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The above chart is taken from the article “Is Obama’s New Index the Right Fix for Social Security?” from the Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s website, which can be viewed below. It does start one to question just what has Social Security become and how should we fix it? (If it should be fixed).
All 50 states make different choices about where they’re going to get the tax revenue they need in order to provide the services their residents expect and demand. With income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes among the revenue-collecting tools at their disposal, most states end up using a combination of all three to make ends meet.
But some states have chosen not to impose any sales tax at the state level, making it a lot cheaper for shoppers to buy. Using a combination of figures from the Tax Foundation, including general state sales taxes and average local-option surtaxes, let’s look at the five states that don’t have statewide sales taxes with an eye toward identifying the impact their decision has on individuals and businesses.
5. Alaska Although Alaska doesn’t have a statewide tax, it does have local option taxes that amount to an average rate of 1.69%. Alaska doesn’t have an income tax, either, relying solely on property taxes for its sole means of support from individuals. The lion’s share of state revenue, however, comes from royalties and oil tax revenue from ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM ) , ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP ) , and BP (NYSE: BP) , all of which have extensive operations in the state. Even recent tax cuts on those oil giants hasn’t added to residents’ share of the overall tax burden, and residents also receive checks from the Alaska Permanent Fund amounting to $878 per person in 2012.
4. Montana Like Alaska, Montana also has local-option resort taxes in certain areas of the state, but the Tax Foundation lacked adequate data to measure the average impact of those add-on taxes. Yet many of the most populous areas of the state, including Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula, don’t have any sales taxes at all. Given that state’s remote location, however, having no sales tax doesn’t do much to draw shoppers from neighboring states. Fairly high income taxes offset the lack of sales tax.
3. New Hampshire With the moniker “Live Free or Die,” New Hampshire gives residents a double-tax break, with no sales tax and an income tax that applies only to interest and dividend income. High property taxes make up the difference, but New Hampshire’s proximity to Boston leads to a regular exodus of shoppers across the Massachusetts border to avoid that state’s 6.25% sales tax.
2. Delaware Delaware is a small state, but it plays a vital role in providing a home for most of the nation’s largest corporations. The state’s 8.7% flat corporate income tax rate leads to tax collections that are the seventh highest in the country and help allow Delaware to charge no sales tax. Nearby Philadelphia and Baltimore provide two sources of shoppers seeking tax-free purchases, but shopping malls strategically located on the Interstate 95 corridor do their best to pull in travelers from all over the East Coast.
1. Oregon Of all the sales-tax-free states, Oregon has the closest symbiotic relationship with its neighbor. Washington lies just across the Columbia River from Portland, and the states are near-mirror-images of each other when it comes to taxation, with Washington having a high sales tax but no income tax, while Oregon has a high income tax but no sales tax. As a result, those living in Vancouver, Wash., across the river from Portland, can structure their lives to pay relatively little in income or sales taxes, taking advantage of their proximity to Oregon shopping.
A better way to tax? Many tax advocates believe that sales taxes are the worst way to tax residents, as their consumption focus tends to hit the poor the hardest. By that measure, these five states are most forward-thinking in their tax strategies, although they also clearly believe that they can attract some economic activity by luring shoppers in with tax-free purchase opportunities.
The oil and gas industry has produced plenty of revenue for governments, but it has also brought big profits for investors as well. One promising company is a leading provider of equipment and components used in drilling and production operations, and poised to profit in a big way from it
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Click below for the full article.
Buy anything on the Internet lately without paying sales tax? In all but a few states, you’re probably a tax cheat.
That’s right, even if Internet retailers don’t collect sales tax at the time of the purchase, you’re required by law to pay it in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Here’s the problem for states: hardly anyone pays the tax, and there’s not much states can do about it.
The Senate is expected to pass a bill Monday making it easier for states to collect sales taxes for online purchases. Some of the nation’s largest retailers are rejoicing. But small-business owners who make their living selling products on the Internet worry they will be swamped by new requirements from faraway states.
“It’s a huge burden for a company like ours,” said Sarah Davis, co-owner of Fashionphile.com, a California-based company that sells high-end pre-owned handbags and purses. “We don’t have an accounting department, we’ve got my father-in-law.”
Davis started the company in 1999 and now runs it with her brother-in-law. They have 26 workers and three stores, in Beverly Hills, San Diego and San Francisco. Last year, Fashionphile.com did $10 million in sales, the vast majority of it online, Davis said.
Fashionphile.com sells bags directly from its website and on eBay. The company collects sales taxes from customers who live in California, but not from people who live in other states, Davis said. Under the law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state.
That means big retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target, with stores all over the country collect sales taxes when they sell goods over the Internet. But eBay, Amazon and other online retailers don’t have to collect sales taxes, except in states where they have offices or distribution centers.
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Yet another story of MORE TAXES, MORE GOVERNMENT, and MORE HARM to small businesses. How original! Click below for the full article.
http://news.yahoo.com/tax-cheat-shop-online-tax-125303228.html
MSNBC host Thomas Roberts on Friday aired a portion of Vice President Joe Biden’s speech given at a plaque dedication remembering the Americans lost in the Benghazi terror attack and falsely claimed he was mourning “children as the victims of gun violence.” Roberts was discussing Biden’s reported plans to make a second push for gun control after losing in the first round.
In the selectively edited clip of Biden’s remarks, the vice president was talking about the serious risks that State Department employees and their families face as part of their service. “No child should predecease their parents. And I wish I could tell you we aren’t going to add anymore names with this wall…but the truth of the matter is, there will be more.” Biden said.
After playing the video, Roberts falsely claimed that the vice president was talking about the children of gun violence before announcing his renewed push for background checks.
Watch the video via MSNBC below:
Now compare that with the unedited video of Biden’s comments provided by National Review Online:
Later on Friday, “The Cycle” co-host Touré issued an apology on behalf of MSNBC, calling the out-of-context video a “producer error.” He also said that the network regrets the mistake, according to NRO.
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Click below for the story and more:
We aren’t going to post any of this gem of an article, but you can check it out at the link below. This one took the cake as the Fox News Fail of the week (and probably month), but there were plenty of other contenders as Fox News tries to help remake the image of George W. Bush, the President who pushed for the Unconstitutional Patriot Act, created the TSA and DHS, expanded the size of government, fought Unconstitutional wars while going back on 2000 campaign promises of his foreign policy, and whose reckless spending left America on a pathway to bankruptcy.
NOTE: Dana Perino’s take deserves honorable mention:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/23/my-favorite-memories-president-george-w-bush/
With the Iraq war behind us and our departure from Afghanistan underway, the United States could be entering a well-earned respite from fighting. But even before peace can take hold, hawks are singing the old country song: “I’ve enjoyed as much of this as I can stand.”
They see a way to escape in Syria, where rebels have been fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad for more than two years. For most of that time, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have been leading the call for U.S. military intervention — and President Barack Obama has been declining the invitation.
His critics, however, think they now have him where they want him. Obama earlier said that any use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a “game changer,” and last week, the White House said it thinks he’s used sarin gas, though it said further investigation would be needed.
Obama was careful in his Tuesday news conference to emphasize the uncertainties: “What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them.”
So far he’s settled for a minimalist response: possibly sending weapons to the insurgents. He added that as a result of the gas attacks, “there are some options that we might not otherwise exercise that we would strongly consider.”
Strongly consider? My advice is to consider them till the cows come home — just don’t actually adopt them. The options at hand are generally dangerous, ineffectual or both.
Graham says the United States has to act because “the greatest risk is a failed state with chemical weapons falling in the hands of radical Islamists.” In reality, the greatest risk is putting our troops into a civil war where they could end up targeted by both sides, as we ingeniously arranged in Iraq. As we showed there, removing a dictator can unleash endless sectarian conflict. Fortunately, even McCain says he doesn’t favor American boots on the ground.
The preferred instrument of hawks is air power — to enforce a no-fly zone against the regime or destroy military assets. But it’s a lot easier said than done.
To begin with, Syria has one of the best air defense systems in the world, built with help from Russia. “Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, frequently singles out Mr. Assad’s air-defense prowess as the biggest single obstacle to U.S. intervention,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Casualty-free intervention, a la Libya, is not a realistic possibility in Syria.
Taking out Assad’s anti-aircraft batteries — or tanks, trucks and infantry — would inflict heavy casualties on the people we’d like to help. Much of the fighting takes place in cities, where civilians are dangerously exposed.
Even precision bombs launched from drones, notes University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, author of “Bombing to Win,” have a blast radius of up to 50 feet, and their shock waves can easily bring down neighboring buildings. Our drone strikes in rural Pakistan do enough collateral damage to sow deep anger among the locals. In urban Syria, civilian fatalities would be far higher.
U.S. bombing might backfire by inducing the regime to make full use of its chemical weapons while it can. Air power also can’t head off the danger of those supplies falling into the hands of Islamic radicals. Bombing chemical weapons sites, even if we could identify them, would mean spewing deadly nerve agents over a wide area — which sort of resembles the outcome we’re trying to prevent.
But securing them from militants would require ground forces — as many as 75,000, according to the Pentagon. Transporting the stockpiles out of the country or destroying them would take a lot of troops and time. “There is no exit strategy with this option either,” says Michael Desch, a national security scholar at the University of Notre Dame.
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Click below for the full article.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/steve-chapman-stay-out-of-syria/article/2528663
Two videos (below) of the arrest of rapper Xstrav (Christopher Beatty) on April 29 outside an ABC Liquor Store in Fayetteville, North Carolina, have gone viral on the web.
According to LatinRapper.com, Xstrav and fellow rapper Tino Brown were waiting in the parking lot for Money Mal to meet them when a man walked up and asked repeatedly what Xstrav was drinking.
Brown, who was holding a camera or a cell phone, recorded the entire incident.
Xstrav told the man several times he was drinking Arizona Half & Half Iced Tea. Xstrav then asked the man several times to identify himself, to which he finally said “police,” but did not immediately show a badge or other form of ID.
The plainclothes police officer told Xstrav that he was “trespassing” and had to leave the property. When the rapper refused, the officer wrestled Xstrav to the ground and handcuffed him.
The plainclothes police officer did flash what may have been a badge for a few seconds, but apparently did not read Xstrav his Miranda Rights.
In the second video, a police car drove up with a uniformed police officer and Xstrav was led into the police car.
While some viewers have suggested the videos were fake, the North Carolina Court System website shows Beatty was charged with trespassing and resisting a public officer.
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Click below for the link to the article on Opposing View’s website.
The Homeless Bill of Rights, the name applied to a new bill that recently soared through the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee on a 7-2 vote, is the latest in a long line of California legislation that has grabbed national attention for its sheer lunacy. At the current rate, California’s “differently sheltered” will be the only residents left with any rights.
Its worst provisions have been stripped away and I doubt the governor will sign something that so thoroughly offends city officials, but the proposal does epitomize the mock-worthy nature of so much of the thinking that dominates this state’s government. Legislators in all states introduce crazy stuff to make a point. But in California, these strange bills can actually make it to the governor’s desk.
The homeless bill’s author, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), deserves credit for at least identifying a real problem, which is an oddity in a Legislature that usually avoids reality. Homelessness is rampant in California, and the troubled people who wander our streets often have nowhere to go as they get chased from one location to the next.
Homelessness is a vexing problem, but the solution is not to make the homeless a protected class of citizen with a constitutional right to urinate on sidewalks and accumulate piles of vermin-infested clothing in city parks. Instead of giving the homeless a place to live, the state government wants to give them taxpayer-subsidized lawyers.
The bill features overstated civil-rights-oriented language. It notes that California has “a long history of discriminatory laws and ordinances that have disproportionately affected people with low incomes.” The language refers to Jim Crow laws and anti-Okie laws.
Cities here struggle – sometimes clumsily and unfairly – with throngs of people who camp out in city parks and sleep on sidewalks and in doorways. There is a legitimate public issue here.
When I worked in a downtown Sacramento office building, my colleagues and I joked about being in a scene from a zombie movie. As we walked down the street, homeless people would limp toward us, hands out, demanding money. One of my reporters was assaulted by one. In a well-publicized incident near my old office, a homeless woman shot a man in a wheelchair after he told her to get a job. It’s not always unreasonable to try to shoo them away.
The homeless – many of whom are mentally ill or have substance-abuse issues – need compassion and social services (preferably ones provided by non-profits, rather than by government bureaucracies more interested in creating big pensions for their employees). Instead they are used as pawns for a politician’s political posturing.
The most objectionable language has already been removed. Critics have mocked the now-deleted provision that guaranteed homeless people “the right to engage in life sustaining activities that must be carried out in public spaces.” That includes eating, congregating, collecting personal property, and urinating. I’ve known non-homeless people who have received a citation for peeing in public, but a homeless person would have been exempt had the original language remained intact.
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Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/03/homeless-bill-of-rights-showcases-califo
Missed that this came out a few months ago, but below is the trailer for Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s new book “Theodore and Woodrow.”
A harsh and revealing political exposé of two beloved presidents.
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano reveals how Teddy Roosevelt, a bully, and Woodrow Wilson, a constitutional scholar, each pushed aside the Constitution’s restrictions on the federal government and used it as an instrument to redistribute wealth, regulate personal behavior, and enrich the government. These two men and the Progressives who supported them have brought us, among other things: -the income tax -the Federal Reserve -compulsory, state-prescribed education -the destruction of state sovereignty -the rise of Jim Crow and military conscription -prohibition and war
The Progressive Era witnessed the most dramatic peaceful shift of power from persons and from the states to a new and permanent federal bureaucracy in all of American history.
THEODORE AND WOODROW exposes two of our nation’s most beloved presidents and how they helped speed the Progressive cause on its merry way.
David French, Senior Vice President of the National Retail Federation, the major industry group lobbying for the so-called “Marketplace Fairness Act,” (more aptly named the “National Internet Tax Mandate”) recently commented that “….the law [governing Internet sales
] today is a 20th-century interpretation of an 18th-century document….” Mr. French’s comments are typical of those wishing to expand government power beyond the limits established by the United States Constitution.
Those of us who insist the federal government remain within the confines prescribed by the Constitution are used to condescending lectures about how the Constitution is a “living document” whose principles evolve over time. I was even once informed by the then-Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who was widely considered one of Congress’ leading constitutional authorities, that the constitutional requirement for a declaration of war was an anachronism!
While Mr. French may not go that far, he is arguing that Congress turn the Commerce Clause on its head by passing the Internet Tax Mandate. The Commerce Clause was intended to facilitate free trade by giving the federal government limited power to ensure state governments did not impose taxes and regulations on out-of-state business. Contrary to modern belief, the Commerce Clause was not intended to give Congress power to regulate every sector of the economy. And the Commerce Clause was certainly not intended to allow Congress to help state governments collect taxes on purchases from out-of-state merchants.
The National Internet Tax Mandate overturns the Supreme Court’s 1992 Quill v. North Dakota decision that states can only force businesses to collect sales tax if the business has a “physical presence” in the state. Quill represented a rare instance where the Supreme Court properly interpreted the Commerce Clause. Thanks to the Quill decision, the Internet has remained a tax-free zone, though some states require consumers to later pay taxes on products they purchased online. This freedom has helped turn the Internet into a thriving and dynamic sector of the economy, to the benefit of entrepreneurs and consumers.
Now that status is threatened by an alliance of big business and tax-hungry state governments seeking new powers to force out-of-state business to collect state sales taxes. Far from updating the Constitution to fit the needs of the 21st century, the National Internet Tax Mandate is a throwback to 18th century mercantilism.
The National Internet Tax Mandate will raise the costs of doing business over the Internet. Large, established Internet companies, such as Amazon, can absorb these costs, whereas their smaller competitors cannot. More importantly, the Mandate’s increased costs and regulations could prevent the creation and growth of the next Amazon.
Raising prices on goods purchased over the Internet will also impose an additional hardship on American consumers, many of whom are already struggling because of the troubled economy. And giving ravenous state governments new authority to tax sales made by out-of-state businesses practically guarantees future sales tax hikes, as the arguments will be made that most of the increases will fall on out-of-state businesses. These businesses will lack effective ability to oppose the tax increases — a form of taxation without representation.
Contrary to Mr. French, it is the proponents of the National Internet Tax Mandate who are embracing outdated principles, such as higher taxes on prosperity, piling more regulations on already over-burdened workers, and legislation designed to help entrenched businesses at the expense of their smaller competitors and consumers. Opponents of the Internet Tax Mandate recognize that the principles of limited government and free markets represented by a true reading of the Commerce Clause provide a timeless guide to economic growth and prosperity.
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Click below to read the article on Business Insider’s website by Dr. Ron Paul, former Texas Congressmen and current Chairman of the Campaign for Liberty.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-internet-tax-mandate-2013-5