The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers of several tax scams.
The scams cover four transactions involving charitable remainder annuity trusts, Maltese individual retirement arrangements, foreign captive insurance, and monetized installment sales.
Read More
Representative Don Beyer (D-VA-08) has a potential work-around to the Senate filibuster that blocks Democrats from significant gun control reform: he’s drafting legislation to enact a 1,000 percent tax on assault weapons, first reported by Business Insider.
“What it’s intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen,” Beyer said, according to Insider.
Read More
Former Democrat New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says teachers’ unions were responsible for keeping schools locked down during the pandemic, a move that has enabled a mass exodus of students from traditional government schools throughout the country.
Given the generally poor academic achievement of America’s students, the steep drop in enrollment means states are now paying more to educate fewer children, and, “paying more for failure,” he asserts.
Read More
In the wake of recent mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma, Democrats are once again sending Americans up a blind alley. Their “solution” is to punish millions of law-abiding gun owners for the crimes of a few evil maniacs. Undeniably, there is a certain appeal to this response. Gun control is a facile “fix” to a complex problem.
Americans have owned guns since the founding, but it wasn’t until comparatively recently that mass shootings became a concern. Guns are not the problem. Our culture is. Broken cultures produce broken human beings. For every school shooter, there are thousands of other weak, confused, mentally disturbed men who are drifting away from society. They aren’t dating, aren’t working, and they spend most of their time in their bedrooms playing video games, smoking weed, watching pornography, and stewing in social media echo chambers.
Read More
Blackrock has gone from being known as the largest asset manager in the world to being known as the investment company that pushes a social agenda on the companies it invests in. From cajoling corporate America into signing the manifesto of stakeholder capitalism, the Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Responsibility, to putting anti-oil board members on the board of oil companies, Blackrock has developed a reputation, at least among conservatives, as a company that is imposing CEO Larry Fink’s social agenda on American capitalism.
In fact, the reputational issue is so prevalent that Fink spent much of the recent annual report rebutting it, arguing that what he is practicing is simply capitalism and that the imposition of climate change minimization measures and other ESG issues relevant to stakeholders is simply capitalism. The standard arguments here are that practicing ESG is not politics but rather risk management. Typically ESG proposals talk about reputational risk or the risk that at some point in the future governments will embrace the values expressed in ESG circles and impose them involuntarily on businesses. In such cases, for example, fossil fuel companies will be stuck with “stranded assets”, i.e. oil and gas wells rendered worthless by the coming age of enlightened energy regulation.
Read More
A three-judge U.S. District Court panel has dismissed with prejudice Paul Goldman’s lawsuit to force new House of Delegates elections in 2022. The Office of the Attorney General had argued that Goldman does not have standing, and the court agreed.
2020 U.S. Census data was delayed, delaying redistricting and forcing 2021 House elections to be held on old lines. Before the election in September 2021, Goldman sued, arguing that population shifts meant that some people would be under-represented, and argued for holding House elections again in 2022. Goldman didn’t gain much outside support and faced opposition from both former Attorney General Mark Herring and current Attorney General Jason Miyares.
Read More
Last week, at least 70 churches in the state of Georgia announced their intentions to split from the United Methodist Church (UMC) over the church’s stance on the LGBTQ community.
Fox News reports that the split marks one of the biggest fractures in recent memory for the UMC, which is the third-largest Protestant denomination in the country. Last Thursday, the North Georgia Conference voted to allow the churches in question to disaffiliate from the broader church. The departing churches will be following the disaffiliation process that was first laid out in 2019 by the UMC’s General Conference, rules that are in effect until the next conference in 2023.
Read More
Over three-fourths of American public schools have reported a rise in the number of students seeking mental health assistance in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As reported by Fox News, the data was released on Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which operates under the guidance of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The report shows that 76 percent of public schools saw staff express concerns about the mental health of their students, including depression, anxiety, and trauma since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020.
Read More
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will testify before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, just days after she admitted she was wrong about inflation earlier in President Joe Biden’s term.
The hearing, which is on “the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget” will only feature testimony from Yellen, according to the committee’s website.
Biden’s budget likely will be under extra scrutiny as gas prices continue to hit record highs and inflation rises at the fastest level in decades.
Read More
The new executive for the national Black Lives Matter (BLM) group has reportedly filed for personal bankruptcy on three separate occasions, raising further questions about the charity’s finances under heavy scrutiny, according to the New York Post.
Cicley Gay, 44, was named chair of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation in April after joining the board of directors and has worked in the nonprofit field for over 20 years, according to her LinkedIn. She filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy as recently as 2016, and also in 2013 and 2005, according to federal court records first reported on by the Post.
Read More
The Bellevue-based Second Amendment Foundation on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and several other officials, challenging the state’s ban on large-capacity magazines for handguns and rifles.
Senate Bill 5078 prohibits the sale of gun magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds, along with the manufacturing, distribution or import of such magazines in Washington.
Read More
Acommemorative postage stamp of former first lady Nancy Reagan was unveiled Monday in a White House ceremony attended by surviving family, historians and first lady Jill Biden who remarked of the portrait-size image on display, “Isn’t this stamp just beautiful.”
When the stamp officially goes on sale next month, Reagan becomes the sixth first lady to have one created in her likeness, following Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison and Lady Bird Johnson.
Read More
State Treasurers in Massachusetts and Nevada have announced their intentions to divest millions of dollars in state funds from investing in gun manufacturers and other firearms-related businesses.
As reported by Newsweek, the two statewide officials, both Democrats, made their plans clear on Thursday, seeking public support for their decisions. In Nevada, Zach Conine (D-Nev.) released a video statement explained his reasoning for seeking to cut ties between companies that produce “assault-style weapons” and the $47 billion in state funds that his office oversees.
Read More
Illicit trade has increased significantly over the last several years, fueled in part by the growth in internet sales and the COVID-19 pandemic. While this criminal activity is happening in communities throughout the United States, the money often flows to dangerous organizations based overseas. Combating this issue is complex, but today we see a growing willingness to combine forces to help fight this danger.
Two years ago, pandemic-related shortages in health care supplies created an ideal environment for counterfeiters and other criminals. Front line health care workers needed personal protective equipment and were too often getting swindled or receiving fraudulent products that could put them at risk. This even extended to medicines and pharmaceuticals.
Read More
Attorney Michael Avenatti was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison for defrauding ex-porn star Stormy Daniels, a former client whose legal wrangling with then-President Trump made Avenatti a popular albeit brief cable news celebrity for bashing Trump.
Read More