Free Republic

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.” Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites. This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already...

WASHINGTON — President Obama presented a budget on Monday that is more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint. It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class. Absent from the plan is any pretense of trying to address the main drivers of the long-term debt — Social Security and Medicare — a quest that has long divided both parties and ultimately proved impossible. The document instead indicates that Mr. Obama, after years of being hemmed in on his fiscal priorities because of politics...

Here is President Obama in a chat yesterday with CNBC’s Steve Liesman: STEVE LIESMAN: Mr. President, ... You’ve said a bunch of times that getting the wealthy to pay a little bit more, and you’ve succeeded in raising that top tax rate to 39% or rolling back the tax cuts. Is there a limit there? Is there a limit to how much you believe the government should take from an individual in terms of a top tax rate? PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I don’t have a particular number in mind, but if you look at our history we are still...

As a union tries to make CEO pay an issue, others question the comparison. Economist Antony Davies said that if McDonald's were to not pay its CEO or all senior management and instead divide those tens of millions of dollars among the minimum wage workers, each employee would end up earning about 1.5 cents more per hour. But some groups are using executive compensation to try and drive a public discussion. The AFL-CIO launched a website that is critical of some salaries, including the heads of some Michigan companies. The union reports that a minimum wage employee would have to...

Economic study suggests we're heading for a Blade Runner future Earlier this month, a group of economists released the results of a massive study looking at the economic prospects of people from across the United States. What they found was that the U.S. is like a patchwork quilt of different countries, where some regions offer people the economic prospects of a typical developed nation — and other regions are more like a developing country. This study debunks a few myths about the United States, including the idea that wealthy nations have wealthy citizens. It's a powerful reminder that nations are...

Financial QUESTION: Obama and Democrats Trying To SEIZE Retirement Accounts (IRAs, 401Ks) ? Aug 9, 2013 I want to know what other Free Republic Members know about this H.R. 2035: Automatic IRA Act of 2013 I got an e-mail stating: "Obama & BIG Government Are Planning To Seize Retirement Accounts!" President Obama’s FY2014 Budget Plan brings us one Large step closer to De-Privatizing IRA’s & 401k’s. Much like Obamacare, Obama’s “Automatic IRA” will force employers with 10 employees or more, to “automatically” enroll their workers in the new Government run accounts. Obama’s Automatic IRA will be managed by the Social...

If you thought the delay in the employer mandate was bad news for Obamacare, just wait. On Friday, Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post discovered that the Obama administration had buried in the Federal Register the announcement that the government won’t be able to verify whether or not applicants for Obamacare’s insurance exchange subsidies are actually qualified for the aid, in the 16 states that are setting up their own exchanges. Instead, until at least 2015, these states will be able to “accept the applicant’s attestation [regarding eligibility] without further verification.” Without employer mandate, Feds to rely...

With his estimated wealth exceeding $200 million, Albert Arnold Gore has come a long way from the time he began a career in government politics. But it hasn’t all been a green path. He can thank some earlier events for paving over muddy ground, a time when his father, Al Gore Sr. met Occidental Petroleum’s CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc was discovered on some of Gore’s land,

Kim Jong Un building 'mini world' with replica Big Ben and Eiffel Tower Chubby tyrant Kim Jong Un is building a “miniature world” in North Korea – with a replica of London's Big Ben at its heart. The dictator is set to open the theme park in capital Pyongyang – and has included the iconic clock tower. The new attraction, which opens this year, will also boast a copy of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. The secretive state famously doesn’t allow its citizens to leave the country – so it appears Jong Un has decided to bring the world to his people....

Indian tribes seek federal bailout money for casinos A native-American tribe struggling to keep its Foxwoods Resort Casino in the red is now turning to the U.S. government for a helping hand. The Associated Press reports that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation has already received more than $4.5 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and from the Interior Department in the last five years. But now members are facing tough times with its casino — which used to be a billion-dollar empire — and are looking at the government for more grants, AP says. Critics...

• Tendai Biti made the announcement at press conference declaring: 'Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 in government coffers' • However he today contradicted his claims by saying the following day $30m was paid into government accounts • Result is culmination of years of ruinous economic policy by Zimbabwe's despotic President Robert Mugabe Zimbabwe's finance minister has taken a hard look at the cash strapped country's bank accounts - and discovered it only has £138 and 34 pence left. Tendai Biti made the announcement at press conference yesterday declaring: 'Last week when we paid civil servants...

With the fiscal cliff deal and many Obamacare taxes taking effect, Americans will be slammed with an estimated $264 billion in new taxes this year alone—making 2013 memorable for delivering one of the largest one-year tax increases in American history. The math breakdown of the new taxes is simple: Key parts of the Bush tax cuts will expire as a result of the new fiscal cliff legislation, hitting American taxpayers with a tax bill of about $39.5 billion each year for the next decade. … Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi issued a projection that the tax burden will cut GDP...

Here we go again folks, the Obama lies continue to flow.  Remember when he said this?  “I can make a firm pledge.  Under my plan no family making under $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.  Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains, not any of your taxes.”  Really.  Then how is it that this week when people got their payroll checks they were a little thinner than they were in 2012?  I’m not talking about the “evil rich”, but the average everyday worker.  With the expiration of the payroll tax cut,...

Sometimes, watching a Democrat learn something is wonderful, like seeing the family dog finally sit and stay at your command. With President Obama back in office and his life-saving “fiscal cliff” bill jammed through Congress, the new year has brought a surprising turn of events for his sycophantic supporters. “What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will...

Pushing back against the Republicans' deficit-reduction strategy, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this weekend that more tax revenues – not just spending cuts – must be a part of Congress's effort to rein in deficits. Pelosi said the tax hikes in the recent “fiscal-cliff” deal are a start, but don't go far enough to generate the revenues the government needs to run the country effectively. "In this legislation we had $620 billion, very significant … changing the high-end tax rate to 39.6 percent. But that is not enough on the revenue side," Pelosi told CBS's Bob Schieffer in...

On the One Hand… These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of, the present administration. Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging at rates far in excess of our own. In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest...

Google avoided about $2 billion in global income taxes last year by shifting $9.8 billion in revenue into a Bermuda shell company, Bloomberg reported. That level is almost double the total from three years ago, Bloomberg said, citing a Nov. 21 regulatory filing by a Google subsidiary in the Netherlands. And it allowed Google to cut its overall tax rate almost in half. Google's action -- moving about 80 percent of its total pretax profit from 2011 to tax-free Bermuda -- isn't illegal. On the contrary, many companies have taken similar steps in recent years to avoid paying steep taxes....

Given what we know in 2012, saying that capitalism will make a society richer than socialism should be about as controversial as saying the earth is round, not flat. Yet, a recent Gallup poll shows that more liberals have a positive view of socialism than capitalism. This is only possible because there are so many perverse incentives that drive the promotion of socialism. If you're a politician, socialism puts power in your hands while capitalism takes it away. If you want to use the government to control people's lives, socialism is a wonderful vehicle to do just that while capitalism...

One of the earliest fears about tax-favored savings accounts like IRAs and 401(k) plans was that when this pool of savings grew large enough Congress would not be able to resist tapping it to help solve the nation’s debt problems. We’re about to find out if those fears—persistent for decades—have been justified. Everything including the sacred mortgage deduction is on the table as lawmakers wrestle with the fiscal cliff, a year-end avalanche of scheduled spending cuts and tax increases. With a combined $10 trillion sitting in IRAs and 401(k) plans, retirement accounts make a juicy target. Some of this money...

'Bama Claus Is Spreadin' It Roundoriginal music and lyrics by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie, updated lyrics by Rebel_Ace You better vote "D" And never vote "R" To Get Stuff for Free From the Welfare Czar 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round The Union's got a list, Who voted twice; Show it to the press they put it on ice. 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round 'Bama Claus is spreadin' it round The Rich they are not Paying We know how...