Free Republic

If Joe Biden is successful in passing his massive capital gains tax rate hike, Americans in 11 states will next year be paying over 50 percent of some of the profits when they sell off their assets to the government. The president's 2025 budget proposal includes increasing the top marginal rate on long-term capital gains dividends to 44.6 percent mark, which is the highest ever since the tax was implemented a century ago. The current rate sits below 25 percent - so the increase represents a significant hike.

A high-level U.N. panel .. made a series of sweeping recommendations aimed at reforming the global financial system, which includes the implementation of an international corporate tax rate. The High-Level Panel for International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI) said a 20% to 30% global corporate tax on profits would “help limit incentives against profit shifting, tax competition and a race to the bottom.” The panel recommends the creation of a body that collects and disseminates data about corporate profits, where the assets of multinational corporations are located, as well as which entities own them,...

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...

Mrs Yattara leads me to her boss, Mr Kante. He has an office all to himself, and offers me a seat... a seat from which I can hardly see him. Tax rule books and copies of Finance Ministry decrees are piled into turrets all around his desk. He asks me questions about my expenses as a freelance journalist. It's unnerving because he is writing things down but I can't see what. Mr Kante ''You have the choice between two income tax regimens, 30% or 3%, which shall it be?'' ''Oh well... err 3%?'' I venture. ''Three per cent it is,"...

It sounds like these professors graduated from the redistributive school of economics.Christopher White of the College Fix reports. Ninety percent income tax rate would help the rich, economics professors claim Opposing economist asks why disincentives in carbon tax wouldn’t apply to income taxEconomists at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Bonn argue that the United States would be better off if well-heeled citizens paid the kind of high tax rates not seen since the Eisenhower administration.According to a working paper by Bonn’s Fabian Kindermann and Penn’s Dirk Krueger published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, going back...

As many Democrats attack companies that take advantage of corporate tax inversions, former President Bill Clinton expressed sympathy for them. “Like it or not, this inversion, this is their money,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview during the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. When asked whether inversions — the practice of American companies acquiring a small overseas rival and reincorporating abroad to lower their tax bills — are unpatriotic, as many critics say, Mr. Clinton said that publicly traded companies, in particular, “feel duty bound to pay the lowest taxes they can pay.” “I should make full disclosure here,”...

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute noticed a very revealing moment in President Obama’s Thursday interview with CNBC’s Steve Liesman: STEVE LIESMAN: Mr. President, I just want to pivot back one more time to domestic issues.  You’ve said a bunch of times that getting the wealthy to pay a little bit more, and you’ve succeeded in raising that top tax rate to 39% or rolling back the tax cuts. Is there a limit there?  Is there a limit to how much you believe the government should take from an individual in terms of a top tax rate? PRESIDENT OBAMA:...

tennis star Serena Williams thinks France's top 75 percent income tax rate "doesn't seem legal." On the CBS Late Show Thursday, Williams took her criticism further telling host David Letterman that although she loves the city and spends a great deal of her time there, "I don't live in Paris. You know, they have that new tax rule which is like 75" ... So Williams won't live in Paris because of the taxes, but she would have voted for the tax-hiking Barack

Obama: Americans voted for tax hikes on rich By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 5 hrs ago Claiming a mandate from his election romp over Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama announced on Friday that he had invited congressional leaders to the White House next week for talks on how to steer the battered economy away from a "fiscal cliff." Obama said he was open to compromise with Republicans—but that any final deal needed to raise taxes on the richest Americans. "This was a central question during the election," the president said in brief remarks in the East...

With their non-stop utterance of “create new jobs”, politicians and their enablers in the commentariat seemingly suffer from a verbal form of Tourette’s. Though both professions are almost to a man oblivious to the truth that the quickest path to slow job creation lies in attempts to create them, we can at least say their hearts are in the right place. Back in the real world, logic and empirical reality tell us that the best way to create jobs is to ruthlessly destroy them. Producing more with less in the way of human labor input is the definition of productivity,...

Taxes: Mitt Romney's admission that his effective tax rate is around 15% prompted the usual class warfare rage from the left. But it also prompted news reports to repeat several myths about the country's income tax code. As CNN put it in the first paragraph of its story, Romney's 15% tax rate means "the multimillionaire pays a smaller percentage of taxes on his income than many middle-income Americans." This is a favorite canard of the left these days - that the super-rich often pay taxes at lower rates than do struggling middle-class families. It was propelled by Warren Buffett, who...

Media reports in recent weeks say that Senate Democrats are considering a 3% surtax on income over $1 million to raise federal revenues. This would come on top of the higher income tax rates that President Obama has already proposed through the cancellation of the Bush era tax-rate reductions. If the Democrats' millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That's more than double the...

....Seventy-eight percent of likely California voters support a 1 percent increase in the income tax rate for Californians earning more than $500,000 a year, according to the poll, which was conducted by Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin and sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers. .....The teachers union is looking to partner with other labor groups to put the tax before voters in November. Such a measure would need approval from two-thirds of voters. The measure is seen as a "sweetener" to lure more voters to the polls should there be another measure on the ballot in the fall asking voters...

Chicago If you thought California had the ugliest budget outlook in America, think again. California's deficit is at $21 billion, or roughly 20%, of the state budget. But in Illinois, the budget deficit of $15 billion is greater than 40% of the state's annual revenues. To close that hole, the legislature in Springfield, controlled by Democrats and led by the all-powerful Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, is now convened in an emergency lame duck session. On Thursday night, Gov. Pat Quinn and leaders in the house and senate agreed on a plan that they'll vote on as soon as...

I thought that there was nothing worse than a U.S. president bowing to a foreign power. President Barry Hussein Soetoro did it at least twice. Once to the Saudi King Abdullah then to the Japanese Emperor Akihito But wait there is something worst. The president and Democrats are spatting like little kids. It seems at his very first attempt to work bi-partisanly with Republicans and Democrats are having none of it. Democrats cursed Soetoro as if he was George W. Bush and threatened to derail Soetoro’s effort. In an apparent, panic Obama called in moral authority that he doesn’t have....

Legalized RobberyCollecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. ~ Calvin Coolidge By: Larry Walker The question of the day: Why is making $250,000 a year suddenly considered wealthy? The Obama's made $5.5 million last year. Is that wealthy?Contrary to popular belief, $250,000 in 2010 had the same buying power as $20,722 in 1926. Annual inflation over this period was 3.01%. An income of $250,000, adjusted for inflation, would have placed a taxpayer in an 11% tax bracket in 1926. In order to have been considered in the top tax bracket back then, in today's dollars, would have...

The Wall Street Journal reports, House Health Bill Slaps 5.4% Tax on Top Earners. The Tax Foundation calculates that adding this surcharge to existing taxes would raise the top tax rate to over 50 percent in 39 states. Click on the link to find out where your state stands in their ranking. I believe the relevant marginal tax rate is even higher than the Tax Foundation suggests. Their calculations seem to ignore sales taxes, which are significant in many states. Because income earned will eventually be spent and thus subject to sales taxes, sales tax rates need to be combined...

  If Sweden was a U.S. state, how rich would it be?  Two Swedish economists recently published a study that asks how European countries would fare if suddenly admitted into the American union. The results? If the UK, France, or Italy became U.S. states, they would rank as the fifth poorest of the fifty, ahead only of Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia, and Mississippi. The richest EU country—Ireland—would be the 13th poorest. Sweden would be the 6th poorest. In fact, the study found that 40% of all Swedish households would classify as low-income in the U.S.  This means that poorer...

Middle Class Said To Pay Higher Tax Rate Than Heinz Kerry And KerryMon Oct 11 2004 10:22:17 ET Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, writes in the WALL STREET JOURNAL on Monday: "According to the Kerrys' own tax records, and they have not released all of them, the couple had a combined income of $6.8 million in income last year and paid $725,000 in income taxes. That means their effective tax rate was a whopping 12.8%.... "Under the current tax system the middle class pays far more than the Kerry tax rate. In fact, the average federal tax...

...According to the Kerrys' own tax records, and they have not released all of them, the couple had a combined income of $6.8 million in income last year and paid $725,000 in income taxes. That means their effective tax rate was a whopping 12.8%. And it was all (presumably) done legally. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not against people paying a 12.8% tax rate. Far from it. I just believe that all Americans -- even those who can't afford to hire tax attorneys to set up complicated trusts and find legal ways to stash income in other tax-sheltered investments...