Tag: regulations

Stampede Grinches: City Hall aims to end Calgary nightlife

By weaponizing Calgary’s noise bylaws, city officials are saddling the nearly 30-year-old Cowboys Music Festival tradition with new sound restrictions and time limits that has long-time festival organizers panicking.

The result is a regulatory squeeze that could make it impossible for the festivals like the world famous Cowboys Music Festival to run its full, star-studded lineup. If you were looking forward to seeing Jason Aldean, Sean Paul or Jason Derulo at the nearly sold-out event, you can thank City Hall for killing the vibe.

According to a Calgary city noise permit issued for the event, once midnight hits on the weekend, the current rules force volume limits down to 65 decibels, which is the volume of a regular, everyday conversation.

The restrictions get even tighter during the week, choking the music down to a microscopic 50 decibels, the volume of a quiet recording studio, at midnight, before forcing the speakers to unplug completely by 12:30 AM.

In an exclusive interview with Juno News, Penny Lane Entertainment CEO, Paul Vickers said the abrupt changes from City Hall came suddenly and gave them very little wiggle room.

“This is not something you do three weeks before Stampede,” Vickers said. “You give everybody time to digest it. Last year, we had a whole year to talk about this. We had a really smooth Stampede last year. We had a really good community effort with everyone.”

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Pay up: Woman fighting to keep home after $600,000 website mistake

A Honolulu woman, 83, recently suffered injuries in a serious car crash, then returned home to find waiting for her a $600,000 city fine, accrued while she was recovering, at $10,000 a day, for a website mistake.

The city’s response was to tell her to hire a lawyer.

The plight of Sandra May, who has lived in her home for 56 years, raising her son there, has been described by Fox News.

The issue is that while she relies on rental income from an attached apartment for some of her income, she is not located in an area where short-term rentals are allowed.

And a rental website mistakenly listed that apartment as available for short-term rentals. It did not, however, allow anyone to actually book a short-term stay.

She’s now had to hire a lawyer after she finished her hospitalization, found the notice of the $600,000 fine, and tried without success to reason with city officials.

The complaint explains that the city issued its notice of violation but May was unable to access it during her hospitalization.

It ballooned before she got home.

“It feels to me like they’re just trying to take my house, put me on the street with the rest of the homeless people,” May told Fox News Digital. “It’s very depressing, very upsetting.”

The city has not been idle, after issuing the fine. Officials put a lien on her house and blocked her access to basic services, such as renewing her driver’s license or car registration.

“All the stress, the stomach problems, every day wondering if I’m gonna have a house… I was gonna live here for the rest of the days I have,” May told Fox. “This is actually — I call this my little piece of paradise on earth. … The thought of losing it is — I can’t imagine.”

Her legal advisers already have raised the city’s apparent violation of the Eighth Amendment, which blocks unreasonable government fines.

Loren Seehase, of the Pacific Legal Foundation, explained, “The Constitution prohibits excessive fines. Governments cannot simply impose fines that are so ruinous that they would financially devastate someone over a simple error. And that’s what we’re fighting for.”

In fact, the lawyer pointed out, it’s apparently an industry for Honolulu, which has issued more than $90 million in fines for related advertising “violations.”

Seehase described the city’s response: “Rather than having some sympathy and understanding that she was out of and in the hospital. They said, Well, we’re going to still fine her $590,000.”

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Washington’s Business Exodus

Washington state’s business climate continues to deteriorate under the weight of record tax increases and burdensome regulations. A spring 2026 survey by the Association of Washington Business (AWB) reveals alarming trends, nearly 1 in 4 employers (24%) are now actively considering relocating their businesses out of state, up sharply from 17% in the previous quarter and nearly triple the level from winter 2025.

Another 55% of business leaders are considering moving their personal residences elsewhere, citing the state’s escalating tax burden as the top challenge. This flight is no surprise. Washington’s business tax climate has plummeted from 6th best in the nation in 2014 to near the bottom today, with the state now ranking among the worst for small business survival.

Major tax hikes enacted in 2025 are now hitting businesses hard. Starting in late 2025 and accelerating into 2026, the state increased Business & Occupation (B&O) tax rates for service businesses and introduced new surcharges. Large companies face a 0.5% surcharge on taxable income over $250 million, while advanced computing firms saw their surcharge jump dramatically. These changes, part of the largest tax increase in state history, are projected to reduce state GDP growth by up to 0.5% in 2026 (nearly $4.5 billion) and cut wages by billions more.

Office vacancy rates reflect the pain. While Seattle’s downtown vacancy remains among the nation’s highest (hovering between 28% and 35%+ in Q1 2026 reports), the broader Puget Sound region and state face similar pressures from remote work shifts and corporate relocations. Companies like Starbucks are shifting hundreds of jobs to lower-tax states such as Tennessee. Other firms have issued WARN notices and moved operations to Idaho, Utah, and beyond.

High-profile exits and stalled expansions are mounting. Entrepreneurs report that Washington’s combination of high taxes, regulatory red tape, and hostile policies makes growth nearly impossible.

Bottom line is as the high earners and companies leave the state, the revenue from increased taxes, including the new income tax, will dry up and politicians in Olympia will be left scrambling for new sources of tax revenue. The $1,000,000 threshold on the income tax will fall in the blink of an eye.

Politicians have to restore small business owners’ confidence in the regulatory environment and keep the promises they are making. Just 3 months after signing the income tax into law, lauding it as the way forward for the state, Governor Ferguson is now claiming he will veto any change to the exemption threshold in order to garner support to keep the legislation in place. History indicates that Ferguson’s claim might be a little “flexible,” and that’s the problem. There is no predictability for business owners.

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US To Tighten Rule Regarding Nonprofits Paying Excessive Executive Compensation

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of the Treasury issued a notice on Friday, announcing their plan to issue proposed regulation concerning taxation on high compensation paid by tax-exempt organizations to employees.

The notice relates to excessive compensation and excess parachute payments, the IRS said in a June 5 statement. Parachute payments are made to key employees when they are terminated or when the business undergoes a merger or acquisition. An excess parachute payment is any such payment that exceeds three times an employee’s average annual compensation for the most recent five years.

Section 4960 of the Internal Revenue Code imposes an excise tax on any nonprofit or tax-exempt organization paying an employee more than $1 million in remuneration in a tax year or an excess parachute payment, according to the notice.

The new rule changes tax applicability regarding excessive compensation.

Prior to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, taxes on such payments were applicable to a tax-exempt organization’s five highest-compensated employees for a tax year whose compensation exceeded $1 million.

But under the new rule, the excise tax is applicable to any employee whose compensation exceeds $1 million in a tax year beginning after Dec. 31, 2025. The requirement of being among the five-highest compensated employees has been eliminated.

The rule is also applicable to any former employee who was a top-five compensated employee exceeding $1 million for any tax year between Dec. 31, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2025.

There is no change to taxation on parachute payments. Such payments will continue attracting taxes as per existing rules.

The updates also provide certain exceptions regarding people offering volunteer services to tax-exempt organizations.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano said the latest rule “strengthens the accountability of tax-exempt organizations.” The regulation “broadens the scope of tax from a limited group of executives to potentially any highly compensated employee.”

The Treasury and the IRS are inviting public comments on the notice until Aug. 4.

The notice comes after the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) recently raised concerns about the implementation of the new regulations.

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Polish Minister Slams ‘Insane’ EU Climate Policies

EU’s ‘green’ agenda is a recipe for disaster.

You know the suicidal environmental policies emanating from Brussels are about to be ditched when even members of the Polish liberal government led by PM Donald Tusk are openly criticizing it.

Tusk was elected with a clear mandate to bring Poland closer to the EU after the conservatives from PiS had bucked the Globalist agenda on so many fronts.

But it turns out that the European Union has become so radicalized that even Tusk’s liberals can’t stomach it anymore.

EU cheerleaders from POLITICO hosted an Energy & Climate Forum in Brussels today, where Secretary of State Krzysztof Bolesta said the EU was ‘moving too fast’ in its emissions cut plans targeting heavy industry.

Politico reported:

“The speed at which the EU is pushing its industry to cut carbon emissions under the Emissions Trading System is ‘insane’, according to Poland’s deputy climate and environment minister [Krzysztof Bolesta].

[…] ‘This is insane. And it’s not one industry branch, it’s quite a few. So, for me, this topic is actually something that we need to change’, he said, adding the current trajectory would hand the EU ‘the moral high ground, but we’ll have no industry’.”

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BEYOND PARODY: The Associated Press Floats Idea of Gun Control for… MUSKETS

Just in time for America’s 250th birthday celebrations, the liberal Associated Press is suddenly floating the idea of gun control for muskets.

They’re not coming right out and saying it, of course. What they have done is drop an article that basically says: Hey America, did you know that muskets are not regulated like other guns? Their purpose here is so obvious.

The liberal left has never heard of a form of gun control that they didn’t like.

The Daily Caller reports:

The Associated Press posted a short video that appeared to highlight what it called a lack of regulation of flintlock muskets Thursday morning.

Under federal law, flintlock muskets fall into the definition of “antique firearms” under the language of 18 USC 921(16), which exempts them from many of the regulations and laws at the federal level, as well as in most states. In a caption for the video posted on X Thursday morning, the AP noted that while a musket could fire a projectile at 1,000 feet per second, it was exempt from gun regulations under federal law.

“When you look at the Congressional Record from 1968, Senator John Tower’s rationale, which involved committee hearing testimonies from gun collectors and other historical organizations, spent a lot of care and effort into identifying that cut-off date,” firearms historian Ashley Hlebinsky told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “He clearly lays out not wanting to burden historians, collectors, gun owners, and museums and dives into a pretty thorough explanation for why he believes the year should be 1898.”

Modern firearms are typically breech-loading weapons that use self-contained metallic cartridges with smokeless powder (or modern propellants) developed primarily after the mid-to-late 19th century, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Black-powder muzzle-loading firearms (often classified as “antiques” under U.S. federal law) are older designs that load loose powder, projectile and wadding from the muzzle end, using ignition systems like flintlock, matchlock or percussion cap.

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Sec. Burgum on Economy-Crushing Bureaucratic Creep: ‘80% of What People Were Being Held Accountable for’ Not Original Law

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.

Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign. 

“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”

“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”

In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. 

As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”

Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal. 

“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”

According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”

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This Is Why the U.S. Can’t Use the Oil It Produces

The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world—averaging 13.3 million barrels per day (MMb/d) in 2024. But strangely, the U.S. also imports about 6.5 MMb/d of crude. This paradox confuses many Americans. Why doesn’t the U.S. just use its own oil? The answer lies in infrastructure mismatches, refinery design, trade economics, and federal laws that restrict the flow of domestic oil.

  1. 🧪 Light Oil vs. Heavy Oil: Not All Crude Is Created Equal
    The U.S. primarily produces light, sweet crude oil, which is low in sulfur and viscosity. Meanwhile, many American refineries—especially those built in the 1970s and 80s—were designed to handle heavy, sour crude, the kind that comes from countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada.

Over 60% of U.S. refinery capacity is optimized for heavy crude processing.
Upgrading a single refinery to handle lighter crude can cost between $100 million to $1 billion.
This means that even though the U.S. produces oil, it’s the wrong kind of oil for its aging refinery infrastructure. So we export light crude (often to Asia and Europe) and import heavy crude to feed our refineries.

  1. 🏗️ Refinery Location and Infrastructure Gaps
    The second major problem is geography. Much of America’s oil production comes from inland fields like the Permian Basin (Texas/New Mexico) or the Bakken Formation (North Dakota). Meanwhile, many of the refineries that need oil are located on the East and West Coasts, far from those production zones.

California, despite being a top 5 oil-producing state, imports ~75% of its crude due to limited pipeline access.
The Keystone XL cancellation and other pipeline delays exacerbate this logistical mismatch.
It’s often cheaper to import oil from the Middle East or Latin America to coastal ports than it is to move domestic crude across the U.S. via expensive trucking, rail, or limited pipelines.

  1. ⚖️ The Jones Act: A Shipping Law That Backfires
    The Jones Act, passed in 1920, requires that any goods (including oil) transported between U.S. ports must use ships that are U.S.-built, -owned, and -crewed. These ships are vastly more expensive to operate than foreign tankers.

A Jones Act tanker costs up to $75,000 per day—nearly 3x more than foreign vessels.
This makes it cheaper to ship oil from Saudi Arabia to New Jersey than from Texas to New Jersey.
The law, originally meant to support the American maritime industry, now creates bottlenecks in the oil supply chain—making domestic crude more expensive to move than imported oil.

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Another Red State, Fully Californicated

“20 years ago Colorado was a Red state and thriving,” the State Leadership Initiative posted late last week. “10 years ago liberals were writing pieces about how Colorado was the next Silicon Valley.” And now CBS News reports that “Colorado is losing businesses and jobs at an alarming rate.”

This was the hope, according to Denver-based 5280 magazine in 2020: “With another tech company setting up an office in Denver, the state could become a magnet for Silicon Valley firms and other prestigious businesses during the worst economic climate in nearly a century.”

Instead of Silicon Mountain, Colorado is quickly becoming “an economic backwater,” as SLI put it, “an omen for what happens when Red states go blue.”

It seems like only last week [It was just last week, Steve —Editor] I shared the schadenfreudelicious tale of how one TDS-suffering Delaware judge launched an exodus of big-name firms led by Elon Musk. Today, I must share similar news about my once-beloved home state of Colorado.

“The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has been sounding an alarm for years about excessive regulation,” CBS reported, and “the Chamber also said that companies are also relocating out-of-state.” According to the story, “since 2019, 98 companies have either left the state, expanded elsewhere, or scrapped plans to move here.” In the last four years, we’ve lost a total of 34 corporate headquarters, too. 

The most recent big name to leave is Palantir, the AI firm recently touted by President Donald Trump for its invaluable contributions to Operation Epic Fury. With basically zero fanfare, the company announced last week that it’s moved its HQ to Miami. 

“We are going to be hurting Colordans not just now, but the next generation, the next generation after that. And we just want to course correct,” tech entrepreneur and investor Dan Caruso wrote to Democrat Gov. Jared Polis in a letter signed by more than 200 business and civic leaders.

Polis and the Democrat-dominated statehouse made some polite noises about maybe looking into something resembling deregulation someday soonish, but Colorado requires so much more.

Let’s go back to something I wrote almost exactly one year ago, when we looked at what Colorado was like before and after 2018, the year Democrats took full control of the state government.

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Today’s Anti-Capitalists Want to Regulate What You Can Eat, How Often You Drive, and the Size of Your Home

It may sound cruel to say so, but such thinking closely mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Planned economics is enjoying yet another revival. Climate protection advocates and anti-capitalists are demanding that capitalism be abolished and replaced with a planned economy.

Otherwise, they claim, humanity has no chance of survival.

In Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (Englisch: The End of Capitalism) is a bestseller and its author, Ulrike Herrmann, has become a regular guest on all the talk shows. She openly promotes a planned economy, although this has already failed once in Germany—just like everywhere else it has been tried.

Unlike under classical socialism, in a planned economy, companies are not nationalized, they are allowed to remain in private hands. But it is the state that specifies precisely what and how much is produced.

There would be no more flights and no more private motor vehicles. The state would determine almost every facet of daily life—for example, there would no longer be any single-family houses and no one would be allowed to own a second home. New construction would be banned because it is harmful to the environment. Instead, existing land would be distributed “fairly,” with the state deciding how much space is appropriate for each individual. And the consumption of meat would only be allowed as an exception because meat production is harmful to the climate.

In general, people should not eat so much: 2,500 calories a day are enough, says Herrmann, who proposes a daily intake of 500 grams of fruit and vegetables, 232 grams of whole meal cereals or rice, 13 grams of eggs, and 7 grams of pork.

“At first glance, this menu may seem a bit meager, but Germans would be much healthier if they changed their eating habits,” reassures this critic of capitalism. And since people would be equal, they would also be happy: “Rationing sounds unpleasant. But perhaps life would even be more pleasant than it is today, because justice makes people happy.”

Such ideas are by no means new. The popular Canadian critic of capitalism and globalization, Naomi Klein, admits that she initially had no particular interest in climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested?

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