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Postmaster General: Postal Service Bailout Would Cost $58 Billion

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Photo Credit: Newsmax

A taxpayer bailout of the U.S. Postal Service would cost about $58 billion through 2017, which Congress could avoid by changing the agency’s business model, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said.

The service, which lost $15.9 billion last year, doesn’t want a bailout, and it would be “unnecessary,” Donahoe said today in prepared remarks for a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

“It may shock you to learn that the Postal Service could be profitable today and for the long-term future; it just needs to operate differently,” he said. “I’m optimistic that Congress will pass a bill this year.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Boomtown 2: Taxpayers Have Spent $15 Trillion on 'War on Poverty'

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Since President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared “war on poverty,” U.S. taxpayers have spent $15 trillion on so-called anti-poverty programs—a figure slightly less than the national debt.

Sean Hannity, Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer, and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon explored the explosive growth of the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in a one-hour Fox News special tonight titled “Boomtown 2: The Business of Food Stamps.”

In 1969, just 2.8 million Americans received food stamps. Today, over 47 million Americans are on food stamps. The Fox News special explained that one contributing factor to the massive expansion of the food stamp program is the crony capitalism that has cropped up around the anti-poverty program.

Soda makers, for example, bag an estimated $4 billion a year in taxpayer money through the food stamp program. Efforts to kill the so-called “soda subsidy” have been met with fierce resistance and lobbying by the soda industry.

In Florida, State Senator Ronda Storms (R-Valrico) introduced a bill last year that would keep taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits from being spent on non-essential items like sodas, candy, chips, ice cream, and other junk foods.

Read more from this story HERE.

Making Crime Pay: Norwegian TV Station Reveals EU Paying Salaries To Imprisoned Palestinians

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Photo Credit: AP

A Norwegian public television investigation that found taxpayer-funded developmental aid to the Palestinian Authority is being funneled to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons has ignited controversy in Norway and could be the tipping point for the European Union’s reconsideration of aid, according to an activist group.

The PA is using foreign aid to pay salaries as high as $3,111 per month to imprisoned terrorists, according to the in-depth report by the NRK, a Norwegian public broadcasting station. The salaries reportedly start at around $400 per month and increase with length of prison time.

The PA has maintained the payments are actually “social welfare” for the families of terrorists, not rewards for murderers of Israeli citizens. But Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide acknowledged last week that the PA mischaracterized the payments.

“It is unfortunate that the incorrect information obtained from the Palestinian Authority was communicated to the Parliament,” said Eide. Members of the Norwegian parliament have called for a reconsideration of funding, and are investigating the issue.

Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli-based activist organization that helped uncover the payments, said the Norwegian government’s response to the controversy could influence policy for the entire E.U. Norway chairs the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates Palestinian developmental aid policy. Other participants include the E.U., the U.S., and the United Nations.

Read more from this story HERE.

CH2M Hill Confesses to Widespread Fraud, Settles with Feds for $18.5 Million; Received $1.3B Stimulus Contract

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Photo Credit: AP

A politically connected engineering company that received massive stimulus contracts has admitted that workers committed widespread fraud under the encouragement of its executives while working on a major taxpayer-funded nuclear cleanup effort.

Employees of CH2M Hill routinely inflated hours worked on the cleanup effort at the Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington state between 1999 and 2008. Company executives sanctioned those violations in order to obtain bonuses that required certain performance benchmarks, according to an agreement between the company and the Justice Department filed in federal court on Friday.

Subsidiary CH2M Hanford Group Inc. (CHG) agreed to pay $18.5 million to resolve civil and criminal allegations brought by the federal government. The civil charges were initially filed by a company whistleblower.

According to a DOJ press release, CHG “routinely overstated the number of hours they worked, and CHG management condoned the practice and submitted inflated claims to the Department of Energy that included the fraudulently claimed hours.”

Members of CHG’s “upper management” facilitated and encouraged that fraud in order to preserve corporate bonuses that required the company meet certain performance measures, according to the court agreement. The timecard fraud took place between 1999 and 2008 when CH2M was servicing a Department of Energy contract worth $2.2 billion. A different CH2M subsidiary was awarded an additional $1.3 billion in 2009 for the Hanford cleanup.

Read more from this story HERE.

Court Stuns Educators With Approval Of Vouchers

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Photo Credit: WNDIn a landmark victory for school choice, the Colorado Court of Appeals surprised educators in the state by affirming the constitutionality of a Douglas County voucher program that allocates money for students who attend “private school partners” rather than government-run schools.

The voucher program came under attack when the organization Taxpayers for Public Education sued the Douglas County School District. The suit challenged the constitutionality of state funding for a program that gave money to parents for their children’s attendance at private religious schools.

In defense of school choice, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and Colorado Springs attorney Stuart Lark filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Association of Christian Schools International, the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs, Shepherd of the Hills Christian School, Southeast Christian School and Valor Christian High School.

“School districts should favor educational choices for parents and their children,” Lark said.

The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that the Choice Scholarship Program was “neutral toward religion.” The court decision also noted that the funds “make their way to private schools with religious affiliation by means of personal choices of students’ parents.”

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Seeks Planned Parenthood Study With Hope To Strip Funding

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Photo Credit: alamosbasementDozens of Republicans in the House and Senate have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine how Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortion services are using taxpayer money.

Those spearheading the effort — Rep. Diane Black (Tenn.), Rep. Pete Olson (Texas) and Sen. David Vitter (La.) — are hoping the study confirms their suspicion that these groups are focusing more on abortion and less on other healthcare services. Black said this finding could be used to justify a reduction in federal funds to abortion providers.

“I firmly believe that organizations which both provide comprehensive health care and respect all life — both the born and unborn — are best equipped to offer the most effective health care services to those in need,” she said in a press release. “My hope is that through greater transparency and accountability we can successfully mobilize the support needed to defund abortion providers — once and for all.”

Black added that Planned Parenthood showed in its latest report that they are providing more abortions and fewer other health services, all while federal funding has increased. “An independent study of the federal funding for abortion providers is necessary to further expose the truth of how these precious taxpayer dollars are truly being used,” Black said.

Federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funding for abortion. But opponents of Planned Parenthood argue that it is not clear the group is ensuring federal dollars are not used for abortions, as required. Olson said there are signs that Planned Parenthood has “failed to properly follow correct billing practices to prevent federal tax dollars from funding abortion services.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Critics Slam Taxpayer-Funded Political Attack: National Cancer Institute Funds Study Calling Tea Party Tobacco-funded AstroTurf

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Photo Credit: Free BeaconCritics of a new study on the Tea Party movement that was funded by a federal agency are lashing out at what they see as improper taxpayer funding for academic work with an overtly political message.

The study in question purports to show that the Tea Party movement was created by and works to advance the interests of the tobacco industry.

Its critics have rejected the study’s findings and expressed particular concern that taxpayer funds were used to support “politically motivated attacks,” in the words of one Tea Party-aligned congressman.

The study, conducted by three academics at the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, claims that the Tea Party was actually created in the 1990s by conservative groups fighting anti-tobacco policies with money they had received from tobacco companies.

“Rather than being purely a grassroots movement, the Tea Party has been influenced by decades of astroturfing by tobacco and other corporate interests to develop a grassroots network to support their corporate agendas, even though their members may not support those agendas,” the study states.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS: $20,000 Minimum Health Care Decree

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Photo Credit: Andrew Aliferis In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.

“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.

Read more on this story HERE.

US Taxpayers Spent an Enormous $1.4 billion on the Obama Family Last Year

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By Alex Pappas. Taxpayers spent $1.4 billion dollars on everything from staffing, housing, flying and entertaining President Obama and his family last year, according to the author of a new book on taxpayer-funded presidential perks.

In comparison, British taxpayers spent just $57.8 million on the royal family.

Author Robert Keith Gray writes in “Presidential Perks Gone Royal” that Obama isn’t the only president to have taken advantage of the expensive trappings of his office. But the amount of money spent on the first family, he argues, has risen tremendously under the Obama administration and needs to be reined in.

Gray told The Daily Caller that the $1.4 billion spent on the Obama family last year is the “total cost of the presidency,” factoring the cost of the “biggest staff in history at the highest wages ever,” a 50 percent increase in the numbers of appointed czars and an Air Force One “running with the frequency of a scheduled air line.” Read more from this story HERE.

This makes Michelle Obama’s lie that Barack “has been struggling with us” all the more difficult to swallow, doesn’t it?