Tag: taxes

American Taxpayers Charged Millions to Provide Illegal Aliens with Free Lawyers

American taxpayers, often unbeknownst to them, are being charged to the sum of millions to provide illegal aliens in various cities with free legal representation, an investigation exclusively shared with Breitbart News reveals.

The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) reviewed expenditures for cities that have implemented a deportation defense program that provides illegal aliens and foreign nationals with free legal representation to fight their deportations from the United States.

“Under U.S. law, illegal aliens and other non-citizens facing deportation orders do not have a right to legal representation because immigration law is a civil matter, not a criminal one,” IRLI investigators note.

The costs, as a result, are falling on American taxpayers. For Fiscal Year 2022, IRLI investigators estimate that taxpayers in 22 cities that have deportation defense programs will be charged at least $5.2 million to provide illegal aliens with free lawyers.

IRLI investigators said this estimate is conservative and does not include many other localities that have similar in-house deportation defense programs.

“These programs are an insult to every law-abiding American citizen and legal resident,” IRLI Executive Director Dale Wilcox told Breitbart News. “Our laws clearly state that non-citizens charged with civil offenses do not have a right to legal representation. Yet we have radical anti-borders groups starting these programs and sticking unknowing citizens with the bill. It’s outrageous.”

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for example, city officials revealed to IRLI investigators that they do not provide any oversight over their deportation defense program despite using hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund it.

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Fauci’s NIH Division Paid $205K for Researchers To Study Transgender Monkeys

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s division of the National Institutes of Health paid over $200,000 during the coronavirus pandemic for researchers to study why transgender women have high rates of HIV by injecting male monkeys with female hormones.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in December 2021 gave Scripps Research $205,562 for the study, which aims to determine why transgender women have high rates of HIV. As part of the study, researchers subject male monkeys to feminizing hormone therapy to study how it impacts the monkeys’ immune systems, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Fauci has overseen rampant animal testing since he took over the NIAID in 1984. It was revealed in November that the NIAID funded a study that infected beagles with heart-worm larvae and euthanized them after experimentations. As part of another study, researchers infected beagles with mutated bacteria from ticks.

The NIAID began running HIV vaccine tests on monkeys a year after Fauci took charge. Each year, the department acquires 400 to 600 rhesus monkeys from a South Carolina island leased by Charles River Laboratories, which has a $27.5 million contract with the NIAID.

Dr. Katherine Roe, a neuroscientist with PETA, says the study is “yet another pointless, wasteful monkey torture experiment.”

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California considering insane plan to double its (already high) taxes

California already has some of the highest taxes in the United States and is losing residents as a result. Yet Golden State liberals aren’t deterred. They’re now pursuing a state constitutional amendment that could double California’s taxes.

The proposed amendment, ACA 11, would hike several key taxes to fund a state-level government healthcare scheme. According to the right-leaning Tax Foundation , it would increase the average household’s taxes by an astonishing $12,250.

It’s estimated that the amendment would increase state revenue by $163 billion a year, which is more revenue than California had ever seen in an entire year before 2020. (That means it’s effectively doubling the state’s taxes.)

As the Tax Foundation’s Jared Walczak explains , the tax hikes take three forms. There’s an income surcharge (on top of the already-high state income taxes) that applies starting at $149,509 in earnings. There’s also a payroll tax add-on, with the top rate applying to employees earning $49,990 or more. Then, there’s a 2.3% business tax hike on gross receipts above the first $2 million a business takes in.

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IRS Watching Your $600+ Payments To Venmo, PayPal, Others

President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress passed a new rule that requires payment companies and cash applications such as Venmo and PayPal to report $600 or more of payments to the Internal Revenue Services.

The law was included in the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes through budget reconciliation to avoid the Senate filibuster. The new rule took effect at the beginning of this month.

The requirement covers payments received for good and services. The rule would apply to payment services like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, Cash App and others.

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Democrats Draft Legislation to Erect Permanent ‘Insurrection Memorial’.

Co-sponsored by nearly 20 Democrats, the bill, dubbed the Capitol Remembrance Act, would “direct the Architect of the Capitol to design and install in the United States Capitol an exhibit that depicts the attack on the Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021.”

The bill specifies that the project must be installed in a “prominent location” and retain a “permanent” status. Property “damaged during the attack,” photographs, and a plaque honoring the “sacrifice of heroes, including United States Capitol Police Officers Brian Sicknick” are among the exhibit requirements. Officer Sicknick, however, died of natural causes according to D.C.’s Chief Medical Examiner.

“The Architect may include artwork created to depict the attack on the Capitol,” the bill adds.

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Another Nail in the U.S. Empire’s Coffin… Biden Signs $770 Billion War Budget

As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

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Californians Learn That Raising Taxes on Marijuana Fuels Black Markets for Drugs

At the beginning of 2022, tax rates for marijuana cultivated in California are set to increase, even though black market sales completely dominate the retail market in the Golden State.

Experts estimate that about three-quarters of all marijuana sales in California happen not through legal dispensaries, but through unlicensed vendors. California voters legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for recreational use in 2016, but extremely high taxes and oppressive regulations have caused the rollout to be a disaster.

The tax increase set to hit on New Year’s Day is a prime example. California taxes the cultivation of marijuana by weight. In the tax regulations that state lawmakers passed for cannabis in 2017, the cultivation tax rate was tied to inflation. When inflation rises, the cultivation tax will also automatically rise.

Inflation rose in 2021, and not by a small amount. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that consumer prices rose nationally 6.8 percent between November 2020 and November 2021. Because of California’s law, cultivation taxes will rise 4.5 percent. For growers of fresh cannabis plants, the cultivation tax will jump from $1.35 an ounce to $1.41 an ounce. On top of the cultivation tax, the state charges a 15 percent excise tax, and the cities that allow dispensaries have their own local sales tax rates. A person attempting to legally buy marijuana in California can expect the price to balloon between 35–50 percent through tax add-ons, depending on the city.

This, obviously, will make it all the more difficult for legal vendors to compete with the black market. That the increase is happening anyway is absurd and should be seen as a warning against automatically tying any tax rate to inflation.

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States Are Hoarding $5.2 Billion in Welfare Funds Even as the Need for Aid Grows

When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.

Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.

According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.

States have held on to more of this welfare money amid rising poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.1% of children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, up from 14.4% the year before. The poverty rate also ticked up for people aged 18 to 64, from 9.4% to 10.4%. As unused TANF dollars have accumulated, applications to the cash assistance program have waned, though it’s not for a lack of need, say experts and people who have applied to the program.

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