“There is but one true bipartisan subject: the Pentagon. War, it turns out, is the ultimate domestic scam and your tax dollars are its heart and soul.”
“A retired attorney in Virginia Beach is so incensed that Republicans couldn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act that he’s suing to get political donations back, accusing the GOP of fraud and racketeering. Bob Heghmann, 70, filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court, saying the national and Virginia Republican parties and some GOP leaders raised millions of dollars in campaign funds while knowing they weren’t going to be able to overturn the law also known as Obamacare.”
“A newly formed and, by all appearances, well-funded national security advocacy group, devoted to more hawkish U.S. policies toward Russia and other adversaries, provides the most vivid evidence yet of this alliance.”
“Senate Republicans aren’t saying much about what’s in their health care bill, but they have made one thing perfectly clear: They have given up on fully repealing Obamacare.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/31/senate-republicans-dont-know-whats-in-th
“President Donald Trump and allies may complain on Twitter and out loud how the Deep State illegally snooped on him under his predecessor, Barack Obama, but that doesn’t mean the White House wants less surveillance authority. The White House and several GOP senators have made it official: They want to make some significant surveillance authorities permanent under law without addressing concerns by civil liberties and privacy advocates that these authorities are being used to collect Americans’ data without the use of warrants.”
Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2017/06/13/white-house-makes-it-official-it-wants-t
401(k) deductions are under attack and tax advantages of inherited IRAs are being eliminated, while retirees move to Ecuador to escape outrageous expenses.
After floating a trial balloon to see how the public would react to the elimination of 401(k) deductions or imposing immediate taxation on internal gains, similar to a campaign pledge to impose immediate taxation on internal gains of permanent life insurance policies issued starting in 2017, the Trump administration backpedaled and, after conferring, indicated that the 401(k) deduction would not be among the individual deductions eliminated by the Trump tax plan after all.
However, inherited IRAs may not be so lucky: under a Finance Committee proposal, IRA amounts that exceed $450,000 will be required to be distributed to the beneficiary within five years of the IRA owner’s death, subject to specific exceptions. Previously, the beneficiary of the IRA would have been able to stretch the distributions over his lifetime, continuing tax deferral on the IRA owner’s original contributions for that entire period.
Meanwhile, even while tax incentives for individual retirement savings are being whittled away by politicians who will be able to count on state-funded pensions and lucrative private-sector consulting gigs for their own retirement, Americans increasingly find retirement in the US to be an arithmetical impossibility. Consequently, American retirees are scattering to the four corners of Latin America in order to maintain their standard of living, and experiencing pushback from the locals as welfare states that depend on a high birthrate-to-immigration ratio buckle under their own weight.
“Millions of Obamacare customers who do not qualify for financial aid to lower the cost of their health insurance — or who opt not to apply for such assistance — pay the full cost of coverage for their plans. While the Republican Obamacare replacement bill pending in Congress would increase the number of people who would qualify for subsidies, the bill is also expected to increase average premiums over the next two years higher than they would be under Obamacare.”
“The new proposal would treat all 401(k) and traditional IRA contributions as if they were Roth IRA contributions. You’d lose the tax exclusion of those contributions, but your future 401(k)/IRA earnings and appreciation would be tax-free. Some think this could raise $1.5 trillion in additional tax revenue over the next decade, making the corporate tax slash feasible. Unless they decide to tax retirement earnings and appreciation too.”
Read more: https://banyanhill.com/congress-coming-401k/
“April 2017 was another month of mass slaughter and unimaginable terror for the people of Mosul in Iraq and the areas around Raqqa and Tabqa in Syria, as the heaviest, most sustained U.S.-led bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam entered its 33rd month.”
Read more: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/09/the-silent-slaughter-of-the-us-air-war/