It’s Tax Time… (Transcript)

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Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to to find out what’s going on in the world today. You just gotta have anything to do with it and what you can do to plan ahead for what you know is going to happen. So, what we’re going to talk about today is tomorrow is April 15th, and that’s tax day, and we’re going to talk about income taxes, taxes in general.

Also, by the way, April 15th, just for the history buffs out there, you should realize that the Titanic sunk on April 15th, and President John, I’m sorry, President Lincoln was killed on April 15th, and so April 15th has more significance than just the tax day that comes and plagues us every year. I don’t know how many people are aware of this, but the average American works nearly four months out of the year, about 120 days each year to pay his federal, state, and local taxes. That’s about 34.7% of your yearly income that you make, basically four months, goes to pay your taxes,and if you think that 34.7% of your income is a fair tax rate, then I’m sorry, you don’t have many brains in your brain, because that is a third of everything you make to go pay taxes, and I can guarantee you, if you’re the average middle-class American, you are not getting back anywhere near the one-third of your salary that you’re giving up.

In fact, you’re giving up that one-third of your salary to pay for illegal aliens, to pay for school busing, to pay for all kinds of things that you yourself do not use, and society waste. There’s a lot of waste in this government. They started with Doge last year, and it was a good idea.

I knew right away that it was just a boondoggle of a project, and I knew that nobody in the swamp really was gonna catch real bad fraud, and I understood, and I had a program right away last year that the whole thing was a scam, and it was a scam. I don’t think Elon Musk thought it was a scam when he started it, but I think that’s what he broke away from Donald Trump so violently last year was over, because I think Elon Musk, being a businessman that he is, wanted to cut spending, realizing there was all kinds of abuse and fraud and waste, but the politician in Donald Trump and the politicians in both the Democrat and Republican Party just simply do not want to cure the problems that America has with its wasteful spending. In fact, the government itself, the GAO, which stands for the United States Government Accountability Office, themselves admit that probably $521 billion, I should say, $521 billion a year just goes to fraud.

That is a half of a trillion dollars just to fraud. Another $162 billion, which is what, $1.15 trillion,goes to improper payments. What are improper payments? That is when the government payscorporations for work they did not do, paid people Social Security checks they themselves did notearn.

Many times you find stories in the paper over and over again where nursing homes, little nursing homes, where maybe one woman taking care of five elderly people, and they have died for years, but she still collects her Social Security checks like they’re still alive, and pockets the money. This happens time and time again. We’re not even talking about waste here.

We’re talking about almost, in my estimation, $2 to $3 trillion a year is on just plain fraud. And not even counting waste. And when you think that our entire budget per year is about $6 trillion, you’re looking at about one-third of that entire budget goes to fraud.

Now, how about wasteful spending? What is wasteful spending? Well, let me give you an example. Here are just a few programs that waste your money. Reports have flagged $5.2 million, doesn’t sound much, for dozing dogs with cocaine, and another $15 million to teach monkeys how to play video games.

$7.5 billion has been allocated for electric vehicle charging stations, and only 68 were ever built. Another thing is an international pet project that makes $20 million available for Sesame Street in Iraq. There’s also improper payments, like I said, in absolute fraud when it came to the COVID money.

There was a report on CNBC about a year or two ago about one group of people that made over $200 million defrauding the government out of COVID checks that did not belong. In fact, COVID money, nearly a third of a trillion dollars, is known to be fraudulent. We’re not talking about waste here, we’re talking about fraudulent that don’t even count in that first $1.5 trillion.

We’re just talking about on top of it. But improper payments that we make? Well, the military pays for all kinds of things that just simply do not work. A case in point is when we first moved to Virginia back in 1996, there was a report that this is during the very famous government shutdown, and employees from the military, from the GSO, whoever buys for the military, they were on leave.

So they had temporary people paying the bills. And this one bookkeeper, who was a temp bookkeeper, noticed a bill that did not have an invoice with it. It was a statement for like a million dollars.

And so she asked for the invoice. And the superior, who was not laid off, I guess he was an essential employee, said, oh, no, you just pay off the statement. And she goes, oh, no, no, you have to have an invoice attached to a statement in order to pay a bill to know what exactly you’re paying.

And he goes, no, no, we just pay that bill. And I don’t think that man was a crook here. This was just procedure, he was telling her.

And she hounded and hounded, and she finally contacted the company with a statement, and she wanted an invoice. And the company could not produce an invoice. And so she flagged it aspotential problem that they could not produce an invoice and she would not pay the bill.

Well, to make a long story short, it turned out that there was this man who did not own a companywho billed the government a million dollars a month for a service he never did, not at all. And they paid it based off of his statement, never off an invoice. They never had a clue what the man claimed he was doing for that million dollars a month.

Here’s another story, about the same time during the government shutdown that another temporary employee was able to discover that our government employees, the essential ones that is, could not figure out. And that was every year Coca-Cola has special Christmas cans. And one year they had the polar bear, I believe, with the Santa Claus hat on or something like that.

And there were a white can and they weren’t a red can. Well, it turns out that the government exchange that buys all the Coca-Cola, some of the people complained they wanted the Christmas cans and they were getting the red cans. So someone, one of these temp people, while the government was still shut down, wrote a letter to Coca-Cola and said, why aren’t we being shipped white cans for Christmas time? We have people complaining.

Well, Coca-Cola writes back, well, it’s impossible because that’s how we’ve been making for the last, I don’t know, so many months. And it turns out that the product that they were buying was not Coca-Cola. It was counterfeit Coca-Cola by a consortium of counterfeiters that made fake Coca-Cola, duplicated the red cans.

And the only reason they got caught doing this was, and they did this for quite a few years, by the way, the story went, and the only reason they got caught was because they didn’t know enough to make a white polar bear can for Christmas time. This is the fraud and abuse that goes on every single day in government. And I guarantee you, if you work for any company, if you work for, my brother and my father worked for the Nestle company.

I worked for a while for the Kimberly Clark company in Milford, Connecticut as a teenager. And everybody knows, and any employee of any big company knows of all the waste that goes on. I remember one time working at Kimberly Clark.

There was, I think 900 employees at the time, but they went through 28,000 pairs of leathergloves a year, 28,000 pairs of leather gloves for 900 employees. Now you figure out if there’swrong with that number. This is the stuff that happens in government, tenfold.

And after this break, I’m going to get back and give you a story of why I always said all along that Pete Hegseth should never be in charge of the Pentagon. And I’m going to tell you an economic reason why, and I think I’ll surprise some people. I’ll be right back after this word about the plain truth.

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You can find that on Your Health Today. All of it can be found by going to theplaintruth.com. Go to theplaintruth.com every day, and you will find stories that you will not find in one place anywhere else, I guarantee it. This is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.

Go to theplaintruth.com, and you will not be disappointed. Well, we’re back, and I wanted to give the story that was told to me when Pete Hegseth got the job. And I was not much for him anyway, but somebody pointed out to me who sells a lot of paint to the Navy, more than we do, and said, do you realize that the Navy is the largest corporation in the world? It’s bigger than Amazon.

It’s bigger than Tesla. It’s bigger than IBM or any of the Bank Seven. It buys 1.5 trillion dollars a year, basically, of goods and services, and that this man that just got the nomination wouldn’t know a contract if he ever saw one.

90% of what a Secretary of the Defense does is buy and overlook corruption, potential corruption, over the vendors they’re buying from. And there’s a lot of that going on. So you put somebody in charge who doesn’t know.

If you can’t run an Amazon or a Walmart, you cannot know how to run our Pentagon. And yet, that was the job he got, and I can guarantee you right now that hundreds of millions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars are being wasted, stolen, abused, and overspent because the person in charge doesn’t know waste, fraud, and abuse when he sees it because he’s never been educated to find that. That’s just one example.

Going on to other things, this is what Medicare admits they overpay people, $54.3 billion. Medicaid, $31.1 billion. There’s another report, by the way, that the states have stolen by defrauding the federal government of Medicaid money because, remember, the states are in charge of Medicaid money, that there are reports that the states have stolen or mis-billed our government by over $250 billion in Medicaid reimbursements that they paid out.

And those states happen to be New York, Michigan, Illinois, California. Are you getting the idea here? We saw what happened in Michigan with these daycare centers that didn’t exist and all of these Medicaid-paid programs that the Somalis ran that didn’t exist. These are all Medicaid fraud against the federal government.

And some people believe that that’s going to be $250 billion. That’s a quarter of a trillion dollars.The SNAP benefits, everyone, I think everybody listening to the sound of my voice understandsthe fraud that goes on with SNAP benefits.

I’ve seen this over the years. People, nowadays it’s not money, they get a credit card, but anybody can use that credit card. There’s no ID to be checked and people share the credit card.

And a lot of times they give out their credit card to get cocaine money, booze money, cigarette money, all paid for by you and me. Then there’s all kinds of other funds, the EPA toxic fund, the restaurant revitalization fund, all kinds of other programs, some of which building bridges to nowhere. I think people remember when Sarah Palin was talking about a bridge they were trying to build in Alaska.

They had no road to it and no road away from it, but they were building a $100 million bridgebecause a senator wanted some money kicked back to his state, given to a contractor who justhappened to be given money to him. If you were to add up, and I do not think I’m exaggerating here, if you were to add up all of the fraud that’s going on in our government today, I think, and not just waste, I think half of our entire budget of $6 trillion would be saved alone. And if you took out the overspending of our government, buying programs that does not work, buying software programs that do not work, buying computer systems that are way overpriced and outdated, everybody remembers the $800 coffee pot, I think, that the government was buying, or the $24 boat.

I remember a 60-minute story where a certain titanium boat was needed for aircraft and it was $24 a boat. And when they investigated, all they were doing was going to Ace Hardware and they were buying 11-cent boats, regular stainless steel boats at the time, they were 11 or 15 cents a piece, but they were charging the government $24 a piece. This goes on.

Everybody knows it goes on. And yet, all of our politicians feign ignorance about waste, fraud, and abuse. The reason being, the people that are robbing out of your pockets are taking some of that money and they’re putting it into the pockets of the politicians who allow it to continue.

The swamp is bigger than ever. Donald Trump’s never got rid of the swamp when it comes to polymarket and other things. But the idea that we are spending, I cannot believe that we’re not spending two-thirds of our money wastefully or fraudulently.

So if you were to say that our true budget, for example, should be about $2 trillion instead of $6 trillion, that means you would work two-thirds less per year to pay your taxes. By the way, this fraud and abuse, I just said the federal government here. How about the state and local governments? Everybody knows, especially if you live in a town, everybody knows the waste andthe fraud and the abuse that goes into town and the cronyism, especially the smaller the town,the more the cronyism.

I live in a little town. My paint plant is in a little town in Virginia that owns the electricity. Believe it or not, they buy the electricity from Community Electric, who does not make electricity, who buys the electricity from Dominion Power, who probably buys the electricity on the market.

To make a long story short, the town marks up the electricity and that’s how they make their money. I’ll give you one example. We have a building.

The building has eight LED light bulbs, eight LED light bulbs. My electric bill in that building, there is no other electricity in that building, none. There’s not a heater, there’s not an air conditioner, there is not anything but eight LED light bulbs.

My bill for the month of February for that building was $272. You think about that, eight light bulbs, LED, they’re supposed to be energy saving, right? Eight light bulbs, $272. Pay it or we shut it off.

My friend of mine who does have a very big home overlooking his paint plant has a light bill on average in the town of the same town, town of Wakefield, as corrupt as it can be in my opinion, pays $1,900 a month light bill for a house of 6,000 square feet. That’s a big house, but let’s say your house is 2,000 square feet. You take two-thirds of that off and guess what? You’re still having a $600 light bill.

Do you think that any house is really using $600 worth of electricity or do you think that town of Wakefield is stealing from you in a form of a different hidden tax that you don’t even know about? Because it comes out of your electric, it don’t come out of your tax bill. Plus they tax the living bejesus out of you as it is on top of that and offer no services whatsoever. This is the corruption in the small towns.

Now go to your states. Go to the states like Connecticut for example. Go to the states like Virginia now, especially under this communist governor we just inherited by election, probably by stolen election, but I won’t go there.

The waste in state government, the fraud and abuse and the kickbacks to politicians in small government is just as bad if not worse than in big government. I’ll be right back with another word about theplaintruth.com and then we’ll wrap up this series about what I think should be done. Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today and we’re going to talk right now about your health today.

It’s the one place of The Plain Truth that we don’t talk a lot about, but it talks about what’s good for your health, what you should do, what you should eat, what you should wear, what kind of clothing you should wear, should you use perfumes, should you use tied laundry detergents? Is there reasons why there are cancer? Does smoking cause lung cancer or are there other reasons of lung cancer not related to smoking? And if that’s the case, that it is smoking, why are lung cancer cases increasing rapidly today among non-smokers? Maybe it’s the perfumes, maybe it’s the laundry detergents, and maybe it’s all the stuff that’s in your clothes, on your skin, and in your food. Go to Your Health Today from theplaintruth.com every day and learn about what you can do to help your health get healthier. And we’re back for the final few minutes and I want to go over what I think should happen everywhere.

I believe that there should be, and you know, if I could wave a magic wand, but you can’t because we have a democratic form of government, which today it’s a democracy, it’s not even a republic form of government, but we just have a corrupt swamp government. And I don’t believe it’s ever going to change. And so this is like, if I had a dream about how to solve everything, how I think God will solve everything, it’s very simple.

You pass every state, every local and every federal government agency has to pass or abide by this law, that they can only spend what they bring in. And they have to cut any program or anything they have to do, including people’s pay, if there’s not enough money in the budget to do what they want to do. And where do they get all of their money? There should be no income taxes whatsoever.

There should only be sales taxes. Each town should have a sales tax, each state should have a sales tax, and the federal government should have a national sales tax. It should not exceed 20% of the total of any goods and services.

And that national sales taxes and the state and local sales tax is the only money government can get. They can also get money, for example, for tolls on roads, which would be fair, and usage tax on things that you use that the government owns. Other than that, the government would have only that tax base.

They could not raise income taxes, they could not waste money, and they would have a bill, a law, which states they cannot spend more money than they take in. Let’s say the fiscal year, to make it simple, it’s not. But let’s say it’s January to December 31st.

They run out of money October 12th, that’s it. Nothing gets paid. People get laid off, go home, collect unemployment.

That’s it. And it will not happen, by the way. And the reason it would not happen is because theywould force government officials, like every business that I’ve ever run, or the one that I own today, we have what’s called sales.

You know, you have, you make a product and you sell it. And let’s say you’re selling $25 million a year worth of paint. Well, that’s your income.

And let’s say it costs you $8 million to make that paint. Well, you take the $25 million and you take away the 10 and it comes out $17 million. And then let’s say you have $7 million worth of overhead to make it even.

Now you’re down to $10 million. That’s your profit. Now, let’s say, for example, your sales plummet to 15 million a year, and you have the same overhead of 7 million, the same cost of goods sold of about 40%.

And now all of a sudden you’re not making money. What do you have to do if you run a business? You shut the business down, you sell the business, or you start laying people off, or you stop buying things you don’t need. This is what every businessman knows.

This is what every homeowner knows, except for those who have credit cards out of whack. The problem with society today and the American public today, because credit is so easy and credit cards are so easy that everybody really lives off their credit card. Are you aware, for example, that $1.3 trillion right now is owed on credit cards over 30 days? $1.3 trillion are over 30 days.

That means people are paying interest probably in a 25 to 35% range per month on $1.3 trillion. You don’t think that’s a problem coming up? You better start looking at all of these debts that’s piling up. We have housing debts that’s piling up.

Do you know, there’s more defaults on homeowner loans right now than there was during COVID. That’s something you’re not probably listening to on TV or on the radio or reading in your newspaper, but that’s the plain truth. There are more bankruptcies happening right now than under COVID.

We are living over our means as a country, and soon we are going to find out what our federal government’s going to find out when they finally run out of money and they can’t print anymore. Bankruptcy, collapse, insolvency, and slavery to those who own you, because your creditor will own you. They will own everything you own, and they will direct every path you have, and you will become a slave to the people who own your debt, just like our government will become a slave to the people who own our debt.

That is what the Bible says is really going to happen to this country. The Bible says America, which is the lost tribe of Israel, Jacob in the Bible, America is going to fall, and we’re going to fall under the domination of Europe, which is the end-time beast of the Revelation, is the Holy Roman Empire of Europe, which is going to reform. Donald Trump seems hell-bent on making it reform in our lifetime.

We are going to fall under the influence of bankers and other nations that are going to own us, lock, stock, and barrel. That’s what happens when you live in debt. There was a time before credit cards when American families knew how to not be in debt.

They only spent the money that they earned each week, and some people were smart enough even to try to put some of that money in a bank. That just simply doesn’t happen anymore, and this is the path that we’re going down to, which is a path that’s going to lead to ruin before it’s all said and done. It’s a scenario that I do not see it ending.

When Donald Trump first took office, I think and I was hoping that he really was going to be able to cut the deficit. He was going to be able to stop this ridiculous spending, and he was not going to be a part of the swamp. Well, what I’ve seen him become is a part of the swamp.

His family is making money off this war. He personally probably is making money off this war. The network of Donald Trump has doubled in 11 months from $3 billion to $7 trillion in 11 months.

His son, Don Jr.’s income has gone up by five times since he’s become president. If you don’t think that’s swamp corruption, I don’t know what is. That’s the problem.

I was hoping that he was going to be able to get this debt under control. He is absolutely burying us in further debt, a war that doesn’t look like we want to win. If we don’t want to win it, why spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a war that we’re actually in worse shape now than we were when we started? This is where we are today.

This country is in trouble, my friends. This country is in a lot of trouble, and I don’t see it getting much better right now. I was wishing it would under Donald Trump, but I don’t see it getting better.

I hope that you as a family start realizing to live within your means, save the money you can, don’t buy what you don’t need, and don’t buy what you don’t need on credit for sure. You might be able to pull through this, at least for you and your family and your loved ones. Well, that’s the show for today.

It’s really an economic type show, and it’s a forecast that’s not really pretty, but it’s what’s happening. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, the one place to go to to find out what’s going on in the world, what it means to you and your family, and what maybe you can do to prevent any tragedy to befall you, and to also know what God has to say about it. Until tomorrow, bye-bye.