Free Republic

A proposal to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of California billionaires has qualified for the November ballot. The California Secretary of State’s office announced Wednesday that supporters had gathered enough signatures to place the measure before voters after months of maneuvering and opposition from influential political and business leaders. The proposal, backed by a health care union, would levy a one-time tax on the assets of the state’s wealthiest residents. Advocates of the measure claim the increase in revenue would help offset the effects of federal spending reductions and provide resources to prevent hospital closures and...

Dear Senator Warren,When I watched your recent video on X about Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, I found myself in the unusual position of agreeing with you—at least in part. That is not a sentence I write often.You see…you are correct that something has gone profoundly wrong in an economy that can produce a trillionaire. You are correct that the gap between the financial elite and ordinary Americans has become so vast that most people can barely comprehend it. And you are correct that millions of Americans increasingly feel as though the economy is rigged in favor of...

I wrote about Jimmy Kimmel's monologue earlier but that was just the first fruits of a bumper crop of left-wing hate. Everyone on the left is now offering Elon advice on how to spend his money (money which he literally can't spend) and quite a few people are just demonizing him as evil for being rich. I anticipated all of this yesterday but I might as well document some of it for posterity here. Rep. Jayapal called the news "total bulls**t" and called for a wealth tax. Imagine if Elon Musk did something to benefit others with his trillion.— Amy...

Talking points went out and lemmings-like Democrats proved to all that they know nothing about wealth creation. All they have is their greed for other people's money. Once upon a time, Americans celebrated success. Some still do. After developing reusable rockets, planning a trip to Mars, launching more satellites than anyone in history, and rescuing stranded American astronauts from outer space, Elon Musk launched an IPO of his SpaceX company, and a lot of people decided to invest in the new stock. That made the man who laid out the capital and took all the risks, Elon Musk, a trillionaire....

Yesterday afternoon I wrote this:I suspect that tomorrow the real work of demagoguery will begin and we'll start seeing thousands of voices echoing whatever Bernie Sanders has to say about it. Tonight is the calm before the storm.As it turned out, we didn't have to wait until today for the ritual denunciations of Elon Musk to begin. The Globe and Mail in Canada was already on it with this article:The Globe and Mail @globeandmail · Follow Opinion: SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate himThe article makes the case that it's not Musk's wealth...

Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE. When the federal government is for sale, the rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted. The system is rigged.

Key FactsNew York lawmakers are planning the tax, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the state budget negotiations who noted the proposal would be levied at 1% of the buying price and be paid by buyers. The legislators are also considering expanding the tax to $1 million or more cash purchases in the state that would incorporate the suburbs and upstate New York, Bloomberg added. The tax in New York City alone could generate up to $160 million, according to the unnamed sources Bloomberg cited. A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., told Bloomberg she “announced a general agreement...

Don’t break up because of that Mam! New York leaders are desperately trying to stop billionaire bigwigs from hightailing it out of the Big Apple with their cash, businesses and thousands of jobs — as fears mount that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s policies will accelerate the Empire State’s nation-leading loss of wealth. The splashy one-two punch of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and Apollo Global Management honcho Marc Rowan pledging to expand outside New York City has been coupled with a silent wave of businesses “quiet quitting” the city over its hostile environment, insiders told The Post. The burgeoning biz bolt has...

The flight of the productive from our major cities has been going on for a while now, but nothing seems to pour accelerant on that flight faster than the election of a "democratic socialist" (you can read that as "communist") mayor, which is what has happened in New York and Seattle. In New York, in particular, anyone with a net worth in the black is looking to the exits, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani seems determined to knock the Big Apple's economy clean out and then go through its pockets for loose change. One business leader, determined to remain in New...

Democratic tax policies always follow the same basic script: They tax the wealthy. The wealthy leave. Democrats increase taxes on the middle class and everyone else to make up for the revenue losses. Economic destruction follows. That's going to happen in New York City, too, as Zohran Mamdani's "tax the rich" plans have prompted the start of a wealth exodus from the Big Apple. Wall Street giant Apollo aims to open 'second headquarters' outside NYC - in latest fallout from Mamdani's war on the wealthy https://t.co/ozffxGvIbE pic.twitter.com/kNwowJ0Mqw— New York Post (@nypost) May 6, 2026Here's more:Yet another major Wall Street firm...

When someone says a retiree is "living off Social Security," it's not usually $100,000 a year. But some U.S. retired couples will be receiving that much in a few years - and a proposal to cap their benefit at that amount has started a painful and much-needed conversation about who should get government benefits and how much.

SALEM, Ore. (KATU) — Two Democratic Oregon Senators will introduce a bill that would change how the state’s personal income tax “kicker” is distributed when revenues exceed forecasts. The resolution would amend the Oregon Constitution. Under current law, when state revenues exceed projections by at least 2%, most of the excess personal income tax revenue is returned to taxpayers as the kicker. Under the resolution, that system would largely remain in place, but with a new threshold. If the total personal income tax surplus exceeds $300 million in a biennium, only half of that excess would be returned to taxpayers....

Former President Joe Biden’s long career in politics allowed him to retire with the largest taxpayer-funded pension of any ex-prez in US history — $417,000, or more than his presidential salary, an expert says. Biden, 83, was in line to rake in the massive amount from two pension funds in his first year as former president, according to an analysis by National Taxpayer Union Foundation Vice President Demian Brady. “It’s pretty unusual, historically unusual, to have such a large pension amount,” Brady told The Post. “I would have to say that it’s the largest,” the taxpayer advocate said when asked...

President Donald Trump halted his motorcade at a Florida shopping center Friday morning to buy marble and onyx “at his own expense” for the new White House ballroom, according to the pool report. The out-of-town press pool remained in vans parked near railroad tracks while Trump was inside Arc Stone & Tile in an industrial area of Lake Worth, Florida , located off of I-95., according to the report. Newsweek has reached out to the White House via email Friday morning for comment. Why It Matters Trump said he recently refurbished parts of the White House with marble floors and...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened his administration Thursday with an explicit pledge to govern the nation’s largest city as a democratic socialist, saying he would not soften his politics as he ushered in the “new era.” “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” Mamdani said in his inaugural address on New Year’s Day before a crowd of thousands gathered at City Hall and at a block party down the Canyon of Heroes. The declaration, made on the steps of City Hall, set the tone for a speech that framed his mayoralty as a...

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation. She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target. But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she...

As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night. “They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.” At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist...

Legislation moving through Congress includes breaks for the upper and middle classes as the House rebuffs President Donald Trump’s suggestions.House Republicans rejected a push by some allies of President Donald Trump to include tax hikes on the rich in sweeping legislation they passed last week — a decision that could carry repercussions into next year’s elections.The legislation House Republicans approved last week extends tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017, cutting rates across income groups, including large benefits for the Americans who pay the highest share of federal income tax — those in the top 5 percent of the...

Republicans are trying to lock in Trump’s tax cuts and Democrats are resisting. We now know that DOGE is trying to end the wasteful spending in DC. But I would really like to see tax rates on the middle class fall. The wealth gap between the top 1% of taxpayers and the bottom 50% of taxpayers is enormous. And has gotten worse since 1990. Meanwhile. to fight off the temporary effects of the tariff war, Trump is urging Fed Chair Powell to cut rates. Powell will likely NOT cut rates. But what does “Lunatic Liz” Warren say about rate cuts??

Tariffs are advertised in the name of helping American workers, but what do you know? They turn out to favor the powerful and politically connected. That’s the main message of President Trump’s decision to exempt smartphones and assorted electronic goods from his most onerous tariffs. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Friday issued a notice listing products that will be exempt from Mr. Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs that can run as high as 145% on goods from China. The exclusions apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives, computer processors, servers, memory chips, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and other electronics. The CBP...