Free Republic

The GOP's long-promised change is an offshoot of a tax overhaul last year that cut corporate rates and winnowed down the number of individual tax brackets. On Friday, the Treasury Department and IRS unveiled the new postcard, which will replace the current forms 1040, 1040A and 1040 EZ.

Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday that absent a last-minute deal with his fellow Democrats who run the New Jersey Legislature, he will be forced to cut $855 million in spending from the state budget lawmakers passed last week. "That's unfortunately the option that we'd be left with," Murphy said at a news conference at his office in Trenton. The Legislature passed a budget on Thursday that, in defiance of Murphy, does not include his plans to raise taxes on personal income over $1 million or boost the state sales taxes from 6.625 percent back to 7 percent. Murphy would not...

One question before the Supreme Court this term was a big one: As technology evolves, how do our laws governing commerce evolve with it? The answer, issued in the ruling held in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, is a bad one for taxpayers. Many proponents of an online sales tax have argued that we must completely revisit what we know about interstate commerce, and create illusory tax regimes to contemplate a brave new order of online transactions. In reality, none of this is true. For one, while it has been 26 years since the Supreme Court visited the issue in...

Time and again we hear politicians from different parts of the country profess the virtues of a soda tax. Their reasoning ranges from wanting to improve the public health, by cutting back consumption of unhealthy drinks, to talking about how much revenue it will bring in. This proclivity of nanny statists to push policies to change people’s behavior hues quite closely to Einstein’s definition of insanity: Trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Policy makers of all stripes need to abandon their affinity for soda taxes. Put simply, soda taxes just don’t work. Take Berkeley, California, as...

In the battle against litter in the Garden State, plastic bags have been public enemy number one. Several municipalities, mostly along the Shore, have acted on their own to limit plastic bag use either through fees or bans. But for years, efforts for statewide regulation of the bags has failed to gain traction. Now, state lawmakers have decided that it is time to move forward. A new fee on plastic and paper shopping bags is being pushed through the state legislature: The bill cleared budget committees in both the Assembly and Senate on Tuesday and could be passed as early...

Online shoppers could find costs going up after the Supreme Court did away Thursday with a decades-old precedent limiting the ability of states to collect sales tax on certain out-of-state Internet purchases. The 5-4 ruling called the current rules “unsound and incorrect.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday that new tax forms, designed to make the filing process clearer and simpler for Americans, will be released next week. “Next week we will be unveiling the new 1040 and it will be a postcard as we promised,” he said during a press conference celebrating the six-month anniversary of the passage of tax reform. “Hardworking taxpayers won’t have to spend nearly as much time filling out their [tax forms].” The 1040 form is the U.S. individual income tax return. Republicans promised to simplify the filing process for taxpayers, famously claiming the forms...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says states can force online shoppers to pay sales tax. The 5-4 ruling Thursday is a win for states, who said they were losing out on billions of dollars annually under two decades-old Supreme Court decisions that impacted online sales tax collection. The high court ruled Thursday to overturn those decisions. snip “Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States. These critiques underscore that the physical presence rule, both as first formulated and as applied today, is an incorrect interpretation of...

Paris. The year is 1788. The air is heavy with the scent of impending revolution. Some praise the king in hushed whispers, others shout “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!” in the streets. Either way, the time for talk is over. How did it get to this point? The hopeful specter of radical liberalism played its part, as the father of modern conservatism Edmund Burke observes in his masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France. But most men aren’t dreamers. Most live parochial lives and think parochial thoughts—there’s no time to dream when you’re working to put bread on the table. For the...

Austin tax dollars to city election campaign dollars has some concerned about the legality of so called "Democracy dollars" An Austin commission is kicking around the idea of giving taxpayer dollars to residents who would then donate the money to local political candidates. Fred Lewis of the Charter Commission calls it the democracy dollars program. The program was created in Seattle and is so far the only US city with such a program. The commission’s Fred Lewis explained its to combat major donors from dominating elections. Each voter could get 50 bucks for each city race they can vote in....

The American Federation of Teachers is urging Democratic candidates to step up their attacks on last year’s Republican-passed tax cuts, armed with voter surveys that find the legislation useful as a way to argue for more public spending. “We’ve found support for an increase in health-care spending, and for an argument that the increase is going to come from tax cuts for the rich,” said Stan Greenberg, a pollster at Democracy Corps who conducted the voter survey for AFT. “They created the vehicle for expanding investment by passing this tax cut.” The survey, conducted with 1,000 voter phone interviews and...

Full Title: Dem Rep Sponsoring Trump Tax Cut Repeal Paid No Taxes for Five Years Repeal could cost the state of Colorado hundreds of millions Congressman Jared Polis of Colorado, who is sponsoring a bill that would repeal the Trump tax cuts, thereby effectively raising tax rates on most Americans and businesses, recently reconfirmed to a reporter in his home state that for at least five years he paid no income taxes at all from 2001 to 2005. The issue resurfaced in a recent debate as Polis is running for governor. The five-term congressman is one of the ten wealthiest...

California state government has so much money this year that it’s opening two new savings accounts so it can keep socking away even more cash for the rainy day that Gov. Jerry Brown says is just over the horizon. That tactic — setting a course to pile up $16 billion in savings over the next 12 months — should reassure taxpayers that cuts to government services won’t be as severe as they were a decade ago when the state’s economy plummeted into the Great Recession. But the money is inviting a different kind ofpolitical problem for majority Democrats. It could...

Electric automaker Tesla is cutting 9% of its employees across the company ... Throughout its nearly 15 years of existence, the company has never made a profit, ... Tesla will also not be renewing its residential sales agreement with Home Depot, Musk said, opting instead to focus on selling its solar products in its stores and on its website.

Tax cuts, deregulation and smart trade policies will make America boom They don’t call it the dismal science for nothing. Remember Paul Krugman predicting the apocalypse in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. And now with the economy clipping along at nearly 3%, deregulation and lower taxes reviving manufacturing, and consumers confidently spending again, some two-thirds of private-sector prognosticators see a recession beginning as early 2020. The new doomsday scenario offered by the Congressional Budget Office and others is that the economy is getting only a temporary jolt from tax cuts and increased government spending, and aggregate demand will tail...

Last December, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. The largest shake-up to the federal tax code in more than 30 years, the law includes myriad changes that will benefit manufacturers. Among other things, the law reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent and repeals the corporate alternative minimum tax. The law also allows companies to immediately expense the full cost of qualified property acquired and placed into service before 2023. And, it maintains the R&D tax credit. While stumping for the bill, President Trump predicted tax reform would be “rocket fuel” for...

The California state budget could extend a tax break to low-income families of undocumented immigrants. Assembly Democrats want Gov. Jerry Brown to expand the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit in such a way that people who do not have Social Security numbers can apply for it. The proposal is meant to help poor Californians recover some of their state income tax. Last year, a household with two children and an adjusted gross income of up to $22,309 would have been eligible for a tax credit. The maximum credit for a family of that size is $2,467, according to the Franchise...

<p>Acadiana lost $26.6 million in proposed construction projects with the stroke of Gov. John Bel Edwards veto pen Wednesday.</p> <p>Twenty-nine projects were part of the 40 items struck from the state’s annual construction budget by Edwards using his line-item veto authority.</p>

The number of electric, gas and water utilities cutting customer charges due to the recently passed Republican tax cuts has passed 100, and the total savings is about $3 billion. According to Americans for Tax Reform, the number has reached 101 with most utilities either cutting bills or not passing on the costs of expanding their operations. “When Democrats threaten to raise taxes if they get back into power they are threatening to raise your utility bill -- month after month,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. The general total for the cuts is over $2.8 billion....

A Miccosukee tribal member owes back taxes on gambling revenue, a federal appeals ruled Monday in a decision that experts believe could pave the way for the federal government to collect more than $1 billion in overdue personal income taxes. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Miami federal judge who ruled that tribal member Sally Jim must pay the Internal Revenue Service $278,758 in taxes, interest and penalties for failing to file a tax return in 2001. The ruling came two years after U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga decided her family's gaming income — a distribution of...