"The price of just about everything is going up. Used cars, to gas, to food."

CNN visited Scranton, PA and found that residents are getting hard hit by President Biden's inflation.

Residents said:

"This is probably the worst it has been in a long time."

"My car usually takes around $25 to fill up. Now it is $10 more."

"We are seeing 10-15% increases -- things like flour, mayonnaise, a lot of oils, everything that we are experiencing now is unprecedented."

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Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have introduced the Democrat Fiscal Year 2022 budget resolution. This budget includes instructions for the Democrats to fast-track their reckless $3.5 trillion ($3,500,000,000,000) tax and spending spree later this year.

ATR urges Senators to vote no on this resolution. If signed into law, it will tee off passage of the following proposals:

Trillions in new tax increases on working families and small businesses. This budget resolution will be the first step toward the Biden plan to raise taxes by $3 trillion over the next decade. Some of these tax increases include:

• Increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, which will be passed along to working families in the form of higher prices, fewer jobs, and lower wages. This will give the U.S. a combined state-federal rate of 32 percent, higher than our foreign competitors including China, which has a 25 percent corporate tax rate. This will also fall on over 1.4 million small businesses organized as c-corporations. 
   

• Doubling the capital gains tax to 43.4 percent, a rate more than double China’s capital gains tax. 
   

• Taking away step-up in basis and imposing a second death tax by taxing unrealized capital gains at death. This will disproportionately fall on family-owned businesses. Taking away step-up in basis has already been tried and failed. In 1976, Congress eliminated stepped-up basis, but it was so complicated and unworkable that it was restored in 1980. 
   

• Imposing a 15 percent minimum tax on “book income” that will disallow the use of important deductions and credits that help promote job creation and economic growth. 
   

• Increase the top income tax rate to 39.6%, a tax increase that will fall on small businesses. As noted in a recent Senate Finance Committee report, "... in 2016, only 42 percent of net business income in the United States was earned by corporations, down from 78.3 percent in 1980." 
   

• New taxes on American energy including a tax on manufacturers based on their methane production and a carbon border tax. These tax increases will be passed along to families and businesses in the form of higher prices. 
   

• Creating a 21 percent global minimum tax, higher than the 15 percent global minimum tax the Biden admin is pushing other countries to enact. 
   

• Repealing the deduction for foreign-derived intangible income, a tax cut that encourages businesses to house their intellectual property in the United States.

$80 billion in new IRS funding to hire 87,000 new agents. This would allow the IRS to audit and harass small businesses and American families for an additional $787 billion. It would hire enough new IRS agents to fill Nationals Park twice.

It would help implement the Biden plan to create a new comprehensive financial account information reporting regime which would force the disclosure of any business or personal account that exceeds $600.

Not only would this include the bank, loan, and investment accounts of virtually every individual and business, but it would also include third-party providers like Venmo, CashApp, and PayPal.

New IRS funding will also be a boon to the union that represents IRS employees. This union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), shovels 97 percent of their money into Democrat campaign coffers.

IRS employees also regularly perform union work on the taxpayer’s dime. In 2019, 1,421 IRS and other Treasury Department employees spent 353,820 hours of taxpayer-funded union time (TFUT), costing the federal government $17.27 million.

Socialist healthcare policies such as H.R. 3, the Pelosi plan to impose new taxes and government price controls on American medical innovation. This legislation creates a 95 percent excise tax on manufacturers and imposes an international reference pricing scheme that directly imports foreign price controls into the U.S. 

This proposal will reduce access to new, lifesaving and life-preserving medicines. According to research by the Galen Institute, the U.S. had access to 90 percent of new cures launched between 2011 and 2018, a rate far greater than comparable foreign countries. For instance, The United Kingdom had access to 60 percent of medicines, Japan had 50 percent, and Canada had just 44 percent.

It will also threaten high-paying manufacturing jobs across the country at a time when we are just emerging from the economic wreckage from the pandemic. Pharmaceutical manufacturers invest $100 billion in the U.S. economy every year, directly supporting 800,000 jobs including jobs in every state. 

Trillions in new welfare spending that will allow the federal government to promote woke policies. This includes:

• Hundreds of billions in funding for “free” pre-K and community college to “close the equity gap.” Part of this funding will ensure classroom environments that are “inclusive for all students.” 
   

• $10 billion to create a Civilian Climate Corps. The program will help set the stage for the Green New Deal and give progressive activists free government housing, transportation, and salaries to “advance environmental justice.” 
   

• New spending to make childcare “affordable,” and to promote “culturally and linguistically responsive environments.” 
   

• New federal subsidies to improve “housing affordability and equity” and to encourage green and sustainable housing. 
   

• Lowers the Medicare eligibility age and expands coverage to Dental, Vision, and Hearing.

The Democrat budget resolution is a reckless proposal that will lead to increased taxes on working families and small businesses and trillions in new spending on welfare programs and woke policies.

The coronavirus outbreak and resulting worldwide pandemic has resulted in more than four million deaths, including 612,000 Americans. In the early days of the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) arrested journalists and doctors who dared to tell the world about the deadly virus that was spreading across China. The CCP blocked information about the virus on social media sites and removed news stories reporting accurate infection data. By the time the world was finally made aware of the danger Covid-19 posed, it was far too late. 

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the murderous and authoritarian CCP deserves recognition for the “transparency” and “leadership” they showed in the face of a deadly virus. WHO publicly said that China’s oppressive regime was “making us safer” from Covid. The four million people who have died thanks to CCP recklessness would surely disagree. 

Unfortunately, WHO isn’t finished repressing opportunities to save lives. Just three days ago, on July 27, WHO released their eighth global tobacco report, focused on reducing global access to reduced harm tobacco products and alternatives to tobacco. There are 1.1 billion people in the world who smoke cigarettes every single day, an all-time high. In 2019, eight million people died as a result of smoking. Thanks to WHO, millions more will die without access to these lifesaving alternatives. 

Just imagine how corrupt an organization would need to be to actively work against lifesaving technology. Fortunately, there is ample evidence demonstrating exactly who is influencing WHO tobacco control policy and how they are doing it. Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former Mayor of New York City, and his multi-billion-dollar “charity” Bloomberg Philanthropies funded, and contributed to, the WHO report and have used their massive endowment to exert undue influence over low- and middle-income countries that are more vulnerable to philanthropic pressure.  

The WHO report is only one example of Bloomberg using his wealth to global health policy. In January 2021, Philippine Food and Drug Administration officials revealed that they have been receiving money from the Bloomberg Initiative and The Union, charities funded by Bloomberg himself. According to reports, the funds were bestowed on the condition that the Philippine government implemented Bloomberg-sanctioned tobacco control policies. While the Philippines are one of the first countries where Bloomberg’s pseudo-colonialism have been publicly exposed, the former Mayor and failed 2020 Presidential candidate has been pouring money into dark money groups for years in pursuit of prohibitionist policies. 

WHO’s report is filled with downright lies about e-cigarettes. In one section, the report states that “The outbreak of electronic-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury (EVALI) in the United States in 2019–2020 highlights the potential dangers associated with (e-cigarettes)”. There is zero evidence that EVALI is the result of nicotine-containing e-cigarette use. Rather, illicit THC vaping products containing Vitamin E-Acetate have been identified as the culprit behind the outbreak. This is common knowledge among the scientific and health community. The report also attempts to tie “popcorn lung” to e-cigarette use, even though there has never been a case of popcorn lung resulting from vaping. WHO is more interested in following Bloomberg’s misguided ideology than sharing the truth about vaping. 

It is truly inconceivable that WHO would allow a prohibitionist like Mike Bloomberg to fund a report that will have incredible influence over the policies of dozens of countries. Bloomberg, and by extension WHO, would prefer to see the one billion global smokers die from cigarettes than switch to an alternative that reduces their exposure to harmful chemicals. 

There are, however, countries that have embraced, or at the very least tolerated, vaping products and other safer alternatives and have seen incredible improvements in public health as a result.  

WHO’s report claims that evidence is “inconclusive” that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, yet 2.4 million British smokers have quit cigarettes with vaping. Even as cigarette smoking has increased globally in the last few years, England has seen a dramatic decrease in smoking prevalence thanks to vaping. The British government has embraced vaping as a method of smoking cessation, publicizing data demonstrating that vaping is 95% less harmful than cigarettes and two to four times more effective at helping smokers quit than traditional nicotine replacement therapies. 

In Japan, cigarette sales have decreased by 43% over the past five years, the greatest decrease in recorded history, as a result of heat-not-burn tobacco products that significantly reduces exposure to harmful chemicals compared to cigarette smoking.  

A form of “clean” smokeless tobacco called snus contains less toxins than other tobacco products and is highly popular among Swedish men. Sweden has the lowest rate of lung cancer in the developed world.   

The World Health Organization knows this, of course. Just how they knew that China was arresting journalists, making truth-telling doctors disappear, and shutting down the spread of information that would have alerted the world to the once-in-a-generation pandemic that would soon sweep the globe.  

This much is clear, the World Health Organization is more interested in lining their own pockets than saving lives. The United States, currently the largest contributor to WHO’s budget, cannot in good conscience continue to fund their willful ignorance that continually costs lives all over the world. American taxpayers must demand that the U.S. defund, or at least suspend, funding to WHO until they commit to expanded transparency and true pro-science policies.