VIDEO: McCain’s Subcommittee Staff Director Urged IRS to Target Conservative Groups

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Little is as unnerving as trouble with the IRS, especially if you haven’t done anything wrong. That happened repeatedly during the Obama administration, as his IRS enthusiastically targeted conservative groups.

We’re now understanding why the Congress didn’t do much of anything about it.

We just released internal IRS documents revealing that Sen. John McCain’s Former Staff Director and Chief Counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner, urged top IRS officials, including then-director of exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, to “audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous.”  President Trump, presumably unaware of these new facts, appointed Kerner as Special Counsel for the United States Office of Special Counsel.

The explosive exchange was contained in notes taken by IRS employees at an April 30, 2013, meeting between Kerner, Lerner, and other high-ranking IRS officials. Just ten days following the meeting, Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had a policy of improperly and deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from conservative non-profit groups.

Lerner and other IRS officials met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Senator McCain had been the chief sponsor of the McCain-Feingold Act and called the Citizens United decision, which overturned portions of the Act, one of the “worst decisions I have ever seen.”

In the full notes of an April 30 meeting, McCain’s high-ranking staffer Kerner recommends harassing non-profit groups until they are unable to continue operating. Kerner tells Lerner, Steve Miller, Nikole Flax, then chief of staff to IRS commissioner, and other IRS officials, “Maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous.” In response, Lerner responded that “it is her job to oversee it all:”

Henry Kerner asked how to get to the abuse of organizations claiming section 501 (c)(4) but designed to be primarily political. Lois Lerner said the system works, but not in real time. Henry Kerner noted that these organizations don’t disclose donors. Lois Lerner said that if they don’t meet the requirements, we can come in and revoke, but it doesn’t happen in a timely manner. Nan Marks said if the concern is that organizations engaging in this activity don’t disclose donors, then the system doesn’t work. Henry Kerner said that maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous. Nikole noted that we have budget constraints. Elise Bean suggested using the list of organizations that made independent expenditures. Lois Lerner said that it is her job to oversee it all, not just political campaign activity.

We previously reported on the 2013 meeting. Senator McCain then issued a statement decrying “false reports claiming that his office was somehow involved in IRS targeting of conservative groups.” The IRS previously blacked out the notes of the meeting, but we found the notes among subsequent documents released by the agency.

We separately uncovered that Lerner was under significant pressure from both Democrats in Congress and the Obama DOJ and FBI to prosecute and jail the groups the IRS was already improperly targeting. In discussing pressure from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat-Rhode Island) to prosecute these “political groups,” Lerner admitted, “it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity.”

The April 30, 2013 meeting came just under two weeks prior to Lerner’s admission during an ABA meeting that the IRS had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups. In her May 2013 answer to a planted question, in which she admitted to the “absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate” targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups, Lerner suggested the IRS targeting occurred due to an “uptick” in 501 (c)(4) applications to the IRS but in actuality, there had been a decrease in such applications in 2010.

On May 14, 2013, a report by Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed: “Early in Calendar Year 2010, the IRS began using inappropriate criteria to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status” (e.g., lists of past and future donors). The illegal IRS reviews continued “for more than 18 months” and “delayed processing of targeted groups’ applications” in advance of the 2012 presidential election.

All these documents were forced out of the IRS as a result of an October 2013 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the IRS after it failed to respond adequately to four FOIA requests sent in May 2013 (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)). Judicial Watch is seeking:

  • All records related to the number of applications received or related to communications between the IRS and members of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate regarding the review process for organizations applying for tax exempt status under 501(c)(4);
  • All records concerning communications between the IRS and the Executive Branch or any other government agency regarding the review process for organizations applying for tax exempt status under 501(c)(4);
  • Copies of any questionnaires and all records related to the preparation of questionnaires sent to organizations applying for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status and;
  • All records related to Lois Lerner’s communication with other IRS employees, as well as government or private entity outside the IRS regarding the review and approval process for 501 (c)(4) applicant organizations.

The Obama IRS scandal is bipartisan – McCain and Democrats who wanted to regulate political speech lost at the Supreme Court, so they sought to use the IRS to harass innocent Americans. The Obama IRS scandal is not over. We continue to uncover smoking gun documents that raise questions about how the Obama administration weaponized the IRS, the FEC, FBI, and DOJ to target the First Amendment Rights of Americans.

JW Sues for Mueller Deputy Andrew Weissmann’s Text Messages

This week we learned that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hid from Congress a text message by FBI official Peter Strzok declaring that Trump wouldn’t become President:

“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

The highly partisan Strzok became a lead player in Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation of Donald Trump. Also, and still, in the lead is Andrew Weissmann, a senior deputy for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a former chief of the Justice Department criminal Fraud Division.

Now the question is: What was Weissmann saying about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? We will find out.

Our legal team just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit asking the court to compel the Department of Justice to produce “all text messages to or from DOJ official Andrew Weissmann” regarding President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-01356)).

We sued after the DOJ failed to respond to our December 15, 2017, FOIA request for:

  • All text messages sent to or from DOJ official Andrew Weissmann regarding Donald Trump and/or Hillary Clinton between August 8, 2016 and the present.
  • All calendar entries, whether in physical or electronic form, for Weissmann from January 1, 2015 to the present.

We’re not at all surprised that the Justice Department didn’t respond, given its deplorable record of transparency.

Weissmann’s objectivity in Mueller’s investigation was called into question in December 2017 when a separate JW FOIA lawsuit uncovered an email Weissmann wrote praising former acting Attorney General Sally Yates for defying Trump on enforcement of the President’s so-called travel ban.

Weissmann wrote to Obama appointee Yates in the email: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.” President Trump fired Yates over her refusal to defend the policy. Yates was appointed by President Obama and was serving in an acting capacity as Attorney General for President Trump.

Also in December 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Weissmann had been in attendance at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party. According to the Washington Post, Weissman contributed more than $4,000 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2008 and $2,300 to the Clinton campaign in 2007.

Weissmann, described by The New York Times as Mueller’s “pit bull,” is the lead prosecutor in the Mueller team’s case against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Weissmann is demonstrably an anti-Trump/pro-Clinton activist. And it is suspicious that the Justice Department refuses to turn over any Weissmann text messages, especially given the anti-Trump bias documented in the FBI”s Strzok-Page texts.

Judicial Watch Seeks Obama-Era Records on Refugee Resettlement Sites

While the professional Left has successfully diverted everyone’s attention to a manufactured crisis involving illegal alien children on our Southern border, we are investigating other ways people flow into our country.

In particular, we continue to look at the UN-sponsored refugee program that has brought dangerous people across our borders. During the Obama administration, pro-refugee officials in several places gamed this system to disguise their intent.

We have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for records on sites that were considered for the resettlement of refugees in the United States during the last two years of the Obama administration. (Judicial Watch vs. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv-01244))

We sued after the State Department failed to respond to our February 23, 2017, FOIA request for:

  • All records reflecting the locations within the United States that were considered as possible sites for refugee resettlement under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) in 2015 and 2016.
  • All records reflecting the criteria used to determine suitability of locations as refugee resettlement sites in 2015 and 2016.
  • All records reflecting the names of local organizations promoting any of the locations identified above for consideration as refugee resettlement sites.

In October 2016 we made public 128 pages of documents we obtained from the mayor of Rutland, Vermont, showing a concerted effort by the mayor and a number of private organizations to conceal from the public their plans to resettle 100 Syrian refugees into the small southern Vermont town. The mayor and resettlement organizations shrouded the plan in such secrecy that not even the town’s aldermen were informed of what was taking place behind closed doors. The aldermen eventually wrote to the U.S. Department of State protesting the plan and opened an investigation into the mayor’s actions.

The State Department says it currently works with nine nonprofit organizations to resettle refugees. Those nonprofits have about 315 affiliates in 180 communities throughout the U.S.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.S. admitted 84,994 refugees during fiscal year 2016, just short of the 85,000 target set by the Obama administration. The U.S. admitted 16,370 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, 12,587 from Syria, 12,347 from Myanmar, 9,880 from Iraq and 9,020 from Somalia. Pew Research reports that nearly 39,000 Muslim refugees entered the U.S. in fiscal year 2016, the highest number on record, according to analysis of data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

In fiscal year 2015, the U.S. reportedly admitted 70,000 refugees. The Obama administration also proposed admitting 110,000 refugees for fiscal year 2017.

President Donald Trump on January 27, 2017 issued Executive Order 13769, which included a suspension of the USRAP for 120 days. There were 29,022 refugees reportedly admitted to the U.S. in 2017 – the lowest number since 2002.

In a July 2017 report on the refugee applicant screening process and associated fraud risks, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that, “Increases in the number of USRAP applicants approved for resettlement in the United States from countries where terrorists operate have raised questions about the adequacy of applicant screening.”

We are suing to find out which towns across America were, without input and over the objections of residents, targeted for refugee settlements by the Obama administration.

And to make sure the Deep State isn’t up to its usual tricks, we are investigating to make sure now that the current State Department is being more transparent and honest in its placement of refugees.

The Strange Case of McAuliffe & McCabe — Another Clinton/FBI Scandal

You won’t hear from this from the liberal media, but the IG report is chock full of facts and scandal leads that go way beyond Clinton emails and the “get Trump” fever that overtook the FBI leadership. As our own Micah Morrison points out in his latest Investigative Bulletin piece, raises more questions about other players in the Clintons’ orbit:

Every student of American politics knows that Terry McAuliffe is that swampiest of swamp creatures, the cool cat with the big bucks. Al Gore called him “the greatest fundraiser in the history of the universe.” In 1996 alone, as national finance chairman of the Clinton-Gore re-election team, McAuliffe raised $50 million, but plunged the Democratic Party into a sweeping campaign-finance scandal involving the sale of sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom, coffee klatches at the White House, a vast cast of sketchy characters and rivers of money. The Clintons loved the ebullient money man and he loved them back. By 1999, McAuliffe claimed to have raised nearly $275 million for the Arkansas couple—and that’s before he joined forces with the Clinton’s 21st century money machine, the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. In 2000, he was named chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In 2008, he chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In 2013, with enthusiastic support from the Clintons, he ran for governor of Virginia and won.

By 2015, Governor McAuliffe already was “shaping a significant role for himself” in Mrs. Clinton’s second try at the presidency, Politico reported. A “consummate political animal, [McAuliffe] just can’t keep his fingers away from the flame. Despite the daily demands of running the state…he’s emerging as Hillary’s informal liaison to governors and the party’s biggest donors, while also keeping a finger on the pulse of the camp’s central operations in Brooklyn.”

By contrast, even today, in the wake of hundreds of media stories and last week’s Office of Inspector General report on alleged wrongdoing in the 2016 election, few people will recognize the name Andrew McCabe. He’s a swamp inhabitant too, though many would put him on the right side of the swamp, on dry land, chasing the bad guys. Except that’s not quite how it turned out.

Many of the McCabe details in the OIG report will come as no surprise to Judicial Watch followers. We’ve been uncovering facts about the McCabe affair for over a year. Read about our efforts here, here, and here.

A useful timeline in the OIG report sketches the McCabe-McAuliffe saga—a swamp tale of a particular sort. In 2014, McCabe, a rising star at the FBI, is assistant director of the bureau’s Washington, DC, field office. His wife is a pediatrician in Virginia. Terry McAuliffe is governor.

In February 2015, Dr. McCabe receives a phone call from Virginia’s lieutenant governor. Would she consider running for a state senate seat?

Less than two weeks later, in March 2015, McCabe and his wife drive to Richmond for what they thought was a meeting with a Virginia state senator to discuss Dr. McCabe’s possible run for office.
In Richmond, according to the OIG report, they are told there had been “a change of plans” and that “Governor McAuliffe wanted to speak to Dr. McCabe at the Governor’s mansion.”

It’s around this time that a veteran FBI agent’s radar might start blinking.

McCabe and his wife meet with McAuliffe for 30 to 45 minutes, according to the OIG report. Fundraising was discussed. “Governor McAuliffe said that he and the Democratic Party would support Dr. McCabe’s candidacy.” McAuliffe asked McCabe about his occupation and “McCabe told him he worked for the FBI but they did not discuss McCabe’s work or any FBI business.” McCabe later described it to an FBI official as a “surreal meeting.”

After the meeting, the couple rode to a local event with the governor, then returned to the mansion with the governor to retrieve their car.

McCabe informed FBI ethics officials and lawyers about the meeting and consulted with them about his wife’s plans. No one raised strong objections. McCabe recused himself from all public corruption cases in Virginia and Dr. McCabe jumped into the race.

In July 2015, the FBI opened an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices.

Let’s pause to note here that while the official FBI investigation was opened in July 2015, Mrs. Clinton was known to be in hot water as far back as March 2015, when the State Department inspector general revealed her widespread use of a private, non-government email server.

Swamp cats will notice that March 2015 is also when Andrew and Jill McCabe got their surprise audience with McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton money man.

The McCabe fortunes rose in the autumn of 2015. Mr. McCabe was promoted to associate deputy director of the FBI. Dr. McCabe received $675,000 from two McAuliffe-connected entities for her state senate race. They were by far the biggest donations to her campaign.

In November 2015, Dr. McCabe lost her race.

In January 2016, the FBI opened an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

On February 1, Mr. McCabe was promoted again, to deputy director of the FBI.

Despite the McAuliffe connection, the OIG report notes, there was no FBI re-evaluation of McCabe’s recusals following his promotions. Although recused from Virginia public corruption investigations, he retained a senior role in Clinton-related matters.

In May 2016, news broke that McAuliffe was under FBI investigation for campaign finance violations. CNN reported that investigators were scrutinizing “McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative” and Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang, a U.S. permanent resident who made large donations to both the McAuliffe 2013 gubernatorial campaign and to the Clinton Foundation.

On October 23, the Wall Street Journal revealed the McAuliffe-linked donations to Dr. McCabe’s campaign. At FBI headquarters, McCabe resists pressure from senior executives to recuse himself from all Clinton-related matters.

Finally, on November 1—a week before the presidential election — McCabe recused from the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation investigations.

Following James Comey’s dismissal in May 2017, McCabe was briefly acting director of the FBI—the most powerful law enforcement position in the land. Following the appointment of Chris Wray as director, McCabe returned to the deputy director position and, as controversy engulfed him and the FBI, he went on paid leave. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him in March, 2018. The Justice Department inspector general has referred a possible criminal case against McCabe to federal prosecutors for lying to internal investigators in an earlier probe of the Wall Street Journal story and leaks.

One of the strangest claims in the OIG report is that the senior leadership of the FBI was not aware of — or perhaps simply did not care about — McAuliffe’s long history with the Clintons. “We were troubled,” the OIG report notes, “by the fact that the FBI ethics officials and attorneys did not fully appreciate the potential significant implications to McCabe and the FBI from campaign contributions to Dr. McCabe’s campaign and did not implement any review of those campaign donations. Thus, while the same factual circumstances that led to McCabe’s recusal on November 1, 2016, were present at the time McCabe became deputy director on February 1, 2016, the FBI ethics officials, McCabe, and Comey only learned of them as a result of the October 23 WSJ article.”

It seems likely now that the McCabe chapter of the larger battle in Washington will end with a whimper, not a bang. The beasts—investigative, media, political—move on. But what are we to make of Terry McAuliffe’s role in the episode?

Swamp aficionados will note the sudden “change of plans” that elevated the trip to Richmond from a meeting with a low-level political operative to an encounter with the governor. McAuliffe is charming and charismatic. Money is (vaguely) discussed, and oh by the way, McAuliffe asks McCabe, what is your occupation?

Now, Terry McAuliffe’s connections are legendary. His devotion to the Clinton ambitions is unswerving. He knows everybody, particularly anybody who has any business with the Clintons (remember, the email controversy is about to metastasize) and certainly he knew that Andrew McCabe worked for the FBI before he asked that question. But now McCabe knows that the governor knows. Next, money—a lot of it—flows to Dr. McCabe’s campaign.

Things might have turned out differently, after all. Jill McCabe might have been in the state senate. Hillary Clinton might have been in the White House. And Andrew McCabe was in line to be the next director of the FBI. Some of the best swamp plays are not about greed but ambition.

The Humanitarian Hoax of Illegal Immigrant Family Separation at the U.S. Border

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The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Children are the future of every nation and culture on earth which makes them the most valuable natural resource in the world. Water, air, land, coal, natural gas, phosphorus, oil, minerals, iron, soil, forests and timber are all subjects of worldwide conservation efforts. What about the children?

Wars are fought over natural resources in competition for power and dominance. So it is with the children. The leftist exploitation of illegal immigrant children is a political dirty trick being played for the hearts and minds of the compassionate American electorate. This is how it works.

President Trump’s America-first policies are demonstrably positive for America and threaten the narrative of Obama’s leftist collectivist destruction. President Trump’s insistence on our national sovereignty is an existential threat to Obama’s battle for internationalized globalism. Obama’s promise to transform America has been exposed as a promise to destroy America from within and replace our infrastructure with socialism in preparation for the mother of all collectivism – planetary governance.

The left is exploiting ILLEGAL immigrant children in a desperate attempt to delegitimize President Trump before the midterm elections. A midterm victory is necessary for leftist Democrats to start impeachment proceedings against the President. Tear-jerking appeals for reunification of ILLEGAL immigrant families are completely disingenuous. They are pure political theater – a humanitarian hoax designed to engage compassionate voters and insure a midterm election victory because:

  • Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion fell apart and only served to expose serious malfeasance of Obama’s FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department.
  • sensationalized news is a weapon designed to stigmatize Trump and offset his stunning economic victories before the midterm elections
  • reunification of families deflect attention away from the damning 6.14.18 IG report recommending more investigations into FBI improprieties during the Clinton email scandal which will ultimately expose Obama’s participation.

The colluding leftist mainstream media deliberately refuses to include the essential word ILLEGAL into its reports. There would be no issue of separated families if the families came to the United States LEGALLY! President Trump is in favor of LEGAL immigration and leftist attempts to deny that reality and present POTUS as anti-immigration are typical of the deceit that has come to characterize the leftist Democrats under Obama.

In a stunning 6.22.18 article Carolyn Glick exposes the deceitfulness of the media outcry over US government policy of separating illegal immigrant minors from their illegal parents:

  • “The policy is cruel. Indeed, recognizing its cruelty, Trump signed an executive order banning the practice.
  • But the policy isn’t new. This was the Obama administration’s policy following a court order prohibiting children from joining their parents in detention.
  • Rather than soberly acknowledge that law enforcement, including immigration law is often a cruel business and recognize that to remain a state of laws sometimes authorities undertake difficult and harsh actions, the anti-Trump media ignored reality and went straight for the kill. David Remnick, Frank Bruni and countless others didn’t care that the Obama administration separated children from their parents, placed them in cages and wrapped them in aluminum foil. As far as they are concerned, the continuation of the same cruel policy under Trump is proof that Trump is a Nazi.
  • Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and the CIA posted a photo of the entrance to Auschwitz on his Twitter feed with a caption ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children.’”

Hans von Spakovsky identifies more media deceit in his 6.21.18 article “Who’s Responsible for Separating Alien Kids From Their Parents? Many People, but Not Trump.” These are two particularly instructive quotes absolving President Trump of wrongdoing:

  • “In other words, it is the 9th Circuit’s misinterpretation of the Clinton administration’s settlement agreement that doesn’t allow juvenile aliens to stay with their parents who have been detained for unlawful entry into the country.”
  • “The Obama administration provided a huge incentive for illegal aliens to smuggle children across the border, since a child acted as a get-out-of-jail-free card for avoiding detention and prosecution for the adult accompanying the child. As the Department of Homeland Security correctly says, this policy ‘incited smugglers to place children into the hands of adult strangers so they can pose as families and be released from immigration custody after crossing the border, creating another safety issue for these children.’”

War makes strange bedfellows and the current culture war on America lead by Obama’s anti-American “resistance” movement has allies in its attempt to delegitimize and overthrow President Donald Trump. The economy is booming under President Trump. Unemployment for black Americans is the lowest in history. Optimism of small businesses is skyrocketing. Negotiations over fair trade are in America’s favor. President Trump is making America great again and the leftist Democrat predators in collusion with the mainstream media including Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Twitter are desperate to stop him from winning the 2018 midterm elections.

It is abusive for illegal immigrant parents to subject their children to separation at the US borders and equally abusive for leftist political predators to support the practice in a vile attempt to swing the midterm elections. It is time for the leftist/media/Internet alliance to stop abusing and exploiting the children they are entrusted to protect. Photographs of crying children tug at American hearts BUT the photographs are fraudulent and are pure political theater – it is a seismic humanitarian hoax!

Americans must understand the malfeasance, purpose, and value of politicizing illegal immigrant children at the border. Leftist child abuse and exploitation is the sinister leftist humanitarian hoax that misrepresents the facts of illegal immigrant family separation begun under Clinton, continued under Obama, and blamed on President Trump in a deceitful campaign to delegitimize POTUS before the midterm elections.

The mainstream media and Internet behemoths are deliberately colluding to misrepresent Clinton and Obama’s abusive family separation policies as belonging to President Trump. Americans believe in fairness. They do not appreciate being manipulated by the colluding mainstream and Internet media into believing leftist political propaganda masquerading as truth. If the humanitarian hoax of illegal immigrant family separation at the border is successful then leftist Democrats will have duped America into blaming President Trump for the abusive policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Support Trump’s Position on Immigration Compared to Obama’s Catch-and-Release Policy

Don’t Ignore the Grave Danger Unaccompanied Illegal Alien Children Face, Idaho Lawmaker Says

In 2015, Judge Demanded Obama Release Children, Mothers Detained in ‘Deplorable Conditions’

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Goudsmit Pundicity.

Here’s How Trump Wants to Streamline Government

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The Trump administration proposes to reform and reorganize government by streamlining food regulation, merging two Cabinet departments, and consolidating housing programs.

Combining the Education and Labor departments is among 32 proposals in a plan released Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget in response to a charge President Donald Trump issued 14 months ago.

“We wanted to change the dialogue in Washington, to say it’s not acceptable to have things that just don’t make sense,” Margaret Weichert, OMB’s deputy director for management, told The Daily Signal.

Weichert did not provide an estimate of savings, but said it would be clear in the administration’s next budget proposal.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, lauded the report’s recommendations Thursday during a Cabinet meeting convened by the president.

The OMB’s 132-page plan also would merge the food component of the Food and Drug Administration, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, into a Department of Agriculture entity to be known as the Food Safety Agency.

The report notes that the USDA regulates chicken, but the FDA oversees eggs—if the eggs are in shells. If the eggs are processed and in a carton for pouring, then it’s the USDA’s job.

What’s more, the FDA regulates cheese pizza but the USDA regulates pepperoni pizza.

“Our favorite one is an open-face roast beef sandwich is regulated by the Department of Agriculture,” Weichert said. “If you stick a layer of bread on top of it, and you add new bureaucracy, it switches to FDA. That just doesn’t make sense.”

Since the Labor Department and the Education Department both are responsible for learning and skills for Americans, the Trump administration wants to create a single Department of Education and the Workforce.

The merger, if approved by Congress, would put the United States in line with most other developed nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Weichert said.

“When it comes to education and labor, most OECD countries managed education and labor missions in an integrated fashion. It’s actually part of the kind of competitive advantage dialogue that you can see in Europe and China,” Weichert told The Daily Signal, adding:

Lifetime learning and whatever form of education is needed to both drive the needs of society broadly, but also to drive the economy, is integrated. The House committee itself that has jurisdiction over these two agencies is a single committee.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, called the proposed change a long overdue recognition of the connection between the two missions.

“We welcome the administration’s focus on education and workforce issues together, and as we continue our oversight over the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, we look forward to working with the administration on the proposal and how the new department could function to best serve American students, workers, job creators, and families,” Foxx said in a public statement.

The merger idea already is getting pushback, though, including from unions.

“The proposed merger of the departments of Labor and Education is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to weaken programs that serve and protect working families and to concentrate even more power in the hands of large corporations,” Chris Shelton, president of the Communication Workers of America, said in a formal statement.

In general, the OMB report calls for combining the functions of several departments and agencies and largely eliminating duplication.

Between a quarter and a third of the recommendations may be done through executive action, but the bulk of them would require congressional action, Weichert said.

In April 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13781, which directed the Office of Management and Budget to propose a plan that would reorganize governmental functions to limit duplication.

The resulting plan contains solid ideas, said Paul Winfree, who was director of budget policy at the White House when Trump asked for the reorganization plan. Winfree since has returned to his position as director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“The Heritage research team started thinking through a reorganization proposal more than three years ago,” Winfree said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal. “Early in the administration, I drafted the executive order that established the plan for assembling the proposal, which the president signed.”

“OMB worked closely with the Heritage team,” Winfree said, “and it’s obvious from reading the administration’s proposal that everyone is moving in the same direction.”

The federal government spends about $250 million a year for education programs on financial literacy across more than 20 agencies. The report recommends consolidating programs to save time and taxpayer resources.

The plan also calls for moving programs providing rural housing loan guarantees and rental assistance out of the Agriculture Department and into the Department of Housing and Urban Development, locating all federal housing programs in a single Cabinet department.

“To be sure, there’s going to be a lot of good public-sector drama around some of these proposals,” Weichert said, adding:

But I hope underneath all of that, we can find a spirit of willingness to actually do the right thing for the American people. Frankly, all of us know we need to do something. That’s why this president was elected. That’s why the American people wanted a businessman to come to Washington, was the fact that so much business as usual in Washington doesn’t make sense.

Past presidents, going back decades, have tried to reorganize and reform government but haven’t reached the desired effect, said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan research group.

“No one can reasonably dispute that our government needs reform, but structural reorganizations are rarely the most effective way to improve service to our citizens,” Stier said in a public statement.

The OMB report notes that President Warren Harding created the Bureau of the Budget in 1921 in one of the earlier reorganization attempts of the 20th century.

President Jimmy Carter carried out a personnel reform agenda that was fully implemented under President Ronald Reagan. And Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all pushed efforts to reduce duplication and increase public-private sector cooperation.

“For the administration’s reorganization plans to succeed, the president and members of his administration must articulate a government-wide vision for reform, the rationale for each proposal, and how the administration will implement changes and measure progress,” Stier said. “The White House also must get congressional buy-in and bipartisan support, make substantial, upfront investments, and plan for sustained attention over many years.”

Still, Weichert contends now is a time for action.

“Our system was designed after World War II, addressing legacy problems that in many cases are not problems today, and, we are 20 years into the 21st century, fundamentally. We have no time to waste,” she said.

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney presenting proposals to consolidate the work of executive agencies during a meeting Thursday of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom)

Trump Administration Opens Office to Find Naturalization Fraudsters

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On June 11, 2018 the Washington Times published an article, U.S. launching office to identify citizenship cheaters, reporting that the Trump administration is opening an office to identify aliens who defrauded the naturalization process by concealing material facts in filing for U.S. citizenship and seek their denaturalization.

This is an important measure and one that enhances the enforcement of immigration laws from within the interior of the United States that will plug yet another gap in the highly porous immigration system.

This, as you will see, also has serious implication for national security.

However, generally most aliens who commit naturalization fraud also committed fraud in their applications for various immigration benefits that subsequently enabled the to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Because of the huge number of applications for various immigration benefits, more than six million applications for various benefits are processed each year by the beleaguered adjudication officers employed by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), many applications are adjudicated without so much as an in-person interview, let alone a field investigation conducted to verify the information contained in the applications.

This creates an invitation for fraud on a massive scale.

The Wasington Times article draws the parallel with this new effort to uncover aliens who lie on application for U.S. citizenship to previous efforts to identify Nazi war criminals who also gamed the naturalization process in order to secure U.S. citizenship to evade prosecution for their heinous crimes against humanity.

Naturalization fraud is of particular concern because U.S. citizenship provide the aliens with the veritable “Keys to the kingdom” as I have described in a series of previous articles and in my testimony before several Congressional hearings.

Here are a few reasons why citizenship is of particular concern and how some of the vulnerabilities must be addressed.

As the Washington Times article noted, aliens who acquire U.S. citizenship may be granted security clearances.  I recently wrote an article about an April 2018 Congressional hearing on how Iranian Sleeper Cells Threaten U.S.

Immigration fraud, including naturalization fraud, enables sleeper agents from foreign countries to embed themselves in the United States in furtherance of their nefarious and often deadly goals.

Additionally, aliens who naturalize may legally change their names.  In such instances, their U.S. passports only reflect their new names.

Criminals and terrorists can thus put themselves into their own “Witness Protection Program” concealing their original identities and gaining entry into countries around the world that might be aware of their original names and would never admit them if they knew who they really were.

However, when such an individual seeks entry with a new name, a name not known to border officials in that country it is likely that he/she will be permitted to enter that country.

The solution to this problem is simple and inexpensive-  have U.S. passports reflect both names.

I raised this issue when I appeared at a Congressional hearing but no action was taken.

This is further exacerbated because many of these naturalized citizens have dual citizenship, they retain the citizenship and passports of their countries of birth.

Dual citizen terrorists and fugitives who defraud the naturalization process can travel easily around the world by using their U.S. passport to travel to an intermediate foreign country, let’s say Germany.  They then conceal their U.S. passport and travel on the passport issued to them by their county of birth to travel to another country, perhaps to engage in terror-related activities. They return to Germany.  In Germany they conceal the passport from their country of birth and return to the United States on their U.S. passport.

A review of entry stamps in their U.S. passport will make it appear that they spent several weeks in Germany when, in reality, Germany was just an intermediate destination on their way to other countries.

Alternating passports covers their tracks the way a smuggler drags branches behind him to cover his tracks in the sand in the desert.

The Trump administration must finally require that the U.S. passports issued to naturalized citizens reflects all names that these individuals have used, to thwart the tactic I have described above.

While it is encouraging that for the first time in decades we have an administration that is determined to not only secure our borders against illegal immigration but restore integrity to the immigration system to protect America and Americans.

The administration would do well to do more than simply attempt to identify aliens who secured U.S. citizenship via fraud.  Denaturalization may be an involved process.  It would be far better to uncover fraud in applications for immigration benefits that precede U.S. citizenship.

In order to qualify for citizenship, an alien must first become a lawful immigrant.  In order to become a lawful immigrant an alien may have been granted political asylum or married a U.S. citizen or lawful immigrant.

Consider this except from the official report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

My recently published booklet, Immigration Fraud:  Lies That Kill also focused on the threat posed to national security by various forms of immigration fraud, including but not limited to naturalization fraud.

Let’s consider a few specific examples of terror suspects who engaged in immigration fraud.

The infamous Tsarnaev brothers Dzhokhar and his older brother Tamerlan carried out the deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.  They and other members of their family were granted political asylum when their authorized temporary period of admission into the United States expired, and they claimed to have “credible fear” that if they were to return to their native Russia, they would face persecution or worse.

Shortly after being granted political asylum in the United States, members of the family voluntarily returned to Russia.  There had been no regime change and therefore, it must logically be presumed that they committed immigration fraud by making a false claim to “credible fear” upon which their application for political asylum rested.

However, no such investigation was launched into this obvious fraud.

Members of the Tsarnaev family were subsequently granted lawful immigrant status making them eligible to apply for United States citizenship.

Tamarlan was killed during the terror attack.  Although he had applied for U.S. citizenship his application was held up when information was provided by the Russian government linking him possibly to Chechen terrorists.

Dzhokhar, however became a naturalized citizen.  He is now on death row awaiting execution.

On January 23, 2018 the Justice Department issued a press release, Ohio Man Sentenced for Providing Material Support to Terrorists, Making False Statements to Authorities.

That “Ohio man” was Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a native of Somalia who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen as part of his strategy to facilitate his travel to Syria.

I wrote about this case in two previous articles, A Terrorist and Naturalization Fraud and How DHS Ineptitude Facilitates Terrorist Operations. As I noted in the first of those two commentaries, Mohamud committed fraud when he lied on his application for his U.S. passport by claiming he intended to travel to Greece when, in reality, he traveled to Syria.

Finally, on January 16, 2018 the DOJ and DHS jointly issued a press release, DOJ, DHS Report: Three Out of Four Individuals Convicted of International Terrorism and Terrorism-Related Offenses were Foreign-Born.

That press release noted that:

The report reveals that at least 549 individuals were convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. federal courts between September 11, 2001, and December 31, 2016.  An analysis conducted by DHS determined that approximately 73 percent (402 of these 549 individuals) were foreign-born.  Breaking down the 549 individuals by citizenship status at the time of their respective convictions reveals that:

  • 254 were not U.S. citizens;
  • 148 were foreign-born, naturalized and received U.S. citizenship; and,
  • 147 were U.S. citizens by birth.

According to information available to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), since September 11, 2001, there were approximately 1,716 removals of aliens with national security concerns.

Clearly the Trump administration is on the right path, but more and bigger steps need to follow and follow quickly.

Nothing less than national security is at stake.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

Supreme Court Upholds Ohio Voter Purge Law

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A five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s voter purge system, finding the process by which the state removes inactive voters from the rolls does not violate federal law.

Although critics of Ohio’s practice charge the state’s true purpose is the removal of left-leaning voters from the registry, the high court found the process is consistent with federal law.

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“Today’s decision is a victory for election integrity, and a defeat for those who use the federal court system to make election law across the country,” Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said. “This decision is validation of Ohio’s efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now with the blessing nation’s highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to use.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Stephen Breyer led the liberal bloc in dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

Ohio’s maintenance process is fairly straightforward. Voters who do not cast a ballot during a full federal election cycle (which runs two years) are sent a mailer confirming they are still residents of Ohio who wish to remain registered voters. If the mailer is not returned, and if the individual does not vote for the next four years, they are removed from state rolls.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act requires all states to adopt policies providing for the removal of ineligible voters from state rolls. In his opinion for the court, Alito claimed 24 million voter registrations are currently “invalid or significantly inaccurate,” according to a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States. However, the National Voter Registration Act forbids removal “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.”

Civil rights and good government groups challenged the Ohio procedure, arguing it targets and prunes voters on the basis of their inactivity. Nonvoting, the challengers point out, is used twice by the state’s process: once as the trigger for the mailer, and again as a condition for final removal. But Alito explained that the National Voter Registration Act only prohibits the use of nonvoting as the sole cause for deregistration.

“We reject this argument because the Failure-to-Vote Clause, as originally enacted in the NVRA … simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant, and Ohio does not use it that way,” he wrote.

Sotomayor wrote her own dissent connecting Ohio’s procedure to “concerted state efforts to prevent minorities from voting and to undermine the efficacy of their votes,” which the National Voter Registration Act sought to curtail. Progressive organizers hit a similar tenor speaking after the ruling.

“Countless voters, including homeless and housing-insecure Ohioans, have already been stripped of their rights as a result of Ohio’s unjust and illogical purge process,” said Chris Knestrick, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. “By green-lighting Ohio’s purge process, the court allowed states to shut out the voices of these voters.”

Defenders of the process say it ensures the states maintain accurate voter rolls, which are not often updated to reflect forms of attrition like death or relocation. Opponents charge it is yet another iteration of GOP voter-suppression tactics, particularly because nonvoting is a poor proxy change in residence.

The civil rights groups challenging Ohio’s policy seized on this point, citing another provision of the National Voter Registration Act that permits states to use U.S. Postal Service data when sending confirmation mailers of the sort Ohio uses. This, the plaintiffs said, indicates that states may only use data points with a high degree of correlation to relocation as a trigger for the mailer, like USPS information or tax records.

But Alito rejected that arguments as well, stressing that their role was not to scrutinize the good faith policy judgements of Ohio’s state Legislature.

“What matters for present purposes is not whether the Ohio legislature overestimated the correlation between nonvoting and moving or whether it reached a wise policy judgment about when return cards should be sent,” he wrote. “For us, all that matters is that no provision of the NVRA prohibits the legislature from implementing that judgment.”

Some 30 states filed amicus (or “friend of the court”) briefs in the dispute. A coalition of 12 Democratic states filed a brief arguing Ohio’s practices were unlawful, while 17 Republican states urged the high court to uphold them.

COLUMN BY

Kevin Daley

Kevin Daley is a legal affairs reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @kevindaleydc.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Supreme Court Gives States the Green Light to Clean Up Voter Rolls

Judicial Watch Statement on Supreme Court Decision Upholding Ohio Efforts to Maintain Clean Voter Rolls

EDITORS NOTE: Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

What We Can Learn About Welfare Reform from Europe

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Daniel J. Mitchell Some European countries have made big changes to their welfare systems that are getting more people back to work.

by Daniel J. Mitchell

America has a major dependency problem. In recent decades, there’s been a significant increase in the number of working-age adults relying on handouts.

This is bad news for poor people and bad news for taxpayers. But it’s also bad news for the nation since it reflects an erosion of societal capital.

For all intents and purposes, people are being paid not to be productive.

Guided by the spirit of Calvin Coolidge, we need to reform the welfare state.

Professor Dorfman of the University of Georgia, in a column for Forbes, pinpoints the core problem.

The first failure of government welfare programs is to favor help with current consumption while placing almost no emphasis on job training or anything else that might allow today’s poor people to become self-sufficient in the future. …It is the classic story of giving a man a fish or teaching him how to fish. Government welfare programs hand out lots of fish, but never seem to teach people how to fish for themselves. The problem is not a lack of job training programs, but rather the fact that the job training programs fail to help people. In a study for ProPublica, Amy Goldstein documents that people who lost their jobs and participated in a federal job training program were less likely to be employed afterward than those who lost their jobs and did not receive any job training. That is, the job training made people worse off instead of better. …Right now, the government cannot teach anyone how to find a fish, let alone catch one.

And Peter Cove opines on the issue for the Wall Street Journal.

…the labor-force participation rate for men 25 to 54 is lower now than it was at the end of the Great Depression. The welfare state is largely to blame. More than a fifth of American men of prime working age are on Medicaid. According to the Census Bureau, nearly three-fifths of nonworking men receive federal disability benefits. The good news is that the 1996 welfare reform taught us how to reduce government dependency and get idle Americans back to work. …Within 10 years of the 1996 reform, the number of Americans in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program fell 60%.

Interestingly, European nations seem to be more interested in fixing the problem, perhaps because they’ve reached the point where reform is a fiscal necessity.

Let’s look at what happened when the Dutch tightened benefit rules.

A fascinating new study from economists in California and the Netherlands sheds light on how welfare dependency is passed from one generation to the next—and how to save children from lives of idleness.

A snowball effect across generations could arise if welfare dependency is transmitted from parents to their children, with potentially serious consequences for the future economic situation of children. …there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Testing for the existence of a behavioural response, where children become benefit recipients because their parents were, is difficult… Our work overcomes these identification challenges by exploiting a 1993 reform in the Dutch Disability Insurance (DI) programme… The 1993 reform tightened DI eligibility for existing and future claimants, but exempted older cohorts currently on DI (age 45+) from the new rules. This reform generates quasi-experimental variation in DI use… Intuitively, the idea is to compare the children of parents who are just over 45 years of age to children whose parents are just under 45. .

Here’s the methodology of their research.

The first step is to understand the impact of the 1993 reform on parents. Figure 1 shows that parents who were just under the age 45 cut-off, and therefore subject to the harsher DI rules, are 5.5 percentage points more likely to exit DI by the year 1999 compared to parents just over the age 45 cut-off. These treated parents saw a 1,300 euro drop in payments on average. …the reform changed other outcomes as well. There is a strong rebound in labour earnings.

This chart from their research captures the discontinuity.

Here are the main results.

The second step is to see how children’s DI use changed based on whether the reform affected their parents. We measure a child’s cumulative use of DI as of 2014, by which time they are 37 years old on average. Figure 2 reveals a noticeable jump in child DI participation at the parental age cut-off of 45. There is an economically significant 1.1 percentage point drop for children if their parent was exposed to the reform, which translates into an 11% effect relative to the mean child participation rate of 10%. …welfare cultures, defined as a causal intergenerational link, exist.

This second chart illustrates the positive impact.

But here’s the most important part of the research.

Reducing access to redistribution to parents is a good way of boosting income and education for children.

…we examine whether a child’s taxable earnings and participation in other social support programmes change. Cumulative earnings up to 2014 rise by approximately €7,200 euros, or a little less than 2%, for children of parents subject to the less generous DI rules. In contrast, we find no detectable change in cumulative unemployment insurance receipt, general assistance (i.e. traditional cash welfare), or other miscellaneous safety net programs. Looking at a child’s educational attainment, there is intriguing evidence for anticipatory investments. When a parent is subject to the reform which tightened DI benefits, their child invests in 0.12 extra years of education relative to an overall mean of 11.5 years. …these findings provide suggestive evidence that children of treated parents plan for a future with less reliance on DI in part by investing in their labour market skills.

And it’s also worth noting that taxpayers benefit when welfare eligibility is restricted.

These strong intergenerational links between parents and children have sizable fiscal consequences for the government’s long term budget. Cumulative DI payments to children of the targeted parents are 16% lower. This is a substantial additional saving for the government’s budget, especially since there is no evidence that children substitute these reductions in DI income for additional income from other social assistance programmes. Furthermore, there is a fiscal gain resulting from the increased taxes these children pay due to their increased labour market earnings. Overall, we calculate that through the year 2013, children account for 21% of the net fiscal savings of the 1993 Dutch reform in present discounted value terms. This share is projected to increase to 40% over time.

Ryan Streeter of American Enterprise Institute explains that other European nations also are reforming.

Welfare reformers might draw some lessons from unlikely places, such as Scandinavia. While progressives like to uphold Nordic democratic socialism as a model for America, the Scandinavian welfare systems are arguably more pro-work than ours… For instance, to deal with declining labor force participation, Denmark eliminated permanent disability benefits for people under 40 and refashioned its system to make employment central. Sweden reformed its welfare system to focus on rapid transitions from unemployment to work. Their program lowers jobless assistance the longer one is on welfare. The Nordic model is more focused on eliminating reasons not to work such as caregiving or lack of proper training than providing income replacement. Similarly, the British government combined six welfare programs with varying requirements into a single “universal credit.” The benefit is based on a sliding scale and decreases as a recipient’s earnings increase, replacing several differing formulas for phasing out of welfare programs with one. An evaluation of the new program, which encourages work, found that 86 percent of claimants were trying to increase their work hours and 77 percent were trying to earn more, compared to 38 percent and 55 percent, respectively, under the previous system. …Scandinavia and Britain learned a while ago that successful welfare reform is not just about how much money a country spends on people who earn too little. It’s really about how to help them find and keep a good job. It’s time for America to catch up.

Amen.

For what it’s worth, I think we’ll be most likely to get good results if we get Washington out of the redistribution business.

In effect, block grant all means-tested programs to the states and then phase out the federal funding. That would give states the ability to experiment and they could learn from each other about the best way of helping the truly needy while minimizing incentives for idleness.

P.S. This Wizard-of-Id parody is a very good explanation of why handouts discourage productive work.

Reprinted from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

The Unreported Story Of America’s Booming Small Businesses

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The untold story — the story the media refuses to tell — is that American small businesses are just banging it under the tax reform package the GOP Congress passed, every Democrat voted against, and Trump signed into law.

American economic strength as measured by unemployment, employment growth, GDP growth and other common measures is perhaps as hot as it has ever been. Even without knowing the exact numbers, Americans recognize this reality and that explains part of the reason President Trump’s approval ratings continue to rise and the generic Congressional ballot continues to narrow.

At the same time, and acting in tandem, small business confidence has hit an all-time high. This matters because businesses make investment, expansion and hiring decisions based on their confidence in the economy going forward, all of which suggests that the economic growth we are seeing has real, lasting legs — barring an unforeseen catastrophic event.

Small businesses are the heart and soul of the American economy. They always have been, and they always will be if the American economy is to retain is global leadership and strength. Apple, Google, Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft, General Motors, may be great companies. But huge companies are not what built and sustain the American economy. Small businesses that blanket every community are that.

And the Trump GOP tax cuts, along with ongoing deregulation, are playing a major role infusing them.

John Horne is a small businessman on the Gulf Coast of Florida and his story is exemplar of hundreds of thousands of small businesses. He owns four restaurants in Manatee County, just south of Tampa, and employs 333 people — 300 of whom are hourly employees with an annual payroll of $2.5 million; 33 are managers who earned $1.5 million in salary and bonuses in the past year.

He recently wrote in SRQ magazine how the tax cuts are affecting his business.

“I met with my CPA after tax season this year when he brought me my returns. What he explained to me was one of the parts of the new Tax Cut and Jobs Act where I get a 20 percent Business Income Deduction this year. He showed me what my taxes were in ’17 and if the new code were in effect what they would have been. I’ve already planned 2018, plugging my adjusted gross income for this year with the 20-percent deduction. We’ve been very consistent in our stores over the last 10 years as far as bottom lines go.”

Like most small businesses — and unlike the caricature created by Democrats and the media — Horne saw a great opportunity arising from the 20-percent reduction that the Trump GOP tax cuts gave him. He is taking that money and reinvesting most of it in his company and people, just like most American small businesses will:

“There are so many options, one I’ve already taken. Back in April after I met with my accountant, I bonused $60,000 to some of my staff. I purchased two new two-sided LED signs at $20,000 each for two of my locations to attract new customers. I heard my accountant say we’d probably realize $100,000 in savings/benefits from the new plan.”

Horne is in the restaurant business, which too many people deride is minimum wage. But that’s not really true. Of his 300 hourly staff members, no one is paid minimum wage; 113 earn $10 and $12.50 per hour; 39 earn between $12.50 and $15; 40 between $15 and $20; and 64 over $20. And about 47 percent of the hourly staff earn more than $15 dollars per hour.

Expect those wages to move up. The suddenly strong economy undergirded by the tax cuts and deregulation is now driving wage growth at small businesses. “The low unemployment rate is contributing to steady increases in wage growth,” according to Martin Mucci, president and CEO of Paychex. That means Horne and everyone else will have to pay more to keep and get employees.

Further, the CBO now reports that the tax cuts may pay for themselves, eliminating the “scary” $1.5 trillion deficit issue. That’s because of the economic growth roaring through the economy based on thousands of reinvestment decisions such as Horne’s.

Last June, the CBO said GDP growth for 2018 would be just 2 percent. Now it estimates growth will be a robust 3.3% — a significant boost. It also cranked up its forecast for 2019 from a paltry 1.5 percent to 2.4 percent. The CBO now expects GDP to be $6.1 trillion bigger by 2027 than it did before the tax cuts.

All of those trillions in GDP will be taxed and that will go a long way toward erasing the deficit — unless Congress continues to spend like drunken sailors, which unfortunately is a safe bet.

Horne’s small business is a down-to-earth illustration of this, also. In the last 12 months, FICA payments at his four stores were $552,544. Matched with the employees’ payments, that means his small business contributed more than $1.1 million in taxes just to support Social Security.

All of this is the undeniable reality of lifting high tax and regulatory burdens off small businesses. When the weight of government on the backs of small businesses is lessened, those businesses take off.

Unfortunately, that is a story most Americans are not being told.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

Government Is the Greatest Purveyor of Inequality

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Thomas J. Eckert The government itself is inequality.

by Thomas J. Eckert

With June being celebrated as Gay Pride month, every year around this time we seem to experience an increase in conversations and media attention regarding the fight against inequality. Across the country, massive celebrations are held, often meant to highlight the differences human beings can have with one another while maintaining a peaceful coexistence, as equals. And while I applaud this mindset of peace and tolerance towards others, there is a growing miscalculation in this fight against inequality.

The Largest Purveyor of Inequality

More and more people have begun to buy into the notion that the current societal problems ailing us are a direct consequence of inequality. Now, whether you believe this to be the case, these problems, we’re told, “require” the all-too-eager hand of government to resolve. But, as we’ll see, if fighting inequality is your goal, applying a bit of an objective lens to your campaign will uncover that government, as it turns out, is the largest purveyor of inequality that has ever existed; and fighting inequality means fighting government.

Let’s start by highlighting the fact that government itself is inequality, in that it falsely grants some individuals the authority to rule over others, essentially creating two classes of individuals; rulers and the ruled. For obvious reasons, they have tried to blur these lines over time by creating alternative forms of governance like democracy, whereby they repeat nonsensical idioms like “we’re all the government” until the ruled class begins to believe it.

To prove this isn’t true, you could simply walk up to your local police officer and proceed to order them around by telling them you’re the government or try walking into your state representative’s office and tell them you’d like to speak on the floor today using the same line. You’ll either quickly learn which class you belong to, or chances are, end up in a jail cell if you persist long enough.

Throughout history, the most successful groups who’ve pushed for inequality (such as the Ku Klux Klan, slaveholders, etc.) all used government institutions to further this unequal divide, oftentimes under the guise of pushing for equality—think Jim Crow’s “separate but equal.” It’s important to recognize this division if you wish to quash inequality. Because too often, solutions put forth to combat this inherent flaw in government are met with opposition from those ignorant of the facts; usually making outrageous claims to keep government programs in place because private solutions could possibly yield inequality.

Private Solutions to Government Inequality

A good example is when we’re told we can’t privatize the police because it will result in two tiers of policing, with rich neighborhoods receiving exceptional service from their ability to pay, and poor neighborhoods getting none at all. Except that two-tiered policing already exists and is arguably much worse due to government’s monopoly control of it.

We continuously see those with money and governmental connections getting away with crimes, often involving a multitude of victims unable to shoulder the cost to fight back. Meanwhile, those in low-income neighborhoods are routinely profiled and preyed upon by police for victimless crimes, which regularly carry draconian sentences due to mandatory minimums and the War on Drugs; all because they can’t afford to endure the arduous court battles. And when it is pointed out that police do make a mistake, it’s nearly impossible to ensure they are held accountable—unless paid leave is to be considered punishment enough for wrongful deaths.

This one-size-fits-all, governmental approach to policing leaves those worst off among us the least represented. And, thanks to government regulation, it’s difficult for private alternatives to easily enter the market. Even so, we’re still seeing people opt out of using police, instead choosing private security companies wherever possible. So much, in fact, that private security officers now outnumber police in many countries around the world. And that’s not the only place we see government fostering inequality.

The same arguments used to defend the monopoly on police are also used—even more aggressively—against those who wish to end public schools. Rich neighborhoods, we’re told, would hire all the good teachers, have the best equipment, etc., while poor neighborhoods would be left with sub-par teaching staff and a shortage of necessities. Resulting in poor students being uncompetitive after graduation and ultimately ending up in an inter-generational cycle of poverty. Which is absolutely terrible, until you realize that’s already the exact system we have today.

With public schools, students in low-income neighborhoods are forced to attend the poorly-run schools within their city’s borders, while state-mandated accreditation and licensing restrictions keep cheaper, alternative schools from coming in and alleviating part of this problem. It’s so bad in fact, that the inter-generational poverty gap exists in large part thanks to government. Whereby kids in inner-city, public schools are more likely to go to prison than college due to gangs and other criminal activities that have crept into these mismanaged government schools; effectively turning them into a “lack of” concentration camp.

Neither of those two examples comes close to the worst one on our list, though. Healthcare in the United States is a blatant example of the government granting itself a monopoly over an entire industry in the all-too-logical hopes of avoiding the problems associated with a monopoly.

With Obamacare adding more than 20,000 pages of regulation to our healthcare system alone, they have effectively created the same, unequal system we’ve shown already exists in police and education. Prices have sky-rocketed for insurance and simple medicines like Epi-pens, while the “free” market is blamed, rather than the labyrinth of red-tape mandated from the FDA. Which, as of 2014, resulted in the cost of bringing new drugs to market to hit more than $2 billion dollars. This leaves the poorest among us unable to get the medical care they need, while simultaneously making it harder for free-market oriented hospitals to enter the market and alleviate this crisis. When we couple all that with the infuriating notion that those who passed the ACA made sure they could opt-out if they’d like, and the Orwellian tactic of naming it “The Affordable Care Act,” it becomes almost indefensible to say that government is not a nefarious source of inequality today.

What we need is a wake-up call to these egregious scenarios we find ourselves in when we defend the government as it tramples on the rights of individuals. We need to highlight the blatant hypocrisy of asking them to fix this manufactured inequality in our society. But most of all, if we ever hope to improve the well-being of those most vulnerable and poorest among us, we need to realize that inequality isn’t the cause of our problems, but rather a clever symptom distracting from of a much larger disorder: The State.

Reprinted from Being Libertarian.

AUTHOR

Thomas J. Eckert

Thomas J. Eckert

Thomas J. Eckert is a Copy Editor for Being Libertarian. With a passion for politics, he studies economics and history and writes in his spare time on political and economic current events. He is a self-described voluntarist.

VIDEO: Scott Israel May as Well Have Bought the Gun for Parkland Killer — He Enabled Him

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“Sheriff Scott Israel worked hand in hand with Robert Runcie to hide criminal actions, misdemeanors, felonious behavior of students like this murderer. They enabled him to avoid having a record established that would have prevented him from legally purchasing a firearm. In my opinion, Sheriff Scott Israel may as well have walked into the gun store and bought it for him.” —Dana Loesch

The Real Story of Parkland: Failed Leadership and Failed Cover-Ups

“The real story of how this murderer could pull off his plan undeterred is and has always been about those who were tasked with recognizing the threat that he posed before that fateful day.” —Dana Loesch

School Board Fights to Preserve Bathroom Policy After Judge OKs Trans Student’s Lawsuit

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A Virginia public school district will pursue an appeal after a federal judge ruled that a transgender student can challenge the district’s bathroom access policies under federal civil rights law and the Constitution.

Gloucester County Public Schools asked U.S. District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen to allow its appeal on Friday. Allen’s late May decision allowing the student to bring a case against the district was not a final judgement, meaning the district must secure Allen’s approval before filing an appeal.

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Though appellate review before final judgement is limited to a narrow range of issues, lawyers for the district argue it is appropriate here, because the appeals court’s decision will essentially determine the outcome of the case.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the plaintiff, consented to the motion. If Allen agrees, the case will proceed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We think the vast majority of courts have already ruled that these sorts of discriminatory polices violate [federal and constitutional protections],” ACLU lawyer Joshua Block told The Associated Press. “And we’re confident the 4th Circuit would agree.”

Allen denied the district’s motion to dismiss on May 22, finding the student can sue the system for violating the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees and Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in education.

The case was occasioned when a transgender student named Gavin Grimm began using the men’s restroom at his public high school. Grimm is a trans man. District policy provides that trans students must use the bathroom corresponding to their birth gender or an alternative all-sex bathroom.

Grimm’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, but the justices punted on the dispute after the Trump administration withdrew Obama-era guidance that advised public schools that Title IX requires administrators to allow students access to the bathrooms of their choice.

RELATED ARTICLE: “BDSM” the next LGBT push on society. Depraved, dangerous behaviors are now taking place at major hotels across America. 

EDITORS NOTE: Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. The featured image of Gavin Grimm attending the Time 100 Gala in New York City on April 25, 2017 is by by Steven Ferdman. [Photo via Newscom]

TSA Ignores Feckless Congress, Bullies States In Power Grab

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By KrisAnne Hall

The Transportation Security Administration is now standing virtually alone, above the law, above Congress and above the Constitution.

It is ignoring the law which created it and bullying any airports that attempt to deploy a private security force — which they are allowed to do under the law — with the threat of creating an effective “no-fly zone” at that airport. It is bullying states such as Texas that try to ban pat-downs.

In reality, there is absolutely no oversight or accountability of the TSA, now a rights-threatening monster created by a Congress intent on looking the other way.

I wrote recently about the secret list that the TSA has created to identify any passengers who have offended TSA agents. Congress is not privy to this secret list, or apparently that it even existed. Congress is not establishing the policies that get someone on the list, nor have they established that people are noticed and a procedure created to petition to be removed. This is a purely arbitrary power resting in the hands of individual, unaccountable agents.

But this not a new dynamic. For the TSA and Congress, it is actually a designed one.

Most Americans do not know that the very congressional act that created the TSA, also established that airports could replace federal TSA agents with private security two years after the law was enacted. However, in January 2011, when more than 16 airports had tried to opt out, TSA refused to leave these airports and the director of the TSA put a “freeze” on the airports’ ability to opt out, violating the very Act that created the TSA.

When the TSA violated this Act with their policies and actions, Congress didn’t step up and remind them of the existing law. Instead, Congress passed a new law, HR 658, reasserting the “right” of the airports to opt out of TSA screeners and required the TSA to notify all airports of this “right.” Yet, in a questionable move, Congress also then gave the Secretary of Homeland Security, the directing agency over the TSA, the authority to approve or deny an airport’s “request” to transfer to private security screening.

In summary, Congress told the airports they had a “right” to opt out of federal screening and then put the TSA in charge of approving or denying this “right.” If the TSA has the authority to approve or deny their own employment, then the airports do not possess a right to transfer to private screening, they merely possess a privilege granted by those they wish to remove.

Would that not mean that by all form and function, our airports are now occupied through force by the federal government? That, by definition, is despotism.

Unfortunately, this point is proven by the fact that in 2011, Texas lawmakers attempted to pass a law outlawing TSA pat downs. The FAA responded immediately by threatening to turn Texas into a de facto “No Fly Zone” if the law was signed. Of course, Texas backed down. If the federal government can deny a State’s right to internally govern itself, this is a violation of the delegation of Constitutional powers expressly enumerated and a violation of the reserved powers of the States expressly identified in the 10thAmendment.

There is no constitutional authority for the TSA to exist, much less wield unchecked power within the states. This unconstitutional agency was created by Congress through the pretense of “national security” and it is failing miserably.

According to James Bovard in the Los Angeles Times,

“the Department of Homeland Security concluded last year that TSA officers and equipment had failed to detect mock threats roughly 80% of the time. In Minneapolis, an undercover team succeeded in smuggling weapons and mock bombs past airport screeners 95% of the time. An earlier DHS investigation found the TSA utterly unable to detect weapons, fake explosives and other contraband, regardless of how extensive it’s pat-downs were.”

Americans have been deceived into trading their essential liberties for a completely non-existent security. We have a private or state option that would likely be more effective and one that could more closely be overseen through the states.

Congress has created this monster. They have made TSA above check and balance, above the law and Congress, and above the Constitution itself: not only the 4th Amendment, but also the 1st Amendment, 6th Amendment, 7th Amendment, 8th Amendment, and 10th Amendment. It is time for the American people to stand up to Congress, the DHS, and the TSA and assert our Right to keep ourselves “secure.”

It is time Americans replace this ineffective, intrusive and secretive unchecked system with one that follows the law and the Constitution, and where the States protect the internal security of the people while the feds are limited to the specifically enumerated powers.

ABOUT KRISANNE HALL

KrisAnne Hall is a former biochemist, Russian linguist for the U.S. Army, and former prosecutor for the State of Florida. KrisAnne also practiced First Amendment Law for a prominent Florida non-profit Law firm. KrisAnne now travels the country teaching the foundational principles of Liberty and our Constitutional Republic. She is the author of 6 books on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and has an internationally popular radio and television show. Her books and classes have been featured on C-SPAN TV. KrisAnne can be found at www.KrisAnneHall.com. Get the book “Sovereign Duty” to learn what the designers of our Constitution wanted Americans to do when their federal government became bloated and out of control. Find this book on Amazon, Barns & Noble, Wal-Mart, and many other merchants.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act.

THE B-1 ‘FRANKEN-VISA’ NIGHTMARE: The little-known visa program that is sabotaging American workers.

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It is important to give credit where credit is due.  I have not been alone in voicing frustration over how the mainstream media rarely, if ever, provides accurate coverage about immigration-related issues.  Today we will focus on an example of solid journalism.

On July 31, 2017, CBS News posted an important and hard-hitting investigative news report titled, “Made in America: How the U.S. Auto Industry Was Built with Foreign Labor.” A YouTube video of the report was aired by CBS News under the title, “Foreign workers being used to build auto plants in the U.S.”  It is a video that I urge you to watch.

The CBS News report caught the attention of Paul Mitchell, a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who, on May 16, 2018, issued a press release to announce a roundtable discussion into visa fraud that was predicated on the CBS News report.

Immigration fraud was identified, by the 9/11 Commission as the key entry and embedding tactic for terrorists who sought to carry out deadly terror attacks in the United States.  This concern served as the prediction for my recently published booklet, “Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.”

Immigration fraud not only costs lives but American livelihoods.

This is the brief press release:

“It’s important that we identify, examine, and fight the fraudulent use of visas by employers. Specific visas are designed for specific purposes, and when companies abuse or deceive the visa system, they hurt American workers and the American economy, as well as the foreign workers they hire under fraudulent pretenses. This morning’s roundtable was a good start to shining a light on visa fraud so the relevant government agencies can take effective steps to enforce our laws.”

Background

  • In July 2017, CBS News released an investigative report providing compelling evidence that certain foreign automobile manufacturers are hiring subcontractors who intentionally employ workers admitted under “B-1 in lieu of H-1B” visas to bypass foreign labor laws and increase company revenue. The report further alleges these workers were paid substantially less than American workers would have been paid performing the same jobs.
  • Today, Rep. Mitchell hosted the Departments of State, Labor and Homeland Security to learn more about what options are appropriate for hiring foreign workers, as well as what efforts are underway to identify, investigate and mitigate the fraudulent use of visas by foreign employers and employees. While the issue of securing the U.S./Mexican border against illegal (un-inspected) entry into the United States figures prominently in the news, nearly half of all illegal aliens did not run our borders thereby entering the U.S. without inspection, but were admitted into the United States and then, in one way or another, went on to violate the terms of their respective admissions as stipulated by the various visas they used to enter the United States.

The State Department provides a Directory of Visa Categories.

Nonimmigrant visa holders are admitted for a limited period of time, depending on the category of visa they used to enter the United States.  Many of these visas prohibit these aliens from being gainfully employed in the U.S.

Most politicians and pundits say that such illegal aliens, who violate their terms of admission, simply “overstayed” their authorized period of admission.

However, while nonimmigrant aliens who fail to depart from the United States before their temporary authorized period of admission expires are indeed illegally present and subject to removal, this violation by itself has little real-world consequence for America and Americans.

What is seldom discussed is that most such “status violators” violate other provisions of their lawful admission and this does profoundly impact our nation and our fellow Americans.  In point of fact, many of these illegal aliens also work illegally.  This not only displaces American and lawful immigrant workers and may result in wage suppression or even wage reduction, but also hammers the U.S. economy as these aliens wire tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. economy to their home countries.

Often these illegal aliens sought visas and entry into the United States fully intent on violating our immigration laws from the outset, but concealed their ultimate goals from the Department of State consular officials who granted them their visas and the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) who interviewed them when they applied for admission.  False statements and the concealment of material facts, and/or the creation of false and misleading evidence in support of their lies to obtain visas and gain entry into the United States constitutes fraud, a serious crime.

Such was the case where these hundreds of European construction workers are concerned.

A partnership exists between the Department of State and the elements of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) that enforce and administer the immigration laws.  The State Department is responsible for issuing visas to aliens and CBP inspectors have the authority to admit aliens into the United States and are guided by the provisions of Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182 which enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded.

The CBS News report focused on the B-1/B-2 visa and a supposed hybrid visa known as the B-1 in lieu of H-1B visa.  I have come to refer to this hybrid visa as a Franken-visa because it is a monstrosity that has no legal underpinning and in my judgment, undermines the integrity of the visa process and suborns fraud and malfeasance, hurting American workers.

A B-2 visa generally permits the bearer to remain in the U.S. for up to six months.  The B-1 visa is a business visa that permits the alien to conduct business in the United States and attend training sessions and conferences, review corporate procedures in the United States and carry out other such functions.  However, they are not authorized to be gainfully employed in the United States.  Typically an alien entering the U.S. for business purposes is issued a B-1/B-2 visas so that after they complete the business that brought them to the U.S. they may spend some time as tourists.

The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) website provides an explanation of the B-1 Visa.

The State Department’s consular officers who issue visas, are supposed to be a part of the process to keep aliens, who are likely to violate the terms of their visas, from receiving those visas in the first place.  These consular officers are supposed to be on the “same page” as the CBP inspectors who make the decision at America’s ports of entry as to whether or not to admit those aliens.

Now it would appear that not only are consular officials not on the same page as CBP inspectors, but are apparently not even reading from the same play book. And once again, America and Americans are paying the price.

The number of controversial H-1B visas that are issued each year are limited by a CAP.  The B-1 in lieu of H-1B visas are not capped and these visas, unlike virtually all other visas are not based on an underlying law.  Visas categories are established by law, not a hunch or a desire to play favorites for those with political clout.

Representative Mitchell’s press release noted that the predication for that Congressional roundtable discussion was a CBS News investigative report that had been broadcast in July 2017 that disclosed how European automakers got huge tax breaks to build brand new factories to manufacture their cars in the U.S., but used European labor to construct those factories.

The European automakers hired agencies such as the German contractor Eisenmann which then outsourced the hiring process to other subcontractors who then gamed the visa process, thereby committing apparent visa fraud that brought thousands of Eastern European construction workers to the United States with B-1/B-2 visas.

These workers were paid approximately ten dollars per hour while it was estimated that American tradesman would command wages of between $45 and $50 per hour.

CBS News explained how these workers were hired:

When a carmaker like Mercedes wants to expand its plant, they hire a contractor, like the German corporation, Eisenmann, to build parts of it. Eisenmann then subcontracts smaller companies to build parts of the plant and some of those companies hire labor from Eastern Europe.

It is a common practice for a company to hire contractors and subcontractors to hire workers.

Here, however, it was shown how many of these foreign workers were coached by those contractors to lie to the consular officers who interviewed them when they applied for their visas and how to lie to the CBP inspectors at ports of entry.

At least one of the companies justified its hiring practices by noting how the B-1 in lieu of H-1B visas made what they did legal.  Of course this is not true, but nevertheless an in-depth investigation must be conducted to determine how and why this visa category was created in the first place.

Clearly ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) needs many more agents to ramp up investigations of worksite immigration violations.  This would be consistent with President Trump’s plan to put Americans first.

Immigration law violations are not “victimless crimes.”

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

‘Right to Try” Law Provides Access to Experimental Treatment to 1 Million Terminally Ill Americans

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SAN DIEGO, CA /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Congressional Candidate, and San Diego “Top Doctor,” Dr. James Veltmeyer announced today that his wife, cancer patient, Laura Veltmeyer may be one of the one million Americans that stand to benefit from President Trump’s recently signed “Right to Try” Law.

The Law, formally known as “Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Belllina Right to Try Act of 2017” amends existing Federal law to allow certain unapproved, experimental drugs to be administered to terminally ill patients who have exhausted all approved treatment options and are unable to participate in clinical drug trials.

“One of the biggest failings of the Health Care System is that there are hundreds of experimental drugs that potentially benefit terminal patients, but until now, they have been withheld from patients because of bureaucratic processes and red tape. While the FDA must be applauded for their diligence in preventing harmful medicines from entering the USA market, every year terminal patients are forced to go offshore in search of promising treatments that are not available in our own Country,” said Dr. James Veltmeyer, Republican Candidate for the 52nd Congressional District.

President Donald Trump stated in reference to the law “People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure — I want to give them a chance right here at home.”

“My wife and mother of my 2 children, is currently suffering from Stage IV Breast Cancer. As her condition advances, it is comforting to know that my wife now has the choice to receive treatments that can potentially save her life,” said Dr. Veltmeyer.

Dr. Veltmeyer is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Therapeutic Solutions International, a biotechnology company that recently announced its intention to provide access to its StemVax product for terminal patients under the newly passed Law.

“I am running for Congress to represent our community and to fix the Health Care system. The 52nd District houses some of the most advanced biotechnology companies that are developing new treatments for terminal diseases.  It is saddening that the current Congressman for the 52nd District, Scott Peters, not only ignored the rights of terminal patients, but also of biotechnology companies, in voting against this Bill.”

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of President Trump kissing Jordan McLinn, a Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patient, after signing the “Right to Try” act on May 30, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo/AP/Evan Vucci)

3 Million People Have Found Jobs Since Trump Took Office

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The good economic news just keeps rolling in.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a positive May jobs report, announcing the U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs and the unemployment rate reached its lowest level since 2000, dipping to 3.8 percent.

While this report shatters expert predictions by nearly 30,000 jobs and continues to show signs of a strong economy, it also makes clear that as people continue to leave the workforce, employers will need to step up their game in order to attract workers to fill open positions.

The strong jobs report shows that a record number of Americans are employed, nearly 3 million people have found a job since President Donald Trump took office, and over the past 12 months we have averaged 191,000 new jobs per month.

In addition to this, African-American unemployment has fallen dramatically from 7.8 percent when Trump took office to 6.6 percent in April, and now to 5.9 percent. This represents a record low.

In addition, Hispanics continue to experience near historic lows in unemployment, reaching 4.9 percent. The unemployment rate for women, now at 3.6 percent, is also at its lowest point in decades.

This brings the unemployment rate down 0.5 percent over the last year, unemployment down by 772,000, and long-term unemployment down by half a million.

The top gains in the report are in retail trade (+31,000 jobs), health care (+29,000 jobs), construction (+25,000 jobs), manufacturing (+18,000 jobs), and mining (+6,000 jobs).

A year and a half into his presidency, Trump continues to add jobs to key sectors he targeted during his campaign. Since he was elected, the U.S. has added 322,000 manufacturing jobs and has reversed the trend of losing mining jobs, adding 91,000 jobs since November of 2016.

On a more troubling note, the labor force participation rate (the number of people who could be working, but choose not to) ticked down a 10th of a percentage point to 62.7 percent. This shows that the labor market is tightening. In fact, the number of people counted not in the labor force reached a record high of nearly 96 million people.

With more and more staying out of the workforce, employers have been steadily raising employee pay. In May, average hourly earnings for all private-sector employees rose by 8 cents, totaling a 71-cent increase over the year. This is the largest 12-month increase since 2009.

What does this mean? To fill open jobs and continue growing the economy, employers need to make work more appealing. How? Pay more and offer more.

One example of this can be seen in Walmart’s recent decision to increase pay, add maternity and paternal leave benefits, and introduce a college tuition program. To attract and keep talent, companies like Walmart will have to offer better and better deals to workers.

Those better deals are made all the more feasible when the government implements pro-growth policies, like the recent tax reform and regulatory reductions. Businesses now have more money and flexibility to be creative in how they attract and maintain their workers.

To date, over 4 million Americans have received a pay raise and/or a bonus because of tax reform. This is not just employers being altruistic, it’s a market-driven response to a need to attract and maintain workers—enabled by the government taking less money away from businesses.

One thing is certain: When businesses have more, they can and will do more. While there are some challenging aspects to the latest jobs report, the overarching theme shows that pro-growth policies are giving employers the flexibility they need to innovate and solve problems.

Let’s keep the momentum going.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Timothy Doescher

Timothy Doescher

Timothy Doescher is associate director of coalition relations at The Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

Why Democrats Aren’t Running Against “Evil” Tax Cuts

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Back in December and January, Democrats and their fellow-travelers in the media were ebullient over the idea of running against the “tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent” tax reform package Congress had passed on a straight party-line vote, and President Trump subsequently signed into law.

It’s worth a quick and entertaining look back at the now commonplace hysterical response from the American Left (Democrat/Media/Culture/Education establishment), this time at basic tax cuts.

House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, a constant well-spring of poppycock, called the legislation “the end of the world” and “the worst bill in the history of the United States Congress.” (Ahem…Fugitive Slave Act?) She predicted the tax cut would create “a permanent plutocracy in our country that does violence to the vision of our Founders.” California Gov. Jerry Brown called tax cuts “evil in the extreme.”

The Washington Post felt compelled to run a column predicting the Great Depression II, including unemployment at 25 percent. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said the bill’s health provisions would kill 10,000 people annually. And economic historian Bruce Bartlett said that tax cuts are “akin to rape.”

Veteran Atlantic political reporter Ron Brownstein argued that “President Trump and congressional Republicans have just taken the same leap of faith that Democrats did when they passed the Affordable Care Act.” The Huffington Post anxiously ran a story headlined “ObamaCare Plagued Democrats In 2010. The GOP Just Voted For A Bill Even Less Popular.”

And what’s a media nonsense roundup without Paul Krugman, who wrote a column, “Republicans’ Tax Lies Show the Rot Spreads Wide and Runs Deep.”

Well, something was running wide and deep.

But now that the big blue wave midterms are approaching, Democrats actually are not running against the end of the world, against 25 percent unemployment, against rot, against evil. You’d think those would be winning issues with the American people. Perhaps the end-of-the-world bombast was just empty drivel like so much that has been upchucked into the media since November 2016.

Remember how Republicans ran loud and hard (and for some, lied) about repealing Obamacare as soon as they had the chance. It was proving unpopular and hitting Americans negatively. We are seeing an almost complete absence of that now in both Democratic primaries, and where the general elections are set, in regards to the tax reform package that was the end of the world.

It’s not just by observation we are seeing this step away from tax cut repeal. Democratic leadership is admitting it. Washington Post political reporter David Weigel asked Democratic leaders about it at their recent strategy retreat, and tweeted their response:

“Asked Dems at retreat presser if they’ll run in 2018 on repealing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Answer: Not really. (They’ll “restore balance.”) Weigel tweeted the full text of his questions and their answers. By balance, they presumably and without elucidation, mean balancing the budget, which they did such a bangup job of doing when they were in control.

Why the big flip for Democrats? It’s more than the dawning realization that the slogan, “Vote for me and I’ll raise your taxes!” is probably not going to resonate with voters.

⇒ First, there are the actual facts involved with the tax reform package. The politically liberal Tax Policy Center ran the numbers and figured the tax cuts would benefit 80 percent of American families, while raising taxes for just 5 percent. Those tax hikes would fall disproportionately on the wealthiest 1 percent. The average family would save $1,610.

More facts. The Congressional Budget Office has sharply increased its forecast for GDP growth in 2018 from 2 percent to robust 3.3 percent as a direct result of the tax cuts. The CBO predicts GDP growth next year at 2.4%, up from the expected 1.5% before the tax cuts. Further, the CBO says that this level of growth in the economy could eliminate most of the so-called tax-cut deficit that Democrats are suddenly so concerned about. Unfortunately but to no one’s shock, the media largely ignored that report.

⇒ Second, the tax cut package still remains popular. The “Republican” or “GOP” tax cuts, not so much. Recent polls showing a decline in support for the GOP tax cuts have elated Democrats and the media. But they’re quite misleading. The tax cuts themselves, broken down by almost every element within the bill, are overwhelmingly popular.

Investors Business Daily broke those down here. Americans’ support is absurdly high for most elements of the tax cuts. But most polls label the tax cuts as Republican or GOP, and when that happens, the support drops significantly.

A couple of things are at work here. One is the ongoing demonization of Republicans in the media. This has been a long-running train. The other is the conflation of budget deficit with the tax cuts. This of course has two elements, one of which is continued runaway spending, which congressional Republicans caved on like they always do. (Remember, they are caving to Democrats who actively pursue the runaway spending.) Saying that the taxes alone caused the projected $1.5 trillion deficit — over 10 years, because that is the only way to make it look bad — ignores half of the equation but clearly can influence news consumers.

⇒ Third, an April Gallup Poll found that Americans think the tax code is more fair today than it was before the GOP tax cuts took effect. Last year, 51 percent of Americans said middle income families pay too much income taxes. That is now down to 42%. And amazingly, given the media coverage, 26 percent say upper-income families pay their fair share, up slightly from 24 percent last year. And the big corporate fat cat giveaway? Well, 24 percent now say that corporations pay their fair share, up sharply from 19% a year ago when corporate tax rates were much higher.

It’s hard to run on a lie when the truth keeps showing up in bi-weekly dollars in the wallet, when you can see how strong the economy around you is. High GDP growth is tangible, just like anemic GDP growth was under Obama.

Americans realize that the tax reform package was a net positive for their pocketbooks, for the economy, for jobs and for the deficit — the absolute opposite of how they rightly viewed Obamacare. That Democrats aren’t clawing to run against it means they still have a modicum of political sense left.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act. Please subscribe to our Revolutionary YouTube.