Taxing “unrealized capital gains” sounds like a catchy and obscure way to make wealthy people pay more in taxes, but it doesn’t work.  A government that moves in this direction ignores the reality that people are not static.  The process also involves “taxing wealth” which then becomes an arbitrary definition.

Unrealized capital gains are not income, they are simply increases in value.

If your home was worth $200,000 last year and $300,000 this year, you have an unrealized capital gain of $100k.   A 15% tax bill on that value increase means the homeowner would have to pay $15,000 to the IRS.

Joe Biden is proposing to pay for his multi-trillion expansion in debt through this type of tax upon billionaires.   Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted this was part of their thinking to help pay for the Biden budget last Sunday.  WATCH:

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Proposing a tax on money that does not exist is the peak of government.   Sure the proposal applies only to billionaires who have massive gains in their stock portfolios, but billionaires are not esoteric titles.  Billionaires are people who can, if needed, move their physical location and avoid any U.S. tax on their wealth.

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The New York Post has an excellent expose’ [See Here] showcasing just how manipulative the legislative tricks are within the mega-trillion dollar human infrastructure and Build Back Better bill.

As anticipated by most political observers, the Democrats are using budgetary tricks to avoid the Congressional Budget Office putting a real price tag on their legislation.  The article is easy to understand even though the legislative tricks are far beyond anything any congress has ever attempted.

(New York Post) – After months of criticizing Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for balking at the original $3.5 trillion price tag, congressional Democrats are finally accepting reality and paring President Biden’s social welfare package to between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion over the decade.

Does this mean they are responsibly removing the bill’s worst provisions and crafting fiscally sustainable legislation? Of course not!

Instead, welcome to the gimmick Olympics, where progressives are using classic accounting tricks to hide the true cost of the bill.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his involvement in the drafting of a DOJ memo to the FBI requesting support for investigations of parents who attend school board meetings across the country.

While the topic is downplayed by U.S. corporate media, the specifics of the issue are pertinent in that they highlight the politicization of the Justice Department by DOJ officials throughout main justice and the various offices of U.S. attorneys.

Garland was prompted to write his instructions as an outcome of the White House coordinating with leftist political operatives within the education system, specifically the National School Board Association.

It seems apparent, from the questioning and responses today, that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco was the central DOJ official who coordinated the political intent of the memo.  Monaco was previously President Obama’s homeland security advisor and lawyer in the White House.  Within the main justice structure, Lisa Monaco is now the head of the DOJ National Security Division, the agency given the prosecutorial power within the Garland memo.

The background of the memo involved parents becoming aware of Critical Race Theory (CRT), essentially Marxist lesson plans within various regional school boards.  The parents responded to the information by confronting school boards across the nation.  The left-wing political operatives were caught off guard by the massive assembly and grassroots organization of parents in almost all states.

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One of the lesser highlighted aspects to Attorney General Merrick Garland using the FBI to investigate parents as domestic extremists when they attend school board meetings, is that Garland put the prosecutorial process in the DOJ- National Security Division (DOJ-NSD).

From the perspective of the general public, the DOJ-NSD has become a well known division within the DOJ in the past several years, because it was within this division where the lawfare alliance constructed their political targeting operations against candidate Donald Trump.  The DOJ-NSD is where the secretive title-1 FISA applications are created and submitted to the FISA court.

As established by AG Eric Holder and DAG Sally Yates, the DOJ office of inspector general, the internal self-checking mechanism to act an a watchdog, was also blocked from having oversight into the DOJ-NSD throughout the era of Barack Obama.  This lack of oversight was intentional to keep the DOJ-NSD political operations hidden from any review.

The DOJ-NSD was the home for John Carlin, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann and Bruce Ohr among others who conducted the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s classified email use and later into candidate Donald Trump via the FBI Crossfire Hurricane operation.  It is the DOJ National Security Division that selects targets for prosecution (ex. FARA) based on political affiliation.   In this round of questioning by Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator focused on the use of the DOJ-NSD by Merrick Garland.  WATCH:

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This evening Senator Josh Hawley released an email (via Twitter) showing the evacuation guidelines given by the administration to the U.S. officials on the ground in Kabul Afghanistan.  The email details quoted instructions to Gregory A Floyd from someone in the administration speaking on behalf of Joe Biden.

As noted by Hawley: “This email was shared w/ me by an American official present in Afghanistan during the evacuation who was shocked by Administration’s failure to vet Afghans before they were evacuated. Email details orders from Joe Biden to fill up the planes – even without vetting:”

Team,

President Biden phoned Ambassador Wilson with the following directive about who to clear to board evacuation flights.

 “1. Anyone with a valid form of ID should be given permission to go on a plane if that person plausibly falls into the categories we will evacuate: U.S. citizens and LPRs plus their immediate families, LES plus their immediate families, those entitled to an SIV, and Afghans at risk.

2.  Families including women and children should be allowed through and held to fill out planes.

3.  Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available.  Err on the side of excess.”

This guidance provides clear discretion and direction to fill seats and to provide special consideration for women and children when we have seats. I expect that C17 flight volume will increase.

Thank you.

Greg

There is a great deal of political media time devoted to the Virginia gubernatorial election that takes place next week.  There is also a major disconnect in the analysis of Virginia politics and what takes place there, so it’s worth pausing and reminding everyone about its unique status.

When an event happens in New York City, the scale of media coverage is so disproportionate to the issue it has historically been laughable.  The media are centered in NYC, so the media focus on events in NYC as if the rest of the country cares.  We don’t.  A waterline break in a NYC subway station gets the scale of national media coverage as if Hoover dam collapsed; most Americans just roll their eyes.

However, because of the proximity to Washington DC, and because of where almost all the federal workers inside the DC system live, that same scale of skewed emphasis is also evident in Virginia when it comes to anything political.

Virginia politics is where the UniParty swamp creatures argue among themselves.  In Virginia the elites in the DNC club debate their high-brow outlooks with the elites in the RNC club.  Virginia is where the traditional DC political establishment of both clubs gather socially to pontificate about their importance in the world of everything political.

Is the whole state like this?  No.  However, the DC beltway is so influential and so populous the other parts of the state are essentially irrelevant to election outcomes.

As the U.S. federal government grew, so too did the swamp physically expand to make room for all the high-minded bureaucrats who run the machine.  Northern and Eastern Virginia were taken over and absorbed into the swamp, the rest of Virginia was cast into the role of Oliver asking for a bit more soup.

When Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were talking about smelly WalMart people, they were really just encapsulating the reality that exists in Virginia, elites -vs- proles, they were not lying; they just said the accepted quiet part out loud and a lot more people saw it, that’s all.

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The screamingly high rate of pricing inflation is catastrophic to the American working middle class; however, there is one small benefit.  More and more people are waking up to the reality that free market principles have been destroyed; what we have now are markets controlled by massive multinationals.

This isn’t news for CTH readers.  Long before prices started to rise, we stood up against pressure from so-called ‘conservative’ pundits to outline that free markets were a joke in the modern economic era.  The truth inside the economic argument is precisely why we stood up to support candidate Donald J Trump in 2015; and the truth inside that economic argument is exactly why we will stand again to support him if he runs again in 2024.  Everything, e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g… every scintilla of a thing, centers around the economics of it.  Economic security on every scale is what keeps YOU free.

In a brilliant outline of how the beef and cattle industry is now trying to fight back against the multinationals of Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef, Matt Stoller uses the cattle industry to talk about what we have outlined on these pages for ten years.   The distance from the red line (steer price) to the blue bar (beef price) is the scale of the multinational profits inside this controlled commodity:

MATT STOLLER – […] Despite high consumer prices, independent ranchers are losing money, and going out of business. “If we don’t get some of these problems fixed quickly, we won’t have any independent ranchers in this country,” explained Oklahoma Farmers Union president Scott Blubaugh.

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the most adored leader amid global leftists.  She is worshiped and praised by leftists, globalists, socialists and those who love big government around the world.  Arden is unapologetic in her views that government should rule the citizens.

Recently, the mad queen of smiley-faced fascism was asked if her national vaccination mandate was intended to create two classes of citizens in New Zealand, vaccinated and unvaccinated.  The Prime Minister did not flinch before gleefully exclaiming that is entirely her objective, “Yup, that’s exactly what it is, yep.”   WATCH:

https://youtu.be/17PZ1MvgDTM

The government of New Zealand acts like COVID-19 is a raging swarm of dragons circling the country waiting to snatch people out of their safe places. 

Worse still, apparently most of the country believes the panic and fear that has been pushed, and they tremble with cowed obedience to the regime.

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During a House Judiciary Committee hearing today, Representative Thomas Massie questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about FBI agents and possible FBI informants planted in the crowd in DC to organize events.

Within the questioning, Massie presented Garland with a picture of Ray Epps, a former leader with the Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers attempting to agitate the crowd.

Massie also played a video [also below], highlighting how Ray Epps was one of the key people trying to stir up trouble and create an agitated mob response. Ray Epps is an interesting possibility, because he was never arrested or charged by the FBI. As pointed out by Sean Davis on Twitter, “At one point, the FBI had his picture up on its page of people it wanted to question (Photograph 16). Not only was he not arrested, his picture was quietly removed from the FBI “Capitol Violence” page.”

The issues of Ray Epps not being arrested; and then his photograph mysteriously being removed; can be reconciled by a hypothesis that Epps was actually working for and operating with instructions from the FBI itself. Not only would this not be surprising, it would actually track directly with coordinated activity the FBI is known for. WATCH (prompted):

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Below is the video that Thomas Massie shared….

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House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan delivered opening remarks before the questioning of Attorney General Merrick Garland today.  Jim Jordan notes the Biden administration’s rush to embrace the totalitarian ideals of communism has triggered a great national awakening.

Now what the administration fears, is the pushback.  The need for control is a reaction to fear.  WATCH:

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