Free Republic

“Negative interest rates” have become a phenomenon with economists and the media. But I’m writing to tell you something about negative interest rates you haven’t heard. You certainly won’t hear about it in the mainstream press. What’s coming at you is a historic event. It’s something our grandchildren will hear stories about, much like the Great Depression or the Cold War. It could send the price of gold much higher in the coming years. If you know what’s coming, it could mean the difference between having lots of free cash in retirement and barely getting by. And please remember this...

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump just revealed an inconvenient truth about U.S. debt, the outspoken and often controversial Peter Schiff told CNBC in a recent interview. Last week, Trump joined CNBC's "Squawk Box" last week to discuss a wide range of topics including U.S. debt, interest rates and replacing Fed Chair Janet Yellen. It was Trump's comments about potentially renegotiating the more than $19 trillion in U.S. debt and the sensitivity surrounding higher interest rates that raised eyebrows. While some observers argued that Trump's approach could be tantamount to a debt default, Schiff told CNBC the GOP nominee was...

<p>Reminds me of something Mike Murphy said about Trump in the aftermath of Jeb’s collapse. The logic in favor of nominating another Bush was always, er, complicated, but the logic against nominating a loose cannon is straightforward.</p> <p>I’ll bet even Murphy didn’t think Trump would advertise the possibility that America’s creditors might not receive payment in full in a Trump administration. Choose your own preferred term for what he’s recommending here — renegotiation, bankruptcy, default.</p>

Newt Gingrich went on with Sean Hannity tonight after the Donald Trump’s Indiana blowout and after Ted Cruz suspended his campaign. Newt argued that Donald Trump could be the “the most effective anti-left leader in our lifetime.” Newt added that anyone who does not support Trump is supporting Hillary. First of all, Donald Trump may turn out to be the most effective anti-left leader in our lifetime. He is against political correctness. He is against bureaucracy. He places American nationalism first which I think we desperately need. I’m tired of being told we have to phony agreements and phony efforts...

The rap on Donald Trump is that he’s all bluster. The New York Times says he’s offering “incoherent mishmash.” Ted Cruz claims Trump has “no idea” how to fix the economy. Don’t’ believe it. The Trump campaign is putting forward proposals to fix problems facing the nation, from the long waits for medical care at the VA to the impending collapse of Obamacare. Check out Trump’s economic plan, for starters. Unlike Hillary Clinton’s radical anti-business agenda, Trump’s plan would actually help unemployed Americans get back to work. Trump slashes the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from the current...

The Big Short: As The Big Short is short on reality, Big Government is short on accountability If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.—Ronald Reagan Enter Dodd Frank: legislation named after Democrats’ Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, which enacted 2,300 pages of banking regulations. What could have possibly gone wrong with 2,300 pages of new government regulations on banks? This:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Wednesday that he was open to raising the federal minimum wage, breaking with the prevailing view of his party. “I’m actually looking at that because I am very different from most Republicans,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on CNN’s. “You have to have something that you can live on.”

Donald Trump's tax plan is so friendly to low-income Americans that even Hillary Clinton fans can be tricked into supporting it, comedian Jimmy Kimmel discovered this week. The Jimmy Kimmel Live host decided to punk a group of Hillary voters, walking the streets of Hollywood, by sending out a staffer and having him list off parts of Trump's tax plan – but say it was Clinton's instead. Kimmel's guy ticked off parts of the plan – liberal-friendly items like no taxes for low-income workers, and conservative red meat like killing off the death tax – and received a chorus of...

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton often assert that the only way to correct wealth inequality in America is to tax the rich at even higher rates. A new study suggests this is false. As part of what she called the “growth and fairness economy,” Hillary Clinton has proposed surtaxes on the wealthy and higher taxes on all capital gains to “shuffle the deck,” as she put it. In the past, she has hammered the rich for being, well, rich. “Economists have documented how the share of income and wealth... ...both Clinton and Sanders would raise rates on...

Bill Gates said investment gains should be taxed at the same level as ordinary income — a bold call for one of the world's largest investors. Speaking Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Box," Gates said that he's "pleased" that there is more discussion around changing the tax code. When asked what he would alter, Gates sided with his pal Warren Buffett and said he supports raising the earned income tax credit. But Gates also said he would raise the tax rate for capital gains — the largest source of income for the richest Americans. The current top tax rate on capital...

WHEN RUMORS SURFACED early last month that Australian cryptographer Craig Wright would attempt to prove that he created Bitcoin, Gavin Andresen remained skeptical. As the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, his opinion counts: Andresen is among the earliest programmers for the cryptocurrency, and likely the one who has corresponded more than anyone with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous, long-lost inventor. Today, Andresen fully believes that Wright is Nakamoto. Now he’ll have to convince the rest of the world, because he’s among the only people to have seen what he claims is the best evidence in Wright’s favor. In an interview...

Companies, if granted the leeway, will surely present their financial results in the best possible light. And of course they will try to persuade investors that the calculations they prefer, in which certain costs are excluded, best represent the reality in their operations. Call it accentuating the positive, accounting-style. What’s surprising, though, is how willing regulators have been to allow the proliferation of phony-baloney financial reports and how keenly investors have embraced them. As a result, major public companies reporting results that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, has grown from a modest problem into a...

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example. He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country's deficit that alongside the cuts he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax, from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine:...

“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...

Trump acknowledged that he “had a feeling that question was going to come up” and proceeded toe the liberal line of political correctness: “Well, look, North Carolina did something that was very strong and they're paying a big price and there's a lot of problems....People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble.” ... Fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie turned to the subject of abortion: “The Republican platform, every four years, has a provision that states that the right of the unborn child shall not be infringed. And it makes no exceptions for...

A group of Harvard Law School activists are demanding the graduate school do away with tuition fees, which they argue are “racially biased.” Members of the group Reclaim Harvard Law School published an open letter Sunday addressed to Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and members of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — demanding an end to tuition costs that they argue impose an unfair financial burden on students of color, The Harvard Crimson reported. Tuition at the law school will rise to $59,550 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and students are graduating with an average...

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent a great deal of time debating the merits of raising the minimum wage at the last Democratic debate on April 14. Sanders, ever the radical, stood behind the popular $15 minimum wage figure that will soon take hold in California and New York. Clinton, who's long pushed for $12, updated her position in support of $15 figure. Both could be misguided. While raising the minimum wage does make sense on paper — working people need to make more to survive than they can on today's minimum wage, so we should give them more money...

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...

Make no mistake here. Cruz is proposing a VAT add-on to the existing personal income tax system.