Free Republic

The politicians and analysts have been talking for more than a year about the potential winners and losers from Mayor Nutter's property tax reform, and now the lines have been drawn. The results of a citywide reassessment key to Nutter's Actual Value Initiative (AVI) were released Friday, and the data confirm some long-held expectations - wealthier, fast-changing neighborhoods are facing stiff increases, and many large commercial properties will see big drops in their bills. Some hikes are jaw-dropping. --snip-- It amounts to a massive redistribution of the city's property tax burden, and the stakes for both homeowners and politicians could...

Senate Democrats are digging in against Republican calls for deeper spending cuts by bringing out some of their favorite punching bags: corporate jets, Wall Street and Big Oil. With the automatic budget cuts in the sequester coming up next month, Democrats hope to vote on an alternative plan to raise taxes on some of their favorite boogeymen in hopes of shifting the blame when the GOP inevitably rejects it. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray of Washington, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana and Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski of Maryland met Thursday to...

Just a day after Phil Mickelson said he needed to make "drastic changes" in his life because his tax rate was going through the roof, he is trying to walk back his comments. He released a statement through his spokesman T.R. Reinman in which Mickelson apologizes to anyone who may have been offended: "Finances and taxes are a personal matter and I should not have made my opinions on them public. I apologize to those I have upset or insulted and assure you I intend to not let it happen again." This is absurd. There is no need for a...

Would you like to save $20,000 this year? Of course you would. Here’s how: Plan a month-long vacation to Disneyland, and budget $20,000 for the trip. Then don’t go. Presto! You just “cut” your family budget by 20 grand. This sounds absurd—because it is. Yet that is precisely how Washington operates. A couple of weeks ago, President Obama claimed on national TV that “I cut spending by over a trillion dollars in 2011.” But as many people quickly pointed out, in fiscal 2011 federal spending rose from $3.4 trillion to $3.6 trillion. Nevertheless, the President repeated the claim on Jan....

In the history of mankind there are countless instances of cult figures who have lead their followers to ruin and disillusionment. Names like Jim Jones, David Koresh, The Pied Piper, Bernie Madoff, Adolph Hitler, Charles Manson, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and a whole host of TV evangelists have done their damage. It was easy for those outside and not sucked in by these hucksters to see the message they peddled defied logic, science and the laws of economics: Alchemy, master race, buy your way into heaven, getting something for nothing, all have that common thread. ... Gore was making hundreds of...

The current state of the GOP brings to mind the surviving Marines in Aliens, with no shortage of demoralized hacks lamenting their inability to resist by channeling Private Hudson: “Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events but we just got our a**** kicked, pal!” So what? So we took a hit on the Fiscal Cliff. Stand up, brush off and get back into the fight. This is no time for self-pity, no time for weakness. Every combat leader knows that when you take a hit, you regroup, reorganize, and prepare to counterattack. The defense is but a temporary,...

Dread. Usually not a word one associates with the New Year… well, provided one is not a glass half-empty sort. Hopeful, encouraged, positive… that sort of rot is what travels the aural circuit in the week or so following clean-slate day. But ‘round these parts – and near the nether regions of other state capitals – the newly-birthed year is greeted with a level of enthusiasm rivaled only by the anticipatory feeling derived from the possibility of a TSA cavity search. And that point of comparison is frighteningly accurate; given said cavity is the only place our local legislators have...

Thanks to the fiscal-cliff deal and the Obamacare tax, we now have a tax code that is more “progressive” than at any time since Jimmy Carter was president. It will be interesting to see what long-term effect that has on household-income trends. The results may prove counterintuitive. Tax increases on high-income people may be redistributive, but not always in the way intended. That is because we pay taxes individually in the short term, but in the long term we pay taxes collectively: Individuals and firms pass on tax costs to employers and consumers to whatever extent they can, just like...

Anyone still need a reason to abandon "grand bargains" and deals negotiated between this President and GOP Congressional leaders? Here it is: The revival of two dormant provisions of the tax code means the much ballyhooed $450,000 income threshold for the highest tax rate is largely fake. The two provisions are the infamous PEP and Pease, which aficionados of stealth tax increases will recognize immediately as relics of the 1990 tax increase. Those measures, which limit deductions and exemptions for higher-income taxpayers, expired in 2010. The Obama tax bill revived them this week. It isn't going to be pretty. Under...

It’s an embarrassing time to be a Republican Congressman—albeit an outgoing Congressman.  As negotiators, we utterly failed to meet our two objectives: to reduce spending and prevent tax increases. President Obama demanded tax increases with small spending cuts, and that’s exactly what passed. Thanks to the leadership of Speaker John Boehner, the House passed a bill which raises taxes by $620 billion while cutting spending by a mere $15 billion over 10 years. Usually, a compromise is an even trade (one-for-one). In this trade, House and Senate Republicans traded $41 dollars in tax hikes for every $1 dollar in spending...

It's the deficit-reduction package that doesn't reduce the deficit. It's the debt-ceiling deal that doesn't touch the debt ceiling (and doesn't cut debt). It's the long-term entitlement negotiation that—after nearly three years of wheedling—does not delay, let alone stave off, a Baby Boomer retirement bomb currently on pace to swallow half of federal outlays by 2030. Say this for the fiscal cliff-avoidance bill that passed on New Year's Day—it is a near-perfect expression of Washington's grotesque devolution since Bill Clinton left office. Not only have a succession of Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses combined to jack up spending from...

Via Mediaite, "balanced approach" is Obama's Orwellian term for selling tax hikes to the public as a condition of spending cuts even though there's nothing remotely balanced about our fiscal problems. Spend 10 seconds looking at the graphs in Yuval Levin's new post at the Corner. That's the reality that the "balanced approach" pretends to address. As Levin said in another post today, “The fiscal trajectory of our welfare state is not sustainable, no matter how much taxes go up.”But okay. The left’s new talking point, pushed by The One himself, is that they absolutely positively won’t negotiate over the...

When an economy is booming and jobs are plentiful, a “do no harm” approach to public policy will suffice. If GDP were expanding at a 4% annual rate and the unemployment rate were 5% and the national debt were low, then the fiscal cliff deal might be tolerable rather than terrible. While it won’t create any jobs or add to growth — just the opposite in fact — and it will only cut the national debt by a rounding-error amount, passage does avoid an across-the-board income tax hike and probable recession.So that’s something. But good enough? Not really. Avoiding...

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama said on Friday evening that if he cannot make a bipartisan deal with congressional leaders before the Monday "fiscal cliff" deadline, he has asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring legislation up for a vote in the Senate that would extend the Bush tax rates for "middle class" Americans only and extend unemployment benefits for 2 million Americans whose government payments would otherwise expire. [Snip] "But let’s not miss this deadline," he said. "That is the bare minimum that we should be able to get done." “For the past couple of months I’ve been...

President Obama is on his way back to Washington, as the Associated Press reports that he's "cutting short his traditional Christmas holiday in Hawaii, planning to leave for Washington on Wednesday evening... expected to arrive in Washington early Thursday." Most Americans probably won't sympathize that the President has a short vacation - after all, at work, he didn't get that big project finished in time for the holidays. The elements of the fiscal cliff can be roughly divided into four categories: defense spending cuts, non-defense spending cuts, income tax hikes, and payroll tax hikes. Of these, what has gotten the...

While most media accounts of the fiscal cliff fiasco have focused on Republicans' travails, few have adequately noted Democrats' starring role in our current dysfunction.  Harry Reid obstructed a vote on the president's plan, Nancy Pelosi whipped votes against her own erstwhile plan, and the president has fully retreated from ideas he supported as recently as last year.  A pre-Christmas Wall Street Journal article walks readers through the failed negotiations, and two recurring themes are woven throughout: (1) Obama has zero interest in meaningful concessions on his end, and (2) Obama is supremely confident in his ability to stick Republicans...

In the standoff over the fiscal cliff, all the discussion has been about the Bush tax cuts. There has been no discussion about the ObamaCare tax increases. That's a mistake. Five of the tax increases Americans will face on January 1 are new taxes created under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). And they are not just for the very rich. Three of the five will hit people who are solidly middle class.The new ObamaCare taxes will hit everything from dividends and capital gains to day care and services for special needs children. They will increase the tax bill for those...

President Barack Obama dispatched Mitt Romney a little more than a month ago but now faces an unpredictable new threat: a deeply divided House GOP that doesn’t even seem capable of bargaining with him.  Obama had hoped the election would unclog the works in Washington. His aides often speculated that he’d be freer to negotiate because he didn’t have to run again — and Republicans didn’t have to run against him.  But Thursday’s revolt was a grim reminder of how closely Obama’s future is tethered to that of his political rivals.  If House Speaker John Boehner can’t muscle his own...

It sounds like Speaker Boehner is angling to push the fiscal-cliff onus back onto Senate Democrats and the president before the holidays hit with his Plan-B gambit, especially now in the light that the Senate is taking off until the Thursday after Christmas — which will leave a mere five days to cobble together any type of deal upon their return. The big question, of course, was whether or not the move would be at all worthwhile, since there are plenty of conservatives expressing their vociferous opposition to said plan and getting it through the House is by no means...

A group called the Conservative Action Project has released a letter today calling on House Republicans to vote against Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” if it comes up for a floor vote. The group released a statement along with a stellar list of signatories, headlined appropriately “NO MORE TAXES!!!!!!!!” NO MORE TAXES!!!!!!!!!As leaders of broad based American citizen groups we call upon Republican House Members to vote no on Speaker Boehner’s Tax Hike known as “Plan B.”  This tax increase bill is just like the tax increase proposal Nancy Pelosi offered last year on May 23rd. Speaker Boehner, President Obama,...