Free Republic

President Barack Obama calls his tax and spending plan ´middle-class economics,´ but most middle-income families would see little change in their tax bills. Obama is proposing a total of $1.5 trillion in new taxes over the next decade, mostly on corporations and high-income households. He would use much of that money--nearly $280 billion--to pay for targeted tax breaks for low- and middle-income families. Obama´s proposed tax cuts would benefit households with two wage earners, families with young children in child care and those with older children in college. One proposal would automatically enroll workers in individual retirement accounts, unless they

In the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like they’d be OK for a while. After a gruelling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what I’d seen and how...

Why don’t abused women just leave their partners? Why don’t poor people just spend less? Why do people in positions of power ask so many stupid questions? ‘Inequality has become a challenge to us as moral beings’Last week, I took part in a comedy night to raise money for the charity Refuge, which supports women and children who have experienced domestic violence. It was a great night: partly because it raised several thousands of pounds for the cause; partly because it was sponsored by Benefit cosmetics, and the idea of a benefit being sponsored by Benefit pleased me greatly; and...

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — As schools reopen here in the coming days after the Christmas break, South Africans are braced for a surge in the power cuts that have plagued the country since early December, and the rolling blackouts could spell trouble for the ruling African National Congress at the ballot box. During the week, schools, factories and offices will move to full capacity, drawing on an already-fragile national grid. And in the heat of the Southern Hemisphere summer, air conditioners will be turned on full blast. A state-owned company, ESKOM, has the monopoly to produce more than 95 percent...

One of the great conundrums of the American political scene is why the poorer states, colloquially known as “red” states, tend to vote Republican or conservative, while the richer states, the “blue” ones (and let it be said that this is very confusing for this European, for over here the colours tend to work the other way around, red is Labour, or left wing) tend to vote Democrat. We would think that it should be the other way around, the poor people voting for more from that Great Big Pinata which is government. But it seems that there’s a simple...

Clinic worker Jenny Higgins says that wealthy women get better abortion care than poor women do. She says: “… We almost never service wealthier women at the clinics where I worked. In the southeastern clinic, which was in an urban area, the majority of the clients were African-American….. [Wealthy women] are more likely to have access to higher quality, private abortion care, either due to their insurance plans or because they can afford to pay out-of-pocket for such services.” …. “Even though I prided myself on providing attentive and empathic care to the patients with whom I worked, the clinic...

In 1977, William McPherson earned the top honor in the writing world when he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize.But nearly four decades later, the former Washington Post critic now hovers on the brink of poverty thanks to a failing pension and a bit of bad luck on the stock market.In a heartbreaking essay for The Hedgehog Review, McPherson describes what it's like to become poor in old age-as part of a overlooked group who are neither middle or lower class.Former teachers and even lawyers who can't pay their bills but aren't on the streets begging for change.Surprisingly, he says...

"....Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument,.........Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The...

Milton Friedman 1978. From a lecture given at Stanford University, he instructs students and faculty on how free markets are the number one tool in the universe to reduce poverty. In the video he disparages government programs that discourage productivity, undermine minority advancement, and actually create poverty...

One of the great misconceptions in American politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich.  That title belongs to the Democrats, who regularly garner the big bucks of America’s moneyed elite.  David Elliott of the AP reports: For as often as Democrats attack the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch for their heavy spending on politics, it's actually the liberal-minded who shelled out the most cash in the just completed midterm elections. At least, that is, among those groups that must disclose what they raise and spend. Among the top 100 individual donors to political groups, more...

Rich NewmanWednesday, October 22, 2014A stagnant economy has undoubtedly put a lot of financial stress on the middle class. And that is bumming out America’s 1 percenters. “Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society,” entrepreneur Nick Hanauer wrote recently in Politico, in an open letter to “my fellow zillionaires.” Hanauer — an early investor in Amazon (AMZN) who says he has been involved with more than 30 startups — cites the well-documented rise in income inequality during the past 30 years as the ultimate cause of a Mad Maxian dystopia he envisions. "If...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, having decided for some inexplicable reason to do a long interview with a fashion magazine (maybe it is her celebrated collection of lace collars), reaffirmed the most important things we know about her: her partisanship, her elevation of politics over law, and her desire to see as many poor children killed as is feasibly possible. Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy...

Looking for something to do this weekend that will help those less fortunate than you? Better steer clear of the People’s Climate Change March. Set to start Sunday morning on the Upper West Side, the march includes everything from labor unions to synagogues, beekeepers to anarchists, anti-Zionists to anti-corporate groups. The thousands of marchers will, the Web site tells us, “take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good jobs,...

It’s a mystery why one person can be poor but still be proud, independent, and reasonably content while the guy next door is only content to slide into a swamp of misery, blame, slovenliness, dependence, and cigarette smoke. I agree that Alchemist summed things up pretty well by observing, “Poor is a state of finance. Poverty is a state of mind.” But why? Entire tomes have been written about poverty, of course. How soul-crushing it is. How it leads to crime. How it’s everybody’s fault except the individuals who are in that state. How it’s increasingly becoming institutionalized among entire...

May 2014 "The Worldview that Makes the Underclass" Anthony Daniels Writer and Doctor -------------------------- ANTHONY DANIELS, who often writes under the penname Theodore Dalrymple, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Born in London in 1949, he qualified as a doctor in 1974 and has worked in various countries in Africa and elsewhere. From 1990 to 2005, he worked as a doctor and psychiatrist in a prison in Birmingham, England. He has written a column for the London Spectator for 14 years, and writes regularly for National Review and the Wall...

President Barack Obama channeled Hillary Clinton’s recent “dead broke” complaints Thursday, when he told a hard-hit Minnesota woman that Michelle Obama’s difficultly with a nanny in Chicago echoed her family’s history of repeated layoffs and wage cuts. Minnesota resident “Rebekah [Erier] sent me this letter, and it moved me,” Obama told his donors at an evening fund-raiser in Minneapolis, Minn, as he tried to show he is in touch with ordinary people’s concerns.

The rapid decline in Americans' tobacco use has leveled off, and now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling for new taxes, regulations and warnings to force Americans to kick the habit. In a new report, the CDC found that 50 million, or one in five, Americans use tobacco every day or some days, and 60 million, or one in four, “every day, some days or rarely.”It also revealed that the use of electronic cigarettes is surging, and and e-cigarettes now account for nearly 5 percent of the smoking market.Worse: Americans aged 18-24 showed up as the top...

Controversial billionaire Chen Guangbiao placed a full-page advertisement in Monday’s New York Times and a half-page advertisement in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, inviting 1,000 underprivileged Americans to dine with him. “I want to spread the message in the US that there are good philanthropists in China and not all are crazy spenders on luxury goods”. Chen said he was “teaming up with a famous American charity to host a charity luncheon for 1,000 poor and destitute Americans, who each will receive 300 dollars”. The underprivileged will be invited to the Boat House restaurant in New York’s Central Park, where Chen...

The next time you can be bothered enough to feed a homeless person you might find yourself at odds with the law. Yes, you have to be “bothered” because you are under no obligation to help your fellow mankind, who has fallen on hard times and on harder concrete slabs. That’s right, because if you help homeless people in cities like Daytona Beach, Florida; Raleigh, N.C.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; and Birmingham, Alabama you could be fined, physically removed and/or be threatened with time behind bars – and they have actually done it. In fact, 33 cities across the United States...

There are multiple levels of irony in this New York Times report on the impact of ObamaCare on poor patients in the nation’s hospitals. Congress demanded the power to revamp the health-insurance industry and expand Medicaid in order to help the poor get better medical care for less money. In reality, the opposite appears to be happening, as hospitals attempt to force the poor into ObamaCare: Hospital systems around the country have started scaling back financial assistance for lower- and middle-income people without health insurance, hoping to push them into signing up for coverage through the new online marketplaces...