Arizona Republicans are weighing in against an ongoing effort from the outgoing presidential administration to offload materials at the border ahead of the transfer of power in January.
Last week, The Daily Wire revealed that “Biden is racing to auction off unused border wall materials weeks before Trump takes office.” These materials were left over from the first Trump administration, when President Biden halted construction on the wall spanning parts of the southern border in various border states as one of his earliest actions in the White House in early 2021.
According to President-elect Donald Trump at a recent press conference, “The (Biden) administration is trying to sell it for five cents on the dollar – knowing that we’re getting ready to put it up.” Trump added that “what they’re doing is really an act – it’s almost a criminal act.”
Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey responded to the news, saying, “Right here in AZ, Joe Biden is attempting a last-ditch effort to keep America’s borders open by selling off materials the Trump Admin will use to finish the wall. This decision from President Biden is reckless, will make Arizonans less safe, and should be reversed – immediately.”
Right here in AZ, @JoeBiden is attempting a last ditch effort to keep America’s borders open by selling off materials the Trump Admin will use to finish the wall. This decision from President Biden is reckless, will make Arizonans less safe, and should be reversed — immediately. https://t.co/GRmVAvvEGc
In an interview with The Daily Wire, U.S. Congressman Eli Crane said, “The Biden Administration is well aware they shouldn’t have reversed construction of the border wall. If it’s true, they’re purposefully hamstringing an incoming president, it wouldn’t be shocking. Why would they want to see President Trump succeed with policies they aggressively sabotaged?”
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen told AZ Free News, “This brazen behavior from Biden is a slap in the face to the law-abiding citizens who voted for a secure border. It’s because of his reckless policies and his administration’s evasion of the law that countless Americans have suffered the dire consequences of criminals pouring across the border into our communities. I’m hopeful the courts will take action against this sale.”
As Petersen mentioned, Republicans around the country are searching for a legal theory to try to stop the Biden administration from continuing with these actions. President Donald Trump takes the oath of office one month from this week on January 20.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
One of the highest priorities for the incoming Trump administration should be to end the Democrats’ weaponization of powerful government agencies against taxpayers and businesses they don’t like. Nowhere has this mission been more pernicious than the party-line vote to fund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with nearly $80 billion and hire tens of thousands of new tax snoops.
By the way, according to the IRS press office, the additional audits have so far raised less than $2 billion, far less than the additional expenditures. So how is this program “paying for itself”?
This was never about seeking tax fairness as liberals claimed. It was about unleashing an aggressive, permanent and unchecked enforcement assault on U.S. taxpayers to rake in more tax dollars to pay for liberals’ political agenda. The American people voted to end such madness, and the IRS should now act accordingly and immediately by ignoring the Biden administration’s 11th-hour efforts to ram through a slew of costly new rules and regulations as they now head toward the exit.
Progressive leaders made wildly erroneous claims that a supersized IRS would raise nearly $1 trillion over 10 years from stepped-up enforcement against higher-income earners and businesses. And they attempted to justify their proposals by broadly portraying entrepreneurs, small businesses, family-owned private enterprises and the wealthy as tax cheats.
The entire exercise was designed to harass lawful taxpayers and threaten them as guilty parties until they could prove themselves innocent.
Fortunately, most voters saw their efforts for what they were: a liberal fantasy grab of other peoples’ money and an attempt to assert greater control over their livelihoods. Democrat leaders did not help themselves by immediately oversteering the car. This included efforts to have the IRS spy on personal bank accounts and require income reporting for basic Venmo payments among friends, as well as punitive measures on those whose incomes are derived from tips or numerous other types of transactions.
Another target for IRS harassment has been business partnerships. Such businesses are one of the most common and practical ways to structure private enterprises of all sizes. A simple analogy might be when one party owns an available tractor and another has available land, and they go into business together to farm the land.
All told, there are an estimated 4.5 million business partnerships in America. Collectively, these partnerships generate more than $12 trillion in revenue and employ millions of U.S. workers.
Yet the IRS, before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office, is now stealthily attempting to implement new rules that threaten the future viability of such partnerships. These proposed changes to the tax code impact what is known as “basis shifting” — a routine and legal practice that business partners use to adjust the tax basis of their respective assets. In short, the proposed rules would deliberately embed uncertainty and subjective IRS interpretations of how taxable assets are treated when one transfers or sells their interest in a business partnership. Basically, the opposite of tax fairness.
Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar bounty the Biden administration claimed their newly armed IRS would secure through added enforcement and new tax rules has completely failed to materialize. The IRS recently disclosed that just $1 billion had been recovered since their aggressive campaign went into effect two years ago, and there is no way of knowing if that would have occurred with or without it.
How ironic and sad is it for taxpayers to learn that the vast amount of the $80 billion Democrats awarded to the IRS to recover or find new “savings” is instead on pace to serve as a massive cost to the U.S. Treasury?
The last thing voters now want is for the IRS to impose any more costly last-minute tax changes that will make problems even worse for taxpayers, workers and employers. Accordingly, the Biden team and the IRS should put down their pencils.
And if they persist with these fourth-quarter rule changes, the Trump team should be prepared to immediately repeal them in January.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Thanksgiving dinner will cost less than it did last year, but it will still be harder on your wallet than before President Joe Biden took office.
Per the Farm Bureau’s annual analysis of Thanksgiving dinner staple costs, the price reduction of nearly five percent from last year is “moderate” and not near enough to undo the “dramatic increase” that occurred two years ago.
A Thanksgiving meal still costs 20 percent more than it did in 2019: about $58 for a feast for 10 this year. Last year, the same meal size cost about $61, and in 2022, it cost about $64.
This annual Thanksgiving dinner survey relies on shoppers across 50 states and Puerto Rico to survey their local grocery store’s prices for classic feast items: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, peas, cranberries, celery, carrots, pumpkin pie ingredients, whipping cream, and milk.
The “moderate” price reduction only occurred with some of these classic holiday foods — others rose in price. Costs were lower for turkey, sweet potatoes, peas, carrots and celery, pumpkin pie mix, pie crusts, and milk, but costs were higher for dinner rolls, cranberries, whipping cream, and stuffing.
The reason for prices of certain items going up while others have gone down has to do with the type of item. Increases occurred mainly in processed products due to nonfood inflation and labor shortages driving up costs for partners across the food supply chain. An exception occurred for fresh cranberries, but the 12 percent price increase is considered a stabilization of pricing after an 18 percent decline from 2022 to 2023. The Farm Bureau noted that, even with the price increase and adjusting for inflation, fresh cranberries have their lowest cost since 1987.
The average costs are as follows: $25.67 for a 16-pound turkey, $2.35 for 12 ounces of fresh cranberries, $2.93 for three pounds of sweet potatoes, 84 cents for half-pound of carrots and celery, $1.73 for 16 ounces of green peas, $3.40 for two nine-inch pie shells, $4.08 for 14 ounces of cube stuffing, $4.16 for one pack of dinner rolls, $4.15 for 30 ounces of pumpkin pie mix, $3.21 for one gallon of whole milk, and $1.81 for one-half pint of whipping cream.
The Farm Bureau also reported significant cost disparities based on region. Those in the Western states face at least 14 percent higher costs for a Thanksgiving dinner for 10, or $67. Comparatively, those in the Southern states have the lowest cost: $56 for a party of 10. The Northeastern states will have an average cost of $57, and the Midwestern states will have an average cost of nearly $59.
Those price disparities grow much more when adding less-traditional Thanksgiving favorites: ham, Russet potatoes, and green beans. Southerners, Northeasterners, and Midwesterners would only pay anywhere from $81 to $83 to add those favorites to their dinners. However, Westerners would have to pay over $93 for the same spread.
Farmers take the biggest brunt of inflation, experiencing lower and more volatile prices. The USDA projects that national net farm income will fall by $6.5 billion this year.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
There are many ways the United States can fail in the areas of border security and immigration policy. Over the past three-and-a-half years, the Biden administration has managed to implement most of those failed policies. A Harris administration would almost certainly make those policy failures complete.
President Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021 with a clear objective to be the anti-Donald Trump president and undo Trump administration policies across the board. Nowhere did this undoing process have greater impact – and create more chaos – than at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On his first day in the Oval Office in 2021, Biden suspended the program formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols. It required immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while their cases made their way through U.S. immigration courts. That was the first green light to potential immigrants around the world – and, more importantly, to those who prey on them – that if they could set foot on U.S. soil and make a claim of asylum, they could likely remain in the United States indefinitely. The border became wide open.
Word spread through WhatsApp and other social media networks. Cartels and human traffickers used the policy change as a marketing strategy to compel desperate migrants to hand over their life savings and make the dangerous journey to the border. Immigrants were coached not to evade but instead to actually seek out law enforcement officials and request asylum — no matter how frivolous their claim.
In case axing the Remain in Mexico policy did not deliver a message that was abundantly clear, Biden followed up in April 2022 by rescinding Title 42, the Trump policy initiated during the pandemic that allowed the federal government to rapidly expel illegal immigrants apprehended at the border and block them from seeking asylum. The results were completely predictable.
According to Customs and Border Protection data, there were 73,994 “encounters” along the Southwest border in December 2020. One year later, that monthly figure was 179,253. In December 2022, the number rose to 252,315. Last December, there were 301,982 encounters.
In his zeal to appease progressives and burnish his anti-Trump credentials, Biden failed to consider – or worse, recognized and accepted – the consequences of incentivizing mass illegal immigration. Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden tasked with stemming illegal immigration’s “root causes” in March 2021, declared on NBC’s Meet the Press in September 2022: “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration.” It was a lie.
Now that she is a presidential candidate, Democrats want you to believe Harris had nothing to do with immigration or the border. The American people know better. They also know that four more years of Biden-era immigration, economic, defense, energy and other policies will be a national disaster.
The Biden administration’s CBP numbers tell the story – 2.5 million encounters at the Southwest border in fiscal year 2023. That is why Gallup reported last month that “significantly more U.S. adults than a year ago, 55% versus 41%, would like to see immigration to the U.S. decreased.” That is the highest level for anti-immigration sentiment since immediately after the 9-11 attacks.
There are two related tragedies here. The first is for the migrants who have endured physical abuse, rape and murder to try to make asylum claims in the United States. Contrary to what the Biden administration and immigrant advocates would like you to believe, illegal migration is not a victimless crime, not to mention the crimes committed by some migrants in this country.
The second tragedy is that anti-immigration sentiment is rising at a time when our economy needs immigrant workers the most. Due primarily to demographics but also to cultural changes in the U.S. workforce, the United States simply does not produce enough native-born workers to fulfill the needs of the agriculture, healthcare and construction industries, to name a few.
The United States needs legal, orderly immigration policies that recognize both our security and economic interests. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures on border security and immigration have understandably soured the American people on even sensible reforms. A Harris administration would only make those failures worse.
Dennis E. Nixon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and chairman and CEO of IBC Bank, based in Laredo, Texas. He has been deeply involved in border, trade and immigration policy for five decades.
The Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars on green energy and yet last year the U.S. and the world used record amounts of fossil fuels.
That would seem to be prima facie evidence that this “great transition” to renewable energy has so far been an expensive policy belly flop.
The evidence is everywhere. Americans aren’t buying EVs anymore than they were before Biden was elected. The car companies even with record federal subsidies are losing billions of dollars making EVs that people don’t want. Wind and solar still account for less than 15% of American energy, and across the country hundreds of communities are saying “not in my backyard” to ugly and spacious solar and wind farms. And of course gas prices at the pump and electric bills are 30% to 50% higher, even though we were promised that the green revolution would save us money.
A case in point is the scandalous mismanagement of how these green energy programs are being implemented. Consider the $7.5 billion federal program stuck inside the Biden 2021 Infrastructure bill — a law that Biden touts as one of his great achievements. That bill promised half a million EV charging stations installed all over the country.
Instead, there have been a grand total of… drum roll please…”seven or eight installed.” To be fair, that was through last month. They might be up to nine now.
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was confronted recently on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about what happened with all the money, he hemmed and hawed and replied: “In order to do a charger, it’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground, there’s utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment.”
Uh huh! Sure. Installing an electric charger for a Tesla in your garage is very complicated business. It’s like trying to Build the Taj Mahal (which may not have cost $7.5 billion).
Here’s another mystery. Why can’t Pete give us an exact count on the progress when the number is small enough to use his fingers? What is for sure is that at this pace they may get 500 built by 2030 — not the 500,000 promised.
Thank God our celebrated transportation secretary renowned for riding his bike to his office in Washington wasn’t in charge of the Normandy landing.
Then there is the question of where the $7.5 billion of taxpayer money has actually gone. At their current rate of production the final program’s price tag could inflate to more than $1 trillion.
If Trump were president, he’d have long ago summoned Mayor Pete to the Oval Office and greet him with those two words that made him famous: “YOU’RE FIRED.”
Instead many Democrats are quietly talking about throwing Joe Biden off the ticket and one of the front runners to take his place is none other than the highly accomplished Pete Buttigieg.
But there are some serious lessons to be learned from this monumental screw-up.
First, though Biden loves to chat up how much money the government is “investing” — where are the signs that any of these trillions of dollars of borrowed money have improved our lives. This EV charger scandal is just another reminder that the government generally doesn’t “invest” tax dollars — it mostly wastes them.
Second, competence matters. At the Committee to Unleash Prosperity we released a study finding that more than 90% of the Biden top economic and finance team has NO experience running a business. We have an energy secretary who knows nothing about energy and a transportation secretary who knows nothing about transportation. They are either lawyers, academics, politicians or government employees.
They are not bad people. They just don’t know how to run anything — and it shows.
Finally, why do we need the government to build EV charging stations? One hundred years ago the government didn’t build gas stations. They just magically sprouted up all over the roads that crisscross America because entrepreneurs responded to the demand. So two or three brothers would scrap together some cash, buy a small plot of land on I-66, build a service station with four to eight hoses connected to a tank, put up a tall sign posting the gas price and drivers would pull in and fill er up.
All of this “infrastructure” without a single penny or instruction manual from Washington.
Can you imagine if Biden had been president in the 1920s and proclaimed that the government will build 500,000 gas stations? They still wouldn’t be built and we’d all be waiting in long gas lines.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
