Free Republic

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a front-runner Democrat in the 2020 presidential race, seems to have a plan for every problem under the sun, from free child care, to free college, to climate change solutions, to “Medicare for all.” However, she has proposed only one plan to pay for all these “free” offerings, which, according to her own estimates, will cost our nation a whopping $52 trillion: raising taxes on the rich. In January, Warren proposed a “wealth tax” of 2 percent on Americans with $50 million-plus in assets and 3 percent on those with assets over $1 billion. After being criticized...

Residents of the expensive California neighborhood where Google has its global headquarters have voted to ban trailers from parking overnight on public streets after a camp of permanent residences has built up due to soaring housing costs. The decision to get rid of the unsightly RVs came in a March city council vote after complaints of sewage spilling from the mobile homes and into the roads around the Googleplex campus. Many in the meeting blamed the Google effect for forcing long-term residents out of their homes and in turn creating the housing crisis that has seen some get in trouble...

From the University of Virginia and the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. A moderated (New York Times rep) forum at the theater on the downtown mall in Charlottesville. Here's the web announcement of the event: All of Our Rights: America’s Legacy of Inequality Share March 21, 2019 @ 8:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Location The Paramount Theater 215 E Main Street Charlottesville, VA 22902 Register Now ($22 general / $11.50 students) Overview Carol Anderson (One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy), Michael Eric Dyson (What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our...

Do you pay enough taxes? What is enough? When asked on "60 Minutes," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn't seem to have a specific tax rate in mind, but then she said, "back in the '60s ... you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent." Suddenly, 70 percent tax rates are a progressive plan, although Rep. Ilhan Omar added, "We've had it as high as 90 percent." She's right. That was the top tax rate when I was a kid, and today, many Democrats say if we'd just raise rates on rich people, government would have plenty of money...

The U.S. Supreme Court said judges “are appointed for life, not for eternity,” in setting aside a pay-discrimination ruling written by a jurist who died a week and a half before the decision was issued. The unsigned opinion said a federal appeals court was wrong to count the vote of the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt in a ruling that let a female math consultant sue a California school official. In letting the case go forward, the 11-judge appellate panel ruled unanimously but splintered in its reasoning. Reinhardt’s opinion said employers can’t pay female workers less than their male counterparts just...

Here’s what’s truly alarming about the apparent success of Nike’s “woke” Kaepernick ad campaign, now emulated by Gillette. It’s not that businesses have discovered they can make money, not by appealing to all customers, but rather by taking explicit political stands that only some customers love. It’s not even that these political stands, so far, seem to be overwhelmingly “progressive.” It’s that — well, Scott Galloway of ReCode’s “Pivot” hit the sore spot when he said the key motivating factor in this trend is that “progressives are capturing the majority of the income” You might expect politicized advertising to split...

New York City’s shrinking middle class is now in full retreat, as masses of our most endangered population depart the city in numbers not seen since the Depression, according to analysts. After decades of sharp income erosion in the face of relentless taxes, escalating living costs and wage reductions through technological changes, the full extent of this shocking exodus is laid bare in the latest US Census data. That shows the city is losing 100 residents each day — with departures exceeding new arrivals.

Not that it matters to the left, but a study from Harvard University titled Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? proves the gender wage gap is indeed a myth because of the obvious reasons: work choices between men and women. Why do men make more than women? Their choice of jobs and working a lot of overtime. In order to prove their point, authors Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel looked at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). It is unionized, which means men and women are treated the same and have to follow the same rules and receive the...

Fire fears from Malibu to Bel Air are adding to the allure of self-contained neighborhoods for A-listers — from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Kardashians — who are already concerned about rising crime and the "Nextdoor effect" on anxiety. When Scott Gillen was dreaming up The Case, Malibu's first gated community in more than two decades, he wasn't factoring in preparation for disastrous infernos. But in the aftermath of the Woolsey fire, which torched 97,000 acres, destroyed 1,500 structures and resulted in at least three deaths, Gillen realizes that his 24-acre development can make a stronger case to buyers. "It wasn't...

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. But hey, I’m an economist, so let me ask a somewhat different question: What’s in a number? Quite a lot, suggest Senators Chuck Schumer and Martin Heinrich. This week they introduced a bill that would direct the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces estimates of gross domestic product, to produce estimates telling us who benefits from growth — for example, how much is going to the middle class. This is a really good idea. Now, I’m not one of those people who think G.D.P. is a terribly flawed or useless statistic. It’s a number...

A sharp-eyed sleuth snapped a picture Friday of Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez at DC’s Reagan National airport. The former Obama secretary of labor was standing in line, carrying a travel bag that looked outside the working man’s budget. The bag appears to be a Louis Vuitton Keepall Bandoulière 55 Damier Cobalt Canvas bag, which retails at $1,840 on the Louis Vuitton website. “In Damier Cobalt canvas, Louis Vuitton’s iconic Keepall 55 travel bag is both timelessly elegant and distinctively modern,” the company describes its bag. “The historic design, dating back to the 1930s, remains as sleek and functional...

It’s the wrong thing to be worried about. When Bernie Sanders came to the University of Massachusetts Amherst during his campaign for president, thousands of my fellow students turned out to hear him speak. With his many campus visits, the socialist senator certainly left an impression — roughly 2 million young people voted for him in 2016. Thanks to people like Sanders, the idea that income inequality is the “defining issue of our time” has been burned into the collective consciousness of my generation, so much so that a GenForward survey found that economic inequality was one of the highest...

You hear about the liberal Baptist pastor in Silicon Valley who resigned after his criticism of the area’s wealthy went public? Excerpt from The Guardian: A Silicon Valley pastor has resigned from his church after calling the city of Palo Alto an “elitist shit den of hate” and criticizing the hypocrisy of “social justice” activism in the region. ................................................. Let’s take the Silicon Valley situation. It is Ground Zero for the Brazilification of America — that is, the process by which our country is being turned into a polity where a tiny minority living behind gates has most of the...

I don't mind saying that this column represents a grossly understated review of "Discrimination and Disparities," just published by my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell. In less than 200 pages, Sowell lays waste to myth after myth not only in the United States but around the globe. One of those myths is that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd all be proportionately represented in socio-economic characteristics, such as career, income, education and incarceration. The fact of business is that there is no evidence anywhere on earth, at any time in human history, that demonstrates that but for...

Ever since the Great Recession of 08-09, we have been inundated with news about the growing gap between the rich and the poor. These narratives have been amplified in recent years by the growing influence of socialism in the Western world. Bernie Sanders – the most popular socialist in the US – has galvanized his supporters by talking about the evil doings (real or imagined) of the top 1%. Unfortunately for his impressionable supporters, Bernie’s understanding of wealth and income inequality is extremely limited. With all this talk of wealth and income inequality in the past few years, I became...

MINNEAPOLIS — When Erin Rathke, the principal at Justice Page Middle School, is called to extract a student from class, she hears the same plea over and over again, most often, she has to admit, from black children: “The teacher only sees me.” The plea weighs heavily at Justice Page, where African-American students are 338 percent more likely to be suspended than their white peers. “It’s painful sometimes, but I have to say, ‘Yes, that’s probably true,” Ms. Rathke said. It is a reality that district leaders here have been grappling with for years: The Minneapolis school district suspends an...

If Mark Zuckerberg and a janitor who works at Facebook’s headquarters each received a speeding ticket while driving home from work, they’d each owe the government the same amount of money. Mr. Zuckerberg wouldn’t bat an eye. The janitor is another story. For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration for nonpayment. In Ferguson, Mo., for example, a single $151 parking violation sent a black woman struggling with homelessness into a seven-year odyssey of court appearances, arrest warrants and jail time connected to her...

We hear a lot about income inequality today. Bernie Sanders nearly displaced the established democrat, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential primaries by being the more vociferous opponent income inequality. Scores of economists—armed with charts and graphs—argue that rising inequality will lead to the breakdown of society. In their article “The Unmet Promise of Equality,” Fred Harris and Alan Curtis write, “Today, the top 1 percent receive 52 percent of all new income. Rich people are healthier and live longer. They get a better education, which produces greater gains in income.”1 In his article “Income Inequality in the U.S. Is...

By Ryan KhuranaIt’s time for the World Economic Forum once again, when a subset of the world’s rich elite meet in Davos, Switzerland for a luxurious few days of self-congratulations, while they lampoon another subset of the rich elite for all global problems. The festivities as usual are heralded by the Oxfam report on global inequality, this year entitled “Reward Work, not Wealth.”Oxfam calculates, using a data set provided by Credit Suisse, that 42 people own 50 percent of the world’s total wealth. From this and other insights about the top 1 percent, such as their collective ownership of 82...

You don't have to be rich to live among the wealthy. One family in New York City is hiring a live-in "domestic couple" to oversee cooking, cleaning, childcare, and construction at their second home, a 30,000 square-foot townhouse.