Every month, 400 adolescent girls are sold on Internet sites, on street corners, and in the backroom deals of sex traffickers. An estimated 300 such transactions occur every day. The girls come from every socioeconomic background: Many are runaways or abused children; some are kidnapped. The average age of entry into the local sex market is between 12 and 14 years old. This heartbreaking reality is not a story from a red-light district in a third world country. Shockingly, these statistics describe the daily plight of hundreds of children right …
Congress soon will seal the fate of federal death taxes. If Congress acts by doing nothing, then the federal tax rate on estates will fall to zero for all of 2010 before rising to 55 percent on January 1, 2011. That’s current law. On the other hand, it could pass legislation to set the tax rate above zero for 2010. That zero rate has a number of people worried, including executives of some of the nation’s largest non-profit organizations, who think that a one-year repeal of death taxes will undermine …
