Free Republic

As 2013 begins with wealthy Americans in line for bigger tax bills, they're not alone. Tax fairness takes the spotlight worldwide this year, as cash-strapped governments look to impose more of the burden on well-heeled companies, individuals and institutions, and to catch and punish tax cheaters. This week, as the U.S. Congress averted a plunge off the fiscal precipice, British Prime Minister David Cameron sent a letter to leaders of the Group of Eight countries that make up about half of the world's economic output. Cameron is incoming president of the G-8 and says corporate tax evasion is on his...

President Obama intends to take a confrontational approach with Republicans in future economic battles by using the same campaign-style events the White House saw as effective in the “fiscal-cliff” fight. Many in Obama’s party believe that he got the upper hand in the recent deal to avoid the mixture of across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts, and that the aggressive approach helped build his public case. Sources close to Obama say he can fend off Republicans for several reasons: his successful reelection; polling suggesting public support for many of his positions; and division among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Jen Psaki,...

Did The Fed Lie About QE 3 And 4? Stock-Markets / Quantitative EasingJan 05, 2013 - 08:24 AM By: Graham Summers It’s common belief that Bernanke and the Fed are printing $85 billion per month ($40 billion to buy Mortgage Backed Securities and $45 billion to buy Treasuries). After all, these are the policies that the Fed announced in September and December 2012, respectively. The only issue with this is that the Fed lied. Today, the Fed’s balance sheet is $1.3 billion smaller than it was at this time last year. Last week it was $19 billion smaller. The largest...

If we use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System , or NICS, as a proxy for gun sales we see that Kentucky is the runaway leader in gun sales for 2012. Four states exceeded one million Federal Bureau of Investigation NICS checks; Kentucky, Texas, California and Illinois. Kentucky is the only state to exceed two million background checks. Background checks are only a proxy measure for gun sales. A buyer may purchase more than one gun through a gun dealer, depending on the local laws, once the background check comes back authorizing the purchase. The list of states and...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their monthly jobs report. Now for the BLS Boogie. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 155,000 workers last month following a revised 161,000 advance in November that was greater than initially estimated. The unemployment rate printed at 7.8% which is up from 7.7% in November but the same as the UPWARDLY REVISED print of 7.8%. U6 partial unemployment printed at 14.4%. Labor force participation remained at 63.6%. And the civilian employment to population ratio fell to 58.6, still stuck are 1983 levels. That’s a lot of people for the 58.6% to support! The number of...

The birthrate in the United States has fallen to record lows, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center. What’s more, the report says the most dramatic drop has been among foreign-born Hispanic women.We have been content for some time that the U.S.-born Caucasian birth rate was below replacement but that the Hispanics had been making up for it by having births higher than replacement, and that this made us unique in the industrialized west.Pew reports, “The overall U.S. birthrate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15-44,...

Middle-class workers will take a bigger hit to their income proportionately than those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 under the new fiscal cliff deal, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Earners in the latter group will pay an average 1.3 percent more - or an additional $2,711 - in taxes this year, while workers making between $30,000 and $200,000 will see their paychecks shrink by as much as 1.7 percent - or up to $1,784 - the D.C.-based think tank reported. Overall, nearly 80 percent of households will pay more money to the federal government as a result of...

CHART OF THE DAY: THE SCARIEST JOBS CHART EVER Sam RoJanuary 4, 2013It's jobs day in America. This morning we learned that the U.S. economy added 155k jobs December and the unemployment rate ticked up in 7.8 percent. Although the numbers were in line with economists' expectations, they still reflect a job market that remains incredibly weak almost four years into the economic recovery. Calculated Risk runs a chart every month putting the current jobs recovery into perspective. "This shows the depth of the recent employment recession - worse than any other post-war recession - and the relatively slow recovery...

Congress Avoids The Fiscal Cliff By Selling Us Down The River Politics / US PoliticsJan 04, 2013 - 07:22 AM By: Peter Schiff With the possible exception of the New York Times' editorial board (and the cast of The Jersey Shore), everyone on the planet understood that the United States Government needs to cut spending, increase taxes, or both. Instead, after months of political posturing and hand wringing, the Federal Government has just delivered the exact opposite, a deal that increases spending and decreases taxes. The move lays bare the emptiness of budget legislation, which can be dismantled far easier...

Feeling down about your small business these days? Is the broken economy hurting your sales and keeping you up at night? Need some motivation and tough love to help you stop pitying yourself? Well, here you go: 13 reasons you might have in your head about why you're not as successful as you should be. #1 Reason You’re Not As Successful As You Should Be – Laziness I don’t think there’s an easy way to put this. I have to assume that you’re lazy. Every single successful person works their butts off to get where they are. It’s ok to...

Suddenly, Lots Of Influential People Are Talking About The Trillion Dollar Coin Idea To Save The Economy Joe WeisenthalJan. 3, 2013, 4:42 PMThis is really thrilling. An arcane idea that started on finance blogs in the summer of 2011-- that Tim Geithner should mint a trillion dollar platinum coin to avert the debt ceiling -- is now seriously taking off. The premise of the idea is this: Although the Treasury can't just create money out of thin air to pay its bills, there is a technicality in the law that says the Treasury has special discretion to create platinum coins,...

Hedge Fund Presents Massive, Bearish Outlook On The State Of US Markets Lucas KawaJan. 3, 2013, 2:51 PMMorgan Creek Capital Management, an investment management firm with offices around the world, released its 2013 market outlook, entitled "Peering Over the Precipice." The presentation was delivered at the North Carolina Bankers Association yesterday. The slideshow presentation focuses on the three big risks facing the market: the Euro crisis, possibility of a downturn in China, and fallout from the Fiscal Cliff. Of these three, the firm is most bearish on the U.S. economy -- to the point of predicting a recession starting in...

Sen. Pat Toomey is one of the great accomplishments of the Tea Party Movement, and after supporting him in ’04 back when Bush was backing Specter, it does my heart good to see him in our dysfunctional deliberate body. For that same reason, some are very angry at him for his vote on the fiscal cliff deal. But as we go into another debt-ceiling fight, he’s one of our better communicators on this issue. So, it also does my heart good to see him go on “Morning Joe,” up against five people who disagree with him, and direct the conversation,...

... We’re back from vacation and, like many Americans, have been trying to figure out the details of the “fiscal-cliff” deal —one of those classic middle-of-the-night congressional compromises that please virtually no one. The White House, by its own accounting, ended up with $737 billion in deficit reduction, a far cry from the $2 trillion or so that it originally sought. But that hasn’t stopped President Obama from touting the deal as a victory in a campaign-style video for supporters. But a politician who highlights good news often leaves out the bad news. Let’s see what’s missing from Obama’s presentation.

A garment maker that specializes in bullet-proof goods for adults is planning to manufacture and sell a line of bullet-proof clothes exclusively for children, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Miguel Caballero has been in the garment business in Bogota, Colombia for 22 years, but has never been able to break through the U.S. market. He hopes his new line of kid’s clothes will change that. Caballero plans to sell T-shirts, vests, and combination backpack-vests. He says the inspiration for his new business model was when he started to receive requests from worried parents after...

Light At The End Of The Tunnel For Gold By Frank Holmes 01/02/13 Intuition was telling me something was going on these past few days (of 2012) in the gold market. Our investment team was watching gold and gold stocks take a tumble for no obvious reason. It wasn’t only us who felt this way: many analysts were caught off-guard. One comment from Barclays Research indicated that the week was unusually “brutal … with quite a few confused participants with some seemingly positive aspects of the market not having an impact.” My hunch was realized only days later when Zero...

ROUBINI: America Has Yet To Wake Up To The Full Extent Of Its Fiscal Nightmare Mamta BadkarJanuary 2, 2013Last night the House of Representatives voted 257-167 to pass the fiscal cliff bill. Many have pointed out that president Obama has come out the winner, while the Republicans who signed Grover Norquist's no-tax- increase pledge have been the biggest losers. But in a new op-ed for The Financial Times, Nouriel Roubini writes that the U.S. has been let down by its leaders and that they "dysfunctional nature" of the country's political system means another crisis isn't far off. He also says...

Congressmen come and go, but the Kleptocracy goes on and on. What would have happened had the parties not reached a deal. Probably nothing much different than now. But maybe the price of gold and silver would have gone down instead of up. This was a complete PR event, stage-managed from the get go to make you believe that higher taxes and increased government spending are the answers to what ails the country and the economy. In the end, none of the changes necessary to save the US and the world from a complete and utter economic catastrophy have been...

"While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they’ve passed..."

Are you ready for a wild 2013? It should be a very interesting year. When the calendar flips over each January, lots of people make lots of lists. They make lists of “resolutions”, but most people never follow through on them. They make lists of “predictions”, but most of those predictions always seem to end up failing. Well, I have decided to put out my own list of predictions for 2013. I openly admit that I won’t get all of these predictions right, and that is okay. Hopefully I will at least be more accurate than most of the other...