This is a total scam.
As if Frisco couldn’t drive out residents any faster. *Eye-roll.*
At Fox Business, "San Francisco considering congestion tax on high-earning drivers: The San Francisco County Transportation Authority is studying the prospect of congestion fees."
My latest — On Earth Day, you shouldn't feel guilty about your plastic trash https://t.co/EmVTAkSCYW via @usatodayopinion
— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) April 20, 2018
Fears of a tax hike are fueling talk of an exodus in Greenwich and Manhattan https://t.co/EI8reC8OBj pic.twitter.com/IFp50a7VLB
— Bloomberg (@business) November 27, 2017
Even Bruce McGuire, founder of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association, understands if wealthy Northeasterners flee the region due to changes in the tax code.
“It would almost be irresponsible if you weren’t thinking about moving,” he said.
The problem for the Connecticut hedge-fund set -- and, more broadly, for a lot of the Wall Street crowd -- is that Republican proposals in both the House and Senate would drive up taxes for many high-earners in the New York City area. By eliminating the deduction for most state and local taxes, an individual making a yearly salary of $1,000,000 -- a figure not uncommon in the financial industry -- would owe the Internal Revenue Service an additional $21,000, according to a preliminary analysis by accounting firm Marcum LLP.
Billionaire hedge fund managers have blazed the trail south in recent years. David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones and Eddie Lampert are New York-area transplants to Florida, which has no personal income tax.
A final bill could still do away with the hike, but so far there are no signs coming out of Washington that will happen. Financially struggling New Jersey had the sixth-highest individual income rate this year, according to the Federation of Tax Administrators. New York ranked eighth and cash-strapped Connecticut 12th. Nine of the 10 states with the highest individual taxes, including Washington, D.C., voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election.
Tax Refugees
No one interviewed for this story would talk openly about making plans to move, but Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is estimating that New York City alone could lose as much as 4 percent of its top earners if the bill becomes law. In Florida, where there’s no state income tax, there’s the sense that this is a great opportunity to lure disgruntled tax refugees.
The Miami Downtown Development Authority is throwing a party next month during the annual Art Basel show, and Nitin Motwani, a real estate developer, has invited wealthy Northeasterners who’ve expressed interest in moving to the area. Because the proposed tax changes are practically begging them to relocate, Motwani expects a crowd.
State and local taxes, also called SALT, “can and should be a major catalyst,” said Motwani, a development authority board member. Tax reform will “certainly be something we’re highlighting” at the party, in the Perez Art Museum. “Inertia is a tough thing, but you add on another tax bill and maybe that pushes you over the edge.”
Democrats like Shannon Watts promote the idea that Bible-believing Christians are a greater threat to America than Koran-believing Muslims. Why? Because exit-poll data show that Bible-believing Christians tend to vote Republican, just like a majority of gun owners vote Republican, and most white people vote Republican. If you are a member of any demographic constituency that is aligned with the GOP, Democrats will find a way to demonize you as the epitome of evil, because scapegoating their enemies is what the Democrat Party is all about.
By the way, is anyone surprised that Shannon Watts’ daughter is gay? Aren’t Democrats now basically the anti-heterosexual party? America is still a free country, and you can say what you want, but they can take away my heterosexuality when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Probably most Americans agree with me, but Democrats hate most Americans. They are fanatically devoted to hating us, and yet can’t seem to understand why we don’t vote for them. Let’s hope they never figure it out, because this is why Hillary Clinton is not president.
The two of us have seen this before: a critical point in U.S. history, when political, social and economic upheavals have left too many Americans battling one another rather than working together to build a better country. We lived through the Great Depression, when men armed with bats and clubs went to the streets in violent attempts to resolve labor differences. We also experienced the civil unrest of the 1960s, when inner cities burned with the heat of racial division and authorities killed innocent students peacefully protesting a war.Keep reading.
Somehow, the drumbeat of dissonance seems harsher today. America’s national ideal of “e pluribus unum”—out of many, one—threatens to become a hollow slogan. Jaded Americans are constantly confronted by a deluge of animus from their televisions and smartphones. The U.S. finds itself increasingly divided along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual identity. Countless demagogues stand ready to exploit those differences. When a sports reporter of Asian heritage is removed from his assignment because his name is close to that of a Confederate army general, political correctness has gone too far. Identity politics practiced by both major political parties is eroding a core principle that Americans are, first and foremost, Americans.
The divisions in society are real. So are national legacies of injustice. All can and must be addressed. Those who preach hatred should be called out for their odious beliefs. But even as extremism is condemned, Americans of good will need to keep up lines of civil, constructive conversation.
The country faces a stark choice. Its citizens can continue screaming at each other, sometimes over largely symbolic issues. Or they can again do what the citizens of this country have done best in the past—work together on the real problems that confront everyone.
Both of us have been at the center of heated disputes in this country and around the world. And there’s one thing we’ve learned over the decades: You achieve peace by talking, not yelling. The best way to resolve an argument is to find common ground.
We encourage Congress and the White House to take this approach in the fall. First, they should raise the debt ceiling and fund the government. There is no benefit to shutting down the government simply because one side does not get all it wants from the legislative process. A government shutdown would only fortify most people’s dissatisfaction with a federal government they (often correctly) believe doesn’t work for them. And it would only breed more debilitating cynicism.
We hope that leaders in Washington will also focus on infrastructure projects that can help the U.S. keep pace with its global competitors, particularly China. Floodwaters don’t distinguish between Republicans and Democrats. Nor do rotting bridges discriminate between whites and blacks. This is an important and easy area to emphasize common interests. Political leaders should prioritize and provide tangible policies that benefit Americans. They are long overdue.
We also encourage Washington to focus with laserlike intensity on the federal tax code, which handcuffs American businesses. This country needs to find politically palatable ways to streamline that code and bring corporate taxes in line with those of other countries. As a way to protect the debate from becoming a battle over whose ox gets gored, Congress should make any tax reform revenue-neutral. Legislation should also encourage investors to bring their money back into the U.S., where it can be put into civic projects that improve America.
Congress and the president must do more than just act on these pressing issues. They also need to set an example to all Americans...
Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur! Today's #SignOfResistance, in Assata's honor, is by @Meloniousfunk. pic.twitter.com/V66au1dRnl— Women's March (@womensmarch) July 16, 2017
Republicans didn’t always scoff dismissively at the self-destructive, reactionary, fractious collection of malcontents who call themselves The Resistance. The hundreds of thousands who marched in the streets following Donald Trump’s election once honestly unnerved the GOP. This grassroots energy culminated in January’s Women’s March, a multi-day event in which nearly two million people mobilized peacefully and, most importantly, sympathetically in opposition to the president. It was the perfect antidote to the violent anti-Trump demonstrations that typified Inauguration Day, and it might have formed the nucleus of a politically potent movement. The fall of the Women’s March exposes the blight weakening the left and crippling the Democratic Party.Keep reading.
The fever sapping Trump’s opposition was evident in microcosm on Monday in the meltdown of the Women’s March’s social-media presence on Twitter. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur,” the organization wrote, dedicating the day’s resistance-related activities in her “honor.” Shakur is perhaps better known as Joanne Chesimard, the name that appeared on the court documents in connection with her being tried and convicted of eight felonies, including the execution-style murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. She currently resides in communist Cuba, a fugitive from American justice.
The outrage that followed the Women’s March’s endorsement of a cop-killer, exile, and unrepentant black nationalist was such that the organization was compelled to explain itself. “[T]his is not to say that #AssataShakur has never committed a crime, and not to endorse all of her actions,” the group flailed. “We say this to demonstrate the ongoing history of government [and] right-wing attempts to criminalize and discredit political activists.” This fanatical display of befuddlement perfectly encapsulates the logic of “intersectionality.” It demonstrates why this vogue ideology shackles its devotees to doomed causes and sinking ships.
“Intersectionality,” the beast born in liberal hothouses on college campuses, slouches now toward the halls of power. It is a Marxist notion that all discrimination is linked because it is rooted in the unjust power structures that facilitate inequality. Therefore, there are no distinct struggles against prejudice. Class, race, gender, sexual identity; these and other signifiers are bound together by the fact that oppression is institutional and systemic. The problem with this ideology is it compels its adherents to abandon discretion. To sacrifice anyone with a claim to oppression is to forsake every victim of prejudice. So, sure, Assata Shakur robbed, assaulted, incited violence, and killed a cop. But she also hates capitalism and white supremacy. Therefore, she’s one of us.
It is this logic that has rendered the “Sister Souljah moment” a relic of the past, and The Resistance is drowning in Sister Souljahs.
One of the March organizers, Linda Sarsour, has enjoyed newfound popularity and legitimacy in the age of Trump...
Good grief! I've had three kids and that didn't happen once. https://t.co/UGEihs31Bj
— Melissa Mackenzie 🌐 (@MelissaTweets) May 14, 2017
THE DAY I PEOPLE FOUND OUT I WAS PREGNANT WITH THING1 what was the day i ceased to be a person and became a vessel, a body without will
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
THAT DAY I CEASED TO BE A PROFESSOR & PROFESSIONAlL, that day i ceased to have 2 Masters & still debating to complete my PhD...
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
MY INTELLIGENCE
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
MY BRILLIANCE
MY TALENT
MY GALL
everything that could define my being, my brawn, disappeared in an ether of condescension
I WAS NOT TO BE TALKED TO
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
I WAS TO BE TALKED AT
i became the VERIFIED property of my spouse, carrier of his spawn, property of his tribe
and yet...
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
and yet...
MOTHERHOOD IN 'AMERICA'
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
Motherhood is an ideal they hold so high, so dear... it's more than an aspiration; it's a manifest destiny...
MOTHERS IN 'AMERICA'
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
as complete human beings expressed in all their complexities?... what do you mean mothers are people?!?
AMERICA
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
LOVES
THE IDEA OF
MOTHERHOOD
it hates,
nay,
it despises
MOTHERS
to the point of
denying our personhood
and our humanity
MOTHERS
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
shouldn't be paid for their mothering
MOTHERS
shouldn't get all the health care they need
MOTHERS
shouldn't be trusted with choices
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS, if this nation really loved not just mothers but all womb-carriers as PEOPLE, motherhood wouldn't be an ideal
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE we wouldn't have politicians giddy sending our babies to war
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE we wouldn't have 50 million applauding into the White House a guy who bragged about sexual assault
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE we would all have HEALTH CARE as the human right it is, regardless of employment or marital status
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE you wouldn't rant about stay-at-home moms as 'welfare queens' but ensured we all had a basic income
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE you wouldn't fight so hard to deny us & babies free health care, schooling, food, housing
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE y'all wouldn't spend energy insulting me onhere instead of pondering all the ways y'all mistreat us
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE you wouldn't belittle the labor of Mothering & penalize mothers in old age for those unemployed years
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE you would never confuse employment with labor and use that to deny mothers social services in old age
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
IF USA REALLY LOVED MOTHERS AS PEOPLE we mothers wouldn't have to defend our CHOICE of motherhood as proof of our will as free individuals
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
YET HERE WE ARE MOTHERING in spite of living in one of the most misogynist, woman-hating, feminine-loathing cultures in Human history
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
YET HERE WE ARE MOTHERING in spite of living in a country where it is still up to debate whether it's a choice to be or not to be a mom
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
TODAY IS MOTHERS' DAY but it would be every day Mothers' Day if we truly loved the people who become mothers and not just the idea
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
I AM NOT AN IDEA
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
i am a woman, a person, an individual, who loves being a mom to my kids and loves mothering everybody around me
MOTHERS AREN'T AN IDEA
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
we are beings in our complexities and contradictions. we are people. we are individuals. we have human rights too
MY LOVE & SOLIDARITY goes out to all the moms & mothering people out there struggling in spite of the odds against us. i hear you. i see you
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
AND TO THE TROLLS SWARMING THANKS TO @MelissaTweets' PRIVILEGED NAY-SAYING you are all exactly proving my point. thanks for playing.
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
ONE MORE POINT: if 'America' truly loved mothers, y'all would adore us BLACK MOTHERS and rebuked as terrorism this:pic.twitter.com/AvkZFkzYT9
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
YOU CANT CLAIM TO LOVE MOTHERS, then find excuses not to support black, indigenous, trans, latinx, immigrant, muslim, poor, working moms
— Liza Sabater 🇵🇷👸🏾 (@blogdiva) May 14, 2017
The left is going nuts over the picture of Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent pointing and smirking at the offical portrait of the Hildabeast during a recent visit for dinner with the President at The White House calling them disrespectful. Just think how they'd react if most of us saw the same picture and what we would do while looking at it! hahaha...
President Trump's dinner invitation to Sarah Palin included guests. So she brought Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. https://t.co/8bPBRGAopD— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 20, 2017
BREAKING: Activists are blockading Stansted runway to stop a mass deportation flight to Nigeria & Ghana taking off. https://t.co/9fSNOt2IJ3 pic.twitter.com/Dz7lqH3vmQ
— Michael Segalov (@MikeSegalov) March 28, 2017
Who wrote this piece of crap Obamacare replacement bill? Please be specific.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
I have to give full identifying info as each health ins co goes bankrupt. What are names of the brain trust that wrote this piece of crap?
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
Also, I would like every person involved in the writing of this Obamacare replacement POS to take a ten-minute IQ test. Transparency!
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
House GOP leadership faced mounting opposition Tuesday after introducing an Obamacare repeal and replace bill that was rejected by small government conservatives, panned by Republican moderates and given only lukewarm support from President Trump.
One day after unveiling the GOP’s long-promised effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better, the new American Health Care Act already appears to be on life support, unlikely to survive the onslaught of friendly fire unless Trump personally rallies his party.
But Trump’s intervention looks uncertain. While the president embraced “our wonderful new healthcare bill” in an early morning tweet, he also suggested it’s just a starting point “for review and negotiation” — opening the floodgates to alternative ideas and proposals that could take weeks to sort out.
Later, in a White House meeting with House Republicans, he offered a stronger endorsement, saying he was "proud to support" their plan and expected it to pass “very quickly.”
At the same time, though Trump is also accepting back-channel calls from conservative Republican opponents — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who are warning him off legislation they view as nothing more than a revamped federal entitlement program. Conservative lawmakers are being backed by the Koch network, whose supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday, and other influential groups including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They dismiss the GOP leadership’s bill as “Obamacare 2.0” or “Obamacare lite.”
“This is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is leading the GOP opposition with Paul and the House Freedom Caucus. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also raised objections.“We promised the American people we would drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington. This bill does not do that,” Lee said. “This is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for, and it is not what we promised the American people.”
For seven years Republicans have promised to end Obamacare, and after winning repeated congressional elections on their promise to repeal and replace the law, they were confident Democrats would have no choice but to join them.
But Democrats have shown no interest in the GOP bill, saying it would drop millions of Americans from healthcare coverage without offering them viable alternatives. Rather than being spooked by their November election losses, Democrats have been buoyed by the outpouring of support for Obamacare by constituents and protesters flocking to lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country...
Worked in a little bit of Hayek here. https://t.co/VOYzS8yamU @FriedrichHayek
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 19, 2017
BTW, if a WV-based writer wanted to rip into Huntington University, I could offer suggestions. @donsurber https://t.co/VOYzS8yamU pic.twitter.com/H6NTsLJgi6
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 19, 2017
The Triumph of Identity Politics - by @noahcrothman https://t.co/JWAZnzEAMp pic.twitter.com/LVt0ywlpqX— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) February 13, 2017
How the two parties approached their respective presidential election cycle losses in this decade is revealing. While the GOP conducted its 2012 “autopsy” in the open and as a result of internal and external pressures, the Democratic Party is conducting a postmortem out of the spotlight. A weekend retreat for Democratic House members and a Monday Priorities USA gathering of progressive groups suggest the party is aware it needs to adapt. Yet even the notion that the party which won the popular vote needs to reform meets with incredulity and bitter resistance from the grassroots faithful. Surely, the admonitions of a Trump-era Democrat like Jim Webb, who on Sunday chided his lifelong party for pushing all its chips in on identity politics, will be similarly discarded by the liberal activist class. Webb’s detractors would have a point. Democrats did not lose in 2016 because they embraced identity politics; they lost because they embraced the wrong sort of identity politics.Keep reading.
In a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Virginia Senator Webb scolded his party for adopting a message that has been “shaped toward identity politics,” thus alienating a core and classic Democratic constituency. “The people who believe that, regardless of any of these identity segments, you need to have a voice in quarters of power for those that have no voice,” Webb added. “And we’ve lost that for the Democratic Party.”
“When you’ve lost white working people, you’ve lost flyover land,” the senator continued. Unquestionably, the Democratic Party and the liberal activists who provide it with animating energy at the grassroots level have embraced an exclusionary and contradictory sort of identity politics. For the most part, the nation’s majority demographic has come out on the losing end.
The Democratic Party’s is a kind of identity politics that views transgendered bathroom access as a civil rights imperative but sees infringements on the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act in service to ObamaCare’s birth control mandate as a necessary element of a critical public health initiative. It’s a kind of identity politics that scoffs at those who offer prayers for the victims of violence, and which rewards those who insist that “Blue Lives Matter isn’t a thing.” It is a kind of identity politics that, when a special needs man is abducted and tortured for being white in the Trump era or a self-described practitioner of Islam perform an act of mass violence in his or her faith’s name, refuses to make note of these realities for fear of handing out coveted victimhood status to the undeserving. Yet it is also an identity politics that extrapolates from almost every incident of violence committed by a male of majority extraction that America is in the midst of an epidemic of racially-tinged violence.
Some of this is real and tangible, and some of it can be dismissed as a problem of perception. All of this is divisive, poisonous, and dangerous. Republicans under Trump didn’t abandon this brand of exclusionary identity politics; they embraced them.
The rise of white identity politics didn’t occur in a vacuum. It was a reaction to the sense of alienation and isolation. This sense was a direct result of the perception among white voters that they were disliked and that their interests were threatened by opinion makers on the coasts...
Behold the Endless stupidity from the left.. #throwback #BenGarrison #cartoon more cartoons at https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/MimxUVJ5WX
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) February 11, 2017
“Why Feminism Wants to Dismantle the Family (long)” — Nikita Coulombe https://t.co/Ds1arZBOUX pic.twitter.com/nHfKow5FUy
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 18, 2017
This woman -> @NikitaCoulombe <- should have THOUSANDS of followers.
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 18, 2017
#Democrats aren't ready for the #Trump Era: https://t.co/H427TQs0nq
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 18, 2017
