Trump Bashes $4 Billion In IRS Refunds To Illegals

President Obama and Donald Trump see immigration differently. The President’s aggressive executive action on immigration is still being litigated, and Mr. Trump proposes action of a different kind. In the meantime, tax credits and refunds for illegal immigrants have become controversial. Mr. Trump says illegal immigrants get $4.2 billion in tax credits. He can point to a 2011 audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. It confirms that individuals who are not authorized to work in the United States were paid $4.2 billion in refundable credits.

It sounds crazy, and yet one source says Trump is the one being unfair, taking this out of context, and not counting their taxes paid. Bear in mind that undocumented immigrants cannot legitimately get Social Security numbers. However, they can file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number or ITIN. They are not supposed to get the Earned Income Tax Credit, but they can receive the additional child tax credit.

That, rather than Mr. Trump, is the culprit. Mr. Trump might also point out the arguably bigger flap over the illegal immigrants whose status would be legitimized under the President’s executive action. That boondoggle is arguably even bigger, involving the Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet, it is the same refundable tax credit responsible for billions in fraudulent refunds. 

The recipe goes like this. First, get a Social Security Number, then claim the Earned Income Tax Credit for the last three years. Then, wait for the IRS to send you three years of tax refunds. The gambit could apparently work even if you never paid taxes, never filed a return, and worked off the books. And the IRS says this is the way the Earned Income Tax Credit works.

Cautious IRS Commissioner Koskinen himself explained the seemingly bizarre result to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Illegal immigrants covered by the President’s amnesty deal can claim back tax credits for work they performed illegally, even if they never filed a tax return during those years. This written response clarified the IRS chief’s earlier statements, confirming that illegals can get back taxes.

Earlier this year, Mr. Koskinen said that to claim a refund, an illegal immigrant would need to have filed past tax returns. Yet the IRS chief later corrected himself and said that they can claim the money even if they never filed tax returns in the past. According to the IRS, illegal immigrants granted amnesty and Social Security numbers can claim up to three years of back tax credits.

The IRS says a 2000 Chief Counsel Advice on this issue is correct. With the amnesty, illegal immigrants could receive tens of thousands of dollars in tax refunds. Calling the three year tax refund perk a mockery of the law, Senator Grassley noted that illegals would be able to claim billions of dollars in tax benefits.Although the President hasn’t backed down, U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry introduced the No Free Rides Act. The bill would not stop illegal immigrants from filing tax returns, but would prohibit those workers from using the Earned Income Tax Credit.

“My bill is a direct result of the (IRS) announcement,” said McHenry. “It’s very simple. If you’re not here legally, you should not be able to access the Earned Income Credit. It’s for the American taxpayers who are trying to make ends meet.” Rep. McHenry noted that even if undocumented workers were employed in the past, many may have used Social Security numbers that didn’t belong to them.

“President Obama’s immigration action giving millions of illegal immigrants Social Security numbers marked an unprecedented executive overreach,” said McHenry. “Now, we learn that these same people, whose first act on American soil was breaking our laws, might be eligible for up to $24,000 in tax credits. This is simply unacceptable. By introducing the No Free Rides Act we ensure these illegal immigrants will not receive any more benefits intended to help American families.”

Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX) has also reintroduced his No Social Security Numbers and Benefits For Illegal Aliens Act.

Via: Forbes

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Nimby Nation: The High Cost To America Of Saying No To Everything

Fueled by legal advocacy groups, cries of Not In My Backyard are quietly costing the United States economy trillions. The ability of America to flourish is at stake. 

By Christopher Helman and Daniel Fisher

For more than 50 years Onyx Specialty Papers of South Lee, Mass. has carved out a niche selling unusual, high-value products like the Kevlar-reinforced paper used in automobile clutch plates. The company’s twin 100-foot-long paper machines sit in a 150-year-old brick building on the Housatonic River, churning out 12,000 tons of paper a year.

Pat Begrowicz and a business partner bought Onyx from industry giant Mead Westvaco in 2009. She cashed in her kids’ college funds to do so. Now she’s wondering whether that was such a great idea. The problem isn’t labor (starting pay for manufacturing jobs at her 155-employee company is $20 an hour) or even raw materials costs or markets. It’s energy.

Via: Forbes

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[VIDEO] Supreme Court May Have Saved Obamacare, but It Doomed Young Americans’ Health Care Options

Six Americans in black robes have, yet again, saved the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from a major crisis, but the most important part of this story for young people is their atrocious ruling will cause significant problems for the nation’s youngest and healthiest citizens.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the highly anticipated case King v. Burwell, pictures of young Americans celebrating at rallies in Washington, DC flooded the Internet and newspapers across the country. Nothing could be more ironic. Since the ACA was first implemented in 2013, prices for all health care insurance consumers have skyrocketed, but price increases have been particularly shocking for people between 18 and 35 years old.

According to a study by HealthPocket, Inc., the average pre-Obamacare premium cost in 2013 for women 23 years old increased by nearly 45 percent in 2014. Women age 30 saw price increases topping 35 percent.

While cost increases for women under age 31 were higher than the increases experienced by men (22.7 percent) and women age 63 (37.5 percent), their price increases were significantly lower than young men. Prices increased by 78.2 percent for men 23 years old and by 73.4 percent for men age 30.

If young Americans’ health care costs composed a significant portion of U.S. health care spending, these price increases might make some sense, but young people, especially young men, are the healthiest demographic in the nation. As John Graham pointed out in his article in Forbes, an analysis by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners says health care costs for 63-year-olds is five times greater than spending on 22-year-olds.

President Barack Obama’s frequent call for all people to “pay their fair share” apparently doesn’t apply to middle-aged and older Americans.

Via: Human Events

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Subsidies and the Price of Health Insurance

Back in 2010 when ObamaCare was enacted, the Pelosi-Reid Congress was running its second trillion-dollar deficit, with two more still to come. So just when they were borrowing money like never before, Democrats passed the biggest entitlement in decades.

At Forbes on January 4, Ben Munro wrote that “2015 looks to be the first year healthcare spending will reach $10,000 per person.” From that alone, one might conclude that Americans are a sickly lot, for that $10K a person adds up to well more than $3T for the nation. And now it’s being reported that health insurance companies need to raise the price of premiums for 2016.

On June 1 in “Will these big Obamacare rates get approved?” at CNBC, Dan Mangan reported: “There are some eye-popping proposed Obamacare rate increases for next year.” Mangan quoted Blue Cross Blue Shield: “The main driver of the increase in the proposed rates is that the actual claims [are] significantly higher than expected.”

On June 2 in “Health insurers seek big premium hikes for ObamaCare plans in 2016,” Fox News reported: “Dozens of health insurers selling plans under ObamaCare have requested hefty premium increases for 2016, according to preliminary information published Monday by the White House […] many of which are in the double-digit percentages.”

On June 10 in “Why Are The 2016 Obamacare Rate Increases So Large?” at Forbes, Robert Laszewski, a frequent guest on cable TV news, wrote:

You just can’t look at this data and come away with a conclusion other than the big cost increases driven by too few people signing up has started. And it has started a year earlier than most of us expected. … What has concerned many actuaries is how the market penetration for Obamacare slowed considerably in year two in the states with the best first year enrollment results.

Via: American Thinker

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Why The Left Needs Climate Change

Try this out as a thought experiment: what would happen if, tomorrow morning, we had definitive proof that catastrophic climate change was impossible, wasn’t happening, and would never happen. Would Al Gore breathe a big sigh of relief and say—“Well good; now we can go back to worrying about smoking, or bad inner city schools, or other persistent, immediate problems.”

Of course not. The general reaction from environmentalists and the left would be a combination of outrage and despair. The need to believe in oneself as part of the agency of human salvation runs deep for leftists and environmentalists who have made their obsessions a secular religion. And humanity doesn’t need salvation if there is no sin in the first place. Hence human must be sinners—somehow—in need of redemption from the left.

I got to thinking about this when reading a short passage from an old book by Canadian philosopher George Grant,Philosophy in the Mass Age:

“During the excitement over Sputnik, it was suggested that the Americans were deeply depressed by Russian success. I thought this was a wrong interpretation. Rather, there was a great sigh of relief from the American elites, for now there was an immediate practical objective to be achieved, a new frontier to be conquered—outer space.”

This tracks closely with Kenneth Minogue’s diagnosis of liberalism in his classic The Liberal Mind.  Minogue compared liberals to medieval dragon hunters, who sought after dragons to slay even after it was clear they didn’t exist. The liberal, like the dragon hunter, “needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.”

Via: Forbes

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Hostess's Revival: What Can Happen When You're Allowed to Start Fresh

Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes has gotten surprising little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here. 

Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers union called a strike after rejecting management clearly communicated final offer. The company, already in bankruptcy, was through negotiating, and chose to liquidate. The press moaned about how all of this meant the end of an era. Steven Bertoni's Forbes writeup shows how wrong they were, and what a business can accomplish when it's not saddled with legacy costs and constraints. 

Because it received no national press coverage despite affecting workers in 48 states, very few people know that the Department of Labor decided after Hostess's implosion that the company's 18,000 affected workers would be eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance. 

That's supposed to happen when workers lose their jobs because of imports, not because they walked away from their jobs and took their employer down with them. At the time, I estimated the taxpayer costs involved at about $800 million. A February 2012 Investor's Business Daily editorial accurately described the government's decision as "a reward for those who refuse to negotiate, and a sop to the manipulative unions that are most adept at gaming the system. ... It's corruption." - 

Bertoni's Forbes article describes the "Twinkies Miracle Comeback." Readers here really need to, well, digest the whole thing, but here are several key paragraphs (bolds are mine):

Twinkie's Miracle Comeback: The Untold, Inside Story of a $2 Billion Feast

... The new factory (in Lenexa, Kansas) is bright and clean. Tight rows of Twinkies march along the $20 million Auto Bake system with the precision of Soviet soldiers in a May Day parade. Yellow robotic arms, which look like they should be welding Teslas rather than boxing Twinkies, stack snacks with hypnotic rhythm. This 500-person plant produces more than 1 million Twinkies a day, 400 million a year. That’s 80% of Hostess’ total output–output that under the old regime required 14 plants and 9,000 employees. And it’s about to get more efficient: Metropoulos and Jhawar just installed a second Auto–Bake system, this one for Cup Cakes ...

In truth, it’s more a resurrection of an American icon ... Hostess’ closing was a cultural moment across the U.S., offering proof of the dire state of American manufacturing. After over a decade of failing health that saw two bankruptcies and five different CEOs, Hostess finally died on Nov. 16, 2012 after the baker’s union pulled the plug with an ill-conceived nationwide strike. Hostess’ roots went back more than 150 years. It left behind 36 factories, 5,600 delivery routes and 19,000 jobs, creating something of a national mourning, not just for the brands but also for what the demise seemed to say about the country itself.

... How they’d do it? Cherry–picking top assets, modernizing manufacturing and distribution, doubling the shelf life of products and capitalizing on the rare place in pop culture Hostess products still held. “People walk up and thank me for bringing back Twinkies,” says ("Junk Food Billionaire" Dean) Metropoulos, who has previously rebuilt brands like Bumble Bee Tuna, Chef Boyardee and Pabst Blue Ribbon. “No one ever thanked me for saving Vlasic pickles.”

... (In 2012) With the unions myopically unwilling to make concessions necessary to make Hostess viable, the debt–holders shuttered it, engendering those “end of an era” editorials nationwide.

... the liquidation had washed away everything. Yes, the company was gone, but so were the pension costs, the union contracts and the debt. It also unbundled the brands, allowing investors to carve out the best businesses. “

We didn’t have to take on the factories or the routes,” says Metropoulos. “We didn’t have to take all the historical drags on the company.”

Metropoulos and Jhawar targeted the cake business: It had the best recognized brands (Ding Dongs, Ho-Hos and Zingers, in addition to Twinkies and CupCakes) and the longest shelf life.

... Metropoulos spent millions on R&D, working with food lab Corbion to tweak the formula of starches, oils and gums in Twinkies, finally arriving at an acidity level that would prevent staleness and discoloration. The singular goal: Make the Twinkie warehouse-friendly. And while none of this will make Alice Waters’ heart flutter, the team succeeded in making the indestructible snack even more so–it’s (sic) shelf life was more than doubled, to 65 days. Hostess switched to a warehouse system. Delivery costs dropped to 16% from 36% of revenue, and Hostess’ retail reach expanded greatly.

... In July of 2013–less than four months after Metropoulos and Apollo took over operations–the Twinkie was back.

... Fans flocked to stores. Demand was so high that large retailers waived the slotting fees they usually charge brands for shelf space. The Metropoulos and Apollo business plan had predicted $100 million worth of Ebitda (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization — Ed.) for 2014–instead they hit $178 million. Those numbers make Hostess’ $410 million price tag look dirt cheap ... “What they’ve done at Hostess should be a Harvard Business School case study on how to turn around a business,” says (Joseph) Gatto, the Perella (Weinberg) banker.

It also should be a far more visible story in the nation's press. But it isn't. Why is that?

Perhaps because the new Hostess's runaway success demonstrates what could have been accomplished if two other companies in a heavily unionized industry had been allowed to go through legitimate bankruptcies in 2009.

Instead, General Motors and Chrysler went through sham "bankruptcies" where the government deliberately picked winners and screwed the losers, blatantly violating centuries of common law and contract law in the process. It was then when columnist Michael Barone coined the simultaneously appropriate and prescient term "Gangster Government."

How much more efficient, productive, and value-adding could the entire auto industry be right now if managers as smart in their line of work as Dean Metropoulos is in his had been allowed to pick up the pieces of GM and Chrysler and assemble new car business dynamos like the new Hostess, and if other competitors had then been forced to adapt to the new reality?

Sadly, we'll never know — and all except those who were favored are poorer for it.

Via: Newsbusters
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Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat

Updated data from NASA satellite instruments reveal the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since the satellite instruments began measuring the ice caps in 1979. Since the end of 2012, moreover, total polar ice extent has largely remained above the post-1979 average. The updated data contradict one of the most frequently asserted global warming claims – that global warming is causing the polar ice caps to recede.

The timing of the 1979 NASA satellite instrument launch could not have been better for global warming alarmists. The late 1970s marked the end of a 30-year cooling trend. As a result, the polar ice caps were quite likely more extensive than they had been since at least the 1920s. Nevertheless, this abnormally extensive 1979 polar ice extent would appear to be the “normal” baseline when comparing post-1979 polar ice extent.

Updated NASA satellite data show the polar ice caps remained at approximately their 1979 extent until the middle of the last decade. Beginning in 2005, however, polar ice modestly receded for several years. By 2012, polar sea ice had receded by approximately 10 percent from 1979 measurements. (Total polar ice area – factoring in both sea and land ice – had receded by much less than 10 percent, but alarmists focused on the sea ice loss as “proof” of a global warming crisis.)

NASA satellite measurements show the polar ice caps have not retreated at all.

Via: Forbes

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Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.

David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”

His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won't result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is muh more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management.

Marotta said that many clients fear an end-of-the-world scenario. He doesn’t agree with that outcome, but does with much of what has people worried.

“I, along with many other economists, agree with many of the concerns expressed in these dire warnings. The growing debt and deficit spending is a tax on those holding dollars. The devaluation in the U.S. dollar risks the dollar's status as the reserve currency of the world. Obamacare was the worst legislation in the past 75 years. Socialism is on the rise and the NSA really is abrogating vast portions of the Constitution. I don't disagree with their concerns,” he wrote.

In his latest note, he said that Americans should have a survival kit to take in case of a financial or natural disaster. It should be filled with items that will help them stay alive for the first 72-hours of a crisis, including firearms.

“A bug-out bag is a good idea depending on where you live even if the emergency is just power outages, earthquakes and hurricanes. And with your preparedness you will be equipped to help others who might be in need,” he wrote. “Be prepared. Especially because it keeps you from being scared.”

He provided a list of items and even a link to bug-out bags on Amazon.

Via: Washington Examiner

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