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I, Ronn Torossian, am a born & bred New Yorker, who raises a family here, owns a business – and loves all this city has to offer. Yet, I would be among the first to advise people not to live or move to New York if they don’t have to. If they have ambition or drive, New York isn’t the place to be. From the non-stop energy to the culture, indeed, this city deserves its title as capital of the world. Yet, from a business perspective, there are so many obstacles for living – and dying – in New York...

UN May Tax and Censor Post-U.S. Internet, Experts Warn 09 April 2014 Following the Obama administration’s decision to cede control over key elements of the Internet, the UN is already plotting to tax and censor the Web.... Full Articlehttp://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/18004-un-may-tax-and-censor-post-u-s-internet-experts-warn

DFLers, who generally frown on grandeur as part of their ideology, are going to build themselves a marvelous new office building. They have been deaf to the idea that it is wasteful and that there are countless ways to accommodate the few of them who are going to be displaced by renovation work on the Capitol. To save a few bucks -- cutting it from $94 million to $77 million -- they claim they are going to eliminate an adjoining parking ramp. But that was to have been principally for the public anyway, and the public has been ignored in...

The Dark Road: The Worst Tax Law You've Never Heard About 08 April 2014 A little-known tax law threatens the privacy, and even lives, of millions of people and the stability of the U.S. economy while laying the foundation for a global tax regime. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act ( FATCA ) ... Full Article:http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/17986-the-dark-road-the-worst-tax-law-you-ve-never-heard-about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhCs9r33tM&feature=youtu.be

The day when the nation collectively has made enough money to pay its total tax burden for the year is three days later this year, according to a new report. According to a report released Monday by the Tax Foundation, this year Tax Freedom Day falls 111 days into 2014, on April 21. By April 21, to group says, Americans will have made enough to pay the $3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state taxes — more than they will spend on food clothing and housing combined. Tax Freedom Day is later than it was last year,...

Does the IRS really want to you to track your capital gains on bitcoin every time you buy a sandwich or a sweater in the digital currency? After our analysis of the Internal Revenue Service guidelines on bitcoin, released in March, some people expressed surprise. They were amazed that the IRS could seriously be applying capital gains rules to something that the bitcoin community sees as a currency, and which in many cases uses as such. “This can’t be good for bitcoin”, said one commenter privately to Coindesk. ” If it’s not a currency, then how are you supposed to...

The Los Angeles Times greeted the Obamacare enrollment data on Monday with a striking headline, claiming that "at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage," which is 3 million people more than the Obama administration itself claimed last week (a number that was itself highly questionable, since it did not exclude those who had not paid for their new insurance). The Times' analysis, however, is laughable. The data reported by Noam. N. Levey are not actual counts of enrollees, but a hodgepodge of "state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide."...

Tackling the effects of climate change could cost governments around the world more than $100 billion a year, a United Nations panel of experts said Monday. A report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius will wipe out up to 2% of the world's income by 2050. "If we get up to 4 degrees temperature rise, which most scientists now expect would happen if we carry on emitting greenhouse gasses as we do, then the cost could be much more severe," Chris Hope, a climate change researcher at Cambridge University...

The Texas Legislature’s point man [Drew Darby] on transportation funding says Texas motorists need to understand that a higher gas tax would be a more 'open and transparent' way of dealing head on with the state's transportation crisis than the 'congestion tax' that motorists are currently paying every day. "I think we need to revert to pay as your go," State Rep. Drew Darby (R-San Angelo) told the San Antonio Mobility Coalition."Nine times members of the Legislature have raised the gasoline tax to pay for our transportation infrastructure, but that hasn't happened since 1991. Lawmakers over the past several years...

In the coming weeks, Americans will spend an average of 13 hours and $210 to prepare their federal taxes. Beyond the compliance burden the federal tax code imposes, it also distorts economic activity and discriminates against some taxpayers in favor of others. But one of its most egregiously unfair provisions is also among its most popular - the mortgage interest deduction. In theory, the mortgage interest deduction is supposed to encourage home ownership, a questionable goal for government to begin with. The purpose of taxes is to raise money to finance government services, not to manipulate human behavior or economic...

The US Internal Revenue Service finally announced its guidance for virtual currencies yesterday, explicitly referring to bitcoin (see the announcement here and notice here). The increased clarity – provided three weeks before the end of the US tax year - will come as a relief to many who were scared to get involved in bitcoin, commercially. But what does it mean for different members of the bitcoin community? US businesses wanting to get involved in bitcoin have been waiting for this for a while. As recently as January, US Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson pressured the IRS in her annual report...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin praised conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh for fiercely defending new-media pioneer Matt Drudge Monday after the White House and mainstream journalists attacked and mocked Drudge for honestly saying that he had paid a penalty for not signing up for Obamacare in his quarterly tax filing. "From one Dittohead to all you others, aren´t you thankful Rush defends truth, and as importantly, he defends those speaking truth!" Palin wrote on Facebook Monday. "Rush is consistently loyal to the cause of justice, walking the walk as he does here in defense of Drudge calling out Obamascare.

A White House aide set off a stampede of liberal media criticism for Internet news pioneer Matt Drudge over Obamacare – but his critics don't seem to understand how small businesses pay taxes. The brouhaha started when Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX.” Jesse Lee, the Director of Progressive Media at Barack Obama's White House, responded that that was a “Flat lie, no fee for previous year,” adding, “Scary how much influence he once had.” Lee’s response to Drudge set off a firestorm in the liberal media, with many...

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...

If you hate paying taxes, pay attention to where you live. Residents of the nation's lowest-tax states pay less than one-quarter of the levies contributed by those in the highest-tax states. And that's even when they earn the same amount and spend the same amount on everything from housing to beer, according to an analysis by personal finance site WalletHub. The site looked at 10 different taxes, from property and state and local income taxes to those on vehicles, food, alcohol, fuel, telecommunications and sales. The total tax hit was based on a hypothetical individual earning $65,596, with a $174,600...

My daydream is to lock all members of Congress and the president in a classroom with a big whiteboard and not let them out until they can pass a basic test in public finance. The first thing I'd teach them about is tax incidence — who really bears the burden of a tax. Our politicians seem to think the burden of taxes falls on those who they require to pay, as in remit or transmit or hand over or submit or mail in, the tax. This is entirely off base. Who bears the burden of (is hurt by) a tax...

Warren Buffett epitomizes everything that is wrong with the global economy, and the U.S. economy specifically. He is the consummate crony capitalist, a brilliant yet conniving oligarch who intentionally plays on the gullibility of the masses to portray himself as one thing, when in reality he is something else entirely.He publicly talks about how rich people need to pay more in taxes, then turns around and pioneers new ways for his company Berkshire Hathaway to avoid hundreds of millions in taxes. He thinks that by going on television stuffing ice cream cones and hamburgers in his mouth and acting all grandfatherly...

2014 is the first year most Americans will have to either have health insurance or face a tax penalty. But most people who are aware of the penalty think it's pretty small, at least for this first year. And that could turn into an expensive mistake. "I'd say the vast majority of people I've dealt with really believe that the penalty is only $95, if they know about it at all," says Brian Haile, senior vice president for health policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service. "And when people find out, they're stunned. It's much, much higher than they would expect."...

Five months and approaching a coupla’ hundred million dollars in federal grants later, Hawaii still hasn’t made much progress on mending their terrifically botched ObamaCare exchange website, and the clock is ticking. With barely a few weeks to go until the open enrollment period ends (for now — I have very little faith that His Highness won’t issue another royal decree somehow extending that deadline, too), the state government is entering panic mode over their super-low enrollment figures and their definitive lack of a long-term financing plan for the exchange, which needs to be self-sustaining by the start of 2015....