Tag: taxes

The Stealing of America: You’re Not a Citizen—You’re a Revenue Stream for the Power Elite

“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”—Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

If the government’s newly dubbed “war on waste,” headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, is anything like its deceptively futile past efforts to drain the swamp and use DOGE to cut spending that is inefficient, we should expect to see corruption, graft and waste rise while vital programs that benefit the taxpayer get slashed.

The level of self-serving corruption, indulgence and excess by the elite ruling class while Americans struggle to make ends meet is off the charts.

Under President Trump, his gilding of the White House has coincided with the dawn of a new self-serving age of indulgence for the American oligarchy. As Debbie Millman writes for the New York Times: “Trump is showing the world that his presidency is a royal court where a select few are invited to pledge their allegiance… Trump is refashioning the presidential residence into a palace; our democracy is now a members-only club.”

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S. 

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 – $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

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Senate Confirms First Ever Assistant Attorney General to Investigate Fraud Nationwide

The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed the first ever Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald to investigate fraud nationwide in a 52-47 vote.

In January, President Trump announced he nominated Colin McDonald to serve as the Assistant Attorney General for National Fraud Enforcement.

“I am pleased to nominate Colin McDonald to serve as the first ever Assistant Attorney General for National FRAUD Enforcement, a new Division at the Department of Justice, which I created to catch and stop FRAUDSTERS that have been STEALING from the American People,” Trump said.

“My Administration has uncovered Fraud schemes in States like Minnesota and California, where these thieves have stolen Hundreds of Billions of Taxpayer Dollars. Colin McDonald is a very Smart, Tough, and Highly Respected AMERICA FIRST Federal Prosecutor who has successfully delivered Justice in some of the most difficult and high stakes cases our Country has ever seen. Together, we will END THE FRAUD, and RESTORE INTEGRITY to our Federal Programs. Congratulations Colin — STOP THE SCAMS!” Trump said.

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NASA to spend $20 billion on moon base, cancel orbiting lunar space station

NASA announced on Tuesday it has canceled plans ​to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use components from the project to build ‌a $20 billion base on the moon’s surface, while also planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars.

U.S. space agency chief Jared Isaacman, an appointee of President Donald Trump who took charge at NASA in December, announced an array of changes to the Artemis moon program including an aim to send more robotic ​landers to the moon and lay the groundwork for using nuclear power on the lunar surface.

NASA also disclosed plans to ​launch a spacecraft called Space Reactor 1 Freedom to Mars before the end of 2028 in a ⁠mission it said would demonstrate advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space. NASA called this a major step forward in bringing nuclear ​power and propulsion from the laboratory to space. NASA said the spacecraft, once it reaches Earth’s planetary neighbor, will deploy helicopters for ​exploring Mars.

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman (NOC.N), opens new tab and Intuitive Machines (LUNR.O), opens new tab subsidiary Lanteris Space Systems, was meant to be a space station in a lunar orbit.

“It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained ​operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman told a crowd of foreign delegates, companies and journalists at a day-long event at NASA’s headquarters ​in Washington.

Repurposing Lunar Gateway to create a base on the moon’s surface – a difficult undertaking – leaves uncertain the future roles of Japan, Canada and the ‌European Space ⁠Agency in the Artemis program, three key NASA partners that had agreed to provide components for the orbital station.

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The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it

The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.

Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).

The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).

The Off-Balance-Sheet Iceberg

The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.

If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

What $136 Trillion Looks Like in Your Living Room

Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.

Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.

That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.

Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.

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Sweden Breach Shows the Security Risks of National Digital ID Systems

A hacker group calling itself ByteToBreach has posted what it claims is source code stolen from CGI’s Swedish division, among the allegedly compromised systems: the codebase powering BankID logins for the Swedish Tax Agency.

It’s a ransacked filing cabinet inside the architecture of a country that digitized itself completely, then discovered the cost of doing so.

BankID is the single authentication layer Swedes use for nearly everything; government services, banking, digital signatures, and tax filings.

Over 8.6 million people in a country of just over 10 million run their digital lives through it. That’s a national dependency, a single point of failure dressed up as infrastructure modernization.

The dump appeared on Breached.

Journalists at Dagens Nyheter reviewed portions of the leaked material and reported finding source code, passwords, and encryption keys. Breached was taken offline over the weekend as part of a cybersecurity operation, limiting independent verification.

Also reportedly being sold separately: databases containing Swedish citizens’ personal data and electronic signature documents. The breach exposes a layered vulnerability.

CGI confirms it, but frames it narrowly

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Missouri Nonprofit Leader Sentenced to 16 Years in $19.7M Child Meal Fraud

This week, U.S. District Judge Audrey G. Fleissig sentenced a former nonprofit executive who stole $19.7 million from a program meant to feed Missouri children to 16 years in prison and ordered her to repay the money.

Connie Bobo, 46, was executive director of New Heights Community Resource Center at the time, which accepted money to provide meals to low-income, school-age children after school and during the summer.

Bobo, 46, of St. Charles, Missouri, was convicted by a jury of three counts of wire fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft and two counts of obstruction of an official proceeding after a three-day trial in October. Bobo set out to defraud the state from the very outset of her participation in the state’s meal program for children, a sentencing memorandum filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek Wiseman says. 

“Connie Bobo’s trial clearly showed that this was the largest public assistance and pandemic fraud in state history,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas C. Albus. “Hungry children were turned away when Bobo’s distribution events ran out of food, all because she was spending public money on luxury goods, real estate and an extravagant vehicle.”

In 2018, she submitted fraudulent state program enrollment documents and created fake board members, fake trainings and fake bylaws designed to induce Missouri to provide her with meal money, the memo says. Bobo submitted hundreds of fraudulent meal reimbursement claims from 2019-2022 and spent millions of dollars in public meal funds on luxury goods, homes for relatives, a new home for herself, a $200,000 Mercedes-Benz G550 Wagon for a romantic partner and a $2.2 million commercial real estate investment, evidence and testimony showed.

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HHS Changes Voicemail to Domino’s Pizza to Mock Taxpayers Demanding End to NIH Kitten and Beagle Experiments

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is facing backlash after a “rogue employee” allegedly changed the agency’s public voicemail to a Domino’s Pizza recording, trolling taxpayers who flooded the lines demanding an end to ongoing NIH-funded cat and dog torture experiments.

White Coat Waste Project, the bipartisan watchdog group that has long exposed wasteful government animal testing, urged supporters to call HHS this week over continued funding for cruel kitten experiments at a taxpayer-supported lab at the University of Missouri, which was covered by The Gateway Pundit.

Instead of reaching agency officials, callers heard: “Thank you for calling Domino’s Pizza.”

WCW Senior Vice President Justin Goodman exposed the sick “prank” during a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

“Torturing puppies with our tax dollars isn’t funny, but people at HHS apparently think it is,” Goodman said.

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Five More Somalis Plead Guilty in $14.6 Million Minneapolis Feeding Our Future Fraud Case

Five additional defendants, all Somali, have pleaded guilty to wire fraud in one of the largest pandemic fraud cases in U.S. history, the Minneapolis Feeding Our Future scandal that stole hundreds of millions of dollars meant for hungry children during COVID.

Ikram Yusuf Mohamed, 42, her husband Shakur Abdinur Abdisalam, 46, her sister Aisha Hassan Hussein, 29, Sahra Sharif Osman, 43, and her mother Fadumo Mohamed Yusuf, 59, each entered guilty pleas this week, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The group ran fake food distribution sites under the Feeding Our Future nonprofit umbrella and submitted phony claims for hundreds of thousands to over a million meals that were never served.

They used fake attendance rosters, inflated invoices through a related company, and paid kickbacks to cover their tracks.

Prosecutors say the five stole and laundered a total of $14.6 million in federal Child Nutrition Program funds, money that was supposed to feed kids during COVID but instead funded personal luxuries like rent, furniture, vacations, dining out, and DoorDash orders.

Each defendant’s company received more than $1 million in taxpayer money.

  • Ikram Yusuf Mohamed opened multiple sites that pulled in over $6.9 million, hid her role by using family names, created Star Distribution LLC for fake invoices ($4.9 million direct and $1.4 million more), and demanded over $1.3 million in kickbacks.
  • Shakur Abdinur Abdisalam ran Inspiring Youth & Outreach LLC, falsely claimed over 1 million meals, received $1.5 million, and paid a $21,000 kickback.
  • Aisha Hassan Hussein ran United Youth of MPLS LLC, claimed 1.3 million meals, received $2.2 million, and paid a $166,000 kickback.
  • Sahra Sharif Osman ran Youth International Club LLC, claimed nearly 700,000 meals, received $1.4 million, and paid a $7,500 kickback.
  • Fadumo Mohamed Yusuf ran Active Mind’s Youth LLC, claimed over 500,000 meals, received $1 million, and paid a $38,500 kickback.

All five pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel.

Each faces up to 20 years in prison.

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The State Will Always Socialize The Cost Of War

War is often sold to the public as an act of national will: decisive, necessary, and under control. The bill arrives later, in a quieter form. It shows up in insurance markets, shipping rates, emergency guarantees, higher fuel prices, and sudden policy reversals designed to keep the economic damage from spreading too far or too fast. That is what is now happening with the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The fighting is not only destroying lives and widening instability. It is also revealing something more familiar about the American state: when private actors no longer want to bear the risk of a war Washington helped ignite, Washington moves to spread that risk across everyone else.

The clearest example came when maritime war-risk premiums in the Gulf surged, in some cases by more than 1000%, as ships and cargoes moved through a combat zone centered on one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. This is what markets do when governments create danger: they start pricing reality honestly. Insurance underwriters do not care about speeches about resolve or credibility. They care about missiles, mines, damaged hulls, and the odds that a vessel will not make it home intact. Once those odds change, the market does what it is supposed to do. It becomes expensive to move goods through a war.

But the American state does not like that kind of honesty, because honest prices expose the real cost of intervention. So instead of letting war become unaffordable to the people escalating it, Washington stepped in. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation announced a maritime reinsurance facility covering losses up to roughly $20 billion on a rolling basis, and later named Chubb as the lead insurance partner. In plain English, the government decided that if the private market was no longer willing to carry the full risk of this war, the state would help carry it instead. That is not a side effect of interventionism. It is one of its operating principles. Risk is privatized on the way up, then socialized when the numbers stop working.

The same pattern is visible in energy policy. As the war tightened shipping and pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel, Washington issued a thirty-day waiver allowing purchases of stranded Russian oil at sea to stabilize markets. That move was not just an emergency adjustment. It was an admission. The administration was effectively saying that one war had already become costly enough to require loosening pressure in another theater. A foreign policy that presents itself as hard and disciplined suddenly becomes very flexible when gasoline, shipping, and inflation begin threatening domestic politics. The slogans remain moralistic. The mechanics turn transactional overnight.

This is what statism looks like in practice. It does not simply bomb another country and call it security. It also rearranges the economic landscape at home and abroad so that the political architects of the war do not face the full consequences of their decisions. The cost is pushed outward onto taxpayers who did not authorize the war, consumers who will pay more for energy and goods, and trading systems that now have to absorb new shocks because Washington and Israel chose escalation over restraint. The state does not merely fight. It conscripts logistics, insurance, credit, and public balance sheets into the campaign.

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SCHUMER’S BLUNDER GOES VIRAL: ‘We Must Fund ICE!’ Dem Leader Blurts Out the Words He’s Been Blocking All Along

Senate Leader Chuck Schumer had an awkward moment on the Senate floor during debate over the ongoing partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security on Saturday.

In a now-viral video clip from the proceedings, Schumer stated, “We must fund ICE!” before quickly correcting himself and saying, “We must fund TSA NOW!”

The remark was widely mocked on social media.

“Great idea! Fund ICE!” reporter Eric Daugherty wrote in a post on X, along with the clip.

Democrats have repeatedly blocked clean DHS funding bills because they are demanding changes to ICE operations and immigration enforcement, while blaming Republicans for not caving.

The shutdown, now in its sixth week, has left thousands of TSA officers working without pay, caused severe staffing shortages, and created long security lines and flight delays at airports nationwide during spring break travel season.

Nearly 400 TSA officers have resigned because they were unable to provide for their families.

The situation is so dire that Elon Musk has now personally offered to pay TSA staffers.

“I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country,” Musk wrote in a post on his platform X.

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