Free Republic

Justice for Taylor Swift! Yeah, now that's a cause that your average working American can get behind. And it is also a cause taken up by presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren which has resulted in widespread mockery. Okay, the mockery hasn't quite reached the levels inspired by the reaction to her hyping of a DNA test last year that revealed that Warren is maybe 1/1024 Native American but it is up there. Warren tweeted her support for Swift in the multi-millionaire's contractual dispute with other millionaires that we should somehow care about as reported by Variety on Saturday in, "Elizabeth Warren Backs...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signaled that she is open to a universal basic income – an idea that has been championed by fellow presidential contender Andrew Yang (D). Warren expressed her willingness to consider a UBI, which quite literally amounts to the government handing individuals and families a “basic” income per month regardless of employment or income status, in a Washington Post survey that asked, “Should the federal government pay a universal basic income to every American adult?

The Stop Warren Primary Democrats reap the radical disaster they sowed. Tue Nov 19, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 37 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. The Democrat 2020 primaries started around stopping Trump, now they’re about stopping Warren. Senator Elizabeth Warren has the worst poll performance of any of the front runners. She’s radical, abrasive, and she’s alienating the money people whom the Democrats need to win national elections. Too bad that Warren is exactly what they deserve. Radical parties get radical nominees....

... This year, American workers and their employers owe a combined 12.4 percent on Social Security payroll taxes for income up to $132,900 (rising to $137,700 in 2020). They owe nothing on earnings above that level. Some Democrats in the thick of the presidential race and on Capitol Hill now seek to change or eliminate that cap — potentially placing a new double-digit tax on high earners, with several plans focusing on earnings above $250,000. ... The result would be a large tax increase on high earners, even before other changes a Democratic administration might contemplate, such as increasing income...

Every single plausible Democratic candidate for president has endorsed tax increases as centerpieces of their economic agenda. Think about what we are hearing from Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and the rest of the Punch and Judy Show. New wealth taxes, carbon taxes, energy taxes, higher death and income taxes with rates up to 70%. Payroll taxes would rise to pay for Social Security benefit expansions and Medicare for All. I remember a time when liberal Michael Dukakis, when running against George H.W. Bush, declared he would only raise taxes as “a last resort.” Now Democrats think raising taxes...

Get ready for the debate of the century — and we’re not talking about the Democratic primaries. That is, get ready if New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has the cojones to face off against a very angry FedEx CEO Fred Smith. The NYT ran an analysis of FedEx’s taxes and accused the company of lobbying for the big tax reform of 2017 on the basis of increasing investment in the US economy — and then reneging on the promise: In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing....

FedEx CEO Frederick Smith has challenged the publisher of The New York Times as well as the paper's business editor to a public debate after the Times reported that the company paid $0 in federal taxes in 2018. In a statement Sunday, Smith argued that the Times's report, published earlier in the day, was "distorted and factually incorrect" and ignored the "$6 billion of capital" that FedEx supposedly "invested in the U.S. economy" in 2018. "I hereby challenge A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times and the business section editor to a public debate in Washington, DC with me...

With few exceptions, states are losing the battle with aging bridges in need of repair or replacement. Even states with low percentages of bridges rated poor are finding it difficult to keep up with bridge and road systems that in many cases are 50 years old or older. Utah, which ranks fourth for the lowest percentage of poor bridges, programs a bridge for repair or replacement in the year after it drops to a poor rating, completing the project within four or five years. The Utah Department of Transportation notes, though, that the number of bridges falling from good to...

This week the the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced new rules requiring insurers and hospitals to inform patients of the cost of 300 common procedures and tests before the patient agrees to undergo them. Insurance companies and hospitals complain that the push for full disclosure goes too far. Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren agreed. “Consumers aren’t competent to decide which procedures or tests they need,” she contended. “Forcing providers to quote prices to them asks these simple people to make judgments they aren’t qualified to make. This is the exact opposite direction from...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here. She wants a 59% top income tax rate and to tax unrealized capital gains yearly, including real estate and business holdings.

... Name a tax and there’s a way to reduce it, delay it or not ever really pay it, if you have the right adviser. Upset that the 2017 tax act took away your deduction for state and local taxes in New York? Change your residence to Florida, as President Trump recently did, and those taxes are gone. Don’t want to pay capital gains tax? Well, you can decide when to sell those investments. If you need the money, you could borrow against the account and leave the capital gains taxes for another day. And if you die still holding...

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has unveiled sweeping tax proposals that would push federal tax rates on some billionaires and multimillionaires above 100%. That prospect raises questions for taxpayers and the broader economy that experts are starting to ponder: Under which circumstances would taxpayers have to pay those rates? How might that change their behavior? And would investment and economic growth suffer? Potential tax rates over 100% could result from the combination of tax increases the Massachusetts senator proposes for the very top tier of investors. She wants to return the top income-tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, impose a...

EBay Inc., the online auction company with 180 million buyers around the world, earned $34 million of profit in Florida in 2014, according to state auditors. At Florida’s official corporate income tax rate of 5.5 percent, eBay should have paid more than $1.8 million in state taxes -- enough money to hire 40 new teachers. But records show eBay actually paid $18,810 -- not even enough to hire one. It’s not an isolated example. Auditors say Sanofi Pasteur Inc., one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers, earned an estimated $55 million of profits in Florida between 2008 and 2013 --...

With a laundry list of tax hikes proposed by Congress or Democratic candidates for president, it's understandable why many would view Washington as the biggest threat to taxpayers’ wallets. However, policymakers at the state and local level are just as likely to reach into taxpayers’ pockets as those in Washington, D.C. Take Election Day 2019, which featured nearly 1,000 tax and fiscal ballot measures.  Publicly-accessible data from secretaries of state and county election offices found 954 measures across 19 different states and hundreds of localities, most of which were negative measures that would impact taxpayers and businesses. There were at...

Forget whether the math works. (It doesn’t.) Expecting billionaires to pay for all the nice things is bad for democracy. One of the more exhausting rituals of presidential campaign season is the effort to make every new proposal “add up.” Sure, it’s better that politicians try to come up with a plan to pay for their wish lists. The problem is that the explanations are often a disguise that make the impossible seem possible, even practical. Fake budgets are the tribute that pandering pays to pragmatism. You could confiscate the wealth of every billionaire and centimillionaire in the country and...

The Democratic candidates for President are promising a smorgasbord of new taxes, but why wait until 2021? Last week Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and Virginia Congressman Don Beyer unveiled the Millionaires Surtax Act, a plan to soak the top 0.2%. The bill would put an extra 10% tax on individual income above $1 million, or $2 million for married couples. This surtax would apply regardless of the income’s source—whether from long-term capital gains, currently taxed at a top rate of 20%, or wages, taxed at rates up to 37%. The legislation’s backers say it would raise $635 billion over...

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took aim at current presidential candidate Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed method of financing free health care for all. “The goal is the right goal, but I don’t think taxing the hell out of the rich is the way to go,” Clinton said. “We’ve already seen Bill Gates threaten to vote for Donald Trump if we try to tax him too much. I don’t think he’s an outlier. The rich are major donors to the Democratic Party. We need to find other sources of the funds needed.” “From my own experience, it seems to...

President Trump’s recently announced adoption of Florida as his home state over his native New York follows a rich tradition of high-profile financiers who have ditched northeastern states for warmer climes with lower taxes. ... In 2017, Connecticut’s top 100 filers, out of a base of 1.8 million, paid $1.13 billion in income taxes, the equivalent of 12% of the state’s income-tax revenue for fiscal year 2018. New Jersey and Connecticut tax officials said it is too early for state revenue data to show whether the 2017 tax law Mr. Trump signed imposing a $10,000 cap on state and local...

As he travels the state with top administrators from the Maryland Department of Transportation, Secretary Pete K. Rahn hears a frequent plea from business leaders, environmentalists and the public — expand bus and rail options, so travelers don’t have to be so dependent on their cars. Rahn has a ready response for transit advocates: Under Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R), Maryland is spending more on transit than at any other time. “We’re at 42 percent of the state [transportation] trust fund going to transit already, with 3 percent of the revenues coming from transit,” Rahn told a reporter in...

For more than 25 years, the Federal government has let the Highway Trust Fund, the source of money for Federal infrastructure projects, lose it's purchasing power. That's because the gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel fuel since 1993. While construction costs have increased 125% since 2003, funding has not. Instead of waiting for Washington to get it together, states have taken it upon themselves to fund their own infrastructure projects. Since 2013, 31 states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation that will increase or may increase overall...