Free Republic

5 Unusual Sales Taxes You Need To Avoid With the economy still struggling, states are getting fairly crafty with how they charge consumers via sales taxes. It's no secret that dubious, yet all-too enforceable government laws have been with us since the dawn of the civilized world. In ancient Egypt, the pharaohs taxed cooking oil – of course, the main seller of cooking oil was the pharaoh. During the first century AD, the Roman empire taxed urine – a popular source of ammonia for common tasks like tanning hides and cleaning clothes. Then at the height of the Dark Ages...

Oak Creek — A local businessman has stepped up to pay the legal fees of Earl Giefer, the 94-year-old farmer who was in the center of an eminent domain controversy earlier this summer. After following Giefer's case in the newspaper, Scott Mayer reached out to the family - which is acquainted with his own family - to pick up $5,000 in legal fees. Empathic understanding Mayer said he, like Giefer, has had difficulty dealing with municipal government and was taught by his father to give back and help people. "I've been jagged around in the past on real estate stuff...

Welcome to the newly designed AmericanMajority.org. Please take advantage of our free resources, including podcasts, guides, and presentations. We hope you will sign up for email alerts under our Join tab so that we can include you in upcoming trainings and announcements. Thank you for all you do.What if you owned a small business? What if you owned a small business and your customers came to your store or office? What if you owned a small business where your customers came to your store or office, and parked in your parking lot? What if you owned a small business where...

Oklahoma’s Golden Opportunity With gasoline prices exceeding $3 per gallon throughout much of the United States, motorists are feeling a considerable amount of pain at the pump. Many elected officials are feeling pressure from their constituents to “do something”... “Doing something” in this case usually means railing against the evils of “Big Oil.” Of course, worldwide supply and demand are the primary determinants of gasoline prices, but that does not stop the wild allegations — often centered on accusations of “price gouging” — against oil companies every time they raise prices or announce a quarterly profit. Accusations of gouging then...

WASHINGTON--An estimated 4 million subscribers to Internet phone services like Vonage could see new fees on their bills under a plan approved Wednesday by federal regulators. The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously at its monthly meeting here to require all voice over Internet Protocol services that connect to the public-switched telephone network--as opposed to using peer-to-peer technology, like Skype--to contribute to the Universal Service Fund. The $7.3 billion fund, which has been a feature of U.S. policy for more than 70 years, subsidizes telephone service in rural and low-income areas. It also runs a controversy-plagued program called E-Rate that provides...

Your pain at the gas pump is the state's gain. Soaring gasoline prices are expected to enrich the state's tax coffers by $200 million this fiscal year - assuming prices for a gallon of fuel stay at $2 or higher, experts say. New Yorkers already pay the highest gas taxes in the nation. And the skyrocketing prices actually result in an even deeper bite here, because fuel taxes are based on percentages of the amount charged, not on a flat per-gallon rate. Local governments, which levy their own gasoline sales taxes, also will benefit from the wallet-gouging cost of fuel,...