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Federal tax evasion: Why it matters and who does it

Source: JournalistsResource.org

Every tax season people try to get out of paying the full share of what they owe the U.S. government in income taxes. The Internal Revenue service usually starts accepting tax returns in late January and returns typically need to be filed by April 15. Here are a few ins and outs of federal tax evasion — why it matters, why people do it and how they do it.

Economic mobility: What Americans think about the American Dream

Source: JournalistsResource.org

Individual perception — for example, how people feel they are doing financially compared with others — often doesn’t jibe with reality.

Economic mobility is one area where beliefs solidify absent information. Research shows that Americans are chronically under-informed about the size of the economic inequality gap in the U.S. That leads people to think they are more economically mobile than they really might be. And misperception can impact policy.

How Fed rates helped fuel the investment bust that sparked the Great Recession

Source: JournalistsResource.org

As the Federal Reserve bumped interest rates more than 4 percentage points in the lead-up to the Great Recession, investors steered toward increasingly risky bets on the U.S. housing market, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.