The cuts to several states come amid an escalating fraud fallout fueled by a dubious YouTube investigation of Minnesota day cares.
The Trump administration on Monday said it had slashed billions in social services funds to a handful of blue states as part of its escalating response to new and unproven fraud allegations in Minnesota.
The Department of Health and Human Services will freeze $10 billion worth of federal grants to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, an HHS official told HuffPost, confirming news first reported by The New York Post.
It’s not clear whether the freeze was inspired by specific fraud allegations or solely for political reasons. Officials did not immediately provide a public explanation.
So the states can just say “hey everyone, until we say to resume, just dont bother paying your federal taxes anymore and we’ll keep the feds outside our borders”?
What are they gonna do, build a wall?
Individuals don’t pay their own taxes, their employers do. When you “pay your taxes” at the end of the year, you are just paying difference between what you should have paid and what you did pay. The exception being contract workers.
And if you don’t pay your taxes, the government can just seize the money from your bank accounts. Of course, if everybody stopped paying, employers included, the federal government would have a hard time processing it all, but if it wasn’t a sudden massive stop, they would just start raiding people’s bank accounts, probably without due process.
Except they can’t physically keep the federal government away their people, just look at what ICE is doing. It would also prevent people from traveling out of state, or risk getting arrested in a red state.