Tag: taxes

Money allocated for home repairs instead went for a Lamborghini

Federal disaster money meant to rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Sandy instead helped finance a contractor’s Lamborghini, Porsche, Jaguar and real estate after he defrauded Long Island homeowners.

Alexander Almaraz, owner of the construction company Design Concepts Group, was sentenced last month to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Key facts: After Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, New York awarded $1.2 billion in federally-backed grants to help almost 13,000 families rebuild their homes. The funds came from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program.

Twenty homeowners hired Almaraz using $1.5 million in grant funding and $1 million from their personal savings. He was supposed to lift their houses onto temporary supports to replace their damaged foundations and then lower them back into place.

Almaraz admitted in court that he never intended to perform the work. He used the money to buy luxury cars, pay his credit card bills and purchase land in Missouri.

Almaraz also told the homeowners they could not live in their houses while he was supposedly working on them. Many moved into apartments Almaraz managed, and paid him rent.

Almaraz then moved to San Antonio without fixing the houses.

One homeowner told CBS New York that he paid Almaraz about $150,000 and was left with a home he could not live in. “The hurricane was terrible, but dealing with him was ten times worse,” he said.

The Department of Justice said it will determine how much restitution the victims will receive at a later date.

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Dem Stefany Shaheen Says ‘We’ve Got to Roll Back These Tax Breaks’ for New Hampshire Families

New Hampshire Democrat congressional candidate Stefany Shaheen, the daughter of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), said this week that she wants to reverse Republican tax reductions, after previously supporting tax and fee increases as a Portsmouth city councilor and receiving financial and political support connected to her mother.

Shaheen said this week, “I believe it’s a matter of electing people who have the will to fight for the issues that matter most to the majority of people, and we’ve got to roll back these tax breaks. And again, let’s be clear: my opponent supports them.”

Rolling back the tax provisions would result in a 20 percent tax increase for New Hampshire families and bring back taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security.

“Silver Spoon Stefany Shaheen just told voters everything they need to know: In Congress, she’d ‘roll back’ tax cuts that have made life better and more affordable for New Hampshire families. It doesn’t get any more out of touch than that. Granite Staters deserve a fighter, not a nepo baby,” NRCC spokeswoman Maureen O’Toole told Breitbart News.

Shaheen’s record as a Portsmouth city councilor also includes votes and proposals that increased taxes and fees. During her time on the council, Shaheen brought forward a motion to increase the city’s hourly parking fees by 25 percent.

A year later, Shaheen voted in favor of Portsmouth’s first budget to exceed $100 million. The budget included a property tax increase and another increase in parking fees.

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Trump Threatens Billions In Federal Funds If NYC Doesn’t Put ‘Little Italy’ Back On Map

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from New York City unless the city updates a map of immigrant communities to include Little Italy.

In 2023, the city created a map, “New York City Immigrant Enclaves,” that maps ethnic communities across the city, such as Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, Little India and Little Manila in Queens, and Little Palestine in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. However, the map omits Little Italy as well as ethnic neighborhoods of Irish and Jewish communities.

Speaking at a Columbus Day celebration at the White House, Trump threatened to cut billions in city funding. “So you have Yemen covered, Haiti covered, Guyana covered, Senegal covered. I think it’s a disgrace. We are going to work on that immediately,” said the president.

The city budget relies on federal funding, with as much as $8 billion in the city’s 2025 fiscal year budget coming from federal sources – most of that going toward education and social services. Federal grants also support counter-terrorism funding for NYPD bomb squads and emergency preparedness teams.

In October, 26,500 New Yorkers lost federal SNAP benefits for food assistance under expanded work requirements set up by the Trump administration. Starting in January 2027, possibly 900,000 New York City residents relying on Medicaid may lose health coverage when new federal work requirements take effect. This federal aid goes to individuals, not the city, but the city and state are scrambling to compensate lower-income New Yorkers for these lost benefits.

The 2023 immigrant enclave map resurfaced on social media back in July, and the City Council’s Italian Caucus released a statement on X that it was deeply disappointed with the city for omitting the contribution of Italian-Americans.

“Italians are not a footnote in New York City history – we helped build it,” City Council’s Italian Caucus said in a statement on X on July 10. All four members of the Italian Caucus are Republicans.

When asked about leaving out Little Italy, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the map predates his administration, but that it would be updated in the future to include Little Italy and others.

“It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic enclaves,” Mamdani said July 11.

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HUGE 2A Victory: ATF Ends Registration for Suppressors and Short-Barreled Rifles For ALL Legal Purchases

In a massive win for the Second Amendment, gun owners across America will no longer be subject to a long, drawn out process in order to purchase rifles with barrel lengths shorter than 16″ known as short-barreled rifles (SBR), short-barreled shotguns, or suppressors for their firearms.  

Previously, purchasing an SBR or suppressor generally required a $200 National Firearms Act (NFA) tax, an application to the ATF, a thorough background check, and a long wait for ATF approval.  Even then, oftentimes gun owners would utilize a gun trust to register the item rather than individually register them.

However, following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, the NFA’s transfer tax was reduced to $0 for suppressors and SBRs.  In August, a federal district court in Texas ruled that once Congress eliminated that tax, the 1934 NFA’s authority to require additional registration and transfer procedures could no longer be sustained.

Initially, the injunction allowed the purchase of the devices without the extended ATF process but only applied to SilencerShop.com and the Gun-Owners of America, who were plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

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A $120 Can of Spam Busts Open Seattle’s Food Stamp Fraud

Look in the mirror: You’re looking at an attractive, smart, hardworking taxpayer. 

And here’s where hundreds of millions of your food stamp tax dollars are going: straight into the hands of addicts, the pockets of pimps, and the funds of charlatans. 

It wasn’t bad enough that California hospice owners were driving Ferraris bought with stolen tax money, and that FireAID donations were given to nonprofits that had nothing to do with actual, you know, fire aid. Now we discover that food stamp fraud is taking place in the open on the streets of America, and nobody’s doing anything about it, apparently.

Independent reporter Nick Shirley, with a group of other indy reporters, revealed the open-air federal food stamp fraud taking place on the streets of Seattle. 

Shirley, San Francisco-based street reporter Darren Stallcup, Seattle’s Jonathan Choe, and other intrepid indy reporters followed the money. 

Choe tells Shirley that EBT cards litter homeless encampments, where they receive so many of them that they begin to throw them away. Many of those “homeless” drug zombies use their food stamp cards to buy drugs. 

Choe and Shirley found EBT cards and sought to follow the lucrative scam from beginning to end. Shirley lays out how simple this is in a new video displaying how one abandoned EBT card can buy drugs, sex, and a $120 can of Spam.

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The $17 Trillion Tax Hike That Leaves Social Security Broke

If you take a look at your last pay stub, you will find a line marked OASDI. It stands for Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, which is the formal name for Social Security. The tax on that line is 6.2% of your wages. What you do not see on that stub is that your employer paid a matching 6.2% of your paycheck directly to the U.S. Treasury. On a $60,000 salary, those two halves equal $7,440 a year. Exactly $0.00 of it went into an account bearing your name. Every single penny went out immediately as a check to a current retiree or a disabled American.

The entire system rests on a beautifully simple, multi-generational promise: Today’s workers carry today’s retirees, and tomorrow’s workers will carry us. For decades, more money came in than went out. But instead of saving the surplus, Washington borrowed the extra cash, spent it on daily government operations, and left a stack of non-marketable IOUs in a drawer. Federal bureaucrats call that paper a “trust fund.” In reality, calling it a trust fund is like putting an IOU in your kid’s piggy bank and telling them their college tuition is fully funded.

Since 2021, the program has paid out more than it takes in. To cover the shortfall, the government has been cashing those IOUs, forcing the Treasury to borrow massive amounts from the public. By 2034, the drawer for the combined retirement and disability funds will be completely empty. By law, that means every retiree’s check will instantly face a devastating 17% automatic haircut.

Enter Brian Poindexter, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Ohio’s 7th District. He claims he can fix it. Today, the Social Security tax stops once a worker earns $184,500 in a year. His plan calls for three dramatic shifts: remove that income limit so high earners pay on every dollar, let people collect full checks at a younger age, and make the checks bigger. Removing the cap, he confidently promises, “will instantly make it solve.”

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Trump Treasury Blocks $175 Million In Federal Payments To Dead Recipients

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump’s push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration’s efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

“Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dead people,” Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

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Report: Federal Govt Spent $26.5 Billion on NGOs for Illegal Migrants

A new report finds that the U.S. government doled out 1,272 awards to pay for programs costing $26.5 billion to encourage and welcome illegal migration.

The site DataRepublican.com has gotten down into the financial weeds with a review of spending on migrant resettlement and Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) awards through January of 2025.

The site also noted there are 217 contracts worth $5.2 billion that are still active.

The active contracts include $3.4 billion to care for unaccompanied children who are already in the system. An additional $544 million is going to aid states with migrants who are already here and in the system, and $1.2 billion is being spent on other ORR grants that have already been granted.

One other program costing five million dollars has been forced to remain active by a court order.

The Trump administration has also canceled 63 awards, worth a total of $186 million.

In September, the White House outlined nearly $1 billion in wasted tax dollars spent on migrants.

The White House recently launched a new initiative to eliminate wasteful and harmful spending and pledged to “cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”

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Yes, The Public Education System Is Broken

I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he’ll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I’d rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That’s incorrect. There’s not a teacher shortage; there’s a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley’s opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.

His opinion piece titled “The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On” states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers’ unions. Early in the article, Turley states, “New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.” He then talks about the “education cartel,” a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.

How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn’t matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers’ unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I’m a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.

Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn’t join any teachers’ union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.

In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher’s paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says “No.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers’ unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.

Aren’t unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don’t. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.

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2SLGBTQIA+ Activists Demand a WHOPPING $450 MILLION in Taxpayer Funding from Canadian Government to Expand LGBTQ Agenda

A coalition of more than 40 LGBTQ advocacy organizations descended on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, demanding that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government commit a staggering $450 million ($350 million US) in taxpayer funding over the next five years to expand the country’s federal LGBTQ action plan.

That’s $450 million in Canadian dollars, equivalent to roughly $325 million in U.S. currency, that activists want Ottawa to commit to their expanding programs and initiatives.

According to NOW Toronto, approximately 45 LGBTQ, human rights, feminist, and labor organizations participated in what organizers described as the largest-ever Queer Day of Action on Parliament Hill on October 6.

Organizers branded the lobby day the largest-ever “Queer day” on the Hill. The money would renew and expand the federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan before it expires in March 2027. That plan was launched by Justin Trudeau in August 2022 with $100 million over five years, about $70 million US, a massive 350% increase over the original allocation.

The day was organized by Queer Momentum, Rainbow Railroad, Egale Canada, Pride at Work Canada, Fierté Canada Pride, and Dignity Network Canada, with more than 40 allied groups in tow, according to a CNW release from the Society of Queer Momentum.

Delegates spent the day in meetings with MPs, senators, and ministers’ offices, then closed with a reception in the Senate co-hosted by the Canadian Pride Caucus. NOW Toronto reported the coalition’s line as “double down, not back down.”

The coalition also wants Canada to expand its international LGBTQ advocacy programs.

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