Free Republic

Many Americans are campaigning for a raise in the minimum wage. Even more Americans are struggling just to find jobs at any wage.Yup -- those two news items are related.While trying to present a case for the Massachusetts state legislature to approve a program that provides summer jobs to teens at non-profits and government agencies, an editorial at the Boston Globe accidentally explained why artificially imposed minimum wages kill job opportunities.I don’t think the Globe even realized it, either: The program provides money for YouthWorks, which pays the wages of 4,400 low-income teens in eligible cities who work for nonprofits...

The globalist movement is on the run as the British people on Thursday voted to “Leave” the European Union. The vote to Brexit—a hard-fought campaign by nationalist populists in the United Kingdom—puts the world elite on their heels, as a similar but bigger and stronger such movement is brewing right here in the United States.

Republican candidate Donald Trump focused this weekend on his economic platform: Cut taxes and regulations across the board while also saving Social Security, Medicare, and other government safety-net programs. Trump’s platform is nearly invincible in the general election if he stresses it enough, polling shows. Trump’s plan will also have a transformational effect on how people view his party. But he still needs to make the accounting work to ensure that his Third Way platform is feasible.

Rome (AFP) – Virginia Raggi was elected Sunday as Rome’s first female mayor, exit polls showed, in an electoral triumph for the populist Five Star Movement that represents a major setback for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement (5SM) took a large lead in the first round of voting for the mayor of Rome, in a possible blow to prime minister Matteo Renzi. Some 13 million people, or a quarter of the adult population, were eligible to vote for mayors in around 1,300 towns and cities, with attention focused firmly on a handful of major centres, including the capital. Victory in Rome would be a huge breakthrough for anti-establishment 5SM, which was founded in 2009 by comedian Beppe Grillo and has grown to be Italy's second largest party. A victory by the populist...

"That's why you should be freaking out," he added. "Look, we have nothing against Donald Trump as a man. We don't. It's just this is a very dangerous combination and I have been warning against it since Fox. I said keep your eyes open because it will come. The pendulum will swing the other way and it will be bad. The only other thing you have to add to that - he's talking about populism and nationalism. If you add socialism - populism, nationalism and socialism, you have the makings of Adolf Hitler. You don't somebody who is a nationalist,...

John Quincy Adams, quintessential Boston Brahman and archenemy of a General and bumpkin-turned-president Andrew Jackson, had a plan. Rumors circulated that Jackson was illiterate (Adams had called him “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name”) and Adams amused himself with the thought of giving Jackson an honorary Harvard degree, the speech for which was traditionally given in Latin. So Adams arranged to have the backwoods president invited and assumed the illiterate Jackson would decline.

The ROOT CAUSE of our economic woes including business leaving our shores is the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT unconstitutionally forcing minimum wage on business. Minimum wage, regulations, unions, and high taxes are THE CAUSE of businesses moving elsewhere. Federal government is the problem NOT the solution. Although I support Trump, his tariff proposals are MORE federal government and do NOTHING to attack the ROOT CAUSES of the loss of jobs in our country. Tariffs have the appearance but not the reality of a solution - they are only palliative and delay the actual reforms needed. A tariff is a tax and China...

“We don’t care who you are,” stated Koskinen, “Whether you go to church, or don’t go to church.” Koskinen explained audits occur when something pops up in your tax returns they find suspicious. It’s basically all about the numbers. Party or religious affiliation is not part of any IRS audit red flag, according to Koskinen.

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example. He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country's deficit that alongside the cuts he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax, from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine:...

Since Obuma was elected to POTUS, I have been coming to Free Republic to get news, opinions and a few laughs. Most of the serious posts were bemoaning the out of control government and what could be done about it. "Oh Whoa is Me!". Then along comes a constitutional conservative. For the first time since Ronald Reagan, we have a constitutional candidate running for the GOP nomination. This man was elected by conservatives to go to Washington and stand up to the elites that no longer listen to the American people. He didn't go to Washington and "fall in" with...

Donald Trump has advanced to the brink of the Republican presidential nomination not by transforming the GOP electorate, but by dividing it along a new axis. Though some conservative Trump critics have claimed that he has relied on a surge of non-Republican voters, the exit polls conducted so far in 15 states point toward the opposite conclusion. Overall, although turnout has soared from 2012, the share of the total primary votes cast by self-identified Republicans this year is virtually unchanged. And Trump has beaten his rivals among self-identified Republicans in every exit poll conducted in states that he has won....

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday kept up his withering criticism of Donald Trump, saying the GOP front-runner reminds him of Adolf Hitler. "Today, he's going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That's the way he started speaking," Fox told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a phone interview on "Anderson Cooper 360." "He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody." Fox's comments come one day after he delivered a scathing response on...

As Donald Trump picks up momentum, the chances of a well-funded assault to block him from the Republican presidential nomination are dramatically dwindling, according to interviews with about a dozen donors and operatives who are appalled by the billionaire real estate showman's campaign. The party's elite donor class has mostly closed its checkbooks to groups dedicated to stopping Trump, while the outfits that have built massive reserves are increasingly deciding to forgo anti-Trump campaigns, despite widespread fears that he is making a mockery of conservatism and could undermine Republicans up and down the ballot. The deepest-pocketed operation on the right,...

Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump told co-host George Stephanopoulos some of his first-day priorities should be elected president of the United States. Trump, coming off a win a night earlier in the Nevada Republican Caucus, said rolling back President Barack Obama executive orders, including one dealing with the border and immigration, repealing ObamaCare and taking care of the veterans would be his priorities. "Well, the first thing I'd do is knock out some of the executive orders signed by our president," Trump said. "Especially the one on the border where people are allowed to...

Last week, on February 13th precisely, Justice Antonin Scalia passed away at the age of 79, as was widely noted in the American and the international media. The fallout has been predictable and highly charged with many conservatives notably down-at-the-mouth, and many liberals struggling to contain their glee. The sudden nature of the Judge's passing and his undeniable position as the conservative champion on the US Supreme Court guaranteed that this would become a most contentious vacancy. Most of the mainstream media commentary concerning the upcoming battle stuck largely to the facts of a liberal President likely nominating an equally...

Tax Plan. Trump’s tax plan is certainly conservative. He proposes lowering the top tax bracket to 25 percent, drops the capital gains tax to 20 percent, dumps the death tax, and drops the corporate rate to 15 percent. Our analysis finds that the plan would reduce federal revenues by $11.98 trillion over the next decade. However, it also would improve incentives to work and invest, which could increase gross domestic product (GDP) by 11 percent over the long term. That’s different from his past positions on taxes, which include fighting the flat tax and proposing a wealth tax that would...

Donald Trump is "far and away the front-runner," for the GOP presidential nomination and the establishment is "living in a fantasy land," by denying that big changes are happening, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday. "Trump is tapping into something in the country that's real," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "If you take Trump's vote and Cruz's vote and Carson's vote -- the three outsiders -- they are once again at about 62 percent in South Carolina, and they have been consistently above 60 percent everywhere in the country. If you pull together all of the...

I'm trying to understand FR's embrace of the Donald, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. I too had a favorable first reaction when I heard him talking about building the wall in absolute terms, and his rejection of the concept of amnesty for illegal aliens. I also admired that he was the first politician in a long time that would fight back against the media and left-wing attacks, instead of trying to appease the left. However, that admiration quickly wore off when I researched Trump and found clip after clip of the man, in...

Donald Trump comfortably defeated his Republican presidential rivals on Saturday in South Carolina's GOP primary. Trump's resounding victory isn't simply a boon to his prospects for winning the Republican presidential nomination, an outcome once thought impossible that is looking increasingly more plausible. It is also an embarrassing repudiation of conservative orthodoxy that has dominated Republican politics for decades. It suggests that the party's intellectual leaders, who organized the base around the National Review/Weekly Standard consensus -- small government, free trade, pro-Israel, deregulation, low taxes, social conservatism and an aggressive foreign policy -- have been generals of a phantom army. The...