Free Republic

I grew up in New Jersey. Morris County to be exact. Don’t get me wrong. I loved living there, but the taxes were immense. And by my senior year of college, my father had enough. They exited to the collar counties around Philadelphia, where the property tax burden was considerably less. Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a red state, especially where my parents live—it’s roughly 50-50 Democratic to Republican—but it’s sure better than the Garden State’s politics. In Pennsylvania, there’s a Republican legislature and if the state party could actually find a sentient being to run for governor, that person could win....

The price at the pump was more than $4 a gallon in Vista, Calif., when Scott Hissem recently embarked on a trip to Texas to celebrate his 40th birthday. When the delivery associate for Amazon.com Inc. arrived in the Lone Star state, he got an unexpected present: Gasoline cost just $2 and change. The gap has Mr. Hissem considering a move to escape California’s high cost of living. “It makes life hard,” Mr. Hissem said of California, which is the most populous U.S. state and the one with the highest gasoline prices. “You can’t go out and do the things...

Carl Icahn, the legendary investor, has told employees that he is moving his company from New York to Miami and a report said his decision to move is based on the Big Apple’s higher taxes. Icahn, 83, whose net worth is about $20.4 billion, is set to move his home and business from the city due to the taxes, sources told Bloomberg. The report said that it is not uncommon for billionaires to settle in the state which is one of seven without a personal income tax. The report pointed to New York’s 8.82 percent rate. …

Electoral prognosticators failed miserably last November. The smart set in the media establishment predicted a landslide win for Hillary Clinton. For an amusing review, here is a video montage of their smug certainty. On what did they base their certainty? Bogus polls oversampling Democrat voters? Or projection of their wishes and fantasies that Donald Trump would be smacked down in big league fashion? We all know how that turned out. Just as the old quote predicted, “Wish in one hand, crap in the other, and see which fills up first.” Obviously political pundits needed more than their wishes to avoid...

In areas throughout the American Redoubt people can be heard complaining about new comers from California or other liberal places. While many new comers are moving here to leave the depressing environment of more taxes, crowded roads, sanctuary cities and gender neutral bathrooms to enjoy the freedoms America was founded upon, there are also those that are not. Those that are not are most likely liberal democrats. Some of them grew uncomfortable in places where the quality of life was degraded by politics they supported. While they may not realize what they helped create, or why they really left, they...

There are no cardboard boxes or bubble wrap or heavy duty packing tape in Tim Stokes' 1,600-square-foot Sacramento, Calif., home. But, according to the 36-year-old, he and his pregnant wife, their three kids and their two 100-pound mastiffs are on the verge of selling the house they bought just over a year ago. Though Stokes was born in Nevada, he has spent all but the first six months of his life in California. For most of that time, any move away from his hometown and family would have been unthinkable for him. But in the past six years, Stokes, who...

If you were born anywhere north of Baltimore, you won’t believe a word of this. And that’s unfortunate, because the survival of our America may depend on enough Americans realizing I’m right. There are, indeed, those who brandish the Confederate flag with the same diseased passion as some Germans revere the swastika. That same crowd will spring to their feet defiantly when the band plays “Dixie.” And there are those who would gladly volunteer to take their shotguns and guard the local statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee during the overnight shift. Don’t deny it, You All, there are such...

It seems that many residents of the West Coast and the Northeast are leaving those regions behind. In March, for example, the Sacramento Bee reported that California “exports its poor to Texas ... while wealthier people move in.” Former Californians report that a lackluster job market, a high cost of living, and high taxes are pushing them out. This week, Chicago Magazine reported on Chicago's highly publicized diaspora. One interviewee reported the crime, high cost of living, and taxes drove him out of Illinois and across the state line to northern Indiana. “I couldn’t have this size house in Illinois,” he said. Last week,...

The Lake Oswego, Oregon-based Holiday Al Mangement Sub LLC, doing business as Holiday Retirement, wants to relocate its headquarters to Winter Park with local incentives and create 157 new high-wage jobs. The jobs would be created over the next three years with an average annual salary of $90,926, more than 200 percent above the prevailing average wage in Orange County. The new jobs largely would consist of administration, human resources, accounting/finance and information technology, according to city documents....

If you want to see the worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like upstate New York or inland California—in states they control. The fondest hope among the blue bourgeoise lies with the demographic eclipse of their red-state foes. Some clearly hope that the less-educated “dying white America,“ already suffering shorter lifespans, in part due to alcoholism and opioid abuse, is destined to fade from the scene. Then the blue lords can take over a country with which they can identify without embarrassment. If you want to see worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like...

Dear Red-State Trump Voter, Let’s face it, guys: We’re done. For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike. All...

We recently came across the following question on Quora: “ If every state of the USA declared war against each other, which would win?“ We’ve published the full answer from Quora user Jon Davis, a Marine veteran who is now a writer and blogger on military, veterans, and Middle Eastern affairs. In Oct. 2014, Davis’ answer was optioned by a Hollywood producer for a potential television series. These are the accounts of the Second American Civil War, also known as the Wars of Reunification and the American Warring States Period.

After nearly three decades in L.A. County, Nestlé will soon move its headquarters from California to Virginia. This food services giant with an estimated $235 billion in assets worldwide will by the end of 2018 remove 1,200 jobs from a state that relies heavily on income taxes to fund its massive public sector. Nestlé's exodus follows other big employers, including Toyota, Campbell's Soup, Dunn-Edwards Paints, and eBay – which took with them tens of thousands of jobs – and mirrors the flight of mom-and-pop operations, entrepreneurs, families, and individuals who have ditched the once Golden State for places where the...

Donald Trump is the most popular Republican candidate in history bringing in over 62.4 million votes during the 2016 presidential election. He also secured victories in at least 83 percent of the counties in the United States. Trump is also ranked the third most popular presidential candidate in history. However, there is one huge difference in Trump’s popular vote win and that of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump is the only popular vote candidate in the top three to receive success in more than 25 percent of the county-level vote, a victory that has all but been overlooked in...

Full title: Obama: Attitudes About My Presidency Among Whites In Northern States Very Different From Southern States; "I Seem Foreign" President Obama speaks about his legacy in a CNN special hosted by Fareed Zakaria that was broadcasted on the cable network Wednesday night. In this segment Zakaria examines if race played a part in early opposition to the Obama agenda. (snip) "There are people who dislike me because they think I'm a liberal," the president told the CNNer. "I think there is a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in northern states are very different from whites in...

In 2000, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but carried fewer than 700 counties. In 2012, President Obama squeezed even more advantage from the biggest places: He carried 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including the District of Columbia), winning them by nearly 12 million votes combined. That allowed him to win comfortably, although he carried only about 600 of the remaining 3,000 counties, and lost them by nearly 7 million votes combined. This year, Hillary Clinton pushed that model just past the breaking point. Pending final results, she now leads in 88 of the nation’s 100 largest...

For many Americans, it feels as if the 2016 election split the country in two. To visualize this, we took the election results and created two new imaginary nations by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas. onald J. Trump won most of the land area of the United States. A country consisting of areas he won retains more than 80 percent of the nation’s counties.While Trump country is vast, its edges have been eroded by coastal Democrats, and it is riddled with large inland lakes of Clinton voters who were generally concentrated in dense...

For many Americans, it feels as if the 2016 election split the country in two. To visualize this, we took the election results and created two new imaginary nations by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas.