1) Soon Biggest Expenditure In Federal Budget: Interest On The Debt
If Biden continues his wild spending and borrowing spree, by 2031 we will likely be spending more money on interest payments than national defense - or any other program.
Interest payments are now the fastest-growing major expenditure in the budget. The CBO predicts that interest rates will triple from $350 billion when Biden came into office in 2021 to $1.1 trillion in eight years.
Already this fiscal year interest payments are running some $30 billion ahead of last year. For two reasons. One: the debt is $4 trillion higher thanks to Biden. And two: the Fed is raising interest rates to slow Bidenflation, which means that when federal bonds come due, they have to be refinanced at even higher rates.
We don’t get any government services from interest payments. No roads. No hospitals. No national defense or police or fire service or courts or schools. Just payment due for past spending.
Worst of all Biden thinks we are going to get out of the economy with more taxes on businesses and “the rich.”
These are supremely dangerous times we are living in.
2) $200 billion In Unemployment Insurance Fraud/ Improper Payments
We called this over a year ago, and now we have official confirmation.
In testimony to Congress last week, Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner testified that the low-end estimate for improper payments – mostly fraud – is $191 billion. This, in part, because the feds allowed the self-employed to "self-certify" for benefits.
Turner testified:
Applying the estimated 21.5 percent improper payment rate to the approximate $888 billion in pandemic UI expenditures, at least $191 billion in pandemic UI payments could have been improper payments, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.
Based on our audit and investigative work, the improper payment rate for pandemic UI programs was likely higher than 21.5 percent.
DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz added:
We also found that multiple states paid benefits to ineligible individuals, including prisoners, with California estimating it sent $800 million in benefits to 45,000 prisoners...
DOL OIG identified one case where a single Social Security Number was used to apply for unemployment benefits in 40 different states, resulting in the disbursement of a total of $222,532 from 29 of those states.
This theft is especially infuriating because congressional Democrats refused to investigate and called these fraud payments a “cost of doing business.” Now instead of hunting down the fraudsters and reclaiming the stolen money, Biden wants a $200 billion tax hike.
3) House Democrats Voted To Let Illegal Immigrants Vote
The District of Columbia City Council recently voted to allow anyone — including illegal immigrants — who has lived in DC for 30 days to vote in local elections. The House voted last week to block that measure on a 260-162 vote, with support from all Republicans and 42 Democrats.
Here are the 162 Democrats who want illegal immigrants to vote:
As we approach the third anniversary of COVID, the number of world leaders who are admitting they mishandled the pandemic continues to grow.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, told the Spectator magazine last September that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had wholly adopted "the fear narrative” and ignored the cost of lockdowns on health, civil liberties, and the economy: “The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy,” Sunak admitted.
Now Karl Lauterbach, a doctor who is the German health minister and who was the most prominent proponent of lockdowns in his country, concedes that many of the measures were “idiocy.” He says school closures were “a big mistake," even though at the time he called for a suspension of schooling for at least a year.
But he said he believes Germany’s record “ would have been even better if there hadn’t been this constant politicization of the measures.”
Really? You mean the citizens should be criticized for getting the story right? If citizens won’t stand against government tyranny, who will?
5) Fox’s Shannon Bream KOs AZ Gov Katie Hobbs On School Choice
Our media person of the month is Shannon Bream, the new host of Fox NewsSunday, for exposing Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs' hypocrisy on school choice.
The background: Hobbs has prioritized scrapping the state’s new universal school voucher program and redirecting the money to failing public schools. Why? Because she is in the hip pocket of the teacher unions. Bream asked her why she wanted to deny parents a real choice in education when she herself went to private school. Bingo!
Hobbs began babbling that private school was her parents’ idea, one she opposed. Sure she did. She claimed her goal is for every kid in the state to go to an excellent public school. Bream asked her what happens to the kids in failing schools. We are still waiting for an answer to that one.
