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Phoenix politicians are pushing a $37 million property tax increase. This is right after they pushed a transit tax of $31.5 billion, a water tax increase of $15.3 million that went for pay raises and bonuses, and an airport ride sharing fee of over $8 million annually. This new $37 million property tax increase is a clear example of Phoenix spending more than they need and taking more money from you and your family. First, Phoenix does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. This property tax increase is coming when Phoenix is seeing record budget revenue...

....Wilton Manors city leaders are in talks of expanding their insurance...Currently, gender confirmation surgery is excluded from the city's health plan, causing a financial strain that can often hinder the completion of the process.

Secretary of State John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz have invested millions of U.S. dollars through family trusts in at least 11 offshore tax havens, according to an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The revelation comes on the heels of the release of the Panama Papers, a treasure trove of 11.5 million legal and financial records documenting how some of the world’s richest and most powerful people have used offshore bank accounts to conceal their wealth and avoid taxes.

(Story from April 16.) The Clintons and their family foundation have at least five shell companies registered to the address 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware — which is also home to some 280,000 other companies who use the location to take advantage of the state's low taxes, limited disclosure requirements, and other business incentives. Two of the five are tied to Bill and Hillary Clinton specifically. One, WJC, LLC, is used by the former president to collect his consulting fees. The other, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was used by the former secretary of state to process her $5.5 million...

Donald Trump was asked this week, "Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy?" He replied, "I do. I do - including myself. I do." Yet Trump's own tax plan would cut the highest marginal federal income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. How does this tax plan square with Trump's newly professed support for "raising taxes on the wealthy"? This is similar to Trump's rampant inconsistency on Obamacare. Trump says he's for repealing Obamacare, but he's not for cutting Medicaid which, thanks to the efforts of those like John Kasich, accounts for most of Obamacare's coverage increases....

Thursday morning, asked on the Today Show whether he believed in raising taxes on the wealthy, Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president, gave a reply that illuminated how much of a Democrat in GOP clothing the Orange-Haired One is, replying, “I do, I do.” As time passes, Trump is becoming almost indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders. Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief saw this back in February, in a piece delineating how alike the two men were on numerous policies. For the sake of solely concentrating on their similarities vis-à-vis economic policy, here’s Shapiro’s section on that: They’re both anti-establishment...

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback offered options on Wednesday for dealing with sinking revenue for the state's current and next budgets, including the sale of tobacco bonds. With the fiscal 2016 revenue estimated to drop by nearly $94 million and fiscal 2017 revenue expected to be $134.7 million less than previously projected, the Republican governor said Kansas could raise about $158 million through its first sale of bonds backed by its share of a 1998 multi-state settlement with U.S. tobacco companies.

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." – The 16th Amendment, Ratified 1913 The birth of the income tax! Prior to 1913, the constitutionally limited responsibilities of the federal government were generally covered by import tariffs. Occasionally, temporary taxes were imposed to pay for wars, but were to be apportioned by the states and could not be direct, personal taxes, according to the Constitution in Article I, sections 2 and 9. W. Cleon Skousen wrote a very...

Democrats keep demanding that the rich pay their “fair share” of income taxes. But they never say what fair is. Probably because they know that the rich pay huge amounts while 45% of households pay nothing. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has some eye-opening statistics on its site that should silence the “tax fairness” debate, if the numbers were widely known. For example, did you know that the richest 20% of households pay 88% of federal income taxes? Or that this is up from 64.7% the year before Reagan took office? Did you know that 45% of all households pay...

Stan Druckenmiller ... when I look at the current picture of expected tax revenues combined with benefits promised to future generations, this is the most unsustainable situation I have seen ever in my career. The disaster that Druckenmiller sees coming for the United States is all about changing demographics and entitlement spending. They don’t add up to a sustainable situation. In 1940, entitlement payments, which include everything from disability payments to Social Security to Medicare, amounted to just over 20% of annual government spending in the United States. Today, entitlement spending has swelled to nearly 70% of the annual federal...

In recent years, proponents of clean energy have taken heart in the falling prices of solar and wind power, hoping they will drive an energy revolution. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests otherwise: Technology-driven cost reductions in fossil fuels will lead us to continue using all the oil, gas, and coal we can, unless governments pass new taxes on carbon emissions. “If we don’t adopt new policies, we’re not going to be leaving fossil fuels in the ground,” says Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We need both a policy...

The answer is no. Now let’s explain. Doug Wilson has published an opinion that “taxation can be done right,” by which he means there is legitimate taxation according to the Bible. While I esteem much of Rev. Wilson, and there is tremendous overlap between us in general, I disagree with this sentiment, and I think it is important for the Christian’s overall vision of the future. I offer this intramural essay. Doug makes a distinction between taxation that is without biblical warrant and taxation with biblical warrant, and which we should therefore accept as normative for society. While we would...

The elite are fleeing major cities around the globe at a staggering rate. In fact, the Chicago Tribune is reporting that approximately 3,000 millionaires left the city of Chicago alone during 2015. The same study discussed in that Chicago Tribune article found that 7,000 millionaires left Paris, France last year. So why is this happening? Why are thousands of millionaires suddenly packing up and moving away from the big cities? Could it be possible that they have many of the same concerns that “preppers” do about what is coming? For quite a while, I have been writing about how the...

An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax ... The top 1% of taxpayers pay a higher effective income-tax rate than any other group (around 23%, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50%. On average, those in the bottom 40% of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20% of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87% of all the income tax...

WASHINGTON - Almost everyone agrees that America's income tax is too complex. Considering this, you might expect that simplifying the income tax would be a slam dunk. Sure enough, the various presidential candidates have proposed sweeping overhauls. But any agreement is mostly rhetorical. The odds that the next president, whoever it be, will engineer genuine tax simplification are negligible. On this Tax Day, it's worth pondering why. Make no mistake: I think we'd be better off with a simpler system. By this, I mean a system with a broader tax base and lower rates. I'd eliminate most tax preferences and...

There’s no need to complain about Tax Day.All the money you donate to the federal kitty goes to good use. Well okay, maybe some of it is questionable: ANOTHER TAXPAYER-FUNDED RENEWABLE-ENERGY COMPANY FAILS... Renewable energy giant Abengoa SA filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. as the Spanish energy company continues talks with its banks and bondholders to agree on its plan to restructure billions of dollars in debt. – WSJLast November, the Washington Times reported Abengoa had received at least $2.7 billion in federal loan guarantees since 2010 to build several large-scale solar power projects in the United States....

Did you watch CNN’s Democratic debate Thursday night? I actually did, and get this. I was entertained. Thoroughly entertained. I had a feeling it would be a bit more exciting, especially since Bernie Sanders has been out there questioning Hillionaire’s qualifications. At one point, Dana Bash grilled Hillary on releasing the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches, and it was glorious. “Secretary Clinton, if I may, Senator Sanders keeping bringing up the speeches that you gave to Goldman Sachs. So I’d like to ask you, so you’ve said that you don’t want to release the transcripts, until everybody does it,...

‘The Local Budget Act is a naked and unabashed effort to strip Congress of powers vested in it by Article I of the Constitution, and to circumvent… the one constitutionally-appropriate way to proceed.’ – House of Representatives’ amicus curiae (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on March 31, 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives filed an amicus curiae brief urging a U.S. District Court to deny the D.C. government’s efforts to dismiss a Judicial Watch lawsuit, which seeks to prevent D.C. from illegally expending tax dollars. The House amicus brief was filed in the U.S. District Court for...

Illinois' public school districts are roughly $20 billion in debt, a staggering figure fueled in part by decades of special deals in Springfield that have given districts exemptions so they can keep borrowing beyond limits set by law. Today, that debt exceeds long-term school borrowing in most other states. It equates to about $10,000 for every Pre-K to 12th-grade public school student in Illinois... All the borrowing is a drain on taxpayers who have to repay the debt, as well as school budgets that must steer billions of dollars annually to principal and interest payments — money that could be...

With Monday’s tax filing deadline looming over many Americans’ weekends, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s new bill may seem like a godsend. The Massachusetts Democrat introduced legislation Wednesday that would allow U.S. taxpayers to have the government do their taxes for them—for free. The conveniently timed “Tax Simplification Act of 2016” would direct the IRS to develop a free, online tax preparation and filing service, using tax information the IRS already has, which Americans could choose to use to have their taxes filed directly with the government, instead of using a third-party service, such as TurboTax.