Tag: taxes

The American Psychological Association Wants (More) Federal Funding To Curb Online “Misinformation”

The American Psychological Association (APA) is among those organizations enlisted to join the “war on misinformation” back in 2021, when APA took a $2 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help push the Covid narratives of the time.

APA’s particular task there was to come up with “a scientific consensus statement on the science of misinformation.”

Now, APA is clamoring for even more federal money as it declares psychology to be “leading the way on fighting misinformation” and advertises psychologists as the right people to research the problem (as it has been presented over the last years), and also be “part of the solution.”

An article on APA’s site doesn’t shy away from using terminology that spreads a sense of alarm, such as “the scourge of misinformation” and asserting that clinicians now have to treat patients “subsumed” by conspiracy theories, while institutions and communities are all allegedly suffering unspecified “harm.”

And APA also doesn’t shy away from mentioning the US presidential election, or from positioning that event as something that makes combating misinformation “messier and more important than ever.”

Messy it is, alright. To position itself properly among all those vying for funding/influence by exaggerating the threat posed by misinformation as a new phenomenon, APA actually states that, with the election in mind, fighting misinformation is “one of the top trends facing the field (physiology) in 2024.”

Really, APA? Maybe the author meant – a top trend faced by the organization itself, since it has had to show something in return for the $2 million 2021 CDC grant given to it to research “the science of stopping misinformation.”

(Spoiler: that “science” is already well-developed and applied; it’s called censorship.)

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NASA-backed Peregrine One has ‘NO CHANCE’ of landing on the moon as leaky fuel tank has 40 hours left – and $108M craft with JFK’s DNA and other’s ashes are set to drift into the darkness

America’s first lunar lander in over 50 years has been abandoned due to critical loss of fuel during its journey to the moon.

Astrobotic, which launched the first private lunar mission Monday, revealed the Peregrine spacecraft is expected to run out of fuel in about 40 hours.

‘Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,’ the Pittsburg-based company shared in an announcement.

The 1.2-ton lander is carrying $108 million worth of NASA instruments, a hair sample from US President John F Kennedy, and the ashes of 60 other people set to be dropped on the lunar surface.

When the fuel is expended, Peregrine’s solar panels will slip into darkness, and the batteries will quickly drain. 

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State Governments Promised Private Companies More than $10 Billion in Subsidies Last Year

Governments often make deals with private companies, offering generous subsidies to encourage development in their respective states. The year 2023 was unfortunately no exception.

According to a new report from Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks economic development deals, 16 states promised more than $10 billion to private companies last year. The group counted 23 “megadeals,” which it defines as any agreement involving at least $50 million in subsidies to a private company.

The most spendthrift state was Michigan, which agreed to shell out $2.73 billion for three projects, including $1.7 billion to Ford Motor Company, the single largest economic development deal in the nation last year. The Center for Economic Accountability, a Michigan-based think tank that opposes corporate welfare, previously named the Ford subsidy 2023’s Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year.

Economic development subsidies are often sold with the promise that the state will recoup its initial investment in the form of greater tax revenues, as the development projects spur economic growth. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledged that the Ford project “has an employment multiplier of 4.38, which means that an additional 4.38 jobs in Michigan’s economy are anticipated to be created for every new direct job.” A multiplier of 4.38 would be extraordinarily high, and a much more realistic number would be closer to 1.5 or 2.

When broken down by the number of jobs the subsidies are supposed to directly create, the math is still unfavorable. Michigan’s $1.7 billion investment, intended to “create 2,500 good-paying jobs,” works out to a staggering $680,000 per job, for which state taxpayers would be on the hook. (Ford has since announced it would be “re-timing and resizing some investments,” which included paring back its project in Michigan and lowering its job creation goal to 1,700).

Good Jobs First noted in its report that 18 of the deals announced last year included “job creation targets,” for a total of 34,928 jobs promised. When compared against the amount of state funding promised in return, though, that works out to an average subsidy of $262,800 per job.

Among the other most egregious examples on the list, Amazon received property tax exemptions worth $1 billion over 15 years for its Oregon data centers. At the time, Good Jobs First noted that Amazon—which recorded $4.3 billion in profits and $524.9 billion in revenue last year—”hasn’t said how many jobs it will create, but the program under [which] the tax breaks were approved requires just 10 jobs per project.”

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California state health insurance to cover sex changes for illegal immigrants

The Golden State is expanding its massive health care system this year, which means more taxpayer dollars will fund sex change surgeries for state residents, regardless of their citizenship status. 

According to a memo first circulated in May 2022 and reported by the Daily Caller Foundation, California’s Medi-Cal covers costs for hormone therapy and procedures “that bring primary and secondary gender characteristics into conformity with the individual’s identified gender, including ancillary services, such as hair removal, incident to those services.”

Nearly 700,000 illegal immigrants between the ages of 26 and 49 qualify, as of Jan. 1, for these federal health care services, which will cost California taxpayers an estimated $3.1 billion. For those living in California illegally within this age range, it translates to approximately $4,058 per year in medical coverage subsidies funded by the state’s general fund.

“Gender affirming care is a covered Medi-Cal benefit when medically necessary,” the memo states. “Requests for gender affirming care should be from specialists experienced in providing culturally competent care to transgender and gender diverse individuals and should use nationally recognized guidelines.”

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Welfare Is Great—for the Welfare Bureaucrats

A few months ago, Christie Gardner’s apartment was wrecked by a fire. Now she’s living with the damage left by the fire, smoke, water, and the firemen who helped save her apartment. “It’s a total disaster right now,” says Gardner. “They broke up all my bookshelves, my computer.” To make matters worse, her electricity has been turned off, so she has to get by with just a few battery-operated lamps and the waning hours of daylight.

But Gardner is no stranger to suffering. The six decade-plus resident of Washington, D.C., was forced to quit her job as a certified nursing assistant after she suffered from a workplace injury that left her needing a hip replacement. Still, Gardner remains positive, always reminding herself and those around her: “It will get better. God is good.”

Gardner now spends her time advocating for her community, volunteering for several nonprofit organizations, attending doctor appointments—and fighting the D.C. government for welfare benefits.

Like many in D.C. and throughout the country, Gardner has fallen over a welfare benefit cliff—it’s what happens when someone suddenly loses benefits because a slight increase in income pushes them over the welfare program’s income-eligibility threshold.

Since 2020, Gardner has seen some of her welfare benefits decline roughly 90 percent despite still being on disability. Among other changes, since 2020 her monthly SNAP benefits have decreased from almost $300 to just $30. Despite her best efforts, she has been unable to determine the precise cause of these reductions, though she says she thinks it could be due to her becoming eligible for and receiving Medicaid.

She turned to a local nonprofit, Bread for the City, that aims to empower low-income Washingtonians to escape poverty by providing food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services. The organization also advocates for their clients by soliciting the D.C. government for needed reforms and by helping them understand what welfare programs they qualify for, how to apply, and how to avoid falling over their benefit cliffs.

The bureaucracy surrounding welfare programs makes them very expensive, inefficient, and confusing to navigate—costing taxpayers a lot of money while failing to provide meaningful help to those that are struggling economically. 

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Philadelphia Relies on Private Sector Chargers To Charge City-Owned E.V.s

Last week, Philadelphia’s NBC10 reported that city-owned electric vehicles frequently queue up at public charging stations along with everyday motorists, causing longer wait times for all. Reporters visited charging stations numerous times during work hours and routinely found city employees either waiting in line for a charger or waiting for their vehicle to finish charging, which can take up to an hour.

Some city employees told NBC10’s Claudia Vargas that they used the downtime to catch up on paperwork, while others sat in their cars apparently watching videos on their phones. Inspectors with Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) spend their workdays going to buildings and job sites, and any time spent waiting to charge is wasted.

Motorists complained about having to wait in line along with workers drawing a city salary, with one noting that city vehicles should “have a way to charge overnight in like their own facility.”

“It turns out they do,” Vargas reported. Philadelphia has 107 chargers to serve its fleet of 261 electric vehicles, but the chargers are poorly apportioned. NBC10 found that many of the city’s chargers are located at city-owned repair facilities, while others are installed at police departments and prison complexes that have no electric vehicles.

L&I has 115 E.V.s—more than any other department in the city—yet it has no chargers at any of its buildings or facilities. Instead, the city contracts with EVgo, a private company that operates charging stations across the country. The result: city employees spending a portion of each workday sitting in their cars, making other motorists wait longer.

Worse, charging during the workday means the city pays peak charging rates. If the fleet were able to charge overnight at city facilities, rates would be lower as there is less demand for electricity.

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California to offer 700,000 illegal immigrants free healthcare as deficit soars and population shrinks

California is ushering in 2024 with free healthcare for more than 700,000 migrants living illegally in the Golden State as the state is faced with a looming $68 billion deficit.

The program, which was announced in May by Gov. Gavin Newsom, will provide health insurance for approximately 700,000 illegal immigrant residents aged 26-49.

California has been providing free health insurance to illegal immigrants who are under 26-years-old since 2019.

The program will begin on Jan. 1, 2024 and will provide more illegal immigrants with health insurance under the state’s Medi-Cal coverage.

When he proposed the bill two years ago, Newsom called the expansion “a transformative step towards strengthening the healthcare system for all Californians.”

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How Biden Hobbled His Own Infrastructure Push

With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers continuing to sag and most Americans still dour about the state of the economy, the White House is understandably trying to change both narratives by pointing to the supposedly transformational benefits of Biden’s 2021 infrastructure spending package.

There’s just one little problem with that plan: finding actual evidence.

Biden is frustrated about how long it is taking to turn that $1 trillion into new construction sites that would serve as convenient backdrops for reelection campaign press conferences, according to CNN. “There’s immense frustration” in the fact that it could be years before some communities see real benefits from the tranche of spending that Biden and Congress authorized two years ago, one unnamed White House official tells CNN.

“He wants this stuff now,” says another.

Impatient children have only another few days to wait for Christmas, but Biden will likely be waiting quite a bit longer to see any significant benefits from the infrastructure bill. Too long, perhaps, given that the clock is ticking rapidly toward the 2024 presidential election.

Some of the reasons are beyond the president’s control, of course. The government is simply not very efficient at doing much of anything, and major infrastructure projects take time to plan, organize, and execute. You can’t actually fix anything by simply dumping money on it, no matter how many times that approach is tried.

However, Biden does bear significant culpability for at least some of the delays that are now frustrating his White House and campaign teams. From the tightening of “Buy American” rules for federal procurement to mandates that limit the ability of nonunion construction shops to bid on these projects, the infrastructure bill Biden signed in November 2021 is loaded with provisions that were always going to slow its implementation and limit its effectiveness.

The outcome was predictable from the start. “Making waivers for Buy America provisions harder to obtain reveals the contradictory aims of Biden’s infrastructure policy,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote in April 2022. “The president wants to make ‘historic’ investments in infrastructure, but he’s also deeply committed to regulations that ensure those investments will buy as little infrastructure as possible.”

Rules requiring contractors to use American-made stuff in federally funded projects have been on the books for decades. That’s one of the reasons why American mass transit projects are much more expensive than similar projects built in other parts of the world. The infrastructure bill doubled down on those problems by expanding those requirements to cover even basic materials like copper wiring, drywall, and lumber.

“The quick implementation of Buy America requirements for such a broad range of materials will cause delays in project delivery while states, contractors, manufacturers, and suppliers continue working to determine how best to track and verify these materials,” Washington state Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar warned federal officials in a letter last year.

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls for reparations funding to reduce violent crime

Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson insisted to CNN that funding for reparations in his new budget will help get to the root of the city’s record violent crime epidemic.

While speaking to network anchor Poppy Harlow on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged the high crime rate in Chicago and declared that the “full force of government” is required to solve it, including the city throwing $500,000 at reparations programs. 

Harlow prompted his answer by citing Chicago Police Department statistics revealing that although “the murder rate is down from 2022,” “all other forms of violent crime, Mr. Mayor, are up from a year ago, up 17% overall.”

“Are Chicagoans going to be safer in 2024?” the anchor asked. 

Johnson, who has been mayor of the Democrat-run city for about seven months, claimed the solution to the problem lies with a major government response, and the “full out community safety plan,” he claimed, “not only gets at the root causes of violence in the city of Chicago,” but makes “critical investments.”

He listed the investments: “A quarter of a billion dollars to address homelessness, $100 million for violence prevention. We added 80 million more dollars to our youth employment program of which we hired 25,000 young people just this summer. That’s a 20% increase from the previous year.”

Johnson also touted his proposal “to hire 4,000 additional young people this summer,” adding, “We have stood up an entire office dedicated to re-entry. So individuals who are returning to our communities who have been incarcerated because of failed policies will have a welcoming space for them.”

He then spoke about city funds being diverted to providing reparations for its African American community. “I’ve added a half a million dollars for restoration and reparations to address, again, the cycle of violence, which looks like school closings, closing of mental health facilities, of which I’ve invested in now. We’re going to open up two mental health clinics that were closed from two previous administrations ago.”

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Illegal Immigrants With Anchor Babies Using Up More Welfare Than American Citizens

Households that are headed by illegal immigrants and have U.S.-born children are more likely to use welfare than are homes led by U.S.-born individuals, according to a recent report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

At least 59.4 percent of illegal immigrant-led homes use one or more welfare programs, compared with 39 percent of households headed by people born in the United States, according to the Dec. 19 report.

High rates of welfare use among illegal immigrants “primarily reflect their generally lower education levels and their resulting low-incomes, coupled with the large share who have U.S.-born children who are eligible for all welfare programs from birth,” the report reads.

“More than half of all illegal immigrant households have one or more U.S.-born children.”

Children born to illegal immigrants in the United States, also known as “anchor babies,’ are considered to have automatic birthright citizenship even though the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t explicitly ruled on the matter. Illegal immigrants can’t access most welfare programs, a restriction that eases for their children who are born in the country.

“The American welfare system is designed in large part to help low-income families with children, which describes a large share of immigrants,” CIS states in the report.

A dozen states offer Medicaid to all low-income children regardless of immigration status. Such children also have access to various government food and meal programs.

Programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, free or subsidized lunch and breakfast for students, and Medicaid for children (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were “explicitly created for minors,” the report states.

The CIS report is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

“The reality is that illegal immigrants are included in the SIPP, a large share of them are poor, and they or their U.S.-born children have welfare eligibility; and many take advantage of this eligibility,” CIS stated.

“A very large share of immigrants come to America, have children, struggle to provide for them, and so turn to taxpayers for support. This can be seen as especially problematic given that there is already a large number of Americans who are also struggling to provide for their children.”

According to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the total number of U.S.-born children of illegal aliens in the United States as of June stood at 5.78 million, a population more than two times that of Chicago.

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