Tag: taxes

San Francisco’s Frat Houses for Pedophiles

It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.

Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.

According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.

The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.

The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.

Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.

You can’t just walk into the Taylor Street complex. The facility has at least one guard and multiple security doors. But residents seem to be able to come and go with relative ease.

We spoke with one man, Paul, as he walked to an appointment in the neighborhood. Paul told us that he served time for a sex-related offense, had to register as a sex offender, and now lives at the Taylor Street house. In his opinion, there’s overblown “hysteria” around sex offenders’ proximity to children.

“For me, seeing a minor is like walking in the Tenderloin late at night,” he said. “Like, ‘stay away from that person.’”

Some of Paul’s neighbors seem less scrupulous. Multiple residents at 111 Taylor Street are “in violation” of their sex-offender-registration requirements, according to the state’s public database. At least one has been accused of sexually deviant behavior during his time at the Taylor house: Kevin Adams, a 37-year-old convicted in 2014 of transmitting more than 600 images of child pornography, including some that were sadistic or masochistic in nature.

Adams was released from prison on supervised release after his conviction. While on supervised release, he conducted multiple lewd internet searches, like “Asian Teens; Teen Cum Shot; and Teen Pussy.” He also searched online for pornographic content of gymnastic videos with young girls. Despite his conduct, Adams was relocated to Taylor Street, where he continued to exhibit “increased sexual deviance related to minors”—including viewing material on social media that depicted minors in various postures, from stretching to kneeling without pants.

As of 2026, Adams was a threat to the community and had a “clear sexual preoccupation with minors,” his probation officer determined. A court revoked his release in September after he admitted to possessing pornography. Adams’s listed address on the sex-offender registry is still 111 Taylor Street.

One of Adams’s neighbors at the Taylor Street center is Michael Eugene Kincade. One night in 2008, after his family had gone to sleep, Kincade went downstairs and molested a 13-year-old girl sleeping on his couch. She cried and told him to stop. He didn’t, according to court documents. Kincade has a history of alleged sexual misconduct; in 2000, he allegedly fondled an 18-year-old in her sleep before grabbing her, forcing her face into a cushion, choking her, and raping her. He did not respond to a comment request.

Neighbors have no idea that the apartment complex on the corner of Taylor Street is crawling with sex offenders. “I would assume the city pushes them over here because it’s a lower income living area [with] subsidized housing,” Steven, a San Francisco resident for 23 years, told us. “People can come over here, get free housing, use drugs, and get food stamps, and not have any repercussions in life.”

Keep reading

Los Angeles County Introduces 10.25% Sales Tax

Los Angeles County introduced a 10.25 percent sales tax on Thursday, four months after voters approved Measure ER.

The Essential Services Restoration Act (Measure ER) overwhelmingly passed in L.A. County earlier this year, raising the sales tax by a half-cent to support health care and other essential services – from 9.75 percent to 10.25 percent.

“For every $100 in taxable purchases, Measure ER adds 50 cents in tax, bringing the total to $110.25,” noted NBC News. “The increase is temporary. Measure ER allows the tax to remain in effect for five years until Oct. 1, 2031 as it is projected to generate about $1 billion annually.”

Supporters of the measure say that it will support roughly 700,000 L.A. County residents dealing with the loss of health insurance as federal funding for Medi-Cal is reduced:

Proponents say Measure ER will provide health care support for those who are losing Medi-Cal so they don’t show up to the local emergency rooms sicker with more serious illnesses.

The federal funding cut will also impact public hospitals and clinics, but if Measure ER passed, it would make up for the lost funds and save some of the public health care facilities and programs.

Critics of the measure, however, charge that it imposes an “unreasonable and unfairly harsh” sales tax in a county with an already high tax. L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger also said that residents are “stretched thin” with one of the highest metropolitan sales taxes in the nation.

“This proposed half-cent increase would push us even higher, making our county less affordable for families and less appealing for consumers to shop and businesses to operate,” Barger said.

“Moving forward, my responsibility is to ensure the revenues generated are managed with accountability and measurable results,” she also said. “Taxpayers deserve to know how these funds are being spent, whether promised outcomes are being achieved. I will be a strong advocate for rigorous oversight and fiscal responsibility every step of the way.”

The Libertarian Party of L.A. County also filed a lawsuit against the tax.

According to LA Mag, spending from the “tax revenue collected by the measure will be tracked through annual audits by the Auditor-Controller, public reporting and a nine-member Citizens’ Oversight Committee that includes the Director of the Department of Public Health and other members appointed by the Board of Supervisors.”

Keep reading

Nigerian Man Accused of Running Fake Government Agency with Federal Budget

An enterprising Nigerian named Adeniyi Adeyemi is facing charges in the capital of Abuja for creating and running a fake government agency for over a year, complete with about $1 million in funding from the Nigerian federal government.

According to prosecutors, Adeyemi created an agency called the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) in 2024 and installed himself as director-general. He kept the phony agency going until he was arrested in October 2025.

Adeyemi was somehow able to secure office space for his fake agency inside the Federal Secretariat office complex in Abuja, along with a million dollars of funding. He got his hands on some presidential stationery and used it to request cooperation from other government agencies – and evidently some of his requests were taken seriously, although prosecutors have not yet indicted any other government officials for colluding with him.

Police investigators said they have traced a total of 34 bank accounts to Adeyemi, including nine of them that were opened in the name of various government agencies. According to prosecutors, Adeyemi even recruited staffers to work for his fake agency.

The ersatz Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) also forged a realistic-looking letter of appointment from President Bola Tinubu, purportedly signed by presidential chief of staff Femi Gbajabiamila.

Gbajabiamila was the official who filed a petition to arrest Adeyemi, who faces eight counts of conspiracy, forgery, and impersonation alongside two accomplices known as “Femi” and “Anu,” who remain at large.

The Premium Times of Nigeria reported that Adeyemi appeared before the Federal High Court in Abuja for his arraignment on Wednesday “after several failed attempts to bring him before the court.”

Those previous attempts were unsuccessful “for various reasons,” including based on requests by his lawyers, his absence from court and the judge’s official engagement elsewhere. A judge swore out a bench warrant for Adeyemi’s arrest after he failed to appear for a July arraignment, and he was arrested within 12 hours, but it still took a surprisingly long time to get him into court.

Adeyemi said through his lawyers that he skipped out on his July arraignment because he “feared for his life” and had written an open letter to President Tinubu asking for protection. The Premium Times observed that he did not look particularly fearful when he finally made it to the courtroom on Wednesday, strolling cheerfully into chambers wearing a baseball cap and a white traditional robe known as a kaftan.

Adeyemi pleaded not guilty to all eight of the charges against him and was remanded to custody in the Kuje Correctional Center by the judge. He has claimed in media interviews that his PFIPC was a legitimate agency and he was working to bring foreign investment into Nigeria.

The case has become a hot topic among Nigerians, who have long complained about corruption and incompetence in their government, but are still shocked that a random con artist could create and operate a phony high-level government agency for months without being detected.

Some critics of the Tinubu government have postulated that Adeyami could only keep his scam running for so long if he was paying off legitimate government officials to evade oversight.

Adeyemi himself has claimed he paid Gbababiamila, the presidential chief of staff, a fee of 400 million Nigerian nairas (about $300,000) to help him forge his fake presidential appointment document. Adeyemi has asked Tinubu to establish an independent anti-corruption panel to investigate his case.

Keep reading

INSANE: School Superintendent in Fairfax County, Virginia is Paid More Than the President of the United States

Certain people who work for the public school system in Fairfax County, Virginia are making an absolute fortune.

They have a dedicated ‘Chief Equity Officer’ who makes almost $300,000 per year, but the lion’s share goes to the school superintendent who makes a whopping $469K a year, more than the President of the United States.

The salary for the US President is a lowly $400,000 per year. President Trump continues to donate his salary to White House and renovation projects.  You can thank Trump for making DC beautiful again!

On top of all these huge salaries, the Fairfax County district is experiencing declining enrollment.

What are we even doing here?

The Daily Signal reports:

When Local Bureaucracy Pays Better Than the Oval Office: Fairfax County’s Salary Problem

Fairfax County Public Schools Chief Equity Officer Nardos King makes $288,064 this year—more than every single member of the president’s Cabinet—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, all of them—each of whom earns $253,100 to run a federal department.

King’s job is to oversee equity initiatives for one county’s school system. Virginia’s largest public school district holds “equity” at the center of its strategic plan, and King is just one of ten district “chiefs” whose salaries clear that bar. A public records request revealed that 13 Fairfax County Public School employees earn more than the U.S. Secretary of Education.

By comparison, Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Jeffery Smith, makes $229,136. In other words, it is more lucrative to be an assistant superintendent overseeing a small region of one Virginia county than to run the Virginia Department of Education.

At the top of the heap, Michelle Reid, Fairfax schools’ superintendent, is paid $469,936 a year—nearly $70,000 more than the President of the United States makes to run the executive branch, command the armed forces, and set foreign policy for 340 million people. Reid, by contrast, runs a declining school district with about 180,000 students.

Reid is the visible peak of a payroll structure that taxpayers have been quietly bankrolling for years—one that a batch of FOIA-obtained salary records shows has ballooned well past anything resembling fiscal restraint.

Who knew you can get rich working an administrative job in local education?

Keep reading

Hilton Mocks Becerra for Saying Tax Breaks for Those Earning Under $150K Benefit ‘the Wealthiest’

Democrat California gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra started his CNN debate by claiming that his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, supports tax breaks for the “wealthiest” Californians. Hilton immediately pointed out that the tax breaks will actually benefit people who earn under $150,000 a year.

One of the key points to take away from the debate interchange below, besides the fact that Democrats are going to have to cheat egregiously to boost an obviously sour and disconnected Becerra, is that Democrats are never content with targeting billionaires. All those deluded taxpayers who think they will vote for higher taxes on the wealthy should remember that Democrats’ definition of “the wealthy” is pretty much anyone who earns a good enough salary to be independent of government assistance and government programs.

Becerra lectured at the Wednesday debate, “If you start making tax breaks for the wealthiest, you damage our working families like my parents, Mr. Hilton.” Grinning, Hilton shot back, “I love the way that Xavier says the wealthiest are people who are earning less than $150,000 a year, struggling. But first of all, I just want to say thank you to CNN for bringing Xavier out of hiding. He’s barely been seen in public since the primary, four months ago.”

Keep reading

Trump’s Horrific, Illegal Iran War Has ‘Costs Us Billions While Making Us Less Safe’

A group of experts says that President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran, which has been massively expensive and has made Americans less safe, shows the need for a radical overhaul of US foreign policy.

Scholars at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts on Wednesday are holding a webinar to present ideas for reducing the US military footprint and using the savings to invest in programs that will directly benefit working-class Americans.

In a video posted on social media ahead of the webinar, PERI experts advocated for making major changes to US foreign policy, which they argued has left the country overstretched.

“The Iran War costs us billions while making us less safe,” says a message accompanying the video on PERI’s social media account. “By reining in military spending and taxing the wealthy to pay their fair share, we can fund critical services like universal preschool, infrastructure investments, and Medicare for All.”

Keep reading

Trump Maps Out $200 Billion in Korean Investment, but the Biggest Deals Aren’t Done Yet

President Donald Trump put some yuge numbers on the table Wednesday: up to $200 billion in South Korean investment for American energy projects, including Alaska LNG, eight nuclear power plants, and a massive natural gas power project in Texas.

The announcement finally gives shape to part of the $350 billion investment package South Korea agreed to as part of last year’s trade deal with Washington. Of that total, $150 billion was set aside for shipbuilding and another $200 billion for strategic investments selected in cooperation with the United States.

From Reuters:

“Thanks to the agreements my administration has secured with the Republic of Korea, they will invest up to $200 billion,” Trump said.

He said that the investment would include the construction of eight large-scale nuclear power plants, a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska and a 6-gigawatt power generation facility in Texas.

The announcement is part of a series of economic and investment deals Trump is highlighting ⁠ahead of November’s midterm elections, as he seeks to reinforce his economic record amid voter concerns over the Iran war and high gasoline prices. The Alaska LNG project also comes as Republicans seek to retain incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan who faces Democrat Mary Peltola. Sullivan was in the Oval Office for the Wednesday announcement.

The Alaska LNG project includes an 807-mile (1,299-km) pipeline carrying natural gas from the North Slope to a liquefaction facility on Alaska’s southern coast, allowing the fuel to be shipped to Asian markets. The project is designed to transport about 3.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day and produce up to 20 million metric tons of LNG annually, according to the White House.

Keep reading

Filing Taxes Will Cost Americans $544 Billion This Year

The process of paying taxes manages to add insult to injury by making it burdensome to comply as you cough up the money the government steals from you. The time lost keeping up on tax rules, filing paperwork, and calculating our own mugging is stolen from the rewarding areas of life, and the costs are diverted from productive activities. How much do we lose in satisfying government’s demands? A new report answers that question in painful detail, just in time for the October 15 extended filing deadline.

The High Cost of Paying High Taxes

“The federal tax code imposes many costs on the US economy. The most direct costs, of course, are the roughly $5.2 trillion in federal taxes (as of fiscal year 2025) that consume 17.3 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP),” the Tax Foundation’s Alex Muresianu and Guy Cardwell wrote last week. “A less direct cost is the time taken out of our lives to comply with a Byzantine tax code that requires billions of hours to complete IRS paperwork and file tax returns.”

Drawing on data from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Muresianu and Cardwell note that “Americans will spend almost 6.9 billion hours complying with IRS tax filing and reporting requirements in 2026. This is equal to 3.32 million full-time workers—more than the population of Chicago and nearly 35 times the workforce the IRS employed in FY 2025—doing nothing but tax return paperwork for a full year.”

That’s an enormous amount of time and energy diverted from Americans’ own priorities—like working, running businesses, and raising families—to satisfy federal paperwork requirements so we can cough up the money the government extorts from us under threats of fines and imprisonment. Few of us want to pay that money to begin with, but we have to surrender part of our lives to calculate the amount owed and satisfy tax rules.

As you might expect, all that tax-consumed time comes attached to a hefty price tag.

Keep reading

Waste Of The Day: Trips To Tiki Bar, Nightclubs

It’s no wonder that California’s infamous high-speed rail line has more than tripled in cost and been delayed by 20 years. The consultants working on the project have been killing time at a tiki bar, a nightclub, an escape room, a gym and more.

The consultants are allowed to bill taxpayers for legitimate business expenses, but the state “routinely” allowed them to travel without advance approval, as required. State officials admitted they sometimes had no idea the consultants had taken trips until the invoices arrived.

Many travel expenses had no written justification, or had vague explanations like “typical travel” or “meetings.”

Consultants booked first-class flights and premium services like Uber Black, which picks up riders in a luxury car. One consultant booked a premium Uber to travel 25 miles to a steakhouse, and another used the service for “repeated” trips to Planet Fitness gym locations around Sacramento. Another took a ride to a nightclub at 9:40 p.m. and booked his return trip at 2:30 a.m.

State employees said the absurd expenses were approved due to “the volume of travel expense claims, limited time to review them, and errors.”

One legal consulting firm’s contract allows employees to earn $570 per hour while traveling on a plane, plus the price of airfare. The consulting firm billed for more than 30 trips. Only three were approved in advance, and even those contained no “adequate explanations for why the travel was necessary.”

When state officials tried to enforce their authority over travel approvals, they were “resisted or overridden,” according to the report. Consultants argued that Ian Choudri, CEO of the California High Speed Rail Authority, had asked them to travel for in-person meetings, and so all their expenses were justified. Choudri has no authority to approve travel for consultants, according to the audit.

The audit reviewed four consulting firms, which are not identified by name.

The Rail Authority said it would only make some changes to its travel expense procedures, arguing that “state regulations do not require justification for each consultant trip.”

Keep reading

Grammy-winning pastor’s half-time side job that pays $540,000 is with taxpayer-funded nonprofit

A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.

That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.

His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.

Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.

“I don’t know whether there were better recipients for this cash, but it doesn’t look like it was supposed to go to pay for the salaries of an organization’s director,” said James Hohman, director of fiscal policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a prominent conservative think tank in Michigan.

Winans did not respond to repeated requests from The Center Square, including a visit to his church, to comment for this article. The Center Square also sent him an email that summarized the article’s findings.

The salary Winans receives from the church itself, separate from the nonprofit, is not publicly disclosed because churches are generally not required to report their spending to the federal government.

His salary increases also come amid his vigorous fundraising campaign to finish work on an enormous church that has been under construction for more than 20 years.

Keep reading