Free Republic

“Congratulations, Joe! You’re rich!” John McCain said to Joe Wurzelbacher in the 2008 presidential campaign. Joe was thinking of buying a small plumbing business. He was dismayed to learn from Barack Obama that the candidate’s plan to raise marginal tax rates on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year was described as “taxing the rich.” Mr. Wurzelbacher didn’t think he was rich, which makes him a lot like the rest of us. Only 5 percent of Americans describe themselves as “rich.” While ideas about how much money it takes to be rich fluctuate depending on current income, most Americans agree...

Pollution, tainted food and education are causing many of the country’s wealthy to flee, survey finds. Earlier this year, the best company at surveying the rich in China announced that more than 60% of the people it surveyed had already immigrated to another country, or were considering doing so. The question for the Hurun Report, which publishes an annual China rich list, was why? Was pollution driving people abroad, weariness over China’s political crackdowns, or something else entirely? It turns out the questions also nagged Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of Hurun. At the time, his best guess was that pollution and...

As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich. Seventy times seventy millions can’t make him rich, as long as his poor heart is breaking for more. I am just about rich enough to buy the least valuable horse in your stable, perhaps, but I cannot sincerely and honestly take an oath that I need any more now. And so I am rich. But you, you have got seventy millions and you need five hundred millions, and are really suffering for it. Your poverty is something appalling.—Mark Twain to Cornelius Vanderbuilt He lies in little...

One of the biggest myths in politics is that Republicans are the "party of the rich." If only....then the rich might be voting for us and pouring massive money into the Republican Party. But, but, but...KOCH BROTHERS! Yes, the evil, terrible, awful Koch Brothers who live in Harry Reid's head for free and eat the dreams of Occupy protesters. In actuality, those guys are only the 59th biggest donors in American politics. Just the six biggest union donors in American politics combined give 15 times more money than the Koch brothers have – and, of course, that money went almost...

Avarice: Many people, it seems, can't get over how well investors are doing these days — as if they shouldn't be able to do OK if others aren't. Instead of taking offense, maybe the others ought to be taking notes. Let's see if we have this right: Some people work to exhaustion, earning money for their security and that of their families. And instead of spending it on stuff they don't need, they set it aside. The latest idea — coming from a French economist — is that eight of every 10 of their dollars should be taken away and...

Those who live in this nation's richest county and those who live its poorest have an important thing in common: a disproportionate dependence on government. In the United States as a whole, according to Census Bureau estimates for the five-year period from 2008 through 2012, 14.9 percent of the people who had civilian jobs worked for government. Another 78.7 worked for private employers and 6.3 percent worked for themselves in their own unincorporated businesses. In America's richest county, this pattern did not hold. Nor did it in the poorest. At the end of last year, the Census Bureau released two...

A first of its kind US oligarchy study yielded a rather troubling discovery and the results of the study are definitely cause for concern for most Americans. The US oligarchy study was conducted by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities and the study showed that the United States is not a republic in substance, but rather an oligarchy where the rich rule and the majority of Americans have virtually no impact on policy decisions, today's report from FDL explained.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donors gave more than $10 million in March to the committee tasked with electing House Democrats and helped it amass a $40 million fund to fight skepticism that Republicans can be ousted from their majority in November. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $10.3 million in March, putting it atop the fundraising contest among party-directed campaign committees. That sum also outpaced most three-month fundraising tallies released thus far from super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations. Donations to House Democrats' campaign committee are capped at $32,400. "The DCCC has sustained a blistering fundraising pace this election cycle...

All too often, rich individuals in this country are demonized for simply being rich. If some sort of financial catastrophe happens, such as the latest recession in 2009, the rich are to blame. If the government is running large deficits, the rich are not paying their “fair share”. If an individual is poor and cannot find employment, it is because the rich hoard all their profits and don’t share with anyone else. It’s time to set the record straight by looking at the facts. The top 1% of all individual income earners in this country pay nearly37% of all federal...

Are you thinking of going to college? If so, please consider that decision very carefully. You probably have lots of people telling you that an "education" is the key to your future and that you will never be able to get a "good job" unless you go to college. And it is true that those that go to college do earn more on average than those that do not. However, there is also a downside. At most U.S. colleges, the quality of the education that you will receive is a joke, the goal of most colleges is to extract as...

<p>Consider what passes for a scandal in New York City these days: The rich, conservative Koch family funding a wing of a city hospital. Wall Street types financing charter schools for poor kids in the South Bronx and Harlem. Non-union Walmart trying to open a store in a low-income neighborhood, which would deliver both cheaper goods and jobs to the locals.</p>

Mayor de Blasio is not interested in children’s getting a better education. If he were, he would endorse the charter schools and allow Cuomo to fund them. But he couldn't care less about quality education – otherwise, why turn against the charter schools that are educating minorities better than any of the other schools? De Blasio’s whole desire is to tax the rich. He has some twisted need to punish them. He has the communist hatred of wealth. He is a man who emotionally identified with the communists when he traveled to Cuba, Russia, and Nicaragua. He is a big...

The College Board announced Wednesday that it is overhauling the SAT, dropping the timed essay and focusing less on fancy vocabulary in order to level the playing field a bit for high school students from a wider range of families. The organization's own data show that wealthier Americans, from more educated families, tend to do far better on the best. As do white and Asian Americans, and those students who had the opportunity to take the PSAT in high school before taking the SAT. Almost certainly, these four findings have common origins in that the SAT benefits families who can...

The new millennium has also given us a new American profile — the hip richeral. Richerals are, of course, well off. But they are even more cool and liberal. The two facts are not so much incompatible, as complementary.For some, big money allows three things: wealth’s cocoon enables you to dream safely about utopia [1] rather than being laid off and broke; it exempts you from worrying much about the high taxes [2] and regulations [3] needed to pay for your redistributionist fantasy agendas; and it gives you the influence, capital, and opportunities to flee from the messy ramifications...

Many job seekers have dropped out of the labor force not because they've gotten discouraged, but by choice. The unemployment rate has been declining, in part because of a declining labor participation rate. A new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray and Christmas finds the biggest decline in labor force participation is among 16- to 19-year-olds. It's down to a record low 30.4 percent. But contrary to reports that job seekers have gotten discouraged and dropped out, many of them just don't want a job. Of the 11.6 million teens not in the...

As we’ve been talking about for months and months, billionaire San Francisco ex-hedgefunder Tom Steyer has been hinting that he’s going to go big in politics in 2014. He made it official Monday telling the New York Times that he’s going to spend big this year. Like $100 million big, making him one of the most significant outside forces in American politics.

The web site OpenSecrets.org has done a great deal of useful work. Especially helpful are its lists of high-dollar political campaign donor organizations. The web site's 1989-2014 and 2012-specific lists, to name just two, demonstrate that the hyperventilating on the left and in the establishment press about the eeeevil Koch Brothers is completely out of line: Imagine that. Koch Industries is way down in 59th place in the past 25 years and 77th place in 2012. This makes at least the following people look really dumb:

the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989 ... The political left always accuses the Republican Party of being the “party of rich guys.” It’s a lie. ... C) Committed Democrat donors have outspent committed Republican donors by nearly $486 million since 1989 D) Overall, the top ten DNC donors outspent the top ten RNC donors by nearly 2 to 1 since 1989. E) The largest committed DNC donor group has outspent the largest committed RNC donor group by 67% since 1989 ... The arguments by Democrats that the RNC...

A student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada was forced to issue a formal apology for emailing a picture of President Obama kicking open a door–all because some students thought the image was somehow racist. Another student issued a formal complaint against Farnan for committing a “micro-aggression.” For those not up-to-date on the PC lexicon, “micro-aggression” is the latest phrase of choice for leftist radicals seeking to blame racism for common annoyances suffered by people of all races. Minority activists at the University of Michigan, for example, have insisted that trivial slights, such as “Having your opinion second-guessed in a...

President Obama is facing a deepening dilemma about whether to abandon cuts to Social Security in his next fiscal blueprint, which is due out in March. Obama touched the third rail of American politics last year when he proposed a new formula for Social Security and other entitlements that would result in benefits being cut over time. Now congressional Democrats and unions are ramping up their pressure on Obama to drop the proposal, which many fear could become an albatross for the party in the midterm elections. “We want the president to make very clear that he is going to...