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Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) apparently traveled to the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, using taxpayer funds.
The post D.C.’s Democrat Mayor Attends Masters Golf Tournament on Taxpayer Dime to Promote ‘Economic Development’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The United Nations on Thursday was accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda through one of its online newsletters, including links to websites that organized protests to block roads in American cities on April 15 in violation of U.S. law.
The post U.N. Shares Hamas Sympathizer Propaganda Promoting Illegal Protests in U.S. appeared first on Breitbart.
As President Joe Biden visited Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, he called for an increase in taxes on the rich.
The post Biden Calls for Increase in Taxes on the Rich appeared first on Breitbart.
Rep. Ralph Norman reintroduced a bill Wednesday aimed at stopping a form of federal spending known as earmarks.
“I’ve always said that earmarks are evil,” Norman, R-N.C. told The Daily Signal. “They are sneaky in the way that they get tacked onto big, important spending packages to be automatically passed by the ‘uniparty’ with the hope that no one looks into the details.”
Lawmakers use earmarks, often referred to as “pork,” to receive funding for projects in their districts. Earmarks are often inserted into large spending bills where they are likely to largely go unnoticed. A congressional earmark dedicates federal funds for a specific purpose, such as the construction of a bridge, the restoration of a city landmark, or a local program.
“Basically, an earmark is taxpayer funding for a personalized pet project for a particular district or special interest group,” Norman said.
The six-page bill he reintroduced Wednesday prohibits Congress from considering legislation that contains earmarks, thus banning the practice.
Norman introduced the bill, known as the Earmark Elimination Act, twice before, and most recently in February 2021.
Five Republican lawmakers are currently co-sponsoring the bill, including Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Tom McClintock of California, and Andy Ogles of Tennessee.
Earmarks have long been debated and were even temporarily banned in Congress from 2011 to 2021. Among the most notorious congressional earmark schemes was in 2005 when two lawmakers from Alaska earmarked $223 million to build a bridge from Ketchikan to the island of Gravina, which at the time had a population of about 50 people. The project was nicknamed the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
“Attaching earmarks to large spending packages doesn’t allow for public discussion,” Norman criticized. “Congress, with the power of the purse, should be primarily looking out for the people’s tax dollars and getting federal spending down as soon as possible.”
Bloomberg Government reports that among the federal government’s 2024 spending bills, Republican and Democrat lawmakers inserted 8,099 earmarks accounting for $14.6 billion.
“To me, this is the most wasteful, abusive way to use hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Norman said.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Congressman Calls on House to Pass Bill Banning Earmarks appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The California economy should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation, showcasing the negative impact of illegal immigration combined with liberal social welfare programs that discourage citizens from working.
The ‘Californication’ of the United States would exacerbate illegal immigration, depress market-driven labor rates, expand welfare rolls, significantly raise taxes on those employed, and prompt the government to address the diminished standard of living by imposing an exorbitant minimum wage.
Increasing the labor pool through illegal immigration drives down wages. The most basic law of economics, supply and demand, states that when supply increases and demand remains the same, price goes down.
You need water to live, but water is cheap because there is a large supply. Gold and diamonds are less of a necessity for maintaining life, but they are expensive because there is a large demand and limited supply. If tomorrow a new goldmine was discovered which quadrupled the supply of gold, the price of gold would go down.
Illegal immigrants increase the supply of workers, which brings down the price of labor, i.e., the wage. And although it is true that illegal immigrants are concentrated in certain industries, the decline in wages affects all industries.
The industries with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants are construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. The Americans who were displaced from those industries went to work in other industries, increasing the quantity of labor and driving down wages.
Using California as an example of what some people want to do to the entire country: illegal immigrants comprise 9% of the population. The market wage for workers was low because of the large pool of immigrants.
The Democratic legislation addressed this issue by imposing a draconian minimum wage of $16 an hour for all workers and $20 for those working in fast food.
The state also has liberal unemployment and welfare rules. As market wages drop and unemployment or welfare benefits increase, people are disincentivized to continue working.
In many Democrat-led states, workers can earn more on benefits than they can working. And a minimum wage of $20 an hour will not fix this problem. Jobs like landscaping and construction used to pay more than $20 an hour.
And jobs in maintenance and janitorial services, while not the highest paid, used to have job security and benefits when they were done on the books, by legal workers.
The Americans who lost those career jobs to illegals cannot make up the lost income by flipping burgers. Removing the illegal immigrants from the labor force will cause the natural rate of wages in landscaping, construction, and maintenance to increase, motivating people to go back to work.
Not surprisingly, as a result of its socialist policies, California has the highest poverty rate in the country when the cost of living is considered (the supplemental poverty measure).
The high taxes, high minimum wage, and lack of law enforcement have caused a steady exodus of companies, resulting in rising unemployment. However, the minimum wage only applies to legal workers, not illegals, so many of the unemployed citizens were replaced by illegal immigrants.
And now, the taxpayers are paying for it in the form of unemployment or welfare benefits. However, the illegals do not pay taxes. So, the tax burden on each legal worker is increasing, which then disincentivizes people from working. And the circle goes on and on, spiraling steadily downward.
At the national level, Democrats in favor of illegal immigration claim that low unemployment rates in the US are proof that “we need illegal immigrants” to fill those jobs. However, this claim ignores the labor force participation rate, which took a nosedive in 2020 and has never returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The labor force participation rate refers to the percentage of the working-age population (usually defined as individuals aged 16 and older) who are either employed or actively seeking employment.
People who are on unemployment are still counted as being part of the labor force because they are allegedly looking for a job. Only those who give up or go on permanent welfare or benefits are no longer counted.
There are two important points here. By liberalizing unemployment benefits, increasing the amount and the duration of the payments, the Biden Administration gets to count these people as part of the labor force.
And yet, the labor force participation rate is declining. This brings us to the second point. The federal government spent $1.3 trillion on welfare programs in 2023. If social benefits were not plentiful, more people would remain in the workforce.
In California, the labor force participation rate has been trending steadily downward since 1989. Currently, only 62% of legal adults are part of California’s labor force. Meanwhile, California has one of the highest incidences of tax in the country.
It also has 28% of the total homeless population of the United States, with the number having increased by 40% over the past 5 years. In short, California is a mess of outcomes that could not happen in a free-market economy that enforced immigration laws and was tough on crime.
According to Pew Research, 87% of Democrat voters agree that illegal immigrants only do jobs Americans won’t do. This notion is completely false. The reality is, there is no job Americans won’t do if they are paid for it.
Removing the illegals and canceling the benefits programs will bring about an equilibrium between wages and labor force participation. Taxes could be cut, and the minimum wage for unskilled work could go back to a reasonable market rate.
People would be incentivized to work and to better themselves, while the burger-flipping jobs would revert to the high school and college students who previously held them.
The post Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Collecting Benefits Won’t Do appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
In this election, we have a tale as old as time: the Democrat wants to confiscate more of what you make for the government's pleasure, and his Republican challenger does not.
The post Breitbart Business Digest: A Tax Day Reminder That Elections Matter appeared first on Breitbart.
As Tax Day passes on Monday, the cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers has hit an unprecedented level on President Joe Biden's watch.
The post Tax Day: Illegal Immigration Costs American Taxpayers over $150 Billion appeared first on Breitbart.
The pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC has launched a website branding independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "Radical F***ing Kennedy" and highlighting progressive and leftist positions he has taken on various policy issues.
The post RFK Jr. on Defense After Pro-Trump Super PAC Launches ‘Radical F***cking Kennedy’ Website appeared first on Breitbart.
Taxes are already a headache, but they will become a migraine for Americans if lawmakers don’t act now to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.
The post Exclusive—Nicole Wolter: Tax Day Emphasizes Need to Make the Trump Tax Cuts Permanent appeared first on Breitbart.
Elon Musk's ambitious plans to launch a Tesla robotaxi service have hit a roadblock in California, as the state's key regulatory agencies reveal that the company has yet to submit the necessary permit applications.
The post Despite Elon Musk’s Hype, California Regulators Have Not Received Permit Application for Tesla Robotaxis appeared first on Breitbart.
Several sanctuary cities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are expected to secure $300 million in American taxpayer dollars for resettling migrants across the United States on behalf of President Joe Biden's administration.
The post Sanctuary Cities, NGOs Resettling Migrants for Biden Administration Secure $300M in Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on Breitbart.
Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration lost track of $24 billion it spent over the past five years on the homelessness crisis, an audit found.
The post Audit: California Lost Track of $24 Billion Spent to Combat Homelessness appeared first on Breitbart.
Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.
The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”
A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
These efforts, now buttressed by the federal government, amplify and extend what Time magazine described as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies,” who had worked behind the scenes in 2020 “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” to defeat Trump and other Republicans. The “shadow campaigners,” Time declared, “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
Heading into 2024, “there is not a ‘shadow’ campaign,” said Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “There is an overt assault on President Trump and those who wish to vote for him occurring at every level of government and with the support of all major institutions.” (The Daily Signal is the news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)
By contrast, Republican Party stalwarts lament that no comparable effort exists on their side. The GOP’s turnout and messaging efforts seek to thread a difficult needle by encouraging early and absentee voting and ballot-harvesting—pandemic-era measures that Trump and supporters blame for his 2020 electoral defeat—while the party simultaneously fights the mainly blue-state laws that made the practices possible. The party’s position is further complicated by its standard-bearer’s warnings of a rigged election bigger than in 2020, which some speculate could turn off moderate swing voters.
The IRS permits tax-exempt nonprofit groups to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives so long as they do not “refer to any candidate or political party” nor conduct their activities “in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates prohibited.”
These entities have become magnets for funds not only from wealthy donors, who can contribute without traditional campaign finance limits—and get a tax break to boot—but also abundantly endowed private foundations that are prohibited from engaging in partisan activities.
In recent years, dozens of progressive-oriented 501(c)(3)s, now pulling in upward of $500 million annually, have engaged in purportedly neutral efforts to impact elections, according to Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at the election integrity-focused advocacy group Restoration of America.
In practice, critics like Ludwig argue, left-leaning charities flout the law by registering and mobilizing demographics that tend to vote disproportionately Democratic behind a veil of nonpartisan democracy promotion.
During the 2020 election, for example, the Voter Participation Center solicited millions of ballot applications in swing states—many of them prefilled for respondents. This nonprofit, like its peers, is clear that it isn’t targeting just any voters, but what it and progressive activists have dubbed a “New American Majority” of “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”
Tom Lopach, a longtime Democratic Party operative and the center’s president and CEO, told RealClearInvestigations in a statement: “We do the work that state election officials typically do not do—seeking out underrepresented voting-eligible Americans … This is difficult but necessary work that brings democracy to eligible Americans’ doorsteps.”
In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan showed how supposedly neutral efforts can have a partisan impact when they funneled some $400 million through two progressive–led but purportedly nonpartisan nonprofits into election offices across the country.
That money disproportionately went to jurisdictions that Joe Biden won in the pivotal battleground states that delivered his victory, often flowing to left-leaning nonprofits to whom election offices outsourced the administration of sometimes critical functions.
In April 2022, a primary conduit of these so-called Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, announced the launch of a successor to the 2020 effort—the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a five-year $80 million program “to envision, support, and celebrate excellence in U.S. election administration.”
“The left has assembled an impressive ‘election-industrial’ complex of nonprofit organizations that is constantly working towards goals like ‘promoting participation’ targeting ‘underrepresented minorities,’” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. Such terms, Snead says, “are code for identifying and mobilizing liberal voters.”
Election experts view such activities as potentially decisive.
“‘Nonpartisan’ and ‘charitable’ voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups” are the Democratic Party’s “electioneering super-weapon[s],” said Parker Thayer, an analyst with the conservative-oriented Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.
Of these, Thayer sees the Everybody Votes Campaign as of paramount importance.
Born of a plan “commissioned by [Hillary] Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, funded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cut-throat Democratic consultants,” Thayer writes in an extensive analysis of the group’s efforts, “the Everybody Votes campaign [has] used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote.”
It does so by funding and training over 50 community groups to register voters to close “the voter registration gap in communities of color,” which it attributes to “modern forms of Jim Crow laws,” such as voter ID requirements, the group’s executive director, Nellie Sires, said in a January 2024 interview.
From 2016-2021, the Everybody Votes Campaign, doing business as three entities, collected over $190 million from major Democratic Party donors, unions, and environmental activists. Some of the largest donors include the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the New Venture and Hopewell funds, managed by for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisors; and the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society—all 501(c)(3) public charities or private foundations forbidden from supporting “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias.”
The Everybody Votes Campaign distributed the funds to a slew of left-leaning state-based voter registration organizations largely in eight pivotal states from 2016 to 2019—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada—and then to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2021.
According to Thayer’s analysis, the Everybody Votes Campaign’s voter registration push “would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” securing Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
One notable backer of the Everybody Votes Campaign is Mind the Gap, a “Moneyball-style” Silicon Valley Democratic super PAC founded by Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, and connected to the political activities of her convicted crypto-fraudster son, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The analytics-focused outfit prepared a confidential strategy memo leaked in advance of the 2020 election, noting that “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate” would be the “single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories”—“4 to 10 times more cost-effective” on after-tax basis at “garnering additional Democratic votes” relative to alternatives like “broadcast media and digital buys.”
Mind the Gap recommended that donors contribute to three organizations: the Voter Participation Center and its sister organization, the Center for Voter Information for mail-based registration efforts, and Everybody Votes for site-based registration efforts.
The largest grant recipient, receiving $24 million during the 2016-2021 period, was State Voices, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan network of 25 state-based coalitions … that collectively partner with over 1,200 organizations” consisting of “advocates, organizers, and activists … work[ing] together to fight for a healthy democracy and political power for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and all people of color (BIPOC).”
Another top recipient, raking in over $10 million, was the Voter Participation Center.
According to the Capital Research Center, the Everybody Votes Campaign would collect and spend over $50 million in connection with the 2022 midterm elections—the most recent period for which financials are available. All told, since its founding in 2015, the campaign says, its network has registered 5.1 million voters, of whom 76% are people of color; 56% are women; and 47% are under the age of 35.
Last November, the news outlet Puck reported on a secret memo circulated by Mind the Gap regarding its plans for 2024. “Our strategy early in the 2024 presidential race will be to massively scale high-performing voter registration and mobilization programs,” the memo read. The PAC again specifically directed donors to the Everybody Votes Campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopach, who has worked in Democratic Party politics his entire career, bristled at RealClearInvestigations’ questions regarding critics’ claims of a partisan bent to its work. “The presumptions baked into the questions … emailed to us are inaccurate and reveal the reporter’s own biases,” he responded, while emphasizing the organization’s targeting of “underrepresented voting-eligible Americans.”
Thayer has dubbed Everybody Votes the “largest and most corrupt ‘charitable’ voter registration drive in American history.”
Of such organizations’ claims of nonpartisanship, Howell told RealClearInvestigations: “If they were truly interested in an informed participatory constitutional Republic, they would have an even-handed approach to registering voters.”
“Call me when they show up to a NASCAR race, Daughters of the American Revolution event, or a gun show,” Howell added. “Then we can pretend for a minute that these are beyond just facial efforts to appear somewhat neutral.”
But NASCAR races have not been hubs for GOP-led voter registration efforts either. Restoration of America’s Ludwig estimates that the Right may spend as little as 1% of what the Left spends on voter registration efforts.
A recent memo from the Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect conservatives, noted that in the 2022 election cycle, while $8.9 billion was spent on federal elections, there were zero large independent expenditure organizations on the Right focused on get-out-the-vote efforts or “ballot chasing.”
Republican Party vehicles and conservative outfits like grassroots-oriented Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4), are engaged in such efforts in the 2024 cycle, but the scale and sophistication of their political counterparts’ efforts would appear unrivaled at this point.
Election experts attribute this gap to several factors beyond the GOP’s focus on other tactics to win elections, or ineffectiveness. They note that Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas and college campuses, making it easier to run efficient registration drives. As regards early and absentee voting and ballot harvesting, it is not clear if these efforts will substantially grow the pool of Republican voters versus merely enabling the party to “bank” votes earlier.
With respect to the use of 501(c)(3)s to conduct such activities, Ludwig said some conservatives may still be fearful of running afoul of the IRS—through exploiting tax laws to pursue efforts perceived to be partisan effectively on the taxpayers’ dime—in the wake of its targeting of tea party groups for extreme scrutiny during the Obama years.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats have opened a second apparent electioneering front that Republicans could not match even if they wanted to: The rise of so-called Bidenbucks, which uses the “unlimited funding, resources, and reach” of the federal government and agency offices located nationwide to turn out favored voters, according to Stewart Whitson, legal director of the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden introduced Executive Order 14019. The directive on “promoting access to voting” orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters—particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directs the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits in pursuit of its goals.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, Executive Order 14019 appears to have been designed by left-leaning think tank Demos and implemented in consultation and sometimes coordination with a slew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups with the goal of generating up to 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually.
The ACLU and Demos have reportedly helped execute the order. RealClearInvestigations additionally found that at least two recipients of grants under the Everybody Votes Campaign, the NAACP and UnidosUS—formerly the National Council of Raza—were also listed on an email as participants in a July 2021 listening session on the executive order convened by the White House and agency officials.
Whitson, whose organization unearthed that email in its fight to expose details about the order, emphasized that “[U]nlike 2020 wherein the shadow campaign was conducted by private citizens seeking to influence government election operations from the outside, the threat we face in 2024 is being launched from within the government itself.”
Facing both congressional scrutiny and litigation, the administration has closely guarded the strategic plans agencies were to develop to carry out the order, how they are implementing them, to what end, and with whom.
Perfunctory press releases, reports from groups supportive of the order, and documents slowly ferreted out via Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, however, demonstrate that relevant agencies have sought to drive voter registration via public housing authorities, child nutrition programs, and voluntary tax preparation clinics.
In August 2023, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued updated guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
More recently, the Department of Education did the same, blessing the use of federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, recently told The Epoch Times that the department had previously threatened schools “that you better be registering students or you could lose your federal funds.”
When asked by RealClearInvestigations to respond to Walter’s claim, the Department of Education would not. Over two dozen Pennsylvania state legislators challenged the order via a lawsuit in January. Citing alleged unlawful attempts by several agencies to register Keystone State voters, the lawmakers asserted:
By engaging in a targeted voter registration effort of this magnitude, focused specifically on these agencies and the groups of potential voters they interact with, leveraging the resources and reach of the federal government, this effort appears to be a taxpayer-funded get-out-the-vote effort designed to benefit the current President’s political party.
Echoing this view, Whitson’s Foundation for Government Accountability submitted an amicus brief noting that “all of the federal agencies FGA has identified as taking active steps to carry out EO 14019 have one thing in common: They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
The plaintiffs alleged the executive order violated both Pennsylvania law limiting voter registration efforts to non-federal actors and constitutional provisions reserving election laws to the states.
On March 26, a district court dismissed the case, claiming the plaintiffs lacked standing. Whitson told RealClearInvestigations that others would likely lodge similar lawsuits, building on the Pennsylvania legislators’ case in the wake of the dismissal. Days later, The Federalist reported that the plaintiffs intended to appeal their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A White House spokesperson did not reply to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries regarding the executive order.
Republicans have had more success opposing the use of Zuckerbucks and other private monies used to finance public elections. More than two dozen states would move to ban or restrict such grants in response to the activities observed during the 2020 election.
Most recently, Wisconsin, where some of the most controversial Zuckerbucks-related efforts took place, was added to that list when, on April 2, voters approved a constitutional amendment barring the private funding of elections.
Despite this crackdown and the feds seemingly stepping into the breach, efforts to privately finance election administration persist. The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence bills itself as an initiative to bolster “woefully unsupported” election offices to “revitalize American democracy.”
The organization says it services jurisdictions—11 listed on its website, ranging across states from Arizona to California and Wisconsin—with “training, mentorship, and resources.” Alliance officials did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiry about whether it would be terminating the relationship with the city of Madison, Wisconsin, in light of the passage of the recent ballot measure that would seem to have barred it. Nor did it respond to RealClearInvestigation’ other inquiries in connection with this article.
Most of these partnerships were initiated with jurisdictions in states that have not banned Zuckerbucks, though it has sought to circumvent such prohibitions in Georgia and Utah. The stated goal of the Alliance for Election Excellence is to support voters via measures like assisting participating centers in “redesigning” forms to make them more intuitive and purchasing infrastructure “to improve election security and accessibility.”
Alliance launch partners include entities such as:
Critics argue this seemingly more modest effort is, in reality, an ambitious Zuckerbucks rebrand.
Snead’s Honest Elections Project published a report in April 2023, based in part on documents received from FOIA requests, indicating “that the Alliance is a reinvention of CTCL’s scheme to use private funding to strongarm election policy nationwide.”
Among other takeaways, it found that:
The report shows that many of the alliance’s launch partners, starting with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Civic Design, are funded by major Democrat-tied, so-called dark money groups such as the Democracy Fund and Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund and Hopewell Fund.
The Democracy Fund is led by Democrat tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, which has granted some $275 million to like-minded organizations from publications like Mother Jones and ProPublica to the Voter Registration Project since its founding.
The District of Columbia recently closed a criminal investigation into Arabella, whose fund network reportedly spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 alone, after probing it over allegations its funds were pursuing political ends in violation of their tax-exempt statuses. The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, the Honest Elections Project says, pushes “left-wing priorities like automatic voter registration” and is run by the New Venture Fund. The Elections Group’s CEO and co-founder, Jennifer Morrell, previously served as a consultant at the Democracy Fund.
The Capital Research Center’s Walter uses a football analogy to explain why he sees these efforts as untoward. He told RealClearInvestigations:
Election offices are the refs in elections; the parties are teams trying to score. You’d be puzzled if you heard Super Bowl refs say they’re trying to boost points scored. You’d be outraged if you learned those refs had received money and training from people who previously worked for one team’s offensive coaching staff. That’s what left-wing political operatives, using left-wing money, are doing, and it’s clearly unfair.
Democrat-aligned groups continue to engage in litigation, like that brought by chief election lawyer Marc Elias, aimed at loosening election laws to their benefit. Snead told RealClearInvestigations, “There are more than 70 active lawsuits right now targeting voter ID laws, anti-ballot harvesting laws, signature verification, drop box regulations, and more.”
After securing victory in a lawsuit requiring signature verification for mail voting in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Committee touted its engagement as well in 81 election integrity cases this cycle. Swing-state Wisconsin is another major battleground for such efforts.
There, Elias’ legal team has challenged witness signature requirements and bans on election clerks filling address information on mail-in ballots. It and others are also working to overturn a state Supreme Court decision finding drop boxes illegal. The Badger State’s now liberal-majority Supreme Court announced in March it would take up the case.
Cutting against these efforts are not only the state’s citizen-approved Zuckerbucks ban, but another Badger-passed April 2 ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to prohibit those other than “an election official designated by law” from carrying out election-related tasks.
Watchdogs like Howell are concerned that left-leaning electioneers and lawfare forces collectively are pursuing an “election ‘dis-integrity’ strategy … to greatly expand the universe of ballots while limiting any ability to ensure that they are fairly cast and counted.”
“It’s a basic recipe for fraud.”
Elias says those seeking to combat such efforts are engaged in “voter suppression and election subversion.”
Democrats also have the federal government working on their side on the litigation front—and in ways extending beyond the veritable lawfare barrage the Biden Justice Department has leveled at Trump.
Speaking in Selma, Alabama, on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 police assault on civil rights marchers, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that “the right to vote is still under attack.”
Garland vowed the Department of Justice was punching back, including “challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
The post How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election appeared first on The Daily Signal.
This year's presidential and congressional elections are unlikely to be decided on the issue of tax policy, but they will very likely determine how much of the tax cuts enacted under President Donald Trump survive.
The post Breitbart Business Digest: What Will Happen to the Trump Tax Cuts? appeared first on Breitbart.
Back on May 30, 2023, after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut a deal with President Joe Biden to suspend any limit on the federal debt through all of 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised the deal as an act of “responsible” government.
“Again, nobody got everything they wanted,” said Schumer, “but this bill is the responsible and prudent and necessary way forward.”
At the close of business on the day Schumer made this statement, the federal debt was $31,463,988,658,765.75.
At the close of business on April 8 of this year, the debt was $34,608,412,560,642.47.
In just over 10 months since Biden and McCarthy made their deal, the debt has increased by more than $3 trillion ($3,144,423,901,876.72).
To put this in perspective, the total federal debt did not top $3 trillion for the first time until fiscal year 1990—214 years after the nation was founded in 1776.
Schumer and his colleagues in the current Congress borrowed more money in less than one year than their pre-1990 predecessors did in more than two centuries.
What is the fiscally “responsible” Schumer talking about now? He is bragging about how he is spending federal money on pet projects in New York state.
In the seven days from April 2 through April 8, Schumer’s Senate office posted eight press releases announcing projects that would funnel $79,174,581 in federal funding to New York.
His communications staff was especially busy on April 2.
The first press release they put out that day said that Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., had “secured $3,822,000 for critical local projects.”
“This nearly $4 million in federal funding makes vital investments in the Capital Region’s top-notch educational institutions, helping give students the equipment and hands-on training they need,” Schumer said.
The second press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $3,000,000 for the Syracuse University and CenterState CEO in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to upgrade facilities at the Syracuse University’s South Side Innovation Center and prepare local small business to succeed in the semiconductor industry through CenterState CEO.”
The third press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “personally secured $1,000,000 for Binghamton University to purchase state-of-the-art advanced packaging equipment for its Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB) in Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills as a Congressionally Directed Spending request to bolster workforce training for advanced chip manufacturing in cleanroom environments.”
A fourth press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $1,200,000 in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations package for DAY ONE Early Learning Community, a preschool in Poughkeepsie that serves low-income children and families.”
A fifth press release published that same day said Schumer and Gillibrand “announced $5,633,581 through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Great Lakes Environmental Justice Grant Program to develop and implement the Western New York Environmental Justice Grant Program for underserved communities in Lake Erie and Niagara River’s watershed.”
Two days later, on April 4, Schumer “announced $1,559,000 from Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to support vital semiconductor and healthcare workforce training programs and higher education infrastructure upgrades in Rochester.”
Four days after that, on April 8, Schumer declared that he was “proud to deliver a whopping $39 million to help rehabilitate the South Grand Island Bridges and bolster resilient infrastructure needed to maintain these vital corridors for Western NY.”
That same day, he also announced that a “whopping nearly $24 million from our Bipartisan Infrastructure & Jobs Law to bolster flooding mitigation on Cortlandt’s Route 6 will drive our communities towards a safer and more resilient future.”
Who is going to pay for these projects in Schumer’s home state?
Federal taxpayers in New York, of course, will carry some of the burden—but so, too, will taxpaying workers in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Alaska, and every other state in the union.
Because the federal government is continuing to run a massive deficit—it was $828.135 billion through the first five months of this fiscal year—not only will current taxpayers fund such projects but so, too, will future generations who will be required to pay the interest on the money the federal government borrows to fund them.
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The post Chuck Schumer’s $79 Million Week appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Freshman Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) suggested that black Americans should be exempt from paying taxes as a form of reparations.
The post Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett: Black Americans Should Not Pay Taxes as a Form of Reparations appeared first on Breitbart.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again stirred up excitement and skepticism with his latest announcement of an upcoming Tesla Robotaxi unveiling on August 8, 2024, despite a history of unfulfilled promises surrounding the currently non-existent "robotaxi" service.
The post Hypemaster Elon Musk Announces Tesla Robotaxi Despite History of Broken Promises appeared first on Breitbart.
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Hunter Biden’s attempt to have all his tax charges thrown out was defeated Monday, letting the criminal case against him move forward.
The post Hunter Biden Defeated in Attempt to Throw Out Tax Case appeared first on Breitbart.
At the urging of the United Nations, aid is being sent to Gaza, where it will be received and distributed by Hamas, the authority in Gaza. Designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the U.S. government in 1997, Hamas imposes taxes on all imports and exports, including aid, which has contributed to Gaza’s initial poverty. Now, with the humanitarian crisis caused by Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, the United Nations and the global community are providing funding to Hamas.
Aid given by sovereign nations comes from taxes; therefore, U.S. taxpayers are now funding Hamas. Under U.S. law, providing material support to designated terrorist organizations is a federal offense. President Trump has urged that all support for Palestine and Gaza be halted because the money is supporting terrorism, but the UN, the Biden administration, and globalists and liberals have criticized him. Additionally, the UN has refused to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In Myanmar/Burma, roughly two million people have fled their villages and are taking shelter in the jungle because of attacks by the military junta, which seized power in a 2021 coup. While these people are running out of food and water and lack proper shelter and clothing, the UN is providing humanitarian aid to the junta. Ostensibly, the junta has promised to ensure that the aid reaches the people the army is trying to kill; however, having been in the jungle in Burma with displaced people, I can assure you that the only things the government is dropping into the camps are bombs and artillery shells.
Private aid organizations would like to assist the internally displaced people in Burma. However, it is prohibited by the regulations of the UN to violate a country’s sovereignty by providing aid without permission. Consequently, small, privately funded groups, mostly Christian organizations from the U.S., such as the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), take significant risks to cross the mountains, often under cover of darkness, through minefields, and under fire, to deliver small amounts of rice and medicine to those in need. Meanwhile, the generals receive millions of dollars in aid from the UN.
According to the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, North Korea ranks approximately fourth in terms of national security threats to the US and second to the national security of Japan, our closest ally in Asia. It is also one of the poorest and most repressed countries in the world due to government mismanagement. The UN continues to provide aid to North Korea, freeing up resources for Kim Jong Un to allocate toward his rocket program.
Since the US pullout of Afghanistan, the UN has provided the country with $2.9 billion worth of aid. The Taliban remain designated as a foreign terrorist organization. With the UN aid, plus the money they are making from selling the US weapons Biden left them, they must be sitting comfortably.
The UN allegedly strives to deliver aid to those in dire need, regardless of the political situation. This is a noble goal, as civilians often suffer the most during conflicts. However, achieving this goal is difficult. Corruption, conflict, and political agendas can divert aid or make it hard to reach those who need it most.
As the list of countries where aid was diverted or stolen is quite long, the UN has implemented stricter guidelines and monitoring programs to reduce diversion. Independent Audits: The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) investigates allegations of misuse of funds. Currently, the People’s Republic of China, the US’ number one national security threat and the world’s most prolific trade cheat and intellectual property thief, sits on the United Nations Board of Auditors.
UN investigators or inspectors have no authority. They must obtain permission from the country they are investigating, and access may not be granted. Beijing denied access to UN investigators who were attempting to confirm the genocide against the Uygur ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang. To this day, China remains in the lead in four UN agencies and has the ability to deny the existence of genocide at home because it has never been proven.
Even if the UN could prove violations, it has no law enforcement capabilities. It can do nothing but issue a strongly worded letter. It could cease aid, as it has in some countries with egregious violations, like they did in Eritrea, but even then, they just wind up reducing rather than completely cutting aid. Often, the aid is restored later. And any number of despots and terrorists continue to receive aid unabated.
China and Russia sit on the United Nations Security Council and have vetoed UN interventions in genocide. Cross-border relief is another major issue where despotic countries can veto. In countries like Burma and Syria, internally displaced people need help, but the government refuses to let the aid get in. The Security Council could vote to bypass the need for permission, but China and Russia hold veto power.
Iran, one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, has held seats on the governing boards of aid organizations such as UNICEF and the UN Development Program. The list of dictators and despots that have sat on the Human Rights Council reads like a parody, including Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Cuba, Venezuela, China, among others. Since 2022, dictators have comprised 68% of the UN Human Rights Council. Additionally, Syria was elected to the WHO and Iran was elected to the top of a women’s rights body.
In summary, the UN provides funds to dictators and terrorists. The US’s top enemies, China and Russia, hold seats on the Security Council and have the power to veto the provision of aid to those who truly need it. Furthermore, a rogue’s gallery of pariah states sits on various committees, facilitating aid and preventing sanctions against some of the world’s worst actors.
Trump was right. The US needs to rethink its involvement in the United Nations.
The post UN Aid Funds Terrorists and Tyrants appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Colorado Democrats are pushing an 11 percent excise tax on gun and ammunition sales, as well as numerous other California-style gun controls.
The post Colorado Democrats Pushing 11% Excise Firearms Tax, Other California Gun Controls appeared first on Breitbart.
South Carolina officials have discovered a bank account belonging to the state containing a whopping $1.8 billion — but no one seems to know why or how it got there.
The post Investigation: $1.8 Billion Discovered in Mysterious Bank Account Belonging to South Carolina appeared first on Breitbart.
New York City has introduced a permitting system for companies seeking to test robotaxis on its streets, with one major catch — the city is mandating the presence of human safety drivers at all times.
The post New York City Welcomes Robotaxis to the Big Apple – with One Catch appeared first on Breitbart.
Democrat-run New York is poised to become the first U.S. city to hit drivers with punitive tolls after transit officials on Wednesday approved a $15 fee for most motorists headed to the busiest part of Manhattan.
The post Start Walking: Democrat-run NYC Approves $15 Toll on Cars Entering Manhattan appeared first on Breitbart.
A U.S. judge on Wednesday will be asked to dismiss the criminal case accusing Hunter Biden of evading $1.4 million in taxes.
The post Hunter Biden’s Attorneys to Seek Dismissal of Tax Case as ‘Politically Motivated’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Xi Jinping’s goal is to have the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ready for a Taiwan invasion by 2027 and to surpass the US military by 2035. The PLA’s modernization costs money that Beijing gets from Americans who invest in China and/or purchase Chinese imports.
The media keeps blaming Trump, saying the tariffs he put on Chinese imports were ineffective because they made Chinese products more expensive, which was inconvenient for Americans. They also warn that if you vote for Trump in 2024, the tariffs are likely to go up.
As a trained economist, I can assure you that the purpose of the tariffs was to make Chinese products more expensive, aiming to deter Americans from purchasing them. Therefore, they were extremely effective in achieving this goal. The only Americans who found them inconvenient were those who refused to buy American-made products.
About half of China’s exports are manufactured by foreign companies in China. The tariffs cause these nations to relocate their factories to other countries, mostly Mexico, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, in order to avoid tariffs. Not only does this decoupling reduce the amount of money Beijing can allocate toward the military, but it also cuts China’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Now, China’s net investment has gone negative, hitting a 30-year low. Factory activity is trending downward. Manufacturers are facing deflation, and youth unemployment hit 21.3%. To make the numbers look better, Beijing stopped reporting. But even after inventing a new definition for “youth unemployment,” the rate remains at a dismal 15% and continues to climb.
Mainstream media also has a lot of “smoking gun” articles where they reveal the shocking claim that the tariffs backfired because they are actually paid by American consumers, not China. Once again, yes, this is exactly how tariffs are meant to work. The price is raised by a tariff, which is a tax. The tariff is paid by the purchaser, not the seller, and the tariff revenue goes to the United States government, not Beijing.
The increased price of tariffed products is a blow to Beijing’s income, because it reduces demand for Chinese products, as explained above. They also create leeway for American companies to enter the market. The main reason companies manufactured in China before was because it was cheaper, and by manufacturing in the US, the product price would be too high and could not compete with products made in China. The tariffs raise the price of Chinese products so that US companies can afford to manufacture and sell them.
This brings manufacturing back to the U.S. It also removes China from our supply chains, making our nation stronger in the event of war.
The Trump tariffs caused several changes within China that helped bring manufacturing back to the US. First, the increased cost of the tariffs makes manufacturing in China more expensive. Second, as US and foreign companies pull out of China and unemployment rises, Chinese consumers have less money to spend. So, there is less of a market in China for US products. Brands like Nike and Apple found it affordable to manufacture in China because they could offset the rising labor costs with domestic sales in China. Now, those sales are winding down. At the same time, Xi Jinping is pushing propaganda encouraging patriotic Chinese to buy Chinese-made products, further reducing the market for US manufacturers. This incentivizes American companies to manufacture in the US or in a friendlier country.
Another added benefit to the US and allied nations pulling their factories out of China is that it reduces China’s opportunity for intellectual property (IP) theft. China’s technological rise is largely predicated on stealing IP from the US and other nations. Putting a stop to this theft will set China back by decades.
One of the main pieces of evidence that mainstream media cited to claim that the trade war was a failure was the fact that the tariffs had failed to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. However, they will need to start printing apologies because not only has Mexico displaced China as the US’s top trading partner, but the US trade deficit with China has been steadily decreasing.
Reducing Beijing’s income with tariffs, investment bans, and sanctions is crucial for national security. In addition to threatening the U.S. directly, China is the primary economic benefactor of North Korea, Russia, and the Taliban. Additionally, Iran is using the money it earns from China to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
One point where the mainstream media is right, however, is that the tariffs could be more effective. This is why they should be raised. A 60% tariff, as Trump is promising, if he is reelected, would be the final nail in the coffin for China as the world’s factory. No one could afford to manufacture there anymore.
The post China Tariffs Reduce Funding for Beijing’s Military appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Photo: Screenshot from the WeChat account of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command
Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly insist that Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, illegally appointed the director of the state’s renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion. And they say they’re willing to give over $2 million more to commercial marijuana sellers to dramatize that point.
Created in 2020 under Youngkin’s predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sprang from a concept popularized by the Left and commonly known as DEI.
However, in his second week as governor, Youngkin signed an executive order Jan. 19, 2022, removing the term “equity” from the office’s name and replacing it with “opportunity.“
In November 2022, the Republican governor appointed Martin Brown, who is black, as Virginia’s chief diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer—as well as director of the renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion.
In response to Youngkin’s name change for the diversity office, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, successfully offered an amendment to the state’s budget bill requiring that the office revert to its original name.
Youngkin has criticized the budget passed March 9 by the Virginia General Assembly, and the spending plan awaits the Republican governor’s signature. Democrats hold a 21-19 majority in the state Senate and a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates.
In a statement emailed Monday to The Daily Signal, Surovell said he “introduced the amendment because the governor has refused to hire a chief DEI officer which is a position created and titled in state law.”
“If the governor is going to violate state law, the money needs to be directed,” the Senate majority leader added, apparently meaning “redirected.”
Surovell’s budget amendment requires Youngkin to change “Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion” back to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” by June 1, or the diversity office’s $2.3 million funding would go to the Virginia Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund, a program to help licensed marijuana sellers.
“Governor Youngkin has been clear that he doesn’t have any interest in a retail market for marijuana; instead, we should be working to fix a backward budget written by Democrats that has $2.6 billion in new taxes on Virginia families,” Youngkin press secretary Christian Martinez said Monday in a written statement to The Daily Signal.
“Since the beginning of the administration, the governor has challenged the groupthink of the progressive Democrats’ pursuit of equity at any cost, instead focusing on advancing equal opportunities, not equal outcomes for all.”
Surovell didn’t respond before publication to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on why his amendment tied the sale of marijuana to the diversity office’s name change.
Last year, Surovell and Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, wrote to Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, inquiring whether Youngkin’s name change for the office violated state law.
In the letter, the two Democrats argued that Youngkin illegally renamed the office, saying the action violated the 2020 law that established the office in the executive branch with a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Here is the letter that @DonScott757 and I sent to @JasonMiyaresVA seeking an opinion regarding the Governor DEI actions – our first question is whether the Governor is bound by Virginia Law because apparently he doesn't think he is@FairfaxNAACP @charlottewords @LVozzella pic.twitter.com/E2PzbTvGL6
— Senator Scott Surovell (@ssurovell) May 2, 2023
The Senate and House leaders argued in their letter to the attorney general that Youngkin illegally named Brown as director since the governor didn’t appoint him to the office named in state law.
In his written statement to The Daily Signal, Surovell said Youngkin had “hired someone for that office [and] renamed the person a diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer who then made offensive comments regarding equity.”
“DEI is dead,” Brown said last April in a speech at Virginia Military Institute referencing the office’s name change.
“We’re not going to bring that cow up anymore. It’s dead,” Brown said. “It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse.”
The move caused an uproar in the General Assembly as many Democrats, joined by the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, demanded Brown’s resignation.
The governor’s office defended Brown at the time, saying that Youngkin would “continue to advance equal opportunities—not equal outcomes—for all Virginians.”
“This is too important of an issue to succumb to those seeking to cancel Chief Brown for challenging the groupthink of the progressive Left’s pursuit of equity at any cost,” the statement said.
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report, which was modified with additional details within 24 hours of publication.
The post Youngkin Stands Firm as Virginia Democrats Prefer to Give Millions to Pot Instead of Opportunity appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Tax documents for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and for a major foundation funded by leftist billionaire George Soros show the organization that purports to represent the U.S. business community has turned hard left in recent years.
The post Exclusive – Tax Documents: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Turns to Soros-Funded Groups and Democrats to Keep Dwindling Operations Alive appeared first on Breitbart.
A country’s slide into socialism/communism begins with socialist policies. And every one of these has been proposed in the United States: like an exorbitant minimum wage which is exorbitant and not tied to performance or return on labor, a universal basic income, charging for electricity usage based on income rather than quantity of electricity used, issuing carbon usage credits, allowing the state, not the consumer, to decide how much is enough, imposing a billionaire tax, taxing wealth transfers and inheritance to prevent parents from helping their children, and taxing unrealized capital gains to discourage saving and investing.
Beyond the purely economic, policies that mandate demographic quotas for promotions, hiring, firing, or school acceptance are examples of social engineering that removes the “profit motive,” the reward for hard work, disincentivizing hard work, and resulting in the promotion of those who cannot meet the quality standards.
Washington State has proposed eliminating the bar exam in order to increase diversity among lawyers. Oregon high school students will no longer need to be able to read, write, or do math in order to graduate, for the same reason.
United Airlines announced that it would prioritize diversity in its selection of trainee pilots. And in order to ensure that the younger generation understands only the state agenda, homeschooling will be banned.
Socialism/Communism has never worked, but somehow, people keep voting for it and believing that this time will be different. The truth is that it has caused tens of millions to starve to death while robbing hundreds of millions of their innovation, creativity, and motivation.
The entire society, working different jobs from research scientist to ticket puncher, for an equal number of turnip coupons, is so unnatural that it can only exist in a totalitarian system where people have no choice.
No capitalist nation ever forced people to earn a profit, but communist countries had to use their secret police and state surveillance to force people not to.
No one was ever shot trying to break into East Germany or swimming to Cuba.
Socialism cannot bring prosperity because it destroys the market functions of private property and eliminates the incentives for more productive people to work harder or more inventive people to innovate. Socialists are always worried about wealth inequality, and their solution always involves taking money from the harder-working, more efficient people and giving it to the less productive.
Socialists believe that if they were to forcibly redistribute the wealth, everyone would be better off. The first problem with this logic is that the people who have wealth now would be worse off if someone stole it.
The United States has the highest GDP per capita in the entire American continent, from Canada to Argentina, including the Caribbean. The US average income is about $76,000 per year.
In Haiti, it is $1,748. If the socialists had their way and redistributed the wealth evenly across the roughly 1 billion people in the Americas, the average would be $35,000 per year. So, US citizens would be giving up more than half their income but would still be working the same jobs, for the same number of hours.
If you received the same wage, no matter what, you would stop doing overtime, stop coming up with new ideas, and pretty much stop working at all. In the Soviet Union, there was a joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
Almost every communist country began by abolishing money and nationalizing production of everything, including food. Within a very short time, these countries faced famines.
With no profit incentive, there was no motivation for farmers to grow food. Additionally, with no money prices, there was no rational way to calculate the cost of planting versus the money earned from selling the produce or to calculate how many resources should be allocated to producing food versus producing some other product.
Nearly six million people in the USSR starved to death in the Soviet Famine (1931-1934). Roughly half of these were Ukrainians, living in the “breadbasket of Europe.”
During the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979) in Cambodia, between one half and a third of the population died of starvation and overwork, although nearly 100% of the population was sent out to the fields to farm. Venezuelans are facing hunger, while Cubans are facing shortages of everything.
The winner of the socialist starvation death toll competition is Mao Zedong, whose Great Famine (1958-1962) killed 30 million Chinese.
India was resource-rich and had the largest workforce, but socialist policies led to India becoming synonymous with extreme poverty. The USSR was the most resource-rich country on the planet and had one of the largest workforces, but had an economy about 5% the size of the U.S. China similarly had a huge workforce, and it was not until 2007 that the average Chinese citizen was earning more than the average American was earning in the year 1900.
Vietnam also experienced a mini-famine caused by communism, but they quickly realized that by privatizing farming, they were able to increase rice production.
It was privatization that also ended the Chinese famine, and Deng Xiaoping allowing private sector entrepreneurs to earn profits that lifted 800 million Chinese out of poverty.
No former communist country has ever reverted to communism. And China and Vietnam, the world’s largest remaining communist countries, dramatically increased the welfare of their people by allowing market economics, profit, and private ownership.
But both China and Vietnam remain dramatically poorer than the US because of their refusal to completely let go of communism/socialism.
Given all the evidence against it, how can American socialists believe that this time will be different?
The post Socialist Policies: Steps Toward a System That Has Always Failed appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Red Guards Cell, Austin, Texas. By Reddebrek, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104103414
Hollywood has reportedly received a whopping $25 billion in state tax incentives to date -- a win for studios like Disney and Netflix but a big "L" for ordinary taxpayers.
The post Hollywood Studios Reap $25 Billion from States’ Film Tax Credits; Taxpayers See Massive Losses appeared first on Breitbart.
Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.
But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:
President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.
Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.
The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.
Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.
Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:
The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.
Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:
The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.
Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.
Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.
The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.
Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:
Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.
Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.
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