Tag: taxes

Gov. Hochul Pledges $50 Million in Legal Aid for Migrants — Stefanik Slams “Illegals First, New Yorkers Last” Policy

In a move drawing sharp criticism from New Yorkers and political rivals alike, Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that the State of New York will allocate $50 million in taxpayer funds to cover legal fees for migrants. The funding, Hochul says, will be used to provide immigration legal services amid the ongoing influx of illegal border crossers resettled in New York.

The announcement comes on the heels of a controversial incident involving New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who was briefly detained by ICE after interfering in an immigration enforcement operation. Lander demanded that ICE agents produce a warrant during an arrest and attempted to block their actions. He was later released—reportedly after pressure from state officials, including Hochul herself.

Critics say this pattern of prioritizing undocumented immigrants over law-abiding citizens is part of a growing crisis in New York. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a rising Republican star and strong contender for the governorship, blasted Hochul’s decision:

“$50 MILLION of New Yorkers’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being used for illegal migrants’ legal fees because of Kathy Hochul’s ‘illegals first, New Yorkers last’ failed leadership in NY. VOTE HER OUT.”

The $50 million payout comes at a time when residents are grappling with rising crime, economic uncertainty, and housing shortages. Many New Yorkers are frustrated with what they see as a lack of support for citizens, veterans, and struggling families—while migrants receive state-funded benefits, housing, and now, legal representation.

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Waste Of The Day: $140 For Taxi Ride Across Parking Lot

Topline: Massachusetts’ Emergency Assistance Family Shelter Program recently funded what might just be history’s most expensive car trip: $140 for a taxi ride of 223 feet. For those quick with a calculator, that’s a rate of $3,314 per mile.

It’s just one example of taxpayer funds spent on “improper and unlawful emergency procurements” while the agency was using $325 million in state funds last year to help address the state’s migrant crisis, according to a recent report from the state auditor.

Key facts: The emergency housing program was originally created to carry out Massachusetts’ “right to shelter” law from 1983, which guarantees housing for families with children or pregnant mothers. 

The program has been overwhelmed with immigrant families in the last few years. There were 3,883 families in shelters in January 2023 but 7,463 families by December 2024. 

The influx forced the state to sign emergency, no-bid contracts with companies that were charging up to $31 per meal to feed migrants on the taxpayers’ dime. One company, Spinelli Ravioli, billed the state 9.6% more than their contract allowed for 493 food deliveries, according to the new audit.

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As Congress struggles to cut spending, states expose Medicaid fraud on steroids

Medicaid for millionaires. Jaw-dropping swindles. Bureaucrats who aren’t checking patients’ eligibility.

As Congress struggles to find spending cuts in a bloated federal budget, a growing number of states are exposing the breathtaking extent of fraud, waste and abuse inside the government’s primary medical welfare program for the poor. 

Arizona became the latest state to unveil failures, as Senate Majority Leader Janae Shamp, House Majority Leader Michael Carbone, and other GOP lawmakers released a report showing that 130,000 of the 388,000 state residents who applied for Medicaid last year were not verified, suggesting up to $6 billion a year in Medicaid fraud.

“When we’re talking about cutting fraud, waste and abuse, that is exactly where we start,” Shamp told Just the News.

The report showed only 24% of Arizonans who applied for the assistance were vetted, and of those people who did get vetted properly, 34% weren’t supposed to be accepted, but they got the Medicaid benefits anyway.

When asked if she believes that Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs would consult the Republicans who led the effort to investigate, Shamp told Just The News, “I always want to believe in the good that, yes, we can work across party lines, and we can figure out how to do this collectively together, because it’s the citizens of Arizona, the taxpayers of Arizona, that are bearing the brunt of this fraud.”

“I have sent a letter to her office, and I’m asking for a bunch of questions to be answered and to find out what it is that the governor’s office is prepared to do with her agency that is directionless, leaderless…no transparency [and] totally unaccountable,” she continued. 

Arizona’s Medicaid problems follow similar issues found in states like Ohio where a Bloomberg Law investigation revealed that state health departments and Medicaid contractors often fail to detect or ignore blatant fraud, costing taxpayers billions annually. 

Congressional leaders are targeting an estimated $50 billion in yearly Medicaid waste, as states and contractors prioritize approving claims over scrutinizing questionable expenditures. 

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Declining Enrollment Leaves 150 Chicago School Buildings Half Empty, Spending Tens of Thousands for Each Student

There are currently as many as 150 Chicago school buildings that are half empty, due to lower enrollment in the city.

The city has been run by Democrats for decades and their closest allies are the teacher unions. There is absolutely no excuse for this disastrous mismanagement of the city’s schools.

The pandemic, and the shuttering of schools for months, certainly didn’t help.

FOX News reports:

Chicago schools face enrollment crisis with 150 buildings half-empty

A new report showed that declining enrollment in Chicago leaves about 150 of its schools half-empty.

The report, authored by ChalkBeat and ProPublica, found that 47 schools are operating “at less than one-third capacity, leading to high costs and limited course offerings.”

Chicago Public Schools had roughly 325,000 students enrolled this year after losing 70,000 students from a decade ago, according to the report.

“District officials project that three school years from now, there could be as few as 300,000 or, in a best-case scenario, as many as 334,000 students. Those estimates are based in part on the city’s sharply falling birth rates. Citywide, from 2011 to 2021, the number of births dropped by more than 43%,” the authors of the report wrote.

While the city faces enrollment struggles, the city spends about $18,700 per student. Some schools are “double or triple” that number the report stated. One school that enrolled 28 students costs $93,000 students…

Frederick Douglass Academy High School, which has 28 students this year, reportedly costs $93,000 per student.

This is one of the reasons why more and more Americans are beginning to favor school choice, including homeschooling.

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Trump Administration Plans to Finance $120 Million Rare Earths Mining Project in Greenland

The last time I wrote about Greenland, the nation had elected independent-minded leaders to the top spots in its political system.

This was then followed by Vice President Vance’s trip with his wife to the Pituffik Space Base on the Arctic island to support the trips.

During an address during the visit, Vance unleashed some hard-hitting statements directed at our ally Denmark. Essentially, Vance took a diplomatic sledgehammer to Denmark’s treatment of Greenland, suggesting that Copenhagen has treated the island more like a neglected outpost than a strategic priority.

Vance did not sugar-coat his opinion of the obliviousness Denmark has had to the threats Russia and China pose in this region.

Given the recent spate of international conflicts (India vs Pakistan, Israel pummeling Iran), Greenland seems to have dropped out of the news. However, it has not been completely forgotten about by President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration is considering financing a $120 million rare earths mining project in the Arctic island nation through a loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) to Critical Metals Corp, in what would be the administration’s first overseas investment in a mining venture. The project, known as the Tanbreez rare earths mine, is aimed at reducing U.S. reliance on China, which currently dominates the global rare earths market.

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Trump Closes Notorious EPA Lab that Conducted Illegal Human Experiments

President Trump is trying to save money by terminating leases on facilities used by federal agencies. One of these is EPA’s Human Studies Facility located at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Scientists are trying to save it,” reports Nature magazine. But being a waste of money is the least interesting aspect of the infamous lab.

In 2011, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I exposed the lab’s illegal experimentation on humans with air pollutants that EPA considers to be deadly. The lab’s central feature is an actual gas chamber into which EPA pumped exhaust from a diesel truck idling outside in a parking lot. You can see a photo of the twisted arrangement here.

After filtering out the carbon monoxide, EPA concentrated the exhaust’s fine particulate matter (soot, called “PM2.5” by EPA) to unrealistically high levels and pumped it into the chamber in which human guinea pigs inhaled it for periods of two hours. The purpose of the experiments was to observe the effects, if any, of inhaling PM2.5. For these experiments, EPA had recruited: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and elderly persons up to 80 years of age. EPA paid its human guinea pigs as much as a couple thousand dollars for their participation in the experiments.

All this may seem harmless enough. But was it? EPA had previously concluded that PM2.5 was, essentially, the most toxic substance known to man. Any inhalation could cause death within hours, the agency had determined.  It had also stated that the people most at risk from inhaling PM2.5 were: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and the elderly. Those at risk from PM2.5 were the very sort of people upon whom it had been experimenting.

But EPA had not disclosed any of this to, and so did not obtain legally required “informed consent” from its human guinea pigs. Instead of informing its human guinea pigs in writing that the agency believed the experiments could kill them, as was required by federal regulations, state law and the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, the agency’s consent forms only disclosed that some temporary coughing or wheezing may result from the experiments.

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Waste Of The Day: Unused COVID Quarantine Pods

Topline: Nashville spent $1.2 million to buy 108 quarantine housing pods in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the shelters were never used. Now the city plans to give 25 of them away to local nonprofits to be used as homeless shelters while covering the cost of renovating them.

Key facts: The combined municipality of Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County bought the pods using federal funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Part of the $1.2 million price tag was for certified nursing assistants and 24-hour security at the pods — which was obviously unnecessary because the pods were never used, Nashville Scene reported.

Nashville started installing 25 of the quarantine pods in 2021 but could not use them until the Tennessee Fire Marshall’s Office gave its approval. The fire marshal told Nashville Scene they required a letter signed by an engineer declaring the pods were safe, but Nashville did not send the letter for almost a year.

The remaining 86 pods have been in storage in an unknown location. The Nashville Scene could not even confirm whether the pods are still in Tennessee.

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The Real National Emergency: Endless Wars, Failing Infrastructure, and a Dying Republic

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower (April 16, 1953)

Seventy years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the cost of a military-industrial complex, America is still stealing from its own people to fund a global empire.

In 2025 alone, the U.S. has launched airstrikes in Yemen (Operation Rough Rider), bombed Houthi-controlled ports and radar installations (killing scores of civilians), deployed greater numbers of troops and multiple aircraft carriers to the Middle East, and edged closer to direct war with Iran in support of Israel’s escalating conflict.

Each of these “new” fronts has been sold to the public as national defense. In truth, they are the latest outposts in a decades-long campaign of empire maintenance—one that lines the pockets of defense contractors while schools crumble, bridges collapse, and veterans sleep on the streets at home.

This isn’t about national defense. This is empire maintenance.

It’s about preserving a military-industrial complex that profits from endless war, global policing, and foreign occupations—while the nation’s infrastructure rots and its people are neglected.

The United States has spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military-industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion.

And now, the price of empire is rising again.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

America’s military empire spans nearly 800 bases in 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

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EU hits Greece with record fine over farmers subsidy fraud

The European Union has imposed a 392.2 million-euro ($451.9 million) fine on Greece over a major scandal involving the mismanagement of agricultural subsidies by a government agency between 2016 and 2022.

The bloc’s Executive Commission decided to reduce the subsidies Greece will receive in the next years by 5%, it said on Friday, reflecting the view that there has been no proper supervision and operation of the subsidy management model for years.

Greece expected to receive about 1.9 billion euros in direct EU subsidies next year.

The fine comes months after European prosecutors charged dozens of Greek livestock farmers who received EU financial aid through the Greek government paying agency OPEKEPE with making false declarations of ownership or leasing of pastureland.

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The $13 Billion Secret: How Obama’s DACA and Biden’s Open Borders Fund Cartels and Human Trafficking

Bottom Line Up Front: Immigration policies that create pathways to legalization, including programs like DACA, inadvertently signal that illegal entry can lead to permanent status, fueling a massive criminal enterprise that generates billions for cartels while subjecting migrants to exploitation and trafficking.

The data reveals that the U.S.-Mexico border has been transformed into a cartel-controlled profit center. Cartels and “coyotes” are reportedly earning around $13 billion a year by smuggling migrants across the United States/Mexico border, an amount that has soared from the 2018 number of just $500 million, representing a 2,500% increase in just five years.

This explosive growth coincides with Biden-era open border policies, expanded asylum processes and legalization programs that signal potential pathways to permanent status. 80 percent of unlawful border-crossers hire smugglers, according to a 2023 report by the Department of Homeland Security, demonstrating how thoroughly criminal organizations have monetized illegal immigration.

Border Patrol sector chiefs confirm unprecedented criminal control over migration routes. ‘Now nobody crosses without paying the cartels,’ testified Chief Patrol Agent John Modlin. Those who try to bypass the criminal networks face severe consequences, including beatings.

The financial incentives driving this criminal enterprise are enormous. Smuggling fees range from $2,000 to $40,000, with cartels taking a substantial cut at every stage. For most migrants, this represents years of savings, an investment they’d only make if they believed there was a real chance of staying in the U.S. If they thought they would be turned away at the border, jailed, or deported upon capture, they wouldn’t take the risk.

Many migrants go into debt or even enter into forms of indentured servitude to the cartels to cover the cost of being trafficked. This often results in exploitation, forced prostitution, and other abuses. It also fuels the ranks of street-level criminals distributing drugs for cartel-connected gangs inside the United States.

The promise of potential legalization has fueled a massive human trafficking pipeline. Smuggling migrants has become one of the top revenue streams, alongside drugs and extortion, for criminal organizations like Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. Children are especially vulnerable in this system. One study estimates that nearly 60% of unaccompanied minors crossing the border are intercepted by cartels and forced into child pornography or drug trafficking.

The scale is staggering: during the Biden era (2021–2024), encounters of unaccompanied children at the U.S. border surged to 546,255. Trafficking children is not only profitable for the cartels, it is also incentivized by U.S. policies like DACA, which shield minors from deportation. These policies contribute to the liberal narrative that “families are being torn apart” when illegal immigrant parents are deported but choose to leave their U.S.-born “anchor babies” or DACA-protected children behind.

According to Pew Research (2024), roughly 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an illegal immigrant parent. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program protects many who entered the country illegally as minors, offering legal protections and work authorization. Even the program’s name, “Dreamers”, sends a message of opportunity, reinforcing the belief that entering the U.S. illegally with children can eventually lead to legal status. As of March 31, 2024, there were over half a million active DACA recipients in the country.

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