Tag: taxes

Five years after the ‘unmarked graves’ claim, Canada still has no bodies — but plenty of demands for silence

The fifth anniversary of the claim that the remains of 215 Indian residential school students had been discovered at Kamloops, BC, has come and gone. Despite the fact that millions of dollars have been spent, and not one body has been found, there have been no apologies from those who made the claim. Quite the contrary, Canada’s Indian chiefs are now demanding the criminal prosecution of anyone who even questions the claim. As they see it, anyone disputing their claim — or even claiming that former residential school students had positive experiences at the schools — should be found guilty of “residential school denialism,” and severely sanctioned — even jailed.

Ottawa appears to be ready to oblige. Bill C-413 would make me a criminal for writing this article — and perhaps you for reading it and passing it on.

But if they get their way, they had better build a very big jail. And they will have to be prepared to throw many former residential school students in that jail. Because it is not hard to find positive residential school experiences described by former students.

Here is an example of a man heaping praise on his residential school and the dedicated people there who gave him a first-class education. According to him, if not for the years he spent at his residential school, he would have died as a drunk on skid row, like so many of his reserve friends. Instead, he went on to become a successful lawyer. He credited the 14 years he spent at a residential school for making that success possible. 

That fellow is Wilton Littlechild, who happens to be one of the three Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Commissioners. He certainly changed his tune later, but for most of his life, he and his family considered themselves very fortunate for his education at the school. Every year, the family and community held a picnic at their rural home, with the chiefs in attendance, to honour the teachers and staff who gave their son and friends the education so many Indians didn’t receive.

Littleton shared this revelation during a 2011 interview with University of New Brunswick students and at a TRC hearing. You can read the full interview at Speak Truth to Power Canada. 

Will Mr. Littlechild be jailed for making these comments about his overwhelmingly positive experience at his residential school?

And while we are on the subject of TRC commissioners, here is what the late Commissioner Murray Sinclair had to say about residential schools.

“While the TRC heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard.”

Would Sinclair have been prosecuted for that?

Sinclair’s grandmother — the grandmother who raised him, and who Sinclair credited for his success — received her education at a residential school. Would the chiefs have her jailed for repeatedly declaring how lucky she had been to have had a residential school education?

Then there is the famous Indian playwright and musician, Tomson Highway, who wrote a book about his experiences at the Guy Hill Residential School near The Pas, Manitoba. He described his experience there as overwhelmingly positive.

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The Big Apple’s Woes Are Not Just the Result of One Election

The destruction of New York is the logic of decades of history and long-forgotten pols addicted to outrageous spending and taxation.

Today’s successors of these big taxers are as myopic as the Bourbon kings who “learned nothing and forgot nothing.”

It didn’t start with the election of socialist/communist Mayor Zorain Mamdani, who followed in their footsteps and said the government should control “the means of production.”

Mamdani is the logical outcome of generations of New York City’s drift toward bigger and bigger government along with destroying the private sector. This leads the most productive citizens and businesses to head for the exits. It’s been going on for generations.

These problems happened as, little by little, the city’s Democrats trended radical left. Even some Republicans moved left. An example of the latter was liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, elected in 1965 and the author of the city’s first income tax. He later turned Democrat. New York’s popular Republican governor, Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller—elected four times from the late 1950s to the early 1970s—nearly spent the state into bankruptcy. It was all in the stars. Before winning the statehouse in 1958, a predecessor Republican governor, Thomas Dewey, told a young Rockefeller, “Nelson, I like you but I can’t afford you.” Dewey was prescient.

In some 15 years as governor, he quadrupled the state budget and quintupled the state debt, including substantial authority debt, practices continued by his successors, including governor Andrew Cuomo. “Rocky” raised taxes many times and initiated a state sales tax. These taxes accelerated the departure of industry, with New York state losing some 500,000 manufacturing jobs between 1969 and 1975.

In 1961, two-term New York City mayor Robert Wagner, who successfully sought a third term, faced the same overspending problems as today’s state and city leaders. Like today’s pols, he whined as the bills piled up. Wagner blamed the bankers selling city bonds.

Wagner—in a statement that could have been made by several succeeding mayors—said he was going ahead with this welfare program expansion: “I do not propose to permit our fiscal problem to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.” About a decade later, the spending bomb he lit blew up. Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, campaigned for mayor in 1973 as the man “who knew the buck.”

Yet a 1975 New York Magazine profile described his budgetary practices as “lies and a sham.” William Simon, US Treasury Secretary in his book, A Time for Truth, said New York governor Hugh Carey “ping ponged from position to position,” and demanded a federal bailout.

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Blue States Starting to Curb ‘Free’ Healthcare to Migrants as Budgets Spin Out of Control

A host of deep blue states are quietly pulling back from their generous programs of “free” healthcare to migrants as federal dollars dry up and their budgets continue to spiral into the red.

With the Trump administration beginning to close the spigot of billions in federal aid that many states lavishly spent caring for illegal migrants, sates including California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Oregon Washington, and the District of Columbia are finding that they cannot afford to replace the chocked off federal dollars with their own state budget dollars. This reality setting in has caused state officials to begin scaling back their freebies to illegals, which all come at the expense of American citizens.

According to the Washington Examiner, 14 states have had been devoting untold millions to migrants, for their children, and for pregnant, non-citizen women.

But after President Donald Trump signed his “Big Beautiful” spending bill, cutting billions in federal aid with cuts to Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, and Obamacare insurance subsidies, many states have been forced to make decisions about their migrant programs.

The cutbacks also reflect the Democrats’ difficulty in funding their hugely expensive urban political machines. Those “Sanctuary City Ponzi scheme” political machines need poor migrants to help conduit federal funds back to local city and state politicians, partly because many productive Americans move away to low-migration cities and states that have lower taxes, less diversity, better schools, higher wages, and cheaper housing.

Thus far, California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington the District of Columbia have already begun cutting free migrant healthcare budgets. And several others are in the process of evaluating similar measures.

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Hegseth outlines record-breaking defense budget featuring largest military pay raise in decades

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has unveiled a historic, generational investment aimed at modernizing America’s warfighters, transforming the Pentagon’s business model and revitalizing the domestic defense manufacturing sector.

On Thursday, Hegseth highlighted that of the proposed $1.5 trillion military investment for Fiscal Year 2027, $90 billion would be allocated toward revitalizing barracks and facilities. In the video, Hegseth said the funding “will get rid of all substandard and failing barracks.”

Under the proposed framework, military personnel would also receive a targeted, tiered pay increase: a 7% raise for those in grades E-5 and below, a 6% increase for grades E-6 to O-3, and a 5% bump for O-4 and above.

Beyond direct compensation, the budget channels $35 million into robust family support systems. This includes fully funding military healthcare — with the strategic goal of making Tricare a more desirable option than Medicare — while simultaneously investing in base childcare, youth programs, upgraded commissaries, and enhanced military schools. Additionally, permanent change of station (PCS) task forces and spousal employment initiatives will receive dedicated capital to ensure smoother transitions during relocations.

“Taking care of our troops isn’t just about doing the right thing; it’s about military readiness,” Hegseth asserted. “When our warfighters know their families are safe, secure, and provided for, they can maintain total focus on the mission.”

According to Hegseth, the massive funding injection is designed to simultaneously address service member quality of life, remediate substandard military barracks, and rapidly put the defense industrial base back onto a wartime footing. The secretary framed the historic top-line request as the definitive execution of President Donald Trump’s America First agenda.

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MASSIVE FRAUD PROBE: HHS Auditing All 50 States Following Shocking, Nationwide Explosion in Medicaid Autism Billing — Taxpayer Dollars Drained by ‘Bad Actors’

In a massive, long-overdue crackdown on government waste and rampant abuse, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has officially put all 50 states on notice.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, a federal HHS Office of Inspector General audit found Colorado made at least $77.8 million in improper fee-for-service Medicaid payments for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy for children diagnosed with autism in 2022-2023 alone.

Every single one of the 100 sampled enrollee-months contained at least one improper or potentially improper claim. Auditors flagged another $207+ million in potentially improper payments.

Similar horror shows hit Wisconsin ($18.5 million improper), Indiana, and Maine, with confirmed improper payments across audited states totaling around $198 million (roughly 31% of the spending reviewed in those samples).

The Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has arrested two Muslim women in Minnesota for defrauding American taxpayers of more than $21 million through a brazen scheme targeting the state’s autism services program.

Now the feds are going nationwide.

CMS has issued a direct call to all 50 states to re-evaluate high-risk ABA providers, remove illegitimate ones, and report back with plans to clean house. States have tight deadlines — 10 business days to respond and 30 days for a full strategy.

This comes alongside the new AERO initiative (Audit Enforcement and Risk Oversight), which is using AI and aggressive follow-up to finally hold states accountable for years of ignored audit failures and chronic noncompliance across HHS programs.

The spending numbers are insane and demand scrutiny:

  • In North Carolina, Medicaid ABA spending surged from roughly $1.9 million just five years ago to over $505 million in 2025 — with projections blasting past $1 billion soon. Some reports flag increases in the thousands of percent.
  • Across eight states with available data, combined Medicaid autism therapy spending exploded from $347 million to over $2.2 billion in recent years — a 561% increase.
  • Minnesota saw one of the most grotesque spikes: from under $700,000 in 2018 to $342+ million by 2024 in its EIDBI autism program.

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Gavin Newsom Vows To ‘Seize’ Money From California Republicans

Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for California to slap a 100% tax on anyone in the state who collects money from President Donald Trump’s new Anti-Weaponization Fund, framing it as a way to block what Democrats say could become a payday for Trump allies.

“Anyone from California that receives any of those funds,” Newsom said at a Wednesday news conference. “We want to tax 100% of those proceeds and that’s an action the state of California can take. It’s an action we look forward to taking.”

Newsom’s move targets the $1.776 billion fund the Justice Department announced as part of a settlement tied to Trump and the Internal Revenue Service. Supporters say it is open to any claimant who can show the government unfairly targeted them. Critics call it a boondoggle and warn it could be used to compensate people convicted or indicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Newsom leaned into that argument in a post on X, tying the fund to Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations.

“He pardoned all of those folks that were beating up cops and absolved them, providing them 1.776 billion dollars. So not only do you get a pardon, you get rewarded,” Newsom wrote. “That’s why this is needed.”

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Mamdani’s Housing Program Follows the Socialist Playbook: Create the Crisis, Seize the Property

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” said New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, explaining how the city plans to seize private property and transfer it to “stewards that include community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants themselves.”

The good news is he will not be taking property from all landlords, only the ones he decides are bad. “Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City.”

Mamdani does not seem troubled by the fact that his proposal appears to violate the Fifth Amendment, which states, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Even before being elected, he announced that he would be seizing private property. As a candidate, Mamdani declared: “We will use every single tool at our disposal, including seizing buildings from slumlords, to ensure that each and every New Yorker is given what is their right, a safe place to call their home.”

Now, as mayor, he is moving to act on it. On May 27, Mamdani unveiled his 112-page “Block by Block” housing plan in Gowanus. The enforcement mechanism involves the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development will launch a “Fix the City” initiative to conduct roof-to-cellar inspections in targeted buildings and aggressively use the 7A Program, through which the city can initiate legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers from day-to-day management.

The plan also has Housing Preservation and Development collaborating with other agencies and borough district attorneys to pursue criminal charges against property owners.

What Mamdani is proposing is a textbook Austrian economics interventionism cascade. Austrian economics, the discipline in which the author of this article is educated, holds that rather than solving problems and making life better for citizens, government intervention generally exacerbates problems, making them worse, more widespread, and increasingly difficult to resolve. Each resulting distortion is used to justify the next intervention, which in turn causes the problem to get worse, necessitating more government intervention, making things worse…until all properties fall under state control.

The landlord crisis Mamdani claims to be solving was created by the very rent control policies his administration is now doubling down on.

The methodology for creating a crisis that allows the state to seize property begins with artificial rent controls such as freezes and rent ceilings. Below-market rates destroy the landlord’s incentive to maintain and invest in property. When rents fall below a certain level, the landlord may not even be able to afford repairs and maintenance.

The rational economic response for a landlord who is forced to rent at rates below operating costs is to defer maintenance. The building deteriorates. The landlord becomes, by definition, a “bad landlord,” not from malice but from economic necessity created by the policy itself.

The city then uses the deterioration it caused as the legal and moral pretext to seize or transfer the property. The government manufactured the problem and now presents itself as the solution.

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Meet the Prominent Police Officer Who Carried Out a Steamy, Two-Year Sexual Affair with Married Obama Judge in Her Chambers

The individual who carried out a loud, steam >affair with an Obama federal judge has been unmasked as a prominent Atlanta policeman, causing the scandal to take another turn for the worse.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a special committee for the Eleventh Circuit discovered that a judge nominated by former President Barack Obama carried out a two-year sexual affair in her “chambers and during business hours” with a police commander.

According to Bloomberg Law, the incidents all occurred within “earshot” of law clerks.

On Thursday, Bloomberg Law identified the judge as Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia. She is married to a DeKalb County judge and former prosecutor.

Ross was also found by the committee to have attended a partisan political event hosted by a district attorney’s campaign and to have lied to judges investigating her conduct.

Now, Bloomberg Law has identified the person who carried out this graphic affair with the Obama judge: 55-year-old Kelley Collier, a deputy chief in the Atlanta Police Department (APD).

Collier has worked for the APD since 1998.

More from Bloomberg Law:

The officer was identified by the person familiar with the situation as Atlanta Police Department Deputy Chief Kelley Collier, who commands the department’s community services division, according to the department’s website.

The report said the officer had worked for the police department since 1998, serving as the “commander of a certain division” since 2025.

Those years align with Collier’s biography on the police department’s website and his now-deleted LinkedIn profile.

The APD said on Thursday that it is now investigating Collier.

“The Atlanta Police Department has launched an investigation to determine if the person mentioned in the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States is indeed an employee of the Atlanta Police Department,” the department announced on its website.

Despite the taxpayer-funded scandal, neither Collier nor Ross has resigned to date.

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U.S. bears brunt of Israel’s missile defense, Pentagon assessments show

The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iranthan Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described toThe Washington Post.

The imbalance, according tothree U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes duringOperation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.

The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’stotal inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors firedfrom naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.

Military analysts said the data describedto The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together.

“The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.”

The shortage of U.S. interceptors has alarmed U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States as a deterrent to potential threats from North Korea and China. “That bill risks coming due in theaters that have nothing to do with Iran,” said Grieco.

U.S. and Israeli officials routinely tout their close cooperation and the strength of Israel’s multilayered air-defense system. But the Defense Department assessments suggest a more lopsided dynamic.

“In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles,” said a U.S. administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

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Severity Of America’s Depleted Advanced Weapons Stockpiles Detailed In New Report

During the 39-day war with Iran, the U.S. used so many key offensive and defensive weapons that it will take three or more years to rebuild some of these stocks to pre-war levels, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The report, compiled by Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park, highlights concerns we raised long before and during Operation Epic Fury about the rapid expenditure of critical munitions and how that could affect a potential future fight against China. U.S. military leaders have suggested that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be in a position where it would feel confident in launching an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.

The warning light on America’s magazine depth was blinking red long before Epic Fury. The stockpiles, especially of Standard Missile-3s (SM-3) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, were degraded by more than a year of combat in the Red Sea region with the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and several efforts to defend Israel. U.S. support for Ukraine, meanwhile, drained off supplies of Patriot air defense interceptors. We will address these issues in more detail later in this story. The weapon expenditure figures in the CSIS report only address Epic Fury, not previous U.S. engagements in the Middle East.

The most drastic setback to U.S. inventories involved the use of Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missiles (TLAMs) and THAAD and Patriot interceptors, according to CSIS. The think tank derived its expenditure figures from an internal analysis, which TWZ cannot independently verify.

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