Free Republic

Biden to students: Sorry, I was just kidding! Thanks for the votes, BTW. LMAO.

The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a nationwide injunction pending appeal against President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness program Monday, adding to previous legal action blocking the plan. The program seeks to forgive $10,000 in federal student loan debt for individuals with incomes under $125,000 and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, with the Biden administration claiming it had the authority to institute the program under the HEROES Act of 2003 and an emergency situation sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina had filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration...

https://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/grasshopper/Student debt bailout, the ant, and the grasshopper: The party that supported slavery wants to force low income taxpayers to pay for vacations and restaurant meals for people with college degreesBy Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)November 14, 2022In Aesop’s classic fable, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the ant spends all summer saving up food for the winter, while the grasshopper does not. When winter comes, the ant is well fed, and the grasshopper starves to death.When I was a child in the 1970s, this fable was taught to children, in order to teach us a lesson. We were...

Democrats are about to include a tax break in their $1.75 trillion social spending plan that will overwhelmingly benefit higher earners.On Tuesday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey wrote on Twitter that the provision had been added into the plan. A Democratic aide familiar with negotiations told Insider that Democrats were eyeing a five-year tax break that runs through 2025, a development first reported by Punchbowl News. The break would also be retroactive to this year. The SALT deduction allows taxpayers to deduct their state and local tax totals from their federal obligation. Under Trump's 2017 tax plan, the previously...

Forty-three TV shows and movies took $1.2 billion in New York state tax breaks from 2015 to mid-2018, state records show. New York state sets aside a generous $420 million a year for tax breaks for film studios that make movies and TV shows in the state. That’s more than any other tax break program in New York state. Critics have questioned the need to subsidize one industry so heavily and they dismiss the jobs as temporary. They also question the need to incentivize shows that would have been made in New York anyway. Saturday Night Live, for example, is...

There was some big news in the entertainment industry recently as the television show “Nashville” was cancelled after four seasons. As a casual fan of the show and a Nashville resident, I enjoyed watching the show. It allowed me to brag to my friends about where I live, plus the music was always on point. Obviously, the market didn’t agree, as the ratings were not high enough for ABC to renew the show for another year.However, the real issue with this show being cancelled has nothing to do with the quality of the show itself. The problem is that this...

Tens of thousands of people who earn too much to qualify for the U.S. government’s taxpayer-subsidized public housing live in the facilities nationwide and the federal agency that runs the program has no intention of evicting the violators. That’s because “there are positive social benefits from having families with varying income levels residing in the same property,” according to the Obama administration official that runs the program.Some beneficiaries earn tens of thousands of dollars a year more than the threshold allowed to qualify for the cheap housing and, in at least one case, a millionaire pays a mere $300 a...

It now appears that, for the sort of reasons that often count most – political reasons – there is a realistic chance that Michigan’s film subsidy program will end soon. When a bill to put a stop to the subsidies was introduced on Jan. 29, skepticism about its prospects seemed justified. Little more than a month earlier, the Legislature had overwhelmingly passed a measure to keep the program rolling, and Gov. Rick Snyder signed it into law. The idea that the Legislature and governor would reverse course just weeks later seemed far-fetched. But much has changed in the brief period...

An exodus of top-level officials from the Department of Homeland Security is undercutting the agency’s ability to stay ahead of a range of emerging threats, including potential terrorist strikes and cyberattacks, according to interviews with current and former officials. Over the past four years, employees have left DHS at a rate nearly twice as fast as in the federal government overall, and the trend is accelerating, according to a review of a federal database. The departures are a result of what employees widely describe as a dysfunctional work environment, abysmal morale, and the lure of private security companies paying top...

As if you needed another reason not to wear your dumb Google Glass in public—or ever, actually—an Ohio man claims he was yanked out of a movie theater and interrogated by federal agents, who believed he was illegally filming the movie with his face computer. The man’s full account is posted on The Gadgeteer, but we’ll summarize it here so you can get the gist of it before you’re engulfed forever in this ghastly winter storm. Last Saturday, our Glass-wearing protagonist and his wife went to a showing of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at an AMC in Columbus, Ohio. About...

It appears that Hollywood is in a lot of trouble, not to mention California as a whole. California offers a paltry amount of tax incentives for filming within the state as opposed to most other states or even a number of countries. In fact, California's tax incentive program for the film and television industry currently stands at $100 million annually while New York's program is at $420 million. Some states don't even have a cap. What this means is that Hollywood is fleeing Tinsletown to film out of state, which is costing California billions of dollars and tens of thousands...

A unpublished report says New York is writing tax credit refund checks to film and television studios that far exceed the amount of taxes they owe the state. The report, prepared for a tax reform commission appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, suggests the program should be scaled back. "The growth in the industry comes at the expense of higher taxes for other taxpayers or lower spending on state services and investments, possibly reducing activity in other sectors of the economy," the report concludes. It's a 137-page addendum to a study by the tax commission co-chaired by former state Comptroller H....

Budget documents state that ‘a talk or variety program’ that gets the credit ‘must be filmed before a studio audience’ of at least 200, have a production budget of at least $30 million or run at least $10 million in capital expenses — and has to have been shot outside New York for at least 5 seasons prior to relocation. New York already gives companies producing movies or television series in the state a tax credit equal to 30% of production costs. It costs the state $420 million in revenue a year.

The federal government instituted crop insurance in 1938 in an attempt to end the need for ad hoc aid to farmers following disastrous droughts or floods. But ad hoc aid has not ended in the past seven decades, and the insurance program that was intended to replace it has transformed into a massive, poorly disguised crop subsidy program that provides few benefits to farmers who practice good risk management. Instead, the program rewards poor risk managers with generous subsidies at the expense of taxpayers, contrary to the fundamental principles of insurance. To be sure, lawmakers have made several efforts to...

<p>For 250 years, pure sugar cane has pumped through the heart of Louisiana. To Louisianans, sugar is more than the sweet stuff we put in our coffee; it's a way of life. Just look at the Sugar Bowl played in New Orleans for more than 70 years.</p>

He said ethanol plants' demand adds about 10 to 15 cents per bushel of corn sold by farmers. "Farmers don't have to haul corn to market as far," he said. "A lot of corn in the past was hauled out of state to market." At 10 cents more per bushel, state corn growers are capitalizing at about $35 million more in income per year, Mr. Oleson said. "That's going to happen every year. That's the value of ethanol plants," he said. "Wisconsin farmers who grow corn hybrids suitable for ethanol production are realizing increased income for their family farms," Bill...

Remember when Hollywood liberals claimed to care about the world's poor? Man, those were the days. Now the richest people in Southern California, who sit on top of a booming $35-billion industry, are using their impressive political clout to punish the struggling citizens of South Africa, Mexico and Romania for having the nerve to think that their tiny domestic film industries could so much as bite Hollywood's ankles. And our politicians are falling all over each other to service Hollywood's poor and huddled masses, doling out heaps of protectionist corporate welfare that our government cannot begin to afford. In Los...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration on Tuesday threw in the towel on the president's proposal to slash farm payments in the face of opposition from lawmakers in both parties. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told key senators he was willing to look at other programs for spending cuts to hold down the federal deficit. ``We acknowledge that many of these policy proposals, such as the reduction in the payment limit, are quite sensitive,'' Johanns said in prepared remarks to a Senate Appropriations Committee panel on farm spending. ``We recognize Congress may have other proposals to achieve these savings, and we...

WASHINGTON - Cuts in food programs for the poor are getting support in Congress as an alternative to President Bush's idea of slicing billions of dollars from the payments that go to large farm operations. Senior Republicans in both the House and Senate are open to small reductions in farm subsidies, but they adamantly oppose the deep cuts sought by Bush to hold down future federal deficits. The president wants to lower the maximum subsidies that can be collected each year by any one farm operation from $360,000 to $250,000. He also asked Congress to cut by 5 percent all...

A Bush administration proposal that would cut billions of dollars in subsidies to big cotton growers has struck at a core GOP constituency, setting off a battle in Republican congressional ranks that pits budget cutters and prairie-state populists against traditional agricultural interests. The Bush plan threatens an elaborate government safety net that is the handiwork of such legendary southern Democrats as Lyndon B. Johnson (Tex.) and James O. Eastland (Miss.), as well as a new generation of Republican leaders from the region. The move reflects growing pressure to hold down soaring federal deficits and a recognition that even a business...