Tag: taxes

The American Empire Is Crumbling Under Its Debt

The pivot from Republic to Empire circa 1949 remains evident even today – fully one-third of a century after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Empire was swept into the dustbin of history. As depicted in the chart below, the War Capital of the World still deploys 173,000 troops in 159 countries and maintains upwards of 750 bases in 80 countries.

Indeed, in some sense it’s as if WWII never ended. As of 2020, Washington still had large military forces in places where they had arrived 75 years ago during the final span of WWII:

  • 119 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
  • 44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
  • 25 bases and 9,275 troops in the UK.
  • 120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
  • 73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea

As we indicated in Part 2, the traditional post-war demobilization after 1945 would have wiped clean the above slate of Empire. But it was reversed in 1948-1949 when the Soviet Union got the A-bomb and Mao won the civil war in China. Thereafter, the spread of bases, troops, alliances, interventions and Forever Wars proceeded relentlessly on the grounds that the rickety communist states domiciled in Moscow and Beijing posed an existential threat to America’s survival.

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No, Illegal Immigrants Do Not Make the Country Rich

There is a joke about immigration: “If illegal aliens grow the economy, then the countries they left must be rich.” The reality is, however, that rather than making the country richer, illegal immigrants cost the country money. The amount of money the government spends on illegal aliens each year is “the equivalent of $500 per American man, woman, child, and retiree.”

Every day, approximately 5,000 illegal aliens enter the United States. The media claims that immigration is growing the US economy, using this argument to justify open borders and illegal immigration. However, there are several intentionally misleading points here. First, the economic growth attributed to immigration includes the wages earned and taxes paid by legal immigrants, which has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The fact that legal immigrants contribute to the economy does not justify what is happening at the southern border.

Yes, every additional person living in the country adds to GDP; however, there is nothing special about illegal aliens that contributes more to this growth. In fact, legal aliens are significantly better for the economy because they pay taxes and are less likely to send most of their earnings out of the country. Legal immigrants are more likely to buy a home and pay property taxes, which fund local schools. They are also more likely to start a business, creating jobs.

Adding people to the economy who do not work or contribute only grows the economy by the amount of government transfer payments they spend. However, these transfer payments come from taxes already paid by citizens or from government debt that will need to be repaid in the future. Additionally, these transfers draw funds away from existing social programs.

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NIH Official Finally Admits American Taxpayers Funded Gain-of-Function Virus Experiments in Wuhan, China

The House Select Subcommittee looking at the origins of the covid pandemic certainly has been busy.

We recently reported on the grilling EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak received. His group was responsible for partnering with Chinese bat virus researchers, and one of those coronaviruses may be the one responsible for the pandemic and the resulting destructive public health policies to contain it. During his testimony in front of the committee, Daszak indicated the intelligence community was aware of the coronavirus experiments carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology years before the pandemic.

Subsequently, all federal funding to Ecohealth Alliance was cut off.

Now the National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak has admitted to the subcommittee that Americans taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the institute in the months and years leading up to the pandemic.

“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”

“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

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Former Texas District Attorney Official Pleads Guilty to Smuggling Illegal Aliens in Government Vehicle

A former official from the Starr County District Attorney’s Office pleaded guilty on Friday to smuggling illegal aliens from the border in a government vehicle.

Bernice Annette Garza had been charged with conspiracy to transport people illegally within the United States.

Garza was arrested on December 7, 2022, during a traffic stop near Victoria. According to a report from MY RVG, four illegal aliens were found inside the District Attorney’s office vehicle at that time.

Express News reports:

In the car with Garza were Magaly Rosa and her husband, Juan Antonio Charles, both then 40 and part of the smuggling operation, according to court records.

The deputy also found four undocumented migrants in the car, records show. They were visibly trembling, were wearing new clothes and appeared to answer questions as though “rehearsed,” the complaint says.

Rosa told authorities that Garza had recruited her to smuggle migrants in her county vehicle. She said Garza provided fraudulent court papers that identified migrants as crime victims, the complaint says.

Rosa and her husband operated their home as a stash house for newly arrived migrants, according to the criminal complaint. They would buy them clothes and feed them, and then Garza would pick up the migrants and Rosa in her county vehicle for the trip to Houston, the complaint says.

Garza confessed that she and her coconspirators had made over 40 trips smuggling the migrants between June and December 2022.

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Woke DC mayor takes her 14-strong entourage 2,500 miles on taxpayer-funded ‘mission’ to LAS VEGAS just weeks after blowing thousands of the public’s cash on lavish golf trip… so do YOU think these business trips are justified?

Washington DC‘s woke Mayor Muriel Bowser will travel on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Las Vegas with her team just hours from now.

It comes just weeks after the Democrat faced backlash for attending the lavish Masters golf tournament that cost $5,000 per person, Bowser personally revealed. 

The mayor will travel with a team of 14 on an ‘economic mission’ to the International Council of Shopping Centers at the Wynn Las Vegas on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, according to her public calendar.  

‘Mayor Bowser will attend the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) to attract retail to the District of Columbia,’ the description states.

‘This economic mission is coordinated by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership, which has organized the District’s presence at ICSC since 2001,’ her office added in the event’s explanation. 

In a separate press release, the mayor’s office said ‘we know that Washingtonians in every part of DC want access to fantastic amenities. 

‘From the Lidl in Ward 7 to the Wegmans in Ward 3, those are conversations that started at ICSC.

The mayor’s team added, ‘Through programs like the Food Access Fund and the Neighborhood Prosperity Fund, we have made good progress in filling amenity gaps, but there is still more to do to ensure greater accessibility and equity – and filling those gaps and supporting the continued transformation of Downtown will be a focus of this trip.’

The traveling delegation’s aims for the trip are ‘expanding the Washington, D.C. brand’, ‘generating business leads for major development projects’, ‘fostering business relationships’ and ‘engaging with new prospects including retailers and brokers.’ 

Mayor Bowser faced intense scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a trip to one of the most exclusive sports events in the world, the US Masters in Augusta, Georgia, last week. 

The mayor’s official schedule said that on Saturday April 13, she would be traveling to the Peach state ‘as part of a sports and economic development visit.’

The communications director for Bowser’s office, Susan Castillo, told DC NewsNow this week that the mayor was invited by two people who are ‘spearheading’ a plan to rejuvenate two areas of the city.

Bowser was invited by the Task Force to Shape Future of Gallery Place/Chinatown Neighborhood chairs Jodie McLean and Deborah Ratner Salzberg, Castillo told the website. 

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NIH official finally admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — after years of denials

It’s about time!

At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”

“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials — including Tabak himself and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci — about the controversial research practice that modifies viruses to make them more infectious.

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Washington DC: The Unaffordable and Unecessary War Capital of the World

Ultimately, there is no mystery as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink a large bipartisan majority saw fit to authorize $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

To wit, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history – a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of interventionism and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such unprecedented levels of economic resources, advanced technology and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the world’s War Capital is Orwellian to the core. Its endless pursuit of war is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied-up in the form of alliances and treaties ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety and prosperity within America’s homeland.

Unfortunately, the whole intellectual foundation of the enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents of history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

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Marathon Runner Left Disabled By AstraZeneca Covid Jab Now Suing Company, But UK Taxpayers To Foot Bill

A 50-year-old UK man named Adrian Walker was left disabled after taking the AstraZeneca Covid shot, and now he’s part of a class-action lawsuit against the company.

This comes as the pharmaceutical giant takes its COVID-19 jab off the market worldwide due to health hazards.

However, even if the 51 people pursuing legal action against the company are successful in court, AstraZeneca will be financially off the hook as the UK government gave the company legal immunity during the pandemic.

Because of the government’s deal with AstraZeneca, and other Covid jab manufacturers, UK taxpayers will instead foot the bill.

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Alaska House Passes Marijuana Tax Reform Bill

A decade after Alaska voters legalized recreational marijuana, the Alaska Legislature is advancing the first major change to the law that opened commercial sales here.

On Friday, the Alaska House of Representatives voted to change the state’s $50 per ounce marijuana tax to a 7 percent sales tax.

If House Bill 119 is accepted by the Senate and Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R), it would impose Alaska’s first statewide sales tax. That pioneering concept troubled some legislators, but the bill still passed the House by a 36-3 vote.

The tax change was recommended by the state’s recreational marijuana task force, which Dunleavy convened in 2022 to analyze the marijuana industry and determine whether aspects of the industry’s enabling law—passed by voters in 2014—should be changed.

Ten years ago, Alaska joined Oregon as the third and fourth states to legalize recreational marijuana use. Since then, many other states have followed suit, but Alaska’s marijuana tax—levied at the wholesale level—is the highest in the country.

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IRS Threatens to Target Biden’s Critics, Those Who Question Washington’s ‘Ability to Govern’

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is threatening to come after individuals or organizations who question Joe Biden or the federal government’s “ability to govern,” it has confirmed.

According to a report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, the IRS is planning to expand its investigative interests to those who threaten the federal government’s “ability to govern” or present a “threat to the public safety or national security interests of the United States.”

He wrote in his Substack:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is positioned to do much more than just collect your taxes as it turns its attention to individuals who threaten the U.S. government’s “ability to govern,” a vague new criteria for criminal investigations, according to its own operating manual.

Buried in the fine print is the revelation that the IRS is pivoting away from its post-9/11 focus on financing of foreign terror groups like al Qaeda and criminal money laundering to a much broader and ill-defined “national security” threat. The shift, revealed in the latest versions of the voluminous Internal Revenue Manual, applies to IRS participation in dozens of federal government “national security” investigative task forces, which were previously referred to as “narcotics and terrorism” task forces until late last year.

Klippenstein goes on to make the case that such criteria is not typically within the investigative remit of a tax collecting agency:

Protecting stock markets and critical infrastructure, protecting the “ability to govern” — that is, the workings of United States officialdom– is hardly a mission historically associated with America’s tax collectors. Their inclusion as criteria to involve IRS special agents in federal investigations opens the door for overreach and abuse.

At a time when the IRS is subject to partisan political attack (the FY 2024 final budget reduced the $80 billion earmarked to the IRS by $20 billion), broadening the IRS mission does little to achieve what the agency says is its goal, which is forcing millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.

Earlier this month, the IRS demanded a further $20 billion from Congress to further expand its operations.

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