Tag: taxes

NATO To Take ‘Quantum Leap’ in Military Spending, Pledging 5% of GDP Baseline

Each member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is expected to ink a pledge to raise military spending to 5% of GDP over the next ten years. This is more than double the current 2% goal. Responding to President Donald Trump’s demands for greater spending, member states will agree to the new baseline in the Netherlands during an alliance summit this week. On Monday, the eve before the summit, this proposal was referred to as a “quantum leap” by Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Under the compromise deal, by 2035, each member state will commit a minimum of 3.5% of their GDP to “core military needs,” along with 1.5% to be earmarked for cybersecurity, infrastructure, and other security components.

“The defense investment plan that allies will agree [to] in The Hague introduces a new baseline, five percent of GDP to be invested in defense,” Rutte told reporters.Despite alliance concerns over Madrid’s refusal to commit to the 5% spending figure, which would necessitate a military yearly budget of nearly $90 billion, Rutte emphasized Spain will not be allowed to “opt-out.” He said, “NATO does not have as an alliance opt-outs, side deals, etcetera, because we all have to chip in.”

Moreover, Rutte insists the new spending will go toward producing thousands of tanks and a five fold increase in the production of air defenses. The NATO chief declared, “Our focus is ensuring that we have all we need to deter and defend against any threat.” Rutte added the summit will see strong support for Ukraine and noted the “most significant and direct threat facing this alliance remains the Russian Federation.”

The alliance has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that has seen hundreds of thousands of casualties with Ukraine losing roughly 20% of its territory.

With the US taking the lead, by 2021, defying Russia’s core security concerns and provoking conflict, Ukraine was being treated as a de facto NATO member. Rutte’s predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, admitted that, under his leadership in the lead up to the war, the Washington-led bloc refused to take potential membership for Kiev off the table in negotiations even though Moscow had made clear that would prevent an invasion.

The policy has not changed. “Last year in Washington, NATO allies agreed… there is an irreversible path of Ukraine to enter NATO. And that is still true today, and it will still be true on Thursday after this summit,” Rutte told reporters.

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US auditors arrive in Kyiv to check for corruption

American auditors have just landed in Kyiv, and their plan is simple – to dig out what is really happening with the billions of dollars that the US has already sent to Ukraine.

The West has poured an estimated $133bn into Ukraine since the start of the war over three years ago, but for much of that time there has been little accountability or reporting on where the money went and to whom.

Ukraine has been plagued by corruption since independence and as bne IntelliNews has reported, corruption is not a problem of the system; it is the system. Ukraine has long been dubbed one of the most corrupt countries in the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Part of the motivations behind the 2014 Euromaidan evolution was that former president Viktor Yanukovych is believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the state.

Now that the US ardour for supporting Ukraine is beginning to cool, the Trump administration intends to hold the Zelenskiy administration to closer account. And the momentum for more transparency has been building. When the US ran out of money for Ukraine at the start of 2023, part of the $60bn emergency bailout package included several tens of millions of dollars in a special budget dedicated to accounting and audits.

Scandals have plagued the Defence Ministry, including one last year when the government was caught procuring eggs for four times the market value and heavily overpaying for dud winter jackets. Zelenskiy sacked Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov in September 2023 in a military shake-up to crack down on corruption, but it remains rife. Reznikov himself was not accused of any wrong-doing.

The arrival of the US audit team has been confirmed by US State Department of contracts worth $814,806. That amount will cover the hotel accommodation of the employees who will stay in the capital of Ukraine for a month in the luxurious Hilton Kyiv hotel.

The audit comes as Trump has been leaning on the Ukrainian presidential administration to cut a ceasefire deal with Russia, but Zelenskiy has proved reluctant to do so. Some experts have speculated that audit comes as part of the pressure Trump hopes will push Zelenskiy into cutting a “quick and dirty deal” with President Vladimir Putin.

A group of 80 to 100 people is in charge of a comprehensive audit, according to reports, checking how funds for military and humanitarian support, logistics, security and security were spent.

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The F-35 Ages Worse Than the Planes It’s Meant To Replace

As the U.S. grapples with ballooning federal budgets and increasingly necessary spending cuts, the military remains ripe for austerity. In February, the Pentagon suggested cutting $50 billion per year from its budget over the next five years—a good start but nowhere near enough, considering the Trump administration is floating a defense budget of nearly $1 trillion.

A recent government report detailed even further evidence that the F-35 stealth fighter jet is a program that deserves to be scrapped.

“The F-35 Lightning II aircraft (F-35) is the Department of Defense’s (DOD) most ambitious and costly weapon system and its most advanced fighter aircraft,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in April 2024. “However, DOD’s projected costs for sustaining the F-35 continue to increase while planned use of the aircraft declines.” (There are three primary variants: the F-35A, the F-35B, and the F-35C, which are primarily for use by the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy, respectively.)

“DOD plans to use the F-35 aircraft through 2088 and plans to spend over $2 trillion on acquisition and sustainment,” the GAO noted, even though the department also “plans to fly the F-35 less than originally estimated, partly because of reliability issues with the aircraft.”

Nonetheless, the report expressed some optimism over the F-35’s future: “As of August 2023, the program was meeting or close to meeting 17 of its 24 reliability and maintainability goals, which are aimed at ensuring that the aircraft will be available for operations as opposed to out-of-service for maintenance,” it noted. At the same time, even though the DOD planned to fly the crafts less than anticipated, that reduction in flight hours meant the various military branches “are now projecting they will meet most of their affordability targets (i.e., the amount of money they project they can afford to spend per aircraft per year for operating the aircraft).”

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tossed even more cold water on the F-35’s viability. It turns out that not only do the F-35s not age particularly well, they don’t particularly offer a competitive advantage over the planes they’re supposed to replace.

“As F-35s have aged, their availability and use have decreased,” the CBO detailed in a report—”availability” being a measure of “the number of hours that aircraft are both mission capable and in the possession of operational squadrons,” as a percentage of that fleet’s total flight time.

“The availability and use of F-35s have been lower, in some cases much lower, than those of other fighter aircraft of the same age,” the CBO continued. “For example, the average availability rate of a 7-year-old F-35A has been about the same as that of a 36-year-old F-16C/D and a 17-year-old F-22.” The fleet’s target availability rate is 65 percent, but all three F-35 variants range between 50 and 60 percent.

The F-35 means to replace previous-generation aircraft like the F-16, but instead, the obsolete models are running circles around their intended replacement. (The F-22, like the F-35, is a stealth aircraft, which the F-16 is not; the report notes that stealth crafts “have different maintenance requirements” and lower availability than non-stealth fighters of similar ages.)

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Budget Office Estimates Biden Border Bedlam Cost States Billions

Arecent report attempted to quantify the real costs the Biden administration’s deregulated border had on state and local governments.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the surge in illegal migration cost governments billions of dollars in 2023, which illustrates the real-world impact of the previous administration’s actions — or inactions. The report also exhorted Congress to provide adequate resources for border security, so that the chaos of the past four years can never happen again.

Quantifying Surge Populations

The CBO report looked at the impact of the Biden-era migration surge among “other foreign nationals.” This immigration category includes those who entered the United States unlawfully; so-called “overstays,” who entered the country lawfully but did not exit when their visa expired; parolees permitted entrance despite not falling into another immigration category; and those awaiting immigration proceedings in court. The budget office estimated that, by the end of 2023, the “other foreign national” population had increased by a net of 4.3 million since the Biden administration took office in 2021.

CBO believes that, of those 4.3 million, “about a quarter,” or roughly 1.1 million, “were qualified aliens upon arrival.” That term has particular relevance because the 1996 welfare reform law restricted eligibility for federal programs to “qualified aliens” who have served a five-year waiting period. However, CBO also notes that “about half,” or over 500,000, “of those qualified aliens” arriving during the surge “were exempt from the five-year waiting period,” and therefore could immediately receive taxpayer-funded benefits.

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Senate parliamentarian strikes SNAP reform from Republican megabill

The Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected provisions in the Republicans’ megabill related to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reform.

The House version of the bill contained language to bar illegal immigrants from receiving SNAP benefits, which MacDonough ruled against. 

The provision that would require states to fund a certain percentage of SNAP benefits based on those states’ error rates in delivering aid was also eliminated.

The Senate is currently revising the version of the bill that the House previously passed.

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Los Angeles Riots Cost Taxpayers Over $30 MILLION, Including $1.4 Million in Clean-Up/Public Property Damage – Leftist LA City Controller Blames ICE: “Raids Have Now Cost LA Taxpayers $32 Million”

New data from the City of Los Angeles’ Controller shows that anti-ICE riots across the city had cost taxpayers over $32 million between June 1 and June 17. 

LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia tried to spin numbers on X, attributing the massive cost to the city to “ICE raids.”

“$29.5 million or 92% relates to LAPD’s response to protests against ICE, including citywide tactical alert costs,” he said, failing to mention the violence by so-called protesters that spurred police responses.

Police have arrested at least 561 people since the riots started earlier this month.

He also mentioned the “$1.4 million relates to clean-up / public property damage,” but somehow, it’s ICE’s fault that leftist rioters and illegal aliens caused over one million dollars in damage.

The total, roughly $32 million, “does not include potential lawsuits,” Mejia said.

ICE agents have faced a 500% increase due to Democrats like Mejia lying to the American people and defaming law enforcement like this.

It can be recalled that Governor Gavin Newsom sued President Trump for exercising his authority as President to federalize the National Guard and prevent the riots from becoming even more violent and costing more money. Trump had sent in 4,000 National Guard Troops to help quell the riots.

After winning a leftist federal judge in San Francisco ordered President Trump to return control of the National Guard to California, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court unanimously sided with Trump, allowing him to keep the California National Guard deployed.

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WHAT? Out-Of-Touch Zelensky Asks ALL Allies To Devote 0.25% of Their GDP to Finance Ukrainian War Effort

After more than 3 years having his regime be the focus of the Globalist establishment, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky now sees the world’s attention turning to the dangerous escalation in the Middle East – and is afraid funds for his war effort will become even harder to come by than they’ve already become.

So, Zelensky came up with a ‘brilliant’ idea: he is calling on Ukraine’s Western partners to allocate 0.25% of their GDP to help Kiev ramp up weapons production.

He also said Ukraine will start exporting weapon production technologies.

Reuters reported:

“In remarks released for publication by his office on Saturday, Zelensky said Ukraine was in talks with Denmark, Norway, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Lithuania to launch joint weapon production.

‘Ukraine is part of Europe’s security and we want 0.25% of the GDP of a particular partner country to be allocated for our defense industry and domestic production,” Zelensky said’.”

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Enemies Within: Information Ties Top USAID Official to Dirty Eric Ciaramella and the First Bogus Attempt to Impeach President Trump

Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani joined Jesse Watters in 2020 where he broke news about the January 2016 meeting in the Obama White House organized by the anti-Trump CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

This was previously reported at The Gateway Pundit in November 2019.

Records show Obama and his Deep State actors in the White House pressured Ukraine to provide dirt on candidate Trump and his team in early 2016.

Highly respected investigative reporter John Solomon called the 11 AM January 19, 2016 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building “one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration’s intervention.”

Suspected Schiff whistleblower Eric Ciaramella chaired that meeting, which was also attended by his frequent collaborator Liz Zentos.

The meeting was ostensibly arranged by the Obama administration for anti-corruption training and coordination, but it didn’t take long for the Ukrainian participants, during the meetings and afterward, “to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump.”

The Obama Department of Justice officials were interested in reopening a closed 2014 FBI investigation that “focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.”

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, then Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor and a meeting attendee, said he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election, when the “black ledger,” key evidence against Manafort, who had joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016 and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016, was suddenly released to the media in May 2016.

According to Ukrainian official Andriy Telizhenko, who has communicated with The Gateway Pundit numerous times, then a political officer at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC and a meeting attendee, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over (it is believed that the FBI attended the January 19, 2016 meeting).

Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, was under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant.

All of the above suggests that the Obama Administration used U.S. government personnel in an attempt to enlist a foreign nation to provide negative information about political opponents and to quash investigation of political allies.

And when the Ukrainians did not agree, it appears that the U.S. government pressured the Ukrainian government to replace obstinate Ukrainian officials with more compliant ones.

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DARPA Wants to Crack the Code of Human Behavior—And They’re Betting on “MAGICS” for Bold New Ideas

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a new program to solicit paradigm-shifting research ideas to revolutionize how scientists predict collective human behavior. 

The program, known as Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS), aims to address the problem that despite the rise of big data and machine learning, we’re still surprisingly bad at forecasting how large, dynamic human systems respond to change.

“For the past decade or more, there has been an assumption and hope that the explosion of digital data streams (e.g., social media, purchase patterns, traffic dynamics, etc.) combined with powerful machine learning tools would usher in a new era of research in complex, dynamic, evolving systems,” a DARPA solicitation notice writes. “[However] Despite many attempts, results have failed to meet expectations.” 

The MAGICS opportunity, announced through DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, invites individual researchers to propose innovative concepts that could form the foundation for a new science of social prediction. 

As DARPA notes, today’s best statistical tools often falter when applied to real-world, evolving systems—whether it’s understanding how economies adapt to disruption, how populations shift under demographic pressure, or how societies react to technological upheaval.

At the heart of the MAGICS effort is answering the question: Can we develop new ways to model collective human behavior that outperform current statistical approaches and capture the dynamics of complex, evolving systems? 

The Pentagon brain trust is looking for fresh frameworks beyond what’s possible with today’s machine learning models, namely systems that can handle the messy, recursive, and often unpredictable nature of human systems.

The stakes are high for national security. From forecasting the spread of misinformation to anticipating societal responses to crises, the ability to model human behavior accurately could offer profound advantages. 

Yet DARPA acknowledges that researchers must overcome foundational challenges that large datasets and artificial intelligence have failed to address before these benefits can be realized.

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Sunnova International just another EMBEZZLEMENT FRONT COMPANY as part of the Biden Regime’s FAKE GREEN movement – now BANKRUPT

Obama was the king of creating fake green companies, funding them with millions and billions of dollars, then watching them all magically go bankrupt as the money completely disappeared (went into the offshore accounts of all the executives involved). Biden was even worse, participating in these scams and schemes on a much higher financial level, running up trillions in unaccounted funds, while claiming to be supporting “climate science” and “climate change” initiatives. All big lies for embezzlement. Sunnova is just another pawn in the big “climate” game of racketeering and fraud.

  • Obama’s Green Energy Scams: The Obama administration funneled billions in taxpayer dollars into fake “green” companies like Solyndra, Abound Solar, and Fisker Automotive—only for them to collapse as executives pocketed the money. These ventures were never meant to succeed, just to launder funds to political allies.
  • Biden’s Bigger Fraud Scheme: The Biden Regime has taken green energy corruption to new heights, pushing trillions in unaccountable “climate” spending while companies like Sunnova and SunPower declare bankruptcy after executives siphon off subsidies. The entire “renewable energy” push is a front for embezzlement and control.
  • Sunnova’s Collapse Exposes the Scam: Sunnova Energy, propped up by federal loans and tax breaks, just filed for bankruptcy with up to $50 billion in liabilities—proving yet another “green” company was a taxpayer-funded Ponzi scheme. CEO John Berger and other insiders got rich while employees and customers were left holding the bag.
  • The Green Energy Grift Continues: From solar to EVs, the government’s “climate” agenda is a racket designed to bankrupt the middle class while elites profit. With more collapses coming, sites like ClimateAlarmism.news expose how these companies were never about the environment—just theft.

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