Free Republic

April 15 is usually Tax Day in the United States – the day by which your individual federal tax return has to have been filed, if you’re to avoid a late penalty. And if you’re in one of the many states with its own statewide income tax – 43 at last count – that usually shares the same deadline. By what right does the government take this money from us? That’s an easy one. The Constitution says it can. To be specific, the 16th Amendment authorized the federal government to collect income taxes, so it’s been legal for 110 years....

The greatest collapse of a mighty state, a large human so­ciety and a fruitful civilization of which we possess a reasonably ac­curate record, has been immortal­ized by Edward Gibbon’s histori­cal classic, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. Henry Adams remarked that Gibbon did not really explain the fall; but this criticism is not altogether just. As the following excerpts from The Decline and Fall show, the philosophic historian offered a number of reflections on the symp­toms and causes of the drama which he set out to describe: "This long peace and the uni­form government of the Romans introduced...

Well, this week Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley said something that upset people who weren’t going to vote for her anyway. At a Town Hall setting someone asked her “What caused the American Civil War?” It’s not at all a question with great relevance 163 years later, but it is a modern litmus test for many people on the left, i.e. people who likely weren’t going to vote for her anyway. History is amazing. Like all hindsight, it can be 20-20 in vision and clarity. Over the past 30 years, this is less and less the case. Led by late-night...

Countries need to increase their taxes on alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, saying too few states were using tax to incentivize healthier behaviors. After studying taxation rates, the WHO said the average global tax rate on such "unhealthy products" was low, and hiking taxes could result in healthier populations."WHO recommends that excise tax should apply to all sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and alcoholic beverages," the UN health agency said in a statement.Excise taxes target particular goods and services.The WHO said 2.6 million people a year die from drinking alcohol, while more than eight million die from...

The Biden administration has just spent two years negotiating with a group of foreign countries to raise taxes on U.S. companies operating overseas. Now we’re being told it’s been “delayed” for two more years. But why delay a bad decision? It’s an awful idea that should be rejected out of hand. “Americans have already been crushed by inflation caused by the Biden administration,” argued West Virginia congresswoman Carol Miller, in a recent op-ed. “But now, they want to add fuel to the fire by giving American taxes to foreign countries, raising costs for Americans, and sticking us with the bill...

In 2022 Norway’s third richest man, Kjell Inge Røkke, announced in an open letter to shareholders he was moving to Lugano, Switzerland. “My capital will continue working in Norway,” wrote the fishing magnate turned industrialist who launched his empire four decades ago with a 69-foot trawler he bought while saving money working on ships off the coast of Alaska. Røkke, who Forbes estimates has a fortune of $5.1 billion, will cost the Norwegian government an estimated 175,000,000 kroner annually (roughly $16 million) with his departure. That might not sound like a lot of money, but Røkke is not the only...

French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested the imposition of a global taxation system in order to subsidise the green agenda to mitigate climate change. Speaking at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris on Friday, Mr Macron argued that actions from individual governments would be insufficient to deal with the alleged armageddon set to descend upon the world and therefore a new international taxation framework should be established.

Tomorrow is the Federal government’s inflation report. As it stands today, overall inflation is slowing as M2 Money growth crashed. Core inflation remains persisitently high (white line), rent is still getting worse (orange dotted line at 8.1% YoY. What about food? Online food prices are up 8.2% YoY. Shopping online is a good place to find cheaper computers and appliances, but grocery prices are still rising at a fast clip. Prices of consumer goods sold online fell 2.3% in May in the US, the ninth consecutive month of declines and the biggest drop since the pandemic started, according to data...

This is a story about weed (i.e., marijuana or cannabis), and it’s a story about greed — greed on the government’s part, which encourages more greed on the part of those willing to break the law for profit. There has been a long-running debate over legalizing the recreational use of drugs, especially marijuana. Proponents argued that legalization – or at least decriminalization – would undermine black market sales of those drugs. Prices would fall and organized crime and gangs, which have long profited from the distribution and sale of illegal drugs, would diminish. Meanwhile, the government could regulate vendors to...

Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is running for re-election, says white owned businesses should be taxed extra and redistributed to black owned businesses.

Getting that pizza delivered could cost $5 to $7 more if the city adopts a new pay rate for delivery-app workers. A controversial proposal by the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection would hike pay for GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash delivery workers far past the $15 minimum wage. Under one plan, deliverers would be paid $33.27 per hour for time spent on active delivery. A second plan would pay them $19.96 hourly for the total time spent online and delivering. A final decision from the agency is expanded soon. The hikes would go into full effect in 2025. A...

When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last year, the White House touted how the bill's $80 billion in new funding for the IRS would "make our tax code fairer by cracking down on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations." It now appears that some of those resources—and some of the coming crackdown on tax evasion—will, quite predictably, be aimed at individuals earning considerably less. This week, the Treasury Department and IRS announced plans to overhaul existing programs that track tips earned by service sector workers. The new Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program will...

<p>Nothing focuses the mind quite so intently on the sheer stupidity of government as doing your taxes. What is taken from us is excessive, the intrusiveness is maddening, and the rules are byzantine, which is the distilled essence of most of our interactions with the state. So, it was with a certain degree of anticipation that I told my son that, after working hard at the supermarket in addition to his homeschooling and martial arts, he would have to file his first tax return. Much fun ensued.</p>

People are being told they need to provide their Social Security numbers to online platforms and cash transfer app companies for the sales of things like clothes and concert tickets over $600, even though the IRS says they don’t need to. The prompts from companies like eBay and Ticketmaster are the result of a change in the tax law that was reneged last-minute by the IRS ahead of the 2023 tax filing season. The switch is causing a lot of confusion among taxpayers and tax professionals — and even within the IRS itself. The threshold for reporting business income or...

It is gratifying to see a few other commentators starting to notice the dramatic contrasts between New York and Florida in government spending and policy outcomes. Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I first covered the subject in December 2020, with a post titled “Contrast Between New York And Florida.” I followed that up with reviews of the respective state budgets in April 2021 (“State Budget Time In New York And Florida”). And now others are weighing in. The Wall Street Journal had a lead editorial on the subject on February 9, with the headline “New York vs. Florida, By the Numbers.”...

I must admit, Joe Biden has a horribly misleading nickname “Middle Class Joe.” Between Biden’s horrible energy policies and Pelosi’s/Schumer’s spending binges, the US middle class and low wage workers have suffered mightely with the inflation tax. Throw in Jerome Powell and The Federal Reserve’s manic money printing and the American middle class has a problem. US inflation peaked at 9.1% year-over-year (YoY), but has declined to a still painful 7.1% YoY as The Fed removes it aggressive monetary stimulus. But to cope with persistent US inflation, consumers have had to dip into savings and use more credit cards. As...

The Biden administration is apparently looking to ban gas stoves, calling them a “hidden danger”. But while that sounds bad enough, a deeper dive shows – as usual – it’s not really about what they say it’s about. Talk of banning gas stoves and “unregulated indoor air quality” could be a Trojan horse designed to get even more “smart” monitoring technology into your home. Let’s jump in.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a week of grueling votes for Speaker of the House — 15 in total — Kevin McCarthy was finally handed the people's gavel and took his rightful place as Speaker. He lifted it up to the raucous applause of both Democrats and Republicans, signaling that the week of Congressional inactivity was over and the long national nightmare of taxing, spending, and corruption could finally begin. "Finally, we will get down to the people's business of stealing all their money for our pet projects, making backroom deals, and holding meaningless investigations where we yell and point angrily...

Back in January of this year, the Canadian province of Quebec announced a plan to impose a tax on the unvaccinated. Officials there claimed that most of the impacts on the healthcare system were being caused by unvaccinated people and that the vaccinated should not be made to shoulder the costs. The following month, after a large outcry from the public, the plan was scrapped. But the government never gave up on the idea entirely. Some are still suggesting that the plan could be retooled and brought up for consideration again.In case that idea moves forward in a substantial way,...

Col. Thomas Hansford was hanged “a loyal subject and a lover of my country” on this date in 1676 — America’s first executed political martyr, since that “country” was not England, but Virginia. Robert Beverly‘s 1705 History of Virginia recalls the genesis of that milestone dispute between settlers and mother England. The occasion of this rebellion is not easy to be discovered: but ’tis certain there were many things that concurred towards it. For it cannot be imagined, that upon the instigation of two or three traders only, who aimed at a monopoly of the Indian trade, as some pretend...