Free Republic

The tax on luxury will become reality for all Russians without exception next year. President Vladimir Putin reminded everyone of that in his annual Address to the Federal Assembly. According to experts, the new tax may send a definite message to wealthy citizens to redistribute their revenues. The head of state said in his speech that the decision on the so-called luxury tax should be made in the first half of 2013. According to the official website of the President of the Russian Federation, one should not give up on the "flat" income tax scale, since the progressive taxation of...

Back in the hot summer of 1990, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell proudly engineered the infamous "luxury tax," a nasty little tithe on everything from furs to jewelry to yachts. Democrats were proud: Not only were they throwing new dollars at the Treasury, they'd done it by socking it to the rich. The wealthy, in the words of then-House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, would finally pay "their fair share." Within a year, Mr. Mitchell was back in the Senate passionately demanding an end to the same dreaded luxury tax. The levy had devastated his home state of Maine's boat-building business,...

...A recent study by... found that over 20 years the Joint Committee on Taxation] has always underestimated the revenues from tax hikes, while overestimating the revenues that are lost when taxes are cut.... The Joint Tax calculations of the "cost" of death tax repeal have been particularly wild and inexplicable. In 2001, JCT famously estimated that repeal would cost the Treasury $600 billion over 10 years -- twice as much as the death tax actually raises. The Joint Tax whiz kids built into their computer models the behavioral effects of lawyers working the interplay between the death and gift tax...

Strike 4The baseball deal will either make the game worse for fans or it'll be a sham that won't hold salaries down. The owners came close to wrecking the season for this? - - - - - - - - - - - -By Allen BarraAug. 30, 2002  | Let's start with the short form. The crisis was phony, the issues were a crock and the deal is a sham. Well, it's about 50-50 that it will turn out to be a sham. No matter what anyone says, it has yet to be proven that the basic agreement worked out between...

Filed at 8:08 p.m. ET ROSEMONT, Ill. (AP) -- The executive board of the baseball players' union failed to set a strike date Monday but will ask major leaguers for the authority to call the sport's ninth work stoppage since 1972. Members of the union's executive board, meeting on the day before the All-Star game, left a hotel near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport saying they will go back to their teammates. Philadelphia outfielder Doug Glanville said that because of the uncertain position, it was wise to ``prepare for the worst.'' After the expiration of the previous labor deal Nov. 7,...