Free Republic

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of “tax cuts for the rich” — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then? The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that appeared...

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then? The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that...

This election is being fought along the traditional skirmish line of capital versus labor. President Obama projects himself as the protector of workers and families who are preyed upon by greedy and wealthy capitalists. Mitt Romney counters that the president doesn't understand business and that his antagonism discourages private investment and job creation. A couple of observations on the table. First, capital income doesn't flow just to "fat cats." It also goes to small businesses, retirement accounts, college endowments, ordinary shareholders, landlords and people who collect interest. Second, labor's shrinking share isn't necessarily a disaster for workers. What else is...

Senators to Unveil the ‘Ex-Patriot Act’ to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin’s Tax ‘Scheme’ Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again. In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap...

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contained a controversial article about a former partner of Mitt Romney’s at Bain Capital named Edward Conrad. Sounding a bit like the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, Conrad argues, forcefully, that we are all better off because of rich people. Rich people, Conrad says, do most of the saving and investing. They provide the capital that creates new businesses and industries, finances inventions and discoveries, and are willing to take many risks and lose a lot of money for every one that pays off spectacularly. If the rich didn’t do these things, we would all be...

President Barack Obama kicked off his re-election campaign Saturday at rallies in Ohio and Richmond, where he cast the election as a choice between policies of the past or progress, and "a make-or-break moment" for the middle class. Before a boisterous crowd of about 8,000 at Virginia Commonwealth University, in the capital of a swing state that could be key to his securing a second term, Obama said that while the nation's economy still faces headwinds, it's making progress. He presented himself as a fighter for the middle class and cast presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney as a potential president...

At a time when America desperately needs to come together, we are becoming more divided than ever. The mainstream media and most of our politicians love to pit us against one another in dozens of different ways, and right now class warfare has become one of their favorite tools for getting us to hate one another. If you are struggling in this economy, you are being told that "the wealthy" are the cause of your problems. If you have money, you are being told that the poor hate you and want to tax you into oblivion. Class warfare has already...

You gotta click the link to see the video. If anybody can get at the direct link, please post it.

One hears a lot of noise these days in and out of the Capitol about "the 1 percent" – those at the top of the income pecking order – and the moral imperative to levy higher taxes on them to support public services. The narrative from left-wing activists and their political allies is that those at the top have rapaciously gathered more wealth while the poor get poorer and those in the middle class struggle to keep afloat. We'll hear a lot more in the coming months because Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature are beating...

Obama jumps the shark with student loan jam President Obama's 'celebrity status' reached perplexing new levels last night on comedian Jimmy Fallon's comedy show last night. After watching this sketch, I think it's fair to say that he has 'jumped the shark.' Last night on the Jimmy Fallon show, Obama "slow jammed" with Jimmy Fallon and his band about his plan to freeze interest rates for student loans, criticizing filibustering Republicans for blocking his plan. Warning that the interest rates for student loans will 'double,' Obama warned that "some hard working students would be paying about $1000 extra just to...

President Barack Obama, courting young voters crucial to his reelection, told a rowdy college-age crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Tuesday that he knows first-hand about the burden of student loans because he only managed to pay his back a scant eight years ago. "Michelle and I, we've been in your shoes," Obama, who turns 51 in August, told a cheering, capacity crowd of 8,000 at Carmichael Arena. "Check this out, all right. I'm the president of the United States. We only finished paying off our student loans off about eight years ago. That wasn't...

Earlier this week Elizabeth Warren was asked by the Boston Globe a seemingly simple and straightforward question about her taxes: In 2011, did she pay the 5.85% rate (which is voluntary) on her Massachusetts state tax form? Since 2001, as I explained in a previous post, residents of the Commonwealth have had the option – if they so choose – to pay a higher tax rate than the 5.3% minimum. And since the former consumer advocate raked in more than $700,000 last year, the Globe believed their inquiry was an appropriate and reasonable one. At the time, however, she refused...

WASHINGTON - It should be clear by now that Barack Obama will not be running for a second term based on his record over the past four years. After presiding over the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression, with a wreckage of still high unemployment, reduced incomes, increased poverty and continuing home foreclosures in his wake, Obama's re-election campaign won't be running "morning in America" ads this year. The kind of campaign he will be running became clear in his campaign speech at a community college in Ohio Wednesday when he leveled this personal jab at former governor Mitt...

Republicans aren’t shy about lobbing the “class warfare” charge at Democrats. But now Newt Gingrich is aiming those words at Mitt Romney over Romney’s idea to scrap or limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes. Romney, the Republicans’ all-but-certain presidential nominee, told donors in Florida last weekend that he’d take away the deduction for high-income earners. His campaign later said it was just an idea, not a hard-and-fast policy. But Gingrich took it as gospel. “Governor Romney’s proposal to limit certain tax deductions based on income, including the deduction for mortgage interest on second homes, is a surrender to the...

“Conservatives believe in the classical American definition of fairness – that every American be treated equally under the law… “Governor Romney’s tax proposal violates that principle by giving politicians the power to carve out exceptions in the law for people of certain incomes. Furthermore, it sets the stage for future tax increases, as politicians will continually try to decrease the income threshold where citizens will no longer be able to avail themselves of the deductions.”

eXiled editor Yasha Levine still has a host of legal woes hanging over his head from being arrested while covering last November’s LAPD crackdown of OccupyLA. Turns out, those are the least of his worries at the moment. During his two-day stay in Los Angeles Metro Jail, Levine says he contracted a wicked case of scabies. Until a few days ago, I thought my scabies was just a gnarly poison oak rash that I had picked up in the Santa Monica mountains after losing the trail and having to cut through the overgrown backyards of multimillion dollar mansions. For weeks...

Reporting from Washington— Republican-led opposition blocked the 'Buffett rule' from advancing in the Senate, turning back an election year effort by President Obama to slap a new tax rate on those earning beyond $1 million a year. Nearly all Republicans voted against the measure, a potentially risky move at a time when 60% of voters support the measure, according to a recent Gallup poll, as a way to ensure wealthy Americans pay their fair share of taxes. Democrats are likely to revive the effort in coming months. “Continuing to allow some of the wealthiest Americans to use special tax breaks...

Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday. Almost to a column, editorial and news account, the analysis centered on Santorum’s somewhat successful capture of conservative voters. And there lies the mystery. How could a man seemingly so opposite of conservative have entranced so many voters who label themselves just that? The easy answer is that as someone who made his religion such a prominent part of his campaign strategy... religious types who tend toward conservatism perhaps felt they’d found their man. [...] Indeed, if we ignore for a moment how very anti-conservative it...

Here's the latest Obama class warfare shot. He is trying to show that "millionaires" should keep less of their money because it belongs to him. It's a "Buffett Rule" calculator. But, there's no calculator for multi millions in taxes due and owing to the IRS by Buffett. The Direct link is above Their email said, " No household making more than $1 million each year should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle class family pays. This is the Buffett Rule—a simple principle of tax fairness that asks everyone to pay their fair share. ABOUT...

Not since the "lost generation" of the First World War has the errors and miscalculations of their elders so disastrously affected the younger generation. Yet, today's youth seem curiously unaware of the bad hand dealt them. Witness the aimlessness of the Occupy Wall Street protest, whose cause and goal should have been clear. What enabled the young OWS protesters to camp out for months was their unemployed status. Indeed, the unemployment rate for all 16- to 24-year-olds is a stratospheric 17 percent. So jobs should have been their unambiguous and elemental cause. Instead, OWS squandered its energy on class warfare,...

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama says the nation can't afford to keep giving tax cuts to the wealthiest, "who don't need them and didn't even ask for them." Obama is using his weekly radio and Internet address to urge Americans to ask their member of Congress to support the "Buffett Rule," which is named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who says he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Why are taxes so much higher in Europe, consuming 46 percent of economic output compared to 32 percent of GDP in America? Is it because nations such as France, Greece, and Sweden have adopted the kind of class-warfare policies that Obama wants for the United States? Surprisingly, the answer is no.As explained by Veronique de Rugy, the United States actually has a more “progressive” tax code than European nations. The corporate tax rate is higher in the United States than in any European country, and the double taxation of dividends and capital gains also is far above the European average....

Wrapping the flag around big-government excess isn’t going to workVice President Joe Biden says paying higher taxes is patriotic. He must have forgotten that America was founded on a tax revolt. While pitching the Obama administration’s plan on Thursday to boost the burden on upper-income groups, Mr. Biden said, “Wealthy people are just as patriotic as middle-class people, as poor people, and they know they should be doing more.” This skewed take on patriotism was quickly retweeted by the White House. The message fits with the shameful class-warfare appeals that claim tax hikes are needed to keep firefighters on the...

Here we go again. At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country's spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health care costs. That was true. He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health care reform. That was not true. It was obvious at the time that it could never be true. If government gives health insurance to 33 million uninsured, that costs. Costs a lot. There's no free lunch. Now we know. The Congressional Budget Office's latest estimate is that ObamaCare will add $1.76 trillion in federal expenditures through 2022....

The president is barnstorming around the nation hoping to enrage voters at the injustice that the wealthy pay fewer taxes than the middle class. "Now that's wrong," Obama objected, "That's not fair." It also isn't true. According to the National Taxpayers Union, in 2009, the top 1 percent of earners paid 36.7 percent of income taxes. The top 5 percent paid 58.6 percent. And the top 10 percent paid more than 70 percent. Social Security and Medicare taxes fall more evenly on all income groups (except the poor) but are lower. Further, Obama had the opportunity to repeal the Bush...

Should Taxes Be Raised on the Rich to help the economy. Freep this poll (needs it badly). 64% say yes! Middle right of the page.

Who wants to be a millionaire? With Barack Obama in the White House — nobody. He has declared the hard-working and successful America’s Enemy No. 1. “Tax the rich to grow the economy” was USA Today’s headline on the president’s “Buffett Rule” speech. His premise isn’t merely that wealthy people aren’t “paying their fair share,” but rather that not shaking them down for more money is somehow keeping you from finding a better job. “What drags down our entire economy is the growing gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else,” Obama said yesterday. The president is right about one thing:...

BOCA RATON, Fla. -“So let me you ask you:  what’s a better way to make our economy stronger?  Giving another $150,000 tax break to every millionaire and billionaire in the country?  Or making investments in education and research and health care and our veterans?Right now, the share of our national income flowing to the top 1% has climbed to levels last seen in the 1920s.  And yet those same people are also paying taxes at one of the lowest rates in 50 years.  You might have heard this, but Warren Buffett is paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. That’s...

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's campaign team attacked his likely Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, on Tuesday for not paying his "fair share" of taxes ahead of a speech by the president on why millionaires should bear a larger tax burden. Obama's populist message is a clear swipe at Romney, the wealthy Republican front-runner likely to face him in the November 6 election, as the Democratic president seeks to appeal to blue-collar voters he will need to win a second term. One of the richest men ever to seek the White House, Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent...

Obama on Why Michelle Was a Working Mom (at $316K Per Year): ‘We Didn't Have the Luxury for Her Not to Work’ By Terence P. Jeffrey April 9, 2012 (CNSNews.com) - Speaking Friday at what the administration called “The White House Forum on Women and the Economy,” President Barack Obama said that after his two daughters were born, he and his wife—both Harvard Law School graduates—could not afford the “luxury” of having her stay home with the children. In 2005, when Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate (and his daughters turned 5 and 7), he and his wife were...

George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management (AFP Photo / Brendan SMIALOWSKI) Billionaire investor George Soros has a new prediction for America. While it might be as dire as it gets for the financial wiz, this bet concerns more than just the value of the buck. According to Soros, there's about to be an all-out class war.Soros, 81, previously bet against the British pound in the early 90s and made $1 billion off its collapse. In the years since, he’s remained active in investing, but also in advocacy. He’s helped keep Wikipedia afloat thanks to impressive contributions and through...

One thing that I have realized about the rhetoric surrounding green energy initiatives and the proclamations by Team Obama glorifying companies like General Motors while vilifying others like ExxonMobil is that the claims and the facts are worlds apart. Voters are led to believe that evil oil companies like ExxonMobil are getting a free pass and not paying their fair share while the supposedly patriotic GM is an American success story which now contributes to society and builds miracle cars like the Chevy Volt which will free the US from foreign oil dependence. One set of facts that is...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to increase taxes on millionaires, reviving a proposal he first pitched last September that aims to draw sharp election-year lines between the president and the Republican opposition. The plan, scheduled for a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate on April 16, stands little chance of passing in Congress.

Many years ago in college, I took a required psychology class. One day we were told by our professor we had to divvy ourselves up into two groups for a particular project. I don’t remember the nature of the project, but I am quite serious when I say it took us three class days to divide ourselves. Much of that time was spent discussing all the hidden hurt feelings and angst that come with being “chosen” into one group or another, reminiscent of the painful procedure of choosing sides for softball in gym class. After one day of this ridiculous...

APPLETON, Wis. (AP) — Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney on Friday defended his personal wealth amid intensifying criticism from his main GOP rival and President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, unlikely allies working to portray the former businessman as out of touch with most Americans. Romney, who is worth up to $250 million, would be among the nation's richest presidents if elected. His Democratic and Republican opponents have thrust Romney's success to the forefront of the presidential contest as he tightens his grasp on the GOP nomination. "If we become one of those societies that attacks success, one outcome is certain...

When Gov. Jerry Brown reached a tax compromise with the California Federation of Teachers and liberal activists, apparently their "Millionaires' Tax" slogan was included in the deal. Brown launched a new campaign website today whose front page calls the proposal a "Millionaires' Tax" even though it contains a quarter-cent sales tax increase and starts hiking income taxes at $250,000 for single filers and $500,000 for couples.

SAN DIEGO — At Mitt Romney’s proposed California beach house, the cars will have their own separate elevator. There’s also a planned outdoor shower and a 3,600-square foot basement — a room with more floor space than the existing home’s entire living quarters. Those are just some of the amenities planned for the massive renovation of the Romneys’ home in the tony La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, according to plans on file with the city. A project this ambitious comes with another feature you don’t always find with the typical fixer-upper: its own lobbyist, hired by Romney to push...

Key to victory? A car key, perhaps. Michael Arno, whose company is spearheading the drive to qualify Molly Munger's tax measure for the November ballot, plans to give away a car each week in a drawing involving his top signature gatherers. The weekly winner can choose a favorite vehicle in the $15,000 price range, said Arno, whose firm must gather 504,760 valid voter signatures. County elections officials must confirm voter signatures by June 28, so the secretary of state has suggested that campaigns submit their petitions to local government by April 20. Clearly, it's pedal-to-the-metal time for initiative drives.

A declassified FBI top secret 50 page report on the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) reveals that Obama king maker Bill Ayers became Educational Secretary of the WUO when it morphed into an international movement to replace “America’ imperialistic state” with a New Democracy, which is their euphemism for a combination of Socialism and Marxism. Ayers’ wife Bernardine Dohrn was elected to their National Interim Committee from June, 1969 to early 1970 when the group went underground. “….doubt about their visceral disdain for America’s white males, especially its cops, consider what the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG) told the WUO....

Gov. Jerry Brown likes to talk about "loyalty to California." For Brown, that means that public people should put aside their partisan interests to do what is best for the Golden State. Last week, Brown failed his own loyalty test. He agreed to a deal to put a tax-increase measure on the November ballot when he has to know that the new measure exacerbates California's dysfunctional finances. Brown's been trying to get a measure on the ballot ever since he was elected. This year, he proposed a "temporary" tax-increase measure for the November ballot. The five-year Brown plan would have...

Two days after Gov. Jerry Brown announced a compromise ballot measure to raise taxes, California's top budget analyst said today that the measure will generate $2.2 billion less next year than Brown has estimated. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office estimated in its review of the measure that the tax increase would generate $6.8 billion in fiscal 2012-13. Brown had estimated raising some $9 billion. The tax initiative, a compromise Wednesday between the Democratic governor and the California Federation of Teachers, would increase the state sales tax less than Brown originally proposed, but include a larger tax increase on California's highest...

CHICAGO – President Barack Obama accused his Republican rivals Friday of embracing an economic philosophy that excludes struggling Americans, in the latest in a series of speeches that have ramped up his criticism of those vying to challenge him in the November election. Obama's tart speech at a fundraiser in Illinois came as Republican candidates campaigned in the Midwestern state ahead of a primary vote there Tuesday, the next major test in what has been a drawn-out and chaotic race to choose a Republican presidential nominee. The Obama camp has stepped into full campaign mode this week, trying to draw...

During a stream-of-consciousness speech to a gathering of police chiefs this week, Jerry Brown noted that during his first governorship, personal income taxes generated about a third of the state's revenue, but since have become a dominant source. The result, he continued, was "more volatility" in the state's revenue, which resulted in "a more or less constant state" of deficits. That's absolutely correct. When income taxes spike upward, politicians and voters squander windfalls on difficult-to-lower spending, and when they plummet – as they always eventually do – the state is then left with multibillion-dollar gaps. Brown told the top cops...

After a months-long feud with his most liberal allies, Gov. Jerry Brown compromised Wednesday to eliminate a rival tax initiative for the November ballot. The new proposal Brown forged with the California Federation of Teachers and left-leaning activists would rely more on taxing the rich to raise an estimated $9 billion for California's budget. The Democratic governor tried with little success to knock CFT's rival tax on millionaires off the November ballot. With a negotiating window closing fast because of the election calendar, state leaders and the teachers group struck an eleventh-hour deal to put their unified plan before voters....

Gov. Jerry Brown sounded resigned to facing competition with his tax proposal on November’s ballot in comments he made Monday to the Police Chief’s Association and to reporters afterward. Proponents of two other proposals, the California Federation of Teachers’ so-called Millionaire’s tax and wealthy civil rights attorney Molly Munger’s broad-based tax for schools, have rejected Brown’s entreaties to back off and are actively gathering signatures to get on the ballot. That’s forced Brown to take his case to the public, arguing before editorial board meetings and various groups that his is the only plan that tames the deficit and seeks...

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in...

A new poll suggests that Warren Buffett's call for high-income Americans to pay more in taxes may not have the backing that the investment mogul believes. The Hill newspaper interviewed 1,000 likely voters and results released Monday show 75 percent of them think the "most appropriate top tax rate for families earning $250,000 or more" is 30 percent or less. Currently, upper income Americans pay a 35 percent rate, and President Obama and several Democrats in Congress want to raise that rate to nearly 40 percent next year.

Well said, Santorum -- well said. At a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday morning: Santorum On Obama 'What A Snob' "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands... and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said, he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good decent men and women, who go out everyday to put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go...

Since the first Occupy Wall Street protest, you haven't been able to swing a dead cat in this country without hitting an Obama-loving media member carping and whining about income inequality.Yet according to this chart created by the nation's largest federation of trade unions the AFL-CIO, the difference between average CEO and average worker pay has been plummeting since the year 2000:Read More: NewsBusters 

"That’s the kind of balance you need," said Geithner. "Why is that the case? Because if you don't try to generate more revenues through tax reform, if you don't ask, you know, the most fortunate Americans to bear a slightly larger burden of the privilege of being an American, then you have to -- the only way to achieve fiscal sustainability is through unacceptably deep cuts in benefits for middle class seniors, or unacceptably deep cuts in national security."