Tag: taxes

Chinese propaganda has even infiltrated the halls of Congress

On my very first day as a US congressman in January, I walked into my office on Capitol Hill and learned a startling lesson.

There among the array of American newspapers delivered free to every member of Congress was a copy of China Daily — a state-run propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party.

That’s when I knew my first piece of legislation needed to send a clear message: America is not for sale.

For too long, Washington has looked the other way as foreign adversaries have bought influence, shaped narratives and quietly infiltrated the institutions that are supposed to safeguard our democracy.

The bill I introduced to halt unsolicited delivery of China Daily to Capitol Hill was a necessary act of defense against information warfare being waged on our own soil.

China Daily is not journalism, but the voice of the Chinese Communist Party, registered as a foreign agent under US law.

By allowing it to be distributed through our internal mail systems — with taxpayer resources covering that cost — Congress was effectively endorsing foreign propaganda.

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Defense Department plagued by financial reporting issues that must be fixed to pass full audit: GAO

The Defense Department has been plagued by serious financial reporting issues that must be fixed for the agency to pass a full audit for the first time, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.

“For the seventh consecutive year since the Department of Defense (DOD) was required to undergo full-scope audits, DOD received a disclaimer of opinion on its financial statement audit in fiscal year 2024, meaning DOD could not provide auditors with sufficient, appropriate evidence needed to support information in its financial statements due to ineffective systems and processes,” the GAO reported this month.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024 requires the agency to “receive an unmodified (clean) audit opinion by December 31, 2028.”

Despite the agency’s failure to pass a full audit, Congress again raised defense spending in fiscal 2025 to nearly $900 billion. 

The defense budget could reach $1 trillion after an additional increase for fiscal 2026, based on President Donald Trump’s budget request.

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General identified 28 agency-wide “material weaknesses” in fiscal 2024 that have hindered “sustainable business processes and a functioning internal control environment” for its financial management operations.

GAO’s latest review found that “several identified DOD-wide material weaknesses directly affected $2.1 trillion (50.3 percent) of DOD’s reported assets and $146.9 billion (3.4 percent) of its reported liabilities, indicating that there is an increased risk that these amounts are materially misstated.”

The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) defines a material weakness as a “deficiency (or combination of deficiencies) in internal control, such that there is reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of an entity’s financial statements could occur that would not be prevented, or detected and corrected on a timely basis.”

The federal watchdog noted that the Pentagon reported more than $4.1 trillion in assets on its balance sheet as of September 30, 2024. 

“DOD’s assets represent a significant portion of the federal government’s reported total assets. The ability to properly account for and report these assets would improve DOD’s ability to successfully carry out its mission and is critical to achieve an unmodified (clean) audit opinion,” the GAO report reads.

The Defense Department is the only major federal agency that hasn’t received a clean audit opinion on its financial statements. 

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Ashley Moody, Rick Scott urge Donald Trump administration to block proposed international shipping tax

The International Maritime Organization is considering a tax to offset costs of ending carbon emissions from ships.

U.S. Sens. Ashley Moody and Rick Scott drafted a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging the Donald Trump administration to continue efforts to block a proposal by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to implement global carbon pricing tax.

The IMO next month will consider adopting pricing increase charges for shipping for carbon emissions by the vessels. The proposal is designed to guide shipping companies toward zero emissions by 2050, if adopted.

“The proposal, which the IMO is taking up next month, would place an unfair burden on American citizens and businesses,” a news release from Moody’s Office said.

The memorandum sent by Moody and Scott to top Trump administration officials urges continued opposition to the IMO proposal.

“The current proposal presents a direct threat to American interests. The proposed framework would impose a binding, escalating global carbon tax on maritime shipping through a system of increasingly strict emissions tiers and rising levies,” the Moody-Scott letter stated.

The original proposal was drafted in April and the intent is to lower emissions of greenhouse gas by the global shipping industry in general. The taxes on shipping companies would, theoretically, use the revenue to support and augment energy transition to carbon-gas-free ships.

But the letter from the two Senators argues the proposed program would limit American autonomy.

“Despite this enormous financial impact, the United States has virtually no influence over the policy and will receive none of the tax revenue in return. This is taxation without representation and a direct threat to the United States’ economic security,” the letter stated.

Moody and Scott reminded administration officials that the U.S. has substantial sway in the shipping industry. Global ports based in Florida include hubs in South Florida, Tampa, The Panhandle, Jacksonville and Cape Canaveral among other notable nautical centers.

That kind of impact can be used to influence the IMO, they argued.

“The senators urged the administration to immediately apply trade leverage to block the IMO framework and note this as a historic opportunity to restore our nation’s influence in global maritime policy and rapidly reassert American maritime dominance,” Moody’s news release said.

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Budget Office Estimates Tens Of Billions Lost To Obamacare Exchange Fraud

his space has previously reported on the fraud associated with Obamacare, particularly the enhanced Exchange subsidies passed in 2021 that Democrats want to extend. In recent weeks, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has now admitted that the law’s subsidy structure encourages enrollees to lie about their income.

These reports come on top of the fact that passing a subsidy extension could expand funding for abortion-related travel, in ways that undermine state pro-life protections. It’s all enough to make one wonder why Republican “leaders” are making noises about extending the enhanced subsidies before their expiration on December 31.

Impact of Skewed Incentives

Prior studies by the Paragon Health Institute have examined the incentives created by the Exchange subsidy regime to falsify income estimates. (Disclosure: While I have done work for Paragon, I had no involvement with this particular report, and am writing this article on my own behalf.)

Those incentives work in two ways: On the one hand, enrollees with income below the poverty level have an incentive to inflate their income up to the poverty level, because otherwise they will not qualify for subsidies at all. (This dynamic largely applies in the 10 red states that have not expanded Medicaid, because enrollees with below-poverty income levels in expansion states would qualify for Medicaid expansion.) On the other hand, enrollees with higher incomes — say, between two and four times the poverty level — have an incentive to understate their income, to qualify for the richest subsidies.

Paragon concluded that, in 2025, there are approximately 6.4 million people with incomes just above the poverty level with potentially fraudulent enrollment, either for over- or under-stating their income. In its estimation, these enrollees led to approximately $27.1 billion in estimated taxpayer losses due to Exchange fraud.

Budget Office Estimates

As part of its responses to questions from congressional Republicans, CBO recently revealed for the first time that it, too, believes enrollees are lying about their income to qualify for Obamacare subsidies:

Estimating the number of people who have improperly received subsidies for marketplace [i.e., Exchange] coverage is difficult. The agency has, however, specifically estimated that 1.3 million marketplace enrollees improperly claimed the premium tax credit [i.e., subsidies] via intentional overstatement of income for 2023; 2.3 million enrollees did so for 2025.

The budget agency went on to explain that it could calculate this improper enrollment “because it appears in enrollment data as an unusual concentration of enrollees reporting income just above” the poverty level.

For instance, CBO noted that the number of people reporting income between 100 percent and 105 percent of the poverty level in non-expansion states was 2.6 times the number of people reporting income between 105 percent and 110 percent of the poverty level. CBO also cited tax reporting data indicating that, in 2023, a large number (39 percent) of enrollees claiming the richest subsidies — which are calculated based on expected income — ultimately reported actual income below the poverty level.

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House members to get $10k a month for personal security after Charlie Kirk assassination

ouse members will get $10,000 a month for personal security after the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, the chamber’s leaders announced.

The effort follows the assassination last week of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.

On Wednesday, House leadership made the decision to double the monthly total currently available to legislators in a pilot program created this summer to increase security for members, POLITICO reported.

House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil said that the funds to increase the pilot program amount were previously allocated and have been repurposed to bump it up to $10,000, according to the Washington Examiner.

Several House Republicans discussed their dissatisfaction over the $10,000 monthly amount with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Steil.

The additional security funding comes after Kirk, 31, was shot and killed by an assassin last week at Utah Valley University during a Turning Point USA event. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been arrested as the suspected shooter.

Later, when asked if Republican leadership would add more money for member security to the stopgap directly, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said there were “ongoing conversations.”

“We said that at the beginning of the week — is that we’re working with our members to find out how to properly make sure that everybody has the security they need to be safe,” Scalise said.

New York Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle said that “more needs to be done” to ensure the security of lawmakers and congressional staff, “but this is an important and necessary start.”

Steil said, “The goal is having leg[islative] branch [appropriations], which is engaged right now in a conference, of them identifying the appropriate funding level as we go forward.”

The additional security funding announcement comes after a $32 million injection in funds for a program that has been in existence that lets Congress members request security through partnerships between the Capitol Police and local law enforcement agencies. The $32 million is part of the stopgap spending bill. The expansion of the pilot program is funded from a separate pot of money from the current fiscal year.

“The funding can be authorized, we need to make sure that that money is in the right buckets,” Steil said.

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Canadian premier to spend $450k of taxpayer cash paying ‘communist, Marxist’ comedian to write his jokes

A Canadian premier has come under fire after it was revealed he could spend nearly half a million dollars of taxpayer money on a self-proclaimed ‘radical Marxist comedian’ to help write his speeches. 

British Columbia Premier David Eby, 48, secretly hired stand-up comedian Charles Demers, 45, in January of this year – signing a contract that pays him a staggering $165 an hour, with the potential to earn up to $450,000 Canadian dollars ($325,945 USD), according to leaked documents.

Officials have raised two major concerns about the move – the first being Demers’ political stance, as his self-proclaimed identity as a ‘lifelong Marxist’ has sparked controversy and criticism over the years.

In a 2018 interview with CBC, the comedian declared: ‘As a teenager, I was in a radical communist sect, with a Marxist newspaper published in New York that we sold on street corners.’ 

Secondly, British Columbia is grappling with a record-breaking $11.6-billion deficit – the largest in the province’s history – and critics are now blaming Eby for what they call tone-deaf spending decisions. 

‘Premier Eby is telling families and small business to brace for cutbacks while his government quietly signs contracts worth nearly half a million dollars for a comedian,’ B.C. Conservative Peter Milobar said in a statement, according to Juno News.

‘In the middle of the largest deficit in B.C.’s history, this is not only tone-deaf, it’s offensive to every taxpayer,’ he added.

‘At a time that we’re supposed to be having a hiring freeze, at a time that we’re supposed to be seeing potential cutbacks to the workforce, the premier’s office – as long as it suits the premier’s needs – seems to spend money.’ 

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The Trump Administration Misses Key Deadlines for Imposing Restrictions on Gain-of-Function Research

Biosafety hawks were initially optimistic that the incoming second Trump administration would at last place binding constraints on so-called “dangerous gain-of-function” research, in which pathogens are manipulated in laboratories to be more virulent or transmissible in humans.

The administration’s picks for top health policy jobs—most notably National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—are both gain-of-function critics who have asserted that this type of research created SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan, China.

In May, the White House issued an executive order creating a broader definition for dangerous gain-of-function research and promising that new restrictions on it would be issued within a few months.

“The conduct of this research does not protect us from pandemics. There’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out by accident even and cause a pandemic,” said Bhattacharya at the Oval Office press conference when the order was signed. With the order, “the public can say ‘no, don’t take this risk.'”

But the deadlines for the new restrictions called for in that order have since come and gone without any new policy being released. Meanwhile, there are indications that the NIH is continuing to fund risky virological research.

Gain-of-function critics who were optimistic that this research would finally be put back in the box are now concerned that the Trump administration will fail to implement meaningful restrictions.

“There was a promise to deliver these policies. It’s very disappointing to see that not emerge,” Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, tells Reason. Nickels briefly served as a contractor advising the NIH on new gain-of-function policy before being let go in August.

In his role as an NIH contractor, Nickels reviewed draft policies on gain-of-function research that the May executive order called for. He said that there was no practical reason why the White House shouldn’t have been able to meet its deadline to issue the new policy.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which is responsible for issuing the new gain-of-function regulations called for in the May executive order, did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.

While arguments about COVID-19’s origins have polarized discussions about gain-of-function research, fears that it could cause a pandemic via a laboratory accident were once mainstream.

The past three presidential administrations issued policies imposing some restrictions on it. That included the 2014 “pause” on gain-of-function research involving MERS, SARS, and influenza viruses issued by the Obama administration.

This was followed by the implementation of a 2017 framework in the first Trump administration that allowed funding for gain-of-function research to start again, provided that the riskiest experiments received risk-benefit vetting by a department-level panel within HHS.

Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration issued a new framework on “dual-use research of concern” that was supposed to clarify when experiments involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential should receive that HHS-level review.

Critics have long argued that these policies failed to actually restrict the most dangerous gain-of-function experiments.

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Marijuana Industry Group Pushes Congress For Tax Relief—And To Apply The Fix Retroactively For Past Payments

A leading marijuana industry association has released a report calling on Congress to treat cannabis businesses like other lawful industries by allowing them to take federal tax deductions—and also to apply that policy retroactively to provide relief for past payments.

The report from the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) and a coalition of stakeholders states that “no industry understands the pain of taxes as acutely as the state-regulated cannabis industry which currently pays draconian tax rates as a result of the unforeseen consequences of” an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code known as 280E.

That code precludes even state-licensed marijuana businesses from taking federal deductions for their expenses because cannabis remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

“This provision is a punitive poison pill that threatens every business in these state-regulated markets, but poses a particular threat to small businesses that have responded to the will of voters,” the report says. “Picture the medical dispensary serving veterans with an alternative to deadly opioids or providing comfort to cancer patients in your community: those businesses cannot survive without action to repeal §280E and, crucially, retroactive relief.”

NCIA says the costs of the IRS policy for the cannabis sector are “staggering,” with marijuana businesses paying an effective tax rate of more than 70 percent. That rate “is economically prohibitive, unsustainable, and counter-intuitive,” it says.

“In the cruelest of ironies, the failure to include retroactive relief for state-regulated cannabis businesses will fall primarily on two groups: small cannabis businesses located in early legalization states and equity-owned businesses provided state-licensing priority specifically because of injuries suffered as a result of cannabis prohibition.”

Notably, NCIA stressed that tax relief for the marijuana industry should be applied retroactively. Without that stipulation, the association said “taxes will continue to result in the closure and consolidation of many state-regulated small businesses.”

“Beyond having negative economic impacts, inaction will also harm public health by forcing consumers back to the untaxed, untested, and unregulated illicit market,” it said.

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Ukraine expects $3.5 billion fund for US weapons to sustain fight against Russia, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine expects there will be around $3.5 billion by next month in a fund to buy weapons from the United States and help sustain its more than three-year fight against Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday.

The financial arrangement known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, pools contributions from NATO members, except the United States, to purchase American weapons, munitions and equipment.

“We received more than $2 billion from our partners specifically for the PURL program,” Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference in Kyiv with visiting European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. “We will receive additional money in October. I think we will have somewhere around $3.5-3.6 billion.”

Zelenskyy declined to provide details of what weapons the first shipments would include, but said that they would definitely contain missiles for Patriot air defense missile systems and munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS.

An end to the war appears no closer, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts.

The Patriot systems are vital to defend against Russian missile attacks. The HIMARS systems have significantly bolstered the Ukrainian military’s precision-strike capability.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for peace talks, telling reporters on Wednesday that “we remain open for negotiations and prefer to settle the Ukrainian crisis by political and diplomatic means.”

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US government to invest $96 million in Ukraine’s minerals

The US government on Sept 17 pledged US$75 million (S$96 million) to kick-start a landmark deal to invest in Ukraine’s vast mineral reserves, a commitment that will ease fears in Kyiv that the Trump administration is walking away from the war-torn country.

When  an agreement in spring granted the US a stake in Ukraine’s critical minerals, Kyiv cast it as a way to lock in American support through business ties.

President Donald Trump has made it clear that he would no longer give US money to Ukraine for the war effort, leaving Kyiv scrambling to retain whatever American engagement it could.

Many observers doubted that the deal could draw US investment while the fighting continues. But the new American pledge and a matching commitment by the Ukrainian government will bring a fund created under the agreement to US$150 million.

The flow of US government money into Ukraine’s minerals, hydrocarbons and related infrastructure could help reassure private investors and attract badly needed capital to sustain the country’s war economy.

It also shows the new mercantile nature of the US-Ukrainian alliance under Mr Trump.

While the Biden administration spent tens of billions of dollars to aid Kyiv, Washington now focuses on opportunities to profit through investments and sales. It provides weapons to Ukraine only through purchases facilitated by a Nato-backed procurement system that uses European funds.

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