Free Republic

Florida earned its reputation as the retirement capital of the US.. A fixed income in retirement can go a lot further in some states than others .. ... To make the most of your retirement savings, you should retire in a state where the cost of living and tax rates are friendly to retirees, if you have the resources to. You should also consider factors like the quality of the state's healthcare system and the abundance of activities that you enjoy.' Colorado, which ranked second for the best state to retire in 2024, offers similarly taxpayer-friendly conditions, with no estate...

In addition to the off-year elections to be decided this November in Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, a number of ballot initiatives will be voted on in other states. Perhaps the most consequential measure appearing on the November 2023 ballot, at least when it comes to fiscal policy, is found in Colorado, where voters will be asked whether they want to weaken the nation’s strongest tax and expenditure limit in exchange for property tax relief. Proposition HH, which was referred to the November ballot by Colorado lawmakers with the support of Governor Jared Polis (D), would weaken the state’s Taxpayer’s...

The federal government collected a record $4,045,979,000,000 in taxes in fiscal 2021. In FY 2017 the Federal government collected $3.3 Trillion. This means that after Trump and the Republicans passed the tax rate cuts that went into effect in 2018, revenues up over $700 billion per year after 3 years. So why do most journalists and other Democrats keep claiming that Trump’s tax cuts cost the government trillions of dollars? They intentionally mislead the public because that is clearly false. Why do they continue to use the CBO’s predictions instead of actual numbers? T0he tax cuts that cost the government...

[snip] Inevitably, the divorce has become fodder for advancing policies unrelated to core issues of marriage, divorce, and fidelity. And in the Age of Ocasio-Cortez—she who has revived the hoary notion of confiscatory tax rates—it was inevitable that some liberal in the media would seize on the divorce as justification for soaking the rich. Enter Ryan Cooper, a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. The actual title of his column: "The real lesson of Jeff Bezos' divorce drama? Soak the rich." Give the guy credit for candor, if not for an understanding of our founding documents or of economics. Cooper claims that...

Pass-Through Business Taxes Previous law: Businesses organized as sole proprietorships, LLCs and partnerships don’t pay corporate tax rates. Instead, the owners pay individual income taxes on their share of business income – they’re called pass-through business taxes. Those tax rates are the same as the individual income tax rates. New law: Business owners can take a 20 percent deduction on their pass-through business income, with limits for those earning above $157,500 (single) and $315,000 (married, filing jointly).

Evverybody knows by now that President Trump is a fascist. He's a Nazi just like the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12. We know this because the mainstream media, a host of dimwit celebrities, various Democratic politicians and the highly reputable antifa tell us he is. What we really know, though, is these groups don't know anything except how to shriek louder and longer than everyone else. A few also well know how to break other people's property and set things that don't belong to them on fire. But they don't know their history, and therefore...

Within the next few months we can expect to see the Trump administration support a bill to lower the corporate tax rate. Of course, it is 100 percent certain that many liberal entertainers will be screaming and protesting about how unfair it would be to lower that tax rate. Every one of them should therefore be asked if they are therefore willing to quit working for the media corporations that pay them their exorbitant salaries. The reason is that Variety has reported that the media company executives, despite their political differences with President Donald Trump, are completely in support of...

Probably nothing like his critics - or his supporters - think To listen to some Trump supporters, you’d think a President Trump would swoop into Washington, apply his mad skills and business acumen to clean up Washington, pull in the reins on the federal bureaucracy, tame the IRS and get things running in a ship-shape manner. To listen to some of his critics, Trump would destroy all rights for minorities, women and the disabled while completely mismanaging everything Washington does and ultimately pushing all the nuclear buttons, thus destroying the world.

Apple CEO Tim Cook struck back at critics of the iPhone maker’s strategy to avoid paying U.S. taxes, telling The Washington Post in a wide ranging interview that the company would not bring that money back from abroad unless there was a “fair rate.” Along with other multinational companies, the tech giant has been subject to criticism over a tax strategy that allows them to shelter profits made abroad from the U.S. corporate tax rate, which at 35 percent is among the highest in the developed world. The move complies with the letter of the law, if not the spirit,...

Fox Business host Neil Cavuto engaged a scholar in earnest Socratic dialogue Thursday. Keely Mullen is a national organizer for #MillionStudentMarch, a movement that demands “tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, and a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers” in response to the crisis caused by rapacious corporate education. “#MillionStudentMarch is a movement for a more equitable and fair system of education as opposed to the really corporate model we have right now,” Mullen said. Mullen is a graduate of the prestigious Francis W. Parker School and political science student at Northeastern University, according to her LinkedIn...

“Apple will be accused of prospering from illegal tax deals with the Irish government for more than two decades when Brussels this week unveils details of a probe that could leave the iPhone maker with a record fine of as much as several billions of euros,” Tim Bradshaw, Alex Barker and Vanessa Houlder report for The Financial Times. “Preliminary findings from the European Commission’s investigation into Apple’s tax affairs in Ireland, where it has had a rate of less than 2 per cent, claim the Silicon Valley company benefited from illicit state aid after striking backroom deals with Ireland’s authorities,...

’ve complained over and over again that America’s tax code is a nightmare that undermines competitiveness and retards growth.Our aggregate fiscal burden may not be as high as it is for many of our foreign competitors, but high tax rates and poor design mean the system is very punitive on a per-dollar-raised basis.For more information, the Tax Foundation has put together an excellent report measuring international tax competitiveness.Here’s the methodology. The Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index (ITCI) measures the degree to which the 34 OECD countries’ tax systems promote competitiveness through low tax burdens on business investment and neutrality through...

I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal last week about the policy debate over whether it’s better to lower tax rates or to provide targeted tax cuts for parents. Since this meant I was wading into a fight between so-called reform conservatives (or “reformicons”) and traditional conservatives (or “supply-siders”), I wasn’t surprised to learn that not everyone agreed with my analysis. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, for instance, doesn’t approve of what I wrote. …why are some folks on the right against giving middle-class families a big tax cut and letting them keep more of what...

It’s a bad idea when governments demand information on your bank accounts and investments so they can impose economically destructive double taxation. It’s a worse idea when they also demand the right to tax economic activity in other jurisdictions (otherwise known as “worldwide taxation“). And it’s the worst possible development when governments decide that they should impose a global network of data collection and dissemination as part of a scheme of worldwide double taxation. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. High-tax nations, working through the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, want to impose a one-size-fits-all system of “automatic information...

Why is our recovery from the Great Recession so sluggish and so slow? Economists are increasingly focusing on Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ObamaCare. Although generally thought of as a measure to insure the uninsured, health reform is affecting the entire labor market in negative ways. As I wrote previously, the employer mandate to provide health insurance will cost almost $6 an hour for family coverage. This health minimum wage (on top of the money minimum wage) raises the cost of labor and will almost certainly discourage hiring. There are two ways that...

For homeowners eager to save money on repairs, it’s a tempting proposition—you pay a tradesman cash-in-hand, he knocks a bit off the bill, and no questions are asked. With the builder or plumber failing to declare their earnings and pay any tax, such secret payments are said to cost the economy £2 billion a year. Now a survey suggests the black economy is booming, with more than four in five homeowners admitting they have paid a workman cash-in-hand. Not only that, but 30 percent have done it three times or more in the past year alone. …

While liberalism’s terminus is failure, its first stop is hypocrisy. Higher-tax advocate Warren Buffett recently illustrated this with his reported use of a tax strategy to avoid — you guessed it — higher taxes. There is nothing new in the tax strategy or in Mr. Buffett’s use of it; it’s just an ample example of liberal hypocrisy. As reported in Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Tax Report on March 20, Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. “plans to limit taxes on more than $1 billion of gains in Graham Holdings Co. stock by swapping the shares for assets owned by the former Washington...

Hello all... Any chance I can get some tax / income savvy freepers to weigh in? New job, first pay. No exemptions are showing up on my pay stub (I took it in the kiester this pay with Federal Withholding). I have three kids who live with me full time. I have a soon to be x-spouse and we are NOT filing jointly. I am in the 28% tax bracket. Is there a (relatively) easy site I can calculate what I should be getting paid? My last job's with holding was CONSIDERABLY less. My new HR rep's merely have heartbeats...

At the Potsdam conference with Harry Truman and Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill learned that the voters of the nation he had led for five years through World War II had just voted to throw him out of office. "It may well be a blessing in disguise," said his wife Clementine. "At the moment, it seems quite effectively disguised," replied Churchill. Republicans must feel that way today. For they have survived their own Dunkirk. They may have left their helmets, canteens and rifles behind, but they did finally get off the beach. That Republicans suffered a rout, as the British did...

President Obama will kick off the new year the same way that he kicked off the old year: by demanding that the wealthy pay their "fair share" in taxes. But while millions of small-business owners, struggling entrepreneurs, inventors and investors brace for a double whammy of fiscal cliff tax hikes and new Obamacare taxes, the class-warrior in chief's richest pals are getting a pass. It's a Golden Pass for liberal millionaires and billionaires who support higher Obama taxes for everyone but themselves. Meet the Democratic tax evaders of the year. -- Google. The left-wing Internet giant provided Silicon Valley's biggest...