Free Republic

The IRS targeting Tea Party groups and other conservative-leaning political organizations has reignited calls for reform and the argument among Capitol Hill Republicans that the federal government has become too big and out of control. Among those leading the calls for reform is Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee, which held a hearing on the scandal five days after the targeting was made public and two days after the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. “This systemic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation,” Camp said at the start of the...

We Americans are taxed at just about every juncture in life that involves money. We are taxed when we earn our money and when we spend our money. We are even taxed when we give our money away, unless our gift recipient is a government-approved entity. We are taxed when we don't realize we're being taxed, as in the hidden, embedded taxes built into the prices of the goods we buy, which pay for corporate income taxes. (You didn't think that corporations paid taxes, did you?) In addition to all the taxes Americans are already paying, government continually enacts new...

An American passport can be a costly accessory-with U.S. citizenship come U.S. taxes. The WSJ's Wei Gu explains why some wealthy Chinese are instead taking advantage of offers to become citizens of cash-strapped European countries and wealthy Asian cities.

Free enterprise, free markets, competition, and choice: All are timeless economic principles, but their application can and should evolve with changing economic circumstances. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the top income-tax rate was 70 percent, inflation was 13 percent, health-care spending was 10 percent of GDP, and publicly held debt was 26 percent. The average American was 30 years old.Today, the top marginal tax rate is 40 percent, and inflation is 2 percent. Health-care spending and the debt have both risen by nearly 80 percent as a share of output. The average American is 37 years...

"Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until "Downton Abbey," make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week. Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. You know something's coming when Dr. Carson says, "It's not my intention to offend anyone. But it's hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere."

. . . "To this district and anybody who intends it harm, or anybody who wants to allow it to just exist and fester: This is a wake-up call for all conservatives, Republicans. This is a wake-up call for our nation," says Mack. "There is no other reason that we have allowed the issues to go this far, and to continue the dogma and lip service that we’re getting from some of our elected officials." In the midst of a challenging era, Mack won't be an ideologue bound by negative talking points. On the subject of making Alabama's budget more...

President Obama’s motorcade sported “Taxation Without Representation” license plates for the first time on Saturday. As part of the National Day of Service kicking of a weekend of inaugural events, the president has traveled to the Burrville Elementary School in Northeast Washington to participate in a City Year service project. Three vans in Obama’s motorcade were outfitted with the unique D.C. license plates as the president traveled to the school, according to a White House pool reporter. The reporter said other vehicles in the motorcade had Maryland, Virginia or U.S. government plates. The White House decision earlier this week to...

John Boehner's first order of business in his second term as speaker is no more one-on-one meetings with President Obama. An aide to the speaker, who won re-election to the leadership post Thursday afternoon, confirmed to Fox News that Boehner is done with closed-door talks with the president. Boehner and Obama over the past two years have made two unsuccessful attempts at striking a "grand bargain" deficit-reduction deal. The last set of talks, in the context of crafting a bill to avert the fiscal crisis, ended with Boehner exiting the negotiations and pushing a failed "Plan B" and then being...

Of course, Greeks must tighten their belts. But is the decimation of the middle class - through a change in labour laws and unbearable tax burdens - the way out of Greece’s financial impasse? At the same time, next to nothing has been done about the ineffectual and massively unproductive public sector which brought the country to its knees in the first place. The entrenched fear of unions and political cost has for decades prevented successive governments from taking drastic action to reform and modernise an antiquated civil service which, in many ways, instead of serving citizens and their interests...

To best understand this spending aspect of the current budget negotiations in Washington, we must answer one crucial question: how much taxation on the top income-earners would be required to fully fund the present level of government spending? To do so, we must first make the unreasonable assumption that the rich will not respond to confiscatory tax rates and hide money from being taxed. This is unreasonable because no scheme of taxation since WW2 has been able to capture more than 21% of GDP. With current spending levels around 23% of GDP, history suggests that no level of taxation we...

Most commentators agree that Mitt Romney has committed political suicide by pointing out that 46pc of Americans pay no income tax but he may have done us all a favour by raising a fundamental weakness in many developed economies – including Britain’s – which is also one of the causes of the credit crisis. Whether or not his candour costs the Republican candidate any hope of winning the Presidential Election in November, he has certainly demonstrated the modern meaning of the word ‘gaffe’ – that is, a statement of the bleedin’ obvious by someone in the public eye. There can...

Middle-Class Wealth Protection, Post-Fiscal Cliff By Jean F. Drew I don’t know about you, but I’m a lifelong, middle-class working stiff who has managed to accumulate a certain modest amount of “wealth” designated to be sent to the future, to supply my support and lifestyle needs when I am “old” and no longer have employment income. I’m speaking of my 401(k)s and IRAs. The way I have assets deployed in these accounts very likely will need to change, given the absolutely predictable outcome of the much-hyped impending fiscal cliff. At least, that is my supposition. Consider: We get the fiscal...

President Obama is among the slickest practitioners ever of the Washington Wink-Wink -- what professional politicians in both parties do when they say one thing while planning to do something else entirely. There was, for example, Obama's 2008 campaign promise to "cut the federal deficit in half." And that "net federal spending cut" he would achieve by the end of his first term? Anybody think he didn't know then that his first term would explode the deficit and spending to historic highs? Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, sees more...

France is sliding into a grave economic crisis and risks a full-blown “hurricane” as investors flee rocketing tax rates, the country’s business federation has warned. Francois Hollande is tightening fiscal policy by 2pc of GDP next year to meet EU deficit targets “The situation is very serious. Some business leaders are in a state of quasi-panic,” said Laurence Parisot, head of employers’ group MEDEF. “The pace of bankruptcies has accelerated over the summer. We are seeing a general loss of confidence by investors. Large foreign investors are shunning France altogether. It’s becoming really dramatic.” MEDEF, France’s equivalent of the CBI,...

France is sliding into a grave economic crisis and risks a full-blown “hurricane” as investors flee rocketing tax rates, the country’s business federation has warned. “The situation is very serious. Some business leaders are in a state of quasi-panic,” said Laurence Parisot, head of employers’ group MEDEF. “The pace of bankruptcies has accelerated over the summer. We are seeing a general loss of confidence by investors. Large foreign investors are shunning France altogether. It’s becoming really dramatic.” MEDEF, France’s equivalent of the CBI, said the threat has risen from “a storm warning to a hurricane warning”, adding that the Socialist...

It should come as no surprise that President Obama will raise taxes if he is re-elected. But here’s the shocker: He will invite the United Nations to tax Americans directly. And the proceeds would go directly to the Third World. In this way, Barack Obama will, indeed, realize the dreams of his father. In our new book, "Here Come the Black Helicopters: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom," Eileen and I describe how there is now pending in the U.N. all kinds of plans to tax Americans and redistribute their wealth – not to other Americans – but...

I generally try to stay out of political discussions whenever possible. I have blood pressure considerations to keep in mind. Every once in awhile, though, something happens that really causes my blood to boil, and I’m forced to comment on it. Last night’s debate provided one of those moments. I avoided watching the actual debate. I try never to listen to President Obama speak—I find his delivery unpalatable, not to mention his content. Instead, I watched highlights on various news channels, and even went to MSNBC to find out how the Left responded to the debate. One of the statements...

A faltering economy, a coalition government torn between spending cuts and tax rises, a sinking currency, money printing and 'unconventional' monetary policy. Britain in 2012? No, Argentina in 2002. The problems faced by Argentina a decade ago and by Britain are eerily similar. In each case the government believed that through its own sophistication and trickery it could defeat a debt crisis of its own devising. In Argentina, every government action served only to make the situation worse. We are following the same path. ....At each stage, Argentina's recovery was sabotaged by the actions of its own politicians, as can...

Back in May I wrote a piece describing Francois Hollande’s election victory as emblematic of the EU’s decline, noting that “his government promises to be a symbol of everything that is wrong with Europe today.” True to his election campaign promise, the new French president, together with his prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, has outlined his plans for a 75 percent marginal income tax rate tax on anyone earning more than €1 million Euros a year. This is economic suicide for the second biggest economy in Europe, a supreme act of financial har-kiri for a country whose public debt has now...

Most mainstream media outlets aide in the proliferation of myths about our tax system and our economy. Here are 5 myths about the US tax system that you probably thought were true. 1. Once A Millionaire, Always A Millionaire As you can see by the graph below, this shows how many consecutive years millionaires file their taxes as millionaires. Half of the people who become millionaires are only at that status for one year.​ 2. Tax Credits Only Help The Rich This graph shows the effective tax rates since 1980. As you can see, because of tax credits and deductions,...

Everyone's getting their knickers in a twist about the 47 percent that Mitt Romney figures are going to vote for Barack Obama, no matter what. But do you know why they will vote for Barack? Wyatt Emmerich did the math back in 2010 for The Clevelend Current in Mississippi. It's been written up at ZeroHedge and by Kathy Shaidle. The message is simple. Earn $3,600 per year as head of a family of three, and your net earnings (after taxes and government benefits) will amount to $31,630. But if you earn $60,000 a year, your net earnings will be $34,366....

Speaking in Wisconsin on September 22, 2012, Barack Obama called for tax increases once again, as usual, this time tellingly stating his belief that "I can afford to pay a little bit more… and Mitt Romney sure can afford to pay a little more." Obama is hoping against hope that he can turn back the clock, back to the days when he convinced a majority, of more than enough states, that he and he alone could clean the air, make the oceans recede, brighten the body politic, and fix what was broken in Washington. He hopes to turn back the...

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 17, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - As the November general election approaches, America’s Catholic bishops have been walking a fine line as they strive to avoid appearances of partisanship while at the same time they wage a high-profile battle against the Obama administration over religious freedom. Earlier this month, one of the leading lights in the U.S. episcopate insisted he “certainly” could not vote for Obama, while not specifically endorsing his Republic opponent Mitt Romney. Asked whether a Catholic could vote for Obama in good faith, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia replied: “I can only speak in terms of my...

Congress must raise taxes on the wealthy "because there just isn't enough to go around," Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute today. "Latino growth has meant that often they're at the back of the line for housing assistance or other things," Donovan said during CHCI's annual Public Policy Conference this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. "And the fundamental problem here (in part) is, are we going to continue to invest in those things? And if we continue to cut the budget for Section 8 housing and public housing and a...

French president Francois Hollande says there will be no exceptions to his plan to impose a 75 per cent tax rate on millionaires. Mr Hollande's comments came after France's richest man, businessman Bernard Arnault, announced he was applying for Belgian citizenship. Announcing the start of a two-year plan to fire up France's faltering economy, Mr Hollande stood by his plans for the top tax bracket, which would be the highest marginal rate in the industrialised world. "I am in a battle and will not look back," he said. "I am setting up a calendar... two years to create a policy...

One of the hardest propositions for conservatives to remain consistent on is the issue of federalism. We believe in federalism. We believe that the Constitution enshrined power to the states through the Tenth Amendment. We believe that that power has been eroded away through the years and want it restored.The hard reality of our position is that some states may seek to push positions that we believe threaten liberty. Conservatives have lauded efforts by Arizona to protect their borders consistent with federal policies and Missouri's effort to nullify ObamaCare. But many have blasted California for essentially legalizing medical marijuana...

ung Quat, Vietnam’s only oil refinery, received various tax incentives from the government last week, including a four-year income tax exemption. Apart from the exemption, Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Co, which runs the 130,500 barrels-per-day refinery, only needs to pay half its corporate tax for the first nine years after it begins earning taxable incomes. Over the course of 30 years, it will be subject to an income tax of 10 percent, compared to the current 25 percent applied to other businesses, according to the government’s website. Dung Quat, which started operations in February 2009, is also allowed to...

For years — decades, really — Miami-Dade homeowners have been ducking property taxes by illegally claiming homestead exemptions, usually with impunity. .......The price of getting caught: Up to 10 years of unpaid back taxes, plus a 50 percent penalty and 15 percent annual interest.... Since January, six detectives from the Economic Crimes Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department have been working to bolster the muscle of 15 investigators at the Property Appraiser’s Office in nailing violators. That is up from two police detectives deployed in 2011 to tackle a backlog of some 3,500 complaints (now about 2,166) which typically come...

The Cost Of "Intervention"The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a small “think tank” in Washington DC which puts out an annual report called: “Ten Thousand Commandments”. The report deals with the regulatory agencies of the US federal government and the cost of the regulations they continually introduce - and enforce. This report would be typical of the regulatory function of pretty well every government in the world. In all interventionist economies, regulations are not set by the “lawmakers”. The “lawmakers” merely pass the laws, their enforcement is left to the various bureaucratic departments of government. And in order to “enforce”...

California state parks Director Ruth Coleman resigned and her second-in-command was fired Friday after officials discovered the department has been sitting on "hidden assets" totalling nearly $54 million. The money accumulated over 12 years in two special funds the department uses to collect revenue and pay for operations: $20.4 million in the Parks and Recreation Fund, and $33.5 million in the Off Highway Vehicle Trust Fund. The money accumulated, state officials said, because the parks department had a pattern of underreporting the actual size of the funds in its regular dealings with the state Department of Finance. ....Advocates for the...

In the mid-1800s, a cousin of Charles Darwin by the name of Francis Galton wrote a series of works expanding on an old idea of selective breeding in human beings. Galton’s theory became known as eugenics. At its core, eugenics was underpinned by an assumption that talent and genius were hereditary traits, and that deliberate breeding could improve the human race. Within decades, intellectuals were spending their entire careers studying these ideas, quickly spawning a number of different fields dedicated to ‘racial sciences.’ Scholars began closely examining racial differences and building volumes of statistics on everything ranging from intelligence to...

In 1935, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was fretting about finding a constitutional basis for the Social Security Act. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone advised her, "The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power." Last week, in his ObamaCare opinion, NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Congress the same advice—just enact regulatory legislation and tack on a financial penalty, as in failure to comply with the individual insurance mandate. So how did the power to tax under the Constitution become unbounded? (Read the rest at the WSJ page) ============Dr....

While the individual mandate tax gets most of the attention, the ObamaCare law actually contains 20 new or higher taxes on the American people. These taxes are gradually phased in over the years 2010 (with its 10 percent “tanning tax”) to 2018 (when the tax on comprehensive health insurance plans kicks in.) Six months from now, in January 2013, five major ObamaCare taxes will come into force: 1. The ObamaCare Medical Device Manufacturing Tax (snip) 2. The ObamaCare High Medical Bills Tax (snip) 3. The ObamaCare Flexible Spending Account Cap (snip) 4. The ObamaCare Surtax on Investment Income (snip) 5....

Every American knows we will be celebrating the 4th of July on Wednesday; not enough of us remember why. Few of us truly grasp the profound significance of the separation between the American people and our government. We are a nation of self-sovereign individuals, and as the term implies, our government has no authority over our private affairs and no claim over our property. That’s what makes this country unique…or did. Our elected officials all talk about “the American people” like we were undifferentiated; they would have us believe what is good for us is just one thing and they...

CNN and Fox News aren’t the only ones doing a 180 on the Supreme Court ruling. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), the first attorney generalin the nation to file a lawsuit over President Obama’s health-care overhaul, said the sky was pretty much falling in a news release issued half an hour after the court upheld the law. “This is a dark day for the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” Cuccinelli said in the release. “This is a dark day for American liberty.” By the time he held a news conference an hour and 45...

What government unit has the right to tax you - your local government, regional or state government, federal government or multinational organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization? The reason the question is becoming more important is that rising numbers of politically powerful persons and institutions are calling for global taxes on such things as financial transactions, tobacco, sugar and carbon emissions. The modern concept of the nation-state goes back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Among other things, it limited the power of the sovereign to the territory of the state,...

BANGKOK (AP) — World markets took a beating Monday as another setback for the U.S. economic recovery sent investors fleeing from stocks. A weak U.S. jobs report flustered investors and intensified fears that a global recession was in the making. The dismal report released Friday came on the heels of other data that showed weak economic conditions in Europe and Asia.

Now is the time for all good men and women to put Country above Party. For far to long the RINO Wing of the Republican Party has been in control of losing National Elections. The time has come to cast aside the hold-your-nose clothespins that the RINOs expect us to use when we vote for their tweedle-dumb or tweedle-dumber Candidates. To all Primary voters: List the top 10 demonstrated positive values for each Candidate for all offices, and vote accordingly. If there is no Candidate that meets your values for a given office, then leave that slot blank. This will...

You remember U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., don’t you? He was the guy who said “the American people don’t care” about the wasteful, pork-barrel spending habits of Congress. He was also the guy who called a flight attendant the “B-word” because she asked him to turn off his cellphone prior to a flight. He was also the guy who told the state of New Jersey how it should spend its own highway funds, much to the displeasure of that state’s very outspoken GOP governor, Chris Christie. Schumer is at it again. This time, he set his sights on Facebook co-founder...

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then? The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that...

In America we treasure our religious freedom. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says that government will keep out of the religion business and guarantees religion will be practiced freely without interference by government. “The wall of separation” is revered. Have we misunderstood the meaning of the wall of separation? We all should be reminded that the First Amendment keeps government out of religion, but says nothing about keeping religion out of government. Under our Constitution, religious people and religious institutions are welcome in the halls of government. They are free to bring their religious convictions with them wherever...

The Tea Party movement did the nation a great service in 2010 by focusing on the problem behind much of what’s gone wrong in America: government, and too much of it. It’s refreshing to see that the sentiment lingers about this nation under God dedicated to preserving our God-given rights. “Voters believe too much government power is a dangerous thing and put a very high value on protecting the rights of the individual,” says ...

America’s religious and private philanthropic organizations are under attack from the left. Money begets power in almost every endeavor of human life. The couple with the largest down payment receive the lowest mortgage interest rate. Those with the reputation as big tippers get the best tables and service at restaurants. The business with the healthiest cash reserve has the power to not only prosper but also to gobble up its competitors during lean times. As true as this maxim is in the private sector, it’s even more prevalent in government circles. Politicians buy votes by offering “free stuff” to their...

Even small dis-incentives can drive economic activity to die off or move.While discussing the near inevitability of a tax on buying or selling shares in a company (separate for already existing taxes for gains from those transaction) the German newspaper Der Speigel cites the British experiment with exactly this sort of tax:  To see why, one must look no further than the meager successes of the British stock exchange tax, which only applies to share transactions, which constitute a tiny portion of all financial transactions. Since the introduction of the "Stamp Duty Reserve Tax" of 0.5 percent on the sale...

With a ton of family issues (medical issues with my oldest son), I've not been active as of late, either in posting to the Hear Us Now site or in actual 'activism'. I did not want to ignore today's anniversary though. And though it is not the best posting ever, because of the end of it, I am sharing the link in as many places as I can. It (the end), has been one of my primary messages for at least a decade now. Even more so since the Tea Party/912 and Liberty movement in general came to be. Check...

Margaret Thatcher once famously pointed out the core problem of socialism: “They always run out of other people’s money.� California has been intent on demonstrating exactly what Thatcher meant with its highly progressive income-tax system that relies heavily on hitting the higher-income earners to fund their government. As the state has been discovering for the past few years, it’s a recipe for amplifying disaster in an economic downturn: Gov. Jerry Brown wants to hit California’s highest-income taxpayers with billions of dollars in new taxes, and is jousting with other groups with their own tax-the-rich measures over which, if any, will...

Gene Sperling, director of the White House's national economic council, said today at an official meeting that "we need a global minimum tax": “He supports corporate tax reform that would reduce expenditures and loopholes, lower rates for people investing and creating jobs in the U.S., due so further for manufacturing, and that we need to, as we have the Buffett Rule and the individual tax reform, we need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually...

President Obama is now campaigning all of the country in the name of “fairness” especially how it relates to the US Tax Code. According to President Obama, “fair” means a progressive tax (where as one makes more money, they pay a higher percentage in taxes). What he’s trying to do through his “fairness” campaign is make the progressive tax more progressive by increasing tax rates on those that have higher incomes. According to the Obama administration, it is more “fair,” to raise taxes on the rich. I’m here to tell you that this isn’t true. Of course all of that...

Much has been made already about President Obama’s comments yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast concerning the Christian faith’s teachings about social responsibility. During his time at the breakfast, the president opined that getting rid of tax breaks for wealthy Americans amounted to a Christian obligation: In a time when many folks are struggling and at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income or young people with student loans or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if...