Tag: taxes

Democrats Hate that New Bill Requires People to Work for Benefits

President Trump’s new budget proposal, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” is already drawing fire from Democrats, who claim it robs the poor to enrich the wealthy. In reality, the bill delivers substantial tax relief for working families, without handing out money to the rich. It also introduces a simple requirement: some individuals receiving government benefits will need to work in order to qualify.

Critics claim that over 13 million people will lose Medicaid coverage under the new bill. But that figure is cumulative over ten years, not immediate. The bill doesn’t “take healthcare away from the poor”; it raises the bar for eligibility. Able-bodied adults under 65 will be required to complete a minimum number of hours each month in employment, job training, education, or, in some cases, community service to qualify for certain benefits. This requirement does not apply to the vulnerable, children, the elderly, pregnant women, the disabled, or full-time caregivers of young children are all exempt.

Importantly, those affected aren’t being denied care; they’re losing access to free, government-funded coverage under Medicaid due to updated qualifications. Many are expected to return to work and obtain insurance through employers or private plans. Others may requalify and reapply as their circumstances change.

Trump’s big sin here is requiring a portion of recipients to work for the benefits they receive. And Democrats hate any system where people are expected to earn their handouts.

Supporters of work requirements argue that they promote personal responsibility, encourage economic independence, and help control long-term government spending. They also reflect a widely held belief that public aid should be tied to effort, not handed out unconditionally.

Critics counter that such requirements create administrative hurdles that could cause eligible individuals to lose benefits. However, this is a non-issue. If someone qualifies, they will receive aid; if they don’t, they won’t. It’s that simple. If a bureaucratic glitch prevents them from getting their benefits, they can go down to the office, fill out the necessary forms, and request the aid be reinstated.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, after all, they’re not tied up at an office job all day.

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ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle pleads guilty to four charges

Australian Taxation Office (ATO) whistleblower Richard Boyle has pleaded guilty to four charges, including taping private conversations without consent.

The former debt collection officer became an internal whistleblower in October 2017, when he grew concerned about operations in the tax office.

When he felt his complaints were ignored, he went public on Four Corners about the culture at the ATO, including allegations his area was instructed to use heavy-handed tactics on taxpayers who owed the tax office money.

Boyle was originally facing 66 charges, but over time many were dropped.

In South Australia’s District Court on Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to disclosing protected information, making a record of protected information, using a listening device to record private conversations and recording another person’s tax file number.

Boyle had been trying to invoke whistleblower protections to avoid a criminal trial.

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DOGE Has Found $14 Billion in Medicaid Fraud, Waste, and Abuse, Dr. Mehmet Oz Says

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator, said his agency and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have identified at least $14 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse.

“There’s about $14 billion we’ve identified with DOGE, of folks who are duly enrolled wrongly in multiple states for Medicaid,” Oz told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

As an example, Oz said: “You live in New Jersey, but you move to Pennsylvania, and which state gets your Medicaid? Turns out both states collect money from the federal government.”

There are other areas, he said, that constitute abuse of the federal health care system. He said some people who are eligible to get a job or seek education are receiving Medicaid. Oz echoed statements made by GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.)., who in recent days said that able-bodied individuals and illegal immigrants have received Medicaid benefits.

Oz urged that Medicaid be cleaned up so that it can provide services to individuals such as people with disabilities and others, suggesting that Republicans keep a work requirement to be eligible for the program.

“I think there’s a moral hazard if we don’t, because you’ve got people who are not working who could work, who should work, and it’s better for them and better for the country if they do,” he said, referring to Republicans’ having added work requirements to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed in the House of Representatives on May 22.

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If California’s Marijuana Tax Hike Takes Effect Next Month, Consumers And Businesses Will Suffer—But There’s A Solution

A critical inflection point threatening the world’s largest legal cannabis market currently looms over California’s industry: A scheduled excise tax raise from the current rate of 15 percent to an unprecedented rate of 19 percent is set to take effect on July 1.

When California voters approved adult-use cannabis in 2016, they envisioned a thriving—and equitable—regulated industry. Unfortunately, the reality is that licensed operators are being strangled by regulations that push consumers straight to the illicit market. And despite the legal market generating approximately $7 billion in tax revenue since 2018, this hike would be a devastating blow.

The Reality of California’s Cannabis Market

On the ground in California, the illicit market continues to dominate cannabis sales. According to recent data from the Department of Cannabis Control (DCC), approximately 63 percent of the 3.8 million pounds of cannabis consumed by Californians in 2024 came from unlicensed production—unsurprising when considering the price differential consumers face.

When a consumer purchases cannabis from a licensed retailer, they’re not just paying for the product. They’re paying layers of taxes that can increase the final price by nearly 44 percent in some jurisdictions.

The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration’s (CDTFA) own example shows how a $35 purchase quickly balloons to over $50 due to combined taxes—and that’s before this tax increase. With the planned hike, that same purchase would approach $60.

Not only will consumers feel this increase in each purchase, many small businesses—particularly social equity operators and independent retailers already operating on razor-thin margins—simply won’t survive another tax increase of this magnitude.

Meanwhile, states like Michigan and Missouri are demonstrating steady sales growth thanks to lower taxes and fewer barriers to entry, and they are already exceeding the average per capita cannabis sales of California.

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GOP Senator Calls For Investigation Into $4.7 Trillion In ‘Untraceable’ Treasury Payments

In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in payments made by the US Treasury that are “almost impossible” to trace – as Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional in the system. This left billions in payments blank and unable to be traced.

“Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services earlier this month.

“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those “optional” days are over. “…this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE added. 

So while the TAS field is now mandatory, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) has called for an investigation into where the untraceable payments have been going.

“There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government,” Schmitt told Fox News. “I’m glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money actually went. I mean this is taxpayer money. People work hard.”

In March. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced a bill – the LEDGER Act – requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments.

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Green Agenda Has Cost British Households £220 Billion Since 2006: Study

British consumers have paid nearly £220 billion more on their energy prices over the past two decades as a result of Westminster’s radical green agenda schemes, a report from a leading energy consultancy firm has found.

The UK public has been “seduced by narratives that renewables are cheap,” however, according to a study conducted by Watt-Logic’s Kathryn Porter presented by Lord Offord, the Shadow Energy Minister in the House of Lords, has found that the opposite is true, with the green agenda not only siphoning off taxpayer cash subsidies but also driving up energy costs for consumers.

“That renewables are not cheap should be clear, based both on the evidence that after 35 years of subsidies, we are yet to see any benefits through lower bills,” the report found.

According to Porter’s calculations, if the British government had not embarked upon its so-called green energy transition programme, British households would have saved £218 billion since 2006.

The report found that the direct cost of net zero policies in 2023-24 accounted for £17 billion in additional costs on consumer energy bills, and it predicted that this would continue to rise to more than £20 billion in 2029-30.

Porter acknowledged that gas prices were impacted by the Ukraine War and broader Western conflict with Russia, however, she noted that this would not explain why energy prices have steadily risen for the two decades prior to the 2021-23 gas crisis in Europe.

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President Trump Threatens to Take $3 Billion of Grant Money from Harvard and Give It to Trade Schools Across the US

Another brilliant idea from President Trump.

On Memorial Day morning, President Donald Trump posted a warning on TRUTH Social that he may take $3 billion in grant money from Harvard and redistribute it to trade schools across the US.

Trump’s really backing the they/them crowd into a corner!

What a great move that would be! And he wouldn’t be funding the whiny young communists at Harvard.

President Trump then let the country know that Harvard is withholding foreign student lists from the administration so that the government can figure out how many of the radicalized lunatics, troublemakers, should not be let back into the country.

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US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet NED

The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups, meddling in their internal affairs.

Regime change on the US agenda

In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated. The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

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BBC’s ‘independent’ Russian partner begged UK govt for funds, files show

Leaked documents show the supposedly self-reliant anti-Kremlin outlet Mediazona asked the UK gov’t for £300,000. With foreign funding drying up, the “independent” news site now faces financial crisis.

Mediazona, the self-styled “independent” Russian outlet which partners with the BBC to track the deaths of Russian troops, requested hundreds of thousands of pounds directly from the British government, according to a tranche of leaked official documents.

Having mainly targeted Russians since its founding in 2014 by members of the Western-backed troupe of provocateurs known as Pussy Riot, Mediazona has largely remained off the radar of news consumers in the West. But that changed with the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine. Since the first day of the conflict, Mediazona has collaborated with the BBC Russian Service on a project tracking the deaths of Russian servicemen through open source methods. Mediazona describes “the work [as] meticulous and time-consuming,” requiring “relentless efforts of journalists.”

Who or what was footing the bill was left unmentioned in the description of the initiative, which was clearly designed to foment dissent and opposition to the proxy war among Russian citizens. Now, leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone indicate that between 2020 and 2023, Mediazona was in line for vast, secret grants for anti-Kremlin agitation from the British Foreign Office, under the official auspices of London’s opaque “Global Britain Fund.”

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New York Governor Kathy Hochul Complains Republican Spending Bill Could Cut Services to ‘Members of the Undocumented Community’

New York’s Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul recently gave an interview to Telemundo in which she complained about the new Republican spending bill, claiming that it could adversely effect ‘members of the undocumented community.’ That’s Democrat speak for illegal aliens.

In voicing this concern, Hochul is ignoring the fact that millions of Americans voted for this. People watched for years under Biden as New York put illegal aliens up in luxury hotels and fed them three meals a day, spending untold billions of dollars on these people as American citizens suffered under the inflation of the Biden economy.

Perhaps New York wouldn’t find itself in this position if the state hadn’t spent a fortune month after month, catering to people who were in the country illegally.

Breitbart News has details:

Hochul: We’ll Lose Money Under GOP Bill, ‘Don’t Want to Go’ to Cutting Services for Migrants

During an interview with Telemundo 47 on Friday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) argued that the state is going to lose money under the Republican tax and spending bill and people will lose health care and responded to if she’ll have to cut services to some immigrants by saying, “I don’t want to go there.” And “This is something we have to look at very seriously for how we can not leave these people without essential care.”…

Host Alejandro Mendoza then asked, “Could we see something like we have seen in California where the governor had to cut services to some immigrants?”

Hochul responded, “I don’t want to go there. This is money that’s now been lost by the federal government — they used to help us pay for this. This is something we have to look at very seriously for how we can not leave these people without essential care.

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