Tag: taxes

San Jose Mayor: Firearms Will Be Confiscated From Gun Owners Who Don’t Pay City Fee And ‘Liability Insurance’

San Jose’s city council passed a measure last month requiring gun owners to pay a $25 “harm reduction” fee and liability insurance or relinquish their firearms to the government, making the city the first in the nation to impose an annual fee on law-abiding, firearm owning citizens.

The city’s Democrat mayor, Sam Liccardo insists the new ordinance, allowing law enforcement officials to seize firearms from those who refuse to pay the fees, will ultimately reduce crime and establish “a new kind of framework for gun safety,  Slate reports.

Allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those who refuse to pay the fee makes will ultimately reduce crime, the Liccardo told the publication.

“For example, there’s a bar brawl and they’re patting down everybody and someone’s got a gun. ‘Have you paid your fee? You have insurance?’ ‘No.’ OK, well, there’s an opportunity for us to remove the gun. And then when the gun owner comes back and demonstrates that they comply with the law and they’re a lawful gun owner, they get their gun back. But in the meantime, you’ve taken a gun out of a bar brawl. And that’s not a bad thing,” he argued.

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U.S. Govt Spent Over $2.3 Million Injecting Puppies With Cocaine.

The National Institutes of Health spent over $2.3 million on studies that injected puppies with cocaine.

The experiment, revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the White Coat Waste Project, follows previously unearthed studies funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci that “debarked” beagle puppies.

Seven six-month-old Beagle puppies were forced to wear a drug-injecting jacket that allowed them to be dosed with cocaine again and again and again for months, along with an ‘experimental compound,’ to see how the two drugs interacted.

The year-long experiment, which began in September 2020, was filmed so research could evaluate the puppies’ adverse reactions” to the drugs. Prior to the drugs being administered, the puppies were forced to undergo surgery, where they were implanted with a “telemetry unit” to monitor their vital signs throughout the experiment.

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Police Chief Gets No Jail, Allowed to Retire, Gets $72k in Benefits After Guilty Plea in Sex Assault Case

Marshfield, WI — In January of last year, Marshfield Police Chief Rick Gramza was arrested and charged with three counts of misconduct in office, disorderly conduct, and fourth-degree sexual assault against a department employee. However, instead of facing a jury of his peers for these accusations, Gramza received tens of thousands of dollars, months of paid vacation, and no jail time.

Last month, Gramza was given a sweetheart plea deal and all of the above charges were reduced to two disorderly conduct charges — on both of which he was immediately found guilty. After paying a measly $661 fine, Gramza will be free and clear.

According to reports, the former chief Gramza is accused of sexually assaulting a department employee on several occasions, as early as 2014 and as late as this past summer.

WSAW reports the Eau Claire detective sergeant investigating the case shared some specific instances the employee told him, including one in 2015, where she says she went into his office to talk about a promotion and then he sexually assaulted her.

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City Now Requires Gun Owners to Carry Liability Insurance, Conveniently Exempts Current, Former Cops

In what’s being touted as a first of its kind action in the country, gun owners in San Jose will soon be forced to purchase liability insurance and pay an annual fee for practicing their right to self defense. The City Council passed the resolution this week, and it is already being torn apart by those who can see past solving problems without government mandates.

“San Jose has an opportunity to become a model for the rest of the nation to invest in proven strategies to reduce gun violence, domestic violence and suicide and the many other preventable harms from firearms in our communities,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said at a news conference Monday.

But will requiring legal gun owners to buy insurance do anything at all to stop crimes or keep people safe? Not very likely. The City Council’s measure does nothing to address the problem of illegally obtained weapons that are stolen or purchased by criminals.

Despite this legislation coming forward as a reaction to the tragic mass shooting that took place at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority rail yard that left nine people dead last May, it does absolutely nothing to stop criminal gun violence. All it does is place a burden on the thousands of lawful gun owners in the city.

The mayor, who acted as a cheerleader for the legislation, even admitted this fact, saying, “this won’t stop mass shootings and keep bad people from committing violent crime.”

On top of liability insurance, legal gun owners will also be forced to pay an annual fee to the city of $25. While it may not seem like much, coupled with an expensive insurance policy, it could make lots of legal gun owners who are having trouble paying their bills, criminals for noncompliance.

Essentially, it is just another way for government to limit the ability of poor people to legally protect themselves.

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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.
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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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