Free Republic

An obscure bureaucratic policy that allowed IRS officials to target conservative and Tea Party tax exemption applicants during the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns is still in place, meaning the same abuses may be continuing, according to a nonprofit government watchdog. The federal tax agency’s policy requires IRS officials to stop processing tax-exempt applications that are “likely to attract media or congressional attention,” the Cause of Action Institute said in a report made public Wednesday. The policy also directs IRS officials to prepare “sensitive case reports” for their supervisors and to ignore “the merits of the application” if it involved...

A copy of a draft order reported by The Washington Post earlier this month and being circulated among cabinet members seeks to address what the order describes as a massive burden on the American taxpayer. The order calls for immigrants “likely to need certain types of public aid” to be identified prior to entry, and for immigrants already using those services to be deported. The draft order also requires strict financial responsibility for relatives who promised to support immigrants who are instead now relying on social aid. The potential savings estimated by the order are as high as “$100 billion,”...

Bay area restaurant industry employment and even general retail employment have fallen, and are possibly headed towards a steep decline. One has to wonder how obvious things will have to get before the press takes the negative effects of the area's mandated sky-high minimums seriously. ... Upward of 60 restaurants around the Bay Area have closed since the start of September alone, with many citing difficulties like the cost of finding and keeping good employees, rising rents, new requirements for providing health care and sick leave, and doing it all while competing with the slew of new dining options. ......

President-Elect Donald Trump bought his son’s failed company, foreclosed on the property, and now South Carolina taxpayers are left to clean up the mess he left behind. President-Elect Trump won South Carolina by a little more than 14 points. In early 2014, a company in Charleston, South Carolina was promising to “revolutionize” home construction, by manufacturing and selling “home construction kits.” First it was called Titan Atlas Manufacturing, later being in reorganized into Titan Atlas Global before shutting down for good in the spring of 2015. Part of this doomed venture was none other than Donald Trump, Jr., who faced...

The National Endowment for the Arts released its latest round of grants, with new taxpayer-funded art such as Macbeth with zombies, cowboy poetry, a play about privilege, and a traveling gay men’s chorus. . . . This year’s grant will support the “world premiere of Monique Jenkinson’s ‘Delicate Material,’ which questions how society views gender and misogyny.” “Fauxnique made herstory as the first cissexual female to win a major drag pageant,” according to Jenkinson’s website. Other projects on gender identity and sex include the play Trans Scripts about six men who are now women, costing $50,000.

The National Endowment for the Arts is spending $30,000 for a series of dance performances, including Doggie Hamlet. The “conceptual art” features actors yelling and running at sheep in a field in Vermont. Dartmouth College received the funding in the latest round of NEA grants released this month. . . . “Doggie Hamlet recalls the bucolic impression of a landscape painting or a 3D pastoral poem,” the group said. “The sheep, the dogs, the human performers, and the earth’s surface are at once performing as themselves and as living symbols in this work.”

LANSING, Mich. (WOOD) — Green Party Candidate Jill Stein will challenge the vote count in Michigan – an effort that will likely cost taxpayers...

Some people blame their issues on other people no matter what and believe they are entitled to what other people earn and have. This story is a case of taxpayers paying the price for one family’s sense of entitlement. In 2012, Arnold and Jeanne Sube and their eight children, moved from France to the UK so that Arnold could study mental heath nursing at the University of Bedfordshire. They currently live in a three bedroom house that they feel is a poor living arrangement. But rather than working and saving in order to afford a larger house, like most people...

IRS data show the average income of taxpayers leaving Illinois surpassed the average income of taxpayers entering the state by $20,000 in 2014, a record loss for Illinois in the wake of the 2011 income-tax hike. Politicians enacted Illinois’ 2011 income-tax hike during a late-night legislative session in January 2011 and raised the state’s personal income-tax rate to 5 percent from 3 percent. This 67 percent income-tax hike lasted for four years, during which time Illinois experienced record wealth flight. IRS data reveal what happens when politicians choose short-term tax revenue gains over long-term stability. The short-term increase in tax...

The long-term costs to taxpayers of immigrants and their descendants are detailed in a new report from the National Academy of Sciences. The findings in the report indicate that if amnesty for illegal immigrants were enacted, the government would have to raise taxes immediately by $1.29 trillion and put that sum into a high-yield bank account to cover future fiscal losses generated by the amnesty recipients and their children. To cover the future cost, each U.S. household currently paying federal income tax would have to pay, on average, an immediate lump sum of over $15,000.

No voter approval for debt which taxpayers are on the hook for means no accountability for elected politicians The town of Apple Valley, California, deep in the heart of the Victor Valley of San Bernardino County, has a ballot initiative battle grappling with accountability for bond debt. But it’s gotten political with citizens claiming elected members of the Apple Valley Town Council have ceased making decisions in the best interests of their community. Nearly 4,000 Apple Valley residents signed petitions to bring Measure V to the Nov. 8 ballot to require voter approval of any Town project of $10 million...

Perhaps this is the reason the price of lifesaving EpiPens increased so dramatically: the single-largest purchaser of the pens in 2015 were taxpayers.The largest source of Mylan's increased revenue came from increased spending from Medicaid and Medicare for the devices. The price of the EpiPens has increased by over 400 percent since Medicaid and Medicare became a larger percentage of EpiPen's revenue. "The majority of Mylan's EpiPen revenue growth came from Medicare and Medicaid," Senator Chuck Grassley told NBC News in a statement after the Iowa Republican's office published an analysis of newly released data on rebates paid by the...

Former president Bill Clinton used taxpayer funds from cash provided to him as an ex-president to pay for employees to set up the family’s private email server, according to a new report from Politico. Clinton drew money from the General Services account to pay part of his aide Justin Cooper’s salary — the same person who helped set up a private email server in Clinton’s home. It goes deeper. Clinton used taxpayer funds to boost the salaries of ten different Clinton loyalists, despite his growing wealth from delivering paid speeches. The funds were also used to purchase equipment for the...

It Gets Worse: Bill Clinton Paid To Install Hillary’s Private Server With Taxpayer Money by Charlie Spiering 1 Sep 2016 Former president Bill Clinton used taxpayer funds from cash provided to him as an ex-president to pay for employees to set up the family’s private email server, according to a new report from Politico. Clinton drew money from the General Services account to pay part of his aide Justin Cooper’s salary — the same person who helped set up a private email server in Clinton’s home. It goes deeper. Clinton used taxpayer funds to boost the salaries of ten different...

This is about the labor groups coming and trying to silence one voice and eliminate the ability of nonunion workers to have a voice in the political sphere The Labor-Management Cooperation Act of 1978 is rearing its ugly head once again in the California Legislature, as it roars to the end of the 2015-16 session. The idea behind the “Labor Management Cooperation Committee” ostensibly is to improve communication between representatives of Labor and Management, expand and improve working relationships between worker and managers, and to ensure health and safety working conditions in the construction industry, among other stated goals. But...

whom to blame for the student loan crisis; it’s big banks, big government and big corporations ... But if we are really honest, it is us, the citizens, who are to blame. We let our government enter into a crazy scheme of financing America’s colleges with debt. As a taxpayer, you had the right to protest. At any time over the past 50 years, you could have elected leaders who would have replaced the federal student loan program. But you looked away. You accepted the indebted fate of your children. ... Colleges responded by gulping up all the money they...

Something very courageous happened at a recent Douglas County commissioners’ hearing. Colorado Community Media reported that at a June 28 hearing, Commissioners Roger Partridge and David Weaver voted “no” to accepting federal Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) monies. In the past, CDBG funds have been distributed to a variety of nonprofit and non-governmental entities throughout Douglas County. Both commissioners voiced their concerns of the far-reaching rules, regulations and compliance requirements hidden deep within HUD’s updated CDBG application. Included in HUD’s application are two things that should cause each of us to pause. The first is the...

Maine Gov. Paul LePage may have considered a proposal to prohibit food stamp recipients from using their benefits to buy candy and sodas to be a sweet one, but the Obama administration disagrees. The friction between the Republican governor and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has reignited a debate after the Obama administration denied LePage’s request to put restrictions on what can be purchased with food stamps. In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, LePage said: “It’s time for the federal government to wake up and smell the energy drinks.” In an interview with The Daily Signal, LePage’s health...

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Epidemiologists at the Vermont Department of Health are concealing the number of refugees with contagious active tuberculosis nearly a month after Watchdog reported that more than one-third of Vermont’s resettled refugees test positive for TB. Earlier this month, Watchdog revealed that 35 percent of Vermont’s incoming refugees in the past four years tested positive for tuberculosis. How many of those cases are contagious and symptomatic, however, remains a secret, as state epidemiologists and top officials at the Health Department have spent weeks blocking efforts to obtain the data. Refugees brought to the United States take TB tests...

State Treasurer Walker Stapleton and PERA Executive Director Greg Smith disagree about how serious the disappointing 1.5 percent return on retirement investments the Public Employees’ Retirement Association fund for 2015 will be in meeting future pension obligations. ... State Treasurer Walker Stapleton said Tuesday’s announcement from the Public Employees’ Retirement Association is evidence of a mishandling by the board, in line with concerns he has raised for several years. ... Stapleton is outraged. For several years, the Republican has shouted for more conservative assumptions. He worries about long-term stability under a high projected rate of return. “PERA has assumed the...