Tag: taxes

St. Louis Will Lose A Half-Million Dollars In Marijuana Tax Revenue After Failing To Submit Documents To Missouri Officials

The city of St. Louis will lose approximately $500,000 in tax revenue after it failed to submit documents with the Missouri Department of Revenue to collect a voter-approved recreational marijuana tax.

City voters approved a 3 percent tax on recreational marijuana in April. State law would have allowed the city to begin collecting the tax on October 1 if paperwork was filed by June 30.

Bill 139 was passed unanimously by the St. Louis Board of Aldermen last December to ask voters for permission to tax recreational marijuana by 3 percent. The state tax on recreational marijuana was set at 6 percent when Missouri voters approved the initiative last November.

“The City wishes to impose an additional sales tax to support efforts for the residents of the City of St. Louis to address historic inequalities,” the bill stated. “These efforts may include but are not limited to funding access to education, workforce opportunities, and youth engagement.”

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NYPD Will Spend Nearly $400 Million to Hide its Radio Communications

The New York Police Department (NYPD) will spend nearly $400 million to upgrade its radio system, including encrypting its communications channels, which the public has been able to tune into since 1932.

At a New York City Council meeting Monday, NYPD Chief of Information Technology Ruben Beltran said the upgrade, expected to cost $390 million, will be completed by the end of next year, replacing the old analog radio network with a fully encrypted digital system. 

The move is part of a growing trend. Over the last decade, other large police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Portland have all encrypted their radio communications or are planning to do so. Departments say broadcasting in the clear gives criminals advance warning. Beltran said encryption would also protect the information of crime victims and block pranksters who jam up NYPD frequencies. (The NYPD regularly leaks information on arrestees and even victims for political purposes.)

However, scanner enthusiasts, news organizations, and elected officials complain that encrypted radio is cutting off a longstanding and useful source of information on police activity. As Gothamist reported, NYPD radio chatter has been the source of several major news stories over the years:

The New York Daily News obtained the crucial video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner thanks to a call that came over the police radio in Staten Island. As tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators flooded the streets in June 2020, Gothamist recorded NYPD officers on radio airwaves using threatening language about the protesters, including saying that officers should run protesters over and shoot them. Responding, one officer was recorded saying “don’t put that over air.”

Police frequencies going dark is especially challenging for photojournalists, who rely on scanners to get to emergency scenes as fast as possible. The Chicago Police Department is considering a 30-minute public broadcast delay to allow news organizations to still hear dispatch calls.

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Up In Smoke: California’s Largest Pot Distributor Collapses Amid $17 Million In Unpaid Taxes

In mid-May, as rumors of the company’s dire situation swirled, CEO Mike Beaudry insisted “these rumors are categorically not true.”

HERBL completely collapsed less than a month later, following in the footsteps of other California cannabis startups like Flow Kana and MedMen.

The company leaves behind $17 million in unpaid taxes, while several smaller pot companies which have been left in the lurch, SFGate reports.

“Mike [Beaudry, HERBL’s CEO] and his team did a really good job of hiding that fact from their own brands… that’s how they kept getting our products,” said Ali Jamalian, owner of San Francisco cannabis company Sunset Connect, who claims that HERBL owes him $180,000.

Another CEO, Tyler Kearns of Sacramento-based cannabis company Seven Leaves, said HERBL owes his company $880,000. He says he knew the collapsed distributor was in trouble when he found out in June that they were laying off delivery drivers, and that it was going to be near impossible to get that money back.

“I knew this was going to be the biggest failure in U.S. cannabis history,” he told the outlet.

HERBL’s role in the California cannabis ecosystem was crucial, acting as a middleman between pot producers and retailers. Its downfall isn’t just a bad trip for the company; it’s a red flag for the industry, indicating that even the mightiest can fall due to systemic issues.

“I do feel like we’re going to see a significant and material number of closures, up and down the supply chain,” said Wesley Hein, president of the Cannabis Distribution Association, who attributes HERBL’s failure in part to poor business decisions – particularly its continued reliance on traditional distribution models while pot retailers struggled to pay their bills. He says the collapse also exposes systemic issues in the state’s pot industry that will doom other industries – such as overtaxation, competition from unlicensed businesses, and “very excessive and overly burdensome regulations.”

He compared the collapse of HERBL to Lehman.

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NYPD detective Louis Scarcella dubbed ‘the closer’ is accused of rigging DOZENS of murder cases and costing taxpayers $110 MILLION in settlements to wrongly-convicted prisoners

A retired NYPD detective accused of rigging dozens of murder cases has cost taxpayers $110million in settlements from 14 overturned convictions.

Louis N. Scarcella, known to colleagues as ‘the closer,’ allegedly coerced confessions and made up witness testimony to help secure convictions leading to people spending decades locked up before being exonerated.

The cost to the taxpayer has been colossal. New York City has paid $73.1 million in settlements to people investigated by the former detective, and the state has paid out another $36.9 million, according to The New York Times. 

The city is expected to be on the hook for tens of millions more, as three men cleared last year of burning a subway token clerk alive in 1995 have filed lawsuits. 

A second-generation cop who smoked cigars, ran marathons, worked a side job at a Coney Island amusement park and jokingly put ‘adventurer’ on his business card, Scarcella, now 72, worked in the Brooklyn North homicide squad during the crack epidemic of the eighties and nineties.

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Every family is entitled to FREE Covid tests ahead of Thanksgiving get togethers as part of $600million Biden project to prevent wave of cases

Every family in the US will be entitled to order up to eight free Covid tests this winter to help avoid spreading the virus to loved ones.

Families were offered four tests per household in late September, but this has now been expanded to another four swabs — which are worth $12 per package.

The tests — made available through a $600million grant to test suppliers — can be ordered online from CovidTests.gov and take at least two weeks to arrive.

They are being offered ahead of the Christmas and New Year vacations, but the update comes too late for Thanksgiving — with orders needing to have already been placed to guarantee the swabs’ arrival.

Covid cases are rising again at present, with wastewater surveillance showing a five percent uptick in the concentration of Covid particles over the week to November 8. Flu cases are also ticking up, with the number reported rising 60 percent in the week to November 12, the latest available.

A total of 14.5million homes have ordered free Covid tests so far, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services told DailyMail.com. 

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New York Governor Signs Marijuana Tax Cut Bills, Providing Local 280E Relief For NYC Businesses

New York’s governor has signed legislation that to provide tax relief to New York City marijuana businesses that are currently blocked from making federal deductions under an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code known as 280E.

About five months after the Senate and Assembly approved the proposal, and less than a week after both chambers formally transmitted their identical bills to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), she signed them into law on Friday.

While Hochul signed a separate budget bill last year that included provisions allow state-level cannabis business tax deductions—a partial remedy to the ongoing federal issue—New York City has its own tax laws that weren’t affected by that change. The new measure is meant to fill that policy gap.

“This bill would allow a deduction for business expenses, incurred by taxpayers authorized by the Cannabis Law to engage in the sale, distribution, or production of adult-use cannabis products or medical cannabis, for purposes of the unincorporated business tax (UBT), the general corporation tax (GCT), and the corporate tax of 2015, commonly referred to as the business corporation tax (BCT),” a summary says.

A section of the city’s tax code would be amended to add sections allowing the deductions “in an amount equal to any federal deduction disallowed by section 280E of the internal revenue code.”

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Florida’s Bloated Prison System Will Cost Billions To Maintain

Florida’s crumbling prison system and aging prison population will cost the state billions to maintain, according to a newly released report commissioned by the state.

A report presented to Florida state lawmakers on Wednesday by the firm KPMG says that Florida will have to pay somewhere between $6 billion and $12 billion over the next 20 years to keep its troubled Department of Corrections (DOC) afloat.

KPMG presented lawmakers with three different options, from most-expensive to least-expensive, to “modernize,” “manage,” or “mitigate” its prison system. According to the report, the Florida prison population is projected to swell from nearly 89,000 people to at least 107,000 by 2042. As it stands, KPMG found that 25 DOC facilities were in “poor” condition, and 16 were in “critical” condition.

Regardless of which option legislators choose, the price tag includes over $580 million for new air conditioning systems (75 percent of Florida state prisons do not have air conditioning), $2.2 billion for immediate repairs, and $200 million to $700 million a year to increase staffing. All three of the proposals include building at least one new prison and two new prison hospitals.

“The findings in the report confirm what lawmakers in both parties and Department of Corrections leadership have been saying for years, which is that the state prison system is in crisis and unsustainable,” says Greg Newburn, the director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center, says.

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Pentagon Fails To Account For Over $3 Trillion For 6th Year In A Row

The Pentagon has failed its independent annual audit for the sixth year in a row, as US defense officials could not provide auditors with enough information to form a full accounting evaluation, according to the Defense Department’s yearly financial report released on Thursday.

“Auditing the department’s $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities is a massive undertaking,” Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord said.

The 2023 audit gave a “disclaimer of opinion,” which means the Pentagon could not provide auditors enough financial data to allow them to form an opinion. An unqualified, or “clean,” opinion is the highest possible rating and a qualified opinion is an acceptable rating. Both mean that auditors were given enough information to make a complete judgement.

In 2022, the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. With this failure, the Pentagon has kept its spot as the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. It also highlights the US war department’s persistent lack of internal financial control, its poor budget estimations and rampant overspending. 

A clear example of this is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to build a plane tasked to perform many different tasks, none of which it does well.The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating these planes – $1.7 trillion – would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

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Americans Are Still Fleeing High-Tax States

“Every year, millions of Americans pack up and move from one state to another, providing unique insights into what people value when deciding where to live, work, and raise a family,” Andrey Yushkov and Katherine Loughead, senior policy analysts for the Tax Foundation, wrote last week. “The latest IRS and Census data show that people and businesses favor states with low and structurally sound tax systems, which can impact the state’s economic growth and governmental coffers.”

This may seem like a “duh” moment for many readers. All things being equal, who doesn’t prefer to live in places where politicians are less prone than the competition to pick pockets and smother progress? And for normal people, the idea that high taxes are a turn-off is common sense.

But we’re not talking about normal people; we’re talking about government officials who use their long-suffering subjects like milking cows and prefer to do so without consequences. There’s even a cottage industry of pundits—like Stanford sociologist Cristobal Young, author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight—who tell politicians what they want to hear.

That politicians aren’t as fooled as they pretend is obvious from the efforts of high-tax jurisdictions to penalize those who flee. In 2018, Illinois legislators passed a law to claw back tax breaks from “any recipient business that chooses to move all or part of its business operations and the jobs created by its business out-of-State.”

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Government Gives Billions in Grants Each Year to Ivy League Universities

A new report from government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com tallies up federal money issued to 10 elite private universities: the eight that make up the Ivy League—Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth College—plus Northwestern and Stanford.

Between 2018–2022, these 10 universities received $33.1 billion in federal contracts and grants. The largest recipient was Stanford, with just over $7 billion; Dartmouth was the only institution not to receive at least $1 billion, capping out at just over $755 million.

Of the $33 billion total, the report notes, only about $4.18 billion came in the form of contracts, in which work is done on behalf of a federal agency that then owns the results; the remainder, more than $28.9 billion, was distributed as grants, whereby an institution receives government money to fund its own projects.

In some cases, universities receive more money per year from the government than from their students: In the 2021–22 school year, Princeton University took in nearly $145 million in net tuition and fees (tuition paid minus scholarships disbursed), but it received over $362 million in government grants and contracts—more than twice the amount it received in tuition. In the 2022–2023 school year, Yale took in more than $458 million in net tuition and room and board costs, but it brought in a whopping $1.038 billion in government grant and contract income.

As private institutions, the universities in question are nominally meant to be funded by student tuition and donations; most also have generous endowments, assets invested to support the institution over a long period of time. And federal grant programs exist that are intended to fund research into projects that could have larger societal benefits: For example, the first COVID-19 vaccines were developed in part at Emory University and Vanderbilt University, with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

But the endowments themselves cast doubt on whether this money is truly necessary. As the OpenTheBooks.com report notes, in the five years during which the 10 universities in question received over $33 billion in government funds, they also grew their collective endowments by $64.8 billion. Stanford, which took in over $7 billion in government funds, grew its endowment from $26.5 billion to $36.5 billion over the same period.

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