Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t forget to eat those July 4 leftovers, it’s probably the last good day for them. I’m away on vacation, but I’ve got a great interview for you to read about sports and local politics colliding over stadium subsidies. But don’t sleep on the links this […]
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last week, reduces the federal tax on transfers of firearm sound suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns from $200 to zero. That tax, originally imposed by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), was meant to be prohibitive, amounting to about $4,800 […]
Here we go again. This week, the Senate unveiled, honed, and passed its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it’s a fiscal monstrosity. What was already an oversized mess in the House has been supersized into a $4 trillion ode to unseriousness. This isn’t tax reform. It’s a bipartisan piñata stuffed with […]
Fraud in the food stamp program is already a huge problem that costs federal taxpayers around $10 billion annually. The Senate might have just made that problem worse. A provision included in the major tax and spending bill that senators narrowly approved on Tuesday could give states a powerful incentive to make their food stamp […]
Hours before he cast the tie-breaking vote on a major tax and spending bill in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to reframe the debate over the legislation. Instead of thinking about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) as a matter of fiscal policy that’s primarily aimed at extending the 2017 personal income […]
Imagine that you’re renting an apartment and the terms of the lease require paying your landlord $2,000 every month. Now, imagine that the lease expires at the end of this month. Here you sit, on July 1, with no lease signed for the month of August. Congratulations, you’ve now got $2,000 extra dollars that you […]
Interest rates may have fallen this year, if not for the uncertainty and higher costs created by President Donald Trump’s tariff schemes. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told a House committee on Tuesday that the central bank likely would have “continued cutting” interest rates during the first half of 2025, but decided to hold rates […]
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” aims to avert the tax increases that would result from the expiration of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it’s drawn criticism for not doing enough to reduce the debt or deficit. Earlier in June, The Washington Post reported on publicly funded homes in some cities costing […]
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Why not try getting a little creative with your wedges today? Congratulations to the half of you that were rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder and the half of you that were rooting for the Florida Panthers. (Glad I’m not the only one who noticed the […]
Colorado’s 1876 Constitution is replete with provisions to prohibit corporate welfare, special privileges for government-favored big business, and government debt without voter consent. The protections have been fortified and extended by constitutional amendment, most notably in the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Yet for the past century, the Colorado Supreme Court, usually in cooperation with […]