Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Core U.S. producer prices recorded their largest fall in more than four years in October and industrial output was flat, underlining concerns at the Federal Reserve about low inflation amid moderate growth. Economists said the data supported the U.S. central bank's November 3 decision to ease monetary policy further even though the 0.6 percent drop in the core Producer Price Index largely reflected the annual introduction of new motor vehicle models. Stripping out the sharp declines in vehicle prices, core producer prices -- which exclude volatile food and energy costs -- would have risen by 0.2 percent,...

I would like to start a discussion about tax systems and propose an alternative to the current tax system. But before I go into the proposal, allow me to state that the current mess we are in is NOT a result of the tax system or the amount of tax we collect. Rather the problem is spending but this thread is not designed to address that issue. Proposal- Ammend the Constitution to abolish the income tax and authorize Congress to raise monies by one of the following: Useage fees - such as entrance fees for national parks Inport taxes Export...

Romanian companies have announced their intentions of moving their businesses to Bulgaria due to the tax policies in Bucharest, the Romanian “Ziarull Financiar” reports. “The new measures, taken on a daily basis by the government, do not surprise me. I want to move Interagro's headquarters to Bulgaria in September. We will translate all documents in Bulgarian by then and we will look for a new building. I would rather pay the 10% flat tax and all the other taxes to the Bulgarian state and pay only land and property taxes here,” said Ioan Niculae, owner of "Interagro", the third biggest...

This is Sarah Corrie Simpson's first visit to Israel. Her younger sister, Rachel Corrie, was killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, at the age of 23. Now, the family is suing the state in the Haifa District Court. "I'm glad the day is finally here, that the eyewitnesses are having a chance to talk in a court of law," she said in an interview with Haaretz on Thursday. "It's been seven long years." The witnesses, who include Rachel's colleagues in the left-wing International Solidarity Movement, say Rachel climbed atop a mount of dirt to be...

International Solidarity Movement's highest priority was to take pictures of her death WANTED: Young, attractive, idealistic female college student to star in a movie about Zionazi oppression of the downtrodden Palestinian people. Acting skills are not particularly important because "if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice" (George Rishmawi, International Solidarity Movement leader). We cannot prove that the International Solidarity Movement actually recruited Rachel Corrie with the intention of making her the star in a snuff film but, when the opportunity to do so arose, the ISM...

Jerusalem (CNN) -- A 23-year-old American activist stands in front of an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. The bulldozer drives over her, crushing her to death. These are the facts. Rachel Corrie, along with colleagues from the International Solidarity Movement, was trying to prevent Israel from bulldozing homes in Rafah, close to the Egyptian border. Her activism cost her her life in March 2003. A colleague said at the time, "Many times the bulldozer came up to us and buried us with dirt, but they always stopped." Corrie's parents want to know the truth about their daughter's death, whether the killing...

SUFFOLK An indiscreet tire change may have been a burglar’s undoing Friday night, according to police. At first, it looked like he’d make a clean getaway. An attempt to burglarize Butler’s Store, on Godwin Boulevard, had been unsuccessful. The store’s owner, John Butler, said he heard an intruder try to kick in the door and had chased him away, but the intruder managed to drive off and, better yet, escape unharmed. “I coulda dropped him,” said Butler, who’d come running out of his store with a 9 mm in his hands. He and his wife live in an apartment in...

After we rescued a beautiful black haired dog from our local animal shelter, we were were told it was "half Labrador Retriever and half "Golden Retriever". I happened to be watching a dog show video on Hulu.com and lo and behold, there was our dog. They called it a " Black Flat Coat Retriever". We googled the breed and sure enough, the pictures left no room for doubt, that was our dog. Now that we are 99% sure that is the breed, a lot of the behaviors of the dog make sense. It is an extremely high energy dog. As...

A woman trying to smash a penny on the tracks was hit by a train Thursday night. Emergency crews rushed to the scene at River Road and Idaho Street in Sedamsville just after 8 p.m. They say the woman in her 20s suffered a minor head injury and was walking around when crews arrived. She was taken to the hospital for observation.

Students stabbed and set alight Two French research students found stabbed to death following a flat fire had been tied up and suffered horrific, excessive injuries, police have said. The bodies of Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, both 23, were found in a ground-floor flat in New Cross, south-east London, on Sunday night. They had suffered a total of 243 stab wounds to the head, neck and chest before being set alight. The biochemistry students had been studying at Imperial College, London. Det Ch Insp Mick Duthie said he had no idea why the students were killed. Fiancee's tribute Speaking...

(Alexandria, VA) -- As House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) plans another push this year for an overhaul of the Tax Code, lawmakers should abandon Rangel's multi-rate proposal and follow the worldwide movement toward a simple flat tax system, according to the 362,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU). In the mid-20th century, Hong Kong was the only country with a flat -- and proportional -- national personal income tax rate. Since then, 17 other countries have followed suit and introduced flat taxes, according to the World Taxpayers Associations (WTA), a coalition of 60 taxpayer-advocacy groups -- including NTU...

<p>A federal appeals court panel has refused to reinstate a lawsuit brought against Caterpillar Inc. by the family of a 23-year-old peace activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer.</p>

An initiative to create a statewide border police force failed in its second effort to get on the ballot and appears to be headed for California's political dustbin. The Border Police Initiative fell far short of the 373,816 signatures needed to make it on the November ballot, according to the California Secretary of State's Office -- short by 373,816 signatures. "The counties did not submit any petitions for verification," said Nghia Nguyen, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. The proposal was the brainchild of Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Temecula, who launched a signature-gathering effort last year. Haynes, who did...

See for example this thread and this thread first. In Colorado the High Schools make US flags against the rules! The same folks who hired Jay Bennish (inspired!) are publically shown to be Fools!

Whether you are for the FairTax or Flat Tax, go ahead and cast your vote. As of this writing, with over 9700 votes in, the FairTax is leading the Flat Tax 43% to 11%. 43% are not not supporting either one. 2% will support either one.

Father imprisoned four girls in flat to 'teach them Islam' By Henry Samuel in Paris (Filed: 07/01/2006) A Moroccan father of four girls who imprisoned his wife and children in their flat "in the name of Islam" received a 10-month suspended sentence and was stripped of his parental rights yesterday. The unidentified 45-year-old was found guilty of breaking French law on compulsory schooling for children over the age of six, which applies to three of the four girls - aged four, 10, 13 and 14. The man, from the town of Romans-sur-Isère in the Drôme region, said he had refused...

Health, mortgage deductions eyed Advisory panel won't urge national retail sales taxBy William L. Watts, MarketWatch Last Update: 3:54 PM ET Oct. 11, 2005 WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - A presidential tax-reform panel on Tuesday indicated it was ready to urge changes in the tax treatment of healthcare benefits and mortgage interest deductions when it issues its final report in the next few weeks. Details are yet to be worked out, but members broadly agreed at the panel's penultimate public meeting to explore the possibility of putting a limit on the amount of healthcare benefits that employers would be able to provide...

It is a rare thing when the American people can get excited about a piece of federal legislation that involves taxes. Normally, our elected officials are trying very hard to figure out how to sugarcoat yet another tax increase so they can supplement their habit of funding things like museums for ground hogs and rodeos and tropical biospheres in the farm belt. But a bill sponsored by US Representative John Linder offers a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for our lawmakers to not only do what is right by the American people, but do something that makes them look good...

PRAGUE -- Flat-tax fever is sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. As the Bush administration looks abroad to places like Chile for new models to revamp Social Security, many former Soviet bloc countries are adopting an idea for income tax reform that American conservatives have pushed since the Reagan era, but which has never been attempted in the United States.

AUTOMATED PAYMENT TRANSACTION (APT) TAX Taxation technology for the 21st century Dr. Edgar L. Feige, Professor Emeritus of Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the originator of the APT Tax concept, has just produced new estimates suggesting that a broad-based transaction tax as low as six tenths of one percent could replace the entire Federal and State 2005 budget revenue requirements of the United States of America. The APT concept is elegant in its simplicity - potentially replacing the entire federal and state tax system - including income, corporate profits, excise and estate taxes - in favor of a...