Free Republic

As part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Republicans capped the state and local tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000. This was an important provision as it helped offset revenue losses in the least harmful way possible. Most tax-reform advocates recognize that the SALT deduction is wasteful, inefficient, and regressive. This is why Reagan tried to eliminate it as part of the 1986 tax reforms. Nonpartisan advocates of tax reform should be celebrating RepublicansÂ’ recent success in chipping away at it.This has not stopped some Democratic partisans from framing the SALT-deduction cap as part of a sinister plan...

Despite simplification measures passed in last year’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the American tax code remains bloated. Decades of explosive growth in the tax code have overburdened taxpayers when filing season comes around. And while increasing the standard deduction and cutting the Alternative Minimum Tax, as TCJA did, will decrease the compliance burden on many Americans, much work remains to be done.A new proposal from three legal scholars in Politico, however, neglects to address the fundamental problem of a convoluted tax code when it comes to making tax filing easier. The authors propose that the IRS pre-fill everyone’s tax forms...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., will introduce legislation Wednesday aimed at making the nation's largest companies accountable to employees and their local communities, not just shareholders. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Warren said companies in the late 20th Century started operating in a way that made them slaves to shareholders. "That shift has had a tremendous effect on the economy," she wrote. "In the early 1980s, large American companies sent less than half their earnings to shareholders, spending the rest on their employees and other priorities." "But between 2007 and 2016, large American companies dedicated 93% of their...

Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com, Of all Donald Trump’s many sins against the Great Church of the Transnational Leftist Establishment, his greatest may be his stubborn refusal to subordinate the needs of the normal citizens of the United States to the dogmas of our alleged betters. He rejects the secular civic religion of our betters, one that urges the sacrifice of regular folk’s interests on the altar of their self-regard and cheesy self-interest. Trump is a heretic, a blasphemer, and it’s no surprise they want to burn him at the stake. Horrors! He demands that the Europeans fund...

Late last summer, and with great fanfare, Xcel Energy announced its proposal to close the Comanche I & II power units in Pueblo a decade ahead of schedule. They offered as replacement the euphemistically titled “Colorado Energy Plan” , a massive $2.5 billion fuel-switching scheme to move its Colorado customers away from baseload, reliable hydrocarbons in favor of intermittent renewables. ... the Minneapolis-based monopoly utility will force captive ratepayers to cough up at least another $287 million. That’s on top of the modeling errors we already found in their accounting, and Xcel acknowledged. In other words, ratepayers will pay higher...

The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing...

Other People’s Money: The Left-wing establishment press has found a new Democratic darling — avowed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose running for Congress in New York City — but to be honest, the party has been trending that way for years. The evidence can be found in the way blue states have been run — into the ground, financially speaking. Several of them are facing massive debt thanks to mostly over-promised pensions approved by Democrats that have drained state bank accounts and are set to saddle taxpayers living in them with hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes.

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was asked a simple question that any politician worth his salt would hit out of the park for a home run. How was she going to pay for the trillions of dollars in spending for all the free stuff she was proposing? Daily Caller: "This is an excellent, excellent question," she replied.  "I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week – I can't believe I can say that, it's really weird – But one of the things that we saw is, if people pay...

NEW HAVEN — More disappointing news for the city. Fitch has downgraded the city’s credit rating on the heels of a similar downgrade Wednesday from S&P Global Retings as New Haven gets ready to sell bonds around Aug. 2. Fitch downgraded the rating from A- to BBB, with a negative outlook from stable. S&P gave the city a BBB+ rating with a negative outlook. The new bonds are $58,030,000 to finance city and school projects and $160 million in refunding bonds, which will be used for debt service savings and to cover an estimated $15 million fiscal year 2018 deficit....

Sen. Elizabeth Warren made an amateur mistake on CNBC on Monday when she gave real answers to a reporter’s questions. The appearance should have been an easy media score as the questioner was John Harwood, a journalist who famously fawned over President Obama’s ability to swat a fly in a 2009 interview. It did not go well, though, as Warren explained why she wants to overturn the Trump tax cuts.

New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey are suing the federal government claiming that "the tax cut legislation unconstitutionally punishes states who choose to impose high tax rates. By limiting the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from income that is taxed at the federal level the legislation impedes our ability to shift some of the tax burden onto other states as has been the custom since federal income tax was implemented in 1916." While there is nothing in the original Constitution or in any of the Amendments suggesting that federal taxes must allow deductions for...

Never short on ideas for things to tax, lawmakers in New Jersey are considering a tax on tap water. The proposal is being floated by State Sen. Bob Smith D-Middlesex, who is trying to say it's not actually a tax but a 'user fee'. "It is a user fee based on volume," Smith told Fox 5's Chasing New Jersey.

The Constitution Does not Mandate Deduction of State Taxes. Four high-tax blue states — New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey — have filed suit against the federal government over the recent tax reform. Specifically, they object to its limitation on the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Under federal tax law, filers are allowed to deduct property taxes (the local part) and either state income or sales taxes. But under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), the SALT deduction is now capped at $10,000. This deduction had been particularly valuable in high-tax, high-house-price states such as California...

Some nonprofit groups will no longer have to give the IRS the names of donors who give them $5,000 or more. Among the groups that will no longer have to report donors are the National Rifle Association, various chambers of commerce, and groups focused on particular issues, such as Americans for Prosperity, which has been closely associated with the Koch brothers. But the ruling also applies to groups like the NAACP, labor unions and volunteer fire departments. Huh? Why the headline focus on the NRA, then? The headline could have just as easily read "NAACP and some other nonprofits" or...

Leo Hickman, the founder of Classy Hippie Tea Company, has been in business for seven years. Hickman said under the current economy, “there is monetary value, even if you are losing” because Trump “just put in tax breaks for owners,” the American Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that can be written off. The American Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in December and will have some benefits to small business owners. The National Federation of Independent Business  says small business owners will be able to file as “pass through entities,” which allows owners to file and pay as an individual. In addition,...

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WPVI) -- Pennsylvania's highest court is upholding Philadelphia's tax on sweetened drinks, rejecting a challenge to the soda tax by merchants and the beverage industry. The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday the 1.5-cent-per-ounce levy is aimed at distributors and dealer-level transactions and does not illegally duplicate another existing tax.

The lawsuit from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland amounted to their latest bid to fight the limit on state and local tax (SALT) deductions imposed by the GOP-authored tax plan. "The federal government is hell-bent on using New York as a piggy bank to pay for corporate tax cuts and I will not stand for it," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running for re-election and is considered a possible 2020 presidential candidate, said in a statement. The tax law signed last year caps those SALT tax deductions at $10,000. The deduction is especially popular in high-tax,...

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) is renewing his call for President Trump to release his tax returns after the president's controversial press conference with Russian leader Vladimir Putin this week. Sanford told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa on Tuesday that he doesn’t know if Putin has any compromising information on Trump, but said he wants more information about Trump’s finances in light of the president's comments while standing alongside Putin the previous day. Trump's remarks during a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki were widely panned by U.S. lawmakers, with many Republicans and Democrats condemning his comments siding with Putin's...

What if the bluest state in the country stole a third of a billion dollars from victims of chicanery and the media refused to notice?    I have been stunned at the lack of media coverage of California’s foiled robbery of almost a third of a billion dollars. That’s right: under Governor Jerry Brown, the Great State of California helped itself to hundreds of millions of dollars – money that was supposed to go to home owners, and you probably didn’t hear about it. Bib Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle was one of the few to cover this...

This is actually a good news story, but only if you’re a law-abiding, taxpaying American citizen.If, however, you’re among more than a third of a million Americans in a tax delinquent category, well, then this is not a good news story.It seems Congress passed a law three years ago requiring the Internal Revenue Service to cull out Americans who have more than $51,000 in overdue back-tax debts. Then, the IRS sends those names in batches over to the State Department where they file the names to deny those folks new passports or passport renewalsEventually, they may be cancelling existing...