Free Republic

When reporters asked whether his plan to cancel student loan debt is unfair to those who have already paid off or chose not to take out loans, President Biden on Wednesday parried with a hit at tax cuts on the rich. “Is it fair to people who, in fact, do not own multibillion-dollar businesses, if they see one of these guys getting all the tax cuts? Is that fair? What do you think?” Biden told reporters after his remarks introducing the plan.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that America was “robbed blind” by fraud with coronavirus relief programs and said that this makes him “a little less excited about the money they’re planning to spend.” He also wondered why Democrats aren’t being “the good government party” they’re supposed to be and Republicans aren’t being the fiscal watchdogs they’re supposed to be. Maher said, “[T]his is the question I asked back in April and I’m going to ask it again, it doesn’t really make me a conservative, does it, that I don’t want to be absolutely robbed...

The wasteful spending by our government is no big secret, as it has unfortunately been going on forever, but I just came across some information that brought out government wasteful spending practices to rock bottom. During COVID, the government came up with a not very well thought out idea: the "Paycheck Protection Program" (PPP). In principle, PPP sounded good, but in practice, it was a blatant abuse of the taxpayers' money to the extent that it enriched the bank accounts of multimillion-dollar law firms. The government actually used the taxpayers' hard earned money to make the already rich lawyers even...

Diesel consumers on the East Coast received some news Wednesday that may suggest an easing of the tight physical market squeeze in the region. There have been head fakes suggesting a softening of markets in the weeks since the East Coast diesel market ran away from the rest of the country. But they proved short-lived, as the weekly national average retail diesel price published Monday by the Energy Information Administration was $5.613 a gallon. The East Coast price was 33.1 cents more than that after a three-week increase that took the spread from 4.9 cents on April 25 up to...

Lightning sparked a few new small fires in the drought-stricken Southwest Monday but the thunderstorms brought welcome rain to the monster blaze that’s been churning for a month in New Mexico and is now the state’s largest in recorded history. “We haven’t seen rain in a really long time so that’s exciting,” San Miguel County Sheriff Chris Lopez said Monday might at a briefing on the biggest active fire in the U.S. burning east of Santa Fe. “It gave us a little bit of a breather,” he said at one of the command posts in Las Vegas, New Mexico, on...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday signed a $1.2 billion tax relief package to relieve Floridians from the burden of President Biden’s economy. “We really worked hard to lift people up and protect jobs and protect businesses,” DeSantis said on Friday, pointing to the fact that Florida set the record for domestic tourism in 2021.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) launched a new state mortgage relief program on Monday aimed at helping families and residents who experienced financial hardships due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a statement on Monday, Lamont said the new “MyHomeCT” initiative will provide grant assistance to homeowners who have experienced difficulties in paying housing costs due to the pandemic. The program comes as local advocates have said the state is going through a housing crisis, with many residents forced to move due to expensive housing costs, the CT Insider reported.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thanks to a sudden $140 million cash infusion, officials in Broward County, Florida, recently broke ground on a high-end hotel that will have views of the Atlantic Ocean and an 11,000-square-foot spa. In New York, Dutchess County pledged $12 million for renovations of a minor league baseball stadium to meet requirements the New York Yankees set for their farm teams. And in Massachusetts, lawmakers delivered $5 million to pay off debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston, a nonprofit established to honor the late senator that has struggled financially. The three...

Former three-term New York Gov. George Pataki is leading a delegation to provide humanitarian relief to 200,000 Ukrainian refugees who’ve fled to neighboring Hungary following Russia’s invasion of their homeland. “We have money, food, clothing and medical supplies we can deliver,” Pataki, whose paternal grandparents were from Hungary, told The Post on Tuesday.

A California man was charged Friday with committing fraud to obtain over $1 million in unemployment benefits for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, a criminal complaint alleges that Idowu Hashim Shittu, 46, used the personal information of other people to apply for pandemic-related benefits from multiple state agencies between March and July 2020.

The Community Gyms Coalition and the Global Health and Fitness Association sent a letter to congressional leaders Thursday urging them to provide pandemic relief to fitness facilities before the end of the year. The groups said that the emergence of the omicron variant — which experts believe might be more infectious than previous COVID-19 strains — could cause more damage to the fitness industry, which has seen 25 to 30 percent of gyms close permanently since the start of the pandemic. “The appearance of another COVID variant, coupled with discussions around reinstituting mask mandates and further restrictions to address the...

Testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed the Biden Administration is encouraging illegal immigrant families "separated from their children" to sign up for taxpayer funded relief checks. "We recently launched a website where families who were indeed separated can register for relief. We are working very closely with counsel for the families. We are working with the government, the nation's of origin to accelerate the provision of passports for parents who do indeed want to come here," Mayorkas said. It’s outrageous to offer massive, taxpayer funded financial payments to...

Most Americans naively believe that the 14th Amendment precludes our governments from discriminating on the basis of race. Sadly, that isn’t how the courts see it. Nevertheless, race discrimination is at least sometimes illegal, as a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday. The case relates to Joe Biden’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund, the terms of which are discriminatory. Hans Bader has the story: On Thursday, a federal appeals court issued an injunction against prioritizing COVID relief to restaurants based on their owners’ race and sex, finding that was unconstitutionally discriminatory. The ruling involved the Restaurant Revitalization Fund,...

A group of young Brooklyn men ripped off $2 million in COVID-19 relief funds by submitting fraudulent unemployment claims — and then stupidly posted pictures of themselves with their ill-gotten cash, prosecutors said on Tuesday. Six of the eight defendants — ranging in age from 18 to 25 — were charged in Brooklyn federal court, documents show. Two of the suspects — Armani Miller, 24, and Johan Santos, 19 — are still at large.

(GREENVILLE, SC/FOX Carolina) - On June 30, South Carolina will return to its pre-pandemic unemployment program. On Thursday, Governor Henry McMaster directed the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce (DEW) to end the state's participation in all federal unemployment benefit programs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Governor said the decision is in response to labor shortages. DEW Director Dan Ellzey said there are over 81,600 open job positions across the state. Ellzey said the agency believes reemployment is the best course of action for economic recovery. ------ "What was intended to be a short-term financial assistance for the...

Vaccine virtue-signaling — three words you probably did not know could exist in connection with one another until a pandemic swept the globe — is so very tiresome.In the novel “White Noise” by Don DeLillo, a scene outlines what is called “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Tourists flock to a mundane barn in a meadow, no different from any other. They stand there among the flashing of cameras, unable to even see the barn among the crowd, tucked into a social phenomenon. If we determine this to be like anything in the real world, those in attendance will soon...

A proposal to use $30 million from the city’s share of the latest COVID-19 relief package to fund cash assistance payments to Chicagoans struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic is set to be introduced to the Chicago City Council on Wednesday. The proposal authored by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward) would send 5,000 families $500 per month for a year as part of an effort to study whether a universal basic income could help Chicagoans recover from the economic catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic and fight poverty.

Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income. The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring groups of companies together with a union to provide guaranteed benefits. All told, about 1,400 of the plans cover about 10.7 million...

The $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill proposed by President Joe Biden and approved by Democrats in Congress “will erase the majority of San Francisco’s projected $650 million budget deficit over the next two years,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The Chronicle reported Tuesday that “S.F’s budget will be saved from painful cuts thanks to federal stimulus”:

Less than a majority of Americans approve of the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief measure, an internal survey from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) showed. The survey, taken February 24-28, 2021, among 1,000 voters across 85 battleground congressional districts, found 44 percent expressing support for the left’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief measure, which Democrats in both chambers have approved.