Tag: taxes

Connect the Dots: Trump, Public Health, and the Third World

After several years of enduring all of the ‘woke’ progressive conspiracy theories regarding President Trump, I had come to believe that their favorite recreational activity was to go to a museum that had a Jackson Pollock painting hanging on the wall, in order to stare at it for hours trying to connect the dots. It got to the point that I began to think that the ‘drip method’ was actually a term that described the people viewing the paintings, rather than a description of Pollock’s painting style. 

At the risk of being guilty of the thing I’m denigrating (a favorite tactic of the left), I will attempt to connect some dots. Considering that I’ve been called far worse than a drip over the course of my lifetime, I consider this to be a fairly low-risk exercise.

A number of reporters, including some who write for Brownstone Journal have legitimately expressed concern that third-world countries would bear the brunt of the withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). Areas of concern include public health programs to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. I share these concerns, but I will now connect a few dots to see whether these concerns are overblown.

First, I’ll provide some context. The immediate justification for US withdrawal from the WHO relates to activities surrounding their corrupt and incompetent handling of the Covid pandemic response. However, it’s been fairly obvious that ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, he has viewed all multilateral agreements as a ruse to rip off the US for billions upon billions upon trillions of dollars. Other examples include the Paris Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NATO, and former trade agreements with Mexico and Canada.

In some cases, the pacts were too costly to continue US participation, while others could be salvaged if negotiated by people who were looking out for America’s best interests. By any reasonable measure, Trump handled these matters fairly well during his first term and has earned the right to continue this process during his second term.

Getting back to WHO and the Covid response, one of the things that happened in Africa was that funds were diverted from HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs in order to give Covid jabs (I refuse to refer to these shots as a vaccine) to a population with a median age of 26. This was a double whammy in that funds were diverted from programs that had been helpful in order to provide a treatment that harmed and killed more people than would have occurred if nothing had been done. The WHO was a major player in implementing these policies. The results for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and Covid have been uniformly disastrous, and this doesn’t include the collateral damage that occurred, which may turn out to be even worse than the direct harms.

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DOGE Recovers Another $1.9 Billion in Taxpayer Funds ‘MISPLACED’ by Biden Regime

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, announced on Friday the recovery of $1.9 billion in taxpayer funds that were misplaced during the Biden regime.

These funds, originally allocated to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for financial services administration, were identified as unnecessary due to procedural inefficiencies.

“$1.9 billion of HUD money was just recovered after being misplaced during the Biden administration due to a broken process,” the DOGE official page announced.

“These funds were earmarked for the administration of financial services, but were no longer needed. Secretary Scott Turner and DOGE worked together to fix the issue and de-obligated the funds which are now available for other use by the Treasury.”

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Thanks To Massive Deficits, U.S. Will Pay $13.8 Trillion In Interest Over The Next Decade

The Friday before Inauguration Day, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) illustrated the fiscal challenge facing President Trump and the new Republican Congress. In a short version of its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, CBO quantified the whopping $21.8 trillion in budget deficits the federal government faces in the coming decade.

While the updated numbers only marginally constitute news — CBO has warned for years about our dire financial future, only for lawmakers to keep spending — one particular nugget illustrates the problem. The budget gnomes significantly increased their spending projections for Medicaid, as but one example of how entitlement programs continue to cannibalize the federal budget.

Double-Digit Growth in Medicaid

Appendix A, which contains all the changes — legislative, economic, and technical — to the fiscal baseline since CBO’s last update last June, contains a sizable change in the last category. Among the technical “tweaks,” the budget office increased projected federal spending on Medicaid over the coming decade by $817 billion, or 12 percent. Most of this projected increase has to do in one way or another with administrative actions by the Biden administration.

Chief among the factors driving the spending explosion were continued increases in Medicaid enrollment, even after states were finally permitted to remove beneficiaries from the rolls following the pandemic (something they could not do during the Covid “emergency”). CBO increased projected enrollment for calendar year 2025 from 79 million last June to 84 million. It also noted that the enrollees remaining on Medicaid have generally worse health than those who were removed from the rolls, resulting in “significantly higher than expected” costs per enrollee last year — which CBO believes will force state Medicaid programs to raise their rates to the managed care plans that provide coverage.

Other factors also drove the growth in the Medicaid spending estimates, including projected increases in enrollment among individuals with disabilities — a result of Biden’s rules expanding eligibility for the Supplemental Security Income program — and rising drug costs, attributable in part to Biden’s recent proposal to require Medicaid programs to cover GLP-1 drugs to control obesity. CBO assumed a “modest increase in expected coverage expansions” under Obamacare, meaning more red states will decide to cover able-bodied adults (which they should not do).

Finally, the budget office assumed that another Biden regulation will raise Medicaid spending. Specifically, a rule on state-directed payments will encourage states to raise reimbursement levels to draw additional federal matching funds. In a recent paper for the Paragon Health Institute, I suggested that Congress or the new administration should repeal many of these requirements, which provide examples of the executive branch spending money without congressional approval.

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Unhinged Democrat Lawmaker Resorts to Scare Tactics to Smear DOGE’s Efforts to Ferrot Out Government Waste at the EPA 

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continue to discover extraordinary waste by the U.S. government, and the shutting off of the taxpayer-funded tap is making Democrats panic.

One congresswoman even resorted to baseless scare tactics to try to smear DOGE’s work and distract Americans from how their funds have been misused.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) bizarrely posited that because of DOGE, Americans would have to start boiling their water to protect themselves.

Stansbury told a gaggle of reporters, “‘I don’t think there is anyone in America that wants to wake up tomorrow and find out that they have to boil their water because the EPA’s workforce has been escorted out of the building.”

“So DOGE is already here. These guys have already hacked the system.”

Stansbury, however, failed to address the impact of waste by the EPA on American’s safety.

The Gateway Pundit reported that an EPA advisor was caught by an undercover video from Project Veritas admitting that the agency rushed to allocate billions of taxpayer dollars to climate change initiatives just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Brent Efron, a special advisor at the EPA and instrumental in implementing Biden’s climate agenda, spoke to a Project Veritas operative about the rush to disburse funds two months before Trump’s inauguration.

“Now it’s how to get the money out as fast as possible before they [Trump Administration] come in … It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic or throwing gold bar off the top edge.,” Efron said.

EPA head Lee Zeldin made it clear that the “gold bars” are American tax dollars, and he will focus on ending the excessive waste at the agency.

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Slovak PM Robert Fico Writes to Musk – Was Fico’s Would-Be Assassin Radicalized by USAID Media?

Populist pro-Trump Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot outside a meeting in May 2024. He barely survived the attempted assassination.

The neoliberal activist and aspiring poet who shot Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was moved by disagreement over funding for the Ukraine War.

Did USAID money lead to the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico? The patriotic, MAGA-style leader of the Slavic country has asked Elon Musk for information on the funding of Slovak “non-“governmental organizations and media by the US International Development Authority (USAID).

In a letter to the head of the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), Robert Fico asked for details of  USAID grants that may have been used for radical political propaganda in his country. Fico has previously charged that Soros media may have contributed to the radicalization and calls for violence that led to his near-assassination 2024.(The name Fico is pronounced “feet so”.)

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Why USAID No Longer Makes Sense

The Trump administration’s decision to decimate USAID, the foreign assistance agency, has sparked a fierce debate in Washington. While Republicans on the hill and in the media have largely directed their ire against the left-wing ideological character of USAID programs, most of their Democratic counterparts have defended the agency on humanitarian grounds. 

The White House, however, has offered the correct, most urgent view: USAID largely fails to advance American national interests, and Washington can no longer afford to spend taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t benefit Americans.

Reasonable people may disagree about the merits of particular USAID programs, but it’s clear that a large portion of funding goes to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries—presented as benign “governance” projects. In fiscal year 2023, $16.8 billion of the total $43.4 billion of USAID obligations were in this category, which has included such projects as bankrolling “independent media” in Ukraine and pouring tens of millions into elections in Georgia. Perhaps these efforts did some good, but the catastrophe that American meddling has helped produce in Ukraine, and the victory of a pro-Russian party in Georgia’s recent parliamentary elections, suggest that USAID can no longer reliably advance U.S. interests in Moscow’s sphere of influence.  

Of course, USAID has also funded genuine humanitarian projects that have saved lives, such as the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But even commendable humanitarian projects may not be worth the burden they place on the American taxpayer, meaning partisan debate about them is legitimate and indeed necessary. So long as people in North Carolina and Los Angeles are suffering from recent environmental tragedies, sending their hard-earned money to foreign lands does not sit right with many Americans.

Lost in the domestic hysteria of the moment is a more frank consideration of the sustainability of U.S. primacy in a changing global landscape. Washington doesn’t use USAID just to save lives, but also to expand and sustain American power globally. But if the “unipolar moment” is over and the world is now bipolar or multipolar, American cultural influence—sometimes called “soft power”—deserves reconsideration no less than the hard stuff.

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BOOM: Biden’s USAID Paid Terrorists, and Here’s HOW They Did It

Readers were shocked when we reported that USAID had paid Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. Now we’ve found out how they moved the money.

In the story “USAID Pays the Terrorists Who Kill Us,” I wrote:

The U.S. State Department and USAID pay millions of dollars per week to the Taliban, the bin Laden family leading the group, and the Haqqani terror network. Remember those guys? Didn’t we wage a 20-year-long war to get rid of them …???

…We left Afghanistan, left behind billions of dollars in equipment, the strategically important Bagram Air Base, and all the biometric data of our Afghani supporters who put their lives on the line to help our efforts to get the Taliban and the terrorists they were hiding from us. So, of course, when Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan had us bug out in disgrace, they left the Taliban a ready-made kill list of our allies.

Former CIA targeter and DoD employee Sarah Adams has reported that the bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Taliban families have intermarried. Paying the Taliban is paying Al-Qaeda. That wasn’t the plan when U.S. troops went into Afghanistan 20 years ago to get Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terror cell, which brought down the World Trade Center Towers. 

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Biden Awarded $50 Million to Obscure Nonprofit on Tribal Land in Last-Minute Heist – But Trump Admin Launched Probe and Stopped Disbursement!

Biden went on a spending spree and handed out $1 billion in grants to various organization in the last couple of weeks of his presidency.

As part of his spending spree in the final days of his administration, Joe Biden awarded $50 million to an obscure 501(c)(3) nonprofit on tribal land with a charity leader who has a shady history of mismanaging money, according to The Washington Examiner.

However, the Trump Administration launched an investigation and stopped the disbursements.

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US Treasury pays $100bn annually to unknown recipients – Musk

Elon Musk, as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has said that the US Treasury pays over $100 billion annually to individuals without Social Security Numbers (SSNs) or temporary ID numbers. Musk has urged immediate reforms to address potential fraud and inefficiencies in payment systems. 

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X has been appointed a “special government employee” to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under US President Donald Trump’s administration and is currently among Trump’s key advisers. Despite its name, the agency is not a permanent federal executive department, but a temporary body dedicated to reducing government spending. The tech billionaire has set a goal of reducing the federal deficit by at least $1 trillion, which would require daily cuts averaging $4 billion.

“Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious,” Musk posted on X.

According to Treasury officials, approximately half of these payments, equating to $50 billion per year, or $1 billion per week, could be fraudulent, Musk stated. He described it as “utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.”

Musk said that in response, DOGE and the Treasury Department have agreed to implement measures to enhance transparency and accountability in government payments. These include requiring all outgoing payments to have a payment categorization code. Musk pointed out that this field is frequently left blank, making audits challenging.

Additionally, all payments must include a rationale in the comment field, which is currently often omitted. 

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Department of Education Caught Funding Teacher Training Program Implying Babies Are Racist

The cultural and political rot at the Department of Education runs deep.

According to material shared by the conservative anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo, the department funded a teacher training program implying that babies develop racist traits from the age of just three. 

In online training session shared by Rufo, the instructor explained the issue of “Racial Awareness in the Early Years.”

Her training is supported by a PowerPoint that states:

AT 3 MONTHS — Infants who are shown pictures of faces can visually categorize them by race. They often show a preference for faces reflecting the race they see most often, which is typically their own race.

AT 9 MONTHS — Infants are unable to distinguish the facial features of people from racial groups other than their own unless they frequently see books and images featuring racially diverse people.

AT 2 YEARS —Children make strong associations between racial features and human behavior, and begin to use racial categories to understand behavior. Children are observing and internalizing power dynamics among children and adults.

AT 3 YEARS — Children of all races demonstrate social biases primarily by attributing positive traits to the dominant (white) race. Children can respond to positive messaging about their own and others racial identities.

AT 5 YEARS —-Children of all races demonstrate social biases primarily by attributing negative traits to non-dominant (non-white) races. Children are capable of recognizing and acting against racial injustice.

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