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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.
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.
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.
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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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
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.
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.
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
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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