Free Republic

WASHINGTON - Payroll growth across the country was sluggish in March as employers added just 110,000 jobs, the smallest increase since July. Nevertheless, the labor market accommodated enough people to drop the unemployment rate to 5.2 percent. The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, offered another mixed picture of America's hiring climate. The job market has been the sector of the economy that has been among the slowest to recover from the last recession. Payroll growth, as measured by a survey of businesses, slowed in March. Job losses at factories and in the retail sector tempered gains in...

A Republican senator promoting the idea of a payroll tax increase is under fierce attack by some conservatives. Sen. Lindsey Graham's proposal to lift the $90,000 cap on payroll taxes to pay for Social Security reform has prompted the conservative Club for Growth to blanket his home state of South Carolina with television ads accusing the first-term Republican of proposing a "huge tax hike" that would hurt families and small businesses. "Why Lindsey Graham? He is the one Republican who is by far the most outspoken advocate of lifting this cap and raising it very significantly. This would be a...

Bass boat or Baby? Feminism or family? Another mouth to feed or leather seats in your luxury SUV? For over thirty-five years most Americans have decided that children are a blessing --the kind to be enjoyed in a very small number that does not interfere with the better marketed blessings of ambition, "me time", and competitive consumerism. The "population pyramid" we all learned about in Social Studies class is thus as dead as a restrained Judiciary (or the Dodo, for that matter), replaced by a weakening "population column," as people have fewer and fewer children. This will mean two things....

by Stephen Moore and Lawrence Hunter President Bush has been heroic in pushing personal investment accounts for Social Security. But he's still got the wrong marketing strategy. At his press briefing Wednesday, Bush again stated that personal retirement accounts are insufficient to make Social Security permanently solvent. With all due respect, Mr. President, you're wrong. The chief actuary of Social Security has scored four separate personal-accounts plans as achieving full solvency without tax increases or benefit cuts. The President makes this mistake because he is receiving bad economic and political advice. The misconception that personal accounts are inadequate not only...

HB3 - Conservatives Must Stop the "Payroll Tax" Now! by Matthew J. Griffing, Esq. Senior Vice Chairman for Legislative Affairs The Republican-led Texas House of Representatives has taken a big step toward doing what Democrats could not do in over 120 consecutive years in power – enacting a virtual state income tax. For many years, Texas Republicans advocated fiscal restraint, and their opposition to a state income tax was axiomatic. Those days are long over, and Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland) is to blame. This session, the House Leadership led by Speaker Craddick is dumping billions of new wasteful spending into...

In 2001, Dems claimed to support Social Security reform -- as long as it meant sacrificing tax relief. ----- Did you know there once was a time when Democrats admitted they believed Social Security needed protection and reform? Of course, it's quite significant that, of the occasions they took to trumpet the need to fix the program, they were the loudest when they used Social Security reform to justify their strident opposition to President Bush's first tax relief package in the first few months of 2001. Juxtaposing the Democratic Party's lackadaisical position on Social Security reform today (remember, they actually...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund. A questioner from the audience, stressing his own Democratic credentials, said he believed Ryan's plan should attract members of his own party and wondered whether the Wisconsin lawmaker...

ITHACA--According to the Ithaca Journal (which cannot be reposted here thanks to the cretins at Gannett news), the City of Ithaca and the rest of Tompkins County is considering imposing a local income tax.According to the article, the democrat-controlled legislature is looking at a 10 percent surcharge on top of the amount of state taxes county residents pay. They are also considering an additional 1 percent surcharge on income of more than $100,000, and 2 percent added for incomes of $200,000 or more.Recognizing that a lot of people drive into the county to work at Cornell from outlying (red counties),...

In the Social Security debate, the one thing that every politician and media analyst seems to agree upon is that however Social Security is eventually saved, benefits for each retiree must not be reduced. To do so is unthinkable, because it would break the “promise” of Social Security. People have done their part, it is argued. They’ve paid their odious payroll taxes for decades and done so with the confidence that it was for a reason -- that in the end they would be provided for, at some humble level, in the twilight of their lives. But what, exactly, was...

Contrary to conventional thinking, allowing workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal retirement accounts will incur no net cost to the federal government. The misconception that there will be new costs--i.e., "transition costs"--arises from forgetting that Social Security is already, in effect, debt-financed. Consequently: 1) Any debt sold to the public in the short term during the so-called "transition period" to pay all promised Social Security benefits simply refinances an existing liability; and 2) Refinancing Social Security's debt through personal accounts makes possible a reduction, and eventually an elimination, of Social Security's unfunded liability, which...

Recently enacted NY state income tax withholding for 2005 require employers to w/h taxes on all types of employee earning. Even if your visit is for 5 minutes! Go to NY for business and you're taxed by a complex and burdensome process.

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Ken Mehlman, Bush campaign manager, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the campaign should focus on Kerry's judgment during his 20 years in office. We will, too, starting soon. However, Bob Dole said two weeks ago that he can't remember a single piece of legislation that Kerry sponsored. We can. We can remember a lot of the hateful legislation Kerry supported; legislation that would have definitely been harmful to low and middle-income American families. Democrats are generally uninformed, politically. In all fairness, many of them are occupied trying to make ends meet and just have no time to pay attention...

August 7, 2004NEWS ANALYSIS: THE CAMPAIGNLow Numbers, New ProblemBy KATHARINE Q. SEELYE ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - All week long, President Bush traveled the country, cheerfully telling audiences that ''we've turned the corner'' on the economy. But on Friday, in the face of the government's paltry new numbers on job growth, the president's new slogan suddenly sounded premature at best.Republicans had hoped the early indications this year that the economy was turning the corner would have allowed them to neutralize, or even turn to their advantage, the issue that John Kerry had once considered central to his White House bid. Instead,...

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lounging in Hawaii on spring break with his wife and kids, tells a reporter that state lawmakers should follow his lead and take more time off. The Legislature, he says, "doesn't have enough to do." Their full-time status in Sacramento simply gives them too much time to make mischief.</p>

WASHINGTON — Friday brought good news on the economic front, with the Labor Department reporting that 308,000 jobs were added last month. But total payroll employment still appears sickly if one looks back over the last three years. There have been two million jobs lost since March 2001. Or have there? It depends, as usual, on which statistics you use. And there is reason to doubt the numbers from the payroll survey, which the Labor Department has used since 1939, because they give a misleading picture of the 2004 economy. The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll...

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Hit by waning support from fatigued donor nations, the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) has been forced to borrow from banks to pay salaries to its 125,000 employees and may be unable to meet its February payroll, the economy minister said Tuesday. Meanwhile, an Israeli settler was shot dead in a West Bank ambush, and a Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites). With unemployment rampant outside the public payroll, Palestinians could be facing unprecedented economic collapse after three years of conflict with Israel. "We took...

ADD another billion, more or less, to California's budget crisis. When state lawmakers finally got around to approving a budget, they managed to make the document look a mere $8.1 billion in the red -- significantly lower than the earlier estimate of $38 billion. But the politicians' dirty little secret is that many of the savings they claim to have achieved were imaginary -- derived from accounting gimmicks, borrowing, and forecasts based on rosy assumptions that had little chance of ever coming true. One of those rosy predictions was that the state's public-employee unions would agree to forgo the pay...

NORTH CONWAY - Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry rallied a trades convention yesterday by slamming President Bush and repeating his call for a "payroll-tax holiday." The Massachusetts senator said the saved taxes would help the average worker immediately. He also called for more investment in infrastructure, training and other programs to restore the 2.5 million jobs he said have been lost during Bush's presidency. In the past, Kerry has said the payroll tax holiday would apply to the first $10,000 of income, meaning no Social Security or Medicare taxes would be collected on that amount. It would apply for one...

GEORGE GALLOWAY said he was pelted with eggs today when he spoke at a May Day rally. The Glasgow Kelvin MP was speaking at a workers' festival in Wallasey, Merseyside, to a crowd of around 200 supporters. When he began his speech, a shaven-headed man threw three objects including eggs and shouted: "You are up Saddam's a***." The man was confronted by several members of the crowd before being arrested by police to prevent a breach of the peace. He gave his name as David Anson, a 41-year-old unemployed builder from the local area, and said: "I don't agree with...