The days of shopping online without paying sales taxes may be ending. States are cracking down and a nationwide system for collecting sales tax on online sales may be coming soon.   Read More...

The budget proposal President Barack Obama released Wednesday is unlikely to gain any traction in agriculture, particularly in areas such as cuts to crop insurance or shifts in international food aid.    Read More...

As states continue to struggle with the after-effects of the Great Recession, state policymakers are searching high and low for a revenue structure that will increase their state’s economic competitiveness.  Just this year in several states, plans have surfaced that propose to reduce state income taxes and shift the tax burden to the sales tax by broadening the base to include services and increasing the rate.  While economists generally agree that consumption-based (e.g., sales) taxes are more efficient than income taxes, extending the sales tax to services generally may have the opposite effect of that intended, since typically 70%-80%  of such an expansion are taxes on business-to-business services and therefore not taxes on consumption at all.  Indeed, taxing business-to-business services raises a host of problems, including:   Read More...

Crop insurance not only deflected a financial disaster on grain farms after last summer's epic drought, it warded off a meltdown for Main Street businesses as well, a new study by University of Nebraska-Lincoln economists Eric Thompson and Brad Lubben found.   Read More...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA or health care reform) says "applicable large employers" have to offer health insurance to their full-time employees or they may incur a penalty. But what is an "applicable large employer", how many hours do full-time employees work, and what happens if health insurance isn't offered?

In late December 2012, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury released proposed rules employers can use in 2013 to determine if they have to offer full-time employees coverage in 2014. At the same time, the IRS released a set of FAQs that summarize the rules and are a helpful guide.   

API, other groups ask Supreme Court to review ruling on E15 partial waivers

The American Petroleum Institute and other groups have filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court for a review of a recent district court decision rejecting a challenge to the Obama administration's grant of partial waivers for use of E15.   Read More...

Successful Dealer Day will be Repeated

Recent surveys by industry publications have turned up a long list of challenges that dealers are facing: low profit margins, cash flow, weather, competition from online and retail outlets, finding qualified help, increased operating costs, where to spend advertising dollars, pressure from manufacturer/supplier partners, service pricing and more.    Read More...

On December 14th, the EPA finalized an update to national air quality standards regarding fine particulate pollution by setting the annual health standard at 12 micrograms per cubic meter. In the announcement, EPA stressed this would have no effect on agricultural dust standards, which the EPA identifies as coarse particles. While the new standard does not impact agricultural dust, it would cover particles from wildfires, prescribed forest burning, and woodstoves. This new standard is predicted to impact less than 1/3 of one percent of counties in the United States.