Tag: taxes

US-Funded “Anti-Misinformation” Groups Are Still Quietly Active

Despite the big and open push that came in with the new US administration to end the practice of the government funding third-party groups to effectively act as its censorship proxies – some of these arrangements continue to be operational.

Most appear to be working to strengthen previously established “preferred” narratives around health issues – as ever, with “combating misinformation” given as the declarative, overarching purpose behind the effort.

But critics say, that was/remains a smokescreen meant to manipulate public opinion.

The Federalist reports that the National Science Foundation (NSF) – one of the US government’s “independent agencies” designed to channel federal funds – had a number of programs under its “anti-misinformation” umbrella, the Convergence Accelerator.

Among the ones who continue to this day are Chime In, Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), and Expert Voices Together (EVT).

Chime In’s original name was Course Correct. It was set up at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – with $5 million coming from NSF in 2022 – to provide “anti-misinformation” resources for journalists.

True to the era, its original “mission” was to persuade (Covid) vaccine skeptics to take the jab; and then it went into advocating (“misinformation detecting”) in favor of persuading people there was no reason to be skeptical about genetically modified (GMO) foods, Covid narratives, and vaccines in general, as well as issues like sunscreen product and raw milk safety.

ARTT, meanwhile, came up with its own “AI” chatbot, that focused on political discourse, but according to the Federalist, once again, heavily tied to vaccine hesitancy.

From 2021, ARTT received close to $750,000 from the NSF, and a further $5 million, “to develop practical interventions to build trust and address vaccine hesitancy.”

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‘Entitled to reimbursement’: Trump DOJ says Jan. 6 defendants deserve to get restitution refunds after having cases ‘invalidated’

Certain Jan. 6 defendants who’ve had their cases “invalidated” and vacated by President Donald Trump‘s Justice Department deserve to get restitution refunds, the DOJ says — insisting Tuesday in a federal court filing that there’s “no longer any basis justifying the government’s retaining funds.”

Stacy Hager, an alleged rioter who was arrested in Texas, had been charged and convicted of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building, according to his original DOJ complaint.

Trump’s mass pardon of Jan. 6 rioters recognized Hager as one of more than 1,500 defendants who have been granted clemency since the president took office for a second time in January. The DOJ said Tuesday that what makes Hager’s situation unique — as well as others who had similar convictions like his “invalidated” — is that he was “not just pardoned” but instead told that the government was flat-out vacating his case while it was still on appeal.

“Here, Hager’s conviction was ‘invalidated’ when the D.C. Circuit vacated it, and thus ‘there is no longer any basis justifying the government’s retaining funds exacted only as a result of that conviction,’” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Dreher in response to a motion filed by Hager on Feb. 28 for reimbursement of fines, fees and restitution.

“This Court subsequently dismissed the case as moot,” Dreher said. “The government thus agrees that, so long as the Clerk of Court confirms that Hager in fact made the special assessment and restitution payments he seeks to have returned, Hager is entitled to reimbursement of those payments.”

According to Hager’s original Jan. 6 complaint, federal investigators found that he was boasting about his participation in the 2021 Capitol attack on his Facebook page, even posting pictures and videos of himself trespassing, the DOJ said.

“Hager also posted words to the effect of, ‘it’s war, don’t go quietly,’” his complaint alleged.

“The publicly available information on the subject account showed, among other things, a photograph of Hager and an unidentified male on the lawn in front of the U.S. Capitol on January 6,” the document added. “Hager was wearing a ‘Trump’ baseball cap, a gray outer jacket, a dark navy or black colored coverall and appeared to be waving a Texas state flag, with the other male waving a United States flag.”

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Taxpayers on the Hook for Sexual Abuse Committed by Government Employees

There is nothing more infuriating to me than adult predators who exploit and sexually abuse children.

As a former president of the board of a summer camp, it had to pay high premiums for liability insurance. Not for the mud bowl, not for rock climbing or rappelling, not for the pool. It was expensive because of the high number of claims for child molestation in that industry that had to be borne by all the other policyholders. And having the insurance is a must, as one huge claim could wipe out an entire organization.

Sexual predators not only impact the price of summer camp, they also do the same for school districts, juvenile halls, and social services providing foster care. Because some governments have not acquired adequate insurance for those services where employees interact with children, the costs are then borne by the taxpayers within the boundaries of the municipality.

In recent years, to address this abhorrent crime, you and I have become indirectly liable for the perpetrators. All that could be done was to hope that this reprobate behavior was not as prevalent as suspected. However, recent legislation upped the ante.

At a recent “California Insider” networking event, I introduced myself as someone who “predicts train wrecks in slow motion.” In 1994, I accurately predicted the Orange County Investment Pool implosion that led to the largest Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing at that time in United States history. But don’t think I get any joy out of being correct.

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Trainwreck Tim Walz Took Minnesota From A $19 Billion Surplus To A $6 Billion Deficit

Americans have seen a lot of Tim Walz lately as the failed vice-presidential candidate has held town halls nationally criticizing national Republicans. In a telling interview, he admitted to the New York Magazine this week, “90% of the time, I can be really good, but about 10% of the time, I can be a train wreck.”

And in an interview with Jake Tapper that was itself something of a train wreck, he rejected the conclusion that every American with a pulse now acknowledges: that Walz and other Democrats should have forced Joe Biden off the presidential ticket in light of his obvious cognitive decline.

Walz is indeed often a train wreck, and as Walz tramps around the country seeking to place himself as the foil to congressional Republicans and Donald Trump, to really understand what a disaster he is, we only need to look at the ongoing mess he has left behind in Minnesota.

A Fiscal Disaster of Walz’s Own Making

It is not hyperbole to say that Minnesota’s finances are in free fall. After boasting a record-setting $19 billion surplus in 2022 — larger than the full budgets of 20 U.S. states — the Minnesotans learned earlier this month that it faces a staggering $6 billion budget deficit. How did this happen? In 2023, Walz and his Democrat allies in the legislature embarked on the most reckless spending spree in Minnesota history, funneling billions into pet projects and giveaways for every left-wing constituency imaginable. The surplus wasn’t used to shore up Minnesota’s long-term financial stability or to return money to taxpayers. Instead, it was squandered in the most reckless fiscal step taken in Minnesota’s modern history.

Walz’s relationship with the truth has always been a distant one, and this case was no exception. Walz tried to falsely pin the financial crisis on the new Trump administration, despite state officials confirming that federal policy did not affect their budget projections. 

Among the drivers of the state’s coming deficit is a stagnant Minnesota economy. Although once among the strongest in the country, the state now routinely ranks in the bottom 10 states for GDP growth. Job creation has stagnated, and businesses are increasingly looking elsewhere to expand or move. Meanwhile, Walz has increased tax burdens on individuals and businesses and made Minnesota one of the least competitive states for economic growth.

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Why Comparing Trump’s Tariffs To The Smoot-Hawley Act Is Dishonest

Trump’s tariffs are not designed to encourage Americans to borrow money and maximize their consumption. Nor are they designed to encourage participation in speculative stock market or real estate bubbles. America’s free trade policies encouraged such excesses after the end of the Cold War, and we can’t stand a repeat of the folly. While his critics wrongly invoke the Smoot-Hawley tariff failures of 1930, Trump’s emerging tariff policies, particularly if combined with the appropriate monetary policy, will have much better results and Make America Great Again. 

As Trump’s tariffs are implemented, they will generate revenue for the federal government and encourage investment in atrophied as well as cutting-edge sectors of the American economy. In addition, they will increase the quantity and quality of jobs available for Americans as a whole, will persuade (and are already persuading) our trading partners to adopt fairer and less predatory trading regimes, will arrest a possible slide into recession, and will get our economy moving toward our long-term growth potential of 3 percent (or more) GDP growth per year.

President Trump says “tariff” is one of his favorite words, and historical evidence indicates tariffs work. They worked for the Chinese this century, they worked for the Japanese after World War II, and they worked for the U.S. and Germany in the late 19th century. Back then, American and German growth rates and economic vibrancy radically outstripped the growth rates and economic vibrancy of a free-trading Britain, which, after abandoning its early 19th-century tariffs, adopted the free trade nostrums of David Ricardo and slipped into decline. 

One of the few instances when tariffs failed was during the Smoot-Hawley tariff episode at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there are special circumstances surrounding the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that the free-traders hesitate to mention. When the United States raised the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the U.S. was the world’s greatest creditor, and by raising the tariffs, we prevented others from selling us things so they could make money and pay us back. When they didn’t pay us back, it collapsed the global financial system and helped usher in the Great Depression.

Obviously, today the circumstances are reversed. The United States is now the world’s largest debtor. If we can’t pay back our debts, the global financial system will collapse, which would be disastrous for the entire world. 

Trump’s tariff medicine will put us on a diet, help us produce more, diminish inflation, and position us to manage and decrease our debt. Thus, Trump’s tariffs are not only good for Americans, but they are also good for everybody else across the world. While the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were bad, Trump’s tariffs are good because the relative financial position of the U.S. vis-à-vis the rest of the world is now reversed. This fact must not be overlooked when assessing the wisdom of Trump’s tariffs versus the folly of Smoot-Hawley. 

Furthermore, as Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, taught us, at root, it wasn’t the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that sparked the Great Depression. It was a monstrous policy misstep on the part of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee. On the eve of the Great Depression, the Fed raised rates and pursued a contractionary monetary policy when it should have cut rates and pursued an expansionary monetary policy. 

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What A Waste: Federal Agencies Spent $4.6 Billion On Furniture For Empty Buildings

Perhaps you should sit down for this.

A new report found federal agencies spent $4.63 billion on furniture in the Covid years to furnish the mostly empty offices of overpriced federal government buildings. 

The new expenditure check by government tracker Open the Books (OTB) shows a host of absolutely insane purchases on the taxpayer’s dime — from $182,000 on plexiglass panels for IRS offices as part of a scientifically stupid Covid mitigation plan, to $237,000 for solar-powered picnic tables with charging stations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Remember, the CDC was the same government agency whose absurd social-distancing guidance urged Americans to stay at least six feet apart at all times. Gee, Yogi, it’s hard to social distance around a picnic table.

All of this wasteful spending was going on, as the OTB report notes, during the height of Covid and the prolonged remote-working policies for federal workers when occupancy rates at government buildings in Washington, D.C. were between approximately 2 percent and 26 percent capacity, according to a 2024 report to Congress by the Public Buildings Reform Board. The study noted the properties’ average occupancy rate in 2023 — when U.S. health agencies declared the end of Covid — was an obscene 12 percent. 

Federal workers are now having to do what has been the unthinkable under President Joe Biden: show up to work. One of Trump’s first orders of business was to tell bureaucrats to stop clocking in remotely and head back to  their “respective duty stations on a full-time basis.” 

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DOGE Official Confirms What We’ve Known All Along: Illegal Immigrants Are on Medicaid and Voting

Democrats love to portray themselves as the compassionate ones. They just want to help people, especially the poor and downtrodden. When you ask them about illegal immigration, they will tell you that these are just poor people looking for a better life for themselves and their families. That’s why they were perfectly okay with a wide-open southern border and letting millions of people into the country. It was all about compassion. However, as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to dig into the twisted story of America’s finances, we are finding out that the compassion ruse is just that, another Democrat party scheme.

Antonio Gracias is a DOGE official. He was recently interviewed on the “All In” podcast and told the real story on illegal immigration during the Biden administration that Democrats told us was absolutely not happening. Gracias said that potentially millions of illegal immigrants who came into the country during the Biden administration have valid Social Security numbers. What Gracias describes is nothing short of an organized racket to import as many people as possible. My colleague Nick Arama has also covered this extensively as well. Gracias laid out the whole thing, saying:

“So now you’re in the country with some quasi-legal status, you’re waiting for your court date, while you’re waiting for your court date — six years is the average by the way, it could be longer than that — you can fill out an asylum application, so without an interview, just an application … once that application is in, you can file another form, a 765 [form] to get work authorization, once you get that, you get a 766 which is the authorization and we automatically send you a Social Security card in the mail. No interview, that is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers. [Emphasis added]”

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The All-Devouring Machine: Pentagon Malfeasance and Insatiable Empire

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

The Pentagon’s previously annual list of its bases, the “Base Structure Report,” is notoriously incomplete and, at times, inaccurate. The Pentagon has also failed to release the Congressionally-mandated annual report since the Fiscal Year 2018 version, making an accurate list even more difficult than in prior years. Most observers assume the U.S. military does not know the true number of bases occupied by U.S. forces. It is telling – but not a good sign – that when a recent U.S. Army-funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my 2015 list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s list.

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Bill Gates Lobbying White House to Reverse USAID Cuts: Report

The cuts made to the so-called “foreign aid” agency USAID (which doesn’t actually have humanitarianism as its primary purpose) in the first days of the Trump 2.0 administration affected various global vaccine initiatives, many of which were pet projects of self-styled philanthropist Bill Gates.

Via Reuters (emphasis added):

Soon after his January 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting more than 80% of contracts and freezing billions of dollars for everything from emergency food assistance to malaria prevention.

The Trump administration, led by the State Department, is reviewing what kinds of foreign aid will remain under its “America First” policy, with a list of around 30 global health projects for consideration, one of the sources said…

[The list includes] rganizations such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, among others. They are on the shortlist for review by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump. The U.S. gives around $300 million annually to Gavi, and more than $1 billion to the Global Fund.

Several projects under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are also on the review shortlist, the source said.

In an attempt to ensure these projects remain federally funded, Gates has reportedly been quietly lobbying the administration behind the scenes to protect the billions that flow to his “non-profit” ventures.  

Putting aside the ultimate question of why Bill Gates isn’t under a federal prison, why do we allow creatures like this to slink around the White House trying to convince Trump, our duly elected president, and his lieutenants to reinstate his own personal scheme that for some reason require public subsidy even though Gates has a net worth of $108 billion?

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GOP Pennsylvania Senator Calls For Legalizing Marijuana And Using Tax Revenue To Create State ‘Legacy Fund’ For Long-Term Investments

A Republican Pennsylvania senator is calling for the creation of a state “legacy” fund, using tax revenue from adult-use marijuana sales and gaming to make long-term investments in the Commonwealth’s economy.

In an op-ed published in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday, Sen. Dan Laughlin (R) said “we must ensure that today’s tax revenue is not just spent in the moment but invested wisely to benefit future generations.” And he’s proposing the “Pennsylvania Legacy Fund” as a means of achieving that.

As the legislature once again debates various cannabis legalization proposals, the senator is making the case that, beyond using any resulting tax revenue to fund day-to-day projects and public services, the state should earmark a portion of those tax dollars for a fund to “provide a sustainable source of prosperity that lasts for generations.”

“Legalization isn’t a matter of if anymore—it’s when,” the senator, who has sponsored bipartisan reform proposals, said. “Ohio took the step in 2023, and every year we wait, we lose tax revenue to neighboring states. A well-regulated cannabis market in Pennsylvania could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually through sales taxes and licensing fees.”

“These funds could be directed into the Legacy Fund, ensuring that revenue from this emerging industry contributes to long-term investments in education, infrastructure, and other critical needs. Additionally, legalization would create jobs, support local businesses, and reduce the prevalence of the illegal and unregulated market. It is imperative that Pennsylvania takes action now to stay competitive and reap the benefits of this inevitable shift.”

Laughlin said his proposal would work by having cannabis and gaming tax revenue deposited into a “carefully managed investment fund,” which would include a “diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate.”

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