Tag: taxes

California offers $100 million to rescue its struggling legal marijuana industry

The California Legislature on Monday approved a $100-million plan to bolster California’s legal marijuana industry, which continues to struggle to compete with the large illicit pot market nearly five years after voters approved sales for recreational use.

Los Angeles will be the biggest beneficiary of the money, which was proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to be provided as grants to cities and counties to help cannabis businesses transition from provisional to regular licenses.

“California voters approved Proposition 64 five years ago and entrusted the Legislature with creating a legal, well-regulated cannabis market,” said Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), the chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee. “We have yet to reach that goal.”

Many cannabis growers, retailers and manufacturers have struggled to make the transition from a provisional, temporary license to a permanent one renewed on an annual basis — a process that requires a costly, complicated and time-consuming review of the negative environmental effects involved in a business and a plan for reducing those harms.

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Biden’s Disturbing Plans to Expand the IRS, Disclosure Rules Should Worry Conservatives

President Biden’s budget proposal calls for increasing funding for the IRS by $80 billion, much of which would go toward hiring nearly 87,000 new workers over the next 10 years. If Congress adopts Biden’s plan, the size of the IRS would double, with its workforce increasing by about 15 percent every year.

According to the Biden administration, the primary reason behind the expansion is to help the IRS chase down individuals and families who cheat on their taxes. Apparently, the tens of thousands of people who already work at the IRS aren’t enough to get the job done.

In addition to Biden’s plan to expand the size of the staff at the IRS, the White House and congressional Democrats have also proposed substantially increasing disclosure requirements for groups that spend money on political advertising, a policy proposal contained in the For the People Act, legislation that is separate from Biden’s budget.

Under the For the People Act, also commonly referred to as H.R. 1, many organizations that spend money during election cycles would be forced to reveal donors who have given at least $10,000.

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‘Let’s not jump to conclusions’: Joe Biden’s acting White House budget director REFUSES to rule out sending more US money to Wuhan lab until science proves if it leaked coronavirus

The acting head of the White House budget office has refused to rule out sending more US money to the Wuhan lab COVID-19 is feared to have leaked from. 

Acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young said she would ‘never make that commitment’ to cut all future funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Young faced questions from lawmakers about Joe Biden‘s budget proposal during a Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, including pointed questions over the sending of federal funds to the Chinese lab.

There is a growing theory that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab during research into bat coronaviruses. Some experts who support the lab leak theory believe the virus, which has so far killed 3.75 million people, is a natural one, while others claim it may have been genetically modified.  

US government officials previously donated $826,000 to the lab over a five year period to help it research viruses like COVID, which is believed to have originally come from bats. 

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The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

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The Pentagon gave $39 MILLION to Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – the charity that funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of the outbreak, federal data reveals

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals.

The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.

The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA.

But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013.

Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

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