Free Republic

The Biden administration’s international tax agenda suffered a setback when Sen. Manchin rejected a 15% minimum tax on multinational companies this past week, dimming prospects of turning last year’s global tax agreement into reality. Biden administration officials had planned to use Democratic fiscal legislation to enact the U.S. piece of the deal struck last year by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and more than 130 other countries. They wanted quick action to set a 15% minimum tax on U.S.-based multinational companies in each country where they operate, a move aimed at showing international leadership and prodding other countries to follow suit....

An elderly Catholic sculptor in Nagasaki, Japan, is all set to complete and install the world’s tallest wooden statue of the Virgin Mary after four decades of time, energy and money. Eiji Oyamatsu, 88, a Catholic from Fujisawa, Kanagawa prefecture, will unveil the 10-meter wooden statue of Mary with the child Jesus at the end of June, reported Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The statue pays tribute to thousands of Christian martyrs of Nagasaki in the 17th century. The single-handed effort by Oyamatsu encouraged a group of volunteers to form the Citizens’ Association for Minami-Shimabara World Heritage in 2018. The group...

LOS ANGELES — Cannabis advocates, small farmers and business owners called Thursday for an overhaul of the California marijuana tax system as they struggle to keep afloat amid rising operating and regulatory costs. They gathered outside the State Capitol in Sacramento to make their case and warn that the industry could collapse if steps aren't taken soon. “We’re here today because the craft cannabis industry here in California is in crisis and on the brink of collapse,” said Amber Senter, a co-founder and the executive director of Supernova Women, a nonprofit organization that works to create opportunities for people of...

The law was included in the Democrats' $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes through budget reconciliation to avoid the Senate filibuster -------------------------------------------------------------------- *resident Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress passed a new rule that requires payment companies and cash applications such as Venmo and PayPal to report $600 or more of payments to the Internal Revenue Services. The law was included in the Democrats' $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes through budget reconciliation to avoid the Senate filibuster. The new rule took effect at the beginning...

Call this suicide by Democrat. We have suicide bombers in the White House. We have suicide bombers in our Governor’s mansions. Worst of all, we have suicide bombers directing the US economy. This is the Titanic. This is the Hindenburg. We are headed for disaster. Vaccine passports will lead to the destruction of capitalism and the US economy. Goodbye small business. Goodbye middle class. New York City now demands vaccine passports to go into any restaurant, bar, nightclub, gym, even retail stores. Los Angeles followed suit. So did San Francisco and New Orleans. How many more will follow? Las Vegas,...

The Supreme Court declined to hear New Hampshire’s challenge to Massachusetts’s pandemic-era policy of taxing out-of-state residents who used to work in Massachusetts but switched to telecommuting from their New Hampshire homes during the pandemic.Billions of dollars in income taxes paid by people who worked from home during the pandemic were at stake in this case, and conceivably in other states such as New York that even in the absence of a public health emergency tax nonresident income.According to New Hampshire, the Massachusetts tax rule goes against New Hampshire’s state sovereignty, its residents’ economic interests, and runs afoul of the...

A high-level U.N. panel .. made a series of sweeping recommendations aimed at reforming the global financial system, which includes the implementation of an international corporate tax rate. The High-Level Panel for International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI) said a 20% to 30% global corporate tax on profits would “help limit incentives against profit shifting, tax competition and a race to the bottom.” The panel recommends the creation of a body that collects and disseminates data about corporate profits, where the assets of multinational corporations are located, as well as which entities own them,...

States that consistently grew faster than the national average over the past ten years are in line to gain representation in Congress. Democrats will work to undermine people's vote with their feet.The U.S. Census Bureau released its once-in-a-decade national census on April 26. Most of the discussion about the census has focused on states losing or gaining seats in the U.S. House, a process known as reapportionment.For the 2022 midterms, seven states will be down one member of the House: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon each gained one...

Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is about to call for a minimum corporate tax rate which, in effect, would prevent American companies from relocating offshore to escape the forthcoming tax hikes, according to reports. Axios reported that "by trying to convince other countries to impose a global minimum tax, Yellen is acknowledging the risks to the American economy if it acts alone in raising corporate rates."

With the Metropolitan Transportation Authority facing a budget crisis, New Yorkers may have to dig into their pockets to help out. Under a new proposed bill, New York City residents would be required to pay a $3 surcharge on packages they ordered online, with the exception for medicine and food. Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who proposed the bill, says the online shopping fee would raise more than $1 billion a year "to fund the operating costs of buses and subways in the city of New York."

With far more political acuity than critics expected, President George Bush disarmed world government proponents while promising more aid to developing nations. The U.N.'s High Level Panel on Financing Development concluded its four-day conference in Monterrey, Mexico, without explicit authorization for U.N. taxes on currency exchange, fossil fuels and a host of other tax targets. The conference, publicized as a poverty-reducing initiative, was, in fact, another effort by the U.N. to gain taxing authority. Ernesto Zedillo, head of the U.N. panel, issued a report on June 28, calling for the new taxing authority. U.S. delegates to the conference made it...

Illinois is still the “shut up and take it” state. You might want to ask what are the lockdown Democrats who control Illinois, Cook County, Chicago and many suburbs really telling us? They endorse the catch-and-release prosecutor of Cook County, who fancies herself a social justice warrior while allowing violent offenders out on the streets. They make their coronavirus shutdown decrees, craft their tax-and-spend-and-never-cut budgets. They push their “fair tax” and that cheap 6 mph over the limit traffic camera Chicago speed trap to grab your cash. Pritzker keeps pushing his progressive “fair tax,” which he his fellow Democrats sell...

A caravan of protesters — some wielding plastic pitchforks — descended on the Hamptons Wednesday to blast the rich and decry the nation’s rising income inequality. More than 100 drivers and about 200 marchers paid a visit to the homes of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including ex-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “Tax the rich, not the poor!” the protesters chanted outside Bloomberg’s $20 million Southhampton mansion, with some calling the failed presidential candidate a “looter.”

If you’re a healthcare worker who went to New York to volunteer to help fight the coronavirus outbreak there, Gov. Andrew Cuomo says you owe New York state income taxes. Even if you were not working for any pay in New York, but you were still being paid in your home state. Pay that enabled you to volunteer and put your own health in danger to help New York. That’s classic taxation without representation. Americans have a history of not liking this. Health care workers that came to New York to help fight the coronavirus pandemic at its epicenter will...

For the third year in a row, NJ Gov. Phil Murphy has proposed big increases to more than a dozen gun fees in New Jersey. Murphy’s push for higher fees in his proposed state budget follows a series of bills he’s signed adding new restrictions to gun laws that were already some of the toughest in the nation. Murphy is asking lawmakers to raise the cost of a $2 gun application to $50, and a firearm ID card from $5 to $100, according to the state’s treasury department. The Democratic governor also proposed a 2.5% tax on firearms and a...

Right now the federal corporate tax is the same whether a corporation operates in high housing cost Silicon Valley or low housing cost Albany, Georgia. I would set the federal corporate rate tax to an employee housing cost calculation divided by an inflation indexing divisor, rounded up to the nearest 1%. To keep corporations from dashing out of Silicon Valley and New York City, the rate would be bounded to within 1% of the standard federal corporate rate tax in 2021 and the bounds would be expanded by 1% in each of the following four years. In five years the...

Eight months into their control of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hasn't missed many opportunities to draw a stark contrast between the two parties' policies. From defending infanticide and trying to gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to the job-killing New Green Deal, hardly a day passes that the Left's radicalism isn't on display. But yesterday, liberals took their extremism to new heights -- demanding a tax on Bible-believing Americans. Thursday's hearing in the House Ways and Means Committee wasn't the first time liberals have tried to use the IRS to do their dirty work -- but it might...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California's nation-leading gas prices are set to climb even higher Monday, when the state gas tax increases another 5.6 cents a gallon. It's the latest increase from a 2017 law designed to raise about $5 billion a year for road and mass transit programs. A 12 cent-per-gallon boost came that November, and voters last year rejected a Republican-led effort to repeal the law. But Southern California voters did recall one Democratic lawmaker who helped pass the measure. California motorists were paying an average $3.75 per gallon as of late June, far above the national average of $2.71...

REAL PROPERTY PROTECTION AMENDMENT Governmental financial impositions of any year with respect to any residential property without water frontage shall not exceed 1/40,000 the average annual federal civilian salary as of the end of the penultimate calendar year times the sum of their square footage of finished living space and linear footage of public road frontage. EMPLOYMENT/INCOME PROTECTION AMENDMENT Federal/state employer/income taxation may be levied at no more than 24/20ths of the rates of January 1, 2019 on any person/entity having an annual income of less than the average annual federal civilian salary as of the end of the penultimate...

REAL PROPERTY PROTECTION AMENDMENT Governmental financial impositions of any year with respect to any housing unit and its curtilage without water frontage shall not exceed the value of 1/500th of an ounce of gold per square foot of finished living space and linear foot of public road frontage. EMPLOYMENT/INCOME PROTECTION AMENDMENT Federal/state employer/income taxation may be levied at no more than 24/20ths of the rates of January 1, 2019 on persons/entities having an annual income of less than the value of fifty ounces of gold. Federal/state employer/income taxation rates/rate thresholds may be changed by no more than 1/20th in any...