Budget and Tax News Podcast

H. Sterling Burnett joins the podcast The District with Teresa Mull to discuss the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act. Burnett highlights how this bill is simply a renamed version of the Build Back Better plan. Biden and Congressional Democrats are taking advantage of the pain that Americans are feeling due to inflation their own progressive policies created. They truly didn’t let this crisis go to waste.

Check out more episodes of The District here: https://spectatorworld.com/radio-category/district/

The government wants you to think its policies are reducing inflation. This isn’t the truth. Inflation is going away because government money infusion is over. Inflation is always a monetary problem of too much money chasing too few goods. The COVID lockdown saw the greatest infusion of money in the shortest time in the history of the world at a time when the economy that was shut down. That spending is over and the economy is turning out goods and services again, so the cause of the inflation has ended. Neither the inflation reduction act nor the Federal Reserve raising interest rates is responsible for the waning inflation, but they could bring it back.

Kevin McGary of the Fredrick Douglas Foundation of California and Every Black Life Matters says liberals and progressives are wrong. The 2nd amendment is absolute and essential for African Americans. More, public schools and socialism are terrible for the black community in America. Individual initiative and free choice are critical to success. African American's should embrace gun ownership for self-protection and protection against tyranny; school choice; and a ban of teaching Critical Race Theory, which embraces the "virtues" of socialism in our public schools. The culture of dependency pushed by liberals is the biggest road block to black Americans' succeeding.

As a defense against the federal government sinking into tyranny, the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States prohibits the government from abrogating or otherwise interfering with the average person’s right to keep and bear arms. Elites have been chipping away at this right ever since. Courts, often composed of elites, have failed to defend American’s Second Amendment rights.

Stephen P. Halbrook, Ph.D., Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute and author of The Right to Bear Arms: A Constitutional Right of the People or a Privilege of the Ruling Class?, explains why the courts are trending towards supporting the right to keep and bear arms.

Freedom of speech is an unalienable right. It is not granted by government. It preexists the government itself. The Founding Fathers established the United States of America to protect our unalienable rights. Today, freedom of speech is under a direct threat. In the United States, there are three corporations that control 97 percent of social media activity. One company controls 75 percent. Three companies controlling 97 percent isn’t problematic in and of itself, but the suppression of Americans’ right to free speech is.

The problem worsened when the White House press secretary admitted that the White House directs Big Tech on what should be censored and removed from the internet. This is antithetical to the vision the Founding Fathers had for the purpose of government.

James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute, testifies in Ohio in favor of protecting freedom of speech on social media platforms. States across the country must draw a line in the sand and prohibit social media companies and the federal government from suppressing speech that they deem unfavorable for their agenda.

Our second-favorite socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently weighed in on the inflation debate, saying we need the government to spend MORE money to counteract inflation. In addition, she also gave her two cents on the recent elections in Virginia. Stopping Socialism's Donald Kendal and Chris Talgo break down her insane comments in this episode of "Stopping Socialism."

Fox & Friends co-host and New York Times best selling author Brian Kilmeade joins the Heartland Daily Podcast to discuss his new book, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul.

This is Kilmeade's third time on the Heartland podcast talking about his popular history books. Hosts Jim Lakely and Chris Talgo talk to Kilmeade about the relationship between Lincoln and Douglass, the development of their special friendship, the state of race relations in the 19th Century compared to today, the zealotry of abolitionist John Brown, the lack of proper history teaching in America's schools, the "calamity" of the assassination of President Lincoln, and what Douglass would have thought of the Black Lives Matter movement and riots in the summer of 2020.

The government The Founding Fathers envisioned was a force for good. Its limited role was to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If alive today, they would balk at what our government has become. Rampant government intervention seen today skews markets and limits the freedom of the individual.

H. Sterling Burnett joins the Great Talks With podcast to describe how The Heartland Institute discovers, develops, and promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems; fighting back against big government.

Find out how the free market has helped accelerate the economic development of western democracies in this podcast.

Check out more Great.com Talks With podcasts.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill into law that aims to protect social media users from being censored or de-platformed. Jim Lakely joins the Jeff Katz show to discuss how this law is a step in the right direction for protecting free speech online. Until now, big tech companies have had free rein to censor whomever they choose, with users having little to no recourse to fight back. The Florida law aims to change that.

Who is the most informed on key issues? Is it viewers of Fox News? How about CNN, MSNBC, or other left-leaning media? Many have hypothesized on this question, but it’s been impossible to quantify until now.

In conjunction with Rasmussen Reports, The Heartland Institute conducted a poll that asked participants key factual questions. These participants were also asked about where they receive their news. It became exceedingly clear that viewers of CNN are wildly misinformed about many issues, including the national debt, climate change, and police shootings.

Jim Lakely speaks with Tony Katz on the results from the poll.

Check out the poll here: https://heartland.org/news-opinion/news/rasmussenheartland-poll-news

H. Sterling Burnett joins Merrill Matthews from the Institute for Policy Innovation to discuss gun control.

President Joe Biden is, rather unsurprisingly, pushing for more restrictive gun control laws. Aside from calling for legislation to unconstitutionally limit the ownership and sale of firearms, he offered a series of executive orders he says are first steps to reduce "gun violence." His proposals amount to virtue signaling on the gun issue and will do nothing to prevent crimes committed with firearms. For instance, Biden is directing the DOJ to treat so-called ghost guns as machine guns, requiring taxes and registration with the government, yet no ghost gun has ever been linked to a crime.

There are many lessons we should take away from the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic shutdowns imposed by governments. First, lockdowns don't work. They didn't halt the spread of the virus, and any many ways resulted in unnecessary suffering and death. It turns out masks do work. The economy declined by a huge amount, yet because the cause was exogenous to the market, and the lack of spending meant people saved more than they ever had, the recovery has been quick and is likely to result in an economic boom. However, the way people work has likely changed forever.

Heartland Institute President James Taylor explains why we must all must fight to protect free speech on the internet. State legislators, too, have a role in protecting the right of their constituents to speak freely on line. As he said in a recent live Heartland Webinar, Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act does not address or preclude state action to protect political free speech on the Internet.

"Section 230 does not give the tech giants, the tech cartel, the right to censor political free speech. Again, this Section 230 explicitly says the purpose is to maximize user control -- not Facebook control, not Google control, not platform control," Taylor said.

"[Online speech] must be sexually obscene or excessively violent, otherwise you do not have blanket authority to play God in terms of what you do or don't allow on the Internet. Yes, we do have the right to insist that we can speak freely, especially on political topics and cultural topics, on the Internet," he said.

H. Sterling Burnett joins Dr. Merrill Matthews on Point of View radio to discuss gun legislation in the Joe Biden era. Joe Biden has promised to enact more strict legislation regarding gun ownership. As a supporter of the 2^nd amendment, H. Sterling Burnett discusses why this legislation will fail to end gun violence but will encroach upon the freedoms America was founded on.

Justin Haskins joins the Morning Show with Preston Scott to discuss government policies threatening the US economy. Justin starts by describing how the lockdowns are destroying live. People are losing their businesses, their jobs, and their savings. More, there's little evidence to show the lockdowns effectively stopped transmission of COVID-19.

Haskins continues by describing how the national debt requires the government to keep interest rates low, benefiting those who can borrow money while further pushing normal people down the totem pole. Haskins and Scott conclude by discussing how government cannot simply cancel student loan debt. The money has to come from somewhere.

Dan Pilla, executive director at the Tax Freedom Institute and policy advisor for The Heartland Institute, joins Dr. Merrill Matthews on Point of View radio to discuss the dark money circulated throughout Washington DC. They discuss possible dark money ties to the riots seen in the capital.

Pilla also discusses how taxes have changed throughout the insanity that was 2020. How did the coronavirus change the tax code? How does the stimulus money factor in? What does the Joe Biden administration plan to do on taxes? Pilla discusses these questions and more.

Christina Herrin, government relations manager of health policy, interviews Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste Project on reckless federal spending. The discussion focuses on federal agency spending, transparency, and the need to end tax payer dollars going to government run experiments on animals. 

Learn more at: 

https://www.whitecoatwaste.org/

Christina Herrin, government relations manager of health policy, discusses the state of Iowa’s legislator during the COVID-19 pandemic with Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver. The conversation focuses on the legislative agenda for 2021. Sen. Whitver explains how Iowa has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, the benefits of school choice for Iowa, and how conservative tax policies benefit the state.

To stay up to date on Sen. Whitver, follow:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jwhitver

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackwhitver