Free Republic

Our tax code is byzantine, our businesses are over-taxed, and our economy is continuing to suffer. We can do better. We have done better. We deserve better. The Tax Foundation released its first global stat called the “International Tax Competitiveness Index”. This index aims to measure two criteria, competitiveness and neutrality, by examining “the extent to which a country’s tax system adheres to”, these “two important principles of tax policy”. The index accounted for more than 40 tax positions and policies. In their analysis, two of the most damning reasons for ranking the United States near the very bottom of...

LOGGERHEAD KEY, Fla. – Twenty-nine Cuban migrants have been rescued after reaching land in the Florida Keys. .... Under the "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, most Cuban migrants who reach U.S. shores are allowed to stay. more here

About half say there is too much regulation; 22% say there is too little .....From 2003 through the remainder of the George W. Bush administration, however, these attitudes settled into a pattern in which Americans were more likely to say there was too much rather than too little government regulation of business. After Barack Obama took office in 2009, the percentage saying "too much" regulation rose into the high 40s, including a reading of 50% in 2011, and has remained at these relatively high levels since. Less than a quarter of Americans have perceived in the last two years that...

’ve complained over and over again that America’s tax code is a nightmare that undermines competitiveness and retards growth.Our aggregate fiscal burden may not be as high as it is for many of our foreign competitors, but high tax rates and poor design mean the system is very punitive on a per-dollar-raised basis.For more information, the Tax Foundation has put together an excellent report measuring international tax competitiveness.Here’s the methodology. The Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index (ITCI) measures the degree to which the 34 OECD countries’ tax systems promote competitiveness through low tax burdens on business investment and neutrality through...

Retail sales of state-licensed weed in Washington topped $12 million by Sept. 8 … and sales keep climbing. The improvement of sales in recreational marijuana here mirrors the steep growth in sales in Colorado, where the recreational market out-sold medical for the first time in July (the latest numbers from that state). The Cannabist reports: “In July 2014, customers purchased more than $29.7 million in recreational marijuana — up from $24.7 million in June. Medical marijuana patients spent more than $28.9 million on marijuana in July — comparable to June’s $28.6 million in sales.” In Washington, there are now 55...

Some employers provide employees with company-paid free lunches. The idea is to keep workers at their desks and improve productivity. The expense has normally been lumped in with other expenses as a cost of doing business. The IRS now wants to tax these lunches as income to the employees. IRS spokesperson Jason Coveter explained that “most employees have to furnish their own lunches. Whether they go out and buy it or bring it from home, they are bearing this cost themselves. It is unfair for other employees to get a lunch paid for by their employer. We’re just trying to...

There's "economic patriotism" and then there's just being a smart businessperson.The Tax Foundation has launched a new statistical benchmark that ranks the 34 most industrialized countries in the world according to 40 different tax criteria. The US came in 32nd. Only Spain and Italy finished lower. The low US ranking helps explain why inversions are becoming so popular - something that enrages President Obama and the Democrats who see all that tax money leaving the country for sunnier climes. Wall Street Journal: The Tax Foundation benchmark compares developed economies with large and expensive governments, but the U.S. would do even...

Chicago Big profit for Pritzkers on costly Chicago FBI deal Sun, 09/14/2014 - 3:30pm Better Government Association @bettergov | Email A deal involving the federal government’s most expensive lease in Chicago produced millions of dollars in profits for a development group that included Penny Pritzker, a top campaign fund-raiser for President Barack Obama who is now his commerce secretary, a Chicago Sun-Times / Better Government Association investigation has found. The developers also included Jack Higgins, a friend and political backer of former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Over the 14-year term of the lease, the government will pay $280 million in...

After winning the presidency, Andrew Jackson sent a message to Congress suggesting that the office be extended to six years but limited to one term. His message caused wild speculation that the first “people's president” would not seek a second term. That led to a dramatic Jackson proclamation, in a letter to Pennsylvania Democrats, that the “call of the people” trumped his “personal inclination” and he could “not refuse to serve them.” The truth is, he was never not going to run. Jackson may have been the first Democrat to be elected as president. But his secretary of State and...

The Democrats’ leader in the House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is either dishonest, drunk, or losing her mind. Soopermexican caught this tweet from Pelosi, which he calls “brutal stupidity.” Nancy Pelosi ✔ @NancyPelosi An American family can't just change their address to avoid paying taxes. @HouseGOP, why can corporations? Let's put the #MiddleClassFirst! 1:54 PM - 12 Sep 2014 As the multimillionaire Pelosi surely knows, individuals and corporations (which are artificial people under the law) can change their addresses and thereby change their tax burdens. It happens every day. I know that from personal experience. I moved from high-tax Maryland...

It was bone-chillingly cold in the village of Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836. There, a group of Texans had gathered to formally announce their break from the despotic Mexican state recently established by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. With the Alamo under siege almost 200 miles to the southwest, the settlers methodically listed their complaints in the Texas Declaration of Independence. One of them lashed out at the Mexican government for neglecting “to establish any public system of education… although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to...

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

Do you remember Occupy Wall Street and its many imitators across North America? It was three years ago next week that the movement went public and eventually set up tent cities across the continent. People camped out in parks, they held marches and meetings and demanded change. They demanded the one percenters pay their fair share. It was supposedly a grassroots reaction to the bailout of big business, the fat cats that run the banks. But of course we know those bailouts happened in 2007 and 2008 and Occupy, some might say the left's answer to the Tea Party, didn't...

It was supposed to be the populist issue that would enrage the middle class and set them with pitchforks against big corporations who were being "economic traitors" by moving their headquarters overseas in order to avoid the high corporate taxes in America.The so-called "inversion" issue would allow the Democrats to ride a wave of popular disgust against Republicans to victory in November. Instead, as Politico points out, the issue is so much of a dud, that the Democrats have quietly de-emphasized much of the white hot rhetoric the president has used to portray corporations as "un-American" who move their operations...

IRS: As the 2014 midterms approach, what has become a political arm of the Obama administration has targeted — as it targeted the Tea Party — a leading conservative truth-teller that has exposed so many of its lies. Even as the IRS races to cover up a prior abuse of power, it ruthlessly engages in another, using its power to tax in an attempt to destroy the vast truth-gathering enterprise launched by the late Andrew Breitbart, which the administration apparently ranks right alongside the Tea Party atop its enemies list. Last Friday, the IRS stretched credulity beyond the breaking point...

Blue states have a problem. Although there are some recently notable exceptions, most vehemently oppose cutting taxes, favoring instead a tax-and-spend or top-down redistribution approach. They require high taxes to finance the pet projects they believe the market is too short-sighted to support, like Solyndra. At the same time, however, these big government states try to pursue goals of economic growth, even if they believe the best way to achieve growth is through central economic planning rather than free markets. Overwhelming economic evidence demonstrates that the best way to achieve robust economic growth is when citizens are able to save,...

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized a fast food protest, demanding that their prospective members all price themselves out of a job. So, understandably unable to resist a straight line while filling in as a talk show guest host, pundit Erick Erickson said that if you’re still earning minimum wage at 30, you’ve probably failed at life. It’s easy to blast Mr. Erickson for the tone-deafness of his comment. While certainly true of some, his quip is hardly true of most minimum wage employees. But is that fair? Is it reasonable, or helpful to the national economic and social...

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

The Obama administration will make a decision on executive action to prevent corporations from leaving the country in the "very near future," Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Monday morning. Speaking at an event on business taxes at the Urban Institute in Washington, Lew placed the responsibility on Congress to address so-called tax inversions, but said that the administration was prepared to step in if lawmakers don't move quickly enough. Inversions are tax maneuvers in which corporations buy firms in low-tax countries in order to place their headquarters in that country. Such deals have grown in number in recent months, with...

The smug self-confidence of financial analysts and writers who predicted that Japan's monstrous sales tax increase would have no long-term effect on its economy should be severely shaken. An Associated Press report tonight by business writer Elaine Kurtenbach tells readers that the Land of the Rising Sun's economy "contracted at a larger than earlier estimated annual rate of 7.1 percent in April-June, as companies and households slashed spending following a tax hike." This means that the "experts" who assured everyone that the second-quarter contraction would be smaller than or merely offset the brisk first-quarter expansion of 6 percent were horribly wrong. The...