The Tucson Pride organization will be shutting down after nearly 50 years of existence.
The organization maintained the third-oldest Pride entity in the country, and the first and oldest one in Arizona.
The announcement comes exactly a month before the organization was slated to have its annual pride festival.
The Tucson Pride Board of Directors said in an announcement that it would refund all funds received for this year’s festival within 30 to 90 days.
“This decision was not made lightly. We recognize the deep importance Tucson Pride has held in our community since 1977, serving as a space of visibility, advocacy, celebration, and resilience for nearly five decades,” stated the organization on its Facebook page and website. “We are profoundly grateful to every volunteer, sponsor, artist, activist, and community member who has supported Tucson Pride throughout its history.”
Tucson Pride was founded following the murder of Richard Heakin in 1976 outside Stonewall Tavern.
The organization’s nonprofit status (Tucson Lesbian and Gay Alliance) was jeopardized in the recent past for failing to file on time. The IRS automatically revoked their nonprofit status in May 2024 for failing to file their tax returns for three consecutive years.
Tucson Pride said one of their prior board members “missed” the 2021 and 2022 tax filings. They did not name the prior board member allegedly responsible for the missing filings.
According to their latest available filing from 2020, the board of directors at the time included Rocque Perez.
Perez is a state senate candidate and a formerly appointed member of the Tucson City Council. AZ Free Newsreported on the recent discovery of Perez’s deletion of his pornographic and violent social media accounts.
Other directors per that last 2020 filing included Samantha Cloud (president), Jeff Myers-Fulgham (vice president), Stephen R. Myers-Fulgham (treasurer), and Matthew Taylor (secretary).
Tax filings revealed the Tucson Lesbian and Gay Alliance had a significant dropoff in revenue between its 2019 and 2020 filings. The 2020 reported revenue ($18,400) was $28,800 lower than its lowest revenue over the past decade of available reports, dating back to 2010.
Prior to 2020, the organization had reported a steady rise in revenue from 2015 to 2019, having a reported revenue high of $171,000 before the 2020 decline.
The organization had a steady rise in revenue from 2016 to 2019.
Last October, Tucson Pride leadership delayed its Pride festival due to financial problems and political pressures. The organization reported having over $50,000 in debt following a slash to ticket sales and donations after 2024.
“Nationwide, LGBTQIA+ nonprofits have seen donations and corporate sponsorships decline due to shifting politics and increased hostility toward queer causes,” said the board. “Tucson Pride has felt this squeeze firsthand, making local fundraising more challenging than in past years.”
A 2024 financial overview provided by Tucson Pride reflected that gross earnings totaled over $110,000, but their expenses totaled nearly $156,000: $37,000 on entertainment; $7,000 on food, beverage, and ice; $50,000 on infrastructure; $5,000 on logistics; $2,000 on marketing; $7,000 on permitting; $27,000 on public safety; $5,000 on tech; $1,000 on a Tihan donation; and $13,000 on supplies.
Cash sponsorships totaled just over $54,000, and festival sales totaled $63,000.
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President Donald Trump has done an admirable job at defanging the IRS, which was converted into a weaponized agency targeting their political enemies.
Chief Justice John Marshall famously pronounced early in our nation’s history that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”
The Democrats inside the Biden IRS took that to heart. They hired thousands of new IRS agents to harass businesses, rich people, and, in some cases, Republican donors. Some of the lieutenants to the infamous IRS enforcer Lois Lerner, the woman who aimed her agency’s auditing guns at conservative groups, are still active at the tax agency.
One of the most noxious of Biden’s left-over regulatory rules applies to partnerships – an increasingly common form of business organization and expansion. Microsoft’s revenues/profits flow down through its business partners.
Business partnerships are vital contributors to the U.S. economy. A 2024 study by Ernst and Young for the Small Business Entrepreneur Council found that 10 million Americans work for these partnerships, and they generate $1.3 trillion in GDP.
The IRS evidently thinks they are TOO successful.
A gang of holdovers from the Biden administration and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, are trying to administratively change the taxation of pass-throughs and partnerships and subject these entities to “guilty until proven innocent” audits. The changes would alter the “economic substance doctrine” which determines how the taxes on a business’s profits are applied to the partners. If the entities are found liable for increased tax assessments, they could face a giant tax bill AND a confiscatory 60% strict liability penalty.
These partnership rules are admittedly murky and may need updated protections against potential tax evasion abuses. But this rewrite of the tax laws would be applied WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL. The Trump admin promised to end this illegal rewrite of the tax laws, but because of the turmoil at the IRS – with a revolving door of IRS Commissioners – the Biden-era rules still stand.
Meanwhile, Wyden has introduced legislation to codify these new rules into law. Get this: the Joint Committee on Taxation scores these IRS “reforms” as a potential $730 billion business tax increase over the next decade.
If the IRS isn’t told to cease and desist, they could be the perpetrators of the largest non-congressionally approved tax increase in American history.
The Trump administration is supposed to be easing the tax burden on our businesses and employers to make them more globally competitive, not handing them a three-quarter trillion-dollar tax INCREASE.
Trump or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should fix this tax raid on business before it reverses some of the job-creating benefits of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a visiting senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.
Donald Trump has promised to create millions of new high-paying jobs.
One easy first step to doing that is to repeal Biden-regulations on America’s 4 million business partnerships (sometimes known as S-corporations) that are prolific job creators. The latest estimates find 10 million Americans employed by these business partnerships, with $800 billion paid in worker salaries and benefits.
For example, “95 percent of Microsoft’s commercial revenue flows directly through” its “partner ecosystem.” The profits from these enterprises are passed through to the 4 million partners, who make tax payments based on their share of those earnings.
These have been the tax rules governing partnerships for many decades. The Biden administration didn’t like the tax rules, so instead of asking Congress to change them, Biden’s Treasury Department worked through the back door to unilaterally modify the rules, as part of its “fairness” agenda.
The precise tax target is a technique used by partnerships to lower their tax liability called “basis shifting.” While technically complex (because everything with the U.S. tax code is complicated), it is also entirely legal and has been used by partnerships for decades to adjust the value of their assets during a transaction or transfer. Whatever one thinks of basis shifting, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) doesn’t have the unilateral authority to change the tax laws — only Congress does.
The Biden crackdown treated business partners as tax cheats. When they hired 87,000 agents to harass companies and individuals, nearly 4,000 of these IRS tax collectors were hired to among other things, “expand enforcement focusing on complex partnerships.”
The more than four million business partnerships became an overnight suspect class, as did the tax returns of millions of partners.
To pry money out of these partnerships, the Biden team wanted to create a retroactive tax (which should be illegal) by changing the rules and apply them going back six years in time. So a tax structure that may have been perfectly legal in the past could now trigger investigations, fines, and litigation.
Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also created a new investigative office to oversee and harass partnerships. That should be shutdown.
So a tax structure that may have been perfectly legal in the past could now trigger investigations, fines, and litigation.
More than 90% of partnerships are small businesses, according to an Ernst and Young study prepared for the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) last year. The business partnership arrangement allows these firms to have ready access to needed capital to expand their operations. In all these companies generated $1.3 trillion to our GDP.
These partnership arrangements allow promising small companies to grow into large ones. This uniquely American business structure is a hallmark of U.S. entrepreneurial success — a path for businesses to go from good to great.
It isn’t broken. The system works. That’s why the Trump Treasury Department needs to immediately command the IRS to cease and desist the Biden witch hunt against these partnerships.
It’s a war on wealth. A war on U.S. businesses. And it’s a direct assault on the Trump promise to “make America great again.”
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book co-authored with Arthur Laffer is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Arizona’s population has exploded over the past three decades, thanks, in part, to movement from states under the control of leftist politicians.
Recently, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) shared data from the Internal Revenue Service, showing that almost 1.5 million individuals have migrated to Arizona from other states, between the years of 1990-2021.
The Grand Canyon State’s gain has been due to other left-leaning states’ loss. California, for example, has shed more than 4.6 million people during that timeframe. New York lost over 4.6 million people as well, and Illinois said ‘goodbye’ to another 2 million individuals.
It wasn’t just Arizona that benefited from the migration patterns of people for the past thirty years. More than 3.7 million people made their way to Florida, and another 2.6 million individuals relocated to Texas.
In an op-ed for Newsweek, Edward J. Pinto, the Senior Fellow and Codirector of the AEI Housing Center, wrote, “For the past 30 years, progressive policies have fueled a mass exodus of the citizens of California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, whether with high-, middle-, or blue collar incomes. From 1990 to 2021, net domestic migration fleeing their states has totaled 13 million… Meanwhile, the red states of Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Nevada, and South Carolina have had net in-migration of 13 million over the same period.”
Pinto added, “If these blue state governors want to reverse this mass out migration, time is of the essence. They should focus on enacting the kinds of policies that drew their erstwhile residents to Florida and Texas: lowering taxes, getting tough on crime, promoting deregulation, reforming public pensions, enacting school choice, enforcing immigration laws, helping blue-collar workers find good paying jobs, ending rent control where prevalent, and adopting light-touch density (LTD) and livable urban villages(LUV). LTD and LUV legalize homes built by the free market that are affordable and inclusionary.”
Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who served eight years as the state’s chief executive, reacted to a recent article from Fox News about the failure of California’s Gavin Newsom to end homelessness in San Francisco, stating, “The 21st anniversary is coming up… for California residents who are sick of ‘leaders’ who talk big and deliver nothing, there’s a simple solution: UHaul.com.”
The 21st anniversary is coming up… for California residents who are sick of “leaders” who talk big and deliver nothing, there’s a simple solution: https://t.co/UOGgmZupCOpic.twitter.com/DpEyTdxHmi
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen told AZ Free News, “Approximately 200 people move to Arizona every day. If you ask why, they will tell you because it is a safe, good place to raise a family and educate your kids. They will also say things like, it is a great place to do business, with low taxes and fewer regulations. What they are really saying is that the state they are fleeing has bad public policy and Arizona has good public policy. This is a direct reflection of the laws passed by the Republican-led legislature.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The latest official employment report finds once again that the federal government and state-and-local government hiring spree is still in full gear. Over the past year health care and government hiring has outpaced every private sector industry.
So, even though there are a lot more government workers, good luck finding them or getting them on the phone.
This is because so few of them are actually physically on the job.
What is happening in the federal government (“Club Fed”) these days borders on the absurd — or should I say the obscene. A recent survey by Federal News Network of federal workers finds only 6% are working full time in the office. Thirty percent are full time remote. Office buildings in Washington have become city-block long zombies. Especially on Fridays.
While exact comparisons between public and private employees are tricky and inexact, best estimates are that in 2023 roughly 30% of private workers were working from home or remotely either some or all of the time. In the private sector, the percentage of employees working from home has actually declined from about 50% during Covid (2020).
This means that federal employees are three times more likely to be working remotely either some or all of the time.
I am all for employees working remotely a few days a week and this is likely to become more common in the information and digital age. I do that myself.
But one has to wonder how many of these workers are really necessary. And what are the chances that these remote government workers who can almost never get fired for bad performance are putting in an honest day’s work. My suspicion is very few.
The irony is that three years ago the federal government issued an order for federal employees to return to work post-Covid. Many thousands have blatantly ignored the order.
Remember, government workers have some of the cushiest and least stressful jobs on the planet. And they get paid roughly 30 to 40% more than comparably skilled private workers — when taking account exorbitant benefits.
Here is my solution. Uncle Sam is losing almost $2 trillion a year. Stop hiring new people. Every federal agency including the biggest bureaucracy in the world — the Pentagon — should impose a hiring freeze — except for extraordinary circumstances — until the budget is balanced. Then impose a 30% across the board reduction in force (RIF).
Finally, if the government needs more revenues, start by selling federal buildings that are less than one-half occupied. Many buildings are less than 20 percent occupied.
Former President Donald Trump’s most popular rallying cry in 2016 was to “drain the swamp.” But today the swamp is deeper than ever and the deep state swamp creatures are more numerous than ever after four years of the Biden-Kamala administration. If Trump wins, he and Republicans should get draining.
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.
