Tag: taxes

Thomas Massie: $100B for Ukraine Could Have Given an Extra $200M to Every Congressional District in U.S.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is blasting Republicans, Democrats, and President Joe Biden for their approving more than $100 billion in American taxpayer money for Ukraine this year.

As part of a year-end $1.7 trillion spending package, 18 Senate Republicans and nine House Republicans voted with Democrats to throw another $45 billion in taxpayer money at Ukraine — bringing the total amount of taxpayer money sent to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, to more than $110 billion.

Massie, in a Twitter post on Wednesday, noted that the more than $100 billion approved for Ukraine this year could have, instead, been spent on every United States congressional district.

“$100 billion to Ukraine. Let’s put that in perspective. That’s more than $200 million this year from each Congressional district,” Massie wrote. “What could your congressman have done for your district with $200 million? How long will the kids in your district be paying interest on this debt?”

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America’s ‘neediest’ cities ranked, from poverty to adequate plumbing

Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Los Angeles all rank among the nation’s 10 “neediest” cities, according to an analysis by the personal finance website WalletHub.

The report ranked 182 cities on 28 economic indicators, including child poverty, food insecurity and inadequate kitchens.

Detroit ranked as the neediest metropolis. One Detroit renter in five faced eviction this year, according to a report in The Detroit News.

Brownsville, Texas, ranked second. One-quarter of the city’s population lives in poverty, twice the national average, according to a recent account in 24/7 Wall St. 

Cleveland ranks third. Cleveland’s poverty rate is 29 percent, according to a report from WEWS-TV, making it the nation’s second-poorest large city, behind Detroit.

Ranking fourth through sixth were Gulfport, Miss.; Fresno, Calif.; and Laredo, Texas.

Philadelphia ranked seventh. The City of Brotherly Love has logged 500 homicides in 2022, according to WTXF-TV.

New Orleans ranked eighth. The city may have the nation’s highest murder rate, with more than 250 homicides this year, according to a report in nola.com.

Los Angeles, for all its wealth, came in at ninth on the list of needy cities. More than 40,000 Angelenos live on the streets, according to a recent report in The Nation.

The nation’s least needy city, by WalletHub’s calculus, is the D.C suburb of Columbia, Maryland, a tony bedroom community in Howard County.

Other cities at the desirable bottom end of the list include Bismarck, the North Dakota capital; Overland Park, the Kansas City suburb; Pearl City, part of greater Honolulu; South Burlington, Vt., home to Ben & Jerry’s; and Irvine, Calif., across the Orange Curtain from L.A.

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Feds funded study proving Thanos couldn’t snap his fingers while wearing Infinity Gauntlet

The U.S. federal government funded a study that determined the Marvel supervillain “Thanos” would not have been able to snap his fingers in the movie Avengers: Infinity War, a new report from Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., revealed last week.

The study, spearheaded by researchers at Georgia Tech, focused on the speed at which humans can snap their fingers, ultimately reporting a finger snap “produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher.”

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers,” Saad Bhamla, one of the researchers involved in the study, said in a press release. “It’s really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn’t been investigated closely.”

Prior to conducting the study, Bhamla and his fellow researchers developed a “framework” to explain “ultrafast motions” in living beings. Seeing Thanos snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet in Avengers: Infinity War inspired the researchers to apply their framework to the massively popular cinematic franchise.

Despite deriving inspiration from Thanos, the study focused more broadly on the human finger snap, raising questions about why humans snap their fingers in the first place and whether other primates have the ability to do so.

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Rand Paul’s Annual ‘Festivus’ Report: $482,276,543,907 in Government Waste

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Friday continued the annual tradition of celebrating “Festivus,” airing out his many grievances as it relates to government waste.

Paul’s 2022 Festivus report highlights $482,276,543,907 in government waste and includes $2.3 million used by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for an experiment involving injecting puppies with cocaine, $202,000 used by the Department of Defense (DOD) on Starbucks espresso machines, and $3 million for the construction of a Gandhi museum.

“This will be the 10th year in a row that I’ve celebrated #Festivus with you. By celebrated I mean have a little fun at the expense of Washington. If we don’t laugh we might cry,” Paul wrote before sharing some of the highlights of the report to his social media page and invoking the infamous Seinfeld quote from Frank Costanza, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!”

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Congress just gave the weapons industry a massive paycheck. What it means for U.S. defense

Congress authorized a massive increase in spending on weapons and ammunition in 2023, signaling a willingness to continue providing defense contractors the funding they need to deliver on future Pentagon orders, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Department Of Defense (DOD) would receive a 9% boost in defense spending, with some of the largest increases occurring in weapons budgets, in 2023 as part of Congress’ yearly funding bill, which allocates a total of $858 billion for defense. Concern that the U.S. lacks the capacity to both support Ukraine and deter China from attacking Taiwan have intensified as the U.S. continues to send billions in aid to Kyiv, but contractors will have to negotiate production challenges in order to supply what Congress and the White House believe they need, experts explained to the DCNF.

“This was not a ‘Christmas gift’ in the sense that defense industry pressure or an insider military-industrial complex led to the defense spending increases,” Eugene Gholz, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former senior Pentagon official, told the DCNF. “Congress has been leaning in this direction for several years, and it is the mood of the Washington consensus right now to throw money at defense.”

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DOT hands out $1.5 billion in grants for ‘woke’ transportation projects 

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just The News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.

This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the Department of Transportation for $1.5 billion in grants for “woke” projects to promote “racial equity,” “environmental justice” and union jobs in transportation.

Part of President Biden’s $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the grants will be administered under DOT’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) Program, the department said in a press release accompanying its Notice of Funding Opportunity. 

The DOT is “encouraging applicants to consider how their projects can address climate change, ensure racial equity, and remove barriers to opportunity,” the department said. “The Department also intends to use the RAISE program to support wealth creation and the creation of good-paying jobs with the free and fair choice to join a union, the incorporation of strong labor standards, and training and placement programs, especially registered apprenticeships.”

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Massive Omnibus Bill Includes Funding For Monuments To DC Journalists

Congress has an absolutely horrible approval rating and so does the media. This story is a perfect explanation of why those two things are true.

The massive omnibus bill currently making its way through congress includes funding for a monument to the media in Washington, DC.

Why? Who among the American people asked for such a thing? Who does this help?

Breitbart News reports:

Omnibus Bill: Taxpayers to Erect Monument to Journalists in D.C., Give over $1B Subsidy to Media

Taxpayers will fund the erection of press statues in Washington, D.C., along with handing out media subsidies worth over $1 billion, if the Omnibus bill is passed into law in the coming days.

According to section 708 of the bill, the establishment media will be given a “commemorative” location in Washington, D.C., to honor “journalists”:

The location of a commemorative work to commemorate the commitment of the United States to a free press by honoring journalists who sacrificed their lives in service to that cause within Area I, as depicted on the map entitled ‘‘Commemorative Areas Washington, DC and Environs’’, numbered 869/86501 B, and dated June 24, 2003, is approved.

The statues will be located in “Area I,” according to the bill, which appears to encompass areas of the Mall in Washington, D.C., along with the White House, Tidal Basin, Theodore Roosevelt Island, and the Potomac shoreline in Virginia.

No budget or allocation of money was disclosed in the bill.

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Omnibus Spending Bill: $410M for Border Security — in the Middle East

The $1.7 trillion year-end omnibus spending bill uses hundreds of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money to fund border security initiatives overseas as the United States, at its own border, is projected to set illegal immigration records next year.

The spending bill includes $410 million “for enhanced border security” in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman. At least $150 million of the funding is to be used to help Jordan secure its borders.

The hundreds of millions of dollars for border security thousands of miles away from the U.S. comes after Republicans and Democrats negotiated a similar plan in March that saw about $370 million go to border security initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa.

In June of last year, Congress authorized nearly a billion dollars in border security initiatives for Middle Eastern and North African countries.

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