From Forbes.com: “Four Arkansas lawmakers who signed a no-tax-increase pledge now are defending their votes on tax-related legislation that passed the state Legislature this year. According to Washington, D.C.-based Americans for Tax Reform, 16 Arkansas state representatives and three state senators signed the group's pledge ‘to oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.’”

In an article by Russell Berman at The Hill, Grover Norquist calls to extend the debt limit every two months. “House Republicans are considering a plan to grant only incremental increases to the federal debt limit in a bid to extract more concessions on spending cuts and budgetary reform from the Obama administration. The idea has a champion in Grover Norquist....’My argument is, you give them two months at a time, because each time you could get something reasonable,’ Norquist told The Hill in an interview this week at his downtown offices… ‘If the Republicans say: Here are the 20 things we want … and we will trade them for every two months we give you of debt ceiling, I think the markets would look at those things and say: Every one of them makes for a stronger America,’ Norquist said.”

In a Newsweek article, ATR’s Ryan Ellis argues against the capital-gains tax. “Then there’s the perspective of conservatives such as Ryan Ellis, the director of tax policy at Americans for Tax Reform, who see the capital-gains tax as little more than a vehicle for double taxation. His argument goes that corporations have already paid a tax rate of 35 percent on their profits (at least theoretically), so why should an individual owning shares in that corporation pay additional taxes just because the stock price went up? … ‘Any of these guys who don’t feel their taxes are high enough, I want to point out that they can make a contribution to the Treasury Department right at the Treasury’s website,’ Ellis says. ‘They don’t have to advocate policies that would ruin the country’s economy just to assuage their guilt.’”