Free Republic

Flooding, famine and rising sea levels will put hundreds of millions at risk in one of the world's most vulnerable regions. People in coastal regions of Asia, particularly those living in cities, could face some of the worst effects of global warming, climate experts will warn this week. Hundreds of millions of people are likely to lose their homes as flooding, famine and rising sea levels sweep the region, one of the most vulnerable on Earth to the impact of global warming, the UN states. The report – Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability – makes it clear that...

Get ready to be blindsided by a barrage of new taxes. $1 trillion worth... They'll be coming courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. And they won't just be affecting those who make over $250,000. The bulk of these taxes will be passed on directly to the middle class. That's because while a majority of these "stealth taxes" were designed to be taxes on businesses, they're actually transferred directly to ordinary citizens. They include the investment income surtax, a Medicare payroll tax, even a "tanning tax" on those who utilize indoor tanning services. "Many of those [hidden]...

“OK, I’ve got a solution,” Krauthammer said. “You make [$80,000 a year] and you don’t have any subsidies. You’ve got a high premium and you lose a lot of money and you end up poor. Well then, you go back and reapply. Now you get a subsidy because you’re poor. So that’s how it would work in practice. Look that wasn’t a joke. That was serious. This is a way of transferring wealth from the upper middle class where you get no subsidies to the lower middle class who aren’t poor enough to end up in Medicaid.” Krauthammer and Napolitano...

New England’s largest coal-fired power plant has been slated for shutdown, partly due to Environmental Protection Agency regulations.The Brayton Point Station in Massachusetts will no longer provide power to the region’s electrical grid when the plant is shut down in 2017. The plant’s owner Energy Capital Partners has cited several factors for its closing, including competition from natural gas and the need to spend “significant capital to meet environmental regulations and to operate and maintain an aging plant.”Environmentalists argue that coal is no longer an economically viable fuel source.“If Brayton Point can’t make it economically, no coal plant can make...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new plan to change U.S. neighborhoods it says are racially imbalanced or are too tilted toward rich or poor, arguing the country's housing policies have not been effective at creating the kind of integrated communities the agency had hoped for. The proposed federal rule, called "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," is currently under a 60-day public comment period. Though details of how the policy would specifically work are unclear, the rule says HUD would provide states, local governments and others who receive agency money with data and a geospatial tool to...