Free Republic

April 15 is usually Tax Day in the United States – the day by which your individual federal tax return has to have been filed, if you’re to avoid a late penalty. And if you’re in one of the many states with its own statewide income tax – 43 at last count – that usually shares the same deadline. By what right does the government take this money from us? That’s an easy one. The Constitution says it can. To be specific, the 16th Amendment authorized the federal government to collect income taxes, so it’s been legal for 110 years....

Wealth taxes are like a specter in search of a host, and an already overtaxed New England state may be the first to succumb. Vermont lawmakers want to tax residents’ unrealized gains, hoping to finally break the barrier that’s kept them from draining asset values year after year. The state’s top tax legislator has spent recent weeks pushing bills that would dial up taxes on high earners. The biggest reach is a proposal to tax the paper gains from assets above $10 million. The plan would slap Vermont’s 8.75% top income-tax rate on half of those gains. That means a...

For Tucker Carlson Colonel Douglas MacGregor lays out how much debt the federal government has pushed onto the workers of the US to pay for for foreign wars and open borders....

Former President Donald Trump swung left in his latest bizarre attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on Tuesday accusing him of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare and calling him a “wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” in an all-caps blast. ​Trump, 76, who announced Nov. 15 that he was seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and is expected to face his most significant primary challenge from DeSantis, initially touted his poll numbers showing him leading the 44-year-old governor before cribbing from Democratic attack ads of the past. “Great Poll numbers are springing forth for your favorite President,...

A top California lawmaker is proposing to spend $10 billion to help families buy homes in the state with some of America’s highest housing prices. Democratic State Senate Leader Toni Atkins on Wednesday unveiled details of a proposal she’s pushing to create a revolving fund that would provide interest-free loans for up to 30% of the purchase price of a home for low- and middle-income households. [snip] The median price for single family homes in California last year was $786,000, according to the California Association of Realtors, more than twice the nationwide average. [snip] Under the proposal, California would spend...

The bipartisan infrastructure legislation moving through Congress could end up on President Biden’s desk before we know it. The $1 trillion bill has reportedly cleared major hurdles in the Senate and will soon land before the House of Representatives. The president would almost certainly sign the bill, which has his support, and its bipartisan passage would represent a political victory for the Biden administration. At least, at first.The promised long-term economic benefits from the sweeping $1 trillion expenditure will likely never materialize, according to a new Ivy League analysis. This runs directly against the president’s promises that it would create...

... The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania a number of years ago developed a comprehensive and substantive platform for evaluating the federal budget. This model was built so that those who govern and those who are governed could have an accurate and reasonably unbiased analysis of federal fiscal activities. It is one of the most useful and effective tools around for figuring out just what the federal government and the various players who lead it in the Democratic and Republican parties are really up to. The conclusion, after reviewing the opening bids put forward by Biden and his...

Because of the coronavirus bailouts, the federal deficit is now expected to be $3.7 trillion for fiscal year 2020. This is a huge drag on Americans' earnings and retirement security. Coronavirus panic is hitting the global economy, and America is no exception. To patch over the shelter-in-place orders and compensate closed businesses, Congress has passed well more than $2.7 trillion in so-called stimulus, including subsidized loans to businesses, increased unemployment insurance, direct payments to Americans, and funding for hospitals and state and local governments.Because of this, the federal deficit is now expected to be $3.7 trillion for fiscal year 2020....

Title says all

<p>Congress and the media obsess endlessly over whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.</p> <p>Both ignore $23 trillion of bigger problems.</p> <p>That's how deep in debt the federal government is now, and because they keep spending much more than they could ever hope to collect in taxes, that number will only go up. It's increasing by $1 trillion a year.</p>

We don't care. You can check Pew or Gallup or any other polling company. We are running deficits that ought to make us nauseated with worry -- the federal deficit passed $1 trillion in September -- but we're not interested. Well, a majority of us anyway. About 48% of those polled by Pew in January said that reducing the deficit should be a top priority for the president and Congress. As recently as 2014, 72% of the public agreed with that statement. Republicans (54%) are in favor of reducing the deficit at higher rates than Democrats (44%), but concern has...

The more I follow the Democratic presidential campaign, the more I see how little I understand some people. After all, we can have differences when it comes to ideology, and we can aspire to different things in life. We can even have different understandings of what morality means. Still, there are things on which we should all agree: Because our government is $23 trillion in debt and its annual budget deficits are permanently heading north of $1 trillion, every American should agree that there isn't much space for more spending. And yet Sen. Elizabeth Warren promises that if she becomes...

There isn’t a dollar in existence that one or more of the Democrats running for president haven’t promised to spend on something. It doesn’t really matter on what, it’s already gone. Of course, your tax money is already spent, as is that of your children and a good chunk of what your grandchildren will earn; that’s what happens when you have a national debt surpassing $22 trillion. So what’s a few tens of trillions more? In the last debate, most of the candidates on the stage came out in favor of a wealth tax, under the banner of the rich...

President Trump on Thursday blocked an automatic pay raise for 1.5 million federal workers, and asked Congress to pass legislation with no increase next year for employees covered by the General Schedule pay system. “Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” Trump wrote in a Thursday letter to congressional leaders, a formality that blocks an automatic 2.1 percent raise from taking effect in January under the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act. "I have determined that for 2019, both across‑the‑board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero," Trump wrote.

Editor's note: This column was authored by Jake Grant. We can all remember that dreaded moment in school––you just finished a test and just knew you didn’t do well. The teacher tells you that they’ll be passing back the test, and you dread that moment all day. Congress likely had that feeling leading up to the CBO’s semi-annual report, “An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook.” The update includes two important factors, which likely give members that sinking feeling of failing a test: the tax cut passed in December and the massive spending deal approved in February. The outlook was...

In "Hamlet," Shakespeare pens one of the most familiar lines -- and best advice -- ever written. Before Laertes leaves for Paris, his father, Polonius, tells him: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." We have ignored that advice for far too long, which is why the U.S. national debt is $20 trillion with more to come, thanks to the Republican Congress, which has passed a two-year spending bill that calls for $300 billion in new spending and removes caps applied by the Budget Control Act of 2011. It's being sold to the public with the highest and purist motives....

I am worried that Republicans in Congress have been eating Tide Pods lately. Tide Pods can kill you and Republicans are in the process of killing the Republican Party with this latest budget agreement. There is no other explanation.What else explains the irrational and liberal policies that Republicans pushed in the latest budget agreement? This agreement is a complete sell-out of the pillar of the 2016 Republican Party platform, which reads in part:“Our national debt is a burden on our economy and families. The huge increase in the national debt demanded by and incurred during the current Administration has placed a...

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 -- our gross domestic product -- totaled about $19 trillion. If the Congress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately. Taxing us is...

"You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile." This quote has often been attributed to the late Chicago mobster Al Capone, who with his fellow organized crime buddies used extortion as one of their tactics to get what they wanted. Today's modern congressional Democrats have clearly benefited from Capone's example. As has occurred many times before, congressional Democrats are threatening a government shutdown on Friday, if President Trump and Republicans don't cave on DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an American immigration policy that allows eligible immigrant youth, who...

Republicans want tax reform, but their refusal to cut spending forces them to look into all sorts of revenue raisers. Some are good, such as eliminating the deductions for state and local taxes. Others are counterproductive, such as the threat to significantly decrease the tax deduction on 401(k) accounts, potentially reducing the overall levels of savings for the millions of Americans using them. Instead, they should keep the deduction intact, hence encouraging savings -- and in addition create universal savings accounts. There are rumors that they are considering such a move. First, let me complain about the no-good proposal to...