Tag: taxes

When Your Government Ends A War But Increases The Military Budget, You’re Being Scammed

The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.

“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.

The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.

“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.

“For the last 20 years, we heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon,” Win Without War executive director Stephen Miles told Al Jazeera. “As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat justifies it.”

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Portland gives $12 MILLION contract to social justice energy company headed by fraudster ex-convict

Linda Woodley, an ex-convict that has racked up millions of dollars in liens for unpaid federal and states taxes, was recently awarded an $11.5 million energy contract by the City of Portland, Oregon.

According to the The Oregonian, Woodley served time in prison for defrauding energy companies and pocketing the proceeds.

Linda Woodley is the Chief of Diversifying Energy, a community-focused nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon. According to their website, their mission is to facilitate equitable access to clean, sustainable energy and improve air quality to vulnerable populations, including low-income communities and people of color.

Information about Woodley’s criminal history can be found through a simple background check, so either the city of Portland knew about her past and they decided to award Woodley with contract anyways or they didn’t properly vette her. A six-figure penalty was even filed against Woodley just earlier this year, information that can also be easily found.

The City of Portland reportedly diverted the contact to Woodley after finding out that the original company it was awarded to had an 85 percent white workforce, The Oregonian reports. The contract supplies low-income families with heaters and coolers.

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AOC Says Taxpayers Should Have to Pay Her $17K Student Loan—Even Though She Makes $174K a Year

  • As a member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes a whopping $174,000 annually, meaning that she individually earns more than twice the average U.S. household’s income. Yet the progressive Democrat nonetheless thinks that working-class taxpayers should have to pay off her student loan debt.

That’s one of the main takeaways from Ocasio-Cortez’s latest speech on the House floor. In the congresswoman’s remarks, she issued yet another factually challenged and morally distorted plea for “student debt cancellation,” a progressive euphemism for having taxpayers pay off approximately $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. (The loans aren’t “canceled” magically but paid off by taxpayers. Congress can’t just make debts go away.)

This is nothing new, as student debt “cancellation” has been one of Ocasio-Cortez’s pet issues since the beginning of her political career. Yet an interesting twist in this speech is that Ocasio-Cortez uses herself as an example — and directly calls for taxpayers to pay off her financial obligations.

“I’m 32 years old now,” the congresswoman said. “I have over $17,000 in student loan debt, and I didn’t go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass. This is unacceptable.”

I’m sorry, what part of that is unacceptable, exactly?

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Government watchdog agency can’t figure out where 20% of federal election grant funding went

An audit by the Government Accountability Office could not account for a significant portion of Election Assistance Commission grants provide to states to assist with voting last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Congress approved the CARES Act, which was designed as a pandemic relief measure, the commission received $400 million in grants, but thus far, the GAO has only accounted for $326 million of that money, meaning the watchdog agency does not know where or how roughly 20 percent of that money was spent, according to a November report.

Republicans in the House first voiced concerns about the election grants in September 2020 in relation to an item of expenditure in California. According to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the GAO’s analysis and findings provide validation for Republicans’ concerns that the problems are not limited to a single state.

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United Kingdom Offers Government Employees Time Off To Attend Free Crystal Healing Sessions

Civil servants in the Westminster government are being offered crystal healing sessions, well-being events, and other “hocus pocus bollocks,” allegedly all paid for by the taxpayer.

First publicised and uncovered by the British politics blog, Guido Fawkes, British civil servants working in Westminster are currently offered a number of strange free courses to attend throughout the week, giving them the opportunity to skip work to attend these sessions.

The schedule for November 3 included a 9 a.m. “counselling session” for any ethnic minorities, a two-day “well-being event” entitled “it’s all about me,” and an interactive session at 12 p.m. entitled “reshaping negative thoughts and language into positive affirmations.”

Guido highlighted probably the most insane event of them all, which was “a beginners guide to crystal healing and deep relaxation,” which took place at 2 p.m. The programme invited the government employees to learn about the “benefits of crystals,” and then engage in a “deep relaxation” session. Speaking to Guido, a government minister slammed the sessions as being “hocus pocus bollocks,” and something that you’d expect to find in Los Angeles, “not in Whitehall!”

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China and India set to receive £1.5billion climate aid windfall – despite scuppering COP26 coal pledges

China and India are set to receive a £1.5 billion climate aid windfall despite scuppering a COP26 deal on reducing reliance on coal power.

Richer countries agreed to double funding for developing nations to prepare for global warming at the Glasgow conference earlier this month.

Despite having two of the fastest growing economies in the world, the UN designates China and India as ‘developing states’.

Analysis shows that the two countries received a total of about £700 million from developed countries in 2019, the latest figures available, as well as millions more from investment foundations and private donors.

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Biden Wants To Empower the IRS Despite Its Track Record of Trampling Rights and Undermining Privacy

President Joe Biden’s plan to beef up IRS enforcement and snoop on Americans’ bank accounts will require hiring more than 80,000 additional tax cops—expanding a federal bureaucracy with a long track record of flouting due process and undermining privacy.

As part of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, the IRS would get $80 billion in additional funding over the next 10 years. The bulk of those new funds, nearly $45 billion, would be directed toward enforcement actions with the goal of doubling the number of annual audits of small businesses. By comparison, the bill spends a relatively meager $1.93 billion on improving taxpayer services, including education and filing assistance.

In short, for every new dollar the IRS will spend helping Americans understand the endlessly complicated federal tax code, the agency will spend roughly $23 new dollars on enforcing those same rules.

Everyone should pay the taxes they owe, of course, but the IRS’ track record suggests that more enforcement will also mean more trampling of Americans’ due process rights.

“It’s a systematic practice at the IRS to violate due process and to abuse taxpayers,” says Isabelle Morales, a policy specialist for Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative nonprofit that opposes tax increases. Biden is proposing to boost funding “for an agency that needs reform,” Morales tells Reason, “and that will only lead to us fueling their bad practices.”

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