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MY ACCOUNTANT, ALSO known as my mother, texted me my tax refund amount this morning.  I am happy about that.  I work hard, I pay my taxes and I deliberately over pay a little bit each month to make sure I owe nothing at the end of each year.

You probably paid taxes last year too, unless you earned no income for the entire calendar year.  If so, you paid more taxes than your favorite social network, Facebook.  In fact, your tax dollars actually got returned to Facebook, in the form of a nearly-half-billion-dollar refund.

What's that, you say?  How is it possible a company worth $67.4 billion that turned a $1.1 billion profit owed less tax than, say, the single mother of three who earned $25,000 last year?

(To be completely clear and fair, Facebook did pay some taxes last year.  But creative accounting, completely legal, drastically reduced their overall tax burden.)

That's good old-fashioned American corporate tax law for you.  And it happens all the time.

Yet we are supposed to believe that government spending on things like Medicare and our National Park Service are the real problem.

READ THIS

A study finds there are just eight nations in the world that do not provide mandatory paid maternity leave for new mothers.  Five are small Pacific islands.  One is a tiny African country.  One is a South American French colony.  The other is the United States of America.

Almost everyone working for BBC News walked off the job today.  Lord knows I've had days over the course of my career where I wanted to organize a general strike...

Before the walk-out, a BBC journalist turned this great story providing even more evidence your dog is a lot smarter than you realize.  (For more on this topic, I highly recommend Alexandra Horowitz's fine book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.)