Free Republic

Out of Control: Few remember it now since the news cycle in America is 24/7/365, but POTUS Donald Trump’s first budget proposal sought to slash tens of billions of dollars from a variety of federal bureaucracies. In January 2017, just a days before the president was inaugurated, we reported that he planned to cut entire federal agencies as he sought $10.5 trillion in cuts over a period of 10 years. Who but a billionaire businessman knows better how to balance budgets by trimming costs and eliminating duplication and waste?

Populist Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has ordered that benefits for asylum seekers be substantially reduced, saying the money saved will be given to police working overtime shifts instead. The new policy will greatly reduce the amount of money asylum seekers receive but will also limit access to integration courses for those who have been approved for a residency permit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. “More controls and less spending. In the area of immigration, things are finally changing, as promised,” Salvini, who leads the populist League, said. Currently, migrants receive between 35 to 45 euros per day from Italian taxpayers...

I cross river, Poor and broke, Take bus, See employment folk. Nice man Treat me good in there, Say I need Go see Welfare. Welfare say, 'You come no more, We send cash Right to your door.' Welfare checks, They make you wealthy, Medicaid It keep you healthy! By and by, Got plenty money, Thanks to you, TAXPAYER dummy. Write to friends In motherland, Tell them 'come, fast as you can' They come in buses And Chevy trucks, I buy big house With welfare bucks. They come here, We live together, More welfare checks, It gets better! Fourteen families, They...

Hat Tip: Kevin Collins I have never heard this said as simply or as well. Class war at its best. The folks who are getting the free stuff don't like The folks who are paying for the free stuff , because The folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer Afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff. And the folks who are paying for the free stuff Want the free stuff to stop. And the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more Free stuff on top of the free...

City officials are trying to figure out if $33.3 million is missing from the city’s main bank account. The discrepancy is the amount the city reports having in its records vs. what bank statements show and was first flagged in the city’s 2017 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), released in February. But the problem wasn’t widely known to the public until the current series of budget hearings — in which Councilman Allan Domb has peppered every city financial official about the unaccounted-for funds. “I’m flabbergasted,” Domb said as he questioned the city’s treasurer earlier this month. “There could be a...

In Douglas County, Colorado, the front line of the fight for school choice and vouchers on the SCOTUS level, Republican voters outnumber Democrats about two to one. Yet until recently, Republican taxpayers .. paying about $1.25 million a year to fund Democrats’ political campaigns. How so? Most of the district’s 4,300 plus teachers belonged to the local American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, to which they paid about $1.25 million in dues annually, according to the union’s IRS filings. Since teachers’ salaries are paid by the county’s property tax payers, their dues come out of those salaries. So the $1.25...

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, Colorado collected $25.4 billion in state and local taxes—or $4,590 for every man, woman, and child. While this is an impressive sum of money, it tells us little about whether or not the average Colorado taxpayer can afford this level of taxation. ... Colorado’s state and local tax burden (tax collections divided by private sector personal income) was the sixth lowest in the nation for FY 2016 at 11.8 percent—or -17 percent below the national average of 14.3 percent. ... Colorado’s tax burden has increased over time by only 3 percent to 11.8 percent in...

Truth in Accounting .. based on fiscal year 2016 comprehensive annual financial reports .. found that 64 cities do not have enough money to pay all of their bills, and in total, the cities have racked up $335.4 billion in unfunded municipal debt. ... Government reports are lengthy, cumbersome, and sometimes misleading documents ... taxpayers and citizens deserve easy-to-understand, truthful, and transparent financial information from their governments. ... to balance the budget, elected officials have not included the true costs of the government in their budget calculations and have pushed costs onto future taxpayers. ... TIA was unable to rank...

Why is the U.S. government withholding salary information on nearly 255,000 employees whose salaries are paid for by American taxpayers? Over the past 11 years, our organization, OpenTheBooks.com, summed up and posted online the salaries and bonus information for nearly every person employed in federal government agencies – a tally that mostly keeps growing and growing. This year, our auditors filed our standard Freedom of Information Act request for the same information in Fiscal Year 2017 – and we got a big surprise. For the first time, the government’s response involved massive and targeted deletions of salary data. A total...

Refugees, which is it: Meatpacker laborers or helping the “oppressed?” Posted by Ann Corcoran on January 4, 2018 Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum tries both arguments in USA Today. Ali Noorani on twitter: @anoorani https://twitter.com/anoorani?lang=en I wasn’t planning to post on one more hysterical story about Trump refugee numbers being low and thus decimating the refugee contractor industry, but I can’t resist mentioning one little bit of the story entitled: Refugee admissions to U.S. plummet in 2017 Before I get to Noorani, Mark Krikorian summed it up with this: “Elections have consequences,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of...

Land of leaving: Moving companies rank Illinois No. 1 for outbound vans Studies by two major American moving companies rank Illinois as the top “outbound” state of 2017. On Jan. 2, United Van Lines released its 41st annual National Movers Study and Atlas Van Lines released its 2017 Migration Patterns study. United based the study on its customers’ household moves made in 2017, and Atlas studied nearly 73,000 interstate and cross-border relocations of household goods from Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 15, 2017. In both studies, Illinois was home to the highest rate of outbound moves in the nation. United’s...

Illegal immigration costs taxpayers in all 50 states a total of $89 billion, and California, where an illegal on Thursday was cleared of murdering Kate Steinle despite admitting to the shooting, pays the most at $23 billion . ... The costs cover added expenditures for education, welfare, law enforcement, and medical care. When federal costs are included, the price tag nationally soars to $135 billion a year. FAIR’s data also includes the offset of taxes paid by illegal immigrants, though the numbers are much lower. In the state and local column, they are $3.5 billion. Nationally they are $15 billion....

Tax Reform: What do you call a tax break that delivers 88% of the benefits to upper-income families and subsidizes rich states at the expense of poor ones? If you're a Democrat, you call it a sacred cow. One provision of the Republican's tax-cutting plan that has drawn intense opposition from Democrats is the elimination of state and local tax deductions for those who itemize. ... Fewer than 22% of tax filers even claim the state and local tax deduction, and the vast majority of these are higher-income families. While 78% of those with incomes above $200,000 claim the deduction,...

President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure may be unprecedented in size and ambition, but it mimics a controversial scheme championed by Vice President Mike Pence when he was the governor of Indiana. That’s why Pence is the public face of the Trump initiative, and executives from financial firms that helped privatize Indiana’s toll road are in the White House, busily sculpting Trump’s national plan. Pence and his allies like to boast about how Indiana sold control of major roads to private firms, claiming the move prompted corporations to invest money in infrastructure that would otherwise have...

Broadly, the costs include $29 billion in free medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement and $46 billion for free education. So says the Federation for American Immigration Reform in its report, titled "The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers," which is the most comprehensive cost tally from FAIR.

Multi-Billion Dollar Stadiums: The Seen vs. the Horrid Unseen By Allan Golombek September 27, 2017 In 1995, the Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers to help build a new stadium. After 20 years in the Gateway City, the Rams moved right back where they came from – leaving the people of St. Louis and Missouri stuck with a $6 million a year tab to pay for an empty football field. American taxpayers spend billions of dollars a year to lure professional sports teams from one place to another in one of...

Facing intense pressure from abortion activists, the pro-abortion Republican governor of Illinois may sign a bill forcing state taxpayers to pay for abortions up to birth.

. . . . During the Spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, Democratic lawmakers passed House Bill 40, on a party line vote (62-55 in the House on April 25th and 33 to 22 in the Senate on May 22nd). This legislation will force taxpayers to fund abortions for women on Medicaid and state workers on the state’s health insurance plan. Based on the increased number of new Medicaid recipients in the last 5 years, Illinois taxpayers could be complicit in the deaths of 15,000 more babies per year. State Rep. Peter Breen (R-Lombard) is on record saying that...

Taxpayers in the United States will face a steep bill if the Trump administration signs legislation to extend legal status to so-called “Dreamers,” the illegal aliens who arrived as children and are now protected under the Obama-holdover unlawful executive order known as DACA. The cost of a legislation to legalize childhood arrivals is likely to be far higher than earlier attempts because of Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes the costs of health insurance for millions of Americans and would likely foot the bill for many of those whose residency in the U.S. would be legalized by...

A day after President Donald Trump again promised to build a border wall during his Arizona speech, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) declared that Trump’s border wall “is a stupid use of taxpayer money” in a Wednesday tweet.