Free Republic

Recently the Wall Street Journal published an article titled As Nashville Rapidly Expands, Residents Worry the Metropolis Is Growing Too Fast, and it beautifully illustrates the basic principles of building a real estate investment index. It seems that the accelerating flow of jobs and peoples from larger cities, especially up north to Nashville, has current residents alarmed."“There is very little opposition in our town to growth,” said David Briley, newly elected mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, in an interview. “I would say there is a high level of anxiety about the pace of growth.”" The...

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes thinks the government should give cash handouts to people with the lowest incomes in order to fight income inequality. And he thinks the money should come from higher taxes on wealthy individuals and even big tech companies, like Facebook. Hughes, 34, was one of Facebook’s co-founders, along with Mark Zuckerberg and three of their Harvard classmates, in 2004. He was Facebook’s spokesperson for the company’s first three years, before leaving to finish his Harvard degree and then to work on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign as a media strategist. He says he's made "half a billion...

State lawmakers proved it again last month: Watch them closely or they’ll get you good. That’s what they did when they passed a new bereavement-leave bill at the 11th hour as the legislative session ended. The bill would force employers to offer workers 10 — yes, 10 — weeks of time off with pay whenever a family member dies. That may sound nice, but the cost would be paid by the worker himself, via a 0.126 percent payroll deduction. Via a new tax, that is.

President Donald Trump was in the East Room of the White House on Friday to trumpet the six-month anniversary of his tax cuts, the singular legislative achievement of his presidency so far. But as his teleprompter instructed him to rattle off statistics about the tax law, Trump determined it was the time and place for a bigger celebration. "Our country is doing so well, possibly as well as it's ever done," the President declared. "I don't think it's ever done like this." As a statement about the country, Trump's remark is debatable. Thousands of immigrant children remain separated from their...

Mike Zaffaroni calls the newest piece of equipment at his landscaping company in Jacksonville, Florida, his “Tax Cut Truck.” He had long wanted to expand the services he offers to his customers and says the tax cuts President Donald J. Trump signed into law six months ago were the motivation he needed to buy the $80,000 truck and forklift. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, most small businesses will now be able to deduct 20 percent off their business income in addition to having their taxable income taxed at lower rates. And for the first five years, they’ll be...

I like how the constant harping and carping about tariffs these days gets invoked together with fearmongering about Smoot Hawley and the Great Depression. What is missing? The Revenue Act of 1932. After the 1929 crash there was a small tax cut, but this was overshadowed by Smoot Hawley just months later. In the middle of bad economic times, you simply don't raise taxes, and yes, a tariff is a tax. But let's get to the meat of the numbers, shall we? The Revenue Acts of 1918 and 1921 had a top tax rate of 73%. The Revenue Act of...

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Friday said he wanted to further lower the corporate tax rate, from 21 percent to 20 percent, as part of a second round of tax cuts later this year. Trump, in an interview with Fox News to mark the six-month anniversary of the $1.5 trillion tax cut law Republicans passed last year, said other parts of the new tax plan would be tailored to the middle class. “One of the things we’re thinking about is bringing the 21 percent down to 20 and for the most part, the rest of it will go right...

The federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reports that for the first three months of 2018 US corporations have repatriated over $300 billion in profits earned in foreign countries. This compares to $35 billion for the same quarter of the previous year. The surge in incoming money was attributed to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed late in 2017. These economic results were a matter of major concern to Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) ominously warned of "the danger this kind of runaway prosperity represents to civilization. This ugly turn undermines the progress former President Obama...

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...