Tag: taxes

The Ukraine Money Pit — Estonia’s €70 Million Scandal

Estonia’s Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur has resigned after a €70 million ammunition deal intended to supply Ukraine blew up into a procurement scandal. Estonia agreed to purchase artillery shells from Datasel, an Italian-registered company owned by India’s Neco Defense Munitions, despite the companies having no established history of selling artillery shells. Millions were paid in advance, deliveries ran into problems, Estonia terminated the contracts, and the dispute has now gone to arbitration. This is what happens when government declares everything an emergency and suddenly the normal rules surrounding public money become inconvenient.

Pevkur says he did not negotiate the contracts and had not even read them. His explanation was rather revealing: “The defence minister does not conduct contract negotiations. The defence minister does not count socks and ammunition.” He said his responsibility was making the fundamental political decision to support Ukraine. He nevertheless resigned because the National Audit Office’s findings raised the question of political responsibility. At least somebody in government still remembers what that phrase means.

The scandal goes directly to the problem with Europe’s entire approach to Ukraine. The politicians declare that Ukraine must be supported at any cost, and once you use those words, cost ceases to matter. Due diligence becomes something bureaucrats complain takes too long. Money must be spent immediately because politicians tell everyone that Europe itself will fall if another artillery shell does not reach Ukraine yesterday.

Estonian officials have essentially admitted that extraordinary risks were accepted because of the urgency surrounding Ukraine. One official told reporters that they knew these procurements involved “greater risks than usual” but believed those risks were justified by what was at stake. There is the entire problem in one sentence. When government decides that the political objective is important enough to justify greater financial risk, taxpayers become the insurance policy when something goes wrong.

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This Red State Is Betting It Can Abolish Its Income Tax

The data center debate isn’t going so well for the builders, as Americans far and wide seriously oppose the construction of new data centers near where they live. One state, however, thinks it can incentivize residents. 

Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) has unveiled seven principles aligned with 2025 legislation to reduce and eventually eliminate state income tax. Under the plan, West Virginia would set aside 50% of its revenue from approved hyperscale data center projects towards the elimination of the state personal income tax – though let’s be clear: the poor, rural residents they’ll be building the DCs next to don’t pay income tax – so no benefit to them. Middle class voters (and up), however, will have all sorts of reasons to support the move. 

“Today, as the world stands on the cusp of a new digital and economic frontier, West Virginia is stepping forward once again to lead, not by repeating the mistakes of other states, but by implementing a proactive, 20-year development strategy on our terms,” Morrisey said in a statement obtained by Fox News. 

The second listed “principle” in Morrisey’s plan says all West Virginians should benefit from data center projects approved through Charleston’s “High Impact Data Center Designation (HIDC)” process and the revenue they generate. The process was established under a separate 2025 state law.

Morrisey’s plan includes “direct tax relief for citizens,” with none of the HIDC revenue entering the state general fund.

“By law, 50 percent of project revenue is dedicated directly to reducing and ultimately eliminating the State Personal Income Tax,” reads the plan. 

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The High Cost Of The Automated Flock-Camera Surveillance State

Flock cameras, and the online surveillance network behind them, offer many ways for law enforcement officials, and other government bureaucrats, to abuse their access to information about the personal lives of the taxpayers. 

For example, a Kentucky police officer has been caught using the surveillance network to stalk women. Another officer in Massachusetts has been accused of using Flock cameras to track her ex-girlfriend. A police officer in Indianapolis was using Flock camera data to track his own wife and friends, checking up on them “3,759 times over a 10-month period – an average of about 12 lookups per day.”

These are just some of the ones who have been caught or accused of abusing Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), the most well known of which operate under the “Flock” brand. It’s impossible to say how many other taxpayer-funded offenders are out there using the surveillance state to serve their particular personal grudges, perversions, and agendas. 

In other cases, Kansas police used the surveillance system to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen. The cases in which police use incorrect Flock data to abuse the innocent are myriad, and researchers are just now starting to document the known cases.  

There are very few controls on how police can use the surveillance databases that underlie the data collection. Records have shown that police can put out a “Flock alert” to track a private vehicle without the vehicle owner or operator being the target of any legitimate investigation. 

Not surprisingly, government agencies appear highly motivated to set up these cameras and use them prolifically. As of this week, there are more than 110,000 confirmed Flock cameras installed in the United States. The company itself states a plan for more than 120,000 cameras. That’s just the flock-branded cameras. At least 135,000 ALPR cameras, overall, have been independently documented in the US. All of these are funded by the taxpayers of course, and are installed with the enthusiastic support of government law enforcement agencies. This has all happened in just a few years. 

Naturally, much of it being funded by federal dollars. These spy camera programs receive funds from a variety of federal grant programs via the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. None of this is surprising. Since 9/11 “local” police has relied heavily on federal dollars for equipment and other types of spending. “Support your local police” rarely has any meaning anymore. Most police agencies are adjuncts of the federal government, and most willingly share their surveillance data with federal agencies. The potential for abuse is immense since the license-plate data is open to countless users who have access to the network nationwide. The Governor of Utah, for instance, recently noted that 10 Flock cameras in a single county of Utah were searched more than 5 million times “between February 2022 and July 2026, with the vast majority of those searches (nearly 97%) coming from police agencies outside of Utah, from 45 states.” 

Many people wrongly think that these are just ordinary surveillance cameras that can be accessed piecemeal by actual humans. In reality, these are AI-assisted automated systems designed to provide easily-accessed tracking data on the movements of any American who drives a car on America’s streets. 

Tax-funded uniformed bureaucrats—i.e., “police officers”—have been “all in” on spying on Americans using taxpayers’ own hard-earned cash. Knowing that many citizens might object, police agencies have attempted to keep it all as secret as possible. This is how tens of thousands of cameras just suddenly seemed to appear in many American communities without a public vote or announcement. In at least some cases, police have used obviously deceptive methods to get their cameras. All at taxpayer expense. In Tennessee, the Mayor of Knox County, Mises Institute supporter Glenn Jacobs, found that police carefully staggered payments to ALPR corporations so that each payment fell under totals that would trigger review from elected officials. The police don’t just lie to the public. They lie to their own bosses in the elected government 

It’s all just a reminder that if government bureaucrats are given new tools for surveilling the public, those bureaucrats will certainly abuse those tools. 

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Sulzbergers Keep Secret Archives at Taxpayer Expense While Denouncing Supreme Court for Doing the Same Thing

A highly hyped New York Times investigation—touted with the unusual label “Times Exclusive”—appeared this month under the headline “How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History.” It complained that “many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come.”

“Some scholars question why papers should be sealed long after a justice has retired,” says the Times article, by Jodi Kantor, with research and reporting contributed by Julie Tate, Ann Marimow, and Adam Liptak. It quoted a legal historian at the University of California, Davis, Mary Ziegler, accusing the justices of engaging in “reputation management,” and, as Ziegler was paraphrased in the article, “protecting themselves from examination and second-guessing.”

Not disclosed in the Times article: that the papers of former Times publishers Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., donated to the New York Public Library in 2007, are closed to public access until 2035 and 2057, respectively, according to the finding aid to the collection.

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Global Empire as Domestic Policy

While many mainstream commentators blanch at the characterization of the United States as an empire, the hard data show that it is today impossible to seriously dispute. The U.S. military operates between 750 and 800 bases around the world, located in around 80 foreign countries and territories. Because there is no fixed or standard definition of “base” for these purposes, there is no accepted number, and some estimates place the figure at closer to 900. The U.S. is also known to operate dozens of secret military bases and black sites, further complicating attempts to settle upon an exact and definitive number.

Just as the number of military bases is disputed, experts have continued longstanding disagreements about how best to tally up total military spending. As the Peter G. Peterson Foundation observed earlier this year, “The United States continues to lead the world in defense spending by a wide margin. In 2025, defense spending by the United States accounted for 33 percent of all military expenditures by countries around the world,” with its nearly trillion-dollar outlay that year exceeding the combined spending of the other six biggest military spenders. This number is down from 2025’s value of nine to six largely because several other countries dramatically increased their military spending (Germany, for example, upped its spending by 24 percent). Breaking Defense reports, “The Pentagon is betting big on a $1.15 trillion discretionary budget request with a further $350 billion coming from the reconciliation process — together adding up to a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget.” The Trump administration’s discretionary funding request of $1.15 trillion marks the first time in history that a discretionary defense request has exceeded $1 trillion on its own. In the previous budget, for FY 2026, the total number hit the $1 trillion mark with a combination of  $848 billion in discretionary spending and $113.3 billion in mandatory reconciliation spending.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes that many “obvious examples of programs many would consider ‘military spending’” under commonsense definitions are not a part of the Pentagon budget, including spending for veteran benefits, the Coast Guard, and even nuclear weapons. Looking at five different methodologies, a POGO report published in June points out that all five share at least one conclusion: “Military spending in the United States has long been radically underestimated.” (Not unrelated to this slippery accounting is that fact that the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in years, failing its eighth in a row at the end of last year.) This recent POGO report finds that “the true total military budget for the last fiscal year (FY 2025) was significantly higher than $1 trillion: It was likely between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion.” If we count interest payments associated with debts for military spending, then “the range is between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion.”

We rarely consider the domestic political implications of Washington’s globe-spanning empire, yet government spending on war and empire functions as the de facto national industrial policy of the United States, largely determining which cutting-edge technologies receive the most investment, which companies will enjoy massive state-guaranteed markets, and which physical objects will be the focus of the country’s industrial production capacity. Through the military empire, the state becomes both the architect of and primary consumer for a huge industrial sector. And while it has grabbed more headlines this year due to the parlous speculative bubble surrounding AI, the political consequences of the connection between the global military empire and the private sector tech industry remain woefully under-discussed in the mainstream discourse. The federal government is funneling billions to AI companies willing to work directly with the military, overpowering objections from employees and the investor market.

Just this week it was reported that “Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence-powered military platform, is now an official program of record for the Pentagon.” The executive and strategic leadership of major technology companies also increasingly connects and overlaps with the military and national security establishment, often through the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and liaisons dedicated to recruiting talent and procuring products from the tech sector. As we have already witnessed for decades, cutting-edge technologies developed for the war and empire inevitably end up being deployed domestically against Americans inside the country. Now more than 50 years ago, the Senator Frank Church Committee showed that the intelligence agencies used programs originally designed for foreign surveillance to monitor Americans here at home without warrants. We still have not seriously reckoned with this connection between the policies and technologies of the empire and the ways our own government sees us and governs us.

Since classical antiquity, astute observers have understood that this kind of worldwide military empire is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law, constitutional government, and even the thinnest definitions of democracy. The administration of such an empire demands secret and centralized forms of decision-making and thus necessarily precludes transparency, accountability, and popular sovereignty. Contemporary political language has managed to disguise what is patently a system of permanent war and empire in the terminology of a liberal and rules-based order of international law and free trade. We have consigned terms like imperialism and colonialism to the history books even as we continue these systems in different forms today. Even the liberal side of our mainstream discourse no longer seriously questions the political system of war and empire that actually governs the country. We will not understand the form of domestic politics we have in the U.S. today until we stop trying to separate it from the imperatives of empire.

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Trump Will Demand Repayment From the EU Over Biden’s Massive Military Aid to Ukraine

Rather belatedly, but it will be demanded.

In the context of a social media burn against ‘SCUM’ journalists who are suggesting that the missile and ammo stockpiles would be dangerously low, President Donald J. Trump suggested that the European Union should repay the US for the untold billions that creepy Joe Biden’s administration sent to Ukraine.

Le Monde reported (translated from the French):

“Donald Trump on Thursday criticized his predecessor, Joe Biden, for providing Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars in aid and ammunition for free, believing that the Europeans should have borne the cost and announcing his intention to ask them for the money.

‘Hundreds of billions of dollars have been given for free to Ukraine and NATO, money that Europe would have paid if it had just been asked, but we will claim this money, even if it’s a little late!’ the US president wrote on Truth Social.”

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Defense firms soar on ample military spending, testing manufacturing schemes

The year 2025 was another record setter for global defense companies, so much so that production bottlenecks in Western nations — not the usual industry lamentations about lacking government spending — began creeping up as the key problem many NATO countries are facing today.

Companies in the United States and Europe rode a wave of significant defense-spending increases on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, individual national budget increases, as well as the European Union’s increasing involvement in brokering and financing joint procurement, continued to increase the revenue of defense industry players large and small.

In the United States, the 2025 Reconciliation Act is set to pump most of the legislation’s total $156 billion into acquisition — on top of the regular defense budget of roughly $900 billion for that year.

“Now, it’ll take years for that enacted money to actually flow to the companies and to their financial statements,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser in the defense analysis program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But it will be a big boost for many companies.”

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Disgraced New England mayor drags heels repaying $240,000 taxpayer cash

A former Connecticut mayor has repeatedly blown past deadlines to repay the $240,000 in taxpayer money that she allegedly misused while in office. 

Erin Stewart, 39, suspended her gubernatorial campaign in May after an investigation exposed alleged misuse of a New Britain credit card to ‘benefit herself, members of her family and her political campaigns,’ the city said.

The city alleged that Stewart improperly boosted her income in the 12 years she ran city hall.

After missing the first two deadlines, New Britain said that Stewart owes a total of $241,558 in attorneys’ fees, taxpayer funds and tuition reimbursement.

‘I take the allegations that have been made against me very seriously,’ the former mayor said in a public statement. ‘And for that reason, I am suspending my gubernatorial campaign effective immediately so that I can focus on addressing those claims.’

Stewart and her charity, the Mayor’s Trophy Charity Fund, were investigated by the Crumbie Law Group who were hired by Mayor Bobby Sanchez, Stewart’s successor, the CT Mirror reported. 

The Republican allegedly used more than $30,000 of the city funds to pay for her master’s degree program in public administration at the University of New Haven, News 8 reported. 

Another $22,000 of city money was allegedly spent on deliveries to her home including clothes, makeup, an ice maker, diapers and baby formula, documents obtained by the outlet showed. 

The card also funded nearly $20,000 in membership fees as well as food and drink at a private social club, the Hartford Club, the Mirror reported. 

According to a letter addressed to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong on June 5, New Britain also accused Stewart of buying items with the city-issued card between 2016 and 2025 and selling them in a ‘moving-out tag sale.’

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Donald Trump Just Proved the Federal Government Spent $3 Trillion to Make Your Kids Dumber

America spent $3 trillion on a federal education bureaucracy.

But only three in ten kids can read or do math.

That’s why Linda McMahon is doing what Ronald Reagan couldn’t do with education – but Democrats are trying to stop her.

The Numbers Washington, DC Doesn’t Want You to See

The Department of Education was born in 1980 under Jimmy Carter.

Ronald Reagan called it a “bureaucratic boondoggle” from day one.

He pledged to kill it.

He couldn’t.

Then George H.W. Bush came along and declared he wanted to be “the Education President.”

Spending went up.

Achievement stayed flat.

Bill Clinton expanded it.

George W. Bush gave us No Child Left Behind and threw more billions at the problem.

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Muslim Convert Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Forced to Return $12,500 From Somali Fraudsters After Secret Tape Caught Him Promising to “Fight These People” and Unfreeze Their Welfare Cash

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to statewide office in Minnesota and a convert from Catholicism, has quietly returned at least $12,500 in campaign cash from Somali figures tied to the massive Feeding Our Future welfare fraud after a secret recording surfaced of him huddling with the same crowd to fend off state investigators.

According to the Center of the American Experiment, the five refunded contributions included donations from Gandi Yusuf Mohamed and Liban Alishire, both of whom became defendants in the Feeding Our Future case.

As The Gateway Pundit reported in December, the 54-minute recording, obtained by the Center of the American Experiment and later entered as a trial exhibit, captured Ellison schmoozing with Somali-American operators who would later be charged or convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme that looted more than $250 million in federal child-nutrition money meant for hungry kids.

The meeting participants complained that state regulators were acting in a “racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic manner” by asking questions about phantom meal sites.

“The only way we can protect what we have is by inserting ourselves into the political arena, putting our votes where it needs to be, but most importantly, putting our dollars in the right place,” Feeding Our Future consultant Abshir Omar said.

“But if you are secure in your donor base, and if you are secure in your power base, you can act the way you want to act,” Omar continued.

“Money is freedom,” Ellison replied with a laugh.

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