Free Republic

Congress must raise taxes on the wealthy "because there just isn't enough to go around," Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute today. "Latino growth has meant that often they're at the back of the line for housing assistance or other things," Donovan said during CHCI's annual Public Policy Conference this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. "And the fundamental problem here (in part) is, are we going to continue to invest in those things? And if we continue to cut the budget for Section 8 housing and public housing and a...

French president Francois Hollande says there will be no exceptions to his plan to impose a 75 per cent tax rate on millionaires. Mr Hollande's comments came after France's richest man, businessman Bernard Arnault, announced he was applying for Belgian citizenship. Announcing the start of a two-year plan to fire up France's faltering economy, Mr Hollande stood by his plans for the top tax bracket, which would be the highest marginal rate in the industrialised world. "I am in a battle and will not look back," he said. "I am setting up a calendar... two years to create a policy...

One of the hardest propositions for conservatives to remain consistent on is the issue of federalism. We believe in federalism. We believe that the Constitution enshrined power to the states through the Tenth Amendment. We believe that that power has been eroded away through the years and want it restored.The hard reality of our position is that some states may seek to push positions that we believe threaten liberty. Conservatives have lauded efforts by Arizona to protect their borders consistent with federal policies and Missouri's effort to nullify ObamaCare. But many have blasted California for essentially legalizing medical marijuana...

ung Quat, Vietnam’s only oil refinery, received various tax incentives from the government last week, including a four-year income tax exemption. Apart from the exemption, Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Co, which runs the 130,500 barrels-per-day refinery, only needs to pay half its corporate tax for the first nine years after it begins earning taxable incomes. Over the course of 30 years, it will be subject to an income tax of 10 percent, compared to the current 25 percent applied to other businesses, according to the government’s website. Dung Quat, which started operations in February 2009, is also allowed to...

For years — decades, really — Miami-Dade homeowners have been ducking property taxes by illegally claiming homestead exemptions, usually with impunity. .......The price of getting caught: Up to 10 years of unpaid back taxes, plus a 50 percent penalty and 15 percent annual interest.... Since January, six detectives from the Economic Crimes Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department have been working to bolster the muscle of 15 investigators at the Property Appraiser’s Office in nailing violators. That is up from two police detectives deployed in 2011 to tackle a backlog of some 3,500 complaints (now about 2,166) which typically come...

The Cost Of "Intervention"The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a small “think tank” in Washington DC which puts out an annual report called: “Ten Thousand Commandments”. The report deals with the regulatory agencies of the US federal government and the cost of the regulations they continually introduce - and enforce. This report would be typical of the regulatory function of pretty well every government in the world. In all interventionist economies, regulations are not set by the “lawmakers”. The “lawmakers” merely pass the laws, their enforcement is left to the various bureaucratic departments of government. And in order to “enforce”...

California state parks Director Ruth Coleman resigned and her second-in-command was fired Friday after officials discovered the department has been sitting on "hidden assets" totalling nearly $54 million. The money accumulated over 12 years in two special funds the department uses to collect revenue and pay for operations: $20.4 million in the Parks and Recreation Fund, and $33.5 million in the Off Highway Vehicle Trust Fund. The money accumulated, state officials said, because the parks department had a pattern of underreporting the actual size of the funds in its regular dealings with the state Department of Finance. ....Advocates for the...

In the mid-1800s, a cousin of Charles Darwin by the name of Francis Galton wrote a series of works expanding on an old idea of selective breeding in human beings. Galton’s theory became known as eugenics. At its core, eugenics was underpinned by an assumption that talent and genius were hereditary traits, and that deliberate breeding could improve the human race. Within decades, intellectuals were spending their entire careers studying these ideas, quickly spawning a number of different fields dedicated to ‘racial sciences.’ Scholars began closely examining racial differences and building volumes of statistics on everything ranging from intelligence to...

In 1935, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was fretting about finding a constitutional basis for the Social Security Act. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone advised her, "The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power." Last week, in his ObamaCare opinion, NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Congress the same advice—just enact regulatory legislation and tack on a financial penalty, as in failure to comply with the individual insurance mandate. So how did the power to tax under the Constitution become unbounded? (Read the rest at the WSJ page) ============Dr....

While the individual mandate tax gets most of the attention, the ObamaCare law actually contains 20 new or higher taxes on the American people. These taxes are gradually phased in over the years 2010 (with its 10 percent “tanning tax”) to 2018 (when the tax on comprehensive health insurance plans kicks in.) Six months from now, in January 2013, five major ObamaCare taxes will come into force: 1. The ObamaCare Medical Device Manufacturing Tax (snip) 2. The ObamaCare High Medical Bills Tax (snip) 3. The ObamaCare Flexible Spending Account Cap (snip) 4. The ObamaCare Surtax on Investment Income (snip) 5....

Every American knows we will be celebrating the 4th of July on Wednesday; not enough of us remember why. Few of us truly grasp the profound significance of the separation between the American people and our government. We are a nation of self-sovereign individuals, and as the term implies, our government has no authority over our private affairs and no claim over our property. That’s what makes this country unique…or did. Our elected officials all talk about “the American people” like we were undifferentiated; they would have us believe what is good for us is just one thing and they...

CNN and Fox News aren’t the only ones doing a 180 on the Supreme Court ruling. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), the first attorney generalin the nation to file a lawsuit over President Obama’s health-care overhaul, said the sky was pretty much falling in a news release issued half an hour after the court upheld the law. “This is a dark day for the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” Cuccinelli said in the release. “This is a dark day for American liberty.” By the time he held a news conference an hour and 45...

What government unit has the right to tax you - your local government, regional or state government, federal government or multinational organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization? The reason the question is becoming more important is that rising numbers of politically powerful persons and institutions are calling for global taxes on such things as financial transactions, tobacco, sugar and carbon emissions. The modern concept of the nation-state goes back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Among other things, it limited the power of the sovereign to the territory of the state,...

BANGKOK (AP) — World markets took a beating Monday as another setback for the U.S. economic recovery sent investors fleeing from stocks. A weak U.S. jobs report flustered investors and intensified fears that a global recession was in the making. The dismal report released Friday came on the heels of other data that showed weak economic conditions in Europe and Asia.

Now is the time for all good men and women to put Country above Party. For far to long the RINO Wing of the Republican Party has been in control of losing National Elections. The time has come to cast aside the hold-your-nose clothespins that the RINOs expect us to use when we vote for their tweedle-dumb or tweedle-dumber Candidates. To all Primary voters: List the top 10 demonstrated positive values for each Candidate for all offices, and vote accordingly. If there is no Candidate that meets your values for a given office, then leave that slot blank. This will...

You remember U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., don’t you? He was the guy who said “the American people don’t care” about the wasteful, pork-barrel spending habits of Congress. He was also the guy who called a flight attendant the “B-word” because she asked him to turn off his cellphone prior to a flight. He was also the guy who told the state of New Jersey how it should spend its own highway funds, much to the displeasure of that state’s very outspoken GOP governor, Chris Christie. Schumer is at it again. This time, he set his sights on Facebook co-founder...

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then? The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that...

In America we treasure our religious freedom. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says that government will keep out of the religion business and guarantees religion will be practiced freely without interference by government. “The wall of separation” is revered. Have we misunderstood the meaning of the wall of separation? We all should be reminded that the First Amendment keeps government out of religion, but says nothing about keeping religion out of government. Under our Constitution, religious people and religious institutions are welcome in the halls of government. They are free to bring their religious convictions with them wherever...

The Tea Party movement did the nation a great service in 2010 by focusing on the problem behind much of what’s gone wrong in America: government, and too much of it. It’s refreshing to see that the sentiment lingers about this nation under God dedicated to preserving our God-given rights. “Voters believe too much government power is a dangerous thing and put a very high value on protecting the rights of the individual,” says ...