Tag: taxes

Supreme Court Rules That US Government Must Cover Native American Health Care

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on June 6 that the federal government will have to cover Indian tribes’ costs incurred in operating tribal health care programs.

The majority opinion in Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe and Becerra v. Northern Arapaho Tribe was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by all three liberal justices and one conservative.

U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra was the petitioner in both cases. He appealed unfavorable rulings by lower courts.

The respondent, the San Carlos Apache Indian Tribe, is based in Arizona. The other respondent, the Northern Arapaho Tribe, is based in Wyoming.

The ruling means the U.S. government will have to pay for overhead costs related to health care that the tribes provide under a federal law intended to give Native Americans greater control.

“Aside from being inconsistent with the statute’s text, [the government’s] failure to cover contract support costs for healthcare funded by program income inflicts a penalty on tribes for opting in favor of greater self-determination,” the majority opinion states.

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Washington State Law Exempting Some Medical Marijuana Purchases From Steep 37% Tax Takes Effect

Some purchases of medical marijuana in Washington State will no longer be subject to the state’s 37 percent cannabis tax under a new law taking effect on Thursday. The exemption, signed into law in March by Gov. Jay Inslee (D), applies specifically to products that have been certified to higher testing standards than typical state-legal products.

Medical marijuana cardholders were already eligible for exemptions from Washington’s sales and use taxes on cannabis, but they were not exempt from the state’s excise tax, one of the highest in the country.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Sharon Wylie (D) and two other Democrats allows state-registered patients and caregivers to avoid the tax when purchasing products that are compliant with Department of Health (DOH) testing standards, which are more rigorous than typical state cannabis standards. Manufacturers in the state are required to submit all medical and adult-use products to labs for testing, but producers can voluntarily have additional testing done—to screen for heavy metals, for example—that isn’t otherwise required.

Marijuana that passes the additional testing can be labeled with a DOH-developed logo, which now also serves as an indication that the product is tax-free for patients and caretakers.

Many states with both adult-use and medical marijuana already exempt patients from taxes.

Washington’s tax break is only temporary. As written, the new law is set to expire on June 30, 2029. A report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee on the revenue impacts of the change is due in 2028.

One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Rep. Shelley Kloba (D) also sponsored a cannabis homegrow bill this session—the latest in a series of such measures introduced over the past several years—but the proposal ultimately died in committee. If passed, HB 2194 would have allowed adults 21 and older to grow up to four plants per person, with no more than 10 allowed per household. Home cultivation of marijuana without a medical marijuana card remains a felony in the state.

Kloba told Marijuana Momentthat she’s co mmitted to continued advocacy for the policy change and plans to introduce yet another homegrow measure next year.

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New York Spends $225 Million on Its Own “Cop City” — to Make the Whole City Run on Cops

NEW YORK CITY Mayor Eric Adams announced last Friday that the city would spend at least $225 million on a new police training facility in the borough of Queens. The mayor’s decision to pour further public funding into policing comes as he slashed services to the city’s most vulnerable, including cutting library budgets by $58.3 million.

The priorities could not be clearer. Like many politicians across the country, the mayor wants to disinvest from public services and privatize them, while instead increasing mass policing and carceral enforcement as a response to social problems.

To see just how much Adams has become the paragon of governance through policing, one need only look at the intended purposes of the police training facility. The site will be used to train law enforcement officers for all the city’s agencies — including the departments of Sanitation, Homeless Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission — under one roof, alongside New York Police Department officers.

In response to the mayor’s announcement, a number of commentators on social media decried the plan as a “Cop City” for New York — the term used to describe a vast police training facility under construction in Atlanta, which will swallow up crucial forest land in that city.

Despite the fact that the Atlanta facility will be a compound of over 85 acres, the cost is estimated to be a ballooning $109 million — less than half the amount New York City is dedicating to its new training building.

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The National Debt Is Making Us Poorer

Many Americans are unhappy about years of higher-than-normal inflation that have sapped buying power and reduced standards of living.

Now, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) demonstrates that a difficult culprit will make you feel poorer over the next few decades: The nearly $35 trillion (and growing) national debt.

At its current trajectory, the rising national debt—and the increasing burden of making interest payments on it—will reduce Americans’ future income growth by 12 percent over the next 30 years, the CBO projects in a new report. That means the average person will earn about $5,000 less annually than they would in a scenario where the debt was not growing.

“This is the result of crowding out, whereby a higher national debt reduces private investment and slows income growth,” explain the number crunchers at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for reducing the federal deficit. “With additional debt, income growth would slow further.”

If the national debt grows faster than the CBO currently expects—something that could happen due to wars, pandemics, or simply because lawmakers in Washington can’t cure their addiction to borrowing—the average person could miss out on $14,000 annually in future income gains that won’t materialize, the CRFB predicts.

That crowding-out effect is a serious threat to future economic growth. There are a finite number of dollars in the economy in any given year, and each dollar that has to be taxed away to make an interest payment on the debt is a dollar that cannot be invested, spent, or paid to an employee.

The costs of rising debt can be a bit difficult to understand because we don’t see reductions in potential earnings as obviously as we see price increases at the grocery store. Still, the effect is pretty similar. Americans’ experience with inflation in recent years is helpful in understanding how the cost of the national debt depresses living standards.

In the CBO’s baseline model, average earnings are expected to climb from about $84,000 this year to $123,000 in 2054, 30 years from now. That sounds great, except for the fact that average earnings would have climbed to about $128,000 by 2054 in a scenario where the national debt was stable and not growing.

To someone living in 2054, that $5,000 won’t feel real because it never existed. But it would have existed, if not for the poor decisions by federal officials in the 2010s and 2020s.

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U-2 Retirement Reprieve Emerges In Proposed Defense Spending Bill

Members of Congress are moving to prevent the U.S. Air Force from retiring its fleet of iconic U-2 Dragon Lady spy planes. The Pentagon approved a waiver last year that had cleared the way for the service to begin divesting the high-flying Cold War-era jets, which The War Zone was first to report. The Air Force’s current plan is to divest the last of the U-2s in 2026 and supplant them with a mix of still largely undefined space-based and other capabilities, which is widely believed to include a classified stealthy high-altitude drone.

The House Appropriations Committee released a draft of the annual defense spending bill for the upcoming 2025 Fiscal Year earlier today. It includes a provision that, should the bill become law, would explicitly and without exception prevent “funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act” from being “used to divest or prepare to divest any U-2 aircraft.”

As of the start of Fiscal Year 2024, the Air Force had 31 U-2s in its inventory, including a trio of two-seat TU-2S trainers.

Until last year, the Air Force had been blocked from retiring any U-2s by provisions in annual defense policy bills, or National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA), enacted in previous fiscal years. However, the earlier legislation had included a path to proceeding with retiring the venerable spy planes if the Pentagon could certify that certain stipulations had been met. Chief among these was the insistence that the resulting capability gap would be filled in a cost-effective manner. You can read more about this here.

“On October 30, 2023, the Secretary of Defense [Lloyd Austin] signed a waiver to divest the U-2 Dragon Lady in accordance with language in the FY 2021 NDAA waiver requirement. In signing the waiver, Secretary of Defense certified combatant commands will continue to be able to accomplish their missions at acceptable levels of risk,” an annual force structure report the Pentagon released in April further explains. “The ability to win future high-end conflicts requires accepting short-term risks by divesting legacy ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconniassance] assets that offer limited capability against peer and near-peer threats. The USAF will fleet-divest the remaining 31 U-2 aircraft starting October 1, 2026.”

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NYC Hotel Room Prices Skyrocket as 20% of Hotels Converted to Migrant Shelters

Average hotel room prices in New York City have exploded now that 20% of hotels have been converted into shelters for illegal aliens.

The average hotel room rate in the city reached a record high of $301 a night since 1 out of every 5 hotels have turned into migrant shelters since 2022, the New York Times reported last week.

“About 135 of the city’s roughly 680 hotels entered the shelter program, with many congregated in Midtown Manhattan, Long Island City in Queens and near Kennedy International Airport — all traditional magnets for tourists,” The Times reported.

“Participating hotels are paid up to $185 a night per room, according to the city. Not a single one has converted back into a traditional hotel.“

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Seattle-area city to host taxpayer funded LGBTQ Pride catwalk for toddlers

A taxpayer-funded LGBTQ pride event in Lynnwood, Washington will feature a “kids catwalk,” in which a panel of adults will judge toddlers while they strut down the runway to sexually charged music.

One of the judges is Democrat state Sen. Marko Liias, who is the legislator behind SB 5599, which allows for minors to be taken by the state if their parents don’t allow them to obtain sex change procedures.

Also judging are Democrat Lynnwood City Council Members Josh Binda and Nick Coehlo, and former Democrat State Senator Maralyn Chase, The Center Square reported.

The “Wizard of Oz” themed event is scheduled for June 8 at the Lynnwood Convention Center and will be hosted by Lynnwood Pride in partnership with the City of Lynnwood, just north of Seattle.

“The Fashion Catwalk Contest” will be from 2 to 3 pm and split by different age groups. The kids category is for children between the ages of 2 to 12, according to Lynnwood Pride’s website.

Participants will select a three-minute song of their choice. The list of song choices suggested by Lynnwood Pride are songs that contain sexually charged lyrics. This includes “Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyonce, “Free Your Mind” by En Vogue, and “Supermodel – You Better Work” by RuPaul.

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Biden admin backs ‘harm reduction groups’ that give free drug paraphernalia to addicts

President Biden and his administration have expressed support for providing free drug paraphernalia to fentanyl and other illicit drug users, an effort made feasible by controversial harm reduction groups that believe supplying addicts with clean smoking gear would reduce overdose deaths by eliminating injection methods.

However, a study released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that smoking fentanyl was increasingly linked to overdose deaths in 27 states and Washington, DC. Researchers found that 74 percent of overdose deaths were linked to smoking fentanyl, while fentanyl overdose deaths through injection plummeted.

The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration has embraced the approach of harm reduction groups, despite the fact that these groups have received widespread criticism, and their efforts, which have failed to create significant positive outcomes, have been banned in numerous jurisdictions.

Critics of harm reduction groups believe supplying addicts with free drug paraphernalia only enables their addictions, and think alternative methods such as rehabilitation and therapy are better options. Those who favor harm reduction measures believe that providing clean drug equipment to users, such as smoke pipes and needles, and creating so-called “safe injection sites,” would prevent overdose deaths and the spread of infections caused by sharing needles. However, their methods have been proven as failed experiments.

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Are Biden And Netanyahu Orchestrating War In the United States?

I start by saying it outright: America is on the precipice of war! And I’m talking not only about war abroad; I’m talking about war within the United States. And these wars are being deliberately orchestrated by President Joe Biden in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

Strong language? Yes. But the facts prove the language is not hyperbolic.

On February 8, I wrote a column entitled U.S. Government Gives Millions To Jewish Group To Escort Illegals Into America.

In that column, I quoted Peggy Hall saying:

Here are the dark and dirty details of how the US is financially footing the bill for the immigrant invasion.

There is a Jewish organization called HIAS, which stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

HIAS gets hundreds of millions of dollars in US funding through the Office of Refugees Resettlement (ORR). ORR was created by Brandon Biden as part of the Department of Health and Human Services in the federal government. (Note: just a reminder for how bloated and excessive the federal government is. There is NOTHING in the Constitution that allows for these unfettered agencies that are created on the whim of the president.)

Check out the ORR website here, and note near the bottom of the list of agencies that are getting matching grants from YOUR money.

You’ll see that HIAS is listed as one of those agencies.

HIAS spends YOUR tax dollars on getting 500,000 ILLEGALS all the way from South America and Central America into the USA.

You might think that the poor immigrants should get the red carpet welcome wagon treatment. After all, think of the deplorable conditions they are escaping, not to mention the risks these asylum seekers face while trying to escape to a better life.

Um… that’s not really the case, at least for these refugees that are helped every step of the way by HIAS (funded with millions of dollars from the US government).

Keep reading, and I’ll show you exactly how HIAS describes how they are helping HALF a MILLION refugees cross the dangerous Darien Gap in the Panamanian jungle to grab money, housing, transportation, cash grants, medical care and jobs that should be going to authentic Americans.

After that column was published, I was chided by several people accusing me of distorting the facts relative to the significance of the HIAS connection to the collusion between Joe Biden’s White House and the Israeli organization in the planned and orchestrated smuggling of not 500,000 but millions of criminal illegal aliens into America—at a taxpayer expense amounting to billions of dollars.

Well, it turns out, not only was I right, but the half was not even told.

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Another Missouri Judge Approves Stacking City And County Marijuana Taxes

Buchanan County can collect a special marijuana sales tax on dispensaries within St. Joseph city limits, a judge ruled Wednesday in the second decision granting counties the right to stack taxes on top of city levies.

Circuit Judge Daniel Kellogg wrote in his two-page ruling that provisions in the recreational marijuana constitutional amendment passed in 2022 do not limit the taxing power of counties within corporate limits of towns and cities.

“To put it bluntly, the court cannot accept [the] plaintiff’s interpretation of ‘Local Government’ to prohibit the power of the county to impose such tax within the Saint Joseph city limits,” Kellogg wrote. “The definition of ‘Local Government’ includes both the city and the county. As such, both are authorized to impose and collect the tax.”

Vertical Enterprises, which is licensed for retail sales, cultivation and marijuana product manufacturing in St. Joseph, sued the Buchanan County Collector’s office, the Missouri Department of Revenue and the Buchanan County Clerk’s office to block enforcement of the tax.

Along with regular sales taxes—which in some locations approach 12 percent—people purchasing marijuana for recreational use also pay a special 6 percent state tax and a local tax of 3 percent if approved by voters.

The ruling will cost Vertical’s customers about $30,000 a month, said Chris McHugh, CEO of the company. There are two other dispensaries in St. Joseph and he estimated their tax payments would be comparable to his.

“Consumers should be outraged,” McHugh said. “They’re paying this.”

Statewide, consumers purchased $1.1 billion worth of marijuana in the first year of recreational use sales.

“This is millions and millions of dollars that never, never should be taken from consumers,” McHugh said. “It’s nothing but an anti-marijuana tax.”

McHugh said he will appeal Kellogg’s decision.

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