By Mike Huckabee
April 17, 2019
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Congressional Democrats are grasping at straws to find something – anything! – to pin on President Trump, and the latest windmill at which they’ve gone a-tilting is Trump’s tax returns. Apparently laboring under the delusion that he makes them out himself and tucks nefarious dealings into them (before sending them to the IRS?) or that they have the mental capacity to understand tax forms made out by a platoon of lawyers and accountants when they don’t even know that the government took over student loans years ago, they are demanding to see Trump’s tax forms.
You’d think they would have learned by now that Trump is rubber and they are glue, and everything they hurl at him bounces off him and sticks to you-know-who. The latest: to comply with their own new standards, a couple of prominent Democrats released their tax forms. And what did they show?
“Beto” O’Rourke and his wife mistakenly took too big of a medical expense deduction and underpaid their taxes by about $4000 in 2013 and 2014 because of a confusing rule based on the taxpayer’s age.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/beto-orourke-underpaid-taxes-in-2013-2014
In 2015, the year Bernie Sanders made over a million dollar thanks to his best-selling book “Our Revolution” (nobody ever went broke selling socialism to suckers), he spent $575,000 on his third home, a lakefront house in Vermont, and gave a whopping 1% of his adjusted gross income to charity.
At least that’s more generous than “Beto,” who in 2017 gave 0.33% of his $370,000 income to charity. But he explained that that’s because his gift to society is himself. For instance, all the time he donates to running for office to improve our mundane lives.
https://pjmedia.com/election/shorter-beto-orourke-my-gift-to-you-is-myself/
So by forcing politicians to release their tax forms, Democrats have already proven that the tax code is so confusing, not even Congress members who wrote it can understand it…and those forms can reveal that a politician is actually a big, fat hypocrite. They just didn’t expect to prove it themselves in front of the whole world before even getting a peek at Trump’s taxes.
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This might surprise you to hear, but I salute Bernie Sanders, and I mean that sincerely, for agreeing to appear on a townhall on Fox News. The Democratic Party leadership is so terrified of being asked a non-puffball question that they refuse to let Fox host one of their debates, even though at the rate candidates are jumping in, they’ll probably have to schedule eleventy-thousand of them. But Bernie sat down for questioning by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and he deserves props for it.
(You can read about or watch the whole thing here: )
That said, there was nothing I heard that will convince me to become a Bernie bro. Although, again, I find myself actually defending him when he was pressed on why he takes the deductions to minimize his income tax bill instead of just voluntarily sending Washington 52% of his income, the way he thinks other millionaires should. Bernie said, “Pftt, come on…I paid the tax that I owe.” He suggested that he wouldn’t pay more than he owed unless he was forced to.
And he’s absolutely right! Everyone should pay their taxes, but nobody should be expected to pay a penny more than they owe. Of course, after that, the hypocrisy came screaming back, when he said they should ask that of Donald Trump. Congressional Democrats keep assailing Trump for allegedly using the tax loopholes they helped create to minimize his taxes, when there isn’t one of them who doesn’t hire the best tax preparers and investment counselors to minimize their own tax bills, even as they’re demanding that everyone else pay more. I say if Trump can legally pay less tax, then more power to him, and the same to every other taxpayer.
If Congress members don’t want people taking advantage of the mountain of loopholes that is our byzantine tax code, then here’s what I’ve been suggesting for over a decade: get rid of the whole stinking thing and replace it with the Fair Tax.
And oh, look: after hearing all these “Democratic” socialists bandy about 70, 80 and 90% tax rates, suddenly, more and more people are coming around to agreeing with that “crazy” idea I was blasted for endorsing when I ran for President back in 2008. Well, you’re a bit late, but I welcome you to the IRS going-away party!
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/abolish-the-income-tax-abolish-the-irs/
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I notice that the big takeaway for most of the media from the Bernie Sanders townhall on Fox News was the fact that the Pennsylvania crowd erupted in cheers when asked if they supported “Medicare for All.” This is being spun as surprisingly high support for government takeover of health care.
Of course, that deliberately ignores the fact that the crowd was a self-selected sample of people who would turn out on a work night to listen to Bernie Sanders for an hour. Of course, they love “Medicare For All.” If I burst into a bar full of alcoholics and yelled, “The drinks are on the house,” I’d get cheers, too. A Bernie crowd would probably cheer the offer of a case of measles if you told them it was free.
I wonder if it might have put a damper on the cheering if the crowd had been told that all the “free” stuff Bernie is promising would cost over $20,000 to every taxpayer in America, on top of what they’re already paying? That’s the big hangover that comes the morning after all the “free” drinks.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bernie-sanders-plan-cost-trillions
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As long as liberal hypocrisy on taxes seems to be a recurring theme today, it was discovered that in 2012, now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who celebrated driving away 25,000 new jobs rather than giving Amazon a tax break) was launching a small publishing business and was quoted in a press release extolling the virtues of tax breaks to help promote businesses. Of course, that was totally different. This was HER business.
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At the link, Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens discusses being accosted by masked, screaming, foul-mouthed “Antifa” protesters who were trying to keep her from speaking at the University of Pennsylvania (the clip includes video of the aggressive protesters whose pathetic antics did not intimidate Ms. Owens.)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/candace-owens-black-vote-is-up-for-grabs-in-2020
So to recap: a group of idiots expressed their opposition to fascism by putting on masks and staging violent mob tactics to try to scare people of opposing views into silence…and their justification for their fascist anti-fascism was that a young, black conservative represents white supremacy?
I think they should take off those masks and trade them for T-shirts that say, “I’m wasting my parents’ money at UPenn.”
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Indiana’s Taylor University (a Christian college) sparked controversy after an alumnus started an online petition demanding that Vice President Mike Pence’s invitation to speak at commencement be rescinded. You see, Pence’s Christian views are “un-Christian,” according to much of the faculty, apparently because he actually believes in the Bible. And there’s all that hateful stuff he said about gay people that a reporter recently tried to dig up, only to discover he never said any of it.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/mike-pences-nonexistent-homophobia
There has been a lot of this bigoted anti-Christian propaganda aimed at Pence, who apparently makes a good target since he also believes in turning the other cheek. But in this piece, he finally responds to some of the unprovoked attacks on him and his religious faith. The Rev. Franklin Graham also weighs in on his behalf. And just in case there’s any question that the attacks on Pence really stem purely from leftist politics and its culture of censorship and oppression rather than genuine religious differences, note who a Taylor professor suggests should speak at commencement instead, to send a message of “reconciliation.”
You guessed it: noted theologian Barack Obama.
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David Forsmark at PJ Media has a unique take on the college admissions scandal that might make you look at the charges against Lori Loughlin in a different light. As he explains it, if she was engaging in a scam, then it was a typical part of an even bigger scam run by colleges to get around a (stop me if you’ve heard this before) government regulation that ignores reality.
Under Title IX, colleges have to provide equal numbers of athletic scholarships to males and females. But the cold fact is that there is simply less interest in women’s sports (both from spectators and female students) than there is in male sports. Colleges need to be able to offer a certain number of scholarships to football players because that’s the only sport that generates revenue and pays for all the other sports (in some schools, basketball, hockey or baseball show a profit, too, and need to attract the best players.)
Consequently, there are a lot of bogus female athletic scholarships created just to balance out the numbers so that enough scholarships can be offered to male athletes. As one commenter notes, this problem is largely found at so-called “elite” schools that offer lots of sports such as lacrosse and fencing. The real “unfairness” is that while the NCAA allows up to 20 rowing scholarships for females (so some schools can give them away like candy), male baseball players, for instance, have to compete for less than a dozen, so students may be really talented but still get rejected.
In other words, as Forsmark points out, it’s possible that Loughlin’s daughter didn’t take the place of a deserving female athlete but of another phony female rower who also wouldn’t have had to show up and do any rowing. The difference is that she allegedly paid for the privilege.
Read the whole article. It’s an eye-opener about how the real scam was created due to well-intentioned but unrealistic government meddling, and how the parents in this scandal were only a small part of it as they sought to use their wealth to take advantage of the bigger scam. Of course, rather than reform the heavy-handed, reality-defying program that started it, the government and college administrators are poised to make it even worse by letting male athletes claim to “identify” as women, compete on women’s teams, and destroy women’s sports entirely, so that real female athletes will be cheated out of scholarships.
This is yet more proof of Ronald Reagan’s rule that one of the three biggest lies of all time is “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.”
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Folks from Hollywood are very talented at creating fantasies, but there’s a reason why “Hollywood bookkeeping” is shorthand for financial fraud and chicanery. As an example, check out actress Alyssa Milano’s Twitter thread that attempts to convince Americans who got a tax cut that they didn’t really get more of their paychecks in their pockets, just because they gave the government a lower one-year, interest-free loan of their money than in previous years. So they should elect people who are promising to spend more money than there is in the known universe and swearing that someone else’s taxes will pay for it all.
Looks as if Hollywood finally found a way to combine creating fantasies with bogus accounting that rips people off.
For the record, to our Hollywood liberal friends: the GOP tax bill not only gave a tax cut to nearly 65% of Americans, it also reduced tax preparation time by least 241 million work hours and saved $2.9 billion for those paying a tax preparer. Not as good as the Fair Tax, which would let you fill out your taxes on a postcard, but a darn good start.
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A new faith-based entertainment company is entering the streaming video market. With Hollywood being uninterested in the faith-based audience (or as studios used to call it back in Hollywood’s Golden Age: “the audience”), or openly hostile (see the attempts to kill the movies “Gosnell” and “Unplanned”), new film studios have been arising to meet the demand for faith-friendly theatrical films.
VidAngel is now entering the market for streaming of faith-based episodic shows direct to homes, a la Netflix and Amazon. They’re launching with a series called “The Chosen” that tells the story of Jesus from the perspective of the people around him. You can learn more, see a trailer for it, and learn where to watch the first episode for free at this link.
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