Tag: taxes

DATA CENTER MYTH BUSTED: No Jobs, Higher Debt, Slower Housing

The data-center gold rush has marched into local communities on one familiar promise: Big Tech brings jobs, growth, and prosperity.

A new 75-page academic working paper found something very different.

Finance scholars Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang compared U.S. counties with operational data centers against “near-miss” counties that attracted proposals but never got operating facilities.

They found little corresponding improvement in fiscal capacity, local employment, or business formation.

Instead, local-government borrowing costs climbed as data-center development grew. Water-bond yields rose 26 basis points more in water-scarce counties than in water-abundant counties.

The paper also found higher school-bond yields in major data-center hubs, where housing-price growth slowed. The authors said those patterns aligned with a weaker expected property-tax base.

“Overall, we conclude that investment without labor strains public infrastructure without generating widespread agglomeration gains.” — Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang

Saagar Enjeti highlighted the study’s bottom line: data centers can pull capital and utilities into a county without delivering the broad labor-market gains that politicians and corporate developers sell.

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Trump Announces $500 Obamacare Rebate Checks to Nearly 1 Million Americans “Wrongly Ripped Off” by Biden Administration

President Trump announced in a video statement on Thursday that rebate checks for families who were “wrongly ripped off” by the Biden Administration through the Obamacare exchange and healthcare.gov will be delivered ahead of the November elections. 

Checks to nearly one million Americans across 30 states will be delivered in “just a few weeks,” Trump said. The White House announced that checks will be sent to those eligible beginning in October.

Trump announced the initiative, dubbed the “Working Families Obamacare Refunds,” in a video statement.

WATCH:

Trump: Today, I’m very thrilled to make an important announcement on the cost of health care affecting hardworking families all across the United States. Our administration has discovered that under Sleepy Joe Biden, American households buying health insurance through the Obamacare exchange, which is a disaster, and the healthcare.gov were massively overcharged, to put it mildly.

They were forced to pay excessive fees, totaling at least $500 million. The last administration knew about this and they studied it, but they kept the money. They just kept it. They never let anyone know. Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off.

Nearly one million hardworking Americans in 30 states will soon be getting refunds of $500 each with a check sent to their home address. In many cases, these refunds will cover the entire spike in your insurance caused by Democrats, who solely work to protect big insurance companies. The big insurance companies own the Democrats.

Congress must now quickly pass the Great Health Care Plan. It’s called the Great Health Care Plan. Cost of healthcare for all Americans is coming down under my plan. We will stop all payments to big insurance and give the money directly to the people, who will then be able to buy better health care at a much lower cost and keep the money and keep the difference.

We’ll have maximum price transparency and require all prices to be posted in plain, beautiful English, and we will get insurance companies to disclose their profits and how many claims they deny, so that we know the good ones from the bad. But the relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged. The rebates are going out in just a few weeks. Thank you very much.

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$50 Million NIH Autism Study Ignores Link to Vaccines, CHD Scientist Says

A $50 million federal research initiative examining the potential causes of autism is sidestepping any examination of a possible vaccine-autism link and is instead funding research by establishment scientists who have denied such a link, a new letter to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya alleges.

The NIH announced the $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI) last year. In his letter, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker wrote that three projects funded by the initiative are led by scientists who “built their careers on explicit, public denial that vaccines could play any role in autism etiology.”

Hooker wrote that his review of the ADSI portfolio turned up no studies examining “vaccines or vaccine components.” The ADSI appears designed to come to a predetermined conclusion that vaccines are not linked to autism, Hooker alleged.

The NIH-funded research instead largely focuses on connecting autism to a range of genetic and environmental causes while ignoring a possible link to vaccines, Hooker said.

In an assessment accompanying his letter, Hooker called the ADSI, as currently structured, “not a search for the truth” but, instead, a “validation engine” for mainstream autism narratives.

Hooker told The Defender he was motivated to write the letter after the Aug. 19 ADSI update meeting and the Aug. 27 meeting of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.

At the latter meeting, NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew Memoli said the agency is “working toward more investigation of vaccines as a cause of autism,” according to Hooker’s original letter.

“Those are reassuring words. They are also, unfortunately, contradicted by the facts on the ground,” Hooker wrote. He told The Defender the ADSI instead “consists of a bunch of re-tread genetics projects that have been altered to look like gene-environmental interaction projects.”

Hooker’s allegations come despite recent reports that studying the vaccine-autism link is a priority for President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Trump Promises $5,000 Dividend To Every American Adult If Republicans Hold Congress

In Dallas last night, President Trump promised the American people that if the GOP keeps the House and the Senate, every adult citizen will receive $5,000 in a direct dividend from his tariffs.

Speaking at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Wednesday evening, Trump explained that the $5,000 payment would be issued by the President if Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives and Senate, thanks to their America First economic strategy that globalists predicted would never work. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders,” he said of the payment.

The reason the profits of tariffs are to be distributed to the adult citizens of the country in the form of dividends is because for decades the politicians in Washington have been running the country into the ground, waging foreign wars, spending trillions of dollars of NATO revenues and other foreign pay to conduct bureaucratic busy work and fail to enhance the prosperity of American working citizens and businesses.

“Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders,” Trump said.

It has to be spent in the United States, he explained. So, no money can be spent in Canada, or China, or Germany for example. It is a closed economic system that rewards American businesses and American workers for their country’s success.

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St. Louis Sheriff’s Office reaches settlement over firing of white, older employees

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Tuesday that it had entered an agreement with the St. Louis Sheriff’s Office to resolve 13 charges of race- and age-related discrimination.

EEOC investigated the Sheriff’s Office and found that former Sheriff Alfred Montgomery used his position to terminate nearly a dozen white employees and two black employees for reasons other than their job performance. Before he was sworn in, Montgomery publicly announced that he “could not wait to get rid of these white officers” and “top-heavy” employees, a reference to older workers, the EEOC found.

Montgomery also allegedly referred to the white employees he terminated as a “racist gang.” After firing the white officers, Montgomery allegedly told his former deputy that “he needed to fire a black guy” to buck a lawsuit for discrimination against white employees.

“The EEOC is firmly committed to enforcing our nation’s civil rights laws evenhandedly, without favor or prejudice, to ensure all workers are protected,” EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said in a press release. “Race discrimination is unlawful no matter who the target is, and employers must ensure their decisions are not based on bias or stereotype.”

The sheriff’s office denied the allegations but agreed to enter the pre-litigation conciliation process, resulting in a settlement that requires the sheriff’s office to “electronically post and distribute all newly created and/or revised employment policies in compliance with Title VII and the ADEA; provide training to its employees about their rights under Title VII and the ADEA; train human resources personnel and management who exercise decision-making authority; post a notice to employees about the resolution of the case and their rights under the laws enforced by EEOC; and report to the EEOC about its compliance with the terms of the 13 conciliation agreements” for the next five years.

The agreement is part of a Trump administration crackdown on racism against white people. In July, the EEOC filed a discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a white male employee at the New York Times who was allegedly targeted because of his race and sex. The media outlet has publicly stated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, and in 2021, the outlet stated that it had enacted goals to increase non-white and female representation in leadership positions. 

As Just the News reported at the time, a white senior staff editor who had been working at the Times for more than a decade applied for a position as deputy real estate editor. The white employee had extensive experience in real estate journalism, but was left out of its final panel interviews for the position in early 2025. All candidates who were interviewed as part of the final process were non-white. Ultimately, the Times hired a non-white woman with little to no experience in real estate journalism even though the experience was a requirement for the position. The woman didn’t go through the standard interview process for the position and was rated less favorably for the position than the other two final candidates by the final interview panel.

“No one is above the law — including ‘elite’ institutions. There is no such thing as ‘reverse discrimination’; all race or sex discrimination is equally unlawful, according to long-established civil rights principles. The EEOC is prepared to root out discrimination anywhere it may rear its head. No matter the size or power of the employer, the EEOC under my leadership will not pull punches in ensuring evenhanded, colorblind enforcement of Title VII to protect America’s workers, including white males,” EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement. “Federal law is clear: making hiring or promotion decisions motivated in whole or in part by race or sex violates federal law. There is no diversity exception to this rule.”

A spokesperson for the Times told Politico in July that “the EEOC deviated from standard practices in highly unusual ways. The allegation centers on a single personnel decision for one of over 100 deputy positions across the newsroom, yet the EEOC’s filing makes sweeping claims that ignore the facts to fit a predetermined narrative.”

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Canada hits the U.S. with tariffs on $20 billion worth of U.S. exports as trade war escalates

Canada retaliated against the tariffs President Donald Trump has imposed on imports from Canada with tariffs on approximately $20 billion worth of U.S. goods. 

The tariffs impact hundreds of American products, including steel, aluminum, cheese, appliances, clothing, cosmetics and farm equipment, the Associated Press reported. 

The tariff rates run from 15% to 50% and match Washington’s tariffs dollar for dollar. They took effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said U.S. tariffs could severely impact key Canadian industries and limit the country’s sovereignty. 

Trump, meanwhile, has warned that Canada’s economy could collapse if Carney continued to treat him as an enemy, and the president threatened consequences “worse than anything that has ever happened to a Canadian Politician.”

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Founder of British Flag Flying ‘Raise the Colours’ Campaign Charged with 14 Offences

The creator of the campaign to raise British and English flags across the country to protest against illegal migrants being housed in hotels at taxpayer expense has been charged with 14 criminal offences, including using “threatening, abusive or insulting words”.

Thames Valley Police said on Sunday evening that Ryan Bridge, 45, of Blackwell has been charged with 14 offences relating to alleged incidents between January 31 and March 31 of this year in Oxfordshire.

According to GB News, Bridge was the founder of the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which began last year in opposition to the government policy of taking alleged asylum seekers and placing them in hotels across the country at taxpayer expense.

The police force said that Bridge was charged with seven counts of using threatening words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress and three counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of, or provoke, unlawful violence.

He was also charged with two counts of racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, one count of racially aggravated fear of violence, and one count of common assault.

Thames Valley Police said that they had decided to submit the case to the Crown Prosecution Service following a review of the evidence, witness statements, and video footage.

It comes as the left-wing-run Birmingham city council that they plan on spending around £2.6 million to remove British and English flags from the streets of the UK’s second city.

According to the Daily Telegraph, around 20,000 flags were raised by members of the public on street infrastructure as a part of the Raise the Colours campaign.

The decision to spend millions removing the national flags comes despite the Birmingham currently being in around £3.5 billion in debt, the most of any local government in Britain.

Meanwhile, in Oxfordshire — where the campaign begun — secured an injunction in July to bar anyone from attaching flags to lampposts or to pain the flag on the road.

Those who breach the injunction against raising the flag face potential prison sentences, fines, or even having assets seized, the BBC reported.

The Liberal Democrat leader of the Oxfordshire City Council, Tim Bearder, said at the time: “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result… This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

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County in Virginia Votes to Give $2,000 in Taxpayer Dollars to Illegal Immigrants Detained by ICE

Members of the county board in Arlington, Virginia have voted to give $2,000 in taxpayer dollars to illegals who have been detained by ICE.

Is this even legal? And why would taxpayers put up with it? Can anyone imagine another country in the world where this would even happen?

People who were arrested for being in the country illegally are being rewarded with cash that has been taken from citizens as taxes. Does anyone believe this is what the founders had in mind?

Breitbart News reports:

Virginia County Board Votes to Pay $2,000 to Families of Illegal Migrants Arrested by ICE

The Arlington County Board has voted to pay $2,000 in tax money to the families of illegal migrants who are arrested by immigration enforcement officers.

The leaders of the Virginia county created a $50,000 fund of tax dollars to dole out to family members for “basic needs” such as housing, food, and utilities.

“We stand with our immigrant families, and we will not stop doing so,” Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said after the unanimous vote, according to ARLNow. “We are valuing the families of those that have been displaced and removed.”

“This investment in our families is about the urgency we have seen in our community in the last month,” de Ferranti added. “And we are going to respond with care. and we are going to respond proudly. That’s what this $50,000 is toward with Thrive.”

The board also voted not to require family members to prove that their detained wage earner was legally allowed to work in the U.S.

The government funds will be distributed by left-wing organization Arlington Thrive, an NGO funded by the likes of Washington Forest Foundation, the Kaiser Foundation, and the United Way, among others.

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25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on federal agencies and Congress to defund the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), charging that the organization had used taxpayer dollars to produce reports that supported plaintiffs in climate lawsuits against energy companies.

In an Aug. 27 letter, the state attorneys general urged the federal government to “end grants to an organization [NASEM] that uses taxpayer money to prop up litigation theories that have been rejected by courts from Maryland to Mississippi to California.”

Much of the conflict stems from a chapter on climate science in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was written by NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC).

This manual provides essential background and technical information for judges who are presiding over thousands of lawsuits in which states and cities across the United States are seeking billions of dollars in damages from energy companies as compensation for alleged harm from global warming.

Allegations of Bias

Critics allege that information NASEM produced for the manual supports the plaintiffs’ claims while ignoring contrary views that favor the defense.

President Donald Trump stated in a July 19 Truth Social post that NASEM had “published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change” and that “taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it.”

In January, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told the FJC in a letter that the manual appeared to include “biased programming” with the “underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs who allege injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.”

In response, the FJC removed the chapter from its manual. Initially, NASEM kept the chapter on its website but removed it on Aug. 7, pending an internal review.

“That chapter has received considerable scrutiny,” NASEM stated. “[NASEM] has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”

However, attorneys general from the group of 25 states, led by Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say they have concerns regarding that review process.

“Now, over five months later, after presidential criticism and increasing public scrutiny, NASEM has temporarily removed the chapter from its website for an ‘independent review’ of the ‘processes used to develop the chapter,'” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “This review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM’s secrecy around all aspects of the review process.”

The attorneys general charged that the chapter in the reference manual that NASEM helped write “materially misquotes the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual’s statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants.”

One of the co-authors of the Reference Manual’s climate chapter, Columbia Law School professor Jessica Wentz, defended the work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, stating that it had undergone a rigorous review process, that Michael Burger had not contributed to it, and that it was “objective and rooted in settled science.”

In addition to the chapter in the reference manual for judges, NASEM produced a report in July titled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026,” which critics say bolstered plaintiffs’ arguments that harm from extreme weather events could be attributed to energy companies’ production of fossil fuels.

That NASEM report supported “extreme event attribution” (EEA), the legal theory underpinning climate lawsuits, which claims that damage from extreme weather can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, as plaintiffs assert. NASEM stated in a summary of the report that “the scientific tools, observational datasets, and methods developed and used for EEA have advanced considerably over the past decade and increased the confidence in EEA results for some types of weather events.”

“[NASEM says] that these attribution studies have more prominence in the press and in legal proceeding and they say attribution methodology is getting better, but saying something is getting better is nowhere near the same as saying it’s any good,” Steven Koonin, physicist at Stanford University and former undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, told The Epoch Times. “You would expect to see graphs throughout the report comparing the results of attribution with what the actual data is, and there is virtually none of that in the report.”

The NASEM report also provides a methodology and causal link between greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate, extreme weather, physical impacts on communities, and societal and economic harm.

Among the climate lawsuit cases currently moving through the courts is a pending Supreme Court case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which could set a precedent for many other similar cases.

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Canada’s Tariff Strategy Designed To Interfere With U.S. Midterm Elections

Late last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from a trade deal with the United States. According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Canada was “offered the best trade deal of any country on the globe,” but Carney abandoned the deal “at the last minute.”

According to the White House, “the U.S. offered Canada the most preferential market access of any country on Earth, with deep cuts on steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, and more. Instead of partnership, Canada chose unreasonable demands, walk-backs, and flat-out rejection.” Canada responded with retaliation rather than negotiation, becoming the only other country besides China to do so.

And the reason is that Canada is trying to influence the 2026 midterm elections in the United States.

After the trade negotiations failed, Canadian officials announced that tariffs of up to 50% will hit roughly 700 American products starting September 8, covering close to $20 billion in goods, about 7% of everything Canada imports from the United States. The rates range from 15% to 50%, and tariffs on American steel and aluminum will double from 25% to 50%. This was a targeted economic strike meant to hit key states before the midterm elections.

Ottawa has barely bothered to deny it. Canadian Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the tariffs were built to apply political pressure on specific states, telling reporters: “We are also targeting products that can target specific states in the United States. We are being smart and strategic in order to apply political pressure, and I think it’s the right thing to do right now.”

Asked directly about the political intent by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Joly did not walk it back: “We are putting pressure clearly on different states and different people. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want this trade war. We didn’t start it.”

The target list reads like a midterm map. Cheese products from Wisconsin. Washers and dryers from Kentucky, where GE Appliances is a major employer. Steel, aluminum and auto parts from Michigan. The Wall Street Journal reported that Canadian officials designed the package to protect domestic industry and to “sting President Trump and his Republican Party” heading into November.

“The states that are most reliant on Canada as an export market are often the northern-tier states – Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire,” Ed Gresser told the Wall Street Journal. He argued that Canada is “trying to show the Republican party that there’s a systemic cost to doing this sort of thing.”

Trade consultant Eric Miller, who heads the Washington-based Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, said Canada picked targets with available substitutes, either domestic production or imports from Mexico and China, items like air conditioners and appliances, while simultaneously hitting producers in swing states and reliably Republican territory.

Nowhere was the targeting clearer than Maine, and nowhere did it collapse faster. Ottawa’s original list carried a 25% tariff on American lobster, set to bite during the fall season when roughly half of Maine’s catch goes to Canadian processors. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), facing re-election in November, had already warned that the trade war would hurt her state. The Maine Lobstermen’s Association warned on Aug. 26 that the duty would land at the worst possible moment for an industry running on thin margins.

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