Free Republic

Zion Williamson is about to get paid. Long before he steps on an NBA court, the projected No. 1 overall pick in June's NBA draft is expected to land a sneaker endorsement deal that will make him far richer than his first NBA contract will. In fact, many in the sneaker industry expect that Williamson's eventual deal will make him one of the three highest-paid rookie sneaker endorsers ever, joining the likes of LeBron James and Kevin Durant. "In my lifetime, I think it's going to be the biggest bidding war ever done," said Sonny Vaccaro, the famed former marketing...

Morrie Tobin was in Boston to cut the deal of his life. It was early April last year. A few weeks before, federal agents had descended on the multimillion-dollar home Tobin shares with his wife and some of their six children in Hancock Park, a moneyed Los Angeles enclave. Warrant in hand, the agents searched the French chateau-style mansion for financial records and other evidence to nail Tobin, the suspected ringleader of a stock scam that defrauded investors of millions of dollars. The raid imploded Tobin’s very comfortable life. Faced with the prospect of years in prison and a seven-figure...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched his presidential campaign in Brooklyn, New York Saturday, declaring his bid is the best shot at beating President Donald Trump in 2020.

Another scandal for the "scandal-free" Obama administration. Not all ICE targets work construction or smuggle drugs. Some are key figures in the Dem machine. But the era of Obama corruption is over. There's a new sheriff in town. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this week arrested two millionaire fugitives from Ecuador whose family donated heavily to American political campaigns. Roberto and William Isaías, 74 and 75, were detained Wednesday in Miami and taken to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation, The New York Times reported Friday. ICE told the Times that the brothers were “unlawfully present” in...

ALBANY — A millionaire walks into the State Capitol and says, “Raise my taxes.” Please. This was no joke: The millionaire was Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive who is the chairman of Patriotic Millionaires, a group dedicated to pushing for higher taxes on businesses and the ultrarich. Testifying on Tuesday at a state budget hearing, Mr. Pearl asked a bipartisan group of about half a dozen legislators to create a new “multimillionaire’s tax” on households earning more than $5 million a year in order to fund new affordable housing, infrastructure and schools. “I’m a person of some means. I...

George H.W. Bush, the 41st U.S. president and father of the 43rd president George W. Bush, died on November 30, 2018, at the age of 94. He passed away less than eight months after his wife, former first lady Barbara Bush, died at the age of 92. The former president will lie in state in U.S. Capitol from Monday to Wednesday. There will be a state funeral for George H.W. Bush on Wednesday at the Washington National Cathedral, and a memorial service for the former president will be held on Thursday in Houston. He will be laid to rest at...

RUSH: Bob McNair, the owner of the Houston Texans, passed away on Friday, I believe. I only met him one time on the golf course. I didn’t know him at all. He had been battling melanoma and I think leukemia for 20 years. Two or three years ago they thought that he had gone into remission and was cancer free. But he succumbed to the disease. He was 81. He was a genuinely self-made guy. He was born in Tampa and arrived in Houston with 700 bucks in his pocket. This is a true story. He got to Houston during...

There's a new film financier around town: the unapologetic Trump-loving, born-again Christian conservative founder of My Pillow, who is sure to stand out in Hollywood.... Michael Lindell invested $1 million into a new film from the makers behind 'God's Not Dead,' and plans to keep spending on projects that fit his message. His investment amounts to one-sixth the entire production budget of Unplanned, which comes from some of the same filmmakers who were behind God's Not Dead and I Can Only Imagine, a couple of Christian films that did well at the box office, earning $61 million and $84 million,...

Brett Kavanaugh's main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has raised nearly $1 million from two GoFundMe accounts, and she's asking for more, according to an article by RealClearInvestigations. Ford is also fielding offers for a book deal. All of this despite Democrats making a big deal during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings that she had "nothing to gain" from coming forward.

Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million. And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times.

**SNIP** “The big thing [with homeowners] in the Hamptons is that if somebody has it, they [all] want it,” said Chris Cosban, a Long Island contractor who installs panic rooms in the area’s mansions. His company, Covert Interiors, charges between $25,000 and $200,000 for a standard space. (High-tech add-ons, such as fingerprint recognition, cost extra.) “There is a wow factor,” he said. “They like to brag about it.” Herman Weisberg, managing director of the personal-security firm Sage Intelligence Group, said many of his clients look at their panic rooms like amenity spaces — doubling as home theaters, wine cellars or...

The celebrity columnist died last night in Cabo San Lucas at age 76 after suffering a second stroke. His "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was syndicated for over a decade, starting in 1984 and helped launch Entertainment Tonight. Don't miss the brief appearance of OUR FAVORITE GUY at second 22 in Leach's video intro for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Memories..! Fair winds and following seas, friend...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s personal income has risen substantially since she entered the Senate in 2013, according to 10 years of tax return documents her campaign released Wednesday. The Massachusetts Democrat and her husband, Harvard Law School professor Bruce Mann, earned a combined adjusted gross income of nearly $5.4 million from 2013 to 2017, according to their tax returns — a 42 percent increase from the couple’s combined income of almost $3.8 million in the five years prior to Warren’s ascension to Congress. Warren earned over half of the couple’s combined income during those years, even without counting her Senate salary....

It was a little report, one you might easily have missed, from the people at Fidelity Investments: The number of people with more than a million dollars in their 401(k) is soaring. Bad news for the economics of envy. Fidelity says that the number of people at the end of the second quarter with a million dollars or more in their Fidelity 401(k) surged by 50,000 to 168,000, a 42% gain. Fidelity has 16.1 million 401(k) accounts under management, with an average balance of $104,000, up 6.4% from a year ago. "Individuals are increasing their savings rates, they're taking advantage...

The corporate media has overwhelmingly praised Barack Obama’s speech in Johannesburg on Tuesday at an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, calling it an “impassioned” defense of democracy, tolerance, equality and the liberal capitalist world order established after World War II. The reports have singled out Obama’s muted and indirect criticisms of Donald Trump’s “strongman politics” and the “utter loss of shame among political leaders” who are “caught in a lie and just double down and lie some more.” No notice is being taken in the press reports of two points in the rambling, 90-minute...

An African-American millionaire and his Manhattan consultant son were victims of a July 4th hate crime in their hotel room during a Florida vacation. A racist creep apparently snuck into Frank and Michael Davis’ room at the upscale Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota and left a 2-by-5 post-it note reading, “You’re a N—-R.” After returning to their sixth-floor room from breakfast, the Davises found the sickening message placed on a globe-shaped bedside lamp. “I was stone cold for 30 to 40 seconds when I read the note,” Michael Davis, 27, a consultant for a financial firm, told The Post. “My...

According to new research released by Charles Varner, associate director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, California lost an estimated 138 high-income individuals following passage of the Proposition 30 income tax increase championed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and approved by Golden State voters in 2012. This new research by Varner updates a previous paper released six years ago that looked at domestic migration to and from California following a 2004 income tax hike. “One reason we wanted to update our previous paper is that this tax change in 2012 is the largest state tax change that we...

Millennials expect to make it big some day, with more than half reporting that they believe they will eventually become millionaires, according to a new study. Despite having crushing student loans (20 percent never expect to pay them off), credit card and other debt, people born between 1982 and 2000 share a confidence when it comes to their financial outlook. 'Young people are optimistic about the future,' said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist for TD Ameritrade, in a statement on the company's new report. 'On average, survey respondents expect to land a job in their chosen field and be completely financially...

Tracking the rich has become a voyeuristic global industry, a form of celebrity worship. But it can also provide serious clues about where countries are headed. When a country begins to fall into economic and political difficulty, wealthy people are often the first to ship their money to safer havens abroad. The rich don’t always emigrate along with their money, but when they do, it is an even more telling sign of trouble. Since 2013, New World Wealth, a research outfit based in South Africa, has been tracking millionaire migrations by culling property records, visa programs, news media reports and...

Soaking the rich is good politics but bad economics. Millions of Americans are beginning to see the fruits of the federal tax overhaul passed in December, with higher take-home pay, bonuses, and a stronger job market. However, these good times could soon end in some left-leaning states that are considering raising their income taxes. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maine may soon place surtaxes on “millionaires,” via legislation in the Garden State and ballot measures in the others. To proponents of larger government and greater state-level redistribution, raising rates on “fat cats” is a perfect way to fund more Medicaid and...