Tag: taxes

Pete Hegseth Cancels Suspension of Aircrew in Kid Rock Helicopter Flyby; “No Punishment. No Investigation.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday evening he is lifting the suspension of the aircrew involved in the flyby of 2 Army AH-64 Apache helicopters near music icon and Trump supporter Kid Rock’s Nashville, Tennessee area home on Saturday. Rock has also done several USO tours to perform for troops overseas in war zones.

NBC News reported earlier Tuesday that the Army had suspended the aircrew pending an investigation.

“Thank you @KidRock. @USArmy pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots”

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Iran strike destroys $300M U.S. E-3 Sentry radar aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia

An Iranian missile strike on a base in Saudi Arabia reportedly destroyed a $300 million U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry, a loss analysts suggest could compromise the military’s ability to detect long-range threats.

The E-3 Sentry — an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) — was one of six units stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base before Friday’s attack. These aircraft are critical for spotting incoming missiles and coordinating complex airstrikes.

At least 10 American service members were injured during the strike on the facility, located approximately 80 miles southeast of Riyadh.

While 16 E-3s remain in the U.S. fleet, a significant portion of them are not currently mission-ready. Notably, this incident marks the first time an AWACS has been destroyed in combat. By Monday, defense analysts were raising urgent questions regarding how such a high-value asset was left vulnerable to the Iranian strike.

“Extraordinary measures are often taken to protect it from hostile enemy fire while in-flight. Sometimes it receives fighter escorts and is never allowed to overfly hostile territory in order to keep it safe,” said military analyst Cedric Leighton.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, argues that the U.S. should have anticipated such an escalation and better prepared for a prolonged conflict. He emphasized that the military should have bolstered defenses for permanent installations, particularly in a theater where the adversary possesses extensive inventories of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones.

Conversely, Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, expressed a more measured view, warning against underestimating the potential for internal damage within Iran. Ozcelik suggested that at this stage of the conflict, observers should remain cautious and avoid overstating the actual extent of the damage sustained by U.S. forces.

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New Restrictions On SNAP Purchases To Take Effect In More States In April

Food stamp recipients in Florida, Texas, and West Virginia will face restrictions on buying certain kinds of less nutritious items such as soda and candy, some starting in April.

West Virginia’s restrictions became effective on Jan. 1, but retailers have until April 1 to be fully compliant.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved Colorado’s restrictions waiver, but the state has delayed implementation of restrictions on certain items for food stamp recipients until after April 30 and stated that it would have a final vote on April 3 on the program.

The Trump administration is clamping down on soda and candy being charged to food stamps, as 22 states now have been approved to restrict certain purchases under the program. The restrictions still require state approval before taking effect.

Kansas, Nevada, Ohio, and Wyoming were the latest states to receive USDA approval for food and beverage restrictions.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, had 40.7 million people participating nationwide at a monthly cost of $7.97 billion as of November 2025.

“The Trump Administration is leading bold reform to strengthen integrity and restore nutritional value within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” the USDA stated on its website. “USDA is empowering states with greater flexibility to manage their programs by approving SNAP Food Restriction Waivers that restrict the purchase of non-nutritious items like soda and candy. These waivers are a key step in ensuring that taxpayer dollars provide nutritious options that improve health outcomes within SNAP.”

For example, starting on April 1, Texas residents will not be able to buy candy or sweetened drinks on their SNAP-provided Lone Star Cards. Those restrictions will ban such purchases as candy bars, gum, and taffy, as well as nuts, raisins, or fruits that have been “candied, crystallized, glazed or coated with chocolate, yogurt or caramel.”

Texas also will ban sweetened non-alcoholic beverages made with water that contain 5 or more grams of sugar or artificial sweetener, according to Texas Health and Human Services.

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10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled.

Ten years ago today, Donald Trump said he would pay off the national debt in the span of just eight years.

That did not happen. Instead, the gross national debt has doubled since that day—from about $19 trillion to over $39 trillion. Much of that additional borrowing has taken place during Trump’s five-plus years in the White House.

The gap between Trump’s outlandish promise and the brutal fiscal reality of the past decade is not just a political gotcha. It’s also an apt illustration of how far and how fast the debt has spiraled. And it’s a painful reminder of a missed opportunity that Americans will be facing for a long, long time. The bill for these 10 years of fiscal profligacy will be coming due long after Trump has finally departed from the political scene.

But it’s a story that starts, as everything in politics seems to these days, with Trump.

“We’re not a rich country. We’re a debtor nation,” is what then-candidate Trump told The Washington Post in an interview on March 31, 2016 (a full transcript was published two days later). “We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.”

How long would it take to do that, asked the Post‘s Bob Woodward.

“Fairly quickly,” Trump replied. When pressed for a more specific answer, Trump provided a shocking timeline. “Well, I would say over a period of eight years.”

That was never going to happen. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) pointed out shortly after Trump’s comments made headlines, “achieving this goal would be virtually impossible—particularly for a candidate who has proposed large tax cuts and ruled out significant entitlement reforms.”

Instead, the CRFB estimated that Trump’s proposals would cause the national debt to nearly double within 10 years. The group arrived at that figure by taking the existing baseline for the debt—which, as of early 2016, was expected to grow to about $28 trillion by 2026—and adding the estimated cost of Trump’s various campaign promises.

It’s worth appreciating how remarkably accurate that assessment turned out to be. The number-crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office and the CRFB didn’t know there would be a pandemic. They didn’t know the outcome of the major tax-and-spending bills that Trump and President Joe Biden would pass. Heck, they didn’t even know who would be president—remember, in April 2026, most of the political class didn’t believe Trump had much of a chance.

The accuracy of that prediction points to two things, Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said when asked about it this week. First, the extent to which rising debt was baked into the federal budget before Trump came on the scene. Social Security and Medicare are the largest federal programs, and both were on pace to borrow more during the 2020s.

Second, it’s due to Trump keeping many of his campaign promises. That’s not the compliment that it might sound like. Trump vowed not to touch the aforementioned entitlement programs that were driving borrowing to new heights, and he promised to both cut taxes and increase military spending. That was a recipe for higher deficits, and over his first four years in office, Trump added over $8 trillion to the national debt that he’d once sought to “get rid of.”

Biden picked up where Trump left off, adding another $4.7 trillion to the debt with various proposals. In his first year back in the White House, Trump has done nothing to address the growing pile of debt. The federal government borrowed $1.8 trillion during the fiscal year that ended in September and is on pace to borrow about the same amount this year.

What have Americans gotten from a decade of heavy borrowing that doubled the size of the debt? Higher inflation and higher interest rates, for starters.

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As Epstein’s Clients Walk Free, an Innocent Man Rots in a Cage for Promoting Liberty

The glaring reality of the American justice system is not that it is broken, but that it functions exactly as intended to protect the elite while crushing the peaceful and creative. To see this in action, you need look no further than the fact that years after the most prolific child trafficking ring in history was exposed, not a single one of Jeffrey Epstein’s high-profile American clients has seen the inside of a jail cell.

Just look at the absolute theater surrounding the Epstein files. This administration actually campaigned on a platform of transparency, promising to finally expose this elite predator ring to the world. First, we were told the unredacted files were “on the desk,” ready for total declassification. Then, the narrative abruptly shifted. The administration claimed the files didn’t even exist, later dismissing the justifiable public outcry as nothing more than a “Democrat hoax.” When they finally did dump a batch of documents under immense pressure, it was a masterclass in state-sponsored cover-ups: tens of thousands of pages with the names of the biggest political and financial power players heavily redacted, or mysteriously scrubbed from the DOJ’s website overnight.

But the true sleight of hand happened next. Just as the heat on the Epstein cover-up was reaching a boiling point, the war drums began beating for Iran. It is no coincidence that the state escalated a catastrophic overseas conflict precisely when they needed a massive distraction from the predators operating within their own ranks. As I pointed out recently, Google trends data exposes this manipulation perfectly: the exact moment the media-manufactured interest in Iran skyrocketed, the public’s focus on the Epstein files flatlined. The political class effectively engineered a bloodbath to change the news cycle, and now, the trafficking network that serviced the world’s most powerful people has conveniently vanished from the headlines. We live in a world where government actors can orchestrate this kind of mass slaughter—like the horrifying reality of the state murdering over a hundred school girls in Iran—and absolutely no one faces justice. The politicians and enforcers responsible for these atrocities will never spend a fraction of a second behind bars, nor will they ever offer an apology for the blood on their hands.

Meanwhile, Ian Freeman, a man whose only so-called crime was facilitating voluntary cryptocurrency exchanges, sits rotting in a federal cage. The juxtaposition is sickening, but it perfectly illustrates the priorities of a ruling class that views individual liberty as a far greater threat than systemic predation and mass slaughter of children.

When a peaceful man in New Hampshire helps people bypass the fiat banking cartel using Bitcoin, the full force of the empire is brought down upon his head. Freeman’s conviction is a masterclass in prosecutorial overreach and judicial acrobatics. As we noted in a previous breakdown of this political imprisonment, he was effectively railroaded for supposedly conspiring to launder money with an undercover federal agent. Under well-established federal law, it is legally impossible to form a criminal conspiracy with a government agent, yet the First Circuit Court of Appeals enthusiastically upheld his eight-year sentence anyway when they officially denied his appeal. They threw an innocent man in a cage over regulatory infractions and the testimony of an IRS agent who admitted under oath that Freeman might actually owe nothing in taxes.

The financial destruction the state has leveled against him is just as absurd as the cage they put him in. In addition to his eight-year sentence, a federal judge ordered Freeman to pay over $3.5 million in restitution to victims of internet romance scams—scams carried out by third parties Freeman didn’t know and never colluded with. The government is literally criminalizing the act of not acting as a financial spy for the state, punishing Freeman for running a business that respected customer privacy by disabling surveillance features on his Bitcoin kiosks.

Fortunately, those who actually understand the concept of liberty haven’t forgotten him. Free Staters have been pursuing a concerted effort to demand a pardon for Freeman, pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of a system that selectively doles out clemency while burying whistleblowers and agorists. The push continues through platforms like FreeIanNow.org and the daily advocacy of his co-host, Mark Edge, on Free Talk Live.

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Migrant Households Are Claiming £1 Billion a MONTH in UK Welfare Benefits.

Foreign nationals are claiming close to £1 billion (~$1.3 billion) in welfare payments from the British government each month, according to the latest Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures. The data, released in response to Freedom of Information requests from Conservative (Tory) Member of Parliament (MP) Neil O’Brien, shows that households containing at least one foreign national received £941 million in Universal Credit payments this month.

Universal Credit, which supports low-income working-age families, is available to migrants who hold Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR)—roughly equivalent to permanent residency in the U.S.—or refugee status. Over the last four years, the total value of claims from households with a migrant has more than doubled, climbing from £461 million in March 2019 to almost £1 billion now. The figure rose by nearly 30 per cent in the past 12 months alone.

Neil O’Brien criticized the trend, saying: “The growth of benefit spending and the rate of migration are both much too fast, and the Government is doing far too little to change either trend. Migrants know that if they can make it to the UK, they will be allowed to stay. As long as that is true, we’ll see more and more coming. Our soft-touch welfare state makes this worse.”

Reform Party leader Nigel Farage has called for the complete abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain as a way to reduce the financial strain of large-scale migration. Reform wants to restrict welfare benefits to British citizens only and replace Indefinite Leave to Remain with a five-year work visa system modelled on the American approach to long-term legal immigration.

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SURPRISE! Zohran Mamdani’s New ‘Free’ Childcare Program is Going to Cost $60,000 Per Child

Are you sitting down? This is shocking news.

It turns out that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new ‘free’ childcare program isn’t free at all. In fact, it’s going to cost $60,000 – Per child. Of course, it’ll be free for the people who get the service, but not for the taxpayers who are funding it.

This is the shell game that is always played by leftists. Nothing is free and they know it. Someone always pays.

Oh and by the way, this is just the rollout of the program. You know it will cost more down the road.

The New York Post reports:

Mamdani rolls out $2.3M day care pilot for NYC workers with hefty $60K cost per kid

The cost of “free” child care is soaring.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the opening of a new daycare center for municipal workers Monday that will cost more than double the average price of child care — to a tune of nearly $60,000 per kid.

The pilot program will start this fall on the first floor of David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan after a multi-million-dollar renovation of a room for just 40 children, ages six weeks to 3 years old.

The childcare center co-ops an initiative of Mamdani’s predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, that was announced in October.

Mamdani said the Adams administration didn’t allocate operating funds for the center, which Hizzoner said would have a $2.3 million price tag and will be included in the city’s upcoming executive budget.

That works out to $57,500 per child to attend the day care from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

On average, day care costs in the city for infants come in at $26,000 and $23,400 for toddlers, according to the city comptroller’s office.

City Hall didn’t respond to questions about the soaring cost to the city compared to private center-based programs.

That’s strange. Why do you suppose Mamdani’s city hall didn’t respond to questions?

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Chicago: Pro-Gun Control Mayor’s ‘Armed Security’ Detail Costing Taxpayers $30 Million A Year

A report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s senior VP and general counsel Lawrence Keane indicates pro-gun control Mayor Brandon Johnson’s “armed security” detail costs taxpayers about $30 million a year.

According to Keane, the detail “includes as many as 150 Chicago Police Department officers.”

Keane noted that Johnson avails himself of the security provided with firearms while simultaneously praising restrictions on citizens’ ability to own the rifle of their choice:

In Chicago, Mayor Johnson has backed some of Illinois’ most restrictive firearm policies. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2023 reversed a lower court’s preliminary injunction against Illinois’ ban on so-called “assault-style weapons,”… [which included the] state’s magazine restrictions, Mayor Johnson praised the ruling and called the law an “important step” that would keep “weapons of war” out of neighborhoods.

Keane observed, “The practical message to Chicago residents was clear. Government officials and their armed details can enjoy armed personal protection but the public should accept tighter limits on the tools of lawful self-defense.”

Numerous other pro-gun control Democrats have taken a similar “guns for me but not for thee” approach in leadership policy.

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The Assisted Suicide Of Lofty State And Local Taxes

We get the government we choose to elect, hence the government we deserve. Voting for ever-higher punitive taxes on the rich is arguably a form of civic suicide. Consider that a wealthy New Yorker can get a raise of almost 40% just by moving.

That’s right. If moving eliminates a 14.8% top state and local tax rate, our top-tier taxpayer gets a 36% raise, not a 14.8% raise, by leaving. It’s doubtful if any of our city and state leaders have done this math, but it’s shocking.

Mamdani wants to take the top rate up another 2%, if not by the state then by the city, which would mean that our rich neighbor can get a 42% raise.

Here’s how the math works.

A rich New Yorker pays a maximum state and city income tax of 14.8%, on top of a maximum federal tax of 37%. But there are hidden taxes. Uncapped Medicare and Medicaid taxes push the marginal federal tax to 39.4%. If the income is earned on investments, the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT, another gift from Obamacare) adds another 3.8%, pushing the top federal tax above 43%.

So, top-tier New York taxpayers may soon pay a marginal tax of 43% to the IRS and 17% to the city and state of New York. The combined 60% marginal tax rates mean they have the privilege of keeping 40 cents of each new dollar they earn. A move to one of the nine states with no income tax allows our taxpayer to keep 57% of every additional dollar of income, instead of 40%. Do the math. That’s a 42% raise.

Forget the argument about “paying their fair share.” “Fair” is an entirely subjective term. Your fair share of someone else’s money might be seen as a ripoff by them, especially if the money is spent less wisely than we might spend our own money. If you are rich and believe you’ve earned your money, will you consider leaving a state for a permanent 40% raise? Of course.

This is hardly a phenomenon unique to New York. California’s headline top rate of 13.3% becomes 14% with the phase-out of deductions. A Silicon Valley billionaire can keep 43% of each new dollar of income. Moving to Dallas or Miami, or Anchorage for the adventuresome, boosts this to 57%, a raise of almost 33%. This doesn’t even count the “please leave now” impetus of a “one-time only” 5% wealth tax on billionaires. Never mind that the fine print on the wealth tax initiative turns a 5% tax into a 50% expropriation for billionaires like the founders of Google, because their 30% voting share at Google, not their 3% equity ownership, is used to determine the tax.

People have called the United States “50 laboratories of democracy.” A state or a city is welcome to impose whatever taxes, regulations, or laws are allowed by its own bylaws or the national Constitution. And citizens are welcome to choose whichever states have taxes, regulations, and laws that they feel best align with their values and beliefs.

Nor is it unique to our various states, with their diverse tax regimes. Taxes drove the Rolling Stones to their own “Exile on Main Street,” relocating to France of all places to escape England’s 90% top tax rate (where a tiny drop to 85% would provide a 50% pay raise). Even Switzerland has divergent tax rates, ranging from 22% in Zug to roughly 40% in Berne, Geneva, and Vaud. Where do the billionaires tend to live? Zug.

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Treasury Dept to reward fraud whistleblowers with up to 30% of fines

The Treasury Department launched a new program Monday to reward fraud whistleblowers with up to 30% of fines that are imposed on criminals.

“As promised, Treasury will reward whistleblowers who provide timely, actionable information on fraud, sanctions violations, and other significant illicit finance activity,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

“President Trump has been clear that Americans have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters. At Treasury, we follow the money, and we strongly encourage individuals to come forward with credible tips to help safeguard our financial system.”

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network submitted a proposed rule to the Federal Register on Monday for the whistleblower payment program.

The program includes tipsters of Medicaid and Medicare fraud, according to The New York Post.

The launch comes after Bessent visited Minnesota in January, which is where Somali immigrants allegedly defrauded government welfare programs of at least $9 billion since 2018.

The reward payments will be directly from the fines, meaning that no taxpayer money will be used, according to confidential Treasury documents that the Post obtained.

“Individuals located in the United States or abroad who provide information may be eligible for awards if the information they provide leads to a successful enforcement action that results in monetary penalties exceeding $1,000,000,” one of the documents reads.

The Internal Revenue Service runs a similar program.

The program comes after Vice President JD Vance on Friday held the first meeting of a new anti-fraud task force that he is leading.

FinCEN also issued an advisory on Monday, warning financial institutions about fraud schemes targeting government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

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