Free Republic

The Tax Policy Center (TPC) released a report in March of 2012 detailing the effects of the Romney tax reform plan on taxpayers. The conclusion reached by the Tax Policy Center stated that the Romney tax reform plan would cut taxes for high-income taxpayers and raise them for middle and lower-income earners. Since the report was released, President Obama and his team have ran with it and used it to undermine the credibility of Romney’s plan. Senior Analyst in Tax Policy at the Heritage Foundation, Curtis Dubay, released his rebuttal of the TPC report yesterday which revealed many of the...

The pilots are at it again. While American Airlines languishes in bankruptcy court, they have taken the difficult steps of instituting cuts to wages, benefits, vacation time and flights. As a result, airline pilots are none-too-pleased, and could create countless problems for the millions of passengers the airline serves each year. According to a Wall Street Journal article: Airlines workers periodically perform badly or walkout to get the attention of management and gain leverage in negotiations. It’s a messy battle that leaves passengers as collateral damage. Late flights means families with small children get stranded at airports when they miss...

Simpson-Bowles targets permanently higher taxes. According to the Simpson-Bowles co-chair report, the revenue target of their proposal is to “cap revenue at or below 21 percent of GDP.” The Simspon-Bowles revenue target is much higher than the historical average. Using historical data either from CBO or OMB, it’s clear that the historical tax revenue burden is closer to 18.5 percent of GDP. Simspon-Bowles is a $5 trillion net tax hike relative to historical tax levels. If Simpson-Bowles’ revenue target was in place for the whole next decade, it would raise $5 trillion more in tax revenue than if historical revenue...

An actress in the movie about the Prophet Muhammad that sparked outrage across the Middle East on Tuesday and Wednesday said she will sue the filmmaker and that the film's script, titled "Desert Warriors," focused on life 2,000 years ago. Cindy Lee Garcia told Gawker that she called the film's writer and director, who has now gone into hiding, when she saw the protests and his quotes in the media. "'Why did you do this?' and he said, 'I'm tired of radical Islamists killing each other. Let other actors know it's not their fault,'" she told Gawker. "I'm going to...

2008: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” --Candidate Barack Obama, Sept. 12, 2008 “No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama’s plan will see one single penny of their tax raised whether it’s their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.” --Joe Biden, Vice-Presidential debate in St. Louis, Oct. 3, 2008 2012: “So if your family makes under $250,000 --...

This letter was sent to a priest who forbid me (Fr. Joseph Dwight) to offer to the people, in his parish church (in Italy, 2009), printed copies of the Testimony of Gloria Polo when I substituted for him at a few Sunday Masses. - - - - - - - Dear Father ... , How are you? I hope that you find time to pray without hurry before Jesus in the tabernacle even though we all have so many things to do. You asked me by telephone to not offer anymore the booklet on the testimony of Gloria Polo: “From...

President Barack Obama has altered his 2008 “firm pledge” that no family making less than $250,000 per year would see “any form of tax increase.” Obama has now limited the pledge to merely “income taxes” – and only for “next year.” On Sept. 12, 2008, speaking in Dover, New Hampshire, candidate Obama said: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” But this Wednesday, August 8,...

With the Olympics and upcoming election dominating news coverage, The United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications in December is not a likely source of interest for most Americans. Yet it certainly should be, for the anti-freedom, pro-regulation policies being considered at the conference are serious enough to have given rise to a rare show of bipartisan action in Congress. The ITU Conference will, among other things, be considering proposed amendments to an international telecommunications treaty, two of which are of particular concern to advocates of a free and unregulated internet. In light of this threat,...

Yesterday, Senate Democrats dropped President Obama’s proposal to raise the death tax in favor of their own. Their plan included stripping all death tax provisions out of S. 3412. By purposefully dropping the death tax provision, at the end of the year the tax is set to revert to pre-2001 tax cut levels, a rate that is higher than the President’s initial proposal. With her AYE vote on S. 3412, Senator McCaskill voted to subject Missouri small businesses, farms, and ranches to millions of dollars in additional taxes on earned assets. In 2006, McCaskill said that she supported “extending the...

Eleven Southern California business owners met this week with Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, at a Costa Mesa manufacturing plant. On the wall behind Mr. Romney's chair hung a large banner that read, "We did build it!" – with "did" underlined for emphasis. The banner underscored how out of touch President Barack Obama seems with what makes the American economy work. The business owners echoed the ire of those nationwide who do understand what makes the American economy work. Their words Monday in Costa Mesa directly refuted the president's now-infamous campaign utterance of last week: "If you've got...

What happens in the real world when those who are fiscally responsible for managing other people’s money hide it and engage in other deceptions? Yeah, they go to jail or at least get sued and have to pay up. What happens in Sacramento? We have a couple of examples of such shenanigans...

Over the last couple of months, Americans for Tax Reform has highlighted the 20 new or higher taxes on American families and employers created by Obamacare. The significance of these tax increases is that they are a direct violation of candidate Obama’s promise not to raise “any form” of taxes on these families. In an attempt to justify this widely unpopular piece of legislation, the Obama campaign released their own sort of “Fact Check” today. The response, however, missed the mark by ignoring hard numbers and common sense. They chose 5 of the 20 overall new or higher taxes to...

As poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote, if it looks "like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, call that bird a duck." The individual mandate upheld by SCOTUS last week not only looks like a tax, functions like a tax, but it is also enforced like a tax. Any cleverly veiled description of the individual mandate as a "penalty" and thus not a tax, blatantly overlooks the fact that it is a tax. Thanks to Congress' legal contortions of our system of jurisprudence, the individual mandate has been allowed to limbo under the bar of judicial...

If Barack Obama has an immediate eligibility problem, it is more likely to derive from the Social Security Number he has been using for the last 25 years than from his birth certificate. Ohio private investigator Susan Daniels has seen to that. On Monday, July 2, she filed suit in Geauga County (Ohio) Common Pleas Court demanding that Jon Husted, Ohio secretary of state, remove ObamaÂ’s name from the ballot until Obama can prove the validity of his Social Security Number. Daniels, who has vetted thousands of Social Security Numbers for numerous other clients, has done her homework. In her...

I suspect the essentials of Keynesian economic theory were scribbled as a faculty prank on a monogrammed napkin in the Harvard Business School cafeteria. After a few laughs, the discarded joke was left on the table with empty coffee cups and a half-eaten bagel; only to be discovered minutes later by an opportunistic work-study sophomore clearing the table. The crumpled napkin was auctioned as the hottest & newest economic pop-theory to a fast-talking tabloid freelancer (who had been to Vegas with his columnist-buddy at The Globe, and had the goods on him). After some hard-nosed and expensive negotiations, the freelancer...

There is a breathless article in today's Washington Post by Lori Montgomery detailing a study by JEC Democrat staff of the House GOP budget's tax reform plan. The headline of the report is that the tax plan, if implemented, would be a net tax hike for middle and upper-middle income households, and a giant tax cut for high income households. The only problem is that the analysis contains a fatal flaw that Lori Montgomery should have seen. The fact that she did not is troubling, to say the least. The House GOP budget empowers the Ways and Means Committee to...

Faced with the coming threat of the largest tax hike in history, commentators are salivating at the idea of another "grand bargain" that gets Republicans to agree to raise taxes on American families and employers. Any lawmaker willing to consider such a deal is poised to become another fool of history. The 1990 Budget Deal: Starting May of 1990, President George H.W. Bush huddled with Democrat House and Senate members at Andrews Air Force Base. What was Promised: Congressional Democrats convinced a number of Republicans to join them in a bipartisan deal promising $2 in spending cuts for every $1...

Deceptive Chimp Hides Ammo, Blasts Unsuspecting Zoo Visitors - (Santino just 1 second before the throw.) A chimp that creates hiding places for rocks he throws at zoo visitors reveals for the first time that humanity's closest living relatives can plan to deceive, researchers say. These findings could shed light on the evolution of higher mental functions such as planning, investigators added. The chimpanzee known as Santino is the dominant male of his group at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. Intriguingly, past research showed the ape calmly gathered stones from his enclosure's moat and pieces of concrete he pulled off an...

Over the past three years, President Obama has demonstrated his willingness to lie about anything and everything if it leads to the acquisition and retention of maximum power for himself and his cohorts. Obama follows a pattern of overloading the system with deception, making responses to every individual distortion impractical or outright impossible. While Obama's opponents spend their precious time addressing each new lie, Obama keeps the focus off the end-zone, and seizures of power previously unthinkable are accomplished. At some point, citizens grow weary of hearing that their leaders are out for their ill, that political policies are nothing...

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