Tag: taxes

Be Prepared to Hear More about Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

Americans currently pay a wide variety of federal taxes on earned income, investment income, estates, gifts, alcohol, tobacco, and tariffs on numerous imports. Americans also pay state and local taxes on real property, personal property, retail sales, alcohol and tobacco.

No matter who becomes president in January 2025, Americans must be prepared for a great deal of heat—and perhaps some light—on taxes over the next year. At the top of the list will be former president Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), the provisions of which expire in December 2025. Congress must grapple with calls to extend many of the law’s provisions as the country faces continuing large federal budget deficits. It is unclear how the new 119th Congress may deal with TCJA expiration, and what the US tax code may look like after 2025.

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Partners in Genocide: Israel Is Slaughtering Palestinians With Western Arms

While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the Academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential”.

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths”, according to the Lancet.

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California advances 0 down, no payment home ‘loans’ for undocumented immigrants

The California Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to make use of the state’s zero down, no payment home “loan” program, an expansion the legislature says would create “significant cost pressures.”

The social and economic benefits of homeownership should be available to everyone. As such, the California Dream for All Program should be available to all,” wrote bill author Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno. “When undocumented individuals are excluded from such programs, they miss out on a crucial method of securing financial security and personal stability for themselves and their families.

AB 1840, which already passed the Assembly and now faces a floor vote in the Senate, would prevent the state’s California Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loans program from denying individuals on the basis of their immigration status. This program allows applicants to secure “loans” of up to 20% of the home’s purchase price — or, about what a typical down payment is — with zero down payment on this state loan, and no payments.

The state’s “loan” can potentially be repaid to the state when the home is refinanced, sold, or transferred, with the borrower paying back the original loan amount plus 20% of any increase in value on the property. It’s not clear what happens if a family decides to hold on to a home as there are no provisions on how long a property can be held for, which means certain kinds of trusts could potentially allow the loan to not be paid back.

The Appropriations Committee analysis said expansion would create “unknown significant cost pressures, potentially in the millions annually, to provide additional funding for the Home Purchase Assistance Program to accommodate the expanded eligibility population.”

This year, 18 thousand individuals applied for the $255 million “loan” program through a lottery, leaving 1,700 lucky winners with up to $150,000 each towards down payment and closing costs.

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F-35: $2T in ‘generational wealth’ the military had no right to spend

On October 26, 2001, Jim Roche, the then Secretary of the Air Force, stood behind the podium in the Pentagon briefing room to announce that Lockheed Martin had won the competition to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Joining him on the stage, were Edward Aldridge, the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy.

All three took turns at the microphone to tout the Joint Strike Fighter’s anticipated virtues. “The Joint Strike Fighter is a family of highly common, lethal, survivable, supportable, and affordable next generation multirole strike fighter aircraft,” said Aldridge.

All these claims have proven to be spurious to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent years as the F-35 program limped through a seemingly endless development process, but none so much as the “affordable” claim. At the time of the announcement, the F-35 was supposed to enter active service in 2008 and the program was expected to cost $200 billion.

Nearly 23 years later, the F-35 is officially the most expensive weapon program in history clocking with an anticipated total program cost of $2 trillion and engineers continue to struggle to make the jet work properly with development and procurement costs having more than doubled.

The three men who made that announcement were nearing the end of their long careers. Aldridge retired from the government in 2003 and went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin. Jim Roche left the Pentagon in 2005 and became the director of Orbital ATK. Gordon England eventually became deputy secretary of defense before retiring in 2009.

Through their Joint Strike Fighter decision, these three men committed the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a program that has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. They created a massive financial obligation that future generations of taxpayers must bear, without the much-touted program having produced any of the actual security benefits it was supposed to bring to the U.S. armed forces.

By the time the program’s conceptual flaws became obvious, all three individuals had long since left government service and it was left to an entire generation of their successors to salvage something from the mess they left behind.

It is that last point the individuals who temporarily occupy offices vested with such authorities need to keep front of mind. They have the power to commit future generations to truly massive amounts of spending. All three of the prime F-35 decision-makers were born in the 1930s making them part of the Silent Generation. Generation X, the Millennials, and Gens Z and Alpha must bear the burden of their decisions.

The power to spend such generational wealth should not be wielded in a perfunctory manner. Those with the power of the pen should be far less credulous when people pitch them on pie-in-the-sky programs based on unproven technological promises and assumptions.

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Kamala Harris is coming for your house

If you thought Kamala Harris’s price controls scheme was straight out of the Book of Nicolás Maduro, wait till you see what she has in stores with her proposal for a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains.

According to Americans for Tax Reform:

The Harris-endorsed budget calls for an annual 25 percent minimum tax on the unrealized gains of individuals with income and assets that exceeding $100 million. Once in place, it won’t be long before the threshold is lowered to hit more and more Americans.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains, by a factor of three to one, including 76% of independents. Americans know that a “gain” isn’t “real” until it is actually realized, in hand.

What that means is that if you bought a house for $60,000 in the 1970s, and saw its value go up to $1,000,000 on Zillow last year (which isn’t uncommon in places like California), you’d be on the hook for taxes on a million-dollar property, which would be more than you actually paid for the house, even though it’s the same ordinary house you bought in a middle-class neighborhood back in the ’70s and you haven’t changed residences.

The same could be said of any homeowner, you’d buy a house for $300,000, but as its value rises to $1.2 million, your tax bill would clock in for a $1.2 million property, and not the $300,000 tract home you bought a few years earlier. If the market value went down by the time you sold, to say, $250,000, you will have spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on taxes while actually earning just $250,000 on your investment.

The same could be said of stocks, or crypto, or any asset, it’s not just homes. You’ll pay the huge taxes, but if the price goes down, as it inevitably will on some assets, you’ll have gotten nothing but the huge tax bill already paid.

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DNC Maggots: FBI Investigates the Gross Breakfast Discovery

The FBI is investigating a potential sabotage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago after maggots were allegedly slipped into the hotel breakfast being served to delegates.

Law enforcement agencies suggest activists likely brought the maggots into the hotel to make a statement, while city officials released a statement addressing the delegate breakfast dilemma.

“Multiple unknown female offenders are alleged to have entered a building (200 block of North Columbus Drive) and began placing unknown objects onto tables containing food. The offenders are believed to have then left the area. One victim was treated and released on-scene. Along with CPD, FBI-Chicago is assisting in the investigation. No further information is available at this time.”

It’s unclear if the contamination was found before any delegates ate the food.

Delegates expressed concern over the maggot incident while Chicago police officers and Illinois state troopers gathered in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel near the meeting rooms.

“They protected us, of course, and turned it around in minutes,” said Indiana delegate Tracy Boyd, who is at the convention representing the Indianapolis region. She said her group was notified that breakfast service would be briefly delayed due to the incident.

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Taxpayer-Funded Posters in London Proclaim “Hey Straight White Men Pass The Power!”

A taxpayer-funded group is once again putting up posters around London that say, “Hey Straight White Men Pass The Power!”

Yes, really.

The posters, which originally appeared in Southwark, London and other areas of the UK in 2022, appear to have popped up once again, with an image posted to X showing one in Acton, London.

They are the work of an art project called the Artichoke Trust and were designed by a black artist from Marseille called Nadina who previously produced ‘street art’ that proclaimed, ‘Never forget George Floyd’ and ‘Nobody is free until Palestine is free’.

“Research from the Taxpayers’ Alliance claimed (the group) had been given £3million from a government art grant,” reported the Daily Mail.

Respondents questioned precisely what ‘power’ straight white men were supposed to give up in a society where they are already disenfranchised to the extent that large, partially government-funded billboards in major cities scream at them for merely existing.

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The Emperor Has No Clothes: Stealth Technology is Sexy and Useless

On 27 March 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a Yugoslav Army unit (3rd Battalion of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade, which was under the leadership of Colonel Zoltán Dani) shot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft of the United States Air Force by firing a S-125 Neva/Pechora surface-to-air missile. It was the first ever shootdown of a stealth technology airplane. The F-117, which entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1983 was the first operational aircraft to be designed using stealth technology; by comparison, the Yugoslav air defenses were considered relatively obsolete. The F-117 fleet was officially retired on April 22, 2008.

Innovative tactics and leaders who know what they are about can take ancient weapons to destroy “state of the art” weapons systems and platforms such as the use of ancient pike tactics at Stirling Bridge to slaughter the English King’s modern heavy horse on 11 September 1297 in Scotland or the English victory against the French at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin’s Day). During WWII, the Russian-Finnish War in 1939-40 set a David versus Goliath fight that saw a very lop-sided body-count for the Russians fighting the tiny Finnish forces.

Stealth is very expensive and puts tremendous constraints on the utility of the the platform employing it. In the calculus of war, its use diminishes over time. Yet another exemplar of the adage that complexity and sophistication doesn’t always yield martial advantage. The stealth capability has been oversold on shaky science in the art of war.

In a fight with peer and near-peer adversaries, the stealth advantage is negligible.

It is overpriced and the enemy always gets a vote.

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SOCIALISM 101: Kamala Harris Confirms Plan For Massive Tax Hikes, Will Roll Back Trump’s Signature Legislation

Kamala Harris is planning massive tax hikes for corporate America that will inevitably impact the lives of ordinary Americans, her campaign has confirmed.

In a statement provided to NBC News, campaign spokesman James Singer, confirmed she would push for a 28 percent corporate tax rate, calling it “a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share.”

“As President, Kamala Harris will focus on creating an opportunity economy for the middle class that advances their economic security, stability, and dignity,” said Singer.

While supporters of corporate tax rises will claim that they will not impact ordinary Americans, they will contribute to the continued decline of the American economy, with some companies inevitably moving their operations abroad.

Such a move would also lead to the continued squeezing of small business, higher inflation and consumer prices and less economic opportunity for all.

It would, however, temporarily increase the tax revenue toward the federal government, with which Harris and the Democratic Party will continue to grow the already unsustainable national debt.

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Ohio Marijuana Retailers Bring In More Than $11.5 Million During First Four Days Of Legal Recreational Sales

Ohio legal weed sales topped $11.5 million in less than a week.

The state’s total recreational marijuana sales was $11,530,708 as of August 10, according to the Ohio Department of Commerce Division of Cannabis Control. Recreational sales started August 6—eight months after 57 percent of Ohioans voted to legalize recreational marijuana. The average of price of an ounce of flower was $266 last week, according to the division.

There were 173,043 units of manufacturer product sold and 1,285 pounds of plant material, according to the division.

Ohio currently has 120 dual-use dispensaries as of Wednesday, meaning they can sell both medical and non-medical marijuana, according to the division. Ohio had 98 dual-use dispensaries when recreational sales started.

More than 70 Ohio cities have local moratoriums prohibiting adult-use cannabis business, according to Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Under Ohio’s ballot measure to legalize marijuana, there is a 10 percent tax at the point of sales for each non-medical marijuana transaction.

The ballot measure created five funds in the state treasury—the adult use tax fund, the cannabis social equity and jobs fund, the host community cannabis fund, the substance abuse and addiction fund and the division of cannabis control and tax commissioner fund.

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