Free Republic

Bernie SandersÂ’ tax plan would impose annual tax rates of well over 100% on the richest 400 Americans, according to his economic advisers, mostly through his new wealth tax. The idea that the federal government should take more from the very wealthy than they earn in a year is a policy innovation, one the Democratic candidate has advanced as part of a sweeping anti-inequality platform. Critics, however, argue that it's unrealistic and would harm the economy by reversing billionaires' incentives to innovate and invest. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the Berkeley economists who've advised Sanders on his wealth tax plan...

A growing number of Senate Democrats say Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) should be more explicit about how she plans to pay for her “Medicare for All” plan. They say the transparency will be rewarded, and that Warren is taking a risk by not being more open about the costs of Medicare for All. “There are pluses and minuses to Medicare for All. You have to be direct about the fact that there are certain consequences of it that will affect people differently. The more you can be transparent about it, I think it’s important,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who...

Eric Pinchet, author of a French tax guide, estimates the wealth tax earns the government about $2.6 billion a year but has cost the country more than $125 billion in capital flight since 1998.

Not that long ago there was a broad political consensus that a fair and economically efficient tax system has a broad tax base and low tax rates. The grand bargain was no special interest loopholes and low tax rates to boost the economy and jobs. As recently as the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans alike joined together to pass a tax reform that lowered income tax rates to 28 percent, while eliminating deductions and carve outs. Nearly every Senate Democrat, including Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, and Howard Metzenbaum, voted for this new tax system. It worked. SNIP...

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley are advising Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and drawing generous media attention for their assertion that the U.S. tax system is flat—that the middle class and poor pay as great a share of their income in taxes as the rich. They’re wrong, and three huge mistakes underlie their analysis. The biggest mistake is to focus on gross, not net, taxes. They ignore transfer payments, like Social Security, which are disproportionately paid to the poor. In doing so, they mistake language for economics. To see the problem, consider a simple...

Never underestimate the government’s ability to be terrible. Let’s see what’s happening in the great state of New Jersey, shall we?

Americans were “treated” to yet another excruciating round of #DemDebates on Tuesday. Lower-tier candidates had no qualms showcasing how desperate they are to lead the pack, criticizing frontrunners like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for having ideas…not too different than their own. For example, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.), South Bend, Indiana Mayor Peter Buttigieg, and Andrew Yang each have their own gimmicky big-government proposals.  But, for all the different specifics, there’s one common theme: pain and suffering for taxpayers. The candidates can conjure up all the statistical pyrotechnics that they want, but at the end of the day, working-class Americans will...

Most Americans have to work to earn a living. But the rich are different: They get most of their income not from labor but from what they own — companies, stocks, real estate and the like. These income-generating assets are what economists call capital. And because capital is heavily concentrated among the rich, the U.S. government taxed earnings derived from capital at a higher rate than earnings made through labor for the entirety of the 20th century. But that’s no longer the case, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley. In their...

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang slammed Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) proposed wealth tax because it has been tested and repealed in other countries.“A wealth tax makes a lot of sense in principle. The problem is that it’s been tried in Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden and all those countries ended up repealing it because it had massive implementation problems and did not generate the revenue that they projected," Yang said during the presidential debate on Tuesday evening in Ohio."If we can't learn from the failed experiences of other countries, what can we learn from? We should not be looking to other countries'...

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Southbend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg criticized Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) during Tuesday evening’s debate over her refusal to admit that her Medicare for All plan would require an increase in middle class taxes. “Let me be clear on this. Costs will go up for the wealthy. They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down,” Warren said when asked if her proposal would require an increase in middle class taxes. “I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families.” The...

Her gun control, made public in August on Medium, shows Warren believes the current ten percent excise tax on firearms is too low. She wants to raise that tax to 30 percent while increasing the tax on ammunition to 50 percent. Because excise taxes are paid directly by the consumer–the taxes are added to the price of the goods–this means a $500 gun would immediately cost $515 and the price for a $20 box of ammo would immediately rise to $30.

Last November, Democrats hailed California voters' rejection of Proposition 6, a law to scrap the state's 2017 massive gas taxes. They crowed that Californians were glad to pay five bucks at the pump when the rest of the U.S. average was half that. Big reason? Because $3 billion of those takings would save the state's tumbledown highways and go to repair roads and bridges.

This week at CNN’s “Equality Town Hall” inspired several of the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential contenders to advocate some bad ideas. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke vowed to “strip tax-exempt status from any religious organization that refuses to recognize gay marriage. In fact, this will be one of my top priorities as president. The Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is just as valid as a traditional marriage between a man and a woman. No one has a constitutional right to oppose this. Any who do must be punished. Imposing taxes on churches and siccing the IRS after them...

Senate Democrats plan to force a vote to repeal a recent ruling regarding the controversial $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, imposed under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Ben Cardin announced on Thursday that they would use a disapproval resolution under the Congressional Review Act to “force a majority-threshold vote” on a measure to repeal IRS rules that block a SALT cap workaround. Specifically, the vote will be on “a resolution to repeal the IRS rule that prohibits states and local governments from protecting residents from ‘double taxation’ of their...

The only way that rich people could pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax would be by selling enough stock to get the money to pay the tax. This would drive down stock prices, and would hurt every single middle class person who has a pension, a 401K, or an IRA. Billionaires don’t just have billions of dollars in cash just sitting around, waiting to pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax.For example, the richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos, the guy who created amazon. 99.9% of his wealth is in the form of stock in the...

It’s not just federal tax changes that drive residents from high- to low-income tax states – turns out hiking statewide taxes on the wealthy drives them out in droves, too. A new study published on Monday showed that when California raised its income tax rates it caused a “substantial one-time out-migration response” among wealthy residents, who left for lower-tax destinations. The study looked at increases to state income tax rates approved by California voters in Nov. 2012 (Propoisition 30) of one to three percentage points for upper-income households. It raised the top marginal tax rate to 13.3 percent for incomes...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey showing that Americans spent more on taxes in 2018 than on food, clothing and health care combined was hailed by Democratic presidential contender Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “proof that socialism works and that the transition to a centrally directed economy will be relatively painless.” The combined payments the average American consumer unit made in 2018 for five categories of taxes—federal income taxes, Social Security taxes, state and local income taxes, property taxes; and other taxes was $18,617. In 2013, the average American consumer unit paid a combined $13,327 for the same...

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...

This November, Proposition CC will ask Colorado voters to permanently lift the spending limits in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, but the political stakes embedded in the question are even more consequential. The ballot question represents the most significant overhaul to TABOR since voters approved the constitutional provision in 1992, and serves as a test case for a broader Democratic effort to overhaul how the state levies taxes and spends money. If voters approve Prop. CC, Democratic leaders and their allies believe it would give them momentum for a broader agenda to revamp property tax rates, increase taxes for key...

WASHINGTON (Nexstar) — In recent years we’ve seen the craft beer industry grow from a handful of breweries in major cities to thousands of smaller, artisanal breweries spread across all 50 states. Brewers said the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act (passed in 2017) has helped with that growth. But those tax breaks expire this year, and advocates want Congress to act fast. **SNIP** Cheston is one of nearly 7,000 craft brewers in the United States, who along with beer lovers, raised a glass after Congress passed the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act 2 years ago. Jim...