Taxation

Saturday

Jane Stannus

Time for Americans to give tea a second chance

“Last night,” John Adams confided in his diary on December 17, 1773, just after the Boston Tea Party, “3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the Sea... This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire.” Some things – like hyperbole and random capitalization – never seem to go out of style in American politics. Tea has been less fortunate. Once the most beloved non-alcoholic beverage in the 13 colonies, it fell so low in America’s regard, as Emily Dickinson would say, we heard it hit the ground. Or the water, in the case of the Boston bunfight.

Adams

Friday

Freddy Gray

So now even Mitt Romney wants to tax the rich

"On the tax front," says Mitt Romney, "it’s time for rich people like me to pay more."It’s always slightly annoying for regular Americans when squillionaires announce that people like them ought to be contributing more to the Treasury. (Nobody’s stopping you from writing a big cheque, Mitt!)But Romney’s intervention in today’s New York Times is noteworthy. It is the clearest sign yet that the pre-Trump Republican party, the party of Bain Capital, hyper-capitalism and asset-stripping, is adapting to a new political reality. And it’s now willing to go after the assets of the billionaires.Romney’s logic is hard to refute. Social security and entitlements are bankrupting America.

Mitt Romney

Thursday

Carol Roth

The elite’s war on wealth

Wealth comes from ownership. Being involved in the financial industry for nearly thirty years, and spending the past dozen-plus years in the media helping people create economic freedom and wealth for themselves and their families, I know that wealth being derived from ownership is an indisputable truth. More concretely, wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time. Ownership is a subject people tend to greatly misunderstand. We misconstrue where wealth comes from, and we misinterpret the benefits of hard work and taking risks. You can meet a poor construction worker putting in eighty hours a week for someone else. You can find professional athletes declaring bankruptcy as soon as their multimillion-dollar contracts end.