Free Republic

By midnight on April 15, roughly 140 million Americans will have filed their federal income tax returns and breathed a sigh of relief. Politicians from both parties, however, will spend most of the day criticizing our current tax system. --snip-- Creating a new tax regime based on the ability to pay had significant consequences. Not only did it provide sorely needed revenue while addressing growing inequality, it also fostered greater social solidarity and bolstered faith in government — a lesson lost on many lawmakers today. Reformers believed progressive taxes could be used to reconfigure the relationship between citizens and the...

Even if racism were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still need to address pervasive racial wealth inequality. Here's why. Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating the economy, economic discrimination is still widespread, and anti-discrimination legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime. The Civil Rights Act was a mild reform, all things considered, but one conservatives fought with vigor and one many conservatives are still bitter about to this day. When the Civil Rights Act passed in...

Finance chiefs from around the globe on Friday gave the United States until year-end to ratify long-delayed reforms to the International Monetary Fund and threatened to move forward without it if it fails to do so. The inability to proceed with giving emerging markets a more powerful voice at the IMF and shoring up the lender's resources appeared the most contentious issue. In a final communiqué, G20 finance ministers and central bankers said they were "deeply disappointed" with the delay. "I take this opportunity to urge the United States to implement these reforms as a matter of urgency," Australian Treasurer...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history. Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market. The probes were announced just ahead of a much anticipated book on the subject by best-selling author Michael Lewis called...

On Tuesday, Breitbart TV, former president Jimmy Carter stepped forward to remove all doubt as to whether he remains the implacable horse’s ass he has been since his days in the White House. In this brief video, Carter suggests Hillary, once elected president, might be “embarrassed” to pursue a strong campaign in favor of women’s rights issues given that she is also a female. Of course, she might also be criticized for bias, though certainly NOT by our national media. (1) And to make his point, Carter offered the example of Barack Obama who he apparently believes to have been...

This worked so well for France that Belgium had a real estate boom with the new tax on millionaires was announced. And New Jersey learned that millionaires have a tendency to leave when confronted with higher taxes. But Illinois? Well, per Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, Illinois is different: “Well, if they’re in Illinois today, they’re probably so much in love with Illinois that they’re not going to leave,” he said, according to the Tribune–a backhanded acknowledgement of how poorly the state is already doing.Madigan may also be encouraged by California’s example, where millionaires have largely...

One phenomenon of the modern economy is affluence that doesn’t feel like it. You work, earn and spend quite a lot, yet it seems you’re getting nowhere. Some new economic analysis helps quantify just how many people might be characterized as the “wealthy poor”— and it’s a surprisingly large chunk of the overall population. A new paper by economists Greg Kaplan and Justin Weidner of Princeton University, and Giovanni Violante of New York University, finds that about 70 million Americans may live in families they describe as “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households. These are families that own assets such as homes, cars,...

Bell linked to a Salon article about the RNC’s new ad campaign featuring a Republican millennial. Naturally, she managed to tie that into an argument for higher tax rates for the wealthy:

The U.S. government’s plan to give away authority over the Internet’s core architecture to the “global Internet community” could endanger the security of both the Internet and the U.S. — and open the door to a global tax on Web use. “U.S. management of the internet has been exemplary and there is no reason to give this away — especially in return for nothing,” former Bush administration State Department senior advisor Christian Whiton told The Daily Caller. “This is the Obama equivalent of Carter’s decision to give away the Panama Canal — only with possibly much worse consequences.” The U.S....

Buried deep in a section of President Obama's budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high. In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP. What's more, the cost of these direct payments is...

Pope Francis has spent his pontificate in a full frontal assault against the devil.“There is no shadow of a doubt,” Pope Francis said in October, “A battle exists, a battle in which the eternal salvation of us all is at stake.”The battle is two-sided, he said in a June audience. “Look around us — it is enough to open a newspaper, as I said — we see the presence of evil. The Devil is acting.”What is it that we find when we open the newspaper? The Daily Beast reports from southern Louisiana: The Hosanna Church was the heart of a...

The United States needs to stop taking its "eye off the ball" on economic growth, in order to stamp out the uncertainty that's preventing investors and companies from taking risk to make money, billionaire real estate mogul Sam Zell told CNBC on Friday. "Wealth redistribution" policies in Washington are hampering the economy, he said. "I find it difficult to believe that you can have wealth redistribution and growth at the same time." Zell called out fellow " Squawk Box " guest James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve-arguing that the U.S. has accepted a level of growth that...

It's happening in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, Syria, and beyond. Revolutions, unrest, and riots are sweeping the globe. The near-simultaneous eruption of violent protest can seem random and chaotic; inevitable symptoms of an unstable world. But there's at least one common thread between the disparate nations, cultures, and people in conflict, one element that has demonstrably proven to make these uprisings more likely: high global food prices. Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be...

Facing a growing homeless population, San Jose is ready to try a new strategy to get people off the streets: pay to put some of them up in local hotels and motels, potentially for years. ...housing prices continue to climb and landlords become pickier about renters...100 homeless people roaming San Jose streets have publicly funded vouchers for subsidized housing but cannot find a place that will accept them. "It's just a tough place to live because of how expensive it is," said Leslye Corsiglia, the city's housing director, who called it an opportunity for homeless people "to get themselves settled...

Amid the hysteria surrounding Romanian immigration at the beginning of this year, something crucial was forgotten: borders open both ways. As the English tabloids were throwing a tantrum about the impending "Romanian invasion", the would-be-intruders were preparing for an invasion of their own: 1 January 2014 marked the day when Romania's honeymoon period as a new EU member came to an end and, under EU law, the country was obliged to open up its land market to foreign investors. As a country with almost 5 million peasant farmers – a quarter of the population – this was a matter of...

The great Obama contradiction on the economy is this: he takes credit for the improved economy, but openly admits that in this recovery almost all of the gains have gone to the very rich. Here is the disturbing passage from Obama's State of the Union speech that I refer to: “What I believe unites the people of this nation ... is the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead. “That belief has suffered some serious blows. ... Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and...

First, the Obama administration showed during the course of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings, that when it comes to Most Preferred Voter classes, some unsecured creditors - namely labor unions, and the millions of votes they bring - are more equal than other unsecured creditors - namely bondholders, and the zero votes they bring. Five years later we are about to get a stark reminder that under the superpriority rule of a community organizer for whom "fairness" trumps contract law any day, it is now Detroit's turn to make a mockery of the recovery waterfall. As it turns out,...

The Democrats are right, there are two Americas. The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t. It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, to obey the law and support themselves and contribute to society, and others don’t. That’s the divide in America. It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power...

President Obama on Tuesday offered up a new kind of "starter" retirement accounts aimed at employees of companies that don't offer such plans. Obama is calling them the "MyRA" and said he would, by executive order, direct the Treasury Department to create them. Details were scarce Tuesday night, but employees will be able to contribute part of their wages to the savings accounts, which would be backed by the U.S. government.