-Added Tax (VAT) to pay for out-of-control spending and a Washington take over of health care. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad appears to be on board. So does Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who has been hired by the White House budget office to help design the health care plan and whose book on health care uses a VAT to fund the new government program. Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker is also on-board the VAT-train.

Read the rest at Fox Forum.

Listen to today's two-minute podcast on this topic here.

AFP director of policy Phil Kerpen discusses the major tax hikes coming to pay for the current and impending explosion of government spending with Neil Cavuto on Fox News, November 25, 2008.

. . . courtesy of the pay-as-you-go Democrats.

By Phil Kerpen

Last week the House Ways and Means Committee reported a bill (H.R. 3996) that would, among other things, prevent the alternative minimum tax from slamming middle-income families. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this bill (like its mother) is packed with ill-advised tax hikes, ostensibly to satisfy the Democrats’ pay-as-you-go rules.

The apparent assumption here is that the government is somehow entitled to the massive tax hike that the AMT represents under current law — a tax hike that was unintended and most lawmakers agree should be contained or eliminated. But a closer look at H.R. 3996 shows that Democrats are more concerned with appearing to follow their own rules than actually following them.