California imposes some of the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, and Governor Jerry Brown’s own budget team says the state could face a budget deficit of $4 billion by the summer of 2020. Even so, the governor maintains the statist view that there is always money for everything. The Golden State…
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As the Associated Press reports, on Thursday, January 5, Shiloh Heavenly Quine, 57, “became the first U.S. inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery.” The procedure cost some $100,000, so Californians might wonder what Shiloh Heavenly Quine did to receive such an expensive procedure on the taxpayers’ dime. In February of 1980 in Los Angeles,…
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Over the past eight years, much of the U.S. federal government’s operations have become something of an unmitigated bureaucratic mess. Whether we’re talking about the Defense Department, the EPA, the DEA, the IRS, the VA, the Energy Department, Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of the Interior, to…
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Customers of Staples Inc. have been enjoying the conveniences of in-store postal services but as Bloomberg reports, that will soon come to an end. The cancellation is a “coup for the Postal Service’s largest union,” the American Postal Workers Union, which fought Staples’ merger with Office Depot and urged customers to boycott the company….
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President-elect Donald Trump has selected South Carolina Representative Mick Mulvaney to be the next director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Mulvaney is an interesting choice for the job, which given many of the public positions that he has taken over the years with respect to wasteful spending in Washington…
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“We are not now in deficit, we were never in deficit and we won’t be in deficit at the end of the year.” That was Susan Hansch, chief deputy director of the California Coastal Commission last August, explaining that the CCC had received almost enough money to repay $1.45 million from the state Department of Finance. According…
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Sometime shortly before January 17, 2016, after the Obama administration had withdrawn roughly $400 billion of U.S. taxpayer money from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Settlement Fund account at the U.S. Treasury, it transferred the withdrawn funds electronically overseas to U.S. accounts at the Swiss National Bank in Geneva, Switzerland. On January 17, 2016,…
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According to the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management, more than 2.7 million people work as civilian employees of the U.S. federal government. For all practical purposes, they are entirely compensated by taxes imposed on the 140 million Americans who are employed in occupations outside of the federal government. Chris Edwards of Downsizing the…
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President Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, the state where he was born and spent his childhood. According to Anita Kumar of McClatchy News, this annual trip cost taxpayers $3.5 million and the total cost of the first family’s travel comes to $85 million, possibly $90 million when further records are released. All told, except…
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Shortly before the holiday season, the Social Security Administration sent out an official letter titled “Important Information.” If you are now at the full retirement age of 66 or older, the letter says, “you may keep all of your benefits no matter how much you earn.” That kind of generosity is hard to top,…
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