Free Republic

President Joe Biden on Thursday proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, a scheme that will likely burden both large and small businesses. While the term “corporation” is widely used to depict large companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and McDonald’s, C-corporations are both small and large businesses, the most prevalent of corporations. Individual shareholders of C-corporations already have profits taxed both on a corporate and personal level (double taxation). In addition, small businesses account for 65.1 percent of net new jobs created from 2000 to 2019 and comprise 99.7 percent of firms with paid employees,...

After weeks of spreading riots and demonstrations in Paris, socialist French President Emmanuel Macron has had an epiphany or sorts. Not only is he not going to put a new global warming tax on fuel, he's going to let financially-strapped French families keep more of their money from the taxman. At least this year. "No mercy"? Sounds like total surrender for someone who, just days earlier, arrested 1, 939 people across the country, more than a thousand of those in Paris. The truth is, Macron has lost control both of the people and of the narrative. His 18% approval rating...

Hillary Clinton looked to separate Donald Trump from recent Republican presidents on Friday, laying out a plan to encourage national service while arguing that Trump would never address the subject. The rollout of Clinton's plan -- which includes tripling the size of AmeriCorps and founding a reserve corps of 5 million people to respond to natural disasters -- was meant to be a moment for Clinton to talk more about her policies and values than about her boisterous opponent. But as has been the case throughout 2016, Clinton's speech was a both a direct and implicit rebuke of Trump.

... In return for more spending, Mrs. Clinton could have offered serious structural reforms: repeal of Davis-Bacon, time limits on environmental reviews, serious cost-benefit analysis, and so forth. Such a package would have been irresistible. Instead her plan simply asserts that Mrs. Clinton will “break through Washington gridlock” and “cut red tape”—promises made and forgotten by every presidential candidate in living memory. If the Sierra Club sues to block her worthy commitment to “upgrade our dams and levees,” will she really short-circuit the legal process, and how? The rest of Mrs. Clinton’s economic agenda is a thousand-course smorgasbord of government...

A would-be Republican presidential nominee has changed his mind on marijuana. Sen. Ted Cruz said he supports Colorado’s state rights to keep marijuana legalized without federal interference during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity at Thursday’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “I actually think this is a great embodiment of what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called ‘the laboratories of democracy,’” Cruz said. “If the citizens of Colorado decide they want to go down that road, that’s their prerogative. I personally don’t agree with it, but that’s their right.” Cruz’s comments at CPAC bring him in line with...

More than two years after Coloradans voted to allow recreational marijuana use, the state’s residents continue to stand firmly behind keeping the drug legal, a new poll found. The survey, commissioned by Quinnipiac University, found that 58 percent of Colorado voters support keeping pot legal, while only 38 percent are against it. The result featured significant gender and age disparities. Voters ages 18 to 34 favored it overwhelmingly, 82-16 percent, while 50 percent of those ages 55 and older were against it, with only 46 percent in support. Likewise, men supported the measure by a margin of 63-33, while women...

Marijuana legalization advocates in Oregon have launched a $2 million-plus ad campaign starring a 33-year police veteran. The new ad, embedded below, features Pete Tutmark, a former patrol sergeant and sheriff’s deputy. Tutmark criticizes what he calls a “broken” system that diverts resources from important crime-solving to drug arrests and urges his fellow Oregonians to vote yes on measure 91 this fall, which would legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use. “Last year in Oregon, there were 13,000 citations and arrests for marijuana,” he says in the ad. “That takes time, time better spent solving murders, rape cases, finding missing children....

High hopes for tax money isn’t as expected as the state’s legal marijuana industry isn’t bringing in as much money as anticipated. In fact, tax revenue is way below expectations. When voters approved recreational marijuana sales the state predicted it would pull in more than $33 million in new taxes in the first six months. The actual revenue came up more than $21 million short. The problem is that buying pot is less expensive on the streets where people don’t have to pay taxes or fees. Medical marijuana is also less expensive than recreational pot, so those with medical cards...

Hillary Rodham Clinton says young people understand the significant threat of (climate change) and that she hopes there will be a mass movement that demands political change. The potential 2016 presidential candidate says at a Clinton Global Initiative University panel that young people are much more committed to doing something to address climate change. Clinton says it isn't "just some ancillary issue" but will determine the quality of life for many people. The former secretary of state cited global warming as a major issue that students could face in the future.

President Barack Obama said he’s willing to consider more spending cuts to lower the deficit, as long as they’re coupled with more tax reforms. Using Saturday’s weekly address to praise Congress’ last-minute deal to avert the “fiscal cliff,” Obama said it’s “just one more step” in the larger effort to boost the economy and reduce federal deficits. He said this week’s deal raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans while preventing a middle-class tax hike that could have thrown the country back into recession. “I believe we can find more places to cut spending without shortchanging things like education, job training,...

Via Mediaite, "balanced approach" is Obama's Orwellian term for selling tax hikes to the public as a condition of spending cuts even though there's nothing remotely balanced about our fiscal problems. Spend 10 seconds looking at the graphs in Yuval Levin's new post at the Corner. That's the reality that the "balanced approach" pretends to address. As Levin said in another post today, “The fiscal trajectory of our welfare state is not sustainable, no matter how much taxes go up.”But okay. The left’s new talking point, pushed by The One himself, is that they absolutely positively won’t negotiate over the...

DES MOINES, Iowa - Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann is telling college students in politically important Iowa that all Americans should pay taxes since they all benefit from services such as roads and bridges, national defense and the courts. Her position, which she was outlining today at Iowa State University in Ames, is a direct challenge to rivals Rick Perry and Herman Cain, who are advocating plans that would allow low-wage earners to continue paying no taxes while implementing a form of a flat tax on all other workers. The Tax Policy Center estimates that some 46 percent of households...

Herman Cain deserves credit for proposing a tax-reform plan that is specific, promotes economic growth, and has captured the imagination of conservatives nationwide. His 9-9-9 plan builds on the insight that one of the chief defects of the current tax code is its bias toward consumption over savings. But his plan’s peculiarities of design, substantive weaknesses, and political naïveté render it unworthy of conservative support. Cain’s ultimate objective is a 30 percent national sales tax, but his interim plan is to replace the current income, payroll, and corporate tax codes with three new taxes. A 9 percent income tax would...

Herman Cain’s catchy 9-9-9 tax overhaul system is gathering major supporters as the former pizza magnate consolidates his position at the top of the Republican field in the race for the White House. House budget committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan and Ronald Reagan’s economic guru Art Laffer both expressed their support for the plan which would replace the current tax code. The anti-tax Club for Growth also came out in favor of Cain’s plan which would cut income and corporate taxes to 9 percent and institute a new national sales tax at the same level. Payroll, capital gains and estate...

(Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.) ... It is not class warfare to suggest that the richest 1 percent of people in society pay one-third of their income to the federal government, as they did under Ronald Reagan. Keep in mind that dividends were taxable as ordinary income every year of his administration, and in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 he supported taxing capital gains as ordinary income as well. Higher effective tax rates on the rich...

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., has proposed a plan for eliminating the multi-trillion-dollar national debt: Tax everything. Earlier this year, Fattah introduced H.R. 4646, the "Debt Free America Act," which would impose a massive new tax for a period of seven years, while the national debt is being paid off. And once the debt is paid, the bill would eliminate the individual income tax, supplanting it with the new, "transaction" tax instead. Specifically, H.R. 4646 would levy a 1-percent tax on every transaction of any kind that uses check, cash or credit cards (with a path in place for also...

SNIPPET: "The leadership of the Tea Party Express PAC came to the National Press Club on Thursday to herald its early successes and to unveil its expanded list of 2010 electoral targets." SNIPPET: "In an effort to show that the Tea Party Express PAC is not a “tool” of the Republican Party, but instead is an independent political force, Russo announced that the PAC is getting behind one conservative Democrat who has opposed President Obama’s agenda: Rep. Walt Minnick (ID-01). The decision to get behind Minnick is attention-grabbing because Republicans have fielded a strong candidate in that race: Iraq war...

I woke up this morning to the sound of my alarm clock, which is powered by electricity provided by the public power monopoly that is regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then proceeded to take a shower in clean, drinkable water from the Municipal Water Utility. After that, I watched on of the FCC regulated channels on my TV to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determinded the weather would be like by usinc satellites launced, maintained, designed and built by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while...

B. Hussein Obama has allowed Rosie Optimism to draft the federal budget. The budget proposal is based on 5% unemployment (Fantasy Island Edition). Obama’s budget is based on back door taxes set to slam the middle class, the very people Obama has been saying he will protect. And, worse yet, the budget contains a black hole of undisclosed revenue created by HUGE tax increases compliments of Cap & Trade. Obama is throttle down, hell bent on destroying America.

AUSTIN — If you don't like gasoline taxes, here's an alternative: a tax on the number of miles you drive in a year. The Texas Transportation Commission has directed a fresh study of the idea, and it's not alone. There are pilot projects in other states and nationally to gauge how such a tax would work. Texas transportation officials suggest it's meant to help give lawmakers information on funding options before their next regular session in 2011, when they confront a funding squeeze that's expected to drain the highway fund of money for new construction contracts by 2012. “We need...