Free Republic

America today has the proven resources to be the world’s number 1 producer of oil, number 1 producer of natural gas, and number 1 producer of coal. What is the policy of the Clinton/Obama Democrats flying under the flag of so-called “progressivism” today? Leave it in the ground!Their reason: if we continue to use the fossil fuel energy that powered the industrial revolution, life on the planet is going to fry, and we are all going to die. This is calculated deception, to justify vastly expanded government power and control, and a socialist takeover of American energy, which offers today...

People often say being the middle child is hard. Well, according to most Americans, it also is getting hard to be in the middle class. While a whopping 88% of Americans view themselves as being in the middle class, 80% say it is harder being in the middle class today than it was just 25 years ago. "The American middle class is not weakened or weakening-it is weak," said Patrick Inglis, an assistant professor of sociology at Grinnell College. "Even the idea of it is weak. The middle class no longer can rely on the kind of job security that...

It’s no secret that the American middle class has been on the ropes for a while now. The problem isn’t just a crippling recession and an economic “recovery” that has mostly gone to the richest one percent, but the larger shifting of wealth from the middle to the very top that’s taken place since the late ‘70s. Add in things like the dismantling of unions that has accelerated apace since Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers, and we’ve seen the middle class more solid in places like Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia, and begin to grow in a number of nations...

Hillary Rodham Clinton calls them “everyday Americans.” Scott Walker prefers “hardworking taxpayers.” Rand Paul says he speaks for “people who work for the people who own businesses.” Bernie Sanders talks about “ordinary Americans.” The once ubiquitous term “middle class” has gone conspicuously missing from the 2016 campaign trail, as candidates and their strategists grasp for new terms for an unsettled economic era. The phrase, long synonymous with the American dream, now evokes anxiety, an uncertain future and a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach. The move away from “middle class” is the rhetorical result of a critical shift: After...

Back in January, President Obama was boasting that the economy had finally turned a corner. [snip] The latest income data, however, don't show anything like what Obama was describing.

During debates and speeches, politicians often bring up the financial burden that’s placed on the middle class. We talk about the middle class as though they are this singular entity, who used to thrive until they underwent persecution by the evil 1%. But, realistically speaking, the middle class and the 99% are not really synonymous. So, who are the middle class? In its discussion of historical middle class societies, The Economist reports, “Their members are neither rich nor poor but somewhere in-between…’Middle-class’ describes an income category but also a set of attitudes…An essential characteristic is the possession of a reasonable...

1. Vacations 2. New vehicles 3. To pay off debt 4. Emergency savings 5. Retirement savings 6. Medical care 7. Dental work

American households now have a total net worth of $83 trillion, but most families are still behind where they were in 2007. Americans’ total wealth has reached a record. According to a Federal Reserve report released Thursday, the net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations rose to $82.9 trillion at the end of 2014. Much of that growth was driven by stocks, which grew in value by $742 billion during the final quarter of last year. The value of residential real estate also rose by $356 billion. However, these aggregate numbers from the Fed provide only a partial view...

WASHINGTON — President Obama presented a budget on Monday that is more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint. It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class. Absent from the plan is any pretense of trying to address the main drivers of the long-term debt — Social Security and Medicare — a quest that has long divided both parties and ultimately proved impossible. The document instead indicates that Mr. Obama, after years of being hemmed in on his fiscal priorities because of politics...

President Barack Obama calls his tax and spending plan ´middle-class economics,´ but most middle-income families would see little change in their tax bills. Obama is proposing a total of $1.5 trillion in new taxes over the next decade, mostly on corporations and high-income households. He would use much of that money--nearly $280 billion--to pay for targeted tax breaks for low- and middle-income families. Obama´s proposed tax cuts would benefit households with two wage earners, families with young children in child care and those with older children in college. One proposal would automatically enroll workers in individual retirement accounts, unless they

McManus is a mechanical engineer and his wife Mairee is a surgical physician's assistant, as well as the primary earner. He breaks out his budget by week. In 2014, they brought home an average after-tax household income of $14,735 a month. In the chart below, check out their average monthly spending for 2013, 2014, and predicted for 2015. Note that these are averages, so a single month isn't depicted.

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the...

[When] Obama delivered his first State of the Union address in 2009, 53% of Americans considered themselves middle class. Six years later, just 44% of Americans define themselves that way..... The middle class itself, however, has changed notably during the relatively short time Obama has been in office, as the chart below shows. The portion of Americans who consider themselves middle class has dropped (as has the portion considering themselves upper class), while the ranks who call themselves lower class have swelled.

.....it is clear that millions are struggling to hang on to accouterments that most experts consider essential to a middle-class life..... Lisa Land, 49, is one of those who have dropped through the hatch. She gets by on her father’s $1,300 monthly Social Security checks and by having her adult daughter pitch in for groceries. Her circumstances are a stark change from just a few years ago, when she considered herself firmly in the middle class. Despite a relatively modest salary, her pay and other resources went a long way in tiny Eden, N.C., where she worked for 13 years...

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that middle-class families concerned about President Obama's plan to raise taxes on their college savings should just send their children to community college. Obama's plan raises taxes on families saving for college by eliminating the tax-free status of money withdrawn from a 529 savings accounts. "I was very surprised by the Obama 529 proposal because in many ways it is anti-middle class for families trying to afford college," SavingforCollege.com founder Joe Hurley told The New York Times. Asked to "square" Obama's State of the Union claim that he wanted to make college...

Let's assume George and Ethel, two teachers, purchased their Southern California home in 1966 for $45,000. Lets also assume that over the next fifty years, the value of the house increased to $1,345,000. Let's also assume that George and Ethel had four children and each of them went to a private four year college and that George and Ethel continued to re-finance their home to put their children through college and take a few cruises. Today, there is a $1,145,000 loan on the house. With pensions and other savings, the now retired teachers manage to pay their mortgage and live...

Paying Your Fair Share:: By: Larry Walker II ::In Tax Simplification, Part II, I expounded on a 2010 Annual Report to Congress, in which National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson focused on the need for tax reform as the No. 1 priority in tax administration. In particular, she focused on the problem of delivering social benefits through the tax system, which complicates the mission of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), resulting in a dual mission of welfare administration as well as revenue collection. But instead of taking heed, the federal government doubled down, adding a new health care excise tax...

LOS ANGELES, Jan 22 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's proposal this week to roll back tax benefits for so-called 529 plans exposes a fundamental disagreement about who is benefiting from these state-sponsored college savings plans. 529 plans are sponsored by states and run by investment management companies. Withdrawals from the accounts can be used tax-free to pay for qualified education expenses at any college or university in the country, such as tuition, fees and books. Supporters of Obama's proposal point to a 2012 government report showing the plans being used by less than 3 percent of all U.S. families and...

The tax plan President Obama unveiled during his State of the Union is an assault on economic growth cloaked in populist demagoguery. It will not help middle class Americans but rather guarantee that their incomes remain stagnant. He wants to divert attention from the fact that his policies of higher taxes, blow-out spending, anti-growth regulations and the costly, chaotic government-created disruption of ObamaCare have caused median incomes to stay below what they were back in 2007. Most Americans are deeply worried that their expenses are rising faster than their incomes.While the economy is showing more signs of life lately, it...

President Obama is proposing a radical change to the 529 college savings plans held by millions of families, which would require those who use them to rethink their approach to college savings. As part of his plan to simplify the tax code and help the middle class, one of the 529 plan’s most attractive benefits would be eliminated: Money could no longer be withdrawn tax-free. (The new rules would apply only to new contributions.) The accounts, many of which are run by the states, allow people to make contributions that grow tax-free. The money can be withdrawn without the paying...