Tag: taxes

Waste Of The Day: COVID Loans For 11-Year-Olds

A weekly allowance or a lemonade stand are great ways to teach young kids how to manage their money. A loan from the Small Business Administration is not. 

Yet according to the Department of Government Efficiency, the SBA issued 5,593 loans in 2020 and 2021 worth $312 million to businesses whose listed owners were 11 years old or younger. Either America’s children have suddenly become expert entrepreneurs or, more likely, another round of fraud from the Covid-19 pandemic has been uncovered. 

DOGE also claimed that the SBA gave 3,095 loans worth $333 million to borrowers who were listed as 115 years or older, bringing the total age-related fraud to $645 million. 

An SBA spokesperson confirmed to the fact-checking site Snopes that “According to our preliminary analysis, SBA can confirm that over 5,500 loans, totaling about $312M, were distributed to businesses whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the disbursement.” 

The White House did not offer additional context to Snopes or FOX News, and it’s unclear how the loans were actually used. Isabel Casillas Guzman, the SBA administrator at the time when the loans were paid, also did not return Snopes’ request for comment. 

Snopes noted that it’s possible the loans were paid to adult borrowers, but the recipients appear as children in the government database because of poor recordkeeping.

Either way, the mistake is serious. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee recently claimed that at least $79 billion of fraud during the pandemic was “readily preventable,” but government officials were not verifying Social Security numbers before paying out loans. 

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Florida Bans State Funds for Groups Accused of Speech Policing

Florida has moved to shield public funds from being used to support what many see as efforts to police speech under the guise of media bias monitoring.

Under the state’s new fiscal year 2026 budget, taxpayer dollars can no longer be spent on advertising or marketing firms that contract with groups like NewsGuard, Ad Fontes, or the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

The measure was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

A press release from the Independent Media Council emphasized that the restriction is aimed at blocking state agencies from doing business with companies that rely on “politically biased media monitoring services.”

The council stated, “These monitoring groups purport to be impartial, but consistently skew their ratings to target conservative and independent media from receiving advertising from major brands.”

NewsGuard, one of the most prominent organizations caught in the spotlight, has received federal backing in the form of a $750,000 grant from the Department of Defense.

This funding helped the group develop its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology, which it now offers to social media platforms, artificial intelligence developers, and tech firms as a tool for tracking so-called misinformation.

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Oregon hospital gives sex toys to criminal psych patients at taxpayer expense

It has been revealed that Oregon State Hospital, the state’s highest security psychiatric facility, distributes taxpayer-funded sex toys to its patients, according to a local news investigation.

The report from KGW found that the state-run hospital dispersed 65 sex toys to patients in 2024 at the cost of $2,900, while 42 sex toys were provided to patients the year prior.

Oregon State Hospital predominantly houses criminal mentally ill patients who were deemed unfit to stand trial or found guilty except for insanity on charges ranging from misdemeanors to serious violent crimes such as murder and sex offenses.

Patients are able to access a wide variety of sex toys with brand names such as Throttle Stroker, Her Pocket Bullet, The Vortex, Vibrating Helping Hand Pro, Vibrating Shower Stroker, Double Dancer, and Waterproof Prostate Massager, according to a 10-page catalog obtained through a public records request. A hospital spokesperson, Amber Shoebridge, told the network that these sex toys are paid for with public tax dollars, which range in price from $14.78 to $84.99.

“The need for sexual expression doesn’t disappear in institutional settings,” Shoebridge told KGW in a statement. “Oregon State Hospital provides access to sexual aids as a way to offer patients an ethical, therapeutic, and private form alternative for a lack of sexual expression.”

According to the report, Oregon State Hospital’s sex toy policy appears to be rare, as psychiatric hospital officials in other parts of the country said they were unaware of similar programs when reached for comment.

“I’m at a loss for words,” said Tiffany Edens, a crime victims advocate and rape survivor. “It’s like you are going into the sex toy store. They’re not appropriate for people who are in a state hospital,” she said, commenting on the catalog.

“You are feeding into people’s fantasies – people that have no business to have these types of toys,” Edens added.

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Baywatch Pay Watch: Half-Million-Dollar Checks, Six-Figure Overtime For LA lifeguards

If it wasn’t clear that the city and county of Los Angeles are in dire need of spending resets, taxpayers can look no further than the county lifeguards paid to watch over its pools, lakes and ocean.

OpenTheBooks.com reported on outrageous overtime spending on the LA police, fire and particularly overpaid employees in the city’s Department Water & Power amid out-of-control wildfires in January, and the anti-immigration riots in June.

Lifeguards, too, enjoy big overtime payouts and generous benefits. The top-paid lifeguard in LA county was compensated more than $500,000 in 2024; and over the past 5 years, a single lifeguard was able to pull down $702,000 – in overtime alone!

BY THE NUMBERS

We reported that in 2021, the top-paid lifeguards earned up to $510,283 — back then, we found 98 lifeguards earned at least $200,000 including benefits.

Now, out of over 1,500 lifeguards, 134 of them earned at least $200,000 including benefits. Thirty-four of them had $300,000 or more in their compensation package.

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USAID Gave Known Con Man $800M Contract To Do Kamala’s Work On ‘Root Causes Of Migration’

President Joe Biden’s USAID awarded an $800 million contract to a business operating out of a Virginia home even after it formally ruled that its key manager lacked “honesty or integrity” — a reference to the fact that, according to a May 12 guilty plea, he had secured USAID contracts through bribery for a decade.

The contract was for addressing “issues affecting the root causes of irregular migration from Central America to the United States” — the work that Biden assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris, but which she never appeared to address, a Daily Wire investigation found.

The Department of Justice announced Friday that Walter Barnes III, the founder of government contractor Vistant (previously known as PM Consulting Group, or PMCG) and Roderick Watson, a USAID contracting official, pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in which Barnes and two others conspired to pay Watson $1 million in exchange for $544 million in contracts.

What has not been reported is that the Biden administration continued to steer contracts to Vistant/PMCG even after it knew of the massive corruption: the migration contract, even larger than the $544 million in the indictment, and others that are still active.

The $800 million contract went to a joint venture between Barnes’ company and CollaborateUp, a tiny consultancy run out of a suburban home in Falls Church, Virginia, where its CEO, Richard Crespin — who runs the company while also working at a think tank — lives. The Virginia home was the address listed on the $800 million contract.

In announcing its $800 million contract, CollaborateUp said it would address the “irregular migration from Central America to the United States” by addressing “climate change.” Its website also touts its work “advancing DEIA” and combating “misinformation.”

This year, it added Mark A. Green, a former Republican congressman who served as Donald Trump’s appointee to lead USAID during his first term, to its payroll as a “senior advisor,” according to its website.

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Taxpayers WHACKED with $66k legal bill for E-Karen’s failure

The eSafety Commissioner’s failed legal battle against Elon Musk’s social media platform X and Canadian activist Chris Elston — better known as Billboard Chris — will cost Australian taxpayers approximately $66,000.

The Administrative Review Tribunal on Tuesday threw out a takedown order issued by Commissioner Julie Inman Grant in response to a controversial post by Elston criticising the World Health Organisation’s inclusion of radical transgender activist Teddy Cook on a policy panel.

In February 2024, Elston shared a post on X stating: “This woman (yes, she’s female) is part of a panel of 20 ‘experts’ hired by the WHO to draft their policy on caring for ‘trans people’. People who belong in psychiatric wards are writing the guidelines for people who belong in psychiatric wards.”

Inman Grant deemed the post “degrading” and issued a takedown notice to X on March 22, threatening the company with a $782,500 fine if it failed to remove the post. X blocked the content, but subsequently challenged the decision alongside Elston.

On Tuesday, the Tribunal sided with X and Elston, ruling the takedown order invalid. Deputy president Damien O’Donovan stated that there was no evidence Elston intended for Cook to see the post.

“In the absence of any evidence that Mr Elston intended that Mr Cook would receive and read the post, and in light of the broader explanation as to why Mr Elston made the post, I am satisfied that an ordinary reasonable person would not conclude that it is likely that the post was intended to have an effect of causing serious harm to Mr Cook,” the ruling read.

An eSafety spokesperson confirmed the legal challenge had so far cost “approximately $66,000”, and acknowledged the Tribunal’s guidance.

eSafety said it would continue an agenda to “protect Australians from online abuse” while taking the Tribunal’s findings into account.

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Choice Tax Breaks: The GOP’s Federal Plan To Transform Education

Buried in the 940-page “big, beautiful” budget blueprint is an unprecedented tax credit that, if approved, will be a long-sought victory for the private school choice movement in its drive to expand and break into Democratic states that for decades have blocked its path.

The tax credit program, which would provide scholarships to K-12 students to pay for private schooling, would mark a significant shift in federal education policy. The scholarships would be the first major federal initiative designed to propel the nationwide growth of private school choice, a largely conservative and Christian movement championed by President Trump and suburban Republicans alike. It comes just as the Trump administration dismantles large parts of the U.S. Department of Education that support public schools attended by the vast majority of 50 million students.

The private school choice movement, which started in 1990 to give families more options aligned with their values and children’s learning needs, remains a small piece of the education landscape. It supports about 1.2 million students in private and home schools in 35 states, primarily in the South and West. Advocates expect that the proposed federal program would jump-start a new round of expansion by providing scholarships to families to make private school more affordable.

Beyond boosting participation, the program is also a wedge to crack into states controlled by Democrats. These blue-state lawmakers, backed by teachers’ unions, have long resisted private school choice as a threat to public school enrollment. The granting of scholarships, advocates say, would plant a seed of interest among families in Democratic enclaves at a time when enrollment and academic performance have been steadily declining at public schools.

“In terms of the number of students served and the geographic scope, it would be the most important piece of school choice legislation ever,” said Patrick Wolf, a prominent scholar of the movement at the University of Arkansas. “Advocates hope it will provide a proof of concept in blue states and show that if a few thousand kids get scholarships the public school system won’t crater.”

But the potential of the scholarship program to meet the advocates’ goals has been weakened this week in the Senate. The program was included in the massive budget bill because, as a standalone measure, it wouldn’t survive a filibuster by Senate Democrats. The budget bill can be passed by a simple Senate majority, provided it only addresses fiscal matters.

The Senate parliamentarian, however, objected to the scholarship program, ruling, to the dismay of Republicans, that it seeks to impose a policy on the states. In response, Republicans had to amend the initiative to allow states to decide whether to participate, a change that could hamper the movement’s efforts to breach liberal jurisdictions.

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Democrats and the Fake News Media Are Hiding This from the American Public: Illegal Migrants Collect More Food, Housing, Cash Benefits, and Medicaid Than Natural Born Citizens

Democrat politicians and far left hacks in the legacy media are outraged that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts Medicaid for illegal aliens in the US.

They say it’s inhumane. They believe it is the American taxpayers duty to welcome millions of illegals a year into our country and to pay their bills.

Of course, this is national suicide. Democrats know this. MAGA knows this.

What these dirty politicians and their media bedfellows won’t tell you is that illegal aliens collect more benefits in food, housing, CA$H, and Medicaid than natural born Americans.

Democrats don’t want you to know this.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report in December 2023 that compares the percentage of natural born Americans receiving government handouts versus the number of illegal aliens receiving government benefits.

The report is based on numbers and data from the 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

The study found that 59 percent of non-citizen households (e.g., green card holders and illegal immigrants) used one or more major welfare program.

This compares to 39 percent of US-born households who receive one or more major welfare program.

Illegal aliens not only broke the law to enter the country but they’re sucking our resources dry.

Democrats seem to appreciate this

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Can Israel Survive Without the West? The Answer Reveals Our Collective Power

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel – militarily, politically, and economically – were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since 7 October 2023.

Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted.

Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law.

The abhorrent “might makes right” maxim would have to be utterly expunged from any future political equation. Middle Eastern countries, both Arab and Muslim, must finally rise to the occasion, stepping up decisively to aid their brethren and to ensure that Israel is powerless to divide their ranks.

For Israel, this demand is simply impossible, a non-starter and, understandably so, from its colonial perspective. Why?

“Invasion is a structure, not an event,” the influential scholar Patrick Wolfe has famously asserted. This profound statement unequivocally means that Israel’s wars, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nakba, of 1948, and all subsequent wars and military occupations, were not random historical coincidences, but rather integral components of an enduring structure of power designed to eliminate the indigenous population.

This renders as simply false the notion that Israel’s behavior after October 7 was solely driven by revenge and devoid of strategy. We are perhaps excused for failing to initially grasp this distinction, given the grisly, unspeakable nature of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the palpable sense of perverse pleasure Israel seems to derive from the daily murder of innocent people.

Yet, the language emanating from Israel was chillingly clear about its true motives. As Benjamin Netanyahu declared on 7 October 2023, “we will turn Gaza into a deserted island”.

That has always been an intrinsic, unchanging part of Israel’s colonial structure, and it will remain so unless it is decisively reined in. But who possesses the will and power to rein in Israel?

Israel operates through a network of enablers, benefactors who have long viewed Israel’s existence as an indispensable colonial fortress serving the interests of Western colonialism.

“The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep. (…) We’re united in our shared values,” Joe Biden declared with striking conviction in July 2022.

Without even bothering to question those “shared values” that somehow permit Israel to perpetrate a genocide while the US actively sustains it, Biden was undeniably honest in his stark depiction that the relationship between both countries transcends mere politics. Other Western leaders blindly parrot the same perception.

The unfolding genocide, however, has spurred some Western—and a multitude of non-Western—governments to courageously speak out against the Israeli war, Netanyahu, and his extremist ideology in ways unprecedented since Israel’s very establishment. For some of these countries, notably Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, among others, the proverbial ‘bond’ is demonstrably ‘breakable’ and their support is most certainly not ‘unequivocal’.

There are various theories as to why some Western governments dare to challenge Israel, while others stubbornly refuse. That important discussion aside, shattering the bond between Israel and the West is absolutely critical, not only for a just peace to finally prevail, but for the very survival of the Palestinian people.

The nearly 21 agonizing months of unrelenting Israeli genocide have taught us a brutal lesson: Israel is, after all, a vassal state, utterly unable to fight its own wars, to defend itself or even to sustain its own economy without the direct, massive support of the US and others.

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Report Estimates US Used $1.25 Billion Worth of THAAD Interceptors To Defend Israel From Iranian Missiles

A report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimates that the US used 93 interceptors from its THAAD missile defense system to defend Israel from Iranian missiles during the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran.

At $13 million per interceptor, that means the US launched an estimated $1.25 billion worth of THAAD munitions during the war. The Israeli military also used its Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors, which are jointly produced with the US. The Haaretz report said that the total cost of the Arrow and THAAD interceptors used was about $1.5 billion.

Haaretz reached its figures using open-source videos that showed 84 interceptors being launched from Israel during eight Iranian missile salvos. Extrapolating from there, the paper estimated that the US and Israel launched an estimated 195 interceptors, including the 93 THAADs, 80 Arrow 3s, and 22 Arrow 2s.

A report from Military Watch Magazine came up with similar numbers, estimating the US used 60 to 80 THAAD interceptors during the war, accounting for 15% to 20% of its global THAAD arsenal. The Biden administration first sent a THAAD system to Israel and about 100 troops to operate it in October 2024, ahead of an Israeli attack on Iran.

In April of this year, reports said the US sent a second THAAD battery to Israel, which would mean that the US has two of its seven THAAD missile defense systems stationed in Israel.

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