Obamacare pays $3.5 Billion to Bailout Insurers/Hide Losses as this ‘Healthcare’ Plan Fails

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Obama’s Administration has funneled $3.5 billion from taxpayers to cover the losses of major insurance companies that helped write Obamacare. This is a classic case of corporate welfare in Washington, an illegal move that most Americans disdain.

Obamacare forced Americans to pay more for their healthcare with higher premiums and deductibles, and now they’re paying for it twice. It bothers those who saw this coming and now the program is riddled with cost overruns and unworkable mandates.

It’s bad enough to have limited choice, the loss of trusted doctors, and higher costs. Now Obamacare is collapsing and taxpayers are hit with the bill. Americans don’t want to bailout giant insurance companies as a result of a law that those companies helped to write.

Americans for Prosperity is the source of this information and they have made it easy to contact our congressman at Action Center.

And it’s not just a problem of paying double for a broken plan. America doesn’t realize that Big Pharma was also a major contributer to the 20,000 page monstrosity of a law that makes prescription drugs available at tax-payers expense.

Adverse Drug Reactions have made medical care the leading cause of illness and death, says Dr. Richard Ruhling, an MD who was board-certified in Internal Medicine and taught Health Science at Loma Linda University, now retired.

Ruhling says he visited US Senate offices with medical literature to show Rx drugs are #1 risk  until one senator said, “You are wasting your time—they own us,” speaking of drug company donations to their re-election campaign.

Ruhling is 74 and has only taken one prescription in the past 50 years. He wonders why he should pay taxes for healthcare of people who choose to eat, drink, smoke and sex as they please. He says true health care is 90% wise choices in what we put in our mouths and getting some exercise.

As an aid, he recommends the DVD, “Eating” that has Bill Clinton’s cardiologist, Dr. Esselstyn from the Cleveland Clinic. Five minutes of it may be seen on his website, http://RichardRuhling.com

EDITORS NOTE: Dr. Richard Ruhling is author of Why You Shouldn’t Ask Your Doctor available on Amazon.com. The book is free on every Saturdays in May.

Obama’s Illegal Aliens Disguised as Refugees

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Below is the press release from the Center for Immigration Studies this morning.  In fact this effort to expand the definition of who is a refugee is going on world wide as so-called ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ (largely teenage boys) are also flooding into Europe. It is not a coincidence!

Teenage boys Texas

Unaccompanied Alien Children arrive at U.S. border in 2014.

For nearly 9 years I’ve watched the definition of the word ‘refugee’ be stretched like a rubber band until now most in the media think that anyone on the move for any reason is a refugee!

But, that is exactly what the No-Borders gang is pushing for.  When you read this remember that a legitimate refugee must prove that he/she has been persecuted for one of several reasons (such as race, religion, political persuasion).

Someone running from crime and wanting a better life does NOT a refugee make!

WASHINGTON, DC (May 2, 2016) — The Center for Immigration Studies has released a new report, “Welcoming Unaccompanied Alien Children to the United States”, analyzing the Obama administration’s persistent efforts to relocate the children of Central American illegal aliens to the United States. The report is online at http://cis.org/Welcoming-Unaccompanied-Alien-Children-to-the-United-States.

When the illegal flow of mostly teen-age boys from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador across the border reached record levels in 2014, the administration at first tried to arrange for them to stay by presenting them as victims of trafficking. But for the immigration benefits of being trafficked to apply, there must be coercion and exploitation; this was not the case.

rush-f1

Next, the administration established the Central American Minors Refugee/Parole Program, to fly the young people directly to the United States. But this program requires that the family members to whom the children are delivered have some form of legal status in the U.S. Because the majority of the minors’ family members in the U.S. are illegal immigrants, the program has not been widely used.

Thus the latest initiative: a new “family reunification program” specifically designed for illegal aliens and their children. In collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the administration is planning to enable illegal aliens to have their children brought to them in the U.S., with the minors labelled as “refugees.” However, by the UN’s own admission most of these children do not qualify as refugees.

The cost to American taxpayers of reuniting illegal aliens with the children they left behind is substantial. The FY 2017 budget request for the Unaccompanied Children (UC) program totals $1.321 billion, making the cost for one UAC likely to be more than $17,000. This is more than double the cost per UAC in 2010.

Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at the Center and author of the report, writes: “We can empathize with children wishing to reunite with family members who make it to the United States before them. … We can also, however, question this administration’s policies and motives and wonder if it is in the best interest of the American people to welcome these children here. … We might even call this program what it really is: a family reunification program specially crafted for illegal aliens and their children under the cover of refugee resettlement.”

(Emphasis mine)

Go here for our very extensive archive on the problem (originally archived as Unaccompanied minors).

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How Important Is the DC Metro? Not Very! by Julian Adorney

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Will Public Transportation Survive the 21st Century?

What if a major city’s rail system suddenly vanished?

Millions rely on rail-based public transportation, either because they can’t afford cars or because traffic is so bad. These trains and light rail systems alleviate congestion and pollution while serving the poor. Many consider them icons of 21st-century transportation and good government.

So if a city’s rail system disappeared, would that city be thrown into chaos and congestion, cars barely moving and horns blaring? Or would ordinary people innovate a solution?

That’s the question DC residents faced this past March. And the nation got to see the results.

When the DC Metro shut down for one day on March 16, most people feared disaster. The tag #Metrogeddon started trending on Twitter. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog opined that if the shutdown were made permanent, DC’s transportation scene would be dire: the city would need to add 1,000 lane-miles to its roadways and double its parking just to keep congestion at current levels. The alternative would be enormous gridlock or people drastically curtailing their commute, which would cause a shift toward a more localized economy — to everyone’s detriment.

But the shutdown happened and the world didn’t end. Instead, something occurred that Wonkblog, which relied on a study performed by the DC Metro itself to justify its costs, didn’t anticipate: people innovated.

Residents responded to the shutdown by telecommuting and sharing rides.Thirty-five percent of the Metro’s 700,000 daily riders are federal employees, all of whom were given the option to telecommute for the day. Other residents used ride-sharing apps. Thousands used Uber on Wednesday, and about one-fifth were first-time users of UberPool, the app’s new service that allows multiple customers to share rides.

Even the Post noted that while congestion was bad, these adaptations kept it from being much worse.

But with less than a day’s warning (the Metro announced its imminent shutdown late March 15), innovations were limited. Uber and Lyft didn’t have time to roll out new features or even advertise their existing ones. New companies didn’t have time to enter the industry, and new technology couldn’t be employed. Workers weren’t able to make long-term arrangements with employers.

If DC and other cities got rid of their metros permanently, within a year they would see much more innovation, as residents discovered novel congestion-busting options that wouldn’t rely on government.

Some workers might telecommute. Gallup notes that 37 percent of workers have telecommuted, and 24 percent of those (that’s 9 percent of the workforce overall) telecommute over half of their working days. Seventy-four percent of respondents, including employees and employers, say telecommuting is as productive or more productive than being in the office. In a city without public transit, telecommuting could become more popular, offsetting some of the congestion that the DC Metro projected without fracturing the economy. Boulder, Colorado, has already become a telecommuting hub, in part to offset its gridlocked traffic.

Increased adoption of the sharing economy might also reduce overcrowding on roads and in parking garages. Uber recently rolled out UberPool for this purpose, and other ride-sharing companies have done the same. By encouraging paid carpooling, these apps reduce congestion and the need for parking.

Car-sharing companies like Zipcar, which lets users rent cars by the hour, could also become more popular. Zipcar estimates that each shared car it offers replaces up to 20 private vehicles, alleviating street congestion and parking concerns.

Driverless cars are another possibility for reducing congestion long term without public transit. Experts suggest that driverless cars could improve traffic flow by 40–50 percent, in part by reducing accidents caused by human error. Driverless car lanes could also be narrower than current lanes, because driverless cars don’t swerve as much. This would enable more lanes to be packed into the same roadway real estate. Google’s self-driving cars are already on the road in California, Florida, and Nevada.

The problem right now is that metros crowd out these solutions. By reducing congestion (albeit at a high cost), they curtail demand for private services like Zipcar that could produce better and cheaper solutions to congestion. Additionally, competing with metros, which often have substantial funding and legal protections, is difficult for private companies.

Too often, people assume that a government-run service is vital because the market cannot come up with alternatives. But that only looks true because the government service crowds out competition. Left to their own devices, people come together in voluntary interactions to innovate better solutions than the government offers.

Government-funded public transit is an inefficient, top-down service. It’s unsafe and expensive. Rather than trying to “Make Metro Great Again,” we should let it fade away so ordinary people have a chance to build something better.

Julian AdorneyJulian Adorney

Julian Adorney is a Young Voices Advocate and a FEE 2016 Thorpe Fellow. He currently works at Colorado SEO Pros.

The ‘Best Alternative’ to Tax Day

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“Our tax policy should reflect our economic ambitions, not be a millstone around the neck of the American economy. Our tax code can and should leverage our entrepreneurial spirit and reward our hard work… thankfully we have a clear alternative — the FairTax. Let’s make April 15 just another beautiful spring day.” – Rep. Rob Woodall (GA-07)

This year taxpayers were provided an extra three days to file their income tax forms with the IRS.

But whether it’s the 15th or the 18th of April, the fact remains: The IRS is currently ‘in charge’ when it comes to taxes, not the average American.

The good news is, you and I both know it doesn’t have to be this way.

U.S. Representative Rob Woodall

This week, U.S. Representative Rob Woodall (GA-07) offered a great and timely reminder that the FAIRtax is the very ‘best alternative’ to Tax Day out there.

“Some have proposed plans to reduce the complexity of your tax return and shrink the reach of the IRS,” writes Woodall, House sponsor of the FairTax Act of 2015, for the Gwinnet Daily Post. “But at a time when America is wasting millions of hours and billions of dollars on compliance, and the IRS is more dangerous than it has ever been, nibbling around the edges of a failed system is not the answer. My plan is the FairTax, which would eliminate your tax return entirely, put the IRS out of business for good, and mark the largest transfer of power from Washington back to the American people in our history.”

Rep. Woodall also notes that the FAIRtax would allow the American worker to keep his or her entire paycheck for the first time since World War II, and pay taxes only on voluntary purchases at the check-out counter.

I urge you to read and share Rep. Woodall’s excellent case for the FAIRtax today, right here.

The movement to promote and pass the FAIRtax is truly exciting. Grassroots Americans in all fifty states are becoming members of the 1040 Club, showing their support for the FairTax in a very real way.

For what equates to a few cups of coffee, you can support our campaign to make the FairTax law in a very powerful way.

Please consider signing up for the 1040 Club today.

VIDEO: The U.S. Military is Shrinking — the Numbers are Alarming

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President Obama has fundamentally transformed the United States military from a global fighting force into a social change petri dish incapable of dealing with growing global threats from the nation states Russia, China, Iran and North Korea and even the Islamic State JV team.

The Middle East is exploding because the Obama foreign policy is based upon smart power rather than real power.

The Obama administration now seeks dialogue and engagement with those who wish to do us harm. Negotiation is part of diplomacy. What Americans see is our stature decline in an ever more dangerous world. What are enemies see is an opportunity to advance their national interests at the expense of America.

The below video by Dennis Michael Lynch explains the decline and fall of the U.S. military by the numbers and from a historical perspective.

Today our U.S. Air Force pilots are flying aircraft that are older than they are. Today the sea born U.S. Navy is commanded by officers who are much younger than the ships under their command.

Watch this short NEWSMAX TV analysis of our incredibly shrinking military:

American president Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to Henry L. Sprague of the N.Y. City Union League Club dated January 26th, 1900, wrote, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” This proverb advises using the tactic of caution and non-aggression, backed up by the ability to do violence if required. This proverb became Roosevelt’s foreign policy.

The greatest challenge for the next president will be restoring America’s big stick. 

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So much for the Pope’s power of persuasion

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I wasn’t planning to write about the Pope’s propaganda stunt in Greece late last week where he visited the island of Lesbos and picked 12 lucky Syrian Muslims to take back to Rome with him, but there is one little bit I want you to see in this report from The Guardian.

One of the major themes throughout the last nearly nine years that I’ve written this blog has been the criticism toward phony Christian/Jewish charity that depends on stealing from taxpayers in order to help the downtrodden all the while claiming credit for being charitable.

I don’t consider that charity—taking Caesar’s money and transferring it from one group of people to another isn’t charity!  But, it has become such an established practice no one seems to think about it anymore.

So, see this toward the end of The Guardian story (which by the way does not tell us if the Pope’s 12 Syrian Muslims will live completely on the Vatican’s dime and not the Italian government—something I doubt we will ever learn because the answer is probably that the Italian taxpayer will be footing their bill for years to come).

Get this! the Pope has been unable to persuade European Catholic Dioceses to take in refugee families!

Is it because they are primarily Muslim ‘refugees,’ or because the churches have become so conditioned to the concept that ‘Christian’ charitable money comes from the taxpayer that they no longer want to pony-up out of their own private funds?  A little of both? Who knows?

The three families, who had initially set their sights on reaching Germany or another European country, were expected to seek asylum in Italy.

Their arrival brings to about 20 the number of refugees living in the Vatican, which has fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. A similar intake across Europe would see 6 million people given asylum on the continent of 300 million. [Does the Vatican give them special Muslim prayer rooms, etc.—ed]

Last year, the pope appealed to every Catholic diocese in Europe to take in a refugee family, an appeal that fell on deaf ears across most parts of the continent.

The number of migrants arriving in Greece has fallen drastically since Turkey agreed to take back all those landing on the Greek islands in return for billions in EU cash and other concessions.

And, by the way, never forget that it is Turkey that originally allowed the launch of hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and Africans from their shores to invade Europe. Most of the Syrian Muslims were safe in Turkey.

For all of our posts on the ‘Invasion of Europe’ click here.   And, don’t forget, it was this Pope who first welcomed the invaders to Europe when he blessed the migrants on Lampedusa in 2013.

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The Hidden Tax That Costs Households up to $1,500 a Year by Salim Furth

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The Cost of Occupational Licensing Adds Up!

A rising tide of regulation has covered almost a third of the U.S. labor market. Workers who previously could find a job on the strength of their experience and talent now need their state government’s permission before taking a job. The “permission slip” in this case is an occupational license or required certification.

Occupational licenses act as a barrier to potential new workers in an occupation. The costs and delay associated with obtaining a license convinces many potential workers to not even try.

As a result of the decreased competition among workers, customers end up paying more, either directly or through their state and local taxes.

Unequal burden

Although state-by-state licensure numbers are not firmly established, a Harris poll conducted in 2013 found large differences between the states. Applying the poll results to average annual earnings in each state and using $1,033 per household as a national baseline, I estimated how much the average household in each state would save from comprehensive licensure reform.

The hidden tax on services is highest in Washington and lowest in South Carolina. The six states that impose the highest costs are states where regulations and wages are both high: Washington, Connecticut, Iowa, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Alaska. In Washington, high regulation costs the average household $1,550 per year.

In low-regulation states the costs are much lower. South Carolina, Kansas, Indiana, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire all impose less than $700 per year in hidden service taxes on the average household.

The results show that there are few obvious regional patterns in the data. For example, three of the six New England states are near the bottom of the list but two are near the top. Most Southern states have lower costs, but only because they have lower wages — and Florida and Texas are the 10th and 11th most costly in the nation despite moderate wages. Low-wage states have lower dollar costs, but readers should keep in mind that a hidden tax of $500 is a larger share of income for the average South Carolina household than it is for the average Washington household.

Every state has room for improvement — for example, South Carolina applies restrictive scope of practice rules to nurse practitioners. If the state instead followed the low-cost New England states and allowed nurse practitioners to prescribe medicine and practice independent of a physician, it would make health care more accessible and affordable without compromising on care.

Evidence

Typically, getting a license involves fees, tests, and continuing education. For example, to become a teacher in Illinois requires a $100 application fee, several tests (each of which has its own fee), and completion of a teacher-preparation class approved by the state. Prospective teachers must also have a bachelor’s degree.

To remain in good standing with the state, teachers have to pay $10 a year (and a $500 fine if they miss a year) and take continuing education classes. The simple certification, however, is not enough for an experienced teacher to become a reading specialist (requires a master’s degree) or to teach driver’s ed (requires specialized classes).

There are specific “endorsements” that are required for each age range — an experienced high school teacher cannot simply accept a job as a middle school teacher without first getting permission from the state.

There is little rigorous evidence that these licenses improve the quality or safety of the services being offered. The Council of Economic Advisers found 12 studies of quality and safety:

  • Two of the 12 studies found positive outcomes from licensure;
  • One found a negative outcome;
  • Nine could not rule out licensure having no effect on quality or safety.

However, there is ample evidence that licensure increases the cost of services, makes it harder to find a job and harder to move between states.

Reform

Occasionally a state takes a step in the right direction, such as Nebraska’s legislature freeing hair braiders from the requirement to become licensed in cosmetology, which is unrelated to hair braiding. But no state has yet attempted comprehensive reform.

Any of the 50 states could step into this void by taking a bold step to help consumers and potential workers. One simple way to enact broad reform would be to recognize licenses granted by the other 49 states. Someone who is qualified to be a doctor in Wisconsin can practice medicine safely in Delaware. Honoring out-of-state licenses would help a state to attract skilled workers, boost its economy, and reduce the hidden tax on its consumers.

This article first appeared at the Daily Signal.

Salim FurthSalim Furth

Salim Furth, Ph.D., researches and explains how public policy affects economic growth as a research fellow in macroeconomics at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis.

Taxpayers Pay through the Nose for the Minimum Wage by Adam Millsap

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A Billion Dollar Stool to Reach the Bottom Rung of the Job Ladder.

In February, the Obama administration proposed a “First Job” initiative. The main goal of the aptly titled initiative is to help unemployed young people obtain their first job by spending $5.5 billion on grants, training, and direct wages. Unfortunately – but unsurprisingly – the press release failed to acknowledge the most significant factor impeding employment in this age group: the minimum wage.

Everyone knows that a first job is a vital step in a young person’s development. Research has shown that work experience at a young age teaches positive work habits, time management, perseverance, and improves self-confidence. Increases in teenage employment also reduce the rate of violent crime. Yet despite these well-known benefits, the US maintains a minimum wage policy that makes it very difficult for all but the most productive teenagers to find a job.

When the minimum wage was discussed in the late 19th and early 20th century it was in the context of preventing the least skilled, most “undesirable” workers from finding a job, with the goal of eradicating the unemployable people. For the next 80-plus years it was common knowledge that a minimum wage would reduce employment among the least-skilled workers. The only debate was about whether such a reduction was desirable from society’s perspective, as many of the appalling eugenicists of the time contended.

As late as 1987, the New York Times editorial staff recommended a minimum wage of $0 because of its negative effects on employment. The Times argued that the minimum wage was an ineffective anti-poverty tool whose employment costs outweighed any benefits from higher wages.

Fast forward to the early 1990s, when an economic study purported to show that a slight increase in the minimum wage may not reduce employment after all. Despite the tenuous results of this study, it provided minimum wage supporters with the ammunition they needed to push for increases in the minimum wage at the federal, state, and local level without worrying about declines in employment. This misinformed thinking continues and is the basis for modern calls to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour or even $15 per hour, as some cities have already done.

Meanwhile, the labour force participation rate for 16-19 year olds has fallen from over 50% in the early 1990s to 35% in January 2016. Some of this is due to more young people engaging in extra-curricular activities and attending college, but if those were the only causes then the Obama administration would have little reason to be concerned about teenage employment.

Despite the decline of teenagers in the labour market and the numerous recent studies that show that the minimum wage has adverse effects on teenage employment, the minimum wage continues to be viewed by many as an effective anti-poverty tool with little to no adverse effects. It is this line of thinking that has encouraged the newest proposal calling for billions of taxpayer dollars to provide jobs; the labor market, not the government, is the problem and so the government should intervene.

An all too common occurrence in US policy is that government intervention causes a problem that the government then tries to solve with more intervention, completely ignoring the possibility that the initial intervention was the source of the problem. In this case, price controls at the bottom of the labor-market ladder have prevented young people from getting on the first rung, so now the government wants to roll over a $5.5 billion dollar taxpayer-funded stool to give them a boost.

Government programs rarely achieve their goal so there is good reason to be skeptical of this one, especially since it fails to address the root cause of the problem. A better, more effective solution for helping teenagers gain valuable job skills would be to set the minimum wage at the proper level of $0 and let the labour market work.

Cross-posted from Mercatus.org.

Adam Millsap

Adam Millsap is a PhD student in economics and a graduate instructor at Clemson University in South Carolina. His research interests are in urban economics and public choice theory. He is currently working in Washington, D.C. as an economic policy intern at the Reason Foundation.

FAILURE: Canada’s $16,000,000 project to vet Muslim migrants

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If Canadian authorities had approached this problem realistically, they never would have spent $16,000,000. They would have known from the outset that this program would never work, and that there is no way to distinguish jihadis from peaceful Muslim migrants.

“RCMP refugee screening a $16M flop, says internal report,” by Dean Beeby, CBC News, April 15, 2016 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Apr 15, 2016:

A $16-million RCMP project to help keep dangerous refugees out of Canada has turned out to be an expensive security flop.

An internal evaluation says the screening project delivered information too late, strayed beyond its mandate, and in the end did almost nothing to catch refugees who might be linked to criminal or terrorist groups.

Meanwhile, 30 Mounties were tied up for four years on duties that did little to enhance Canada’s security.

“The current approach does not appear to provide much by way of relevant information to support the admissibility screening of refugee claimants,” concludes the Sept. 29, 2015, report, obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act.

The report on the anemic results was completed at about the same time as then prime minister Stephen Harper said Canada had to proceed cautiously in accepting Syrian refugees so that Canada’s screening process could weed out terrorists.

“When we are dealing with people that are from, in many cases, a terrorist war zone, we are going to make sure that we screen people appropriately and the security of this country is fully protected,” Harper told a 2015 election rally in Welland, Ont.

“We cannot open the floodgates and airlift tens of thousands of refugees out of a terrorist war zone without proper process. That is too great a risk for Canada.”
Domestic databases checked

The RCMP screening pilot was launched in 2011-12 as part of a package of Conservative reforms tightening up the processing of refugees, including a controversial move to withdraw some medical treatments for rejected asylum seekers. The Liberals have since reversed that measure.

Under the pilot project, the RCMP vetted potential refugees already in Canada — the names were provided by the Canada Border Services Agency — by checking domestic police databases for links to criminal or terrorist organizations, among other things.

But the auditors found a raft of problems:

RCMP officers hired for the work couldn’t get started for months because legislation was slow to be passed in 2012.
The border agency and RCMP computers couldn’t talk to each other, so the organizations had to exchange thousands of names manually.
The cost per screening skyrocketed from a planned $425 to $1,026, on average.

The RCMP delivered screening checks to the border agency too late about a third of the time, rendering them useless because of refugee-decision deadlines.

The RCMP reported only 85 of 4,085 names as potential problem refugees, the auditors said, based on a significant sample of the completed work. But the border agency used only two of those names in its vetting process because of late or inadequate information from the Mounties. And even the information on the two names was later found not to be pertinent to the border agency’s final decision.

The RCMP pilot began poorly by primarily vetting the names of refugee claimants who were brand-new to Canada — and therefore were unlikely to have a Canadian criminal record….

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A Tax on Income Attacks Life Itself by Jeffrey Tucker

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The least of the problems with income tax is that it takes your money. The really big problem is that the income tax takes your life. It gives the government direct access to the things you own and sets up the political-bureaucratic sector to be the final arbiter of what you can and cannot consider to be yours.

Illustrating this point is the bitter realization that the IRS considers it completely legal to demand access to your electronic communications whenever it wants. This news came about in 2013 because of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The filing unearthed a 2009 memo that stated outright: “The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.”

Forget search warrants and legal processes. In the interest of getting its share, the government can have it all on demand. This assertion was made again in 2010 by the IRS’s chief counsel: The “Fourth Amendment does not protect emails stored on a server” and there is “no privacy expectation” on email.

A Century of Intrusions

This assertion openly contradicts a 2010 legal decision from the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals. United States v. Warshak said that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant before forcing people and providers to cough up email archives. Granted, even that’s not much protection. Government always has its “probable cause.”

Good for the ACLU for making an issue of this. But at some level, it’s all beside the point. The problem isn’t the legal process that allows the government to do what it wants; the problem is that government has a hook into personal income that allows powerful people to have their way with the whole of your life.

As we look back at the history, we can see that the income tax enabled a century of intrusions into our lives. It’s been 100 years of a form of imposition that no American in most of the 19th century could have ever imagined or tolerated.

The income tax is what enabled Prohibition, for example. Without the ability to monitor and adjudicate how people made money, the power of enforcement would not have been there at all. (Remember that Al Capone was not convicted for bootlegging, but for tax evasion.)

It is what made possible the central planning of the New Deal. The government’s presumption that it owns the first fruits of labor gave rise to wage controls and mandatory participation in the Social Security system. It allowed the central planners to push aside young workers and tell them that they aren’t allowed to be part of the workforce. It allowed the introduction of the minimum wage that continues to shut out whole sectors of society.

And look what happened during World War II. The price controls on wages and salaries – made possible only because the income tax gave government a fiduciary interest – inspired companies to start offering health-care benefits as part of the compensation package.

That practice was intensified over the decades until it became mandatory. That practice is a major source of the health care problems we have today. So there we have it: There is a direct link from Obamacare today back to the income tax of 100 years ago.

The Root of All Evil

Frank Chodorov, author of the enduring masterpiece, was right to call the income tax the “root of all evil.” We look back to history and are in awe that anyone ever had the full right to earn whatever money he or she wanted to and to never have to tell the government about it. But that was the way it was for the dominant part of American history.

That’s the system once called freedom.

It’s striking when you realize just how completely unnecessary the income tax is for the funding of government. What if we cut back government spending by exactly the amount the income tax collects? That would take us back in time to 2006. Was the government really too small back then? Would society really collapse if we went back to a government we had just ten years ago?

Yes, the government likes our money and always wants more of it. But more crucially, the government uses the income tax as a primary means of controlling not just our money, but the whole of our lives. That’s the real purpose of the income tax and why the government will fight for its preservation to the end.

Right now, many Americans are sweating it out to get their taxes done in time for the filing deadline. It would be immeasurably hard without the brilliant companies that have put together software programs – updated constantly! – that make what would otherwise seem impossible rather easy. This is the type of thing that free enterprise and the private sector do. They help us to have better lives.

But government? What does it do? It takes. It snoops. It controls. It destroys.

Jeffrey A. TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. Email.

State by State: The Cost of Illegal Immigration

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UPDATE: The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration to U.S. Taxpayers – 2017

Wondering how illegal immigration is affecting your pocket book? In 2013, taxpayers shouldered $100 billion in state spending on illegal aliens!

You may also access FAIR’s State Cost Studies and Immigration Facts for more information.

Below are state-by-state detailed infographics on how much illegals burden you and your state:

Alabama Kentucky North Dakota
Alaska Louisiana Ohio
Arizona Maine Oklahoma
Arkansas Maryland Oregon
California Massachusetts Pennsylvania
Colorado Michigan Rhode Island
Connecticut Minnesota South Carolina
Delaware Mississippi South Dakota
District of Columbia Missouri Tennessee
Florida Montana Texas
Georgia Nebraska Utah
Hawaii Nevada Vermont
Idaho New Hampshire Virginia
Illinois New Jersey Washington
Indiana New Mexico West Virginia
Iowa New York Wisconsin
Kansas North Carolina Wyoming

RELATED ARTICLES:

States’ War on Obama’s Executive Immigration Actions Goes to the Supreme Court

Trump Watch! Is rumored refugee cap reduction to 50,000 that significant?

Under Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony. The below infographic shows how Mexico deals with those who come there illegally:

mexico illegals law

The 50-Year Disaster of Government Trains, Buses, and Streetcars by Daniel Bier

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Today, Less than 2% of Trips Use Public Mass Transit.

Ronald Reagan once quipped that “government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

There, in a nutshell, you have a short history of mass transit in America. CEI’s Marc Scribner explains,

Following decades of excessive local government fare regulation that led to a terminal decline in the private mass transit industry, government began taking over the responsibilities performed by now-bankrupt private mass transit companies following the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964.

Over the span of a decade, the mostly-private mass transit industry was replaced by government transit monopolies.

As a result, for the last several decades, government at all levels has spent trillions on mass transit, subsidizing fares, expanding lines, and building vast new rail systems. Today, transit consumes more than 25 percent of all surface transportation funds (which mostly come from non-transit users through gas taxes).

What was the result of this tidal wave of taxpayer cash?

Despite receiving more than one-fourth of the funding, mass transit still represents less than 2 percent of trips taken nationwide. Even when one looks only at commuting, where trains and buses do best, mass transit’s national mode share is less than 5 percent — down from more than 6 percent in 1980.

That’s right: after receiving a massive and disproportionate share of taxpayer funding, totaling trillions of dollars, transit’s share of commutes declined.

But government transit monopolies keep lobbying for more and more funding. They claim the real problem is that public transit systems haven’t been expanded enough to draw more people into using them. Scribner calls this theField of Dreams theory: “If you build it, they will come.”

The problem with this theory is that it’s bogus. Research from Steven Polzin shows that the capacity of transit networks, including buses, streetcars, and trains, has nearly tripled since 1970, while absolute ridership has grown by just a fraction of that. Transit trips per capita have been dead flat since the 1970s.

Polzin writes, “Supply has grown far more rapidly than demand for the past several decades. This is a report card on productivity that mom and dad would hardly be proud of.”

Meaning: we built it; they didn’t come.

Scribner concludes,

The trillions spent on mass transit have given governments many more empty buses and trains, but very little in terms of additional ridership. …

Mass transit can serve a very important, albeit narrow, purpose for people in limited settings. There is a reason that 40 percent of all US mass transit trips take place in the New York City metro area.

But it is wholly irresponsible for politicians to continue mass transit’s taxpayer gravy train, which is based on less substance than Kevin Costner’s dramatized auditory hallucinations.

When the next flashy transit project comes to your town, remember to be skeptical. Proponents of light rail, streetcars, and other hugely expensive projects routinely overestimate how many people will use the line and underestimate how much it will cost to build and run. Decades of evidence shows that if you build it, people will still probably drive — and you’ll still be stuck paying for it.

Daniel BierDaniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of FEE.org. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

VIDEO: Is Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cheating on his taxes?

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Brian Lilley digs into a Journal de Montreal story about how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has used numbered companies to hide his wealth. This isn’t a surprise but considering how he casts aspersions on others, isn’t it incumbent on him to be honest with Canadians?

Lilly reports:

Remember during the election when Justin sat down with his friend Peter Mansbridge for that friendly tête-à-tête during which Trudeau revealed that he thought many small businesses were just shell companies set up to avoid taxes?

Peter and the CBC let that comment slide but we didn’t because it seemed obvious that it revealed something about Trudeau himself. For one, how out of touch he was with regular hard working Canadians and for another, perhaps it said something about his own experiences with tax avoidance?

This should surprise no one but it turns out Justin was speaking from personal experience and certainly knows what he’s talking about at least for himself and his brother who had several numbered companies set up for them, allowing them to defer taxes for a very long time.

Despite repeated claims of transparency, it turns out he’s actually been quite opaque.

READ MORE.

EDITORS NOTE: Justin Trudeau campaigned against government money for childcare. Now taxpayers are paying for PM Trudeau’s two nannies, even though he’s wealthy. Canadian readers may SIGN A PETITION opposing using taxpayer money to pay for the PM’s nannies at PayForYourOwnNanny.com.

Why Is the United States Funding a Hamas-Linked Charity — Again?

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The U.S. has given $270,000 to Islamic Relief Worldwide, a group which was banned in Israel for funding Hamas and in the UAE for Muslim Brotherhood links.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently gave a grant of $270,000 to a Muslim Brotherhood linked charity, according to The Daily Caller.

Islamic Relief Worldwide, a UK based charity and the largest Islamic Charity in the world, has been banned in Israel and the United Arab Emirates for dispersing funds to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Last month it received the money for its work in Kenya, specifically aimed at promoting “global health security as an international priority” as part of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s global health security partner engagement initiative.

While the specific program the U.S. government is funding may be perfectly innocuous, the charity itself is not.

“The IRW is one of the sources of Hamas’s funding and a means for raising funds from various countries in the world” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said in July 2014. “We do not intend to allow it to function and abet terrorist activity against Israel.”

In 2006 Israel arrested and deported Iyaz Ali, IRW’s Gaza branch project director, for working “to transfer funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations.”

In 2014 Islamic Relief Worldwide announced they had conducted an independent audit which found no ties to terrorism whatsoever.

“Islamic Relief abhors terrorism in all its forms” the group said in a statement. “We are an impartial, independent, purely humanitarian organization whose sole focus is to alleviate poverty and suffering.” They refused to name the auditor due to “sensitivities in the region.”

Israel and the United Arab Emirates rejected the findings and stood by their designations. Israel charged that Islamic Relief Worldwide “funnels millions of dollars a year to Hamas institutions.”

This is not the first time the U.S. government has funded Islamic Relief Worldwide despite concerns being raised about the group’s links to terrorism.

In December 2015 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded a grant of $100,000, also for the organization’s work in Kenya.

By continuing to fund charities with ties to terrorism, the U.S. government is legitimizing all aspects of their work, not just those areas they are directly supporting.

There are plenty of underfunded and laudable projects around the world with no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas.

Why isn’t the U.S. government funding them instead?

RELATED ARTICLE: USAID Gives Muslim Brotherhood Tied Charity $100,000

Small business desperately seeking candidate to grow the economy, cut taxes/healthcare costs

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NEW YORK, NY /PRNewswire/ — A new survey released today by OnDeck® (NYSE: ONDK), the leader in online lending for small business, found that as the presidential primary progresses, small business owners are losing faith in candidates on both sides of the aisle. The survey is the second from OnDeck examining the attitudes of small business owners tied to the 2016 presidential election and reveals that 34 percent do not have confidence in any of the current candidates, up from 25 percent in a survey taken last fall.

With declining faith in the current crop of presidential candidates, small business owners surveyed expressed nostalgia for a past U.S. president they deemed a friend to small business: Ronald Reagan. The 40th President was overwhelmingly selected by more than four in ten small business owners (42 percent) as the best president for small business, trailed by Bill Clinton (17 percent) and President Barack Obama (14 percent). For more top findings, see OnDeck’s Small Business and the Election infographic:

SMBElectionIIv2c032316

Navigating an Uncertain Political Climate

According to the OnDeck survey, small business owners are looking to candidates this election season to address three critical issues: economic growth (67 percent), tax policy (46 percent) and healthcare costs (35 percent).  In order to help small businesses in the near term, some respondents would like to see the federal government cut taxes (36 percent), reduce healthcare costs (19 percent), invest in infrastructure improvement (13 percent), and cease increases in the minimum wage (13 percent).

“Small business owners are keenly interested in this year’s presidential election as they grapple with some big issues tied to economic growth and health care costs,” said James Hobson, Chief Operating Officer at OnDeck. “Given their active participation in past presidential elections, candidates would be wise to engage this vast voting constituency of 28 million small business owners.”

Small Business Owners Get Out the Vote 

The OnDeck survey indicates that as a population, small business owners are actively engaged in the electoral process. In fact, nine in 10 business owners say they voted in the last presidential election. Nearly all small business owner respondents (95 percent) are registered voters, three in 10 made a donation to a Democrat or Republican candidate in the last election and a quarter have already made a political donation during this primary election season.

When asked to select the presidential contender who they think has the best interests of small business in mind, Donald Trump (37 percent), Bernie Sanders (28 percent), and Hillary Clinton (16 percent) topped the list.

Survey Methodology

This survey of 531 small business owners was conducted online via Facebook between February 29 and March 14, 2016.

About OnDeck

OnDeck (NYSE: ONDK) is the leader in online small business lending. Since 2007, the company has powered Main Street’s growth through advanced lending technology and a constant dedication to customer service. OnDeck’s proprietary credit scoring system – the OnDeck Score® – leverages advanced analytics, enabling OnDeck to make real-time lending decisions and deliver capital to small businesses in as little as 24 hours. OnDeck offers business owners a complete financing solution, including the online lending industry’s widest range of term loans and lines of credit. To date, the company has deployed over $4 billion to more than 45,000 customers in 700 different industries across the United States, Canada and Australia. OnDeck has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and operates the educational small business financing website www.businessloans.com. For more information, please visit www.ondeck.com.