Tag: taxes

Pelosi, AOC, Other House Dems Hit with Ethics Complaint – Accused of ‘Repeatedly’ Misusing Funds

An ethics watchdog has filed an ethics complaint against 10 Democratic lawmakers, claiming that they are using public resources for partisan political purposes.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust said the Democrats “repeatedly” used official resources for political gain, according to a news release on its website, naming Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California, Cori Bush of Missouri, Jamaal Bowman of New York, Sean Casten of Illinois, Greg Casar of Texas, Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida, Ted Lieu of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ritchie Torres of New York.

Although Democratic Rep. Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts was not mentioned in the release, exhibits of her allegedly using official resources for political gain were included in the examples filed with the complaint.

“The law at issue is simple,” the release said, noting that government resources cannot be used for “campaign or political purposes.”

The release said that “official House photographs and video, government buildings, a Member’s official website and social media accounts, and anything created by government employees” are considered off-limits.

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Federal agency spent $20 billion to welcome migrants over last two years

The federal agency responsible for busing, sheltering and supporting the largely unauthorized immigrant population pouring across America’s borders spent nearly $20 billion over the last two years, according to a new report.

Most of that money was spent on sheltering and caring for immigrant children who are in the U.S. illegally, with other funds also going to help new arrivals from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti and other nations favored by President Biden’s immigration policies, according to OpenTheBooks.com.

It’s not just more people. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is expanding the type of assistance it offers to include helping migrants access loans, build credit or collect direct cash payments.

“Regular Americans are underwriting the generosity. And it’s the hardworking taxpayer who is feeling the strain as migrants are resettled in their neighborhoods across the country,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks. “Exploding expenditures on everything from resettlement to auto loans are further incentivizing a vicious cycle at our borders.”

He called the money a version of “financial self-harm.”

ORR’s work has been controversial for a decade, dating back to the Obama-era migrant surge in 2014, when immigrant children unaccompanied by a parent streamed in illegally. Under federal policy, those children are supposed to be quickly transferred from Homeland Security to ORR for placement in government-funded shelters while the government searches for sponsors to take them.

The children have taxed schools’ resources and in some cases have been used as child labor, in addition to other social ills. The children from the Obama surge, for example, helped fuel a revival of MS-13, the murderous immigrant-heavy gang, from Virginia to Massachusetts.

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Biden is set to RAISE taxes to help fund social security benefits as the president desperately tries to make up ground in polling against Trump ahead of the general election

President Joe Biden‘s camp is examining strategies to make up for lost ground in the upcoming presidential election, and raising taxes on the wealthy to bolster Social Security is on the table.

According to a recent party nominee satisfaction poll by ABC News and IPSOS, Donald Trump leads at 72 percent among leaned Republicans, with Biden trailing 57 percent among leaned Democrats.

According to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, Trump holds a 53 to 47 lead over Biden in general election polling.  

With Trump emerging as the most likely GOP frontrunner, the current President’s aides have floated the idea of imposing new taxes on the wealthy to help further fund Social Security benefits, sources tell the Washington Post.

As the former President has vowed once again to protect Social Security if elected, some Biden advisors believe this move could help define the contrast between economic policy on either side of the aisle.

It would require Biden to expand his proposed tax increases, although they would not affect people earning under $400,000 per year, people familiar with the matter told the publication.

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Davos Globalist Demands Worldwide ‘Coordinated System of Carbon Taxes’ at WEF Summit

The climate change agenda can only be fully if international carbon taxes are implemented on the global population, Saudi Arabian Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan proclaimed at the World Economic Forum meeting this week.

During a panel discussion on the “Global Economic Outlook” on Friday during the annual WEF meeting in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, Al-Jadaan argued that in order to solve the supposed climate crisis, a global carbon tax will be required.

“There is no realistic solution to the climate transition that does not involve a globally coordinated system of carbon taxes,” the Saudi politician said.

Al-Jadaan rejected the notion that such a system would hit the poor and developing nations the hardest, by hindering industrial growth and spurring inflation, arguing that such countries will face even worse outcomes if climate change is not prevented by international intervention.

“There’s a perception that it’s unjust, it’s unfair, it will lead to inflation. In fact, quite the contrary. If we don’t do this, the countries that will suffer most ultimately are the developing countries. They’re going to be the worst affected by climate change,” he said.

“What we need is a system of carbon taxes coupled with subsidies for developing households and a stream of funding for the developing world, to allow them to engage in investments and mitigations and adaption that allows them to keep growing. And that’s a real opportunity,” Al-Jadaan continued.

“It’s a fair solution and it’s the only realistic solution, and we can’t keep ducking it,” he concluded.

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Squad member Jamaal Bowman on slave reparations – says he wants ALL 42 MILLION black Americans to get $333,000 and reveals ‘creative ways’ to pay them

A New York lawmaker is calling for every black person in the US to receive $333,000 as reparations for slavery.

Jamaal Bowman is among nine backers of federal bill H.R. 414, which states there is a ‘moral and legal obligation’ to make restitution to the descendants of slaves.

The legislation would force the government to distribute $14 trillion between almost 42 million black Americans.

The figure is based on academics’ estimates of the amount the US benefited from forced labor between 1619 and the end of slavery in 1865, according to the bill.

Yonkers representative Bowman, a member of the so-called ‘Squad’ of young controversial Democrats in Congress, also suggested ‘creative’ ways of paying, including staggering the payments over a number of years.

He also claims the federal government’s response to the pandemic and the space race prove it has the capacity for the program. 

‘When COVID was destroying us, we invested in the American people in a way that kept the economy afloat,’ Bowman told the Journal News. ‘The government can invest the same way in reparations without raising taxes on anyone.’

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Feds To Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on E.V. Chargers in ‘Disadvantaged Communities’

Last week, the White House announced that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) would issue $623 million in grants for states to build chargers for electric vehicles (E.V.s). The money comes from the Charging and Fuel Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, a $2.5 billion fund established as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. According to the announcement, the project “will fund 47 EV charging and alternative-fueling infrastructure projects in 22 states and Puerto Rico, including construction of approximately 7,500 EV charging ports.”

Unfortunately, that money is unlikely to go as far as it would have in private hands. “The CFI Program advances President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, which set a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” bragged the FHWA press release. “More than 70% of the CFI funding announced today will support project sites in disadvantaged communities.”

As an example, it notes “$1.4 million to the Chilkoot Indian Association, an Alaska Native Tribe, to build an EV charging station in Haines, a rural and disadvantaged community where there are no publicly available EV charging stations.”

Haines is in Haines Borough, Alaska, which has a population of just over 2,000 people.

It’s hard to imagine that “disadvantaged” communities would buy E.V.s if only there were public charging stations available. A November survey from S&P Global Mobility showed that potential buyers cite high E.V. prices as their primary concern, higher than concerns about range or charging infrastructure. And while E.V. prices have declined in recent years, the average new electric vehicle still costs around $50,000.

Not that this is the first instance of poorly planned government spending on E.V. infrastructure. Last month, Reason reported that even though the federal government had dispensed $2 billion out of the $7.5 billion apportioned by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to build public charging stations, no chargers funded by the cash had come online. Speaking to Politico‘s James Bikales, state and E.V. industry officials blamed “the difficulties state agencies and charging companies face in meeting a complex set of contracting requirements and minimum operating standards for the federally-funded chargers.”

“The barrier isn’t technological,” The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board noted this week. “It took Tesla less time to install 80 chargers at its Harris Ranch station in northern California.” Rather, “the bureaucrats are getting in their own way.”

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20 Percent of Welfare Spending Goes to the Households Taxed To Fund It

About one in every five dollars that passes through the federal welfare system ends up right back where it started, according to a new report.

It’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s more like “robbing Peter to pay Peter,” wrote the report’s author, Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute.

As the federal welfare state has grown to a point where many middle-class and even some upper-income households receive benefits, it has become more common for the same households to both pay federal taxes and collect federal transfer payments. Glock’s paper shows how significant that overlap is: About 20 percent of the annual funds in the federal welfare system are simply returned to households that paid that amount in federal taxes.

And if you don’t count households that are receiving Social Security—the largest federal welfare program, even though it is rarely identified as such—the percentage of welfare payments canceled out by taxes within the same year is 29 percent, Glock’s research shows.

Seems like those individuals and families would be better off simply not paying so much in taxes in the first place.

“Such a system of taxing and returning the same amount of money is a pure waste,” Glock wrote, “since both the taxes and transfers limit households’ options, and there is a bureaucratic cost to circulating income from households to the government and back to households.”

Economically, those transfers and taxes simply cancel each other out and households are left—on a balance sheet, at least—no worse off than if the money had never been taken by the government and then returned.

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REVEALED: How American and Chinese scientists sought to create a virus in 2018 that was almost an EXACT match with Covid

Bombshell new documents shed light on a shady 2018 project between US and Chinese scientists to create a novel virus with the same rare features seen in Covid.

The proposals lay out plans to use US taxpayer money to engineer bat coronaviruses with several properties that would make them infectious to humans – a year before the pandemic happened.

The documents – which consist of hundreds of emails, grant applications and scientific papers – highlighted four characteristics that would make the new viruses a ‘clear… danger of a new SARS-like pandemic.’  

All four characteristics spelled out in the research proposal match features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, according to a watchdog who exposed the files, as well as several experts who reviewed them.

The experiments, part of a grant known as DEFUSE, were to be a collaboration between US scientists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is where the FBI and many scientists believe Covid leaked from. 

The proposal was ultimately denied funding and there are no official records that the experiments were actually carried out. Nonetheless, virology experts have called the records are a clear ‘blueprint’ to create Covid-19. 

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Missouri Courts Ask For $3.7 Million To Continue Expunging Past Marijuana Convictions

Missouri circuit courts have cleared more than 100,000 marijuana charges from people’s criminal records so far—a mandate that was a big selling point for those who voted to pass the constitutional amendment that legalized recreational marijuana in 2022.

However, court officials say it’s hard to determine how many more charges are left because many court records are not digitized.

Missouri court officials are set to request another $3.7 million to complete marijuana expungements in the coming budget year, making their case Wednesday to a House appropriations committee.

By law, any revenue the state collects from taxes on recreational marijuana sales, along with fees the businesses pay, must first go towards the state’s costs of regulating the program. Then it goes to expenses incurred by the court system for expunging certain marijuana offenses from people’s criminal records.

Last year lawmakers signed off on $4.5 million for state courts to pay their employees overtime or to hire temp workers to complete the massive number of expungements required by law. They approved an additional $2.5 million in a supplemental budget on May 5.

Circuit courts must request funds to reimburse their expenses for completing expungements from the Circuit Court Budget Committee, which oversees the special assistance program.

So far, the committee has given $4.2 million to the county courts, said Beth Riggert, communications counsel of the Missouri Supreme Court. And the committee has allocated the funds to any circuit court that has requested it, she said.

“Some circuit courts have advised they have not requested special assistance funds because they did not have current court clerks willing or able to work overtime,” Riggert said, “and/or have been unable to find qualified individuals to provide special assistance because the analysis required is complicated and better done by experienced personnel, such as retired clerks.”

As of January 2, Missouri courts have granted 103,558 expungements. Out of all the counties, Greene County has received the most funding, nearly $940,000, and has completed the most expungements at 4,306.

After Greene, the counties that have completed the most expungements are not necessarily the largest counties or the ones that have received the most money.

The second highest number is 3,515 from Laclede County, which has a population of 36,000. The county has received a little more than $35,000 from the special assistance program.

In third place is St. Louis County, the state’s largest county with more than a million people, where court officials have processed 3,479 expungements. The county has received just over $135,000. The court has reviewed 11,300 files, a spokesman for the 21st Circuit Court said.

Franklin County, which has a population of 104,000, is fourth, completing 3,200 expungements and receiving about $53,000. Franklin is just ahead of Jackson County, which has a population of 717,000. Jackson has completed 2,900 and received nearly $195,000.

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Journalist Uncovers “Shadowy Network” Of NGOs Facilitating US Border Invasion

Journalist James O’Keefe uncovered a “shadowy network of secretive nonprofits” (some of which are funded by taxpayers) that are facilitating the invasion of illegals on the southern border. 

O’Keefe said “Alita’s Angels” is a “brand-new nonprofit with no tax records on file” that operates inside an old Bank Building in the Arizona border town of Nogales.

We just followed the trail of the migrant vans right to the source, visiting the Arizona border town of Nogales, where we encountered some rude and suspicious “Alita’s Angels” NGO (@alitasangels) workers who once again called the police on us. 

A volunteer with the American Red Cross, who wouldn’t give us his name, tried to prevent us from filming outside a migrant facility and kept sticking his hand over our cameras. Then, when we questioned a volunteer with the NGO, she said “I am your father” and stormed off. 

Nogales Police officers showed up and questioned us after Alitas and Red Cross workers falsely accused us of using racial slurs and inhibiting their movement. We tried to get the officer’s first name but he refused to give it. When we FOIAed the bodycam footage, we were told Nogales police don’t use them. 

A group called “Alita’s Angels” runs the facility, but they’re a brand-new nonprofit with no tax records on file. (We requested the documents, with no luck.) -O’Keefe

After Alitas, the migrants are crammed into busses like cattle to a processing facility an hour away in Tucson. 

Once the migrants were boarded on the bus, we got a head start to meet them at a processing facility an hour away in Tucson, but once again, we couldn’t get anywhere near the building. The staff of the facility, run by Casa Alitas, threatened to call the cops again, but we managed to interview a local driver who does business at the facility and he gave us even more information. -O’Keefe

O’Keefe said, “A WORKER with Casa Alitas CONFIRMED TO OUR UNDERCOVER journalist that Casa Alitas was getting federal money.” 

“These “Alitas” (http://alitasangels.com) groups are part of a shadowy network of secretive nonprofits funding the mass migration of millions of people into the country, without truly vetting asylum seekers’ claims and determining if they are eligible for refugee status,” the journalist continued. 

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