Regular HOTLINE readers know that there are nine states — led by Florida, Tennessee, and Texas — with no state income tax. Now, the race is on to see who will become the 10th. Some states like Nebraska and Arizona have come close with rates of 3% or less.
Now the latest entry into the sweepstakes is North Dakota. This is from Doug Burgum's State of the State speech this week:
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DICKINSON — “It is time for us to say goodbye to the state income tax once and for all,” Burgum said Tuesday, Jan. 23, in his speech at Dickinson State University...
Burgum said the state has made strides to collect no income tax from many residents.
“I challenge the 69th Legislative Assembly to take that final step.”
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3) "Never Incorporate Your Company in Delaware"
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That was Elon Musk's response to the ruling by a judge in Delaware who yesterday struck down his $55 billion Tesla pay package.
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Even to some of your editors, this seems to be an extravagant and hard-to-justify deal for Musk. But after all, Musk put up most of the money to start the company, which under his leadership now has a $600 billion market cap. Also, Musk reportedly doesn’t take a conventional salary, but is paid on a long ago agreed upon incentive system based on the valuation of the stock and company performance.
Nobody twisted anyone's arm to buy Tesla stock. There is a Tesla board of directors and a compensation board - though the complainants allege that Musk stacked that with his friends.
Musk has also made tens of billions for the shareholders and Tesla has become one of the Magnificent Seven firms that have driven the stock market into the high heavens.
The judge ruled that the pay package was “not reasonable” - and maybe that's true.
Here's our concern: decisions about how a company is run and how much executives are paid, should be made through corporate governance and at shareholder meetings, not in a courtroom. (See item
Below on Bernie Sanders' latest gambit.)
Once upon a time, Delaware was the best place in America for a company to go public.
We wonder whether that will remain the case.
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4) French Farmers Block Paris Roads to Protest “Net Zero” Lunacy
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By blocking access to Paris with their tractors, French farmers are fighting the EU’s version of the Green New Deal that aims to eliminate all fossil fuel use in the years ahead. As we noted in yesterday’s Hotline: no energy means no food.
Although we don't think protesters have a right to block commerce, we at CTUP are in complete solidarity with the farmers.
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https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en
These farmers have had it with the bureaucratic green diktats. And so have others. In the Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen Movement made substantial gains in a recent election.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energy-crisis
Our only question is: Where, oh where are the protests in the United States against the existential threat of environmental tyranny?
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Bernie Sanders is up to his old tricks in his latest attempt to “sock it to the rich.” He has introduced a bill in the Senate that would impose a 5% tax surcharge on CEOs who get paid 500 times what the average worker at the firm earns. He calls his bill: “Time to Rein in the Millionaire and Billionaire CEOs.”
This bill is predicated on the notion that the rich don’t “pay their fair share of taxes.” Alas, polling indicates that most Americans agree with him.
This got us wondering whether Bernie Sanders and ordinary folks know who pays the taxes in America.
So here is the question for the day that we intend to ask in an upcoming poll.
How much in taxes does Jeff Bezos pay each year?
A) less than the average American in taxes
B) about the same
C) somewhat more
D) 100,000 times as much
E) I don’t know because I’m a Progressive who doesn’t pay any taxes
We will report back our findings in. A few weeks.
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6) A Victory for “Women’s Rights” or an Excuse for a Mad Shopping Spree?
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If you haven’t seen this video of E. Jean Carroll holding hands with her lawyers as she celebrates her $83 million jackpot award by a jury last week to be paid by Donald Trump, you really should take a look. It's sad but humorous too.
MSNBC and CNN have been trumpeting this absurd "defamation" jury award as a victory for sisterhood against that no-good Donald Trump.
But the jig was up when E. Jean Carroll joyfully reported on MSNBC that she intends to spend her award money – not on charitable causes like shelters for battered women – but to buy new dresses and shoes, a motorcycle, and take a trip to France with her new bosom-buddy pal Rachel Maddow. One of her lawyers quickly interjected that E. Jean was joking. It sure didn’t seem that way to us. She comes across as a witless, money-grubbing publicity hound.
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