Free Republic

Is it better to live in a state with no income tax? It’s a great question considering we already have to set aside a portion of our paychecks for the federal government. The case for removing an individual income tax typically goes like this: states that don’t dip directly into their residents’ pay become beacons for growth. They’re better at creating jobs and keeping a core of young, educated workers from moving to other states. The American Legislative Exchange Council reports that over the past decade the nine states without a personal income tax have consistently outperformed – on GDP...

ALBANY, NY -- It may be one of the few taxes in which New York state’s bite doesn’t rank among the nation’s highest. Now, some New York City lawmakers want to more than double the state’s beer excise tax to provide more money for the State University of New York system. The excise tax, paid by beer distributors, is currently 14 cents per gallon. Bills introduced ahead of the upcoming State Legislature session would raise that to 30 cents per gallon (that matches the state’s current excise tax on wine). The Assembly sponsor of the bill, Brooklyn Democrat Harvey Epstein,...

Tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service has reportedly tumbled to the lowest level in at least four decades. Just 0.45% of individuals were audited in 2019, down from 0.59% in 2018 and marking the eighth straight year of decline, following years of budget cuts, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. That figure is down more than half from when the IRS audited 1.1% of tax returns in 2010. In other words, roughly 1 out of every 220 taxpayers were audited last year. A decade ago, those odds were closer to 1 in 90, CNBC explained. The IRS said it...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates rejected the idea of voluntarily donating to the U.S. Treasury after calling for the U.S. government to raise taxes on the wealthy. "When I say the government needs to raise more money, some people ask why Melinda and I don’t voluntarily pay more in taxes than the law requires," Gates, the second-richest person in the world, wrote in a recent blog post. "The answer is that simply leaving it up to people to give more than the government asks for is not a scalable solution. People pay taxes as an obligation of law and citizenship, not...

Here’s one thing that unites local pols across the political divide — a gentrification tax. A bipartisan group of city lawmakers is pushing Albany to approve tweaks to the state tax laws that would allow them to hit new homebuyers with tax bills based on the actual market prices of their properties. The coalition of 13 Republican and Democratic city council members says that taxes would not go up for existing owners. New York’s famously opaque property tax system offers big breaks to new homebuyers by taxing them at assessed values that are often millions of dollars less than the...

Mitt Romney caught the notice of many folks in Washington when he signed onto a bill with his Democratic Senate colleague, Michael Bennet. Bennet is a serious lawmaker, and we’ve found some of his proposals appealing in the past, such as a lifetime ban on lobbying by former congressmen. Romney has a long history of bipartisanship, too. He was, after all, the governor of Massachusetts. But the latest Bennet-Romney proposal was startling because it represented almost a full reversal of where Romney stood in 2012, when he was the Republican nominee for president. Romney famously disparaged (or at least, that's...

Concealed More than $2.2 Million in Income An Alexandria, Virginia, tax lobbyist was sentenced to one year in prison today for willfully filing a false tax return, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia.According to court documents, attorney James F. Miller, 67, underreported his gross income on his 2010 through 2014 tax returns by more than $2.2 million. Miller, a tax policy lobbyist and former employee of the Justice Department’s Tax Division, filed multiple false tax returns with the...

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has said that none of her tax-increase plans would hit average people, pledging not to "raise taxes on the middle class by one penny." Yet Warren and several other presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders, are pushing a financial transactions tax that would cost everyday people saving for the future. This plan is a retirement tax that would affect millions of middle-class people. Proponents of the financial transactions tax argue it is "tiny tax" that would only hit rich Wall Street speculators. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A financial transactions tax would hit every single...

The proposals by Democratic presidential hopefuls to tax the wealth of billionaires have received a lot of attention. But it is their plans to hike payroll taxes that would have the biggest impact on voters. Elizabeth Warren and other leading Democrats have said that they would impose a stiff payroll tax hike on higher-income families. In Warren’s proposal, she would impose a 14.8 percent payroll tax on workers with incomes above $250,000.

Fifty weeks before voters say yea or nay to Democrats’ plan for a graduated income tax that would rake in new dollars by the billions, here’s what the people of Illinois see: · Citizens see federal agents ripping at the innards of Illinois governance and politics. From clout artists at Chicago’s City Hall to lobbyists for a big utility to one state legislator who allegedly tried to bribe another, the feds are exploring how bills pass, how favors flow and how politicians scam their fellow citizens. These are individual cases, for now. But the intensifying percussion of warrants, raids and...

Alina I. Marshall, of Virginia, to be a Judge of the United States Tax Court for a term of fifteen years, vice L. Paige Marvel, term expiring. Christian N. Weiler, of Louisiana, to be a Judge of the United States Tax Court for a term of fifteen years, vice Albert G. Lauber, term expiring.

Elizabeth Warren's crusade against rich people is even worse than we thought. According to Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal, some millionaires and billionaires would experience tax rates of over 100 percent on investments under Warren's proposals. Potential tax rates over 100% could result from the combination of tax increases the Massachusetts senator proposes for the very top tier of investors. She wants to return the top income-tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, impose a new 14.8% tax for Social Security, add an annual tax of up to 6% on accumulated wealth and require rich investors to pay capital-gains taxes at the...

Just wanted to throw this out there. Over the past several years, we have heard from various billionaires that yes, they should pay more in taxes. Now we have socialist idiots out there - Elizabeth Warren and others - that have now called their bluff. They are saying, okay we'll just take 100 million from you and now, all of a sudden, they are balking at the idea of their wealth being stripped from them. We always knew it was bull but now the hypocrisy is out in the open.

Taxpayer watchdog group: Emails show sales tax revenue going toward projects that are ‘not what most voters have in mind’..[ full title] ... A Colorado Springs tax watchdog group obtained communications between city employees that show discussion of using sales tax revenue for traffic reduction and bike lane infrastructure while other city officials have denied that’s where funds would be directed. City voters approved a road improvement ballot measure called 2C in 2015, which is up for renewal in the Nov. 5 election. 2C is a 0.62 percent sales tax increase that is supposed to be dedicated to road maintenance...

Trump must be publicly drawn-and-quartered because he is the leader of the uprising. It should by now be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump with or without credible evidence that he has committed any act resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The “whistleblower complaint” that Nancy Pelosi used as the pretext for launching her ersatz impeachment inquiry contains little but hearsay and fabrication, while her claim that it proves Trump has “violated the Constitution” fails the laugh test. In the end, however, impeachment is less about offenses committed by the president than the...

Rahm Emanuel raised taxes to get city worker pension funds on a ‘path to solvency.’ The shortfall still ballooned by $7 billion. ... A record-high property tax increase. A new tax on water and sewer service. A higher 911 emergency fee on telephone lines... Emanuel’s series of tax hikes was painful, but he promised the extra money was part of a plan to get the woefully underfunded city worker pension funds on a “path to solvency.”.. in the four years since .. The pension funds are actually worse off. When Emanuel pushed through the tax hikes, the city worker retirement...

Sen. Bernie Sanders announces a wealth tax that would hit multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos especially hard. Rival presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has a plan that would impose a tax of 2% of wealth over $50 million and 3% on wealth over $1 billion. Sanders’ plan starts at a lower wealth level – taxing those worth $32 million at 1% – so his tax would hit about 180,000 families while Warren’s would affect about 75,000 households. The sliding scale of the Sanders plan quickly escalates for wealth over $500 million, which would be taxed at 4%. Here are estimates...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax may create a new incentive for rich couples to divorce to avoid the tax, according to Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw. Warren’s plan would impose a 2% annual tax on wealth over $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion. If a wealthy couple is worth $100 million, they would pay a 2% tax on any wealth over $50 million, which in their case would amount to $1 million a year. If they divorce and split their fortune in half, they would each be worth $50 million and neither would owe...

The American depository receipts of Tata Motors Ltd. (TTM) have gained over 10% on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, after the government of India cut its corporate tax rate and set other measures to boost growth. At 12:25 p.m. ET, Tata Motors ADRs had gained 10.24% to trade at $9.69. Volume was heavy, with over 2.2 million ADRs trading, above the 65-day average volume of some 1.6 million. Local companies in India will now pay a 22% corporate tax, a reduction of 8 percentage points, and new companies who begin manufacturing operations in the next four years will...

In July, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted 419-6 to repeal the health care “Cadillac Tax.” As the Senate returns to work, it is now time for the bipartisan group of more than 60 Senators to repeal the Cadillac Tax and end the threat that will destroy the health care of 181 million hard-working Americans and their families. Hard-working Americans and their families have already been negatively impacted by the looming “Cadillac Tax” on the health care plans that the job creating employers of America provide to their workers. This tax was part of the Affordable Care Act and...