Tag: taxes

NYC Rapper “Principal” Collects Nearly $200,000 for a School That Never Opened

This is ludicrous. A 33-year-old New York City Department of Education administrator is pocketing a principal’s salary of $192,374 a year for running a high school that does not exist and was never approved.

Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, who also performs as the rapper Cal Combs, was handpicked in January to serve as project director of the proposed Next Generation Technology High School in Lower Manhattan. The promotion came with a $50,000 raise from his prior assistant principal pay of $141,960 at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem.

Months later the school is dead, he is not assigned to any actual campus, and the checks keep clearing.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels killed the proposal in April after opposition over its merit-based admissions model and broader anxiety about artificial intelligence in classrooms. The planned FiDi school was supposed to focus on AI and computer technology. Instead it became another casualty of the city’s allergy to anything resembling rigorous standards.

A project director of a planned school normally becomes its principal once doors open. That never happened here. According to the New York Post, a DOE source said officials “never should have named a principal before the school was approved” and that, without tenure, such appointees are typically returned to assistant principal roles when a project collapses. Haraguchi-Combs never served as principal long enough to seek tenure in the role.

The Department of Education’s official line is that he is “developing new proposals and supporting in-progress proposals.” A DOE insider strongly disputed that framing, calling the continued principal-level compensation a huge waste of resources when actual schools need principals.

When a Post reporter approached Haraguchi-Combs outside his Downtown Brooklyn high-rise this week, the response was not an explanation of his duties. “You came to my house? Outrageous,” he said.

The arrangement surfaced in an October letter from anonymous Manhattan high school principals demanding an investigation into Superintendent Gary Beidleman. The letter catalogued organizational dysfunction, hiring of unqualified candidates, failure to meet class-size rules, and specifically flagged Haraguchi-Combs’ status.

Zilvinas Silenas, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, called the salary an insult to taxpayers. “This is a new level for New York, when you are getting paid nearly $200,000 for a job you’re not doing,” Silenas said. “Most taxpayers have never even dreamed of making that kind of money.”

Haraguchi-Combs calls himself “half hip-hop artist, half English teacher.” His 2017 album “Carmel,” named for an Indiana city where he once lived, includes lyrics describing a drug deal that turned violent: “So now I got a nine hidden in my backpack… They said that they would meet us at the spot at seven thirty/we packed a bag and arrived five minutes early.”

Another track, “Roundabouts,” references cocaine use and heavy drinking: “One more bump on that key/one more drink and I’m free/one more shot to forget/how much I hate me.”

He began his education career as an English teacher in Tokyo in 2015 and took his wife’s last name. A Manhattan Center official confirmed he is no longer at that school.

New York already spends more per pupil than almost any other state while producing mediocre results. Paying nearly two hundred thousand dollars to an unassigned project director whose proposed selective tech school was scrapped for ideological reasons is not an anomaly. It is the system working as designed.

Scripture is blunt on the subject: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

Taxpayers who do work are funding both the salary and the administrative apparatus that refuses to reassign or demote him.

Schools that actually open still struggle with vacancies, overcrowding, and the fallout from earlier decisions that prioritized equity rhetoric over competence. Haraguchi-Combs’ situation, brought to light by fellow principals tired of the dysfunction under Beidleman, shows how far the Department of Education has drifted from any basic expectation that public employees do the jobs for which they are paid.

The school never existed. The paycheck does.

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Mamdani Grins With Glee as NY Governor Signals More Tax Hikes to Fund His Childcare Program

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared to grin gleefully on Friday as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul teased the prospect of new taxes.

Mamdani and Hochul were speaking together at a joint news briefing when a reporter asked them about the prospect of raising taxes on the “wealthy.”

Pointing to her “record over the last five years,” which included repeated tax increases, Hochul replied by saying that “when we have a severe need to do something extraordinary, I am willing to do what has to happen.”

“I had to increase the Payroll Mobility Tax to make sure that we would keep the lifeline of New York City functioning, and that is the subway system,” she added, proudly touting one of the many tax hikes seen during her tenure.

“I did that for the MTA. Again, I couldn’t let New York City have its bond rating downgraded, causing chaos,” she continued. “I needed to help the mayor get out of a problem he didn’t create.”

“So I think you’ll see a very thoughtful approach to this,” she concluded. “It is not ideological. It is pragmatic, and what we need to do to deliver for the people who put us in office.”

As she spoke, Mamdani appeared to grin gleefully.

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Ottawa’s new budget plans nearly $289 billion in deficits, and younger Canadians will be the ones paying it back

The Carney government’s second budget, tabled Thursday, projects a $62.3 billion deficit this year and deficits every year after that through 2030-31. Together they add up to nearly $289 billion in new borrowing over five years. Writing for the Fraser Institute the day before, Jake Fuss predicted more spending and large deficits, and it was not a hard call to make. The more useful question is who ends up paying for it. The answer is people who are in school, starting careers or trying to buy their first home today.

Mark Carney campaigned on a “very different approach” to federal finances and promised to spend less than his predecessor. Instead, the government posted a $66.9 billion deficit last year. By Fuss’s count, the deficits it has planned through the end of the decade are about double what the Trudeau government projected before it left office. A government elected partly on the promise of fiscal competence has gone further down the same road.

The budget leans on an accounting distinction the government introduced last year, splitting “operating” spending from “capital” spending and promising to balance only the operating side. It now says that will happen in 2027-28. But every dollar of both kinds is borrowed. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has already warned that the definition of capital is loose enough to let the government move spending between columns to hit its target. A balanced operating budget alongside a $60 billion overall deficit is not a balanced budget in any sense that matters to the people who will repay the debt.

That is where younger Canadians come in. Fuss notes that federal debt interest is projected to reach $75.7 billion by 2029-30. That is more than Ottawa plans to spend on Employment Insurance and the Canada Child Benefit combined. Interest buys nothing, and it has to be paid before anything else. The bill will land on today’s 20- and 30-somethings for decades, as higher taxes, thinner services or both. It also lands sooner than that. When Ottawa borrows this heavily, it competes for the same pool of capital as families and businesses, which helps keep interest rates higher on the mortgages young buyers are already struggling to carry.

Baby boomers grew up while Ottawa was paying down debt in the late 1990s and 2000s. Their children and grandchildren are being handed the opposite. A budget that set a real date to balance, counting every dollar, would be a start. This one does not.

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Texas Democrat Vows Taxpayer Voucher Money for Islamic Schools, Including One Funded by Iran-Linked Bank

Democrat Sarah Eckhardt, who defeated incumbent Republican Don Huffines in the Nov. 3 race for Texas comptroller, said at her first news conference on Nov. 4 that she would ensure Islamic and other religious schools are not blocked from receiving money through the state’s $1 billion Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) school voucher program, according to the Houston Chronicle. As comptroller, Eckhardt will oversee the program, which Islamic schools sued to enter this year.

In February, Eckhardt said in a statement that the comptroller “has been instructed by the GOP to illegally discriminate based on religion” by keeping Islamic schools out of the program.

At the Nov. 4 news conference, she said, “I am not a fan of this policy. However, it is a policy that has passed the Texas Legislature, and it is the law. So as the comptroller, I will implement it, because it is the law.” She also said she would review the program’s spending and the data collected by the vendor that runs it.

Brighter Horizons Academy in Garland, one of the Islamic schools now in the program, describes itself on its own website as “a model Islamic educational institute” whose mission is to develop “practicing Muslim Leaders.” The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington think tank, reported that the school received $995,000 from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB).

The bank is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and is affiliated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim-majority countries. Iran is the bank’s third-largest shareholder, while Qatar and Turkey are also among its top 10 shareholders, according to an Oct. 21 FDD report. The U.S. government has designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism.

The Oct. 21 report found that IsDB has given more than $17 million to at least 50 private Islamic schools in the United States.

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Inside CHIRLA’s Secret Voter Campaign

Since 2019, California has granted more than $100 million to a left-wing NGO called the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA. The group has used those or other resources to fight deportations, address “hate incidents,” and craft what it calls “progressive policies.”

CHIRLA and its political arm, CHIRLA Action, are radical. The nonprofit wants to abolish ICE, expand welfare for illegal migrants, and “roll back immigration enforcement.” Some of its programs, like its “Immigrant Political Power Project,” are explicitly political, targeting “new citizens, Latinos, and English learners” in hopes of creating “a voter base from scratch, with enough power to sway state politics.”

Last week, we went undercover to a CHIRLA get-out-the-vote event at its headquarters in Los Angeles, ahead of the midterm elections. The event featured speeches, a mariachi band, and a press conference. The building was festooned with left-wing iconography, ranging from a massive LGBTQ pride flag to a “Stop ICE” poster.

During the press conference, CHIRLA’s executive director, Angelica Salas, described the group as a 501(c)(3) organization, and said that its members participate in campaigns year-round.

“Every campaign and election cycle is an opportunity for us to flex our electoral muscles,” Salas said. “We will also be paying tribute to the people who have died in custody in our detention centers or in the streets at the hands of ICE.”

Inside, we discovered that CHIRLA was hosting an official L.A. County voting station, with multiple Smartmatic voting tablets and a ballot drop box. After we entered, a woman wearing a neon vest gave us a state-issued voter guide. County Registrar records confirm that CHIRLA was hosting a County Flex Voting Center that day, which the government has deployed to “reach voters with distinct needs.”

We returned to the main room, where a man in a CHIRLA polo shirt, whom we later identified as one of the nonprofit’s employees, agreed to help us vote. He took us into an adjoining room, then went through our ballot line-by-line and relayed endorsements for various races.

“Starting with here, the city, we’ve endorsed Karen Bass,” the employee said, pointing at the incumbent mayor’s name on the ballot. “For the city attorney, we’ve endorsed Marissa Roy.”

The employee also recommended Xavier Becerra for governor and Rob Bonta for attorney general, noting that Bonta, in particular, has been “very supportive.” Though he had mentioned that we were “free to vote” for other candidates, the “endorsements” were crystal clear.

This potentially violates state law. In California, it is a misdemeanor to “solicit a vote or speak to a voter on the subject of marking the voter’s ballot” within “100 feet” of “the entrance to a building that contains a polling place” or ballot-drop location. Given the voting infrastructure in CHIRLA’s office that day, the employee’s remarks could constitute a prosecutable offense.

CHIRLA’s voting operation might also violate federal law, which prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations from electioneering. According to the IRS, charitable organizations cannot endorse candidates or engage in “voter education” efforts “with evidence of bias that . . . would favor one candidate over the other.” Though CHIRLA has a related 501(c)(4) political organization, CHIRLA Action, the voting center was advertised as a CHIRLA event, the employee was wearing a CHIRLA shirt, and when we asked him to which organization he belonged, he replied: “I’m with CHIRLA.”

When reached for comment, CHIRLA defended its employee’s conduct. “Our Civic Engagement staff are trained to give every voter who asks for assistance clear, accurate guidance,” said a CHIRLA representative. “This is yet another example of the dirty, underhanded tactics anti-immigrant opponents have used to target CHIRLA because of who we are.”

CHIRLA has long ridden the edge between charitable work and partisan politics. This time, CHIRLA may have crossed the line. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has been aggressive with nonprofit-law enforcement, should take decisive action. If CHIRLA has violated federal regulations, the IRS should strip the radical group of its nonprofit status once and for all.

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Ending An 8,000-Year-Old Landlord Relationship: Florida’s Property Tax Revolt Begins

With Amendment 3 written into the state constitution, Florida leaders are eyeing full elimination of homestead property taxes—backed by state surpluses, tourism sales tax revenue, and a mandate to rein in bloated local spending.

For nearly eight millennia, governments have operated on a simple, inescapable reality: land cannot pack its bags and move across state lines.

In ancient Sumeria, temple administrators used clay tablets to assess rotational taxes on fields and livestock. In Egypt, royal scribes measured Nile farmland after every flood to calculate what farmers owed the Pharaoh. Rome’s Emperor Augustus standardized an annual 1% levy on land value, and in 1086, William the Conqueror compiled the Domesday Book to ensure no parcel in England escaped the Crown’s reach. When the Pilgrims and Puritans landed in New England in the 1600s, they brought that same centuries-old fiscal machinery with them.

For thousands of years, the underlying bargain never changed: you might hold the deed, but if you fail to pay the sovereign’s annual tribute, the tax collector can slap a lien on your land and take it away. Even after paying off a 30-year mortgage, homeowners remain perpetual tenants—renting their own property from the government.

In Florida, that ancient arrangement just collided with modern reality—and voters decided they had had enough.

On November 3, Floridians approved Amendment 3, a sweeping constitutional overhaul that triples the state’s non-school homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, cuts the annual assessment cap on non-homestead properties in half from 10% to 5%, and places strict constitutional guardrails on how local governments spend property tax dollars.

Yet as far as Florida’s political leadership is concerned, Amendment 3 is only the opening salvo.

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Fraud-Linked Democrat Somali Daycare Owner Flips Seat in Minnesota Legislature

A Democrat candidate in Minnesota who defeated a Republican incumbent in the midterm election Tuesday owns a Somali daycare center that is linked to a huge fraud settlement.

The Democratic Farm Labor Party (DFL) (the official name of the Democrat Party in the state) candidate Abdi Daisane is the CEO of Blooming Kids Child Care Center in St. Cloud, Fox News reported Friday, noting he won Minnesota’s House District 14A seat.

Over several years, the childcare center has received over $7 million from the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, the report continued:

His childcare business also received $598,251.62 from the federally-funded Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) since 2020. A nonprofit called Partners in Nutrition, which recently had to pay an $18.5 million civil settlement for fraud, was the center’s sponsor for CACFP funds.

A press release from the settlement says Partners in Nutrition “knowingly defrauded the State of Minnesota out of millions of dollars in federal child nutrition funds during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the Minnesota False Claims Act.”

More than 20 locations in Minneapolis were raided in April as federal officials moved to crack down on the alleged fraud linked to Somali-run businesses after citizen journalist Nick Shirley exposed suspected fraud in the state’s Somali community, according to Breitbart News.

The Fox article said it visited the Blooming Kids Child Care Center on Thursday and found the building and area to be quiet and a nearby parking lot mostly empty.

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No, MAGA Didn’t Cut Israel Aid, They Hid It — And the Left Has the Same Plan

On the morning of Election Day, with polls open and the war in Iran dragging his party toward a historic beating, Donald Trump phoned into Fox & Friends with a surprise. The United States, he said, would stop sending roughly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel at the end of 2026, under a deal he claimed he and Benjamin Netanyahu had struck months ago. For a base that spent the past year watching its “America First” president drag the country into another Middle East war, it sounded like a long-overdue win.

It wasn’t, and the man who did more than anyone in Congress to force this issue into the open said so within hours. Rep. Thomas Massie called it “pennies on the dollar” and “a desperate Election Day lie,” warning that the same taxpayer money would simply flow through as military coordination instead of as a separate line item in the appropriations bills. He’s right, the paper trail proves it, and it fosters less transparency, not more.

Start with the motive, because Trump practically confessed it on air. He complained that Israel aid had become “a bad talking point” and asked why Republicans should “suffer the slings from lunatics” over money Israel doesn’t “need.” That is a campaign problem being managed, not a foreign policy being changed, and Bloomberg reported he pitched it explicitly as a way to blunt election-year attacks.

It also came with no plan. Trump never explained how the money would actually stop, even though the memorandum guaranteeing Israel $3.8 billion a year runs until September 2028 and Congress wrote those levels into the 2021 defense bill. A president doesn’t undo a statute on a morning show, and the deal he says was made months ago reportedly blindsided Israeli security and financial officials, who noted next year’s budget was already drafted around the existing agreement.

Meanwhile, Israel has been angling for more, not less. Axios reported a year ago that Israel was seeking an unprecedented 20-year security agreement likely worth at least $4 billion a year, repackaged with “America First” provisions to win over Trump’s base. Nobody negotiating a two-decade package is preparing to walk away from the money, which raises the obvious question of where it’s going instead.

The answer is the Pentagon. The Congressional Research Service, hardly a hotbed of antiwar agitation, laid out the mechanism months ago: replace grant aid with joint programs funded from defense accounts, and shift congressional oversight away from the foreign affairs committees toward the defense ones. The Quincy Institute was blunter, calling it not a reduction in support but a reorganization that moves billions out of State Department grants and into general Pentagon procurement.

That reorganization is already moving through Congress. The House-passed defense bill authorizes $750 million for U.S.-Israel cooperative programs and extends the weapons stockpile authority for Israel, and the source for that is AIPAC’s own press release celebrating it. The same bill creates a new U.S.-Israel defense technology initiative that critics warn would be harder for future Congresses to unwind and would shift the relationship away from highly visible aid votes. Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept it was highly irregular, a near-copy of an AIPAC-backed bill that had already died.

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France Votes To Tax Big Tech By The Gigabyte – And Someone Just Bent The Barrel Back

France’s National Assembly voted on Friday to tax the internet by the gigabyte. An amendment to the 2027 budget would charge every company that sends data to French internet subscribers €0.055 per gigabyte, and its Socialist authors expect it to raise €10 billion a year.

But by Sunday, someone had turned the tax on the party that wrote it.

An internet user put a 44MB PDF from the Socialist Party’s website on a server on his own machine, downloaded it in an endless loop and tallied the tax the traffic would generate: 13,109 downloads, 576 gigabytes and €31.70 in under four hours.

In the simulation, the counter shows the loop running from a local address, 127.0.0.1, so no traffic reached the party’s servers and no internet provider metered a byte. The math matches the amendment’s rate, though: 576.4 gigabytes at €0.055 comes to €31.70.

The potential damage could be huge. VideoLAN, the French nonprofit behind the VLC media player, said the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year – as the amendment doesn’t say how its revenue-based cap would apply to a nonprofit that earns little.

The roll call shows how slim the majority was. Only 35 deputies voted, 11 in favor, 10 against and 14 abstaining, and the amendment was adopted on Oct. 30 on the strength of its 11. National Rally’s 10 deputies abstained, and had they voted no, the amendment would have failed 20 to 11. The yes votes came from five Socialists, two members of La France Insoumise, two Greens and two from the Democratic and Republican Left. All 10 votes against came from the center and the right: four from Ensemble pour la République, five from Droite Républicaine and one from Les Démocrates. Four of La France Insoumise’s deputies also abstained.

The text was filed Oct. 9 by Socialist Laurent Lhardit and dozens of his colleagues, former President François Hollande among them. It would make the “content provider” that sent the data, not the internet provider, liable for the tax, which it calls a tax on digital data producers. Internet providers would be required to meter every sender’s traffic into French homes and businesses under the supervision of the telecom regulator Arcep and the tax administration, and report the totals to the tax authority each quarter. The amendment bars collecting anything about what the data contains or where it goes. When a sender uses a content delivery network, the volume counts as everything leaving that network. The details of the metering would be left to a government decree.

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DOJ Uncovers $29M More In Minnesota Benefits Fraud, Calls State ‘Epicenter For Fraud In America’

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it identified roughly $29.1 million in government benefits fraud in Minnesota over a one-month period.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 30, the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division and the District of Minnesota charged, convicted, or sentenced 13 individuals for proven or alleged schemes that caused nearly $83 million in intended losses to the federal government.

The DOJ said in an Oct. 30 statement that it uncovered $29.1 million in fraud in newly charged cases, which is part of the total $83 million.

The targeted benefits programs include Minnesota’s Medicaid program, the Federal Child Nutrition Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Some are accused of engaging in bribery as part of carrying out their schemes.

In one case, Shaakir Mohamud Ibrahim, 54, of Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, is facing wire fraud and money laundering charges for being part of a scheme to defraud the Federal Child Nutrition Program through the nonprofit Feeding Our Future.

Ibrahim and his co-conspirators are alleged to have falsely claimed to be serving thousands of meals to children every day for four months. The department alleged he used this fake meal distribution to collect more than $1.1 million in reimbursements through the nonprofit.

In another case, the DOJ said it charged Feisal Mohamed Elmi, 46, of New Brighton, Minnesota, with 11 counts related to health care fraud in an $8.2 million scheme that targeted the state’s Medicaid program.

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