Tag: taxes

California Democrats Vote to Force Taxpayers to Subsidize $150,000 Down Payment on Homes for Illegals – But the CA Department of Finance Confirms the Program Has No Money!

California Democrat state senators on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill that would give illegal aliens $150,000 interest-free home mortgage loans.

Illegal aliens will get zero down payment, interest-free home mortgage loans under this new bill.

California’s Democrat governor Gavin Newsom hasn’t said whether he will sign the bill.

Democrat assemblymember Joaquin Arambula (Fresno) recently introduced Assembly Bill 1840 to extend a first-time homebuyer loan program to illegal aliens.

If the bill becomes law, illegal aliens will be eligible for a new program that offers a loan worth 20% of the purchase price of the residential property. There are no monthly payments and no interest accrues on the loan. Rather, the loan is paid back when the borrower refinances or sells the property. The borrower will have to pay back the original loan plus a 20% increase in the value of the property.

California’s Democrat lawmakers in the State Senate approved AB 1840 23-11.

The bill will head to the California assembly for final approval after lawmakers in the senate made changes.

Keep reading

Democrats Aren’t Really Protecting Social Security

The discussion over the future of Social Security has once again drifted to the sidelines this political season. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because it has pulled a vanishing act every election year over the past decade.

While you have likely heard that the program pays more than 70 million people, not many address the fact that another 30 million Americans are about to start collecting Social Security over the coming decade. Although monthly Social Security payments may not be important to every one of these people, roughly 40 percent will depend on their Social Security check as their primary source of income. Basically, the program is a lifeline to millions of Americans. 

For most of us, these people are also known as mom and dad; ma and pa; and soon enough, the person in the mirror. Despite the importance of the program, any question about the reliability of its payments drifts from election to election as it maintains its inevitable course toward insolvency. 

Against this backdrop, voters need to consider that the longer we do nothing, the worse the problem gets. Or put another way, the greatest threat to Social Security is the passage of time and the politics of the status quo.

To illustrate this point, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) co-sponsored the Social Security Expansion Act of 2019. That proposal was based on the 2018 Trustees Report, which used data from the year ending 2017. So, the last time that the current Democrat nominee for president looked at the problem, it was nearly half the size that it is today.

Moreover, Harris’ proposal didn’t deal with the entirety of the problem as it was. It came up 20 percent short of what the problem was even back then.

As another example, presidential candidate Joe Biden back in 2020 argued that the wealthy should pay their fair share. He defined wealthy as those earning more than $400,000 in annual income. In 2024, the definition hasn’t changed despite inflation levels the country hasn’t seen in decades. In a growing economy, the definition of rich should rise faster than inflation. In Biden’s mind, the measure fell by nearly 20 percent in real terms purely as a matter of the clock going tick-tock.

Folks, the clock continues to tick. On August 14, Kamala Harris released a statement: “For 89 years, Social Security has made the difference between poverty or peace of mind for millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and other beneficiaries. As President, I will protect and expand these bedrock programs.”

In the five minutes that it took her team to post that empty rhetoric, the program generated another $5 million in empty promises. 

Keep reading

The Politics of Envy

Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.

Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell for seven figures and up. The Guardian describes a luxury London development where the main door opens to luxury marble tiling and plush doors, and a sign on the wall alerts residents to the fact that the concierge is available. Round the back, the entrance to the affordable homes is a cream corridor, decorated only with grey mailboxes and a poster warning tenants that they are on CCTV and will be prosecuted if they cause any damage.

To me, this is an amazing passage. In Larson’s example, some “regular working people” are housed in some of the most luxurious apartments in the world. But Larson still objects because these people don’t get to use the fancier entrances made for the superrich who pay market rates. As you read Larson, you can feel his seething hatred for the rich: he would like to pull them down, just because they are able to afford things others cannot. He offers no evidence that the working people in the apartments are dissatisfied. If I had to guess, I would imagine them to be happy to be getting the windfall that results from the government’s interference with the free market on their behalf; but whether I am right does not in the present context matter. The point is simply to expose Larson’s emotion for what it is. As an analogy, consider someone who resents first-class air travel, not because he finds coach class uncomfortable, but just because others travel under better conditions than he does. And the case that envy and hatred are involved in Larson’s example is stronger than for the air travel case. Except for the entrance, the working people are getting the luxury good—but this is not enough for Larson.

A much more prominent economist than Larson illustrates the same attitude. Thomas Piketty’s central idea is that inequality is the supreme social sin and must be radically curtailed. He doesn’t deny that capitalism results in economic growth and an enhanced standard of living, but the income and wealth of the rich have grown far faster than those of the poor. You might ask why this matters, even granting his dubious statistics: Don’t people care about how well they are doing, much more than they resent the rich, if in fact they resent them at all?

Keep reading

Oregon Voters to Consider Approving Nation’s First Universal Basic Income

Oregonians will vote in November on a controversial ballot measure that would give every resident, regardless of age or income, $1,600 each year—as long as they live at least 200 days in the state.

A family of four would receive $6,400 annually, with no strings attached. The money would be non-taxable and would not affect other benefits.

If voters approve Measure 118, the Universal Basic Income (UBI) program would be funded by a tax on the gross receipts of corporations that generate more than $25 million in annual sales.

Oregon would be the first state to roll out such a comprehensive UBI.

As of June 2024, no U.S. states have a UBI program, though several states and cities have run pilot programs.

However, the “Oregon People’s Rebate” proposal is meeting with stiff bipartisan resistance from elected officials and pushback from the business community.

Keep reading

Government announces more COVID-19 tests can be ordered through mail for no cost

On the heels of a summer wave of COVID-19 cases, Americans will be able to get free virus test kits mailed to their homes, starting in late September.

U.S. households will be able to order up to four COVID-19 nasal swab tests when the federal program reopens, according to the website, COVIDtests.gov. The U.S. Health and Human Services agency that oversees the testing has not announced an exact date for ordering to begin.

The tests will detect current virus strains and can be ordered ahead of the holiday season when family and friends gather for celebrations, an HHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Over-the-counter COVID-19 at-home tests typically cost around $11, as of last year.

The announcement also comes as the government is once again urging people to get an updated COVID-19 booster, ahead of the fall and winter respiratory virus season. 

Keep reading

Democrats Push Cheap Housing for Illegal Migrants

Democratic politicians nationwide are trying to put many illegal migrants into apartments and homes that would otherwise go to young Americans.

In California, Democrats in the state Assembly have passed legislation that would create homebuyer tax breaks for illegal migrants who walked through weak border controls.

“When undocumented individuals are excluded from such [house-buying] programs, they miss out on a crucial method of securing financial security and personal stability for themselves and their families,” according to the sponsor, Rep. Joaquin Arambula, a Democrat with a large and poor Latino constituency in Fresno Valley.

The giveaway will drive up Americans’ housing costs — and make life tougher for the 85 percent of American-born California families who earn less than roughly $80,000 per year and spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a pro-migrant advocacy group.

In Canada, the government’s mass migration policy is preventing many young Canadians from buying homes, reducing the birth rate, exploding Canada’s homeless population, and shifting vast wealth to older investors. Many young people will lose the retirement wealth that their parents earned from house ownership, Canada’s pro-migration Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted in July.

Keep reading

Be Prepared to Hear More about Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

Americans currently pay a wide variety of federal taxes on earned income, investment income, estates, gifts, alcohol, tobacco, and tariffs on numerous imports. Americans also pay state and local taxes on real property, personal property, retail sales, alcohol and tobacco.

No matter who becomes president in January 2025, Americans must be prepared for a great deal of heat—and perhaps some light—on taxes over the next year. At the top of the list will be former president Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), the provisions of which expire in December 2025. Congress must grapple with calls to extend many of the law’s provisions as the country faces continuing large federal budget deficits. It is unclear how the new 119th Congress may deal with TCJA expiration, and what the US tax code may look like after 2025.

Keep reading

Partners in Genocide: Israel Is Slaughtering Palestinians With Western Arms

While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the Academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential”.

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths”, according to the Lancet.

Keep reading

California advances 0 down, no payment home ‘loans’ for undocumented immigrants

The California Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to make use of the state’s zero down, no payment home “loan” program, an expansion the legislature says would create “significant cost pressures.”

The social and economic benefits of homeownership should be available to everyone. As such, the California Dream for All Program should be available to all,” wrote bill author Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno. “When undocumented individuals are excluded from such programs, they miss out on a crucial method of securing financial security and personal stability for themselves and their families.

AB 1840, which already passed the Assembly and now faces a floor vote in the Senate, would prevent the state’s California Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loans program from denying individuals on the basis of their immigration status. This program allows applicants to secure “loans” of up to 20% of the home’s purchase price — or, about what a typical down payment is — with zero down payment on this state loan, and no payments.

The state’s “loan” can potentially be repaid to the state when the home is refinanced, sold, or transferred, with the borrower paying back the original loan amount plus 20% of any increase in value on the property. It’s not clear what happens if a family decides to hold on to a home as there are no provisions on how long a property can be held for, which means certain kinds of trusts could potentially allow the loan to not be paid back.

The Appropriations Committee analysis said expansion would create “unknown significant cost pressures, potentially in the millions annually, to provide additional funding for the Home Purchase Assistance Program to accommodate the expanded eligibility population.”

This year, 18 thousand individuals applied for the $255 million “loan” program through a lottery, leaving 1,700 lucky winners with up to $150,000 each towards down payment and closing costs.

Keep reading

F-35: $2T in ‘generational wealth’ the military had no right to spend

On October 26, 2001, Jim Roche, the then Secretary of the Air Force, stood behind the podium in the Pentagon briefing room to announce that Lockheed Martin had won the competition to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Joining him on the stage, were Edward Aldridge, the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy.

All three took turns at the microphone to tout the Joint Strike Fighter’s anticipated virtues. “The Joint Strike Fighter is a family of highly common, lethal, survivable, supportable, and affordable next generation multirole strike fighter aircraft,” said Aldridge.

All these claims have proven to be spurious to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent years as the F-35 program limped through a seemingly endless development process, but none so much as the “affordable” claim. At the time of the announcement, the F-35 was supposed to enter active service in 2008 and the program was expected to cost $200 billion.

Nearly 23 years later, the F-35 is officially the most expensive weapon program in history clocking with an anticipated total program cost of $2 trillion and engineers continue to struggle to make the jet work properly with development and procurement costs having more than doubled.

The three men who made that announcement were nearing the end of their long careers. Aldridge retired from the government in 2003 and went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin. Jim Roche left the Pentagon in 2005 and became the director of Orbital ATK. Gordon England eventually became deputy secretary of defense before retiring in 2009.

Through their Joint Strike Fighter decision, these three men committed the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a program that has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. They created a massive financial obligation that future generations of taxpayers must bear, without the much-touted program having produced any of the actual security benefits it was supposed to bring to the U.S. armed forces.

By the time the program’s conceptual flaws became obvious, all three individuals had long since left government service and it was left to an entire generation of their successors to salvage something from the mess they left behind.

It is that last point the individuals who temporarily occupy offices vested with such authorities need to keep front of mind. They have the power to commit future generations to truly massive amounts of spending. All three of the prime F-35 decision-makers were born in the 1930s making them part of the Silent Generation. Generation X, the Millennials, and Gens Z and Alpha must bear the burden of their decisions.

The power to spend such generational wealth should not be wielded in a perfunctory manner. Those with the power of the pen should be far less credulous when people pitch them on pie-in-the-sky programs based on unproven technological promises and assumptions.

Keep reading