Tag: taxes

New GOP Bill Would Block Marijuana Industry Tax Deductions, Even After Federal Rescheduling

Two GOP senators have introduced a bill that would continue to block marijuana businesses from taking federal tax deductions under Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code 280E—even if it’s ultimately rescheduled.

Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) filed the “No Deductions for Marijuana Businesses Act” on Thursday to maintain the tax barrier for the industry, which has been eagerly following the ongoing administrative process of moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in large part because it would address their 280E challenges under current law.

While rescheduling isn’t a guarantee, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) hearings on the proposal have been delayed, the senators are aiming to preemptively take the wind out of the industry’s sails.

The bill would amend the IRS code to say that, in addition to all Schedule I and Schedule II drugs, businesses that work with marijuana specifically would be barred from taking tax deductions that are available to other industries.

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Tariffs and the Constitution

The taxing power in the federal government resides in the Congress. The Constitution states that Congress has the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts” of the federal government. Indeed, in order to emphasize the location of this power in the Congress, the Constitution also requires that all legislation “for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”

So, if only Congress can impose taxes, how can the president impose tariffs?

Here is the backstory.

However one characterizes a tariff, since it consists of the compulsory payment of money to the federal government, it is a form of taxation. It is – to use James Madison’s language – a duty or an impost. The federal government survived on duties and imposts – some of which were imposed on the states – from the time of its creation in 1789 until the War Between the States. Even under Abraham Lincoln, when unconstitutional income taxes were imposed, they were done by legislation, not executive fiat.

Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt and a congressional ban on the exportation of armaments to be implemented at the president’s discretion. This sounds fairly benign, yet it fomented the supercharged presidency that we have today. When Congress banned the sale of American arms to foreign countries, it did so by giving FDR the power to decide what to ban and upon which countries to impose the ban. Then it did the unthinkable: It made a violation of the president’s fiats a federal crime.

I call this unthinkable because under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause jurisprudence, at the federal level only Congress can make behavior criminal.

In defiance of FDR’s ban, Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, an American manufacturer of military hardware, sold armaments to the government of Bolivia, and the Department of Justice persuaded a federal grand jury to indict the corporation. Then a federal judge dismissed the indictment on the constitutional basis that only Congress can decide what behavior is criminal and it cannot give that power to the president.

The trial court merely enforced the well-known and universally accepted non-delegation doctrine. It stands for the principle that the three branches of government cannot delegate away any of their core powers. Among Congress’ core powers is writing laws and deciding what behavior is criminal. By giving away this power to the president, the trial court ruled, Congress violated the non-delegation principle, and thus FDR’s determination that arms sales to Bolivia was criminal was itself a nullity.

The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Had the court simply reversed the trial judge and sent the case back to him for trial, we might never have heard of this case or the policy it established.

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Could We Be Witnessing the End of Liberal Media?

For years, the liberal media has been a dominant force in shaping public opinion; whether parroting the Democratic Party’s talking points, attacking conservative figures, or downplaying major scandals that could harm their favored candidates, they had a virtual monopoly in the field of journalism. Things have changed. From the rise of conservative networks and independent journalists, people have more choices now, and it could spell the end of the liberal media.

It’s not just me saying it. Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of the USAID-funded Politico, also believes the heyday of left-wing media might finally be over.

And not just because they’re losing the slush fund money.

“The left right now, liberal media, has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now,” he said.

It’s not hard to see why. Prominent outlets like CNN, NBC News, and even The Washington Post have hemorrhaged viewers and readers amid declining trust and massive shifts in how Americans consume information. Could this be the beginning of the end for the left’s media empire? 

It’s safe to say that the collapse of left-wing media is not just anecdotal; hard numbers back the trend. CNN, for example, recently slashed approximately 6% of its workforce, eliminating roughly 200 jobs in a desperate bid to adjust to what the network called “irreversible shifts” in audience habits. Translation: fewer people are tuning in to their liberal propaganda. 

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Slashing Foreign Aid Redux

Hot damn!

Not only has Elon Musk brought the hammer down on the entirety of the Deep State’s foreign aid boondoggles, but his sleuths have apparently also uncovered one of the Swamp’s most pernicious artifices. To wit, numerous Federal agencies, including USAID, purchase a shit-ton of expensive subscriptions from beltway megaphones like Politico, which by pure happenstance, of course, favor their agency subscribers with a steady patter of “news” that tracks right down the UniParty fairway.

And we aren’t talking chump change. These “subscriptions” for the “pro” version of various Politico newsletters, for instance, come at $3,000 to $24,000 a pop. Since two of the latter were purchased by the climate crisis bureau over at USAID you have to wonder what that had to do with feeding the world’s starving masses or why USAID bureaucrats needed high-priced climate policy gossip when their inboxes were already flooded with free climate change propaganda from dozens of other Federal agencies, Federally-funded think tanks, NGOs and anti-fossil fuel activists.

As it happened, the tab across all Federal agencies just for the various Politico publications accumulated to $8.2 million over the past nine years according to USASpending.gov. Since most of that cash flow was due to purchase of the high-price “pro” versions, we can only imagine the “deep” insights that must be contained in the “Politico Pro Analysis” at $5,000 per year. Well, at least compared to the regular political gossip/news contained in the standard “Politico” subscription at $200 per year that a smattering of political junkies out in Flyover America apparently purchase.

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The Unraveling of the Propaganda Industrial Complex

On February 5, the White House confirmed that over $8 million of taxpayer money was paid to POLITICO during the final year of the Biden administration. It has also been reported that The New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) received millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars.

This story is still breaking, with the scale of the scandal escalating with every new X post, especially this one by Elon Musk, reposting a WikiLeaks apparent scoop: “USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 “media” NGOs, including nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine.” Musk, who is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been investigating government spending, posted a one word response: “wow.”

Musk also reposted a message from President Trump, which suggests an even wider scandal.

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Need Proof of USAID Funding Being Utilized to Orchestrate Coup D’Etat? Look No Further Than Joe Biden’s Own Admission

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, along with a team of young men at the Department of Government Efficiency, dealt a massive blow to the bureaucratic ‘Deep State’ last week with the temporary pause on funding to USAID.  The organization has previously come under scrutiny for its lack of transparency in how it allocates its almost $50 billion in funding, with many suggesting that the organization is a “front for the CIA.”

J. Michael Waller, author of Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went From Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villians,” pushed back on the “front for the CIA” claim in a post on X.  In it, he claimed, “It’s worse than that.  USAID became its own unaccountable covert operations agency.  USAID ran covert ops without presidential finding as required by law.”

While most of the “covert ops” may, in fact, be opaque and without presidential findings, not all are.  On Wednesday, Just The News reported on several examples of USAID exerting influence on foreign countries to sway political winds in favor of U.S. interests.

Among them was the East-West Management Institute, a Soros Open Society-backed organization that also received more than $260 million in USAID grants over the years.  This money, according to Just The News, was used to “promote rule of law in Georgia, strengthen civil society in Uganda, and advance Serbia’s accession talks with the European Union.”

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The Mockingbird Media Will Never Recover From These Shocking Revelations About The Associated Press, The New York Times, And Politico

A free and independent press is absolutely essential.  In fact, Thomas Jefferson once warned that “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”  Sadly, we have just learned that some of our most prominent media outlets have been receiving enormous amounts of money from the government.  The New York Times, Politico and the Associated Press were being absolutely showered with money during the Biden administration, and it is no coincidence that their coverage of the Biden administration was extremely favorable.  This is a scandal of epic proportions, and there is no way that these media outlets will ever recover from this because their credibility is totally gone.

What has been happening at Politico is particularly egregious.

It is supposed to be an independent media entity, but it has been receiving millions of our tax dollars.

In fact, it has received more than 8 million dollars from USAID alone.

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Trump Takes the Gloves Off, Orders GSA to Cancel “Every Single Media Contract”

President Trump is on a roll!

Trump on Thursday ordered the General Services Administration (GSA) to cancel “every single media contract” funded by the agency.

Contracts for Politico, BBC, Bloomberg and Politico Pro were canceled. Politico Pro costs $10,000 per year!

Axios reported:

The White House has directed the General Services Administration to terminate “every single media contract” expensed by the agency, according to an email obtained by Axios.

What they’re saying: “GSA team, please do two things,” a Trump administration official wrote:

Pull all contracts for Politico, BBC, E&E (Politico sub) and Bloomberg

Pull all media contracts for just GSA – cancel every single media contract today for GSA only.

Why it matters: President Trump is targeting the federal government’s media contracts after Elon Musk and his allies discovered millions of dollars in agency subscriptions to Politico Pro, a policy tracking service widely used in Washington.

The fake news media took a hit this week.

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Wasteful FEMA Spending Topped $9 Billion During the Pandemic

It’s been nearly five years, and the total cost of wasteful COVID-era spending is still being realized. A recent Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) report illuminates several examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

The OIG found the agency overobligated “at least $1.5 billion in funds for one state’s medical staffing grant.” Additionally, FEMA failed to properly vet funding to the state, leading to $8.1 billion of questionable spending.

During the pandemic, FEMA developed a streamlined process to award reimbursements through its Public Assistance Program. Instead of awarding funding to a project based on actual costs that were comparable to current market rates, the agency offered reimbursements based on cost estimates. The new process, designed to get disaster funding out of the door faster, generated less oversight and more fraudulent spending. 

The state, which the OIG does not name, received about $853 million from FEMA in September 2020 to address staffing shortages at over 200 health care facilities statewide. Over the next year, FEMA incrementally increased funding, eventually awarding over $9 billion, which the state did not need. From May 2021 to April 2023, unspent grant funds reached $4 billion, before falling to $1.5 billion. FEMA was unaware of this until April 2023, when an OIG investigation was conducted. The agency subsequently de-obligated $500 million of the state’s funding. 

FEMA did not “validate cost estimates or determine cost reasonableness before obligating funds,” according to the OIG. One of the cost estimates, which totaled $1.1 billion, was supported by one sheet of paper, which did not include itemized costs and was not conducted by a “cost-estimating professional” (which is required under FEMA guidelines). 

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Before it was shuttered, USAID routed funds to Soros-aligned causes, terrorists and drag queens

Before the Trump administration closed USAID’s doors, the agency regularly routed funding to causes aligned with George Soros’ nonprofit empire, terrorists and drag queens. 

The agency came under scrutiny from the new administration over failures to ensure transparency in its funding to organizations across the globe and concerns that the leadership was not responding to explicit policy directives from the State Department and the wider executive branch to align its programs with Trump policies and the U.S. national interest. 

In recent days, the Trump administration identified USAID programs ranging from contraceptives for Afghanistan to LGBT diversity programs for European countries as clear evidence that foreign aid needed to be paused and reevaluated, a task that fell to the Rubio State Department. 

The development agency for years also funneled money to several nonprofit groups that also received substantial backing from components of George Soros’ empire. Some previously came under scrutiny during the Obama administration for “democracy promotion” and judicial reform efforts in European countries that critics claimed promoted leftist politics. 

For example, U.S. government spending records show that the East-West Management Institute, which is in part backed by Soros’ Open Society Foundations, received more than $260 million over the years in grants from USAID to, among other things, promote the rule of law in Georgia, strengthen civil society in Uganda, and advance Serbia’s accession talks with the European Union. 

That same nonprofit group came under scrutiny during the Obama administration after Judicial Watch uncovered government records and communications showing that the East-West Management Institute’s “Justice for All” campaign in Albania received $9 million in funding from USAID. 

The assistance concerned several GOP Senators, who sent a letter to the newly appointed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017, alleging the campaign funded by the U.S. government helped craft an Albanian judicial reform proposal that may “give the Prime Minister and left-of-center government full control over the judiciary.” 

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