Free Republic

On Saturday August 9, 2014, 18 year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by a Ferguson police officer after he had earlier robbed a local convenience store. As a result of his death protesters in Ferguson have caused mass destruction in the community. Several dozen businesses were damaged in the looting and violence. Here is an interactive map of the attacks, shootings, lootings, and destruction. Many of the local businesses were looted not just once, but twice. Now this… St. Louis County officials are discussing disbursement of federal aid to the more than 100 businesses that suffered financial losses during...

If a company is conducting business legally in the United States and you label them as "unpatriotic" then YOU ARE A FASCIST!

If you’re looking to move from Miami to Canada, as Burger King Worldwide is, chances are excellent that your motive is something other than the weather. The word “inversion” has entered the popular vocabulary, describing a tax-driven corporate merger in which a U.S. firm acquires an overseas company and then relocates its legal domicile to that firm’s home tax jurisdiction. The purpose of this is in no small part to escape the onerous U.S. corporate income tax. That’s what Burger King is looking to do by acquiring beloved Canadian doughnut chain Tim Hortons, which is based in Ontario. A number...

Small, medium or large? The amount of outrage over Burger King’s deal to buy a Canadian donut chain could possibly determine whether the deal goes through — and helps Burger King dodge millions of dollars in U.S. taxes.

Gambling might join the list of Baltimore City's problems after Horseshoe Casino opens Aug. 26. As the city touts 1,700 new jobs, millions in education funding and an expected economic boost, new billboards advertise hotlines for gambling addiction, a dark side to Horseshoe’s shiny exterior. A moral gamble? With a median household income of $35,000, Park Heights is among Baltimore City’s poorest ZIP codes. In 2012, however, it led state lottery ticket sales, with a total of $34 million, according to a Capital News Service analysis. Father Zaborowski compares gambling spending to alcohol and drug addiction, which plague the neighborhood,...

President Obama would have proudly proclaimed Warren Buffett a true patriot in his bailing out of the banking system with expensive loans and his 'realization' that those earning more than $1 million should be tax-tax-taxed. However, the "Buffett Rule" appears to have one caveat... if you are making over a $1 billion, you're good to go with tax-avoidance strategies. In one of his career's most hypocritical moves Warren "tax-me-more" Buffett has decided that putting his money where his mouth is no longer makes sense.. and is funding $3billion of Burger King's "tax-inversion" takeover of Canada-based Tim Hortons. Somewhere on...

Taxpayers accustomed to filing a simplified 1040EZ will not be able to do so if they received health insurance tax credits this year. Some highlights: -- You may have heard that the IRS cannot use liens and levies to collect the law's penalty on people who remain uninsured. But there is no limitation on collection efforts in cases where consumers got too big a tax credit. If your refund isn't large enough to cover the repayment, you will have to write the IRS a check. "They are not messing around," Brandes said. For families, the cap is double the amount...

Comrades, there are wreckers in our midst. The industrialist reactionaries at Burger King have declared their intention to abandon the struggle and join the ranks of the enemy in rightist Canada. That’s right. The traitorous corporation Burger King plans to take advantage of the fact that America’s English-speaking neighbor to the north maintains the second-lowest corporate tax rate of any G-7 nation. How dare they? “The iconic American fast-food brand is in talks to buy coffee-and-donuts chain Tim Hortons and move its headquarters to Canada,” Forbes reported. If concluded, this deal would create the world’s third-largest restaurant company and allow...

Taxes? Who wants to think about taxes around Labor Day? But if you count on your tax refund and you're one of the millions getting tax credits to help pay health insurance premiums under President Barack Obama's law, it's not too early. Here's why: If your income for 2014 is going to be higher than you estimated when you applied for health insurance, then complex connections between the health law and taxes can reduce or even eliminate your tax refund next year.

SEATTLE - Popular online retailer Zulily is planning to add about 900 jobs in central Ohio as part of new tax credit deal from the state. The Seattle-based company says most of the positions at the new call center will be in customer service. The move is expected to generate $28 million by 2017. This comes in addition to Zulily’s existing facility in Obetz. As part of a tax agreement, the Ohio Development Services Agency says the company will receive a 75%, 12-year tax credit in exchange for operating in Ohio for at least 15 years. Zulily is an online...

Need some help remembering: where Mike Huckabee has demonstrated his establishment thinking and his lack of understanding of conservative issues (outside of the social issues)- and where he has bought into big government solutions. I'm on a panel tomorrow about Huckabee in 2016 (I did not choose the topic) - and I need some memory jogging.

Medtronic Inc. said Tuesday that it is "fully committed" to completing its deal to buy Covidien PLC, which has come under scrutiny over a controversial tax tactic that has drawn criticism from U.S. government officials. The Fridley-based company also posted fiscal first-quarter results that exceeded analysts' expectations as the medical-devices maker reaped strong revenue from its U.S. operations. "Our growth was broad-based across businesses and geographies," chairman and chief executive Omar Ishrak said in a news release. "I was especially pleased that our innovation pipeline is delivering strong results, particularly in the U.S., which had its highest revenue growth performance...

President Obama doesn't have the authority to simply stop the companies he calls “corporate deserters” from taking up legal residency in low-tax countries. The Obama administration began examining its ability to take executive action to address corporate inversions without Congress because it lacks the support of Republicans. "Unless the U.S. corporate tax rate is reduced to 10 percent or less," Harvey told the Examiner, "it will still be beneficial for U.S. [multinational corporations] to invert."

If anything approaches “taxation without representation” in contemporary American government, it is property taxation.  This is because as a practical matter voters – as property owners – have no say in the amount of property taxation they endure.Harold Lasswell, a prominent U. of Chicago political science professor, once said that the country is made up of two groups: the political elites and the masses.  The exploitation of the masses is now being achieved through property taxation. Since political elites have, in most counties, complete control over issues of assessments and property taxes, they have the opportunity to exploit this power...

It appears Sen. Orin Hatch's comment that "everything from this ill-conceived tax's structure to its implementation has been a disaster," are coming true. As AP reports, an "Obamacare" tax on medical devices is falling short of its revenue target because thousands of companies aren't paying it, according to a government audit released Tuesday. An audit found the IRS received only 5,107 returns (against expectations of over 9,000) with a 24% shortfall in revenues. The tax is projected to generate $29 billion over the coming decade, so a 24 percent shortfall - if it were sustained - would be significant. As...

HARTFORD - A broad coalition of environmental, economic, regional and construction groups urged Connecticut's gubernatorial candidates Tuesday to conduct a debate focused on transportation issues, and to consider higher taxes and tolls to pay for the state's dire transportation needs. The activists put out a four-point program they said the state's next governor must consider, and expressed concern about the possibility that massive federal funding for highways and mass transit might dry up in the next few years. The coalition's key issues are: •Making certain that state revenue that is supposed to be devoted to transportation - such as gas...

An ObamaCare tax on medical devices is falling short of its revenue target because thousands of companies aren't paying it, according to a government audit released Tuesday. The audit by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration says the IRS needs to do a better job policing the tax. The tax agency, however, doesn't have adequate tools to identify which companies owe it, the audit said.

(CNSNews.com) - Combined federal, state and local government spending per household exceeded the median household income in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the three most-recent years for which full data is available, according to calculations made using numbers from the White House Office of Management and Budget and an historical online database of state and local finances recently established by the Census Bureau. In 2011, in current year dollars, total government spending in the United States was $6,115,429,668,000. That included $2,516,666,590,000 in net state and local government spending and $3,598,763,078,000 in net federal government spending. That year there were 121,084,000 households...

Some of the best analyses lie not in the field of economics, but in books like The Giver—dystopian tales sitting on shelves marked Young Adult.Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges in The Giver.The world is an increasingly unequal and unfair place, economists tell us. Every year, it becomes a little harder to picture what equal opportunity and egalitarianism even look like. As the rich attract capital like Jupiter attracts space debris and the poor fail to make any substantial gains, the gap between them comes to seem to us less surmountable, more of a force of nature than something for which...

On St. Paul's East Side, homeowners in the 1900 block of Hawthorne Avenue are in line for property tax increases of 40 percent or more -- an additional $430 on their tax bills. Property owners along the 700 block of Summit Avenue will see just as much in savings. The city's middle-class property owners will feel the biggest bite in their wallet come tax time, and nowhere more so than on the city's East Side. After years of mild tax breaks, the owners of median-value homes in St. Paul likely will do a double-take when "Truth in Taxation" statements arrive...