Tag: taxes

Israeli PM Netanyahu always brings his dirty laundry to US state visits so White House staff can clean them for free, report says

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consistently brings bags of dirty laundry when he and his family visit President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, so White House staff can clean it for free, according to The Washington Post.

“The Netanyahus are the only ones who bring actual suitcases of dirty laundry for us to clean,” an anonymous US official told The Post. “After multiple trips, it became clear this was intentional.”

Since former President Barack Obama’s administration, the US government has offered laundry services to all foreign leaders for free, The Post reported. The trend has continued into Trump’s administration, US officials told the newspaper.

Netanyahu last visited the White House on September 15, 2020, when Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic-normalization agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

The Post did not specify where Netanyahu and his wife stayed the night, but the venue was likely Blair House, one of a clutch of buildings opposite the White House that together make up the President’s Guest House.

Netanyahu also stayed at Blair House in January 2020 and March 2018.

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A Child Tax Credit Expansion Is Stuck in the Senate—Here’s Why

Legislation to expand the Child Tax Credit is currently stalled in the Senate amid deep disagreements about its passage before the 2024 election.

The federal Child Tax Credit was first introduced in 1997 and, presently, allows parents with children aged 17 and under to write off up to $2,000 per child on their annual tax burden, of which $1,600 is refundable. The credit was temporarily expanded to $3,000 for the year 2021 and made fully refundable—leading to an estimated 44 percent reduction in the national child poverty rate. Proponents argue it is necessary to help low-income families afford food and clothing, among other things, for their children.

In January, negotiators in the Senate and House of Representatives announced a bipartisan deal to expand the credit for tax years 2023, 2024, and 2025, which passed the House by a vote of 357–70 later that month.

However, nearly six months later, no action has been taken on the bill in the Senate, with time running out for the 118th Congress to pass it.

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Another Kamala Harris Failure: After Three Years and Billions of Dollars, Rural High Speed Internet Plan Has Connected ZERO People

Border Czar Kamala Harris, who failed miserably protecting our borders, was tapped to lead another component of the Biden-Harris agenda, connecting rural Americans to high-speed internet.

The program was launched in 2021 at a cost of $42 billion to American taxpayers.

President Biden put VP Harris in charge of the effort, and after 985 days under her leadership, NOT ONE person has been connected, and zero Americans have benefitted from this boondoggle.

Brendan Carr, who serves as Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, shared the abject failure of the Biden-Harris plan, which broadband infrastructure builders have said is “wired to fail.”

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Boeing, Money Printing, & The Military-Industrial Complex

Boeing’s commercial jets struggle, but its military machines thrive, all fueled by endless fiat money…

Not-so-mysteriously, none of the problems now associated with Boeing passenger planes seem to be affecting the weapons of annihilation they produce for the Military-Industrial Complex’s borderless global war machine, which is fueled by infinite fiat money.

Myriad problems with Boeing passenger jets have put the company into the news just about every day for months, but the company makes much more than just planes for commercial passenger airlines. Boeing is also a major aerospace contractor that produces fighter jets, attack helicopters, predator drones, missiles, and even the president’s airplane, Air Force One. 

To be fair, Boeing’s record as of late beyond commercial jets is far from perfect — its Starliner, a crewed craft designed to bring astronauts to the ISS, was plagued with issues on the way to the space station that are now being investigated by its astronauts. And Boeing’s main rival in the space industry, SpaceX, has had its own problems with similar craft.

But when was the last time you heard about an Apache helicopter breaking down on its way to deliver a payload of highly-combustible “democracy” to a country unfortunate enough to be on the ever-expanding list of nation-states roped into unnecessary wars waged by the US or one of its global proxies?

Somehow, the systemic quality control issues at Boeing appear much more likely to get a handful of hapless air travelers injured than to cause problems with a military operation that has the “righteous” cause of protecting the petrodollar hegemon. The printing of fiat money fuels both phenomena in different ways.

Boeing’s corner-cutting and quality control issues are just one symptom of living in a fiat money system. As the dollar is debased, the incentive and ability to create solid, long-lasting products is degraded in kind. Manufacturing costs rocket upward as supplies, materials, logistics, storage, maintenance, insurance, wage demands, and every other production factor all increase, leading to a degradation in quality across the process as the irresistible temptation intensifies to prioritize minimizing costs over producing reliable, well-made, quality goods such as safe airplanes. 

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Bad News for Universal Basic Income

The largest study into the real-world consequences of giving people an extra $1,000 per month, with no strings attached, has found that those individuals generally worked less, earned less, and engaged in more leisure time activities.

It’s a result that seems to undercut some of the arguments for universal basic income (UBI), which advocates say would help lower- and middle-class Americans become more productive. The idea is that a UBI would reduce the financial uncertainty that might keep some people from pursuing new careers or entrepreneurial opportunities. Andrew Yang, the businessman and one-time Democratic presidential candidate who popularized the idea during his 2020 primary campaign, believes that a $1,000 monthly UBI would “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real stake in the future.”

In theory, that sounds great. In reality, that’s not what most people do, according to a working paper published this month.

The five researchers who published the paper tracked 1,000 people in Illinois and Texas over three years who were given $1,000 monthly gifts from a nonprofit that funded the study. The average household income for the study’s participants was about $29,000 in 2019, so the monthly payments amounted to about a 40 percent increase in their income.

Relative to a control group of 2,000 people who received just $50 per month, the participants in the UBI group were less productive and no more likely to pursue better jobs or start businesses, the researchers found. They also reported “no significant effects on investments in human capital” due to the monthly payments.

Participants receiving the $1,000 monthly payments saw their income fall by about $1,500 per year (excluding the UBI payments), due to a two percentage point decrease in labor market participation and the fact that participants worked about 1.3 hours less per week than the members of the control group.

“You can think of total household income, excluding the transfers, as falling by more than 20 cents for every $1 received,” wrote Eva Vivalt, a University of Toronto economist who co-authored the study, in a post on X. “This is a pretty substantial effect.”

But if those people are working less, the important question to ask is how they spent the extra time—time that was, effectively, purchased by the transfer payments.

Participants in the study generally did not use the extra time to seek new or better jobs—even though younger participants were slightly more likely to pursue additional education. There was no clear indication that the participants in the study were more likely to take the risk of starting a new business, although Vivalt points out that there was a significant uptick in “precursors” to entrepreneurialism. Instead, the largest increases were in categories that the researchers termed social and solo leisure activities.

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NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad

NASA has spent $450 million designing and building a first-of-its-kind robot to drive into eternally dark craters at the Moon’s south pole, but the agency announced Wednesday it will cancel the rover due to delays and cost overruns.

“NASA intends to discontinue the VIPER mission,” said Nicky Fox, head of the agency’s science mission directorate. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line.”

NASA has terminated science missions after development delays and cost overruns before, but it’s rare to cancel a mission with a spacecraft that is already built.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission was supposed to be a robotic scout for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. VIPER was originally planned to launch in late 2023 and was slated to fly to the Moon aboard a commercial lander provided by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, which won a contract from NASA in 2020 to deliver the VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic is one of 14 companies in the pool of contractors for NASA’s CLPS program, with the goal of transporting government-sponsored science payloads to the Moon.

But VIPER has been delayed at least two years—the most recent schedule projected a launch in September 2025—causing its cost to grow from $433 million to more than $609 million. The ballooning costs automatically triggered a NASA review to determine whether to proceed with the mission or cancel it. Ultimately, officials said they determined NASA couldn’t pay the extra costs for VIPER without affecting other Moon missions.

“Therefore, we’ve made the decision to forego this particular mission, the VIPER mission, in order to be able to sustain the entire program,” Fox said.

“We’re disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s certainly difficult news… VIPER has been a great team to work with, and we’re disappointed we won’t get the chance to fly them to the Moon.”

NASA said it will consider “expressions of interest” submitted by US industry and international partners by August 1 for use of the existing VIPER rover at no cost to the government. If NASA can’t find anyone to take over VIPER who can pay to get it to the Moon, the agency plans to disassemble the rover and harvest instruments and components for future lunar missions.

Scientists were dismayed by VIPER’s cancellation.

“It’s absurd, to be honest with you,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It made no sense to me in terms of the economics. You’re canceling a mission that is complete, built, ready to go. It’s in the middle of testing.”

“This is a bad mistake,” wrote Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, in a post on X. “This was the premier mission to measure lateral and vertical variations of lunar ice in the soil. It would have been revolutionary. Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”

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Trudeau’s Signature Pot Legalization Is Failing On All Fronts

Isaac Newton said he lost money on the South Sea Bubble financial collapse because, although he could track the movement of stars, he could not calculate the madness of men.

In Canada, the legalization of cannabis in October 2018, unleashed a mania that has seen nearly 1,000 companies receive federal production licences and retailers open nearly 3,500 stores selling cannabis products across the country. It is a short street indeed that doesn’t have a pot shop on it.

The Cannabis Act was a cornerstone piece of legislation for the Trudeau government — a welcome end to 94 years of failed prohibition and an attempt to make Canada safer by closing down the black market in unregulated pot.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way and now there are dire warnings that the onerous federal regulatory and tax regime is in danger of killing the nascent licensed production market.

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The Economic Folly of a Carbon Tax

The push for a carbon tax has regained popularity as the fiscal storm in 2025 and climate change debates intensify. Advocates claim it’s a solution to pay for spending excesses while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But a carbon tax is a misguided, costly policy that must be rejected.

A carbon tax functions more like an income tax than a consumption tax, capturing all forms of work, including capital goods production and building construction. These sectors are heavy on carbon emissions, meaning the tax disproportionately burdens them, stifling investment and innovation — much like a progressive income tax, but with broader economic repercussions.

For example, in the US, the construction sector alone accounts for about 40 percent of carbon emissions. A carbon tax would heavily penalize this industry, reducing its capacity to grow, generate new housing, and create jobs. Moreover, implementing a carbon tax involves massive administrative costs. The federal tax code is already complex and costly; a carbon tax would exacerbate these issues.

Determining net carbon emissions is a nuanced process subject to ever-changing and arbitrary federal definitions, increasing compliance costs for businesses and consumers.

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LA CITY COUNCIL CONSIDERS FUNDING FORMER IDF SOLDIERS TO PATROL ITS STREETS

THE LOS ANGELES City Council is considering whether to give public funds to private, armed security patrols to protect its religious communities, following a protest against the marketing of West Bank settlement properties at an LA synagogue last month that turned violent. 

In the immediate wake of the incident, city council members introduced a motion to give $1 million to several Jewish security organizations that would expand their work around Jewish schools, religious institutions, and neighborhoods. 

Magen Am, a nonprofit that runs armed patrol services and firearm training programs for the Jewish community, was named as the recipient of $350,000 in the motion. The group is largely made up of former Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. military veterans, according to the group’s website and social media posts, and was founded by a former MMA fighter with ties to the National Rifle Association. The majority of the former Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the group are “lone soldiers,” according to several reports, the term for individuals with no direct ties to the state of Israel who immigrated there to serve in the nation’s military.

The city council has since introduced a new motion, which would give $2 million to various faith groups that want to hire additional security and does not mention Magen Am or any recipients by name. But LA activists are still concerned that city funds will go to an armed group with hard-line political stances.

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Under Biden More Americans on Welfare and Fewer Americans Working

Socialists want higher taxes, increased reliance on government, and if possible, the complete elimination of the private sector.

They aim to transform the US into a country where, like much of the world, 1 in 5 youths are NEET—“not in employment, education, or training.” In the US, the percentage of those aged 16-24 qualifying as NEET has already reached 11.9%, and as welfare and unemployment benefits increase, so will this number.

They advocate for universal basic income (UBI), which is defined as “an unconditional cash payment given at regular intervals by the government to all residents, regardless of their earnings or employment status.” The country appears to be moving in this direction.

Under Biden, more people are on government assistance than at any time in US history, and the workforce participation rate is at the lowest point since 1978, when women became fully integrated into the workforce.

The low workforce participation rate is the result of liberal government unemployment and disability payments, as well as food and rent assistance, that make it more profitable to stay home and collect checks than to work.

Those who support welfare programs often downplay the amount of money recipients receive by citing a single program like SNAP, where the maximum benefit for a family of four is $931.

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