Free Republic

I wended my way up the Walgreens greeting card aisle. I stopped dead in my tracks. A card featured a cartoon image of a white man with a mullet haircut. This cartoon character wore a baseball or seed cap and a sleeveless t-shirt, a so-called "guinea T," "dago T" or "wife-beater." The very names convey class and ethnic contempt, as the New York Times points out. "Is the vilification of working-class men fair?" The Times laments, in an op-ed entitled "Are We Really Still Calling This Shirt a 'Wife Beater'?" Over the sleeveless t-shirt, the character on the card was...

The coronavirus outbreak is exposing the vast differences between how the rich and poor live in America in 2020. The gaps became clear almost immediately, when companies and governments began advising employees to work from home. Bankers and corporate employees could go remote. People working on the front lines of the restaurant and retail industries could not, especially as stores were flooded with panicked people stockpiling pre-isolation. "What do I do?" a Walmart employee told Hayley Peterson and Shoshy Ciment in early March. "I'm scared. I'm scared to lose my job and I'm scared to die from the coronavirus. Please...

Most Americans don’t believe people are rich because they work harder than other people or poor because they don’t work hard enough, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center.In the results of a poll released Monday, some 65% of U.S. adults said people are rich because they had more advantages in life than others, while only 33% said it’s because they work harder than others.When it comes to the question of why people are poor, some 71% of respondents attributed it to having to face more obstacles in life. Only 26 percent of respondents in the...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously took to the House floor last week to quibble over the origins of the old maxim about “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.” “You know this idea, this metaphor of a bootstrap started off as a joke,” she said. “Because it’s physically impossible to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces. It’s physically impossible!” She obviously believes this to be some sort of profound observation, but perhaps someone could have taken the time to explain to her that the difficulty of the physical act is kind of the point of the metaphor. According to Writing...

You might want to sit down for this one. If you thought the IRS was just a necessary yet uncomfortable part of American life, here’s some more evidence that it’s simply an arm of the United States government that deserves to be excised. The IRS just admitted that it audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1 percent. Here’s why, according to ProPublica: "…the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits —...

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires out of existence, or at least make them an endangered species. His proposed wealth tax of up to 8 percent per year would mean “the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years,” he says.The progressive tax would start at 1 percent on retained wealth over $32 million, rising to 2 percent over $50 million, and so on, reaching to the top rate of 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. Whatever is left would be taxed again the following year, and every year until it was gone.Let’s...

To all the Democratic politicians tripping over themselves to give away the tax money of hard-working American citizens to illegal immigrants, I have two questions for you: First, have you ever been a poor American citizen? Second, what do you have against poor American citizens?

The idea of giving poor people cash with no strings attached in lieu of government welfare payments has been floating around the leftist fever swamps since the 1960s. It's called universal basic income and Chicago will apparently develop a pilot program to test it.WLSTV: Some Chicago families could start collecting a $1,000 check every month with no strings attached. That's the new proposal from a task force created by Mayor Emanuel. The idea is to break the cycle of poverty. The pilot program would give 1,000 struggling Chicagoans $1,000 a month.Supporters say people could use the extra cash to...

Leftist Democrats eyeing the White House in 2020 are plotting new ways to confiscate Americans’ hard-earned money and give it away. Claiming economic inequality is a national crisis, they want to take money from those they say have too much. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is pushing a first-ever wealth tax. Never mind that it’s unprecedented and unconstitutional. Warren says it would target only the richest one-tenth of a percent of the country. Maybe at first. When the federal income tax was imposed in 1913, it initially hit less than one percent of the country. Now half the nation pays it....

NEWPORT NEWS A group of students at Christopher Newport University is pushing school leaders to provide free menstrual products on campus. The school's chapter of PERIOD, a national nonprofit that advocates for women on menstrual issues, has started a petition that calls on the university to provide what they argue are basic necessities and "end period poverty." It had 351 signatures as of Monday morning. "Interrupted studies. Missed classes. Stunted education," reads the petition. "This is the reality for so many students who menstruate, simply because they lack access to readily available and affordable period products." Rachel Applebach, a 20-year-old...

Why are people poor? Conservatives and liberals offer very different explanations.Conservatives point to a “culture of poverty” and suggest that much deprivation is the result of flawed choices and behavior by the poor themselves. They point to a strong correlation between poverty and a failure to follow the so-called “success sequence”: finish school, get a job, get married, and only then have children. Relatively few people who do those things end up in poverty. Liberals, on the other hand, say that that is all very well, but choices are always constrained by the circumstances in which people live. Therefore, conservatives...

Pope Francis's 3 Top Oppressors of the Poor Whom he Supports Yahoo News, on November 18, reported Pope Francis saying: "The cry of the poor daily becomes stronger but heard less." Sadly, the Pope needs to point his finger at himself. Why does Francis supports these 3 oppressors of the poor? 1. Francis supports the Chinese Communist regime against the poor Chinese underground Catholics by his forcing these powerless Catholics to be ruled and oppressed by totalitarian Marxist controlled bishops. 2. Francis supports the Venezuelan Dictator by meeting him and refusing to condemned the dictatorship while it starves the...

If I wanted to keep poor people poor, there are several government policies I would favor. Let's count them down.1: An Expanding Welfare State For starters, I would advocate for a robust and ever-expanding welfare state—programs like Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc.I would recognize that an effective recipe for keeping poor people poor is to create incentives that push them into decisions that prevent them from climbing out of poverty.Rather than help individuals, the perverse economic incentives created by the “social safety net” trap aid recipients on welfare. Case in point: A 2012 study by Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public...

As of Dec. 31, Kavanaugh had between $15,001 and $50,000 in an interest-bearing Bank of America BAC, +0.04% account, and less than $15,000 in Vanguard funds within a 401(k) plan offered by the Employee Retirement System of Texas, according to his financial disclosure form. He has fully paid off a loan from a thrift savings plan, as well as a credit-card account from JPM, -0.62% that appeared in a previous disclosure plan. Not every Supreme Court justice has such a bland portfolio. According to watchdog group Fix The Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito...

Despite popular depictions of subsidy recipients as the deserving poor or people hardly able to feed themselves or their children without help, the statistics tend to show another picture. A recent economic study highlighted the shocking fact that essentially nobody in the United States will be poor if he or she merely works full-time at the minimum wage, even if that person has children. “The main reason people are poor is because they aren’t working,” said study author Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow at the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research, in a press release accompanying the study. “The welfare...

Before the massive growth of our welfare state, private charity was the sole option for an individual or family facing insurmountable financial difficulties or other challenges. How do we know that? There is no history of Americans dying on the streets because they could not find food or basic medical assistance. Respecting the biblical commandment to honor thy father and mother, children took care of their elderly or infirm parents. Family members and the local church also helped those who had fallen on hard times.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has “quietly” put an end to most work at the Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), one of the lesser initiatives of the Eric Holder era, according to a Thursday New York Times report.The tiny ATJ was founded in 2010 under then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Its last published organization chart, from 2015, shows only three appointees and their support staff. ATJ distributed grants and drafted “statements of interest” aimed at supporting the right to competent legal representation for the poor and indigent secured by the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s famous 1963 decision in...

PHOENIX — One of the state's three Republican legislative leaders has vowed he won't let the Trump tax cuts have a negative ripple effect on Arizona taxpayers. House Speaker J.D. Mesnard acknowledged that the linkage between federal tax laws and the state tax code means that what is in the federal law affects the deductions that Arizonans are allowed to take when computing their state income taxes. The state Department of Revenue figures those changes would automatically take an extra $250 million a year out of the pockets of individual and business taxpayers. Mesnard said he will push for changes...

<p>On Friday, Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano urged her Twitter followers to watch Republicans debate the tax overhaul bill hours before its scheduled vote.</p> <p>“watching…..Senator Tim Scott “$100 a month is real money” to struggling families ? Is he F**KING kidding ? HOW MUCH does $100 buy in this day ? Costs me $50 to fill my f**king gas tank FFS,” replied Twitter user Cherl Criss.</p>

Seattle’s City Council made national headlines earlier this year when it enacted a city income tax aimed at “high earners.” Immediately, politicians crowed that they had planted a flag of “resistance” to the forces of “Trumpism.” In a court hearing last week, the city defended its war on wealth against several legal and constitutional challenges. The briefing from both sides exposes an inconvenient reality for the levy’s defenders: its real, ultimate victims aren’t necessarily the plutocrats they claim to be targeting. In fact, just the opposite. Some background: there are few precedents from other parts of the country for a...