Tag: taxes

San Francisco Board of Supervisors Expresses ‘Unanimous Support’ for $5M Reparation Payouts to Black People

San Francisco’s woke Board of Supervisors is strongly considering a draft proposal to gift black people in the uber-liberal city $5,000,000 as part of a reparations package.

Additionally, black people in the city could be entitled to homes, have all debts and tax burdens forgiven and receive a guaranteed income of at least $97,000 per year as part of the package.

The outrageous proposals were made by the city’s “African American Reparations Advisory Committee” as they deliberated various ways to atone for decades of slavery — never mind the fact slavery never existed in California.

“And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing,” the Associated Press reported.

The current proposal would cost non-black families “at least $600,000” according to numbers by the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

The AP reports “Fewer than 50,000 Black people still live in the city, and it’s not clear how many would be eligible,” but admits critics are worried the massive payout would exacerbate the city’s already “deep deficit,” which is projected to reach $728 million over the next two fiscal years.

Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian said the plan could bankrupt the city.

“Many African Americans living in San Francisco face significant economic challenges,” Ohanian said. “But implementing the Reparations Committee’s recommendations is not the solution to these problems. Rather, it is a proposal that would result in massive business and household relocations, ultimately bankrupting the city.”

Meanwhile, reparations committee vice chair Tinisch Hollins said the package was necessary in order to set a precedent for the nation.

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‘All-Out War’: Biden’s Budget Would Balloon ATF Funding To Nearly $2 Billion, Up 50% From Obama Admin

President Joe Biden is seeking to beef up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) budget to $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2024, a $663 million increase in funding compared to the end of the Obama administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget.

Under Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget, the ATF would receive $1.9 billion in federal funding, an increase of roughly 50% or $663 million compared to the end of the Obama administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget of $1.237 billion. Biden’s budget coincides with several gun control measures, including pistol stabilizer rules, ghost gun rules and a “zero tolerance” policy for gun dealers.

“Especially through the Department of Justice, and in particular with the ATF, this administration has declared all-out-war on the Second Amendment,” director of federal affairs for Second Amendment advocacy group Gun Owners of America (GOA), Aidan Johnston, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Whether it’s their demands for significant increases in funding for enforcement, by arbitrarily changing statutory definitions via executive fiat, or by implementing a zero tolerance policy to shutdown firearms dealers and expand an illegal gun registry, President Biden and his anti-gun cabal are doing everything they can to harass, discourage, and chip away at gun owners and the community as a whole.”

Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget would provide additional funding to the ATF to further regulate the firearms industry, create gun trafficking strike forces, enforce background checks and implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, according to the budget. Alongside the DOJ and ATF, the FBI will receive $51 million to support the continued implementation of enhanced background checks required by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

If the proposed budget for fiscal year 2024 is passed, the ATF’s budget would increase by 35.7% or $500 million compared to the final year 2020 budget of $1.4 billion when Biden took office. Year over year, the budget would increase by $200 million, a 13.6% increase from the fiscal year 2023 budget.

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New Wuhan Scandal: US Agencies Double-Paid Virus Research Costs

The US government may have made tens of millions of dollars in duplicate payments for virus research at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, according to a review of government records by a former federal investigator, CBS News reports.

“What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds. It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research,” said Diane Cutler, whose services were engaged by Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall.

Cutler has more than 20 years of experience investigating healthcare fraud and white-collar crime, an her conclusions spring from her review of over 50,000 documents relating to US grants that financed coronavirus research in China.

The apparent double-payments, made via the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and US Agency for International Development (USAID), related to a variety of claimed costs, including salaries, travel, medical supplies and equipment.

Anonymous sources told CBS the damage may amount to tens of millions of dollars. Marshall has turned over Cutler’s findings to USAID and the agency’s internal watchdog, which has launched an investigation of its own. It could take six months or more.

On Feb. 28, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau had long ago concluded the Covid-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a leak from a Chinese lab. Days earlier, it was reported that the Department of Energy had — in 2020 — reached its own determination that a lab leak was most likely.

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The CDC funded groups tackling vaccine “misinformation”

Since 2021, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in grants focused on promoting flu and COVID-19 vaccines and tackling what it calls vaccine “misinformation” in minority communities all across the country.

To receive the funding, the grantees have to commit to helping the CDC in enforcing “federal orders related to quarantine and isolation.” They also have to commit to collecting community-level data on behalf of the CDC, Defender reported.

“The recipient is expected to provide to CDC copies of and/or access to COVID-19 data collected with these funds, including but not limited to data related to COVID-19 testing. CDC will specify in further guidance and directives what is encompassed by this requirement,” the grant requirement stated.

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Pentagon asks for biggest budget EVER at $842 BILLION – and it could soon hit $1 TRILLION: US wants $11B for hypersonic weapons, $29.8B for missile defense systems, 72 jets and $1.5B to defend Guam from China

The Pentagon has asked Congress for a range of advanced missiles, modern jets, state-of-the-art defense systems and more money to guard against threats from China in its biggest peacetime budget in history.

The $842 billion request includes $11billion for hypersonic weapons, $37.7 billion to modernize the nuclear arsenal and a huge investment in research and development to take on threats from adversaries including China and Russia.

$6.2 billion has been requested for a Columbia ballistic missile submarine, $28.8 billion on missile defense systems, an investment in space warfare and cash to bolster defenses in Guam and Hawaii – as Beijing bulks up its military and threatens Taiwan.

There’s almost $38 billion to buy new nuclear submarines, field the new B-21 stealth bomber and manufacture new ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles 

The huge Department of Defense blueprint would put the military’s annual budget over the $1 trillion threshold in just five years, its chief financial officer said Monday.

It’s the largest request since the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the mid-2000s, when the weight of hundreds of thousands of troops deployed in those overseas conflicts ballooned overseas war spending.

There could be the largest pay raise for troops in more than 20 years, as the Pentagon faces problems with recruitment across all branches.  

The budget could surge again to meet the higher cost of weapons and parts, but also to answer the vulnerabilities that the Ukraine war has exposed in the U.S. defense industrial base, and the strategic threat the U.S. sees from China´s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal, its hypersonic capabilities and its gains in space.

Even if it only grows to account for inflation, ‘the budget will hit a trillion dollars,’ probably before the next five years, Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord told a press briefing.  

‘Maybe that´s going to be a psychological, big watershed moment for many of us, or some of us, but it is inevitable.’

While the number seems astronomically high, it is only about 3 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. For comparison, during the Second World War the country was spending about one-third of its GDP on defense, McCord said.

The budget request is part of an overall $6.8 trillion spending proposal rolled out by Biden last week, which Republicans say they’ll reject. 

But it’s not clear how they’ll act on the Pentagon proposal.

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Minnesota Dems Want $100 Million for Reparations, Apologies for George Floyd and Dred Scott

Not to be outdone by California, representatives of the Evil Party in Minnesota on Thursday introduced the “Minnesota Migration Act” in the state legislature “to study and provide reparation grants for American descendants of chattel slavery who reside in state.” This is a reparations bill that is designed to redress, according to one of its sponsors, the “structural institutionalized racism in Minnesota and all of American society,” which they claim “has led to overwhelming Black-white disparities in housing, business investment, economic prosperity, health and wellness, life expectancy, and infant mortality.” To end that structural racism, or at least make up for the damage it has done so far, white Minnesotans are going to have to pony up $100 million.

It’s noteworthy that the sponsors of this act are Minnesota Reps. Samakab Hussein, Hodan Hassan, Ruth Richardson, Mohamud Noor, Athena Hollins, and Cedrick Frazier. All appear to be black, but Hussein, Hassan, and Noor seem to be part of the wave of Somalis (which also included Ilhan Omar) who began immigrating to Minnesota in the 1980s and 1990s. The question thus inevitably arises: if this bill passes, which it very well could in woke Minnesota, will the Somali community be among those who receive the reparations cash, or will they have to line up with Whitey to pay out the money?

The bill calls for the establishment of an advisory council that will, among other things, “determine what form of compensation to African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States can be achieved.” The Somalis certainly aren’t descendants of people enslaved in the United States, so apparently, they will be among those who are paying for the African Americans’ gravy train.

There are other problems as well. The act stipulates that all members of the advisory council “must be chosen with an emphasis on appointing members who are descendants of persons believed to have been enslaved in the United States, or members of the American descendants of chattel slavery with lived experience of racial discrimination and who were impacted by policies which have caused intergenerational trauma.” That means that at least three of the act’s five sponsors can’t be on this council. What’s more, staffing it is going to be hard to come by if every member has to be the descendant of a slave. You may recall, if you’ve studied American history at all, that Minnesota was admitted to the Union in 1858 as a free state.

Ah, but Hussein, Hassan, Richardson, Noor, Hollins, and Frazier are ready for that objection. Their bill claims that “although slavery was illegal in Minnesota, Dred Scott and Harriet Scott were held in military bondage at Fort Snelling, along with other African Americans who were used for enslaved labor by United States Army agents.” So the bill is going to have the state of Minnesota apologize not just for George Floyd, but for Dred Scott. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, “it is estimated that throughout the 1820s and 1830s anywhere from 15 to more than 30 enslaved African Americans lived and worked at Fort Snelling at any one time.”

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The Myth That America Prospered After WWII Despite Extremely High Taxes on the Rich

Left-wing politicians who demand higher taxes on the rich argue that the United States has, in the past, prospered when tax rates were very high, proving that high taxes do not harm the economy. And it is true: In the 1950s and early 1960s, the top federal personal income tax rate in the US was a horrendous 91 percent, after which it was lowered to 70 percent. Under Ronald Reagan, it was then successively reduced to 28 percent by 1988 (before being raised several times and then lowered again under Trump).

However, as Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early show in their book The Myth of American Inequality: “The top income tax in 1962 was 91 percent. After deductions and credits, only 447 tax filers out of 71 million paid any taxes at the top rate. The top 1 percent of income earners on average paid 16.1 percent of their income in federal and payroll taxes while the top 10 percent paid 14.4 percent and the bottom 50 percent paid 7.0 percent.”

Even when the top tax rate was lowered to 70 percent, not much changed. Only 3,626 out of 75 million taxpayers actually paid taxes up to 70 percent. Interestingly, the actual percentage paid by the top 1 percent of earners in the US was only 16.1 percent in 1962, when the top marginal rate was 91 percent. However, in 1988, when the top rate was only 28 percent, the percentage paid by the top 1 percent of earners had risen to 21.5 percent! As the top tax rate fell by two-thirds, the percentage of their income that the top 1 percent of tax filers paid in federal income and payroll taxes rose by a third.

This seems paradoxical, but it is logical, because it is not only the tax rate that is decisive, but the amount of income that is actually taxable. In the pre-Reagan era, there were numerous exemptions, loopholes, and tax-saving schemes that top earners could use to reduce their taxable income. Reagan abolished many of these opportunities, thereby increasing the proportion of income that was subject to taxation.

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New York City Spending $5 Million PER DAY on Housing and Feeding Illegal Immigrants

New York City is reportedly spending five million dollars a day on the feeding and housing of illegal immigrants now living on the city.

In what world is this kind of figure acceptable or even sustainable? How long can this possibly go on?

Think about the size of that number and imagine what could be done with that money to help American citizens.

If New York City has that kind of money to spend on illegal immigrants, why are there homeless people in the city? How is anyone in the city going hungry?

The New York Post reports:

NYC official says city is spending an estimated $5M a day on housing, feeding migrants

New York City is spending nearly $5 million a day to house and feed thousands of migrants — but the Big Apple is still barely getting a dime in aid from President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The mind-blowing cost of the crisis was revealed Friday afternoon after city Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol told a City Council panel that Gotham’s Department of Homeless Services and Health & Hospitals each spend an average of $363 daily to provide food and shelter for just a single migrant.

Given that there are more than 30,000 migrants currently being housed in city taxpayer-funded facilities, that would amount to a daily staggering bill of $10.89 million.

City Hall then waited until Friday night to officially correct Iscol’s comments.

After Mayor Eric Adams’ administration refused for several hours to go on the record, a spokeswoman, Kate Smart, finally wrote in an e-mail to The Post that “$364 per household is the per diem for asylum seekers.”

Based on what City Hall would only say on background earlier, “there are 12,700 households currently in our care,” that puts the daily migrant cost for the city still at a colossal $4,622,800.

This is insanity.

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This AI Knows Who You Are and Who All Your Friends Are (And Is Telling the IRS)

A Bay Area tech company wants to sell AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance software to determine not just who you are but track who your friends are, too.

Vintra is a San Jose-based firm whose “co-appearance” or “correlation analysis” software can, “with a few clicks,” according to the Los Angeles Times, take any individual on a surveillance camera and backtrace him to those he’s seen with most often. From there, the software can take people deemed “likely associates” and locate them on a searchable calendar.

The Times reports that AI-enabled co-appearance technology is already in use in Communist China as part of that country’s Orwellian “social credit” digital report-and-control scheme, but Vintra appears to be the first company to market it in the West.

It’s already in use by the U.S. government:

The firm boasts on its website about relationships with the San Francisco 49ers and a Florida police department. The Internal Revenue Service and additional police departments across the country have paid for Vintra’s services, according to a government contracting database.

The IRS needs to know who your friends are because reasons. Creepy, authoritarian reasons.

Back in December, I wrote about the time facial-recognition software got a New Jersey woman forcibly removed from a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall around Thanksgiving because she works for a law firm engaged in a suit against a restaurant owned by the same parent company, MSG Entertainment, that owns Radio City. The lawyer, Kelly Conlon, was not in any way engaged in the long-running suit.

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BLM Rioters Get $6M Because Cops Didn’t Wear Face Masks

The Black Lives Matter race riots in New York City were among the worst in the country. Racist mobs injured hundreds of police officers, started fires, looted stores and vandalized parks and statues. At least 450 businesses, many of them small and family owned, were damaged or looted by the rioters who claimed to be angry over the drug overdose death of George Floyd: a vicious career criminal who had previously robbed a woman by putting a gun to her stomach.

While Black Lives Matter was swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, funneled to it by radical nonprofits, major corporations and Hollywood celebrities, family businesses in New York City looted by those rioters were offered a maximum of $10,000 to rebuild their shattered lives.

One small business owner in the Bronx complained that it would hardly even begin to cover the $200,000 in damages to her store after rioters “smashed glass display cases and medical equipment”. But participants in an extremist group’s Bronx protest are getting a much better deal. New York City will be paying $21,500 to each of the “protesters” in the Bronx for a total of as much as $6 million. And none of that money will be going to the looted businesses.

This has been described as the largest payout for mass arrests in American history.

The BLM riot era class action lawsuit claimed, among other things that the, “police officers responding to protests frequently failed to wear masks or to assist detained protesters in covering their noses and mouths, and on occasion even forcibly removed protesters’ masks, exposing protesters to a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Family businesses lost everything and cops and civilians were badly wounded during the BLM riots, but the police officers didn’t always wear masks when trying to control those riots.

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