Pressing on: The U.S. government on Tuesday forecast domestic crude production will rise even more than expected a year ago, undeterred by the worst price rout since the financial crisis, Business Insider reports. U.S. crude oil production will peak at 10.6 million barrels per day in 2020, a million barrels more than the high forecast a year earlier, according to the annual energy outlook by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department. Crude production will then moderate to 9.4 million bpd in 2040, 26% more than expected a year ago, the agency forecasts. Read the full story.
Plenty of pink slips: Since crude prices began tumbling last year, energy companies have announced plans to lay off more than 100,000 workers around the world, The Wall Street Journal reports. At least 91,000 layoffs have already materialized, with the majority coming in oil field services and drilling companies, according to research by Graves & Co., a Houston-based consulting firm. Now the cutbacks are slowly showing up in federal employment data. Direct employment in oil and gas extraction—which had grown by more than 50,000 jobs since 2007—has fallen by about 3,000 jobs since it peaked in October at 201,500, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read the full story (subscription may be required).
Living in the past: Founding Father Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things certain in this world are death and taxes, but he wasn’t necessarily talking about federal income taxes. As Time reports, the U.S. didn’t institute such a tax until the time of the Civil War, as a temporary measure. The Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, made it possible for the federal government to tax individuals directly. But the story of Tax Day doesn’t end there. In 1954, Congress passed nearly 1,000 pages of revision to the Internal Revenue Code. Though it didn’t change the tax code much, it did establish April 15 as Tax Day in America. Read the full story.
