Free Republic

 I am very disappointed to learn that some Tea Party Activists are now promoting Representative Jim Bridenstine’s H.J.RES. 104 as a way to “repeal the 16th Amendment and abolish the income tax”.  Additionally, donations are being asked to support this movement.  The problem is, if H.J.RES. 104 was adopted and its proposed wording added to our Constitution, the 16th Amendment would indeed be repealed, but Congress would continue to have power to lay and collect taxes calculated from profits, gains, and other “incomes”. The important wording in Representative Jim Bridenstine’s proposed amendment declares:`Effective 2 years after the ratification of this article...

The day when the nation collectively has made enough money to pay its total tax burden for the year is three days later this year, according to a new report. According to a report released Monday by the Tax Foundation, this year Tax Freedom Day falls 111 days into 2014, on April 21. By April 21, to group says, Americans will have made enough to pay the $3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state taxes — more than they will spend on food clothing and housing combined. Tax Freedom Day is later than it was last year,...

You can't get blood out of a rock. Traditionally the United States has had a consumer-driven economy, but now years of declining incomes and rising debts are really starting to catch up with us. In order to have an economy that is dependent on consumer spending, you need to have a large middle class. Unfortunately, the U.S. middle class is steadily shrinking, and unless that trend is reversed we are going to see massive economic changes in this country. For example, in poor neighborhoods all over America we are seeing bank branches, car dealerships and retail stores close down at...

Earlier today U.S. Representative Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, released a bill designed to fundamentally reform both the federal corporate and individual income tax (press conference video here and executive summary here). America is far overdue for such reform. As Camp points out in the Wall Street Journal: “According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate at the IRS, Americans overall spend over six billion hours and $168 billion every year to file their returns. This is stark testimony to the complexity of the tax code. Meanwhile, owners of small businesses face tax rates as...

The Republican plan to overhaul and simplify the nation’s tax code is expected to call for a cut in the top corporate income rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, and a reduction of the seven individual tax brackets to two — at 10 percent and 25 percent — according to aides familiar with the proposal. The proposal, which is set to be released Wednesday after nearly three years of behind-the-scenes work, is the brainchild of Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and it reflects the long-held tax overhaul goals of the Republican-passed...

Online mortgage company HSH.com recently estimated the salaries needed to afford a house in 25 metropolitan areas across the United States. Because, the cost of real estate varies across cities and regions — you need to be making about four times as much money in San Diego as in Cincinnati to afford a house. The map illustrates these differences. The wider the circle over a city, the more you need to make to afford a house there: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE MAP AND TABLE

The cost of living in America varies wildly. In Cleveland, people need a base salary of at least $19,435 a year to afford the average home, while San Franciscans must make upward of $115,000 annually.HSH.com, an online mortgage and consumer loan information website, figured out how much a person would have to earn to afford a home in 25 of the country's largest metropolitan areas.To do so, HSH looked at the National Association of Realtors’ fourth-quarter data for median home prices and HSH.com’s fourth-quarter average interest rate for 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages to determine how much money homebuyers would need to...

President Obama’s big government philosophy has created an economic environment hostile to job growth and economic prosperity. He says he is committed to “shovel ready jobs,” yet onerous regulations from his agencies delay projects from moving forward and shackle businesses with costs that prevent them from expanding. His signature legislation—The Affordable Care Act—has led some employers to slash hours and freeze hiring, and may lead employees to voluntarily reduce their own hours or leave the workforce altogether. Now it appears that the President is doubling down. His newest plan to help Americans is to raise the minimum wage, a proposal...

Like it or not, the sharp inequality in the country is a fundamental issue. The gap between the richest and the rest of us is greater than it has been since 1929—a notable year. The gap between the pay of CEOs and top executives and the average pay of their companies' workers has grown into a yawning chasm compared with the ratio just a couple of decades ago. One can believe, along with deluded oligarchs such as Tom Perkins, that any criticism of the rich is like Kristallnacht—or, more reasonably, that without the drivers of wealth, the entire society would...

President Obama’s recent State of the Union address was the culmination of months of advocacy from Democrats and activists for a higher minimum wage. The President proposed a raise to the minimum wage for federal contractors by executive order to $10.10 per hour and called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage for all workers to the same mark, along with indexing it to inflation. A raise of the national minimum wage was framed as giving low income workers the “living wage” they deserve and fighting perceived growth in income inequality in America. Though the President’s proposal is well...

SEE: TheBlaze, Feb. 4, 2014 ‘A Pattern of Lawlessness’: Ted Cruz Outlines Why Even Democrats Should Be Concerned About Obama Administration’s Actions "Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) said there is a “pattern of lawlessness” underway by the Obama administration that is truly “breathtaking,” and it should not only concern Republicans. “Suppose the next president says, ‘I’m instructing the Treasury Department [to] no longer collect taxes at a higher rate than 25%,” Cruz remarked on Glenn Beck’s radio program Tuesday. “That happens to be policy I agree with. I would love to see moving towards tax reform and lowering the top...

What a wonderful law. Thank you, Democrats. Thank you, Barack Obama. Not only will Obamacare kill off over 2.3 million jobs but it will reduce wages, too! Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf told a Congressional committee today that Obamacare will reduce workers wages. “We expect as other analysts believe that over time costs that employers bare for their employees end up being borne by the employee in the form of lower wages.” Terrific. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) It’s not as if Americans weren’t already suffering. Since Obama entered the White House US households have lost $4,019 in real income, a little...

Unless you are exceptionally coldblooded, it's hard not to be disturbed by today's huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, wider than most Americans would (almost certainly) wish. But this incontestable reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for many of our problems. Actually, the reverse is true: Economic inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause. For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The two conditions are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got rich by running profitable small businesses (car dealerships,...

Democrat nominee for the Governor's Mansion in the Lone Star State is finding herself at the receiving end of a new ethics violation complaint filed with the Texas government, as reported by Fox News on Jan. 30, 2014 via Watchdog.org on Jan. 29, 2014 State Senator and darling of the left since her recent pro-abortion filibuster in the Texas State Legislature, Wendy Davis has just been figuratively slapped with accusations that she failed to disclose income as well as ties to lobbyists as required by state law for those seeking elected office. The editor of the citizens rights/journalism activists group...

In his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama is expected to take sharp aim at wealth inequality. He'll propose a hike in the minimum wage, extended unemployment benefits, and more funding for education and skills improvement. He is also likely to contribute to several persistent myths about the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else. There is no question that income inequality in America is high compared with other countries as well as with the three decades in the U.S. after World War II. And a consensus is growing among business leaders, politicians and...

A Leftist is someone who advocates marriage for homosexuals but opposes it for heterosexuals. Recently, Ari Fleischer, a press spokesman for George W. Bush, responded to the current administration’s newfound desire to fight the plague of “income inequality”—which has spread more under Barack Obama than under any other recent president—by stating the obvious: that marriage is good economic medicine. “`Marriage inequality’ should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don’t,” Fleischer said. “According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just...

Maybe France's President François Hollande's publicly revealed, private personal indiscretions (ok, maybe in France they're not considered indiscretions but standard operating domestic procedures) also prompted him to publicly question the standard operating procedures of France's socialist economy.  With French unemployment officially at over 10.5%, unofficially probably higher, Hollande put on his clothes, slunk out of his latest female friend's apartment and stood before the national enquiring minds of not only the French press but the international media as well, plaintively asking: "How can we run a country if entrepreneurs don't hire?" he said. "And how can we redistribute if there's...

The World Economic Forum says the gap between the rich and the poor is the most likely risk to the global economy in coming years. In its annual risk assessment ahead of next week's gathering of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum says income disparity in the wake of the global financial crisis is the "most likely risk to cause an impact on a global scale in the next decade." It warns of a "lost generation" of young people coming of age in the current decade that could hamper the global economic recovery and stoke...

In 1900, we had no airplanes, no computers, no cellphones, no internet. We had only rudimentary versions of cars, trucks, telephones, even cameras.But in the last century, 1900 to 2000, as Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon report in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, real per capita GDP in the U.S. grew by nearly 7 times, meaning the American standard of living grew by that much as well. The authors explain,“It is hard for us to imagine, for example, that in 1900 less than one in five homes...

President Obama considers income inequality a “defining challenge of our time.” Continuing from my previous column ( “Questions for redistribution's proponents” ), I have some additional questions for Mr. Obama and others who want government to redistribute more income from “the rich” to “the poor.” • When you describe growing income inequality in the United States, you typically look only at the incomes of the rich before they pay taxes and at the incomes of the poor before they receive noncash transfers from government such as food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. You also ignore noncash transfers that the poor receive...