On Tuesday, the president invited rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats to the White House to negotiate. Not one Democrat showed up, yet it got little coverage. What would the coverage be if Democrats wanted negotiations and no one around Trump showed up?

We see lots of false headlines about federal workers being forced to work without pay. Every one of them is going to get paid for his work as soon as Democrats stop their hissy fit and vote for a border barrier (as they have done more than once before). So it is deferred pay, not working without pay.

Recently, thirty Democrats went to Puerto Rico to party with lobbyists while the shutdown is going on. What would the coverage be if Trump and Republicans were on a lobbyist junket instead of negotiating?

Over Christmas vacation, President Trump was willing to negotiate in D.C., while Pelosi was vacationing in Hawaii. What would the reporting have been if Pelosi were in D.C. and Trump were in Hawaii?

But there is a group of federal employees who never get paid or don't have to be paid, and they are congressional interns. Members of Congress all have a huge budget, yet many of them choose to pay their interns nothing.

Here is a partial list of Democrat senators who refuse to vote to put the federal employees back to work and who also don't pay their interns: Feinstein, Coons, Blumenthal, Booker, Gillibrand, Schumer, Menendez.

Congress makes a lot of rules for private employers that can stifle economic growth, yet in many cases the congressmen exempt themselves.

The Democrats are loudly campaigning to raise the national minimum wage to $15, which will greatly harm small, midsize, and large communities that are lower-cost and that struggle to get jobs. This law would greatly reduce initial opportunities for the young and the poor, taking away their opportunity to move up the economic ladder. While they demand that the private sector pay $15 per hour plus the corresponding payroll and unemployment taxes, plus benefits, the minimum wage for congressional interns remains zero.

Democrats like to set rules for overtime, paid sick leave, paid vacation leave, parental leave, etc., but they exempt themselves from all those for congressional interns.

Democrats demanded that private employers give specific costly health benefits to employees if they worked over thirty hours per week, but there were no rules for congressional interns.

Democrats refuse to vote for less than six billion dollars (less than two tenths of a percent of the federal budget), but it is clear that the amount spent would be dwarfed by the savings relating to the welfare programs that illegal aliens' access: 63% of non-citizen households access welfare programs, compared to 35% of native households.

We are told federal workers should be paid higher than most Americans because they are more qualified. If they are so good, why do they continue to allow so much fraud?

If they would just stop a sliver of the fraud, the wall could be paid for in a few weeks.

Earned Income Tax Credit: Small Benefits, Large Costs A major weakness of the EITC is the program's high rate of overpayments, which are caused by math errors, misunderstanding of the rules, and fraud. The EITC error rate has been more than 20 percent since at least the 1980s. The Internal Revenue Service reports that the EITC error and fraud rate in 2014 was 27 percent, which amounted to $18 billion in overpayments.

The Facts about Medicaid Fraud In September, the Department of Health and Human Services sent out a warning that improper payments under Medicaid have become so common that they will account this year for almost 12 percent of total Medicaid spending – just shy of $140 billion. (Total improper payments across federal programs will come to about $139 billion this year, according to estimates that have proved too generous in the past, and almost all of that is Medicaid-driven.) That rate has doubled in only a few years, driven mostly by the so-called Affordable Care Act's liberalization of Medicaid-eligibility rules. 12 percent in improper payments isn't an error rate – it's a malfeasance rate.

Report: Federal Low Income Housing Program Lacks Basic Anti-Fraud Safeguards The federal government's flagship affordable housing program lacks basic anti-fraud safeguards, according to a new government watchdog report. Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an investigation into the $9 billion a year Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, finding that it lacks the necessary monitoring to prevent contractors, developers, and other program beneficiaries from fraudulently overbilling the system.

Fraud and billing mistakes cost Medicare – and taxpayers – tens of billions last year Federal health officials made more than $16 billion in improper payments to private Medicare Advantage health plans last year and need to crack down on billing errors by the insurers, a top congressional auditor testified Wednesday. James Cosgrove, who directs health care reviews for the Government Accountability Office, told the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee that the Medicare Advantage improper payment rate was 10 percent in 2016, which comes to $16.2 billion. Adding in the overpayments for standard Medicare programs, the tally for last year approaches $60 billion – which is almost twice as much as the National Institutes of Health spends on medical research each year.

If anyone wants to see where the media and other Democrats policies striving for big government and moving toward socialism come from, just look at how Pelosi believes that food stamps and unemployment benefits are much better for the economy than fewer regulations and lower taxes. The thoughts show an absolute infantile knowledge of how the U.S. became the most powerful and generous economy in the world in such a short time.

The U.S continues to allow over one million (legal) immigrants into the country each year. It is time for journalists to stop calling the leaders who try to stop these xenophobes and racists. It is also time to give the power and purse back to the people, as Trump wants, versus making the government and bureaucrats richer and more powerful, as Democrats want.

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