'Pay Up...Or Else!' - IRS Spending MILLIONS On Weapons!
According to a watchdog group, the Internal Revenue Service may be competing to become a new branch of the military: since 2020 the tax collector bureau has spent ten million dollars on weapons, including rifles, shotguns and ballistic shields. Feel safer? Also today, Biden's squirrelly new mortgage tax and foreign aid to teach make-up arts to transgender people overseas.
According to a watchdog group, the Internal Revenue Service may be competing to become a new branch of the military: since 2020 the tax collector bureau has spent ten million dollars on weapons, including rifles, shotguns and ballistic shields. Feel safer? Also today, Biden's squirrelly new mortgage tax and foreign aid to teach make-up arts to transgender people overseas.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is our Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good to see you.
All right.
We want to talk about my least favorite.
No, I have a lot of least favorites.
One of the very low ones.
Matter of fact, it's almost close to the Federal Reserve because they work hand in glove.
And that is where they both were established in 1913.
One was, of course, the Federal Reserve.
The other was the income tax.
So they're bad news.
So we're going to talk about the income tax and the IRS.
And we didn't expect anything good to come from this new administration.
And we were right.
We were right again.
But they released a statement recently trying to reassure the people who are worried.
And they wanted to reach out to our supporters so they don't get nervous and lie awake at night worrying about a knock on the door.
But they've sent out a little note to remind people that they're on the people's side.
They released a strategic operating plan to explain to the people what really is happening, outlining how it intends to use $80 billion in additional funding received as us stealing it from the taxpayer.
And it came out of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
So that's available.
Maybe it'll get stopped before it's been.
Who knows?
Let's hope so.
But they said this is what their intentions were.
Good intentions.
They want to improve the taxpayers' experience.
And they want to do that by improving customer service.
And they'll do this by hiring.
They initially thought, we'll hire about 87,000 IRS agents so that we can pass out our good stuff, you know.
And they want to modernize the technology.
And the last one, they admit the truth, strengthen tax compliance.
This is it.
And that might have been the reason, that might have been the key to it.
Not that we haven't complained about it before, because I never liked the idea of any bureaucrat owning guns because I don't like the bureaucracy.
But anyway, they've had guns before, but they really are moving up, up on this.
So there's an article out, Zero Hedge had it in this announcement.
IRS has spent $10 million on weapons, ammo, and combat gear since 2020.
So they're pro-gun.
And, you know, I always like to get people's attention.
I am for gun control.
We need to eliminate the guns of all the federal bureaucrats.
So anyway, that is in the market there.
But there's other big things going on, the whole thing about all this wokeism and all the chaos in the street and cultural Marxism.
And I think in the middle of all this, there's a plan and a strategy for a cashless society.
They've been talking about it a long time, but I think they're serious about approaching that point.
And also, the idea of not only a national, but maybe an international cryptocurrency.
You know, technology is great, and I believe in making sure it's legal, but it's also not legal under the Constitution if it's used for dictatorial reasons.
And they introduced it, and it's part of one government around the world.
That's not very much in defense of our national security.
That's sacrificing it, just as we do with the sacrificing of our borders.
So that's in the news.
And I want to surprise you, Daniel.
Even if you'd have debated this with me in office when we were in office, I'd have voted no on this spent on IRS.
Well, you know, on one hand, we've talked a lot about the militarization of the police and how that's a big problem.
You know, when you give your local cops a tank, they're going to be tempted to use it.
But what about the militarization of, I would have thought these guys would have had those pocket things in there, you know, with pens in it and calculators.
I never thought they'd be coming at us with tanks.
Well, here's the article we're talking about.
It's from American Greatness, and Zero Heads did pick it up and tipped us off to it.
But watchdog, IRS has spent $10 million on weapons, ammo, and combat gear since 2020.
It's only their first part of 2023.
If you put that next one here is from the article.
The organization is called Open the Books.
It's a government watchdog group.
And they found that the IRS spent $5 million in 2021 alone as the agency ramped up the militarization of its agents.
In the last three years, the IRS has spent a total of $2.3 million on ammo, $1.2 million on ballistic shields, half a mil on Smith ⁇ Wesson rifles, and another half a mil on Beretta tactical shotguns, and finally, a quarter of a million dollars on body armor.
I don't know what they're doing with this.
Well, they're telling us what their plans are.
I mean, people are going to be very happy because the customer service is going to be improved.
What is their business?
Oh, it's threatening taxpayers to pay their taxes or they'll be in big trouble.
Have you ever heard a story of people being charged with three or four really bad crimes and they have a little trouble proving it?
So they usually get them on taxes.
It's almost a universal fallback on.
And they can get somebody on tax evasion.
And that, of course, the big problem is the appetite by the people for big government, the appetite for us defending our empire.
And a lot of people will talk tough on the IRS and agree with what we're saying, but they're not all that tough on doing that.
We're getting more Republicans, I think, speaking out.
But even the overall Republican Party are very ambivalent about a non-interventionist foreign policy and a budget.
They're the ones who make sure the budget gets passed.
It is bipartisan.
And that, of course, will continue.
But they're theoretically getting $80 billion.
The government's getting $80 billion access to Biden.
They keep talking about how's Biden going to spend it.
And I think, how can they get to this point of putting that money in for the emergency COVID episode?
And all of a sudden it's Biden's money to spend?
I mean, technically, it can't be that, but in reality, it probably is.
And that was when the story came out.
Well, the first thing he'll do is have $87,000.
They had that in writing.
I think they have to back off there because the Republicans have put their foot down a little bit.
But that is a real mess.
But taxation, you know, we were told once long ago that that's what we have to pay for civilization.
Yeah, right.
And I've sort of disagreed with that statement because when I see it spent at home or abroad, it doesn't look like they're civilizing anybody.
No, not at all.
And I think it raises a bigger issue of, and I think it's legitimate, we may overuse the term, but I think it's part of the deep state.
You know, they're unelected, they're bureaucrats, they're well-armed, they take on a life of their own, just like remember with Homeland Security.
That's what you warned about when they started it.
This is going to take on a life of its own.
This is not going to protect us from the bad guys.
It's going to turn us, call us the bad guys.
And I think that's what's happening.
You know, it's a bigger problem.
And it's all about, I mean, as you say, it's not like they really need to, you know, get that last dollar out of Granny.
What they're trying to do is to enforce compliance.
You know, they're trying to let you know what your place is and you'll stay in your place.
But, you know, until Americans just stand up and say we don't want to live in a kind of country where we have, you know, our tax collector has a tank and an A-bomb or something.
You know, part of their PR and strategy is going after the very innocent person, the grannies, and the people who don't have much money.
And they might technically find it like catching a minister.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and he cheated $100 on his income tax or made a mistake of $100.
But that gets in the news.
And people, I know some people say, boy, if they'll even do that to a minister or this poor lady living by herself, that to me is just a strategy of intimidation and a form of terrorism.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, if you think back, you know, it started in 1913, and I'm sure it was probably sold to the, you know, much better than I do to the American people.
Oh, this will just be a little couple dollars, you know.
And it reminds me of that meme, how it started and how it's going.
And if we can actually move ahead to and put on that picture of our favorite little IRS agents, how it started, just a couple dollars to help fund the government, how it's going.
And I know you like this picture, Dr. Paul.
Hello there.
Have you filed your taxes yet?
We've come to collect.
So it's funny, but not funny, I guess.
Oh, it's a real tragedy, I think, when this happens.
But, you know, who's to blame?
Well, there's a lot of blame to go around.
But the people that you have to really look for for the ultimate support about this are the special interests who benefit big time.
And it's usually not the person that innocently is going by and says, well, I need food stamps.
Send me some money.
And that locks them in.
That locks them in as they have to support those issues.
And that's the biggest issue around: are they going to cut our Social Security?
You know, right now, the Democrats use it more than the Republicans as the threat.
Oh, they're going to take away your Social Security or they're going to reduce it.
And that sort of thing.
That's already into the presidential election.
They're using ads on this stuff.
So they get them and they lock them in.
They become totally dependent.
And they figure, well, I didn't start this.
All I'm trying to do is survive.
And in many ways, they're trying to survive the other things on how the government's going to spend the money.
They take the money.
I say we get hit twice.
They first take the money, which is robbery.
Then that hurts the person they took it from.
And then they spend it.
And then what they spend it on gets hurt too.
They write more regulations for who knows what.
So it's not a very good situation.
People need to wake up, but they have to associate big government and the Federal Reserve on why we've allowed this government to get so big that the welfare state is out of control.
The empire's out of control.
And if you don't support, if you didn't support the lockdown on COVID, and if you don't support the troops overseas, you're unpatriotic.
And they call you bad names.
Well, this is Outrage Day, I guess, on the Liberty Report, because our next segment is also an outrage.
And I'm sure a lot of our viewers have seen this, Dr. Paul.
This is a piece written by our good friend Jim Bovard, and so we want to put it up and tell everyone, of course, if you're not reading Jim Bovard, you should be reading him.
But he talks about this thing, and we've been kind of mulling it around for a few days.
It's the squirreliest thing I've ever heard of.
Biden's mortgage equity will screw up the home buying market.
That's Jim's headline, and I think he's absolutely right.
If we can go to the next one, I'll just tell you what we're talking about.
If you haven't heard this, starting on May 1st, a Biden administration decree will require adjusting mortgage calculations to penalize home buyers with a credit score of 680 and above, which is almost two-thirds of the population.
This levy, this fine, will be used to reduce the costs for people with low credit scores, i.e., risky borrowers more likely to default on mortgages.
Jerry Howard, CEO of National Association of Home Builders, warns that President Joe Biden's policy, quote, could decrease home ownership among the middle class.
So, Dr. Paul, I don't know what, I do know what you think about this, but raising the costs for people who are very good with their money and giving it to people who are blowing their money on who knows what.
Yeah, this is manipulation at the worst point, at the worst possible way, increases the bubble.
The bubble comes, of course, easy credit, and the money's available, and the easy credit is supposed to help poor people too.
But guess what?
People who want to build a house or move up qualify.
I'm talking about back in 2008.
Yeah, because the 2008 bubble is we're still seeing the result of that.
The consequence of that and the zero-rate interest rates, and it's led up to this new bubble.
And it started back there with a housing bubble crisis.
And I can remember so clearly complaining about it because, of course, there was the monetary inflation, but there was also this red lining.
These evil people were making a living.
They had responsibility in their job to their investors and to decency that they were making loans according to a person's credit.
And that turned out that certain segments of a community wouldn't be able to get a loan as much as others.
So it was racist.
It was all kinds of things like that.
So the bankers were forced to make bad loans.
They were forced to make the bad loans, and then they got hit.
And those local banks where they forced all that false lending, they go into bankruptcy.
But the same thing is happening now just through the various housing programs and with the inflation.
And right now, though, the inflation and the problems we face today is a consequence of the solutions that they used for 2008 because the solution was zero rate of interest, you know, and also to say that we have a goal.
We know how to take care of it because the economy was soft.
And they said you can only measure an active economy and a healthy economy is when prices are going up, which is totally fallacious.
But anyway, that was the theory that the professors were teaching.
So the policy of the Federal Reserve had been for years, if we could only get the prices going up at 2% a year, this would mean we have a healthy economy.
Inflation's Uncontrolled Rise00:04:10
And guess what?
They achieved it after about 10 years of zero rate interest.
And guess what?
They started down, uncontrolled by the Federal Reserve.
And you know what their main purpose is right now for the Fed?
It's getting inflation at 2%.
But this time they're trying to lower it because the inflation rate is probably 10%.
And they're struggling to get it down to a price inflation of 2%.
So, yes, I think we're living right now with the exaggeration and the stupidity of the policies for a long time.
But each cycle, it is theorized that each cycle gets more difficult.
So, this one is going to be more difficult in 08 because we're reacting to the consequence of what we did.
This follows Mises' theory.
He says, anytime you do something for anybody in an artificial way, subsidize something or solve a problem, you create two new ones.
That's good for good bureaucrats.
They tend to like jobs like that.
They get more money.
Well, as Beauvart points out, we're not talking about chicken feed here.
Let's put on this next clip from his article.
I mean, this is serious.
Do the next one if you can.
There we go.
This is a little small, sorry, but Jim writes, this surtax, no, just, yeah, there you go, thanks.
This surtax could amount to $60 or more per month.
You say, well, that's kind of a lot.
Then he says, that's equivalent to more than $20,000 over a 30-minute year mortgage.
So basically, the government is coming and ripping $20,000 out of your pocket and giving it to people that don't qualify for houses.
And Jim, with his characteristic wit, writes, What will Biden's wizards uncork next?
Maybe a special home buying discount for people who fizzle at least $12 a day at Starbucks.
Maybe a mortgage subsidy for boneheads who spend half their income on a spiffy electric car.
Actually, the new compulsory cross-subsidy is part of the Biden crusade to close the home ownership gap between black and white families.
And you point out, Dr. Paul, that that's also what we faced in 2008 in the name of equity, forcing bad choices on people that actually don't end well.
And if we can put the next one up, this next clip up, Jim explains very well why it doesn't work.
Jim says, giving people mortgages they can't afford can ruin their lives.
He says, thanks to the housing crash, the median net worth of Hispanic households declined by 66% between 05 and 09, and the median net worth of black households declined by 53%.
He points out a quote from the Washington Post.
He says, the implosion of the subprime lending market has left a scar on the finances of black Americans, one that not only has wiped out a generation of economic progress, but could leave them at a financial disadvantage for decades.
So back in 08, they tried to help black families who couldn't afford homes, saying, You got to buy this home.
You got to buy this home.
Here's some money.
You want some money?
And then it turns out they lost everything.
So in trying to help, they actually harm these people.
And one consequence of this manipulation, and while it's still working its way through, is that prices go up and rents go up.
Sometimes there's the local people say, hey, no, you can't raise the rent under these conditions.
You do feel sorry for the people who are suffering the consequences of printing too much money.
So what they do is they go ahead and put on price controls, put controls on rents.
That was the worst episode of that was in the great state of New York, you know, New York City.
And guess what?
There's a shortage of rent places, too.
And there's a shortage of taking care of those rent places.
And they're run down because it doesn't come together.
The market's not allowed to work.
So this is, and what Jim is talking about here is the total rejection of the market forces dealing with housing.
Price Controls Lead to Shortages00:02:35
And in the past, you could predict a little bit, but there's no way you can predict this now and say, well, this is going to happen because it's ongoing.
The cycles are moving quicker and they're deeper.
That is more price inflation and more crashes and more debt.
More debt.
In spite of trying to help people who have trouble passing their bills, everybody has to deal with the debt because you say, Well, I've taken care of him and I still have some money in the bank and all that.
Yeah, but will taxes come along and take that away?
Will inflation eat up what you're doing with the debt?
So the debt is a big deal, but you can't really talk about that except in a political sense.
You know, well, this is a time we should be raising the national debt.
Yes, but the Congress voted this for all this spending.
And if they cut anything, you know, there's a political ramification for this.
Yeah, it's cool, buddy, murder.
Well, before we go on to our final outrage of the day, this is Outrage Thursday.
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Lying About Transgender Entrepreneurs in Nepal00:05:36
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And now, Dr. Paul, we're going to look at something that we spend our money on.
People think, oh, a little bit of money overseas, foreign aid.
That's nice.
We're going to help the poor people overseas.
Well, it doesn't happen that way.
And let's look this final article up.
I think it's from the Daily Caller.
Here's where your money is going overseas.
When we get that queued up, uh-oh, the Biden administration funds classes for transgender makeup entrepreneurs in Nepal.
In Nepal.
And most Americans couldn't even find Nepal.
I'm not even sure I could.
But we've got to make sure they can have transgender makeup artists.
But the trick here for us is the outrage is so bad, and people can understand this.
If we were to say, and we talk a lot of time, you know, they're taking $2 trillion and doing this.
People can't comprehend it.
It's hard to know what it is.
But this is not a big sum of money.
But it's still an outrage.
It can stir up an outrage because it all adds up.
People figure, oh, yeah, it could add up because of the stupidity of subsidizing this.
But when I saw this, I have to confess to our viewers that I was a little slow on it.
And I had to come to you to get this explained.
To get this explained to me.
So there was this transgender makeup entrepreneurs in Nepal.
So first, why are we in Nepal?
Of course, yeah, that's just part of our foreign policy.
But it said they were going to encourage entrepreneurs.
It was a makeup entrepreneurs.
Oh, I thought it was a fake entrepreneur.
They really weren't entrepreneurs.
They were just labeling themselves as being fancy entrepreneurs.
But you had to make sure that I knew and understood that they're training people to put on makeup of transgender people.
I thought, holy man.
You know, if you're looking for an outrage, this has to be.
Even if it is only a few thousand dollars here and there, soon it'll add up to a million dollars.
Yeah, it will.
And not only that, it's not going to engender the people of this country kindly to the U.S. You know, this is a country I was just looking as we were talking here.
The GDP per capita of Nepal is $1,208.
It's lower even than Bangladesh.
This is a country that is struggling to survive, struggling to eat, struggling to put food on the table.
And instead of going over there helping with that, and I'm sure we're helping with a lot of that, we're going over there saying, hey, we can import something in the U.S. that is considered a very fringe perspective, and we can endorse it and support it there.
Look at this next clip.
This is from that article, and this is where they're using our taxpayer dollars to teach makeup artists for transgender entrepreneurs in Nepal.
And if you go to the next one, this is from the article.
And this is how these bureaucracies hide, Dr. Paul.
They hide with all of these different titles and offices and bureaus.
But this one says the grant was authorized by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
It began in April and will end in May.
Its aim is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange.
You know, we've seen a lot of countries who do not want to have this kind of cultural exchange with the U.S.
And again, we don't care what people do in their own homes, but we do care what people do when the money is stolen from our homes to give to them to do it.
You know, they talk a lot about accurate identification.
And in the old days, if you lied on an application about your background and where you're from and that sort of thing, you could get into a little trouble.
But I'm amazed about this sort of thing.
You know, I have to just study this stuff better.
State Department has also announced on March of 2022 that citizens could choose X.
Oh, X is what?
You know, X and Y and all that kind of stuff.
No, I think they choose X as their gender.
But there is no gender like that.
But if you say that, that gets you into trouble.
So the government is demanding, this is shocking, demanding that people lie, lie to themselves and the whole world.
I'm a nobody.
I'm just an X.
And yet, that's one of the big problems that I try to concentrate on is that empires really depend on increasing the magnitude of the lying.
And now there's this type of lying.
But the worst thing is it's lying to a generation of people who having now a lot of remorse about, oh, maybe we should have done that.
I don't know why we did this.
And this is something that could be solved by people being a little bit more straightforward with themselves And facing up to the fact that wealth doesn't come out of the thin air.
We all know it comes out of a Federal Reserve computer.
Lying To Future Generations00:05:37
Exactly.
Well, it is a shame, but it looks like this stuff is going to be around for a while.
But more and more people are getting disgusted.
And I do believe this will be important in the campaign in this next year.
Yeah, it should be.
And, you know, I don't think most Americans are aware of how much that woke agenda is pouring into our foreign aid programs, pouring in overseas.
And it's making a lot of countries angry at the U.S. and hate us.
And actually, if you don't like Russia, this is just fuel to Russia's fire because it's saying, look, while they're exporting this stuff, we're trying to have traditional values here.
And so they're actually helping them.
But look, put this next one up because it's not just a couple of thousand here and a couple of thousand there to put on some makeup.
It's a lot more than that.
This is from that Daily Caller article.
The Biden administration offered $500,000 in a grant to teach the English language in Pakistan.
That sounds okay, whatever, you know, you're going to spend it.
But the program promotes, quote, intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth from the ages of 13 to 25, according to the notice of funding.
So we're spending a half a million dollars to indoctrinate kids of 13 years old on transgender issues.
That's wonderful.
In 2022, the State Department announced, quote, an open competition for organizations interested in submitting applications for projects which have the goal to provide lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex communities.
Funding program was between $7.50 and $1.5 million.
Again, in a gazillion-dollar budget like we have, it's just a drop in the bucket.
But again, it's just showing people overseas that this is a decadent country.
Yes, and it's universal where they will go to try to get their views across.
And we do know that it's in the schools, and the parents are starting to wake up to this.
Parents should be in charge of their kids, not the school teachers' unions that dictate all these nonsensical rules.
But there is a story, there's a little bit of optimism here, although it's still discouraging.
12-year-old stands up to the school board after he was kicked out of class for saying on his t-shirt, only two genders.
Oh, that is subversive.
So subversive.
He says, I have been told that my shirt was targeting a protected class, not him, though.
He wasn't in the protected class.
Who is this protected class?
Are their feelings more important than my rights?
Yeah, they said that somebody came and complained about his shirt.
His shirt was making them feel uncomfortable.
So what do they do?
They go and take away somebody else's rights as if you can transfer rights into something that doesn't qualify as a right.
But he went and held his own.
His dad had to come pick him up from school.
And I don't have the final solution there, but just the fact that this is occurring and putting a 12-year-old, you know, the one thing he said when he went before that, he says, this is made, you know, he was just a kid making a statement.
He says, I never thought my shirt would have me come here.
He says, this makes me feel very uncomfortable.
Now, that's real discomfort.
Intimidating and telling the kids that he's nuts and he's going to get kicked out of school.
And he has to go and talk to a bunch of people to the school board unions, you know, so often.
So that is a shame.
Well, there is a good solution that's called the Ron Paul curriculum because I would never let my kids in that situation.
But I'm going to close out the end of the week for me.
Dr. Paul, you've got to come back tomorrow with Chris, but I'm it's the end of the week for me just by reminding you to get your tickets.
We're less than a month away from our Houston conference.
It's a beautiful hotel, delicious breakfast, brunch, great speakers.
Dr. Paul will be speaking.
I'll be speaking.
Jordan Schaefer will be speaking.
We have a couple of other speakers that are going to be there.
It's going to be a great event, a great time.
Again, we've kept the prices at last year's prices despite inflation.
But we do want to have all of you there.
So I will include a link in the about section of today's show.
You can also go to ronpaulinstitute.org, and there's a little link on top of the right-hand section of the page.
And so we look forward to seeing you in less than a month.
Very good.
I'm looking forward to the conference.
There are always great events.
And I want to make a point once again about trying to get people to understand that telling the truth is very helpful.
But the question is, or the answer really is, nobody has a perfect knowledge of the truth.
And I don't believe that is the case.
But there are some people who seem to have assumed that they have a perfect understanding of the nihilism that they teach.
And they make up the truth.
They're the purveyors of lies and innuendos and then these new societies because they substitute truth telling with something that is made up and supports their political system.
So that is something that has to be addressed someday because right now I think we've drifted a long way from the sentiment of our founders of this country that tried to put these views into the Constitution and worried about it being viable if the people reject the moral standards that you need to live in a free society.
Seeking Peace and Prosperity00:00:52
So we work hard at the Liberty Report to try to seek out and do our best to understand what is true about these things and explain really that the solution isn't that difficult.
And the one thing is if you seek peace and prosperity with the principles of individual liberty, it's not complex.
You just can't use aggression against people.
You can't hurt people and steal their stuff.
But the second half of that is you can't allow the government or encourage the government to do the same thing and think that you can rake off the top and have your special interest or have the lobbyists take care of individuals.
The poor people are trapped because they're in the middle of this grinder, but the ones who are running the show don't seem to suffer the consequences even when the market's turned down.