Free Republic

f you want good roads, you have to pay for them. It’s not just the politicians in Madison and Washington, D.C., who have failed to learn that lesson. It’s the people of Wisconsin, too.

If states are “laboratories of democracy,” ballot initiatives in Washington and California next month will test whether voters are willing to tax pollution, and how the revenue should be spent. These experiments will provide crucial insights for shaping climate initiatives elsewhere. In Washington state, Ballot Initiative 1631, also known as the Carbon Emissions Fee Measure or the Protect Washington Act, would impose a fee on the state’s largest industrial polluters. The fee would start at $15 per ton of carbon dioxide in 2020, and rise by $2 per year plus inflation thereafter. That’s nowhere near the more than $100 per...

The first hint came about a month and a half ago. A well-connected Democrat laid out a new scenario to me. It went something like this: “Democrats will take over the House and possibly the Senate after the midterms. We’ll demand that Trump release his tax returns. He won’t do it. The fight will become a legal battle. It’ll go to the Supreme Court. We’ll impeach him over it. That’s how we’ll finally get Trump.” I had a few reactions to this stated strategy. First, I can’t imagine that such an effort would reach fruition before 2020, when President Trump’s...

A Saturday report from The New York Times found Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, paid little to no federal income taxes from 2009 to 2016 using legal tax mechanisms. An IRS policy known as depreciation is a deduction Kushner Cos. used to diminish its taxable income on properties largely bought with borrowed money. Though not illegal, the filings show how real estate tax codes leave room for profitable maneuvering. The New York Times found Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, paid little to no federal income taxes from 2009 to 2016 — without...

TALLAHASSEE When Floridians head to the ballot box in November, they will encounter a list of candidates asking for their vote for seats in the state House to the U.S. Senate. Among the choices they must make will also be one of the longest lists of proposed constitutional changes in decades, from betting on dog racing to implementing a ban on public officials lobbying for six years after they leave office. The 12 constitutional amendments on this year’s ballot are the most since 1998, when the state’s Constitution Revision Commission — which meets once every 20 years — put nine...

A woman who spent £16m at Harrods in a decade can now be identified as Zamira Hajiyeva - the first target for the UK's new anti-corruption law. Mrs Hajiyeva lost a legal battle to stay anonymous after the media argued the public should know the full facts. Originally from Azerbaijan, she is the wife of an ex-state banker. She risks losing her £15m home near the London store and a Berkshire golf course if she fails to explain the source of her wealth to the High Court. Under the terms of the UK's first ever Unexplained Wealth Order, Mrs Hajiyeva,...

Full title - Nancy Pelosi Joins Catholic ‘Nuns On The Bus’ For ‘Tax Justice Truth Tour’ En Route To Trump’s Mar-a-Lago LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — Catholic nuns have joined forces with leading figures of the Democratic Party to call out what they see as the GOP’s abdication of their duty to the American people. “Nuns on the Bus” kicked off their “Tax Justice Truth Tour” in Ocean View Park in Santa Monica Monday, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a keynote speaker. The group of 30 nuns has planned to host 54 events in 21 states across the country...

Three months ago, one of the country’s best known actors went missing. Now, seemingly chastened, she has reappeared with a bill for £112m in unpaid taxes and fines

Fan Bingbing, one of China's most famous actresses, mysteriously disappeared for three months after being accused of tax evasion. On Wednesday she broke her silence, offering a simpering apology to Beijing and swearing to change her ways. Her fall from grace serves as a powerful warning shot from China to show that nobody can escape their scrutiny. Tax authorities in China's Jiangsu province on Sunday found that the 37-year-old actress and her companies evaded 248 million yuan ($34 million/£28 million) in taxes, but gave no further details on the companies or this figure. The state-run Xinhua News agency, a prominent...

Massachusetts is home to some of the best colleges and universities in the world—and some of the worst traffic jams. A Democratic gubernatorial candidate is betting residents of the Bay State will be willing to tax the former to alleviate the latter. Jay Gonzalez is building his long-shot campaign around a levy on the endowments of nine private schools that would create revenue to invest in public transportation and relieve Boston-area congestion, among other things. Boston drivers spend 14% of their time driving in congestion, the worst of any U.S. city, according to the INRIX, a transportation analytics company. The...

When conservatives were targeting the death tax, wealthy liberals were arguing that it was unfair that successful entrepreneurs could pass on their hard-earned wealth to their children. It was unfair to those whose parents weren’t successful and wealthy. The kids would be spoiled with money they did not earn or deserve while some were leaving their kids nothing but well wishes. People should not be punished because they work hard, become successful, and want to pass on the fruits of their labor, or even their ancestors’ labor, to their children. Certainly, Donald Trump’s father believed that and to the extent...

A freelance automotive journalist worries a testing site operated by the Illinois Tollway Authority could be for more than just testing automated tollway technology. Paul Brian said he’s noticed a site with various sensors on northbound I-294 for years with a sign that reads “for testing purposes only.” Illinois Tollway Authority officials said the site is used for testing various sensors, but only for tollway purposes. The site, established in 2015, had an initial price tag of $2.7 million. “The Illinois Tollway has used the test site to study a range of systems – some of which were adopted and...

North Korea has ordered its citizens to donate dog hides to the regime as part of celebrations marking the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea on October 10. The government collects dog hides ahead of the anniversary each year “to raise funds for the party”, the dissident Daily NK website reported, but this year the authorities have raised the amount of money that families who do not keep dogs are required to pay instead. “Although the party is asking for dog hides, there are not many houses that have the luxury of raising a dog...

The people who took the time to read the story and associated material came away two important points: 1) the Trump family had and continues to have lots of money, and 2) the president engages in bombastic and shameless self-promotion.

The Illinois Republican Congressional Delegation sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office calling for a full investigation into JB Pritzker’s “scheme to defraud” Illinois taxpayers by ripping toilets out of his mansion to claim the property as uninhabitable. October 3, 2018 The Honorable John R. Lausch, Jr. United States Attorney’s Office Mr. Lausch: We write to call your attention to a recent Cook County Inspector General investigation which concluded that Jay Robert (J.B.) Pritzker engaged in a “scheme to defraud” Cook County of over $300,000 in improper property tax reductions and refunds. The Inspector General’s report concluded that the...

I have spent some three decades railing against faulty budgetary scoring of tax bills, but the latest charade from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Tax Committee takes the cake. The story of fiscal phony math is so indefensible when it comes to the Trump tax cut that you may not believe it could be true. Alas, it is. The story starts with the CBO forecast in 2017 that over the next decade the national debt will double to 150 percent of GDP in about 20 years. Those are debt numbers that don't have a happy ending – just ask...

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.Snippets: "The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children." and "President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters". Robert Trump, the president's brother: "Our dear father, Fred C. Trump, passed away in June 1999. Our beloved mother, Mary Anne Trump, passed away in August 2000. All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the...

"The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s."

Cook County’s chief watchdog has concluded that more than $330,000 in property tax breaks and refunds that Democratic gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker received on one of his Gold Coast mansions — in part by removing toilets — constituted a “scheme to defraud.” Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard also recommends that Cook County should try to recover the money from the billionaire. […] Blanchard writes in the report that the Cook County Assessor’s office was “the victim of sworn affidavits containing false representations.” […] “The use of these affidavits was part of a scheme for obtaining money by means of...

Democrats are quietly planning to use an obscure and rarely used law to examine President Donald Trump’s tax returns if they are able to take control of a congressional chamber in the wake of the midterm elections. Trump’s tax returns, which have remained mostly concealed to this point, could be the target of a 1924 law that permits the chairmen of Congress’ tax committees to look at anyone’s returns. Democrats say they will use this power to help answer a long list of questions about Trump’s finances, reports Politico. “Probably the approach would be to get all of it, review...