CNN news 2012-04-18 加文本

cnn news 2012-04-18

CARL AZUZ, HOST, cnn STUDENT NEWS: An introduction from halfway around the world -- awesome. Thank you to those students and thanks to all of you for spending part of your Tuesday with cnn Student News.

First up, today is the annual April deadline for Americans to file their taxes. All right. You hear about taxes all the time. There are different kinds of them, but they`re all basically fees that governments collect in order to pay for the goods and services that governments provide.

AZUZ (voice-over): Federal, state, local governments can set different taxes for different things. For example, most of you have probably paid a sales tax. That`s extra money you pay when you buy something. If you have a job and notice that your paycheck is less than you expected, that might be because of what was taken out for income taxes.

The federal government and most states charge a fee on the money people earn. That`s what today`s deadline is all about. Every year, people have to file their income tax returns, which lists what they earned and what taxes they`ve already paid. Normally, that has to be done by April 15th. That was a Sunday this year, so people were given an extra two days.

AZUZ: You might be wondering what the government uses tax money for or when all this started. That`s part of what Lizzie O`Leary is going to explain in this breakdown.

LIZZIE O`LEARY, cnn CORRESPONDENT: If you don`t pay your taxes, the IRS will eventually find you. We know a lot of people get hauled into court for their back taxes.

About one-fifth of it goes to defense. About one-fifth goes to Social Security. Another fifth goes to health care, and a little less than that goes to veterans.

We had an income tax during the Civil War. Then it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895. Then the income tax came back in 1913, and that sets up the modern income tax as we know it today.

One of the reasons that historians think we pay in the spring was at one point, taxes were levied, mostly on the rich, and the rich started to get out of town for the summer in the spring. So the government wanted to collect taxes in the spring before rich people skipped town.

We have a very complicated tax structure, and a lot of it has grown up because interest groups have asked for certain things as our tax laws have been rewritten. The last time it got a full rewrite was back in 1986. Ever since then, most lawmakers have been talking about how complicated the tax code is, but no one`s rewritten it.

There are all sorts of battles about the tax code. Some people have proposed flat taxes, a national sales tax, whether the rich should pay more in taxes. Probably the biggest battle is whether tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 should expire or be made permanent.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Today`s Shoutout goes out to Mr. McConnell`s English class at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in Los Angeles, California. Riyadh is the capital of what country? You know what to do. Is it Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Oman? You`ve got three seconds, go.

Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia. It`s also the country`s most populated city. That`s your answer, and that`s your Shoutout.

AZUZ (voice-over): An area around that Middle Eastern capital was plunged into darkness last Friday by a massive sandstorm that hit Saudi Arabia. A cnn iReporter took this video of the storm. You can get a sense for how far it stretches.

The iReporter said he`s never seen a sandstorm this big before. Behind him -- you see it right there -- totally clear, but then there`s this giant cloud rushing forward on the other side. He said when the storm did finally reach where he was, it was a total blackout. He jumped in his car as the sand passed over, and said the vehicle shook for two straight minutes from the power of the storm.

Our next story takes us from Saudi Arabia up to Syria. We reported yesterday on renewed violence in that country after a temporary truce last Thursday. That was the deadline for a cease-fire and a peace plan put together by a United Nations representative.

U.N. observers are in Syria right now. They`re there to monitor the situation, see if a cease-fire can last. Yesterday both sides, government and opposition forces, reported fighting. The opposition said the government was launching attacks on Syrian cities. The government blamed the violence on armed terrorists, a claim it`s made many times.