Trump Vows To Make Interest On Car Loans Tax Deductible During Speech In Blue Wall State
Trump’s proposal aligns with his broader tax reform agenda
President Donald Trump vowed at his rally in Tuscon, Arizona, Thursday that he would eliminate all taxes on overtime pay — an unprecedented proposal from the federal government. This is part of a broader raft of proposed tax cuts, one of which is apparently so popular as to drive Kamala Harris to adopt it as her own.
"We will end all taxes on overtime," said Trump. "You know what that means? Think about it."
Trump suggested not only that Americans would have a greater incentive to work more if they knew the government wasn't skimming off the top but that businesses would have a easier time with recruitment and retention.
'It's time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break.'
"The people who work overtime are among the hardest-working citizens in our country. And for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them," continued Trump. "They're police officers, nurses, factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers, and machine operators. It's time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break."
The Labor Department under Trump issued a rule in 2019 making overtime pay available to an additional 1.3 million workers. It did so by raising the salary level that companies would have to pay in order to avoid paying workers at least 1.5 times their regular pay rate for work in excess of 40 hours a week.
Even though millions of Americans benefited, supposed labor activists, Democrats, and the liberal media criticized Trump's salary-level increase, suggesting it was not as generous as one of President Barack Obama's failed schemes.
Piggybacking on the success of Trump's rule, the Biden administration announced a final rule in April further increasing the salary threshold required to exempt workers from federal overtime pay requirements — from $36,568 to $43,888 by July 1, 2024, and to $58,656 by Jan. 1, 2025.
As a result of the 2019 and 2024 threshold increases, a great many Americans would be able to avoid forking over their hard-won overtime earnings to the government under Trump's proposed tax policy.
Reuters noted that while this proposal is a first from the federal government, Alabama paved the way this year, becoming the first state in the union to exclude overtime wages for hourly workers from state taxes. The move is, however, temporary.
According to the Tax Foundation, which has been tracking proposed tax policies on the campaign trail, Trump has said he would also:
It appears the Harris campaign did not take Trump's announcement well.
A Harris campaign spokesman said, "He is desperate and scrambling and saying whatever it takes to try to trick people into voting for him."
It is unclear whether Harris, who was recently exposed copying and pasting policies from her former running mate, will also claim this proposal for her own.
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Bill Belichick, former New England Patriots head coach and one of the most decorated coaches in the history of the NFL, is talking taxes.
According to legend, a Massachusetts law is discouraging star football players from signing with the New England Patriots.
“It’s Taxachusetts,” he jested. “Even the minimum players are pretty close to a million dollars, and so once you hit that million-dollar threshold, then you pay more state tax in Massachusetts.”
Rob Eno, BlazeTV Media Critic and a Massachusetts native, joins Jill Savage and the “Blaze News Tonight” panel to explain why athletes may be financially incentivized to sign with teams from states with more sensible tax codes and “why football is affected more than other professional sports.”
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“In November 2022, the citizens of Massachusetts actually voted to get rid of the Constitutional amendment that said they can't have a progressive income tax,” Eno explained, adding that instead, citizens opted to “have a one tax rate flat rate of 5%” as well as “a millionaire surtax of 4%.”
He points to NBA forward Grant Williams as an example of why athletes are flocking away from Massachusetts.
Williams, who played four seasons with the Boston Celtics, compared a Massachusetts’ salary of “$48 million with the millionaire’s tax” to the Dallas, Texas, equivalent of “$54 million.”
“There's this jock tax. ... Even if you live in Dallas, you're going to pay California taxes or Boston taxes for the day games that you do there, but if you live in Massachusetts or if you work for the Boston Celtics or you work for the New England Patriots and you come to Dallas, you're still going to pay that Massachusetts tax rate because that's the state where you're earning the money,” Eno explains.
The millionaire’s tax isn’t just hurting athletes though.
“The CPAs in Boston ... that deal with high-net-worth individuals have said that they have at least one client that's looking to leave. ... The owner of the Boston Celtics is making plans to leave” due to an “estate tax in Massachusetts,” Eno reports.
“Is this actually hurting the [Patriot’s] roster?” asks Jill.
“I think it’s actually hurting the roster, and I think that all of the teams are seeing this,” says Eno. “Major League Baseball and the [NBA], there’s luxury taxes,” but “in football, you can’t do that.”
“[Belichick] is actually making a political statement,” says Blaze Media’s editor in chief Matthew Peterson.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.
The Harris campaign revealed this week that if the Democratic vice president and her running mate — who apparently thinks that communism means that "everyone is the same and everyone shares" — win in November, then they will slap Americans with various new taxes, including a tax on unrealized gains.
Despite claiming to be fiscally responsible, Harris and Walz would simultaneously redistribute American wealth in a manner some economists have indicated will exacerbate the very problems they are supposedly intended to remedy.
The official 2024 Democratic Party platform was released Monday, revealing what former presidential candidate Joe Biden apparently planned to do if afforded another term. It turns out that just as Kamala Harris was ready to adopt Biden's candidacy and his committed delegates, she is now also ready to embrace many of the policy proposals attributed to him in the document.
Those proposals include raising the federal corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
Communist China's federal corporate income tax rate is, by way of comparison, reportedly 25%.
Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer confirmed to Reuters that Harris plans on raising the rate, claiming it would be part of a "fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share."
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans previously cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. When ratifying the bill, Trump noted, "It's going to be a tremendous thing for the American people. It's going to be fantastic for the economy. It's going to keep companies from leaving our shores."
A 2017 Tax Foundation study indicated that "empirical evidence seems to support earlier theoretical analysis that domestic U.S. labor bears the largest portion of the burden of the U.S. corporate income tax."
"The share of the burden falling on labor is routinely found to be between 50 percent and 100 percent, with 70 percent or higher the most likely outcome," said the study. "As the tax reduces investment, productivity, and wages, the dollar amount of the cost to labor may exceed the revenue raised by the tax by a wide margin."
Extra to adversely impacting labor, this Harris tax hike would also adversely impact the stock market.
Strategists at Goldman Sachs told Reuters that each percentage point change in the corporate tax rate could shift S&P 500 earnings by "slightly less than 1%."
Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel, said, "Anything that reduces earnings should ... have a negative impact on the stock market."
Harris — who, as vice president, oversaw the U.S. national debt topping $35 trillion and championed various handouts along the way, including the taxpayer-funded subsidization of college education for hundreds of thousands of student debtors — has other taxes planned for 2025, around the same time various other Trump-era tax cuts are set to expire.
'The taxing of unrealized gains, no matter what the level of wealth, will drive assets, jobs and companies away from the United States.'
Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration proposed in its FY 2025 budget a 44.6% capital gains rate, reported Moodys Private Client. This increase — from the current rate of 20% left over from the Trump tax reform — would constitute the highest federal capital gains rate in American history.
The Harris campaign told the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that she "continues to support all of the revenue-raising provisions in the President's FY 2025 budget."
According to Americans for Tax Reform, the Harris-endorsed budget proposal also calls for a yearly 25% minimum tax on unrealized gains. While initially, this would target only the sliver minority of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million, critics suspect this "unconstitutional wealth tax" might ultimately be expanded to millions of Americans.
"Capital gains taxes should only be paid when a gain is realized. Harris's wealth tax would break with current tax policy and impose tax Americans based on the value of an asset on a particular arbitrary date," stated Americans for Tax Reform. "This unprecedented tax would give even more power to the IRS, encourage taxpayers to move assets overseas, and will only expand to hit millions of Americans over time."
TheStreet's Bob Byrne expressed similar concerns, noting, "While this only impacts a handful of people, and the measure is highly unlikely to pass, even the concept is worrisome. The taxing of unrealized gains, no matter what the level of wealth, will drive assets, jobs and companies away from the United States."
Harris has provided a few indications of how she might redistribute some of this wealth.
Harris intends to have taxpayers inadvertently provide a $25,000 handout to first-time and certain other prospective homeowners.
Some economists suspect this is an exercise in futility.
Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's, recently told Axios Moody's that this house credit for buyers would increase demand and "translate quickly into higher prices."
While the Democratic platform claims the party is "working to end special interest giveaways," this scheme would no doubt be a big win for those big investment firms that have bought up residential real estate across the country.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget indicated this handout would cost $100 billion over four years, though the number "could be higher and lead to additional costs."
Americans for Tax Reform noted that Harris has endorsed other tax hikes including raising Medicare taxes from 3.8% to 5% for those making over $400,000 a year.
While such taxes are necessarily coercive, the Harris-Walz campaign suggested in an Aug. 16 release it was simply "asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share."
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The Internal Revenue Service noted in a March 25 press release that due to scads of people failing to file their 2020 taxes, an estimated more than $1 billion in refunds have gone unclaimed for that tax year.
But the agency warned that that clock is ticking: People need to act before the approaching deadline if they want the opportunity to claim the cash.
"Under the law, taxpayers usually have three years to file and claim their tax refunds. If they don’t file within three years, the money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury," the IRS noted. "But for 2020 tax returns, people have a little more time than usual to file to claim their refunds. Typically, the normal filing deadline to claim old refunds falls around the April tax deadline, which is April 15 this year for 2023 tax returns. But the three-year window for 2020 unfiled returns was postponed to May 17, 2024, due to the COVID-19 pandemic emergency."
As Americans toil to file their 2023 taxes before the deadline next month, the ever-expanding U.S. national debt is more than $34 trillion.
"There's money remaining on the table for hundreds of thousands of people who haven’t filed 2020 tax returns," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said, according to an IRS press release. "We want taxpayers to claim these refunds, but time is running out for people who may have overlooked or forgotten about these refunds. There's a May 17 deadline to file these returns so taxpayers should start soon to make sure they don't miss out."
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Saying Goodbye to Tax Day!