Bureaucrats Attack Republicans with Tax Dollars
By: Sam Stone
During the five years I served as chief of staff to one of the last remaining big-city Republican councilmembers in the country, almost nothing got me as consistently hot under the collar as the constant deluge of tax money the City of Phoenix routinely poured into left-activist orgs. Most Republicans don’t realize it, but your tax dollars are being used against you by the millions and billions. Over here, a militant anti-police, open-borders group gets paid to do business outreach around light rail construction. Over there, a teacher’s union front group collects a giant check to deliver boxed meals to seniors. Little of what they’re theoretically paid to do will actually happen. There will be zero accountability required, or even expected. That’s not what the money is really for, and both sides of the transaction eagerly play along, because the real purpose is buying elections. Everyone involved in the game knows it.
Over the years, I tried to keep a running total of these abuses, but found the exercise easier said than done – often the handouts are hidden as line items in routine city business, or forced on contractors as part of their awards, so the true scope of this electoral and financial fraud is hidden from the public.
Now we have a report by the Claremont Institute detailing the depth of these left-activist giveaways, at least at the federal level. Claremont’s Federal Progressive Subsidy Database details the hundreds of millions – under Biden more than a billion – given by the federal government to leftist orgs each year. The numbers are staggering and, as noted above, the money is almost entirely unaccounted for.
It's also just the tip of the iceberg. Claremont has announced the intention to maintain and update their database annually, so my guess is they’ll find a lot more out there in just the federal universe than what they’ve discovered already, but those numbers will still fall short of the staggering sums of taxpayer money bureaucrats are managing to filch from taxpayers and hand to their political allies on the left.
If the number is “only” $50 million per year, on average, from cities controlled by Democrats, that’s at least another $3-4 billion per year. Throw in another $50 million per (and this number is almost certainly low, as in bottom of the ocean low) per Blue State, and you’re looking at a total of at least $7 billion dollars per year being funneled from taxpayers to leftist advocacy by bureaucrats.
Remember that $7+ billion next time you wonder how a center-right country is teetering on the edge of insane leftism, because it buys a lot of votes.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.