Trish Reagan Intel. Three Articles of Importance
Illegal Migrants Hotel Bill at $86 Million For Only 1,239 Beds
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed a short-term contract with the non-profit division of Endeavors to provide temporary shelter and processing services for families who have not been expelled and are therefore placed in immigration proceedings for their removal from the United States,”said in a statement the ICE acting Director Tae D. Johnson.
“The $86.9 million contract provides 1,239 beds and other necessary services. The families will receive a comprehensive health assessment that includes COVID-19 testing.”
Endeavors is a non-profit organization which provides direct care, migrant wellness support, case management, home study and post-release services, staffing, and holistic programming for unaccompanied migrant children and families. Endeavors has served migrants since 2012.
“Our border is not open. The majority of individuals continue to be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control’s public health authority,”continued ICE acting Director in his statement.
Project Veritas Exclusive Photos From Inside Texas CBP Facility Show Horrific Border Crisis
In a stunning revelation of how horrific conditions at the border have become, Project Veritas released exclusive photos Monday from reportedly inside one of the border’s detention facilities.
The never-before-seen photos are said to have been taken from inside a Customs and Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas. In the images (scroll down for more) you can see asylum seekers in tight spaces wrapped in space blankets, lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor.
The facility currently houses thousands of immigrants that travel illegally across the border and is beyond its capacity. Indeed, according to the Project Veritas source that provided the photos, “there are eight pods with eight cells each in the facility. At any given moment,” the source explained, “an average of 3,000 people in custody here.”
In addition, the source tells Project Veritas that the immigrants are “separated by age or physical size depending on room. Fifty were Covid positive in these cells over the last few days. There have been multiple sexual assaults, normal assaults and daily medical emergencies.”
Axios also reported horrible conditions at the same facility. In a report Monday, Axios quoted Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) who recently toured the Donna facility and described the conditions as “terrible for the children.” The Congressman added that Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration.”
A reported 15,500 children are now in federal custody at the border.
Though Representative Cuellar was unable to take pictures, he was able to gain a tour of the facility. But he’s one of the few to have seen the conditions directly. Indeed, there has been what appears to be a deliberate and coordinated effort to keep journalists out of the facilities.
Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe visited the detention facility in Donna, Texas late last week and was asked to leave the location by staff members at the facility. You can watch the video here.
Meanwhile, an attorney representing migrant youth in the custody of the U.S. government was recently denied a tour of the Donna, Texas facility. Naha Desai told CBS News, that she interviewed children who said they were hungry and never saw the sun. “Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” she explained.
On March 2nd, the Donna complex was said to be holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to CBS. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security head is calling on volunteers to assist CBP at these facilities complaining that the most number of migrants in 20 years have arrived.
A report over the weekend on ABC News showcased an interview with an asylum seeker in which he explained President Biden is one of the main reasons he made the journey to the border.
Biden Tax Hike Would Make Some States’ Rates Near 70% – Among Highest in World
New York, California, and numerous other states could soon become some of the highest tax places in the world if the Biden Administration gets its way. The Biden tax plan that Congress is debating this week would raise the top income tax rate to 39.6% from its current 37% today.
And that’s not all…
Biden wants to place a new payroll tax of 15% on earnings over $400,000 (or $200,000 each for a married couple.) This combined payroll and income tax hike would bring the marginal tax rate on an additional hour of work to 54%.
State and city taxes can no longer be deducted from federal returns. As such, high-tax states like New York, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey would all see marginal tax rates approaching 70%.
Meanwhile, if California and New York get their way, taxes could go even higher. Both states are discussing ways to shore up their disastrous finances. In California, the General Assembly is considering raising the state income tax to 16.5%. And, in New York, the embattled Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a two percentage point hike. This would raise income taxes in New York City to 15.5%.
As economists at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity point out, if New York and California are successful with their tax hikes, they will officially become home to some of the highest tax places in the world.
Hey, who needs Bernie Sanders when President Joe Biden is willing to go so far left and turn us into a socialist state?
To be clear — higher taxes is not a sustainable path forward for America. Instead, we need pro-growth policies that will generate more wealth for the country as a whole, instead of onerous taxation that will discourage prosperity.
The Biden tax hikes, the largest since 1993, should not be approved.
Reported by 
It was not enough for bakery shop owners Melissa and Aaron Klein to pay more than $136,000 fine to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The state has now wiped out all cash from all their bank accounts too – and 
Still, closing the business and issuing a gag order was not enough for 
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Several politicians have recently been offering free goodies to voters. One of the most popular of these, oddly enough, is something that several state governments have already tackled: free college tuition.
The details vary by state, but Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Louisiana (among others) all use tax dollars to pay for at least some of their residents’ college tuition.
Louisiana provides a great case study for advocates of similar federal policies. Louisiana just so happens to be in the news right now because the governor is threatening to suspend his state’s version of free college tuition for everyone.
Louisiana’s Tuition Program
Louisiana’s plan is called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, or, more commonly, TOPS. This extremely popular program uses tax dollars to pay full tuition (and some fees) at any of Louisiana’s public universities. Other than residency requirements, all high school students qualify as long as they have a C average (2.5 GPA) and at least an 18 on the ACT.
So the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students doesn’t cover every student’s tuition, but it ends up covering it for a large chunk of middle-/upper-class families.
How It Started
The program started out in the late 1980s as the brainchild of oil tycoon/philanthropist Patrick Taylor. The program, which wasn’t originally named for him, started out as a tuition assistance plan only for low-income individuals.
In 1997 the state removed the income caps. At that point, all Louisiana students, regardless of financial need, were made eligible for “free” tuition at any Louisiana public college. Once in college, students had to maintain a C average to keep their TOPS awards.
As of 2010, approximately 70 percent of Louisiana’s high school graduates headed to college within one year. That’s nearly 20 percent higher than the rate in 2000.
Who’s Paying for It?
It’s easy to call the program a success because of this increase, but it’s just as easy to point out that the program doesn’t really provide free education. In one way or another, someone pays for it.
The eventual implosion of the program was easy to predict back in 1997 for the same reasons that pretty much any similar subsidy is destined to fail. Subsidies don’t really lower the cost of products and services; they only lower the up-front price that some people pay.
(In 1997, this program inspired my very first public critique of a government policy. Back then, I thought it was a terrible idea.)
No Such Thing as Free Tuition
A person receiving “free” tuition may not see it (or even care), but subsides actually raise the total cost of an education. The core problem is that they remove the paying customer—in this case the student—from the equation.
Without the subsidy, the paying customer receives the direct benefit for the service and bears the direct cost. If that person doesn’t think the cost is worth it, they don’t pay.
Louisiana’s program replaces this paying customer with groups of government officials. These officials neither receive the direct benefit nor endure the direct cost of obtaining an education. These groups do, however, benefit a great deal from obtaining more of your tax dollars.
And they rarely bear any direct cost from either increasing your taxes or delivering a substandard education product. (The incumbency rate is fairly high for politicians.)
On a practical level, Louisiana’s program converts tuition payments into a state budget item. In other words, a large chunk of each school’s “tuition” becomes nothing more than revenue sent in by the state bureaucracy.
In Louisiana, four separate higher education systems—each its own bureaucracy—fight over these “tuition” payments. Smaller schools inevitably get the smallest shares, but that’s kind of another story.
A Burden on University Resources
When the influx of students hits—more people going to school when tuition is “free” is pretty much a foregone conclusion—it strains universities’ existing resources. So the transfer of money has the natural tendency to lead to expanded facilities, faculty, and staff.
But these increases call for a permanently higher level of funding, and all of these effects tend to reinforce each other. That is, school officials have a built in reason to ask for larger transfers, and politicians have a built in excuse to raise taxes.
When the state’s coffers are not flush with cash, the schools’ budgets get cut. Thus, universities have every incentive to raise more money from students who are not a part of the Taylor Opportunity Program.
Of course, for any given level of Taylor Opportunity Program students, a higher posted rate of tuition results in a larger transfer from the state. If the program covered full fees and tuition for literally every student, then taxpayers would bear the full cost. But it doesn’t, so non-TOPS students bear some of the cost.
(Pretty much every student ends up paying higher fees directly, too, but that’s almost an aside.)
Non-subsidized markets don’t work this way—prices can actually fall in response to changes in demand and supply. Subsidized systems, on the other hand, are destined to result in higher—not lower—tuition.
Recent numbers support this explanation. The Taylor Opportunity Program has nearly doubled in cost since 2008, and most of that increase has been due to higher tuition.
What I failed to fully appreciate in 1997 was how bad of a deal the Taylor Opportunity Program would end up being for the smaller schools. Then I spent almost a decade teaching at Nicholls State University, a regional state school in Thibodaux, La.
Small Universities Are Hardest Hit
In one sense, the Louisiana program amounted to a cruel trick for these institutions. Smaller schools are the ones least able to sustain the permanently higher costs associated with the new TOPS-generated revenue stream.
When the state budget goes south—and it always does in Louisiana—smaller schools get slammed. (Louisiana State University has more than 25,000 students, so small changes in per-student fees go a long way).
No matter how much we want it to, subsidizing something simply doesn’t make it more cost-effective.
The Taylor Opportunity Program does give certain people a better deal on tuition at one point in time, but then it makes up for it somewhere else.
Ironically, the earlier waves of Taylor Opportunity Program graduates are among those about to get hit with a tax increase. That’s what politicians mean by free.
Aside from the subsidy/cost issue, there are many other reasons why this is bad public policy.
First of all—and I know this sounds crazy—everyone should not go to college. Some people simply aren’t cut out, and many just don’t need to. Yes, people with college degrees tend to earn more than those without, but it does not follow that everyone should go to college.
When the program was started, Louisiana public universities offered students a good value because they were relatively inexpensive. Now that Louisiana taxpayers have spent more than $2 billion on the program, tuition rates are out of reach for many students that don’t qualify for the program.
While the best solution for Louisiana would be to get rid of the program altogether (unlikely since politicians love the program), the best residents can hope for now is an increase in the program’s academic standards and some form of means testing. At least these changes would better direct subsidies to academically prepared students with more financial need.