Tag: taxes

Why is the Welsh government funding Drag Queen Story Hour?

The Welsh government has clearly learnt nothing from Scotland’s disastrous flirtation with gender self-identification. Welsh ministers are still blithely pushing ahead to make ‘Wales the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe’, by which they really mean the most beholden to gender ideology. To this end, it has already produced an arsenal of mad policies as part of its LGBTQ+ Action Plan, from the ‘recognition of nonbinary’ identities to ordering public buildings to fly flags representing ‘asexual’ and ‘aromantic’ people. And this week the Telegraph revealed that Welsh government funding was used by Cardiff’s Labour-run administration to pay for a controversial drag act in a children’s library.

In August 2022, Cardiff council paid an undisclosed sum for a Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) event at Cardiff Central Library, using grant money from the Welsh government. The event was hosted by ‘Aida H Dee’, the drag persona of DQSH founder Sab Samuel.

According to DQSH’s website, the purpose of grown men dressing in drag to read stories to kids is ‘to show the world that being different is not a bad thing’, and to provide ‘imaginative role models for children to look up to’. DQSH has certainly proved a hit with many publicly funded bodies, which have booked it on a regular basis. But it has proved less popular with parents and others who argue the performances are inappropriate for youngsters and are trying to indoctrinate children into gender ideology.

Keep reading

It’s Time to Decriminalize Personal Possession of All Drugs. Yes, All of Them 

Drug addiction is a chronic disease. It alters the way the brain works, stripping people of self-control and their ability to resist further drug consumption. Yet unlike responses to other diseases, in the United States, arrests and incarceration serve as the primary treatment for drug addiction.

This approach has been a failure. It’s time to treat drug addiction as a public health matter and not a criminal law one. This begins by investing in a treatment infrastructure and decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs.

Police in the United States make 1.16 million arrests a year for drugs. The vast majority of these arrests, 87 percent, are for personal possession or use of drugs, meaning that police arrest a person for drug possession, not drug selling, every 32 seconds. Drug arrests represent the number one activity that police engage in, at nearly 2.5 times the volume of arrests for all FBI-classified violent offenses combined (homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). Despite people of all races using drugs at similar rates, Black people comprise 27 percent of all drug-related arrests—even though they make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population. There are about 350,000 people incarcerated in jails and prisons for drugs.

Yet for all these arrests and incarceration, we have little to show for it, other than more people in handcuffs and jail cells. New data released just last month revealed that nearly 110,000 people in the United States died from drug-involved overdoses in 2022, compared to fewer than 20,000 in 1999. The CATO Institute estimates that taxpayers spend approximately $47 billion a year on drug prohibition. In the 23 years that drug overdoses rose from 20,000 to 110,000 a year, taxpayers spent more than $1 trillion.

Keep reading

Socialist Scholar Cornel West Owes $500,000 In Taxes

Socialist professor and presidential candidate Cornel West wants “massive investments” including “free college tuition” and “Medicare for All” as part of his presidential campaign.

Just don’t expect him to chip in on the bill.

According to the Daily Beast, and confirmed by West, the Union Theological Seminary professor owes over half a million dollars in taxes.

The Green Party candidate has “more than $500,000 in outstanding federal tax liens lodged against him in two states” dating back to 2005, according to the liberal news outlet.

He explained, when asked on Monday by commentator Charlamagne Tha God, that not paying taxes is part of his “gangster proclivities.”

“They’re not wasting no time attacking you because now they’re saying you owe a half a million dollars in taxes and they’re trying to say it’s hypocrisy on your part,” the commentator said.

“Because you spent so much of your life advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy. I’m like ‘I ain’t never heard any of this about Dr. Cornel West before but now all of a sudden he’s running for president,’” he said. “Everything’s coming out the woodwork,” another host said.

“Absolutely, absolutely, and the thing is, I mean, I told you before, I got so much gangster in me, I was a gangster before I met Jesus. I ain’t nothing but a reformed sinner with gangster proclivities,” West said on the show.

“Partly it’s because I do like to give to loved ones and others too,” he said. “But I take responsibility for it too. But it don’t make no difference to me.”

“They want to use it as a distraction. Why don’t you keep the focus on the suffering that I’m highlighting?” he told Charlamagne Tha God recently.

Instead of focusing on West’s legal obligation to pay all his taxes, the obligation that all Americans share, the media should instead focus on “the suffering” people in Appalachia, Chicago and Harlem.

“This is just a matter of trying to hit you below the belt and keep the distraction,” he added.”

He appeared to deny a report from the Daily Beast that he also owes $45,000 in child support, saying the outlet was “lying about his kids.”

Keep reading

Does the IRS think you’re DEAD? Taxman has incorrectly ‘deceased locked’ 90,000 accounts despite filers still being alive

More than 90,000 taxpayers have had their IRS accounts locked because the government agency incorrectly thought they were dead, a new watchdog report states.

The blunder – which the IRS blamed on ‘human and computer programming issues’ -has left legitimate and living citizens unable to file tax returns and receive rebates. They were also then lumped with the burden of rectifying the issue.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report last week claiming that prior to January 2022 it identified 77,868 accounts with potentially erroneous locks and a further 20,222 over the next ten months.

The IRS has since confirmed those affected can notify the service and file new returns once their accounts are unlocked.

Keep reading

The IRS Misplaced Millions of Taxpayer Records. Again.

Do you know where your tax records are? It’s a serious question in the case of millions of Americans whose records the IRS carelessly misplaced. That’s the big reveal in a recent inspector general’s report telling us that the federal mugging agency continues to be mindbogglingly incompetent at safeguarding the sensitive financial information it forcibly extracts from us all.

“The IRS was unable to locate any of the FY 2010 microfilm cartridges that should have been sent from the Fresno Tax Processing Center to the Kansas City Tax Processing Center,” the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed in an August 8 report on the tax agency’s data-handling practices. “As a result of the lack of adequate inventory controls, the IRS cannot account for thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive business and individual tax account records.”

That’s bad—remarkably bad given the bait the information in those records represents for criminals inclined “to commit tax refund fraud identity theft,” as the report goes on to warn. You could omit the “tax refund” part since the details we’re required to submit to the IRS could enable scammers to rob us blind in a host of ways that don’t matter to the government but are extremely serious to anybody on the receiving end.

As you might expect of a government agency, the incompetence doesn’t stop there.

Keep reading

Biden admin to spend $1.2 billion to VACUUM sky of carbon dioxide

President Joe Biden’s administration is planning to spend $1.2 billion in order to vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.  

The United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced Friday that her agency would be funding two projects to deploy technology known as “direct air capture.” 

Granholm, on Thursday, told reporters that these “projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next-generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal.” 

She described the projects as “giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky.” 

The projects were approved in Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan for 2021. Total funds that were allocated to the four commercial-scale air capture plants amount to $3.5 billion.  

The plants will vacuum the carbon out of the air in order to provide “environmental benefits for diverse applications across multiple sectors of the economy.” 

In addition to removing the fossil fuels from the air, the plants are to be used as a way to develop “a robust clean hydrogen supply chain and workforce by prioritizing clean hydrogen demonstration projects in major shale gas regions” with “regional clean hydrogen hubs.” 

It will essentially be a process where hydrogen pulled from carbon dioxide will be used to fuel hydrogen energy plants.  

Keep reading

Army vet Greg Gross, 65, wins $20M after Yuba City cop Joshua Jackson snapped his SPINE during traffic stop and paralyzed him

A 65 year-old Army vet has been awarded $20million after a cop snapped his spine during a traffic stop and left him paralyzed – with the appalling assault captured on camera. 

Greg Gross was left horrifically-disabled after the April 2020 ‘pain compliance’ restraint by Yuba City Police Officer Joshua Jackson, with video footage showing the bloodied brutality victim sobbing as he wailed: ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ 

The bed-bound former military man has been awarded the sum by a Sacramento jury after they were told he now requires 24 hour care from a team of nurses. 

Stomach-churning body camera footage captured the moment Gross was injured after being pulled over on suspicion of causing a slow-speed crash while drunk driving. 

Jackson made Gross sit on the ground, with his legs straight in front of him. He then repeatedly pushed the senior citizen’s torso forward, towards the ground, with a force that ultimately snapped Gross’s spinal column as fellow cops Scott Hansen and Nathan Livingston looked on.  

Officers did not believe the victim when he repeatedly said ‘I can’t feel my legs’ after his spine was crushed as he was pinned to the ground outside a hospital in Yuba City, California.

Keep reading

Get Money (COVID remix)

Early 2021 was a prosperous time for Austin Richard Post, better known as the “Sunflower” singer Post Malone.

While many of his entertainment-industry colleagues struggled to pay rent under the pandemic-era lockdowns that decimated live music in the US, Post bought a 9,000-square-foot ski chalet in Park City, Utah, which had been listed for $11.5 million, in an all-cash transaction that February.

By May, he’d bought an industrial space in a Salt Lake City suburb that had been listed for $1.45 million. There, he opened a commercial forge to craft knives and swords, “as a hobby,” Post’s representative told the city’s planning commission. 

But later that year, a corporation controlled by Post successfully applied for a $10 million grant from a taxpayer-funded federal program intended to provide “emergency assistance” to help struggling arts groups recover from the pandemic. 

The program, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, was a lifeline for the live-entertainment business. Administered by the Small Business Administration, it doled out $14.5 billion to institutions like movie theaters, ballets, operas, talent agents, performing-arts venues, and museums. Unlike the Paycheck Protection Program, which many venues didn’t qualify for, the Shuttered Venue program was a grant, not a loan. Qualified applicants were eligible for up to $10 million with no obligation to repay it.

“SVOG was there to save us, and to carry us through,” said Meredith Lynsey Schade, who was managing an off-off-Broadway theater company when the pandemic hit.

But the Shuttered Venue program was also plagued by ineffective oversight and loopholes that allowed some of the biggest names in the music industry to get huge payouts, an Insider investigation found.

R&B artist Chris Brown got $10 million. Rapper Lil Wayne got $8.9 million. Nineties rockers The Smashing Pumpkins got $8.6 million. Nickelback — yes, Nickelback — received $2 million.

Keep reading

America’s top 5 weapons contractors made $196B in 2022

American weapons makers continue to dominate the global arms industry, with four U.S.-based companies in the world’s top five military contractors, according to a new Defense News ranking of the top 100 defense firms.

In 2022, America’s top five weapons contractors made $196 billion in military-related revenue, according to Defense News. Lockheed Martin dominated all other defense-focused companies, with total military revenue of roughly $63 billion last year. RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, was a distant second, earning roughly $40 billion in revenue in 2022.

The same five American “prime” contractors have long dominated lists of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics have remained in the top seven of the Defense News ranking since it began in 2000.

Notably, several Chinese firms have expanded their military operations in recent years as tensions have risen between the U.S. and China. Four Chinese companies are now in the top 20, including one — the Aviation Industry Corporation of China — that became the world’s fourth largest military contractor last year. 

The top 5 for 2022 are as follows: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Aviation Industry Corporation, and Boeing.

The U.S., for its part, had 10 companies in the top 20. Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom each had at least one of the world’s 20 biggest military firms last year.

Keep reading

Chinese-run biolab in California that was experimenting on deadly viruses was awarded over $500,000 in US TAXPAYER cash

A Chinese-backed biolab in California was awarded over half a million dollars in US taxpayer cash, records show.

The black market lab – which was raided earlier this year – was found to be making illegal Covid and pregnancy tests and storing disease-riddled mice and hundreds of samples of pathogens, blood, and other dubious chemicals.

Public records show that the company linked to the lab received nearly $150,000 from the US government under a Covid-era loan program, receiving two separate loans of $74,912 in April 2020 and February 2021.

Universal Meditech was also awarded a massive $360,000 tax credit in 2018 through California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CalCompetes program – though UMI’s inability to meet program guidelines meant it never actually received those funds.

The company – which was based in Fresno, California, went bust in 2022 and was taken over by its main creditor, a company with Chinese owners who moved the operation into an unassuming warehouse in the sleepy town of Reedley.

UMI had been operating legally prior to its closure, with its Fresno facility properly licensed and permitted from the state to produce pregnancy, ovulation, and menopause diagnostic tests. 

While it had received the federal money as a legal company, a subsequent move by regulators to put

In December 2022, the Food and Drug Administration, which must issue pre-market approval for diagnostic tests, recalled approximately 56,000 of UMI’s Covid tests in California and Texas, citing the company’s lack of pre-market approval from the agency.

The recall did not mention the pregnancy tests.

Keep reading