Tag: Taxpayers

Minnesota Department of Agriculture Asks Public to Weigh In on Food Purchase Assistance Program

The Center Square

Taxpayers have until Dec. 12 to tell the Minnesota Department of Agriculture how they want it to distribute $3.16 million in grants through a community food procurement and distribution program.

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced its Agricultural Marketing Service signed an agreement with Minnesota under the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The American Rescue Plan authorizes the program to maintain and improve supply chain resiliency, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Sept. 7 news release said. The program’s goal is to buy local food from socially disadvantaged farmers and distribute it to the state’s underserved communities. Nationally, the USDA is awarding up to $400 million to states and Tribal governments to buy food from producers in the state or within 400 miles of delivery destination.

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Report: Transit Agencies May Turn to Taxpayers for More Money When COVID-19 Funds Dry Up

The Center Square

Transit agencies could turn to taxpayers for more money when federal COVID-19 money runs out.

With federal money dwindling, some mass transit agencies are preparing to seek more tax dollars at a time when fewer people are riding, according to a report from a credit rating agency.

Some workers never plan to return to the office, creating uncertainties for mass transit agencies and the taxpayers who fund them, especially those more dependent on riders for fare revenue. A new report from S&P Global Ratings said transit systems could seek additional tax dollars when federal COVID-19 money runs dry in 2025.

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IRS Accidentally Posts Personal Information of 120,000 Taxpayers

Minnesota Sun Staff

The IRS briefly made public the personal financial information of roughly 120,000 taxpayers, the agency announced on Friday.

Taxpayers’ Form 990-Ts were temporarily available to public viewing on the IRS website, but the agency has since removed them, according to the Wall Street Journal. Individuals file the form to disclose certain types of income within their retirement accounts.

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Taxpayers to Pay Billions After Biden ‘Forgives’ $10K to $20K in Student Loan Debt per Borrower

The Center Square

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday his administration would “forgive” $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 per year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the plan could cost taxpayers more than $200 billion.

The total income cap is expected to be higher for married couples, likely around double the $125,000 mark, though that has not been confirmed.

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Commentary: Non-College-Educated Taxpayers May Soon Be Responsible for Billions in College Debt

RealClearWire

Most Americans have been conditioned to accept some level of incompetence and inefficiency from government – but not to the extent that federal employees paid by our tax dollars simply admit that they are fundamentally incapable of doing their jobs. Yet shockingly, this is what we are now witnessing with the Department of Education’s failed and convoluted attempt to process claims for student loan cancellation. 

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Analysis: 10 Actions to Reduce Energy Prices That Won’t Cost Taxpayers $740 Billion

The Center Square

Rather than impose higher taxes and more restrictions on domestic production of oil and natural gas, as Senate Democrats voted to do by passing the Inflation Reduction Act, those in the industry proposed 10 actions policy makers can take right now to reduce costs. The industry says its solutions won’t cost taxpayers $740 billion, as the Inflation Reduction Act does, or increase the national debt or inflation, as 230 economists have warned the act will do.

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Analysis: Americans Will Pay for Biden’s Draining of Emergency Oil Reserves

Minnesota Sun Staff

President Joe Biden’s continuous sales of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) could have severe consequences for taxpayers, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration announced plans last Tuesday for another wave of oil sales from the SPR, as well as a proposal to help restock the reserve, according to a White House press release. The Biden administration aims to strategically sell oil from the reserve to boost supplies and fight soaring gas prices, but the rapid draining of U.S. stockpiles could cause taxpayers to foot the bill when the department inevitably refills its reserves.

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IRS Destroyed 30 Million Tax Filing Documents, Lawmakers Demand Answers

The Center Square
Outside of IRS building

The Internal Revenue Service has been under fire for delays and millions of backlogged returns, but now lawmakers are raising the alarm after the federal agency “destroyed” millions of Americans’ tax documents.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig this week asking for answers about why these records were destroyed.

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Commentary: Stimulus Checks Are the Latest Immigration Scam

Admin

A great plague of our contemporary political landscape is that one bad policy begets even more bad policies. Such is the case with many of America’s existing immigration laws.

Federal law, for example, calls for specific enforcement protocols. But our elected representatives have decided that some of those protocols simply should be ignored. This mindset led to ideas like catching and then releasing illegal aliens into our communities, preventing local law enforcement from working with federal law enforcement, and “sanctuary” cities where those who have broken our laws can hide from accountability.

From this witches’ brew of bad ideas has come the latest product rollout, one suited for our time: stimulus checks for illegal aliens. Using the economic damage caused by COVID-19 as a pretext, anti-borders activists and their allied politicians have found a way to sustain those here illegally while creating further incentives for even more foreign nationals to move here.

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Minnesota Taxpayers Spending $3 Million on Malls

The Center Square

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) announced recipients of the $3 million Minnesota Cultural Mall Operator Grants program.

The Legislature passed the $64 million bipartisan Main Street COVID-19 Relief package in 2021 and Gov. Tim Walz signed it into law, which will award grants ranging from $20,000 to $300,000 to 12 cultural mall operators across Minnesota whose facilities lease space to a total of over 1,178 Black, Indigenous, and People of Color business owners.

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Commentary: Parent and School Board Tensions Could Be Eased by School Choice

Minnesota Sun Staff
Young girl in pink long sleeve writing

Public education has been under the microscope lately, especially since many states shut down in-person learning last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning from home via technology, many parents had the chance to hear what their children’s teachers were saying—and they didn’t always like it. In fact, many were downright disturbed by what public schools were teaching their children.

Parents should not be forced to sit by and watch as their children get indoctrinated with progressive ideas they don’t agree with. Assuming it is legitimate for the government—that is, the taxpayers—to fund education, the government should distribute those funds directly to parents in the form of vouchers and allow them to choose where to educate their children. Not only would this allow for more choice in schools, but it would also reduce much of the conflict we are seeing today between parents and school boards across the country.

A common response to voucher proposals is that they would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private religious schools, thus violating separation of church and state. In other words, atheists and progressives argue that they should not have to financially support schools that teach students religious worldviews.

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Taxpayers May Have to Pay for Apple’s Digital ID Program

Minnesota Sun Staff

U.S. states may have to provide funding for Apple’s plan to store government-issued identification credentials in its devices.

The company first announced partnerships with several states in September to develop a digital driver’s license and state identification card that could be stored on a person’s iPhone. However, the technical maintenance of the program, the customer support and marketing, may be paid for by taxpayer dollars and reviewed by Apple, according to documents seen by CNBC.

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Commentary: Don’t Be Fooled by the Bipartisan, ‘Paid For’ Infrastructure Bill

RealClearWire
Capitol building looking up, blue sky in background

Over the course of the pandemic, federal overspending has exploded even by Congress’s lofty standards. While trillion-dollar deficits were a cause for concern before 2020, spending over just the last two years is set to increase the national debt by over $6 trillion. It’s bizarre, then, that the only thing that members of opposing parties in Congress can seem to work together on is fooling the budgetary scorekeepers with phantom offsets for even more spending.

In total, the bipartisan infrastructure deal includes around $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure to take place over five years. Advocates of the legislation claim that it is paid for, but they are relying on gimmicks and quirks of the budget scoring process to make that claim.

Take the single biggest offset claimed — repurposing unused COVID relief funds, which the bill’s authors say would “raise” $210 billion (particularly considering that at least $160 billion have already been accounted for in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline). Only in the minds of Washington legislators does this represent funds ready to be used when the national debt stands at over $28 trillion.

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Commentary: Taxpayers End up Paying off the Insane Tuition Costs of Grad Programs at Elite Colleges

Minnesota Sun Staff
A see of college graduates at the commencement ceremony.

“Columbia and other wealthy universities steer master’s students to federal loans that can exceed $250,000. After graduation, many learn the debt is well beyond their means,” notes the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal reports on Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts Film program, one of the worst examples, in an article titled “Financially Hobbled for Life: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off”:

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.

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Arizona Gains 66,000 New Taxpayers, Mostly from California

The Center Square
Phoenix, Arizona cityscape

Taxpayers are coming to Arizona from other states by the tens of thousands and bringing billions of dollars in annual earnings with them. 

The Internal Revenue Service released its annual migration statistics, a record of address changes by filers and their dependents between tax years. The data released in late May reflects changes from the 2018-2019 tax years, which symbolize moves that occurred between 2017 and 2018. Nationwide, 8 million people relocated to either another state or county. 

Arizona gained 218,736 new taxpayers in that time. Having lost 152,769, that’s a net gain of 65,967 exemptions from one tax year to the next. That’s nearly 1,000 more than the previous tax year.

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IRS: California Shrank by 165K Taxpayers, $8.8 Billion in Gross Income

The Center Square
Aerial shot of a California suburb

California residents of all ages and incomes are leaving for more tax friendly climates, and they’re taking billions of dollars in annual income with them.

The Internal Revenue Service recently released its latest taxpayer migration figures from tax years 2018 and 2019. They reflect migratory taxpayers who had filed in a different state or county between 2017 and 2018, of which 8 million did in that timespan.

California, the nation’s most-populous state, lost more tax filers and dependents on net than any other state.

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Biden Administration Aid to the Palestinians Could Go to Hamas

Minnesota Sun Staff
Hundreds march in New York City to support Palestinians and resistance in Gaza

A spokesperson for the Biden Administration’s State Department confirmed the possibility that some of the aid being sent to the Palestinians could go to the terrorist organization Hamas, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The administration is allocating up to $100 million of American taxpayers’ money to go to the Palestinians, but has repeatedly declined to confirm if there are any safeguards in the aid package that could prevent some of the funds from going to Hamas, the terror group that is responsible for thousands of unprovoked rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks.

An unnamed senior official with the State Department said that “as we’ve seen in life, as we all know in life, there are no guarantees,” with regards to the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on some of the funds.

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Analysis: Senator Elizabeth Warren Appears to be Distorting Reality in Order to ‘Sell’ Her Wealth Tax Proposal

Minnesota Sun Staff

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently revived her campaign proposal for a wealth tax on taxpayers with a net worth exceeding $50 million. Unfortunately, the plan retains the same defects as her previous proposals to tax wealth, along with the same distortions she used to defend it last time.

Warren’s proposal, introduced along with companion legislation in the House sponsored by Rep. Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Boyle (D-PA), would tax wealth above $50 million at a rate of 2 percent, and wealth above $1 billion at a rate of 3 percent.

Senator Warren has routinely presented her wealth tax proposal as a minor, moderate tax on the ultra-wealthy. Just as she did on the presidential campaign trail, Warren is describing her plan as a “two cent” tax. This dishonest framing allows Warren to pretend that the tax is small.

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Commentary: Taxpayers and the Homeless Are Just Pawns in Scheme to Buoy Leftist Donors

Minnesota Sun Staff

Arguably, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is the most incompetent, destructive, negligent, no good, irresponsible mayor in American history. And he’s got plenty of competition right now. San Francisco’s London Breed, Ted Wheeler in Portland, and Bill de Blasio in New York City are all top contenders. Blue City mayors bent on destroying civilization are plentiful, but Garcetti is the worst member of this odious gang.

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Obamacare Loophole Allows Medicaid Fraud, Costs Taxpayers, Report Says

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Affordable Care Act mandated that states accept a hospitals’ decision on the eligibility of all able-bodied adults who verbally report their income to be below the Medicaid level, which has led to many fraudulent eligibility claims, according to a report published Monday.

The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) report examined recently released data from state Medicaid agencies. It specifically looked at the government Medicaid funds that were wasted through false hospitals’ presumptive eligibility (HPE) determinations.

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Report: Taxpayers Billed up to $133,000 per Refugee Resettled in U.S.

Minnesota Sun Staff
Tennessee Star

Breitbart reports, “American taxpayers are billed up to $133,000 per refugee resettled in the United States over the course of a lifetime, a new study reveals.”

In a recent report on the costs to U.S. citizens for its welcoming immigration and refugee policies, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that each refugee resettled in the U.S. especially those in the United States illegally, and use social welfare programs cost American taxpayers anywhere on average between $60,000 and $133,000 over the course of a lifetime.

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State Revenues in Trump Economy so Strong They’re Giving Money Back to Taxpayers

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Grace Carr   Several states are cutting taxes and putting money aside to protect themselves during future recessions as state economies continue to boom since President Donald Trump took office. Almost every U.S. state is experiencing a thriving economy; 48 states will meet or exceed revenue expectations, according to…

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College Apologizes for Taxpayer-Funded Protests at Family Farm

Admin

by Troy Worden   The president of Evergreen State College has apologized, more than a year after the fact, for the Washington state school’s use of taxpayer funds to bus students and educators to a workers’ rights protest at a family farm. KGMI, a news-talk radio station in Bellingham, Washington,…

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