Senator Dodd sure knows how to use money. According to an article I found via Dvorak Uncensored Senator Dodd just awarded $54 million in stimulus money to a very profitable casino. Here’s the gist of it:
The tribe runs the sprawling Mohegan Sun casino, halfway between New York City and Boston, which earned more than $1.3 billion in gross revenues in 2009. Each tribe member receives a cut of the profits, a number a tribal official said was “less than $30,000” per capita per year. The stimulus money is a loan from a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development program that is meant to help communities of less than 20,000 people that have been “unable to obtain other credit at reasonable rates and terms and are unable to finance the proposed project from their own resources.”
So some of our tax money just went to another country. Although somebody is going to yell racism because I’m bringing this up some education is truly in order. Native American (I’m not using this name to be politically correct, I’m using it so there isn’t confusion with people from India) reservations are sovereign soil, not part of the United States. We gave them land after we took it from them as compensation for practically wiping them out. Part of this compensation is the fact the land given back to them was not part of the United States but sovereign soil for the Native American tribes.
Because of this people living on Native American reservations do not pay taxes to the United States (unless they buy goods and services off of reservation land in which case they have to pay that state’s sales tax). This makes sense because they are not in the United States while on their reservations. Likewise as a mechanism for generating wealth most reservations have built casinos. Gambling is usually restricted or outright banned in most states making casino construction difficult if not impossible. Since Native Americans are not bound by the laws of the state their reservations are in they are able to build casinos.
Here’s my problem, that stimulus money is tax money. It’s money stolen by the government from it’s citizens. Now it’s being given to another nation whom do not contribute to said taxes. So I don’t care if each member of the tribe is getting less than $30,000 they shouldn’t be getting tax money since they don’t pay taxes (and they shouldn’t have to as they aren’t members of our country).
Oh I love this one:
“As with all beneficiaries of funding through this program,” said DeJong, “the loan will be repaid to USDA with interest.
Hopefully by that they don’t mean the loan will be repaid by taking government from another source as with GM.