Free Republic

  I heard a man speak on Tony Brown’s Journal in the 1980s, on the thesis that the Federal Reserve System is a tax-farming system, creating monies out of nothing, loaning them to the United States, charging interest that must be repaid with taxes. It sounds paranoiac, until you learn that the Federal Reserve Act was closely associated with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution establishing the Federal Income Tax. Now that Texas is close to pushing us over the top of the number of states required to ask Congress to call a Constitutional convention, what might happen...

This week Vermont Senator and self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders sat down with CNBC’s John Harwood for an interview on the issues facing all the 2016 candidates. Sanders is technically running for President, and is at least keeping up the public appearance of being serious. (He told Harwood, I think we got a shot to win this thing.) With that in mind, I suppose it’s worth taking a moment to examine some of his answers and remind everyone exactly what’s lurking under the covers of the deep left wing of the Democrats. While it may seem like a bit of...

The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has admitted collecting $26.4 million in previously unreported fees from foreign governments and foreign and U.S. corporations for speeches. For tax purposes, who should be treated as the recipient of that money? We’ll come back to the question. As with all things Clinton, the control of the story has been impressive. Sure, the Foundation should have been clearer about this, says the narrative. But it does such incredibly important work on HIV AIDS and other global initiatives.

Fox News has decided that Mike Huckabee should not be the Republican nominee, so Chris Wallace went on the attack against Huckabee’s flat tax plan on Fox News Sunday. Video: (VIDEO-AT-LINK)CHRIS WALLACE: You want to abolish the income tax. You want to abolish the IRS and create a fair tax, which as you say is a national sales tax, but critics say the problem with that is that it’s too regressive. The Tax Policy Center said this, that “the average rate for the lowest income group would exceed 33% while the average rate for the top group would fall to...

During the 2010 campaign for governor, Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs in his first term. Toward this end, one of his first acts as governor was to privatize the state's economic development agency. Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) opened its doors in July 2011. After a series of damning audits, which highlighted mismanagement and incompetence, and news reports of special treatment for Walker donors, on Monday Democratic state lawmakers called for a federal investigation of the scandal-plagued entity. Walker is the Chairman of the Board When walker created WEDC in 2011, he named himself Chairman of the Board....

Before Officer Michael Griffin was indicted on federal charges for using excessive force and lying under oath, he cost the city of Minneapolis $411,864.78. The city paid $140,000 in 2014 to settle a lawsuit filed by Ibrahim Regai, who Griffin allegedly knocked unconscious at a Minneapolis night club in 2010, while he was off duty. That same year, a federal jury in a civil trial ruled the city must pay Jeremy Axel, Michael Mitchell and their attorneys $271,864.78. Griffin allegedly kicked Mitchell in the chest and punched Axel in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious outside a club...

Hours after a chaotic end to the 2015 legislative session, Gov. Mark Dayton said he wants to summon lawmakers back to the Capitol to fix an "insufficient" education funding bill. Dayton renewed his promise Tuesday to veto the $17 billion spending bill that had yet to cross his desk, noting it left out his top priority of universal preschool. That means lawmakers, who came within $25 million of a deal that didn't materialize before the end of the legislative session Monday, will have to come back to St. Paul in the coming weeks for a special session held somewhere other...

"I think the reason these anti-bike policies are being proposed is it’s a red-meat issue for a lot of Republicans," Bike Fed executive director Dave Cieslewicz told Madison.com. "They have stereotypes about what cyclists are and they don’t see them as their voters. They see attacks on cycling as politically beneficial." WATERLOO, Wis. (BRAIN) — Trek Bicycle's president, John Burke, is urging Wisconsin cyclists to contact their state lawmakers in support of the state's Complete Streets Law, which Gov. Scott Walker has proposed eliminating. Burke, in an email sent this week, also urged them to oppose a $25 state bicycle...

Last month, the Michigan House Tax Policy committee heard testimony about the state’s economic incentive programs. The usual justification for giving selective favors to particular firms was trotted out: Other states will capture these projects if this state does not distribute taxpayer cash to companies and developers. Without special incentives, proponents argue, Michigan is doomed to fall behind. Yet this rationale reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works. Monthly job reports suggest that Michigan’s economy grows or shrinks very slightly from month to month, but this data hides the massive amount of job creation and job loss that...

Eau Claire County (WQOW) - A new week brings disheartening news to the taxpayers of Eau Claire County. The former Eau Claire County Treasurer and his assistant have been accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to the criminal complaint, they took more than $625,000 from the county between 2011 and 2013. Larry Lokken and Kay Onarheim have both been charged with 11 counts of felony theft, as well as three counts each of misconduct in the office. They were arrested by the Eau Claire Police Department on Thursday and have been in jail since then. The two...

One of every four retired workers from the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools is getting a pension of more than $60,000 a year. That’s 80,365 people in all. For 13,240 of them, those checks provide a yearly income of $100,000 or more, a Chicago Sun-Times/Better Government Association analysis of pension records has found. An additional 20,004 have pension incomes totaling between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. ... the root of the problem is that government officials kept promising lifetime benefits to workers — and, in many cases, to their surviving spouses should they...

As Alice in Wonderland might say, a curious tax just got curiouser. The burden to states could mount to $13 billion in less than a decade. ... It works like this: State governments pay insurers for the tax. The insurers then pay the tax to the federal government. The federal government then reimburses part of the cost to the states. It may sound absurd, but it's not amusing to state governments, which wind up losing 54 cents for every dollar of the insurance tax. State taxpayers end up the biggest losers, without any added benefit to their state's low-income Medicaid...

ATHENS, Ga. — Presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Friday that he will release in the coming weeks details of his promised "simple, flat tax" to replace existing graduated income tax rates. But the Texas senator told the Associated Press that he's still not decided on key details, such as whether a flat tax would also replace payroll taxes and taxes on investment income....

Despite fury from lawmakers the day before, Colorado’s health exchange board voted on Thursday to collect millions of additional dollars from all Colorado health insurance customers, even those who have nothing to do with the exchange. On top of that “broad market assessment,” the board also voted to more than double the user fees levied on people who buy insurance through Colorado’s exchange. .. The higher broad market fee is projected to allow Connect for Health Colorado to scoop up about about $20 million in 2016. It has been set at $1.25 per member per month on all health insurance...

Resurrecting his “You didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen” theme, Barack Obama called for higher taxes on people whom he characterized as “society’s lottery winners.” The comments were made Tuesday at a poverty summit at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where, alluding to his longstanding proposal to raise taxes on “carried interest,” Obama said, “If we were able to close that loophole, I can now invest in early childhood education that will make a difference. That’s…where the question of compassion and ‘I’m my brother’s keeper’ comes into play. And if we can’t ask from society’s lottery winners to...

There have been few progressives as angry about off-shore investment accounts as Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL). In 2011, not coincidentally while Mitt Romney readied his presidential campaign, Grayson wrote at the Huffington Post that Barack Obama should order “the IRS to audit every one of the Fortune 500″ corporations. Grayson wanted to stop them from “evading taxes through transfer pricing and offshore tax havens.”Grayson may have known more about that than first thought. Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times found out that Grayson himself had incorporated two funds in the Caymans later that same year, the same kind...

Speaking to a panel on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama dismissed wealthy Americans as “society’s lottery winners” and called on them to made a “modest investment” to the poor in the form of tax increases. – Daily Caller If you Google “Life’s Biggest Lottery Winner” I’m pretty sure this will be the first image entry: The luckiest man in the world “There’s a fairness issue involved here. And by the way, if we were able to close that loophole, I could now invest in early childhood education to make a difference. [Prove it] That’s where the rubber...

The state of Connecticut may be embarking on new territory as they seem to be pushing a rather creative way to extract revenue from for-profit businesses. The state legislature of Connecticut has proposed what’s commonly referred to as SB1044. Muddled in the labyrinth known as legal terminology, we find this gem of a sentence in the bill itself: Any covered employer that employs, or whose franchisee employs, any employee (1) who was listed on such covered employer’s or such franchisee’s payroll for at least ninety calendar days prior to the completion of the most recent calendar quarter, and (2) whose...

Democratic congressman Alan Grayson reportedly unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against a reporter who questioned his offshore investments during a recent interview, angrily asking the journalist if he’s “some kind of s**tting robot” who goes around “s**tting on people.” The fiery moment reportedly came after Tampa Bay Times political editor Adam Smith inquired about some accounts in the Cayman Islands which he said Grayson “incorporated … so investors could avoid taxes”; the politician railed against this accusation.