Tag: taxes

What Happened to Internet for All?

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned on a promise to connect Americans to high-speed internet. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set aside $42.5 billion to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. “What we’re doing is, as I said, not unlike what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he brought electricity to nearly every American home and farm in our nation. Today Kamala and I are making an equally historic investment to connect everyone in America to high speed internet, and affordable high speed internet, by 2030,” Biden stated. To date, no one has been connected to the internet under this program.

Biden is correct that he has acted like Roosevelt insofar as creating countless social programs and encouraging Americans to become dependent on the welfare state.  The $42.5 billion actually rises to $90 billion when we factor in the Affordable Connectivity Program. Kamala Harris was tasked with overseeing the Internet for All initiative, but she has done absolutely nothing to help the program progress. “While Republicans in Congress have refused to help us revive this program, our Administration is refusing to let them stop us from delivering for families across America,” Harris stated this past June.

Harris believes she could solve the problem if endless funds were made available. She did nothing with the initial investment and continues to ask for more funding despite having nothing to show for the BILLIONS invested in these Build Back Better programs. We recently saw the same fiasco with FEMA misplacing billions, claiming its budget toppled, and then blaming the Republicans for not blindly handing them more funding.

Harris consistently factors in race to her social programs and has supported the Digital Equity Plan than will prioritize internet access to minorities first. Divide and conquer.

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Governments must tax or ban Bitcoin to maintain deficits: Minneapolis Fed

A recent research paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis suggests that assets such as Bitcoin should be taxed or banned to help governments maintain deficits. 

In an economy where the government tries to maintain permanent deficits using nominal debt, the presence of Bitcoin BTC$66,910 creates problems for policy implementation, the Minneapolis Fed said in a working paper released on Oct. 17.

Bitcoin introduces a “balanced budget trap,” an alternative state where the government is forced to balance its budget, the Fed wrote. 

The researchers used Bitcoin as an example of a fixed-supply “private-sector security” without “real resource claims.” They concluded that it should be banned or taxed to solve the conundrum. 

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Kamala Harris Wants America to Have the World’s Highest Death Tax

Here is something no one in the media is reporting as Vice President Kamala Harris continues to duck and weave like Muhammad Ali in the ring to avoid any questions about her economic plan.

The American Business Defense Foundation reports that under the Harris tax plan, the number of Americans subject to the hated death tax would double or triple.

This would happen because Harris has declared she will let the Trump tax cut expire next year if she becomes president.

Thanks to the Trump tax cut, the amount of an estate that is currently exempt from tax is roughly $13.6 million.

But according to the IRS: “Under the tax reform law, the increase is only temporary. Thus, in 2026, the exemption is due to revert to its pre-2018 level of $5 million, as adjusted for inflation.”

Kamala wants this to happen. She wants to soak the millionaires and billionaires. But under her plan, thousands more families will be clobbered by this tax when a parent dies. This brings new meaning to the idea of “the grim reaper.”

We aren’t talking about the very rich — people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who are already subject to the unfair death tax. (Though these super billionaires have built massive family foundation tax shelters to escape the tax.)

Now many farms, ranches and family-owned businesses will have to be sold after a funeral just to pay the taxes. These are mostly owners and operators of small businesses that have been built up over a lifetime to million-dollar-plus enterprises. The owners have already paid Uncle Sam millions of dollars of income, property, payroll, energy, business and other taxes and annual levies.

Now they will have to pay a 40% estate tax rate, plus another 5 to 15% depending on what state they die in. In other words, roughly half of a family inheritance must be forked over to the politicians. The IRS gets almost as much as the kids and grandkids. The agents should at least pay their respect at the funeral!
How is that fair?

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The Trojan Horse of “Public Health”

At the recent Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina Tom Woods made some flattering comments about Yours Truly regarding my 2000 book coauthored with James T. Bennett entitled
From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Transaction Publishers).  That’s the year 2000, not 2020.  Tom’s comment was the result of his discovery that my coauthor and I had smoked out the dishonesty and left-wing political gimmickry of the “public health establishment” nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The “public health” movement was created shortly after the Civil War with the creation of state and local government “health departments” that concentrated on sanitation issues, disease research, enforcing quarantines, inoculations, controlling mosquitoes, waste disposal, swamp drainage, immunizations, and attempting to control communicable diseases in general.  The American Public Health Association (APHA) was founded in 1872 as a trade association for public health professionals.  It is almost shocking today to read about how post Civil War cities in America were full of such things as pig pens, cesspools, privy vaults, and manure piles!

For the first several decades of its existence the presidents of the APHA were all people with scientific training – surgeons, medical statisticians, chemists, sanitarians, experts in bacteriology, hygiene, anatomy, and even botany.  Great progress was made in controlling diseases and eradicating some of them, like Yellow Fever, and improving mortality rates.  Economic growth surely played an important role as well, enabling Americans to attain better nutrition and living standards in general.

By the 1950s the dire problems that existed in the post-war years had pretty much disappeared, confronting the public health establishment with a major dilemma: With its mission essentially accomplished, how would it continue to justify its existence and its tax-funded support?

Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” explosion of welfare state spending during the 1960s provided the answer.  The federal government’s “Kerner Report” of 1968 on the “root causes” of poverty was fully embraced by the APHA.  In doing so the public health establishment changed its focus entirely from controlling disease to creating a healthy society through welfare statism.  The goal was no longer enhancing individual health but “curing” society’s ills.  That’s where the big tax money was.  Fewer and fewer medical and health professionals were among “public health” professionals, with more and more lobbyists, political activists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.  The public health establishment began crusading for increased welfare payments, a guaranteed annual income “for all Americans,” government housing subsidies, racial hiring quotas, and school busing.

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Harris Endorsed Transgender Operations For Prisoners In Bret Baier’s Fox News Interview

Vice President Kamala Harris told Fox News host Bret Baier she would “follow the law” when asked about her support for prisoner “sex change” surgeries. According to the law under the Biden-Harris administration, trans-identifying prisoners could be entitled to taxpayer dollars for the procedures.

On Wednesday, Baier presented Harris with an ad from former President Donald Trump’s campaign airing the then-California senator’s endorsement of trans surgeries for prison inmates. During a sit-down interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in 2019, Harris spoke about her time as attorney general when she “made sure that they changed the policy in the state of California so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need,” including requested surgery.

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DeSantis Stirs Pot Again With More Anti-Marijuana Ads Funded By Taxpayers, Including One Linking Cannabis To Domestic Violence

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is facing new allegations of weaponizing state agencies with taxpayer-funded ads to support his campaign to defeat a marijuana legalization initiative that voters will decide on at the ballot next month.

In an ad from the Department of Transportation (DOT), three sheriffs make various claims about the harms of cannabis—including one who suggests that marijuana use is associated with a greater risk of domestic violence, contrary to research on the topic.

“When we make home visits for domestic violence calls, they’re often associated with marijuana use,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.

Duval County Sheriff T.K. Waters said in the PSA, first reported by Seeking Rents, that there are “too many kids going to the ER because of weed gummies and joints laced with fentanyl.”

In one of the only statements from the sheriffs that seems directly relevant to DOT, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said “we see more traffic collisions and fatalities because of driving high.”

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Biden to ‘surge’ U.S. funding of Ukraine war effort as U.S. military plans for major black swan event causing ‘civil disturbance’ here at home

With the swipe of his pen, Joe Biden announced another $425 million in military aid for Ukraine this week as he updated Ukrainian President Zelenskiy on his efforts to “surge” American funding of Ukraine’s war with Russia over the final months of his term in office.

The package includes air-defense weapons, air-to-ground missiles, armored vehicles, and critical munitions to meet the urgent needs of a badly outmanned Ukrainian army, according to a White House statement that said Biden spoke by phone with Zelenskiy about additional U.S. military aid to the country.

The statement reads:

“In the coming months, the United States will provide Ukraine with a range of additional capabilities, including hundreds of air-defense interceptors, dozens of tactical air-defense systems, additional artillery systems, significant quantities of ammunition, hundreds of armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, and thousands of additional armored vehicles, all of which will help to equip Ukraine’s armed forces.”

During the phone call, Zelenskiy updated Biden on his plan to achieve victory over Russia. A victory which any rational observer knows is impossible.

It’s impossible by the simple fact that Russia has a population that is nearly four times that of Ukraine and Russia has a defense industry that’s shown itself capable of out-producing all NATO countries combined when it comes to critical ammunition, such as 155mm artillery shells.

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Berlin Freezes School Budgets While Allocating Billions For Migrant Housing

Berlin’s public schools are facing a budget freeze that has halted spending on key activities, including school trips, as the city contends with major financial challenges.

The freeze follows the Berlin House of Representatives’ decision to allocate an additional €1.3 billion for the accommodation of migrants, raising concerns about the city’s spending priorities.

In a letter issued on Wednesday, Education State Secretary Christina Henke (CDU) informed school administrators that they are no longer allowed to enter into “financially effective” contracts that extend into the next financial year. According to Tagesspiegel, this restriction includes school trips, where teachers’ travel expenses — typically reimbursed by the state — will no longer be covered.

Sven Zimmerschied, head of Friedensburg High School in Charlottenburg and board member of the Berlin Secondary School Heads’ Association, expressed his concerns over the sudden halt.

“On Monday I signed the leasing contract for a new copier,” he said, ahead of the ban.

The budget freeze, he explained, will disrupt many routine activities, though he noted that exceptions could be made in cases of “indispensability and urgency.”

The move comes as the city struggles to balance its budget following the House of Representatives’ decision in June to spend an additional €1.3 billion on the accommodation of asylum seekers. This includes expanding tent cities at former airports in Tegel and Tempelhof, renting more hotel space, and setting up 16 new locations for container housing.

During the summer, Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) warned that Berlin’s capacity to accommodate more refugees was nearing its limit.

“The pressure is increasing. We already have no places,” Wegner said.

The billions set aside have funded new emergency housing but at the cost of cuts to other areas, including education.

The budget freeze has drawn criticism, with many wondering why funds are available for migrant accommodation but not for school activities.

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WOW! Kamala Harris Says She’s Considering Taxpayer Funded Reparations for Black People

Kamala Harris joined black radio host Charlamagne Tha God for a live audio town hall where she indicated that she’s considering reparations for black people if elected president. 

It can be recalled that Charlamagne Tha God is the same radio host who Joe Biden told, “You ain’t black” if you don’t vote for him in 2020.

The Gateway Pundit reported on Kamala’s scripted town hall, which was still a disaster despite not even being on camera.

The town hall abruptly ended as Kamala Harris rambled on about nonsense.

During the show, Harris was asked about her stance on reparations, and she said that the idea “needs to be studied.”

She then continued with her typical talking point that she “grew up in the middle class.”

After the last four years, we all deserve reparations for suffering under the Harris-Biden Regime while illegal aliens receive handouts paid for by our hard-earned money.

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Waste of the Day: Biden Set to Break Improper Payments Record

Medicaid and Medicare accounted for 43% of improper payments last year, but problems were found across the board. Dead people received $295 million, mostly from pension benefits the Office of Personnel Management sent to former federal workers who had passed away. Prisoners were paid $171 million.

The Internal Revenue Service spent $25 billion doling out fraudulent and mistaken tax credits, with some IRS programs reporting mistake rates above 30%.

The issue is not new, but it is getting progressively worse. Barack Obama wasted roughly 4% of his spending on improper payments in his second term. Donald Trump wasted roughly 5%, and Biden is approaching 6%.

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