Washington Examiner: A law phasing out incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012 has prompted some states to challenge the reach of federal government.
Pennsylvania and South Carolina have legislation pending to exempt their states from the regulations. And Texas has already passed a bill purporting to nullify the government regulations within their state. Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed a similar bill last year.
Los Angeles Times: Shopping at Amazon.com Inc. and other major Internet stores is poised to get more expensive.
Beginning Friday, a new state law will require large out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes on purchases that their California customers make on the Internet — a prospect eased only slightly by a 1-percentage-point drop in the tax that also takes effect at the same time.
AZCentral: Federal authorities can’t secure sections of the U.S. border because of environmental laws that block access to public lands and slow efforts to stop drug smugglers and illegal immigrants, say backers of legislation that would waive those laws along the border.
CNS News: “The jobs created and saved by the economic stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed on Feb. 17, 2009 cost at a minimum an average of $228,055 each, according to data released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).”
Washington Examiner: “The number of prisoners who file false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service has more than doubled in the last five years, according to a new Treasury Department report, and the amount of money the IRS has mistakenly refunded to those prisoners has nearly tripled. Meanwhile, the report, from the Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, accuses the IRS of failing to enforce a law passed by Congress in 2008 to crack down on false returns coming from the nation’s prisons.”