This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 29, 2015:
John Harwood, one of the trio of CNBC moderators of the third Republican debate held Wednesday night in Boulder, Colorado, set in motion the evening’s tone and tenor with this condescending question of Donald Trump:
A portrait of George Lucas, Pasadena, California, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Small business owners, some of whom have spent their lifetimes building their businesses, are unloading them before the end of the year in order to save taxes. With taxes on capital gains increasing by almost 60 percent on January 1st, Bert Wolf decided to sell his compressed-gas business, Acetylene Oxygen Company in Harlingen, Texas. It wasn’t in his plan to sell, but the offer from Praxair, and the uncertainty about what congress might, or might not, do during the upcoming lame duck session to avoid the fiscal cliff, made it too good to resist: “It just made more sense for me to take my chips off the table and go do something else.” Besides, the increase is so onerous that, if he had decided to keep the business, it would take him “at least 3 or 4 more years [of building the business] to achieve the same after-tax sales dollar.”
The current capital gains tax rate is 15 percent but in January it is scheduled to increase to 20 percent, plus the Obamacare tax of 3.8 percent added on top brings it to 23.8 percent, a jump of 58 percent. Even if a lame duck Congress extends the present rate of 15 percent, there is no conversation in Washington about repealing the Obamacare tax, so at best capital gains taxes will increase by 25 percent after the first of the year.
John Emerick, one of the owners of IM Solutions LLC, an online marketing company that focuses on the legal profession, calculated that if they waited to sell until 2013, it would cost him $1 million out of his share:
It was pretty clear to us that it made more sense for us to pull the trigger early. For me—I’m 49—I’m thinking I might not earn that much for the rest of my life. The earnings for the rest of my life would be equivalent to the tax I’d be paying by waiting until 2013.
George Lucas, the founder and chairman of Lucasfilm, best known for developing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, no doubt did the math and decided to
With the October 1st deadline for a budget for 2013 approaching rapidly the Republicans in the Senate yesterday forced a vote on five different budgets, and each was voted down. Four of them were presented by Republican senators, while the fifth was based on President Obama’s budget
None of them passed, including the president’s which was voted down unanimously, 99-0. Sen. Patrick Toomey’s (R-Pa.) plan garnered 42 votes while Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) captured 41 votes. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) saw his plan gather only 17 votes, just ahead of the plan offered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky., right, Senate photo) which received 16 votes.
Toomey blamed the failures on Democratic intransigence, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called them all “stunt budgets.” Said Toomey:
My colleagues on the other side refuse even to debate our fiscal crisis, let alone introduce a fiscal blueprint for solving our country’s problems. Instead of lobbing political attacks at the ideas I and my Republican colleagues have put forward, it is incumbent upon the majority party to put forward ideas of its own. Anything less is a flagrant abdication of its governing responsibility.
Reid responded:
Democrats won’t agree to a one-sided solution that lets the superwealthy off the hook while forcing the middle class to bear all the hardship. These four stunt budgets all take that one-sided approach.
On the surface, Paul’s budget looks to be the most aggressive, with the budget projected to
Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry spelled out the details of his “Cut, Balance, and Grow” flat tax plan on October 25, saying that “the U.S. government spends too much. Taxes are too high, too complex, and too riddled with special-interest loopholes. And our expensive entitlement system is unsustainable in the long run.” Perry’s plan would offer taxpayers a choice between a new flat rate of 20 percent on incomes over $50,000, or their current income tax rate. The plan would allow them to file their taxes on a postcard, eliminating the enormous current compliance costs in filing their Form 1040s. Various deductions and exemptions would be eliminated, he says, thus improving incentives for entrepreneurs to invest, create, and hire.
In addition, Perry would cap government spending at 18 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and put a freeze on
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Stephen Moore’s math in his Wall Street Journal article is compelling: by the time the Democrats’ proposed three-percent surtax on incomes over $1 million a year is added to all the other taxes people pay, those at the high end would be paying 62 percent of their income in federal and state income taxes.
He adds together the current 35 percent top income tax bracket to the three percent surtax, along with the expected repeal of the Bush “tax cuts” in 2012, payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, the 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, the hidden 3.8 percent sales tax in ObamaCare which begins in 2014, and state income taxes, and he comes out, inevitably, to
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April 15th is the day when American taxpayers must file their income tax returns, and Tea Partiers are protesting those taxes all across the country. One question not being raised is: If these citizens are sovereign over their government, who can explain the income tax? How did this happen? Are the citizens not sovereign after all?
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he clearly relied on the thinking of his mentors, especially including John Locke. According to Jim Powell,writing for The Freeman, Locke “expressed the radical view [at the time] that government was morally obligated to serve people, namely by protecting life, liberty, and property. He explained the principle of checks and balances to limit government power. He favored representative government and a rule of law.”
Locke published two treatises on government in 1689 in which he said:
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