Free Republic

Sen. Elizabeth Warren pledged Friday not to raise middle-class taxes to fund her "Medicare for All" plan, responding to pressure she faced as she emerged as a front-runner in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.In a new outline, Warren's campaign said her single-payer health plan would cost the country "just under" $52 trillion over a decade, which includes $20.5 trillion in new federal spending. It estimates the proposal would cost just less than the estimated $52 trillion in spending for the current system over 10 years. The Massachusetts Democrat's campaign said her plan would give every American "full...

Do you hear that dull thud sound? That’s the sound of Elizabeth Warren beating her head against reality. Unlike Bernie Sanders, Warren hasn’t been willing to admit that taxes will have to go up to pay for Medicare for All. All she’ll say is that “for middle-class families, for hard-working people costs are going to go down.” Warren wants us to imagine is a system in which taxes go way up on top earners but people in the middle are better off.Monday the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a new estimate of what it would take to...

Key Takeaways 1. Middle-class incomes, after adjusting for inflation, have surged by $5,003 since Donald Trump became president in January 2017. 2. These surges in income, have occurred at exactly the time when many liberal economists and media talking heads were shouting “recession.” 3. These latest income numbers also squarely contradict the claims by Democratic presidential candidates.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires out of existence, or at least make them an endangered species. His proposed wealth tax of up to 8 percent per year would mean “the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years,” he says.The progressive tax would start at 1 percent on retained wealth over $32 million, rising to 2 percent over $50 million, and so on, reaching to the top rate of 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. Whatever is left would be taxed again the following year, and every year until it was gone.Let’s...

Last week, Elizabeth Warren walked into an interview that was supposed to be easy: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The liberal talk show host made it clear long ago that he’s no supporter of President Trump. He spent most of the interview joking around with the Democratic presidential hopeful, asking softball questions. But then he asked a serious question about the cost of her proposed “Medicare For All” scheme. “How are you going to pay for it? Are you going to be raising middle-class taxes?” Colbert asked. Now she could have done what a normal person would do: answer...

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” 2020 presidential candidate South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) stated that fellow 2020 candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been “extremely evasive” on whether her Medicare for all plan will raise taxes for the middle class. Buttigieg said, “Senator Warren is known for being straightforward, and was extremely evasive when asked that question, and we’ve seen that repeatedly. I think that if you are proud of your plan and it’s the right plan, you should defend it in straightforward terms. And I think it’s puzzling that when everybody knows the answer to that...

Over a Million Households Climbed to Middle Class Under Trump, Census Data Shows More than 1.2 million American households moved to above $50,000 in annual income between 2016 and 2018, according to Census Bureau data released on Sept. 10, a sign of a growing middle class.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) refused to say if she would raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for Medicare for All during the third Democrat debate in Houston, Texas, on Thursday evening. Joe Biden (D) lauded his progressive challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for being forthcoming on how he would pay for his Medicare for All plan, admitting that middle class taxes will go up. The issue was also presented to Warren, but she repeatedly dodged the question, refusing to say if she would raise taxes on middle class families. Warren said we all owe a “huge...

Here’s a sad reality: In order to raise a family in an expensive coastal city like San Francisco or New York, you’ve now got to make $350,000 or more a year. You can certainly live on less, but it won’t be easy if your goal is to raise a family, save for your children’s education, save for your own home and save for retirement (so you can actually retire by a reasonable age). A middle-class lifestyle is a reasonable ask. But thanks to inflation, it has gotten a lot more expensive if you want to have children. The median wealth...

Once again, a traditional symbol has become a target of those who attack private property rights and the American way of life. In this case, the symbol is the lawn – those closely-cropped grassy areas that surround most single-family homes. The basis for the attack is very typically environmentalism and racism. The messenger is an article in The New York Times. Its title is unassuming enough – “The Great American Lawn: How the Dream was Manufactured.” The vehicle is an embedded seven-minute film, produced by David Botti. The Attack The film’s first minute summarizes the environmental concerns: More water is...

Jonathan Guzman and Mayra Finol earn about $130,000 a year, combined, in technology jobs. Though that is more than double the median, debt from their years at St. John’s University in New York has been hard to overcome. The two 28-year-olds in West Hartford, Conn., have about $51,000 in student debt, plus $18,000 in auto loans and $50,000 across eight credit cards. Adding financial pressure are a baby daughter and a mortgage of around $270,000.

The ideological schism between factions within the Democratic Party quickly emerged during the first minutes of the second Democratic debate, with the progressive firebrands on stage strongly defending their "Medicare-for-all" single-payer health care plans and the more centrist candidates casting their proposals as unrealistic and too extreme. When the CNN moderators for the debate on Tuesday night in Detroit pressed the more progressive White House hopefuls on whether their health care proposals involve a tax hike for the middle class, most candidates skirted the question. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — two high-profile progressives who...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper to discuss an array of issues. One of the topics that came up was Medicare For All.Tapper played a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden in Michigan talking about how it's impossible to implement Medicare For All without raising the taxes on the middle class."Well, I find that people say they're for Medicare For All but they're not going to tax the middle class because we don't need to do that. Come on," Biden said. "What is this, a fantasy world here?"Sanders finally admitted what...

Ever since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, Democrats and a few Republicans have decried how the law’s $10,000 cap of the state and local tax deduction harms schools, local communities, home values, first responders, and middle-class families. Fast forward almost two years later and these false claims are not going away. House Democrats recently announced a hearing scheduled for Tuesday where many of the common myths are likely to be repeated. Here are a few of the most common misconceptions. Myth #1: The Cap Hurts Middle-Class Taxpayers Before the 2017 tax cut capped the state...

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s election and the “yellow vests” protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them?

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives? Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists. What are the popular gripes against them? One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies...

A middle class that outnumbers the combined poor and aristocracy is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back to around 1900. The rise of the middle class was the result of Industrial Revolution capitalism. It has been one of the most significant and epochal developments in history, yet the intellectual reaction for the most part has been to either ignore it or treat it with disdain. Now the project to destroy the middle class is well under way, with unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences that promise to be just as epochal as its creation. Intellectual condescension towards the middle class is so...

Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare. The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here. “It raises a lot of questions as to what kind of city it will be,” said Janet Smith, co-director of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which compiled the maps that document Chicago’s shrinking middle class — and an...

Young and less educated men are losing their place in the U.S. workforce. Why it matters: Technology and automation, shrinking unions and changing family dynamics have transformed the role of men in the workforce, while male high school graduates either need to pursue higher education or enter lower-paid industries traditionally dominated by women. 1. The shifting workforce Technology, globalization and the shrinking of unions have led to lower wages and disappearing blue collar jobs, Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and former chief economist for the Department of Labor, told Axios. In their place, unskilled jobs in health care...

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday announced a dramatic drop in state income tax revenue of $2.8 billion, which he says will prompt him to revise his 2019-20 budget and reconsider spending on schools, health care and repairs to roads and bridges. Cuomo, a Democrat, blamed the shortfall on a federal tax plan backed by Republican President Donald Trump. Cuomo said the law's cap on deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 was to blame and suggested it is, anecdotally, triggering high-earners to leave New York. “At this point there is no doubt that the budget we...