$2,883,250,000,000: Federal Taxes Set Record Through August

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money-ap_photo-j_scott_applewhite-2The federal government raked in a record of approximately $2,883,250,000,000 in tax revenues through the first eleven months of fiscal 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 through the end of August), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released Friday.

That equaled approximately $19,346 for every person in the country who had either a full-time or part-time job in August.

It is also up about $198,425,330,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $2,684,824,670,000 in revenue (in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars) that the Treasury raked in during the first eleven months of fiscal 2014.

Despite the record tax revenues of $2,883,250,000,000 in the first eleven months of this fiscal year, the government spent $3,413,210,000,000 in those eleven months, and, thus, ran up a deficit of $529,960,000,000 during the period.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total seasonally adjusted employment in the United States in August (including both full and part-time workers) was 149,036,000. That means that the federal tax haul so far this fiscal year has equaled $19,345.99 for every person in the United States with a job. (Read more from “$2,883,250,000,000: Federal Taxes Set Record Through August” HERE)

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Air Force Pilot Brutally Attacked for Having This Flag on Motorcycle

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olympia-hate-crime[Last week], masked men rioted in front of City Hall in Olympia, Washington. The they blocked traffic and smashed the windows of city hall.

The violence culminated in a brutal mob attack on a biker, who also happens to be a US Air Force pilot. The man was apparently targeted because he had a Confederate flag on his motorcycle.

The victim was hit in the shoulder with a baseball bat, sprayed with mace, and hit with other weapons. The mob tried to push him off his motorcycle, but he miraculously got away. Surveillance video of the mob shows people throwing projectiles and wielding clubs.

Olympia’s FOX affiliate comically described the events as “a peaceful protest turned violent.” They is no indication that any attempt was ever made to have a “peaceful” protest. The rioters arrived with baseball bats, golf clubs, and bottles full of red paint. They all wore masks and matching black clothes, which is designed to make it harder for police to prove which perpetrators committed which crimes. (Read more from “Air Force Pilot Brutally Attacked for Having This Flag on Motorcycle” HERE)

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Yale Establishes Islamic Law Center Thanks to $10M From Saudi-Sharia Banker, Alleged Bin Laden Financer

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Saleh-Abdullah-Kamel-Reuters-640x480Saleh Abdullah Kamel, a Saudi banker who is now worth billions of dollars thanks to his success with Sharia-compliant financing, has donated $10 million to Yale University as part of a successful effort to build an Islamic Law Center at the Ivy League school.

“Mr. Kamel’s extraordinary generosity will open up exciting new opportunities for Yale Law School and for the entire university, said Yale President Peter Salovey. “The Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization will enhance research opportunities for our students and other scholars and enable us to disseminate knowledge and insights for the benefit of scholars and leaders all over the world.”

Professor Anthony Kronman, a new co-director of the Islamic Law Center, said of the school’s new addition:

“The contemporary challenges of Islamic law are broadly relevant to political events throughout the entire Islamic world and those are developments that are watched by a much larger audience of people who in many cases have not much knowledge at all of the history and traditions of Islamic law.”

“It’s the responsibility of universities to teach and instruct and that obligation applies with particular force where an issue or a subject tends to be viewed in an incomplete or inadequate or even caricatured way. There the responsibility to teach and enlighten is even stronger,” he added. (Read more from “Yale Establishes Islamic Law Center Thanks to $10M From Saudi-Sharia Banker, Alleged Bin Laden Financer” HERE)

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Boston Bombers Were ‘Refugees Seeking Safety’ and Obama Wants 10,000 MORE of Them

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boston-750x533Obama is willing to import 10,000 “refugees” from Syria into America. These refugees will mainly be Muslim men . . .

The Syrian operative claimed more than 4,000 ISIS gunmen had been smuggled into western nations – hidden amongst innocent refugees . . .

According to Washington post:

With their baseball hats and sauntering gaits, they appeared to friends and neighbors like ordinary American boys. But the Boston bombing suspects were refugees from another world — the blood, rubble and dirty wars of the Russian Caucasus.

(Read more from “Boston Bombers Were ‘Refugees Seeking Safety’ and Obama Wants 10,000 MORE of Them” HERE)

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Expatriates Choosing to Leave the U.S. Rather Than Pay Taxes

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102344610-78532484.530x298More Americans renounced their citizenship and terminated their long-term residency in the first three months of the year than ever before, courtesy of the crackdown in foreign tax rules.

The upsurge subsided some in the second quarter but has been ongoing since the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service began aggressively enforcing tax rules for American expatriates. The crackdown on the Foreign Bank Account Report is fresh, though the law has been in existence since 1970. Under the law, U.S. taxpayers are required to file if they held one or more foreign accounts totaling more than $10,000 over the course of a year.

“Many people have been getting caught up on their U.S. tax filings and then renouncing,” said Andrew Mitchel, an international tax lawyer who analyzes Treasury Department data.

For a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate and gift tax returns and paying estimated taxes are generally the same whether one is in the country or abroad. A person’s worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where he or she resides.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is intended to ensure that the Internal Revenue Service obtains information on accounts held abroad by U.S. taxpayers at foreign financial institutions. (Read more from “Expatriates Choosing to Leave the U.S. Rather Than Pay Taxes” HERE)

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This GOP Candidate Will Be the First to Drop out of 2016 Race

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635652263103535809-nhrepublicansBy Theodore Schleifer. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who insisted he learned lessons from his disastrous 2012 presidential campaign, dropped his second bid for the White House on Friday after just 100 days.

“Today, I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States,” Perry said in an address in St. Louis that virtually mirrored his standard stump speech until the very end. “Life is good. I am a blessed man.”

The departure of Perry, who had little support in early-voting states or among the GOP donor class, is unlikely to alter the contours of the Republican race. But Perry nevertheless implored his supporters in an email to back a candidate who embodies the principles of conservatism.

“The conservative movement has always been about principles, not personalities,” Perry said, before making a not-too-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, the GOP’s current front-runner. “Our nominee should embody those principles. He — or she — must make the case for the cause of conservatism more than the cause of their own celebrity”…

He raised only about $1 million in the first fundraising quarter, and he never had enough supporters for him to earn a spot in the premier GOP debates. Back in Texas, he remained under indictment on an abuse-of-power charge. (Read more about this GOP candidate HERE)

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After Being Consigned to an Undercard Debate, Perry Drops Out

By B. Christopher Agee. Just days before the second Republican presidential debate, the Associated Press reported Friday that Rick Perry is on the cusp of becoming the first to bow out of the race. Western Journalism previously reported that the former Texas governor was one of five candidates to be consigned to an undercard debate preceding CNN’s prime-time presidential faceoff Wednesday.

According to two separate AP sources, Perry will announce his decision Friday evening at an event in Missouri.

Speculation has brewed for roughly the last month that Perry – who ended his 2012 presidential bid in January of that year – would be the first GOP contender to drop out.

Politico reported in August that roughly half of the Democrats in early primary states shared such a prediction, along with nearly as many Republicans. The recognition that his campaign was in trouble, however, was not necessarily a denunciation of his message. (Read more from “This GOP Candidate Will Be the First to Drop out of 2016 Race” HERE)

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Club for Growth: Trump ‘Worst Republican, Simply Awful’

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Donald TrumpClub for Growth President David McIntosh released an email letter this weekend saying the group was not going to “back down” in their fight against Donald Trump.

McIntosh claimed Trump is “posing” as an anti-establishment conservative, but in reality he’s a liberal.

The letter accuses the billionaire of supporting single-payer socialized medicine “to the left” of Obamacare; advocating the largest tax increase in history; opposing a flat tax; use of eminent domain laws to seize private property; and protective tariffs that will lead to “massive trade wars.”

McIntosh described Trump as the “worst Republican candidate on economic issues” and that “short of Bernie Sanders, he may be the most liberal candidate” in the race.

Trump, for his part, has also trashed the Club on Twitter, claiming they run an “extortion” racket after they asked him for a donation that he declined to give. (Read more from “Club for Growth: Trump ‘Worst Republican, Simply Awful'” HERE)

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GOLDMAN SACHS: Oil Prices Are on the Verge of Plunging to $20 per Barrel

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oil-prices1Oil prices have been on a rollercoaster ride over the last year. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil tumbled late in 2014 from over $100 (£64.78) per barrel to just around $45 per barrel early this year.

After a recovery back to around $60 per barrel during the early summer, prices have gone through the floor again, down to $45.12 again today . . .

The price of a barrel of oil could go to just $20 soon, according to Goldman Sachs analysts led by global commodities research chief Jeffrey Currie.

There’s a huge surplus of oil in the world, put down to both buoyant supply and weaker demand, and that could leave prices at levels not seen in decades. Here’s a snippet from Goldman’s latest note on oil:

The oil market is even more oversupplied than we had expected and we now forecast this surplus to persist in 2016 on further OPEC production growth, resilient non-OPEC supply and slowing demand growth, with risks skewed to even weaker demand given China’s slowdown and its negative EM feedback loop… While not our base case, the potential for oil prices to fall to such levels, which we estimate near $20/bbl, is becoming greater as storage continues to fill. (Read more from “GOLDMAN SACHS: Oil Prices Are on the Verge of Plunging to $20 per Barrel” HERE)

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Mike Huckabee Unveils Ground Game for 2016

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Huckabee2-Getty-640x480GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is expanding beyond his religious liberty message as his campaign lays out Huckabee’s battle plans for the 2016 race.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Senior Communications Advisor Hogan Gidley and Huckabee’s campaign manager, his daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders, explained what the former Arkansas governor plans to do differently in the 2016 race than he previously did in 2008, arguing experience is on Huckabee’s side.

“You guys know at the end of the day, you don’t vote for someone you don’t like,” Gidley said, pointing to Huckabee’s high favorability rating.

To his credit, Huckabee has one of the highest favorability ratings among GOP presidential candidates according to a recent Gallop poll, which has him with a national favorability rating of 57 percent.

Even more impressive is Huckabee’s favorability levels in Iowa at 67 percent and South Carolina at 59 percent, which are based on an average of recent polls. (Read more from “Mike Huckabee Unveils Ground Game for 2016” HERE)

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Donald Trump Says Illegal Alien Deportations Done in Two Years

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BN-KE638_Trump0_G_20150907180316Donald Trump estimated that it will take 18 months to two years to get the roughly 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally to leave the country, and that he would then build a wall running along the border with Mexico.

The businessman’s statement made on a call with Alabama Republicans Thursday night added a bit of specificity to the Republican presidential frontrunner’s hardline stance on immigration. Mr. Trump released a six-page policy paper on immigration last month, and reporters have asked for details about how it would work since.

The Alabama Republican Party hosted the dial-in call with Mr. Trump Thursday night as part of series with the 2016 presidential candidates. Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have also participated.

On the call, Mr. Trump was asked for details about how long it would take to round up illegal immigrants living in the U.S., with the questioner asking if five or ten years was an appropriate timeframe. Mr. Trump said his two year benchmark could be met with “really good management.”

“We have to get them out. If we have wonderful cases, they can come back in but they have to come back in legally,” Mr. Trump said in an audio clip posted on YouTube Thursday night by a person on the call. (Read more from “Donald Trump Says Illegal Alien Deportations Done in Two Years” HERE)

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