Free Republic

President Obama's approval numbers are starting to mimic Mitt Romney's. According to a new YouGov poll, it's the rich -- not the poor or middle class -- who back Obama more despite his 2012 campaign attacking the rich. The poll for the Economist found that fewer than half of those with incomes less than $100,000 per year approve of Obama's performance, while he enjoys a 54 percent approval rating among those with incomes higher than that. Those earning less than $40,000 a year disapprove of the president's performance, 51 percent to 45 percent. Those earning $40,000 to $100,000 disapprove by...

Taylor Swift is adding to her property portfolio after securing a $17.75 million deal for a new seaside home in Rhode Island. The I Knew You Were Trouble hitmaker recently went house hunting along the U.S. northeast coast with her mother Andrea, father Scott and younger brother Austin, and she appears to have settled on a lavish estate in the town of Westerly. The property, which boasts five bedrooms and sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean, had reportedly been on the market for $20 million - but Swift managed to use her charms to negotiate the lower price -- she...

Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are in contract to buy a $10.5 million apartment in The Whitman, at 21 East 26th St. Come June, NoMad residents will be keeping up with the Clintons. Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are buying a sleek, $10.5 million apartment overlooking Madison Square Park, sources said. The Whitman, first built in 1924, is near the couple's current place, a rented loft in Gramercy Park. The 5,000-square-foot pad, in The Whitman at 21 E. 26th St., is just a few blocks from the couple's rented Gramercy Park loft. Sources said staying nearby...

Nine years after cashing her $10,569,000.10 cheque, lotto winner Sharon Tirabassi is catching the Barton Street bus to her part-time job. She’s working to support her kids in their rented house in northeast Hamilton.Tirabassi, 35 — one of this city’s biggest lotto winners — has gone from rolling in dough to living pay cheque to pay cheque. The Lotto Super Seven payout didn’t come with a financial adviser and before she knew it — big house, fancy cars, designer clothes, lavish parties, exotic trips, handouts to family, loans to friends — the money was gone.“You don’t think it’ll go (at...

— Pedro Quezada said he was walking past Eagle Liquor in Passaic on Monday when he noticed a commotion. He wondered whether someone had won the lottery there. "I thought maybe the winning ticket was sold in this store," Quezada said, referring the $338 million Powerball jackpot that was drawn this weekend. So just after 4 p.m., Quezada took the ticket he bought there and scanned it through the liquor store's lottery machine. Suddenly, the 44-year-old Dominican immigrant and father of five got life-changing news: He had won the fourth-largest jackpot in Powerball history. "I had no idea I was...

One of Yahoo’s newest employees is a 17-year-old high school student in Britain. As of Monday, he is one of its richest, too. That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to the company on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo said it would incorporate his algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones, in its own mobile apps, with Mr. D’Aloisio’s help. “I’ve still got a year and a half left...

Many people think that the rich are able to weasel their way out of taxes, but they actually pay an overwhelming majority of the taxes in the United States. What's more, their share of the tax burden is increasing. The top 10 percent of taxpayers paid over 70% of the total amount collected in federal income taxes in 2010, the latest year figures are available, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank. That's up from 55% in 1986. The remaining 90% bore just under 30% of the tax burden. And 47% of all Americans pay hardly anything at...

Seems like Justin Bieber may need to put things in perspective. The newly 19-year-old pop superstar took to Twitter to whine about his “worst birthday,” which went down on Friday night. Earlier in the day, it seemed the Biebs was excited about his big birthday celebration, tweeting things like “Gonna be fun tonight” and “Big night ahead!” After receiving a customized Batman-themed bike from his dad, according to toofab, and spending the day shopping—picking up pricey items like Christian Louboutin sneakers—Bieber headed to the Cirque du Soir club in London with his pals, US Weekly reported. But the poor millionaire...

Can you name this donor? He co-founded Silicon Valley’s first great corporation. He funded and befriended every Republican President from Nixon to George H.W. Bush. His decisive actions helped save two conservative think tanks, the Hoover Institution in the 1950s and the American Enterprise Institute in the 1980s. In 1992 he declared, “the Democratic Party has been the party of socialism since President Roosevelt’s term,” and it “is indentured to union labor.” Your last clue: The foundation named for him—America’s seventh largest—is a pillar of the liberal philanthropic establishment.

When President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, he will also usher in a new era in American power politics. Whereas the old left-wing definition of “who rules” focused on large corporations, banks, energy companies and agribusinesses, the Obama-era power structure represents a major transformation. This shift stems, in large part, from the movement from a predominately resource and tangible goods-based economy to an information-based one. In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in...

Word is, Phil Mickelson is mad as hell about rising tax rates, and he’s not going to take it anymore. What follows is a brief portion of an interview Mickelson gave earlier today after carding a final-round 66 at the Palmer Course at PGA West in La Quinta – which I assure you, is not associated with the La Quinta next door to your local Denny’s – in which the golfer hinted that he is considering drastic career changes because of a combined tax rate nearing “62, 63 percent:”

Houston trial lawyers Steve and Amber Mostyn say they’re giving $1 million to a gun-control group formed by former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. Steve Mostyn is a major Democratic campaign contributor, backing candidates in Texas and nationally. He gave $3 million to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC aiding President Obama’s re-election. He’s perhaps best known in Texas for launching a media campaign against Rick Perry two years ago in which he chided the Republican governor for his reluctance to debate in his 2010 reelection race with a full-page newspaper ad depicting Perry and...

R'n'B-pop diva Beyonce Knowles, "American Idol" winner Kelly Clarkson and Grammy Award-winning artist James Taylor are just some of the artists tapped by re-elected U.S. president Barack Obama to perform the country's most patriotic songs during his upcoming inauguration ceremony on January 21. Beyonce is chosen to deliver the U.S. national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner", Kelly is selected to sing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and James is invited again to perform "America the Beautiful".

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has released a breakdown of how much the federal government forgoes in tax revenue due to various credits and deductions that benefit everything from NASCAR owners to gamblers. It's a fairly comprehensive analysis that should get bipartisan support, but one of the categories that Sen. Coburn targets to raise taxes from may be surprising: "the rich." Coburn highlights $100 billion in tax revenue that could be raised over the next ten years by ending some of these deductions only on millionaire households. Over the 2006-2009 time period, Coburn notes, millionaires deducted over $20 billion in gambling...

With the generally upbeat spending reports on black Friday and cyber-Monday, Gallup paints a different point of view in its most recent poll that shows U.S. Consumer Spending Holds Steady, Consistent With 2011Americans' self-reported daily spending averaged $73 in November, essentially on par with September and October. It is also similar to the $71 Americans spent last November and slightly higher compared with November 2010 and 2009 -- but still much lower than in November 2008. November 2012 vs. November Prior Years U.S. Upper-Income Spending Sees Worst November on Record Upper-income Americans' (defined as those making at least $90,000 per...

Ah, the hypocrisy of tax-hikers who do everything they can to avoid the taxes they wish to impose on others. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.: He tried to avoid $500K in his home state's sales and excise taxes by docking his newly purchased $7 million 76-foot yacht in Rhode Island. Massachusetts lowered its state income tax in 2001. Given the presumably large number of rich people who pine to pay more taxes, the state allowed tax filers to check a box and voluntarily pay the old, higher rate. In a liberal state of over 3 million tax filers, how many volunteered...

Jerry Finkelstein, who made a fortune in business, real estate and newspapers, including The New York Law Journal and The Hill, and for many years was a self-styled Democratic power broker in New York City, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.

Restraint is way overrated.

Several months ago, an ad hoc consortium of self-proclaimed millionaires, sent a letter to Obama, Reid and Boehner, demanding that "for the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000." This grass roots initiative was formed in the aftermath of Warren Buffett's, since defunct, proposal to impose a "millionaire tax" rule. Of course, back then, as now, someone actually did the math and realized what the impact of such as tax would be in the grand scheme of the next decade of deficits, as we...

This is called surrendering before the war starts: Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy. ***** "It won't kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "It really won't, I don't think. I don't really understand why Republicans don't take Obama's offer." "Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic...

A counterpart to the biblical adage that the poor will always be with us is the notion that the rich will always be one tax hike away from leaving us. That's the foundation stone, after all, of the argument against raising taxes on "job creators" and of bestowing preferential treatment on capital gains (largely collected by the rich) over wage income (the sustenance of us other poor slobs). And it's a linchpin of the campaign against Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to raise income taxes on income above $250,000, topping out at a 13.3% rate on income over $1...

The release of over two decades of Mitt Romney's tax information on Friday must have been so anticlimactic for Team Obama --- not only does it turn out that Romney contributed a boatload of money towards the federal coffers, but he's also an almost wildly generous and charitable individual to boot. After the monumentally huge deal Team O made out of the tax returns, with dodgy "secrecy" ads and unsubtle fat-cat jabs out the wazoo, they don't seem to be seizing on the information with quite the fervor you would've expected.Yes, Romney is hugely wealthy, and hey, maybe some of...

Almost three-quarters of New York voters favor a tax on millionaires, a poll found, days after several hundred people marched to the homes of some of New York City’s richest financiers to protest economic inequality. Support for taxing wealthier people breached party lines, with 83% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans in favor, according to the Siena College Research Institute poll released Monday. A separate poll released by Quinnipiac University showed New York City voters support an extension of the tax by 61% to 28% percent, with Republicans favoring it by 55% to 38%. Let’s go back 160 years and...

Former Evergreen Solar CEO Richard Feldt’s five-bedroom, two-plus acre Hingham pad is on the market for $9.9 million, nearly $1.4 million more than what the company’s Devens factory sold for earlier this year. The Bare Cove Lane property also boasts four bathrooms, a pool, stone terrace and 200 feet of frontage on Hingham Harbor, according to a real estate listing. “The natural light is incredible. The views are spectacular. The finishes and millwork are masterful,” the listing says. “Rarely does a home of this caliber become available for sale.” Feldt, who left Evergreen Solar in 2010 to become CEO of...

Its biggest donation - $2 million - came from telecom billionaire Irwin Jacobs, who had not previously given to the Obama super PAC. And Priorities received $1 million each from Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner, an Obama campaign bundler and prominent gay rights supporter who had previously donated $500,000, and star actor Morgan Freeman, a newcomer to big-political-check writing. It also received $750,000 from billionaire heir Jon Stryker, a big donor to gay rights causes, and $333,333 from billionaire media entrepreneur Haim Saban, who was among a handful of major Democratic donors who had been intensely courted for months to...

Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country. U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported. They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new financial report from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney shows that his wealth remains near $250 million, about the same as last The new financial report from Romney describes sales of a large amount of stocks managed through his blind trust. Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul stressed that the trust manages investments for Romney and his wife, Ann. The new report shows that Romney still made millions of dollars over the past year in lucrative bank notes and investment funds, including nearly 40 different funds associated with his former company, Bain Capital.

Eduardo Saverin can escape the United States, but he cannot slip Facebook. “Everything I do in my personal life, in my professional life, it’s completely there,” said Mr. Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, in his first major interview. “A lot of what I do, what everyone does, is influenced by it.” Alone among Facebook’s 900 million users, Mr. Saverin is special: a billionaire with only the vaguest of causes. He co-founded Facebook at age 21, then left two years later with a legal settlement that cut him off from Facebook but left him phenomenally wealthy. His stake will most likely be...

The president seemingly lost a major fight Monday when the Senate shot down his "Buffett Rule" minimum tax for the wealthy, one of his signature issues and what promises to be a central plank of his reelection campaign. Or did he lose? ...

Rick Santorum built his presidential candidacy on the premise that he is very different than wealthy, establishment front-runner Mitt Romney, that he is someone who has faced the plights of the average American. Among the hardships Santorum claims to share is an underwater mortgage, the kind that's forcing millions from their homes. "The value of my house is a fraction of what it was when I bought it," the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania recently told Michigan supporters. But the Republican presidential contender's housing situation is quite unlike the one so many other Americans actually face, according to experts and...

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. -- Michael Jordan's longtime personal residence in suburban Chicago is for sale for $29 million. The sprawling estate is in Highland Park, along Lake Michigan, and has more than 56,000 square feet of living space. That includes nine bedrooms, 15 baths and five fireplaces. There's also a three-bedroom guesthouse, pool area, outdoor tennis court and three climate-controlled multi-car garages. An indoor basketball complex features a full-size regulation court with specially cushioned hardwood flooring and competition-quality high intensity lighting. It has a sound system set up to provide perfect acoustics within the court space. The property was put...

The Sacramento Bee website is reporting that the number of top-income taxpayers in California has declined by a third. In an article in its Capitol Alert section, the Bee says that those Californians with $500,000 and up taxable incomes have declined from almost 150,000 in 2007 to slightly under 100,000 in 2009. The article also notes that the 100,000, representing just over a half percent of the 14.6 million returns, accounted for 18.8 percent of total income reported, but paid 32 percent of all income taxes in 2009. If Governor Jerry Brown wonders where a whole bunch of those making...

Obama: Millionaires Should Pay At Least 30 Percent in Taxes By Michael O'Brien People earning over $1 million per year should pay an effective tax rate of no less than 30 percent, President Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. The president laid down one of his most political markers of the annual policy speech by crafting what he called the "Buffett Rule," named after the famous billionaire investor. The president calls for lower taxes on lower-income wage earners but asks for wealthier taxpayers to pay more. "Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you...

Not so much a big win for us as a big loss for them. Democrats backed away from their demand for higher taxes on millionaires as part of legislation to extend Social Security tax cuts for most Americans on Wednesday as Congress struggled to clear critical year-end bills without triggering a partial government shutdown… Republicans minimized the significance of the move. “They’re not giving up a whole lot. The tax they wanted to implement on business owners was something that couldn’t pass the House and couldn’t pass the Senate,” McConnell said in a CNBC interview. Jettisoning the tax could also...

Lobbyists for a day, a band of millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday to urge Congress to tax them more... "If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt." ...

If you told me that somebody had published a comprehensive report on wasteful government policies which dole out billions of dollars to the wealthiest individuals in the country, one of the last people I’d expect to find as the author would be Senator Tom Coburn.(R-OK) But that’s precisely what unfolded when I found that the senator had borrowed a tag line from 1970s television programming and released, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous.� U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released a new report “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous” illustrating how, under the current tax code, the federal government...

On the one hand, there is the former community organizer Obama. This Obama has made it clear in recent weeks that he is at one with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying, for example, when ABC asked how he viewed the demonstrators, that "the most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side. ..." Obama coming down on the side of demonstrators carrying signs demanding the arrest of investment bankers and other "masters of the universe" shouldn't come as a surprise...

So just who are those top 1 percent of Americans that we're all supposed to hate? If you listen to President Obama, the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, and much of the media, it's obvious. They're either "trust-fund babies" who inherited their money, or greedy bankers and hedge-fund managers. Certainly, they haven't worked especially hard for their money. While the recession has thrown millions of Americans out of work, they've been getting even richer. Worse, they don't even pay their fair share in taxes: Millionaires and billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. In reality, each of...

Nearly 12 per cent of households in Los Alamos have assets worth $1m or more. The northern New Mexico town of Los Alamos has been revealed as having the highest concentration of millionaires in America. The town, which is home to a government nuclear weapons lab, topped a report after it was found that more than one in ten households is home to a millionaire. Report findings state there are 885 millionaire households among the population of Los Alamos of around 18,000. ... Los Alamos saw off competition from Naples, Florida, which was second, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was third...

Members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, a nearly 25 percent increase over the 2008 total, according to a Roll Call analysis of Members' financial disclosure forms. Nearly 90 percent of that increase is concentrated in the 50 richest Members of Congress.

The recession slashed both the number and earnings of Ohio millionaires, according to a newspaper’s analysis of state tax returns. The Dayton Daily News reports Monday that the state in 2007 had more than 7,800 taxpayers with adjusted gross income of $1 million or more. By 2009, the number was down to about 4,500. Ohio Department of Taxation spokesman Gary Gudmundson says the 43 percent drop mirrors the national, 40 percent decline in millionaires during the same period. Ohioans making $1 million or more had adjusted gross income totaling $50 billion in 2009, less than half the $103 billion the...

… Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those fortunate enough to belong to the 1 percent, made up of the super-rich, stand on one side of the divide; the remaining 99 percent on the other. Even for a country that has always accepted opposite extremes as part of its identity, the chasm has simply grown too vast. Those who succeed in the US are congratulated rather than berated. Resenting other people's wealth is viewed as supporting class struggle, which is something very frowned upon. Still, statistics indicate that the growing disparity is genuinely...

Chinese Spend More Money On Luxury Goods Than Europe And The U.S. Combined Gus Lubin Oct. 27, 2011, 5:06 PM The size of China's luxury boom is absolutely incredible. Here are some facts based on a UBS report: * Last year emerging Asia accounted for around 50% of global luxury sales, most of which came from China. The Chinese probably spent more on luxury than the Americans and Europeans combined. * Emerging Asia accounted for 60% of luxury growth. * Tourists from emerging Asia account for half of luxury sales in Europe and 15% of sales in the U.S. Most...

‘They are . . . not interested in asking millionaires and billionaires to pay a half a penny on the dollar for the sake of the future of our children and communities.” That was the reaction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) upon the defeat Thursday evening of the bill he sponsored that paired an element of President Obama’s jobs plan — funding for the hiring of some first responders and hundreds of thousands of unionized teachers — with a surtax on those earning more than $1 million. Yet that same evening, Menendez and his fellow Democrats — as well...

We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. Not working is hard work. After a month of tying up the police, generating mounds of trash, railing against Jews while holding up "Nazi Bankers" signs, grappling with pervs, rapists and thieves in their ranks, communing with avowed communists, and hobnobbing with 1 percenter celebrities donning 99 percenter costumes (phew!), the Occupiers are rallying around a new mascot: Robin Hood. The crime-plagued Carnival of 1,001 Demands is now focused on one unified agenda item: a soak-the-rich tax on financial transactions worldwide. The corporate-bashing Canadian magazine "Adbusters" (funded...

SACRAMENTO -- Occupy Wall Street protesters may be long gone by November 2012, but labor leaders are hoping that voters' anger toward the wealthy won't be going anywhere as the election season unfolds. For that reason, the California Federation of Teachers and a coalition of liberal allies are moving forward with plans to place a millionaires tax measure on the ballot next year. Millionaires, in this case, are defined as individuals whose annual income is $1 million or more. Josh Pechthalt, the president of the 100,000-member teachers union, said the month long protests that have spread around the globe have...

Zbiginew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, told the "Morning Joe" program he thinks the names of the rich "should be known publicly" so the masses can "pressure some of those people to give some of it back to society." "You know, how many Americans are really fully aware of how many other good people, that’s like Warren Buffett and others, who really donate a lot of their earnings to charities, to philanthropy?" Mr. Brzezinski said. "But how many more are there in the hedge funds? In the banks? In a variety of other places who on the basis...

I heard a Commentator say that Steve Jobs created a Trust before his liver transfer to avoid Estate Taxes to his children. He wasn't sure that he had to pay a Gift tax on the transfer of 3 homes, 30 Million Shares of Apple and 120 Million shares of Disney.

The US Senate just voted to defeat Harry reid's 5.6% added income tax on "billionaires" (those making over $1M/year). Two Dems joined 46 Repubs to kill the bill that needed 60 votes to continue.

The national Occupy Wall Street movement has been heating up again — resulting in about 50 arrests in Boston early Tuesday and plans for a Manhattan "Millionaires March" to the homes of some of New York City's wealthiest residents. The protesters from the Occupy Boston movement were arrested after they ignored warnings to move from a downtown greenway near where they have been camped out for more than a week, police said. Police spokesman Jamie Kenneally said the arrests began about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday and were mostly for trespassing. A conservancy group recently planted $150,000 worth of shrubs along the...