I am a business economist with interests in international trade worldwide through politics, money, banking and VOIP Communications. The author of RG Richardson City Guides has over 300 guides, including restaurants and finance.
USAFacts Founder Steve Ballmer is back with a new episode of Just the Facts! Americans file their taxes every year, but how exactly does the system work? Whether you're curious about the tax debates currently going on in DC, how much corporations pay or why some people get refunds without owing anything, this video is here to answer your questions. Some top takeaways:
In 2024, individual income taxes brought in $2.4 trillion, or 49% of all federal revenue, while payroll taxes accounted for another 35%. Corporate income taxes comprised 11% of the total.
Payroll taxes, which totaled $1.7 trillion, are earmarked for Social Security and Medicare. Workers earning the median household income of $80,610 paid approximately $4,998 toward Social Security and $1,169 toward Medicare.
Credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit can lead to a refund even if the filer doesn’t owe income tax. For instance, a single head of household with three children and $22,000 in income could owe no taxes but receive a refund of around $12,920.
The top 3% of filers — about 4.7 million people — contributed 50% of federal income tax revenue.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set corporate tax rate at a flat 21%. Meanwhile, a 15% minimum tax introduced in 2022 ensured that profitable corporations pay at least some federal tax regardless of deductions or credits.
RG Richardson Economic Interactive Dictionary. Multi-language Chinese, English and German. With the power of the internet, this guide provides over 9900 links through 8 search engines to definitions, terms, charts, videos and graphs. Never out of date! Increase your financial literacy! Interactive City Guides searching in multiple languages. Job search, interactive notes, dictionaries, shopping and real estate guides. Using the power of the internet this guide is all about 9900 preset searches keeping you up to date about your city. Rolling out in 2022 with 8 search engines and 9900 links using your browser in over 10 different languages; point and click that's it! You can now avoid spelling mistakes and language difficulties making this guide simple enough for everybody to use. Simply click the icon, your search is done, read everything you want to know and it is never out of date. These guides have extensive hotel and restaurant searches; not to mention real estate, shopping, job and employment opportunities available in the guides.
More remarkable developments from Ukraine this morning, which just carried out a third strike on one of Vladimir Putin’s pet projects: the bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea. Meanwhile, Russian war bloggers have identified the man they believe to be the mastermind of the drone attacks on military targets across Russia this weekend: former Ukrainian DJ Artem Timofeev. Hey, it’s important for guys to have hobbies. Happy Tuesday.
Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society board of directors, speaks at the Cambridge Union in the U.K. on March 11, 2025. (Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for the Cambridge Union)
Get Away From My Face, You Leopard!
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump’s breakup with the conservative legal movement was a long time coming. Most presidents would commit unspeakable acts to get the sort of home-field advantage Trump enjoys in the courts—most notably, a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court, a full third of whom he nominated himself. But Trump has long felt this arrangement entitles him to a certain standard of living: a world where he can operate more or less without judicial oversight. When “his” Supreme Court failed to abet his attempt to steal the 2020 election, he raged that they hadn’t had the “courage” to do what was necessary.
Four-plus years later, the pressure is still mounting, and not just at the Supreme Court level. Republican appointees on court after court have enraged the president as they worked to stymie Trump’s lawless actions.
The broader break with judicial conservatism came last week. On the heels of a 3–0 decision at the U.S. Court of International Trade straitjacketing his tariff authority—a decision that starred one of his own judicial nominees—Trump apparently decided he’d had enough. In a baggy, rambling 500-word post to Truth Social¹, he trained his rhetorical fire on judicial conservatism’s ideological home base, the Federalist Society, and its co-founder, former longtime vice president, and current board co-chairman Leonard Leo.
“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges,” Trump fumed, calling Leo a “real sleazebag” with “his own separate ambitions.” “I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!”
I can’t deny there’s a certain “I never thought the leopards would eat my face” schadenfreude to this. Trump’s openly transactional 2016 embrace of the Federalist Society helped soothe the consciences of a lot of skeptical Republicans: How lawless and megalomaniacal could he REALLY be, if he shares our commitment to originalism and judicial restraint? And the Federalist Society types were perfectly content to let Trump slingshot them into the judiciary by the truckload.
But as he now lashes out in pique, Trump stands to hurt himself more than the Federalist Society. As a confederation organized more around a shared judicial approach than personal loyalties, there may be no group in Republican politics less susceptible to simply being bullied into submission. Instead, Federalist Society-sympathetic judges are likely to perceive Trump’s attack for what it really is: a rejection of the notion that even friendly judges should be able to restrain him at all, and a pledge to appoint nothing but unprincipled lickspittles in the future.
As things stand, there is a plethora of ways his attacks could come back to bite the president. They will only accelerate the growing sense among Federalist Society types already wielding significant judicial power that the president’s lawless actions are less an opportunity for testing out novel legal theories than a danger requiring immediate restraint. A Trump who played nice with the conservative legal movement was a Trump who got goodies like a new and expansive SCOTUS-approved definition of “presidential immunity.” Just eleven months after that ruling was handed down, it’s growing harder to imagine the Court deciding that case in the same way today (not that at least two of the justices wouldn’t try to find a way).
Trump also may find that his attempts to more aggressively shape the judiciary according to his whim result in him getting less opportunities to shape it at all. As our friend Gregg Nunziata of the Society for the Rule of Law points out, judges are rational actors who are less likely to retire if they feel they’ll be replaced by a presidential toady.
“Many judges who are eligible to retire or take senior status have been watching to see what they can expect from the White House,” Nunziata told Bloomberg Newsthis week. “These are ominous signs for them.”
Already, we’ve seen other ways in which the legal profession has demonstrated some backbone. Trump’s lawfare campaign against America’s law firms seems to be sputtering out. While the courts have come to the defense of firms that wouldn’t bow to his blackmail, some of the ones that did are paying an unexpected price. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Support for the law firms that didn’t make deals has been growing inside the offices of corporate executives. At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.
Yesterday, JVL wrote about what’s becoming a key split screen of Trump 2.0: While official channels start to stiffen their spines against him, he continues to push the envelope anywhere he is permitted to move freely. This is most obvious when it comes to his jubilee of indefensible pardons for allies and his shocking use of federal law enforcement and the military, including the growing deployment of masked plainclothes officers and a purge of top brass thought to be insufficiently “loyal” to Trump himself.
All this is intensely alarming—and if you keep reading below, Bill will alarm you some more. But it would be worse if Trump weren’t finding it tough sledding with civil society and the courts.
Only intensification of community cooperation can repel and reject an invasion of hostile values and systems of thought
Gene Miller
Dark clouds hover over the Statue of Liberty in New York. One theory floating around the internet suggests a small group of tech billionaires are are actively dismantling democratic institutions. If successful, democracy in America will be permanently replaced by a corporate-run authoritarian state. PIX4FREE
In late February, I fell across this online. The title alone, Dark MAGA, was seductive. The more I read, the more I thought I was reading a sci-fi movie treatment (lightly edited):
If you’re a little confused about what Elon Musk is trying to achieve with DOGE, here’s the breakdown:
Musk and Peter Thiel co-founded a company that became PayPal. Other executives at PayPal went on to found or lead other huge tech companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Affirm, and many VC firms.
This group became known as the PayPal mafia because they basically controlled Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel mentored a young JD Vance and helped him get set up in his first VC firm.
Thiel and Musk all but forced Trump to choose JD Vance as VP in exchange for funding his presidential campaign.
The three of them, plus a lot of other tech billionaires subscribe to an ideology called the Dark Enlightenment espoused by this super weird, creepy dude: Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.
Yarvin preaches that the media and academia represent “The Cathedral” that secretly controls power and must be dismantled.
He advocates for a corporate run monarchy, led by a CEO-Dictator. Says that Democracy is “outdated software” and openly opposes it and that the elite tech billionaires should rule because they have the intelligence to “fix” society.
The strategy is to gut the government and to replace it with private corporations; to eliminate elections because they are “obsolete;” to use distraction and chaos to prevent public resistance.
Trump is their useful tool to be disposed of as soon as they can wrest control. They are not Trump supporters, they are “Dark MAGA” This isn’t a hypothetical. The plan is already in motion:
Musk, Thiel, and their network are actively dismantling democratic institutions. If successful, democracy in America will be permanently replaced by a corporate-run authoritarian state.
You think, “Aw, c’mon. This is some drugged-out superannuated adolescent’s takeover fantasy.”
In any case, I forgot about this paranoid riff until I caught an online episode of “Laura Flanders and Friends” with Canadian authors Naomi Klein (ShockDoctrine, This Changes Everything) and Astra Taylor (The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart).
Klein, in particular, has been online wallpaper lately, reporting on what she calls “End Times Fascism.”
As she describes it, the tech oligarchs (the “Broligarchy,” the “Nerd Reich”) are eager to create exclusive and presumably impermeable, self-regulated minute “countries” on U.S. federal lands, and/or in Greenland and Honduras (check the existing Prospera City), as the rest of society destroys itself. At the same time, Klein warns, ultra-right Christian fascists, sensing the approach of the Rapture, are poised to overpower what’s left of American democracy.
Friends, have you noticed how hallucinatory reality has become?
Donald Trump never runs out of emergencies. The border “emergency” in Trump 1.0 provided the pretext to build his wall on the Southern border. A trade “emergency” in Trump 2.0 was his justification for unilaterally imposing on-again-off-again blanket tariffs, thereby disrupting the entire international trading order. Last week, the U.S. Court of International Trade called foul on the fake trade “emergency.”
The court unanimously found that while Congress “has responded to the growing complexity of global economic relations by delegating trade authority to the President,” that delegation came with “clear limitations that retain legislative power over the imposition of duties and foreign commerce.” In claiming an “emergency” to wrest that power entirely away from Congress, Trump resorted to linguistic and legal contortion.
Congress could not constitutionally delegate unlimited power to Trump to enact sweeping tariffs, the court determined. The decades-long imbalance of trade with certain countries is no “emergency,” the court held, nor can a “emergency” be created out of thin air simply to facilitate the president’s sensationalist tendencies or scheme to extract concessions from trading partners. This court is not alone in decrying phony “emergencies” to supercharge presidential authority.
“The Trump administration has exhibited a dangerous pattern of invoking spurious emergencies to undermine the Constitution, threatening liberty and circumventing Congress,” wrote the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin. “This is most evident in the fields of immigration and trade policy. If not stopped, or at least curtailed, these policies could harm millions of people, imperil civil liberties, and compromise our constitutional system.”
Courts in other contexts, Congress, and the voters at large must take a similarly skeptical view of Trump’s incessant reliance on “emergencies.”
Meanwhile, when a true emergency does come along, Trump turns a blind eye. Last week, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied North Carolina’s request for the agency to match 100% of the state funds for Helene cleanup, according to a letter sent from the acting FEMA administrator to the governor of North Carolina,” ABC News reported. It was an emergency, apparently, when Trump claimed former president Joe Biden was not responding quickly enough; now, North Carolina can fend for itself.
Democratic Governor Josh Stein pointed out that Trump somehow cannot find the money to support his state’s emergency, forcing North Carolina to “pay toward debris removal [that] will mean less money towards supporting our small businesses, rebuilding downtown infrastructure, repairing our water and sewer systems, and other critical needs.” (Maybe Trump could use some of the self-aggrandizing June 14 parade money to help actual people?) And, due to Trump’s cuts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is not at all prepared for the upcoming emergencies that come with hurricane season.
Trying to figure out what constitutes an emergency for Trump and his vengeful MAGA minions can be tough.
Bird flu? Nope! Cut funding.
Kids and pregnant women getting Covid? Well, anti-vaxxer nut RFK, Jr. says no funding for that, even though the CDC, which ultimately reports to him, insists that vaccines should be given to healthy kids aged 6 months to 17 years. Good luck to doctors and parents figuring out who to trust.
Dictionary.com defines “emergency” as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.” But for Trump, an emergency is whatever he wants to do (usually in retaliation against perceived political enemies or in furtherance of his war on invented problems) while real “emergencies” are things he does not want to do if on behalf of blue states, democracies, political opponents, and/or in step with scientific reality. Since the word has lost all meaning in this current environment, we should stop using it, recognizing that Trump operates by whim, not by a clear-eyed assessment of what constitutes an actual “emergency.”
Greater focus is required on the real emergencies: People legally in the U.S. getting swept up by masked ICE agents to be shipped off to foreign prisons without due process; spurious arrests of political adversaries and critics including Judge Hannah Dugan, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), and Newark Mayor Ras Baraca (subsequently released without charges).
Fortunately, nearly 150 former and current judges realized that Dugan’s preposterous arrest was a real emergency, prompting an unprecedented amicus brief urging dismissal of all charges. “The federal government’s prosecution of Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Hannah C. Dugan, if permitted, threatens to undermine centuries of precedent on judicial immunity, crucial for an effective judiciary,” it states.
This is not the only true emergency. We have witnessed the economic dislocation and chaos caused by Trump’s unhinged tariff moves; the accelerated destruction of Ukraine (made more acute by Trump’s slavish devotion to Russian President Vladimir Putin); the impoundment of hundreds of millions in aid to research universities; and the unconstitutional mass layoffs and evisceration of federal agencies and departments. Trump calls such emergencies “his agenda.” Thankfully, 96% of rulings from federal judges in May recognized that many of these Trump-created emergencies justified temporary restraining orders and/or preliminary injunctions to prevent immediate harm.
If MAGA Republicans get their way, millions of Americans will experience real emergencies from loss of SNAP benefits, lack of healthcare coverage due to Medicaid cuts, and steep hikes in higher education and energy costs that the massive tax and spending bill would inflict on middle- and working-class Americans.
In sum, there are true emergencies everywhere the eye can see, largely the result of an unhinged president acting in illegal and/or erratic ways. The manufactured “emergencies” and those deliberately inflicted on vulnerable Americans are part of the assault on our constitutional system, while Republicans in Congress remain largely mute. Now that is an emergency.
On January 1, 1863, the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, issued a proclamation ordering
that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
This was the Emancipation Proclamation.
On Saturday evening, June 7, 2025, the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, issued a presidential memorandum addressed to the secretary of defense, the attorney general, and the secretary of homeland security. One might call it the Usurpation Proclamation. And while this weekend’s mobilization of two thousand National Guard troops in Los Angeles has alarmed many observers, I suspect we aren’t alarmed enough by this presidential order, which has implications far beyond this one action in one place.
Let’s take a look at it. It consists of only three paragraphs.
In the first paragraph, the president asserts that “numerous incidents of violence and disorder have recently occurred and threaten to continue” in response to the execution of federal immigration laws. And, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
This claim of “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” establishes the legal predicate for his action announced in the next paragraph:
In light of these incidents and credible threats of continued violence, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.
If you look at 10 U.S.C. 12406, the authority Trump is invoking, it authorizes the president to call into federal service the National Guard when “the United States . . . is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation, or when there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” The president has claimed in the first paragraph that such a rebellion exists, and so directs the secretary of defense to mobilize at least 2,000 National Guard personnel for a duration of “60 days or at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense.”
And the president, in his proclamation, goes further than the deployment of the National Guard: “The Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.”
Note that neither Los Angeles nor the state of California is mentioned in the memorandum. Trump’s mobilization order is in no way limited as to time or place. It is an open-ended authorization for the secretary of defense to mobilize as many troops as he wishes for as long as he wishes, and to deploy them anywhere he wishes within the United States. And these military personnel can be deployed not just where protests have occurred, but anywhere protests “are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”
The memorandum’s final paragraph states that, “To carry out this mission, the deployed military personnel may perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” and ensures that the secretary of defense consults with the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security “prior to withdrawing any personnel from any location to which they are sent.”
Again: “Any personnel,” “any location,” and for any length of time.
Trump understands the breadth of his order. When asked by a reporter yesterday if he planned to send troops to Los Angeles, he answered: “We’re gonna have troops everywhere.”
Chain restaurants are attempting a cultural revival
Though Gen Z and millennials don't dine at mid-price spots as much as older generations, chains are desperately trying to capitalize on their yearning for youth and newfound spending power.
You probably haven’t thought about Red Robin since the last time its “Yummm” slogan jolted you from a couch slumber. But the burger joint’s stock is enjoying a much-needed boost after the chain reported a rare swing to profitability last week.
Amid an overall downturn in consumer spending, Red Robin is one of a slew of casual chains trying to weave nostalgia into its broader comeback strategy (see: last year’s Red Robin x Juicy Couture tracksuit).
Another competitor, Chili’s, is channeling the good ol’ days especially well:
A Saved by the Bell actress starred in a Chili’s ad campaign for margarita specials last month, and the chain opened an Office-themed location near Scranton, PA, in April.
Viral TikToks of mozzarella stick cheese pulls helped the chain’s sales jump 31% last quarter and helped get “Chili’s back in culture again,” its parent company’s CEO said.
Children get older: Though Gen Z and millennials don’t dine at midprice spots as much as older generations, chains are desperately trying to capitalize on their yearning for youth...and their newfound spending power. A recent Rainforest Cafe pop-up at the Empire State Building reeled in thousands of diners looking to eat next to a giant plastic bird for the first time since childhood.
Many casual chains are still struggling. Hooters recently filed for bankruptcy, foot traffic is down at Outback Steakhouse, and despite its recent bright spot, Red Robin has lost more than $100 million in recent years.—ML
