Taxation
The Rhode Island Statewide Coalition has been making a concerted effort to peruse all of the legislation making its way through the General Assembly and recently unearthed this gem from Senator Charles Levesque (D., Bristol, Portsmouth), creating a Highway Maintenance and Public Transit Trust Fund, financed as follows: … There is imposed a surcharge of…
Big Business learns that Big Government giveth and taketh away: On Capitol Hill and in the White House on Monday, Democrats were fuming over a series of announcements that started Friday from Fortune 500 firms saying their bottom lines will take huge negative hits because of changes in tax law mandated by Obamacare. That hit…
“Desperate times call for desperate measures”, right? So now we learn that the RI General Assembly is looking at taxing non-profits to earn more “revenue.” The method will be via suspension of the tax-exempt status by removing the sales tax waiver that non-profits receive (the GA isn’t considering property taxes or taxing donations…yet). According to…
I’ve been intending to look into arguments for a “Fair Tax,” but they seem so unnecessarily complicated that I’ve continued to demur. In his usual manner of breaking such things down to the basics, Ramesh Ponnuru suggests that it sounds too good to be true because it is: It is not at all clear that…
If you put your ear to the exterior walls of the State House, you might actually be able to hear the antiquated gears of the General Assembly’s brains whirring a little harder to come up with a strategy for getting away with tax increases: The plan was broadly outlined by Grafton H. Willey IV, co-chairman…
The Tax Foundation has looked at Amazon taxes and found the following: Contrary to the claims of supporters, Amazon taxes do not provide easy revenue. In fact, the nation’s first few Amazon taxes have not produced any revenue at all, and there is some evidence of lost revenue. For instance, Rhode Island has seen no…
A letter by Middletown Republican Town Committee Chairman Antone Viveiros in the Newport Daily News directs attention to H7563, submitted by Rep. Amy Rice (D., Portsmouth). The legislation would add the following language to Rhode Island tax law: Opting out of the domestic production deduction. — All corporations doing business in the State of Rhode…
One must suspect that Ed Achorn is link-seeking when his column addresses both state-government dependents and the state of my youth, New Jersey: Ultimately, while the public-employee unions and other government-fed special interests keep fattening up, the middle class suffers from a loss of jobs and opportunity, and the poor suffer from a loss of…
It’s a small thing, perhaps, but then they’re all small things, from a certain perspective. This is just too perfect an emblem of the government under which we’re living: All the funds raised for those three [charitable] purposes, listed on the “Rhode Island Checkoff Contributions” portion of the tax return, go directly into the state’s…
Remember this explicit statement that President Obama made almost a year ago? if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. Oops. – President Obama says he is now “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making under $250,000 a…