Tag: taxes

Taxpayer-Funded Study Pays Gay Minors To Report Sexual Activity Without Parental Permission

The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $8 million on a research study that pays gay and transgender boys as young as 13 hundreds of dollars to report their sexual behavior on a mobile app, all without parental permission.

NIH-funded researchers at Columbia University offer up to $275 to gay and transgender boys, between the ages of 13 and 18, to document their sexual activity on MyPEEPS Mobile, including whether they have “condomless anal sex.” The NIH spent more than $300,000 to develop the app in 2012 and 2013, and $7.9 million since 2016 for Columbia researchers to study the data it collects, according to a government spending database. The app for “young men who have sex with men” provides “interactive games and activities” designed to teach participating teenagers how to minimize risk in their sex lives, according to the research grant and resulting study.

While researchers say MyPEEPS Mobile provides educational information for gay adolescents on how to have safe sex, some medical experts say there are ethical concerns. According to one of the program’s studies, teenaged participants in the pilot trial were “recruited” to use the app in six different cities and traveled to attend “interventions” to discuss the sex education program, all without parental permission.

“There is an ethical balance between investigators’ desire to enroll children in a study and the need to support parents in caring for their children,” Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst, former deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the Washington Free Beacon. “There are additional concerns that minor children in this study may be engaged in sexually exploitative relationships with older males, sex trafficking/child prostitution, violence, and sexual abuse, from which they should be protected.”

Wubbenhorst, a former member of the Duke University Health System Institutional Review Board, said minors are considered a vulnerable population and are unable to give informed consent in research studies. Department of Health and Human Services regulations require researchers to apply for a waiver of parental permission for minors through designated institutional review boards, which determine if “an appropriate mechanism for protecting the children who will participate as subjects in the research is substituted.”

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State-Run Pre-K Resulted in Worse Educational, Behavioral Outcomes for Kids

Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of “universal” preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are “critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.” Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden’s stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a “historic $200 billion investment in America’s future” to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling. 

Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that “studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That’s why we’re going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child.”

On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.

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Rep. Hakeem Jeffries pays just $200 in property taxes thanks to sweetheart subsidy law

Brooklyn Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, a potential replacement for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, already lives in a “People’s House” — that’s heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

Public records show that Jeffries and his family reside in a condo unit in red-hot Prospect Heights, paying just $213 a year in property taxes thanks to a sweetheart deal under a law he supported when he served in the state Assembly.

The condo the Jeffries bought in 2007 in the six-story, 40-unit complex on Underhill Avenue benefits from a massive property tax break granted under the 421-A abatement program that housing advocates have long complained is skewed toward wealthy developers and well-to-do tenants.

The law provides developers and residents property tax breaks over 25 or 35 years in exchange for making at least 20 percent of the apartments “affordable” for moderate- to low-income residents.

The generous subsidy program costs the city treasury up to $1.6 billion a year in property tax revenues, according to the comptroller’s office. The median property tax for city homeowners is more than $5,000.

One Staten Island condo owner told The Post their annual property tax bill is $5,000. A Queens homeowner said his bill is more than $9,000.

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Biden Plans to Give Taxpayer-Funded ‘Legal Services’ to Illegal Aliens

President Joe Biden’s administration is set to roll out a new federal program, funded by American taxpayers, that will provide “legal services” to border crossers and illegal aliens, a new report details.

The plan, first reported by Axios, would ensure that private contractors working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) help provide a range of legal services to border crossers and illegal aliens arriving at United States-Mexico border stations in California, Texas, and Arizona.

Axios’s Stef Kight reports:

It will be for migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, those in Border Patrol custody, in the [Remain in Mexico] program or who may be enrolled in [Remain in Mexico] or otherwise placed in deportation proceedings, according to the published documents on SAM.gov.

Increasing migrant access to legal services has long been a goal of the administration. While the new Legal Access at the Border (LAB) program will help prepare migrants for the immigration legal process, it will not directly provide them attorneys.
…

Contractors will explain the migrants’ options for staying in the U.S. while deportation orders are pending, as well as general immigration court practices and procedures.

The expanded legal services for border crossers and illegal aliens are part of a larger plan by the Biden administration to transform the southern border into a mere checkpoint for foreign nationals seeking entry to the U.S.

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IRS To Require Facial Recognition To View Tax Returns

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has partnered with a Virginia-based private identification firm which requires a facial recognition selfie among other things, in order to create or access online accounts with the agency.

According to KrebsonSecurity, the IRS announced that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log into irs.gov will be through ID.me. Founded by former Army Rangers in 2010, the McLean-based company has evolved to providing online ID verification services which several states are using to help reduce unemployment and pandemic-assistance fraud. The company claims to have 64 million users.

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Yachts To Be Exempt From EU’s Carbon Pricing Plan

If there is anyone still confused why ESG, and the entire “green” movement is one giant, boiling cauldron of lies, hypocrisy and fraud, read on.

Last summer, we reported that the European Commission – that murder of career bureaucrats – has proposed exempting private jets, the one most polluting form of transportation, from the planned EU jet fuel tax. A draft indicated that the tax would be phased-in for passenger flights, including ones that carry cargo. Private jets will enjoy an exemption through classification of “business aviation” as the use of aircraft by firms for carriage of passengers or goods as an “aid to the conduct of their business”, if generally considered not for public hire. It gets better: a further exemption is given for “pleasure” flights whereby an aircraft is used for “personal or recreational” purposes not associated with a business or professional use.

This is odd because a recent report found that private-jet CO2 emissions in Europe rose by 31% between 2005 and 2019, with flights to popular destinations up markedly during summer holiday seasons. So if Europe was truly concerned about curbing CO2 emissions it would ostensibly go after some of the biggest culprits… but no.

Of course, since it is mostly billionaires and the ultra wealthy that fly private, and these same billionaires and ultra wealthy tend to be exempt from regulations (which are usually written by politicians that the ultra rich have previously bribed or bought) that apply to the rest of the peasantry, this was hardly a huge surprise.

Which is why we doubt that the latest news showing just how pervasive the “green” hypocrisy is, will also come as a surprise.

According to a new report from Transport & Environment (T&E) titled “Climate Impacts of Exemptions to EU’s Shipping Proposals:
Arbitrary exemptions undermine integrity of shipping laws” , more than half of Europe’s ships would be exempt from the European Commission’s carbon pricing plan for the sector. Among them: highly polluting if extremely desirable – for the Monte Carlo set – yachts.

According to the report, in July 2021, the European Commission published a set of proposals to decarbonize the maritime sector. However, what quietly not mentioned, is that the proposed carbon pricing scheme (ETS) and the low GHG fuel standard (FuelEU Maritime) will only apply to ships above 5,000 GT and exclude a number of ship types such as offshore vessels, fishing vessels and…. yachts.

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Quebec Government Becomes World’s 1st To Impose Steep “Health Tax” For Unvaxxed Citizens

It seems that throughout the pandemic the English-speaking countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been in competition to see which respective government can impose the most restrictive, liberty-suffocating Covid measures on its population – all ironically in the name of “health” and “public safety”. Anyone with friends or family in major cities of Canada, for example, might be used to picking up the phone and hearing stories of Canadians having to sneak out of their homes in the dead of night just to visit in-laws or grandparents under cover of darkness, on fear of getting ticketed by authorities for a lockdown violation. And recall, as another example among a seeming myriad of absurdities, that New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern less than two months ago actually addressed whether citizens were allowed to use the restroom in the homes of friends or neighbors.

As we’ve said over and over, just when you think Covid-lunacy has reached its peak… enter a new insane policy cooked up by a neurotic and despotic government somewhere, typically in the West. And of course the latest is out of Canada: “The Canadian province of Quebec will charge a health tax to residents who are not vaccinated against Covid-19,” BBC reports.

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