2011 W-2 Tax Forms and HR3590 can be stated as Tax documents for the year 2011 and legislation HR3590.
Claim:  Starting in 2011, all employees will have to pay taxes on the value of health insurance provided by their employers.  Example:  [Collected via e-mail, May 2010] I contacted my Congressman about House bill HR 3590, the health care bill. I asked for a summary of changes. The Aid directed me to go to www.thomas.gov, enter HR 3590 in the search box and look for summaries. Starting in 2011 (next year folks) your W-2 tax form sent by your employer will be increased to show the value of whatever health insurance you are given by the company. It does not matter if that's a private concern or Governmental body of some sort. If you're retired? So what; your gross WILL go up by the amount of insurance you get. You will be required to pay taxes on a large sum of money that you have never seen. Take your tax form you just finished and see what $15,000 or $20,000 additional gross does to your tax debt. That's what you'll pay next year. For many it also puts you into a new higher bracket so it's even worse. This is how the government is going to buy insurance for 15% that don't have insurance and it's only part of the tax increases. Not believing this I researched the summaries and here's what I'm reading: On page 25 of 29:TITLE IX REVENUE PROVISIONS- SUBTITLE A: REVENUE OFFSET PROVISIONS - (sec. 9001, as modified by sec. 10901)    Sec.9002."requires employers to include in the W-2 form of each employee the aggregate cost of applicable employer sponsored group health coverage that is excludable from the employee's gross income." Joan Pryde is the senior tax editor for the Kiplinger letters. Go to Kiplinger's and read about 13 tax changes that could affect you. Number 3 is what I just told you about. Why am I sending you this? The same reason I hope you forward this to every single person in your address book. People have the right to know the truth because an election is coming in November and we need to vote in Conservatives that will repel this horrid law!    Origins:  This is another case of a legislative issue which has a kernel of truth to it, but which has been misinterpreted, affects only a small percentage of the population, and has misleadingly been blown out of proportion through someone's mistaken assumption that it applies to everyone. Section 9002 of PPACA, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590), requires that all employers, beginning in 2011, report the aggregate cost of employer-sponsored health benefits they provide to employees on those employees' W-2 forms.  However, the monetary values so reported will neither be counted as gross income nor will they be taxed; they will be included for informational purposes only.  (Section 106A of the Internal Revenue Code states that, in general, employer-provided health coverage is not taxable to the employee.) Section 106A The portion (Title IX, Sec. 9001) of the PPACA referenced above is entitled "Excise Tax on High Cost Employer-Sponsored Coverage."  This is the section of the recently passed health care reform legislation that addresses taxing so-called high-level "Cadillac" health care plans that some employees receive through their employers.   Title IX, Sec. 9001 In general, beginning in 2018 (not 2011), the PPACA imposes a 40% excise tax on the value of employer-sponsored medical insurance that exceeds a given threshold (initially $27,500 annually).  This excise tax would be paid by the insurance company, not the employee, and is initially expected to affect fewer than 10% of families covered by health insurance: Many employers pay most of the premium for health coverage. Workers pick up the rest but pay no taxes on the employer's often-substantial contribution. That's why many unions have bargained hard for generous health coverage over the years, even if that meant forgoing a bigger pay raise. The new agreement would take away the tax advantage for a small portion of the health benefit by imposing a 40 percent tax on the amount by which the premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage exceed specified thresholds. That would be $27,500 a year for a family, starting in 2018. The tax on a $29,500 plan would be $800, or 40 percent of $2,000. The insurance company would pay the tax but would almost certainly pass it along to the employer and its employees. That $27,500 threshold is well above the current average of $13,400 for a family plan. By 2016, more than 80 percent of all family plans are projected to still fall below the threshold. In the following years, the tax threshold would rise more slowly than the likely rate of inflation in medical costs, which could mean the plans of millions of workers  a small minority of the work force  would be subject to the tax in theory. Most likely, insurers will drop their premiums just below the threshold. They could do that by setting higher deductibles and co-payments, managing access to care more tightly, or reducing benefits. Last updated:  25 May 2010    The New York Times.  "Cadillac Plans."   15 January 2010.    The Washington Post.  "Will President Obama Defend the 'Cadillac Tax' to Cut Health-Care Costs?"   12 January 2010.
Ball-Point Pens for the Astronauts When NASA started sending astronauts into space, they quicklyDiscovered that ball-point pens would not work in zeroGravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent aDecade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zeroGravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glassAnd at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. Your taxes are due again  enjoy paying them. [The Moscow Times, 2000] There is a charming anecdote that roams from e-mail box to e-mail box around the world about how, at the height of the space race, the Americans and Soviets approached the same problem: how an astronaut (or cosmonaut) could use a pen to write in zero gravity. As the story goes, the Americans spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ambitious, gravity-immune ballpoint pen; they successfully developed such a pen; and this pen went on to become a massive commercial success in the private sector. The Soviets  with the simple elegance their scientists are so rightly famed for  opted instead to use a pencil. Thelesson of the infamous "space pen" anecdote related above, about NASA's spending a small fortune to develop a ballpoint pen that astronauts could use in outer space while completely overlooking the simple and elegant solution adopted by the Soviet space program (give cosmonauts pencils instead), is a valid one: sometimes we expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a "high-tech" solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple answer is right before our eyes. As good a story and moral as that may be, however, this anecdote doesn't offer a real-life example of that syndrome. Both U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can flake and break off, and having such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity posed a potential harm to astronauts and equipment. (As well, after the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967, NASA was anxious to avoid having astronauts carry flammable objects such as pencils onboard with them.) When the solution of providing astronauts with a ballpoint pen that would work under weightless conditions and extreme temperatures came about, though, it wasn't because NASA had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars (inflated to $12 billion in the latest iterations of this tale) in research and development money at the problem. The "space pen" that has since become famous through its use by astronauts was developed independently by Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co., who spent his own money on the project and, once he perfected his AG-7 "Anti-Gravity" Space Pen, offered it to NASA. After that agency tested and approved the pen's suitability for use in space flights, they purchased a number of the instruments from Fisher for a modest price. This is how Fisher themselves described the development of their Space Pen: NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed asafer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and development costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government. Because of the fire in Apollo 1, in which three Astronauts died, NASA required a writing instrument that would not burn in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. It also had to work in the extreme conditions of outer space: (NASA tested the pressurized Space Pens at -50C, but because of the residential [sic] heat in the pen it also writes for many minutes in the cold shadows.) Fisher spent over one million dollars in trying to perfect the ball point pen before he made his first successful pressurized pens in 1965. Samples were immediately sent to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Manager of the Houston Space Center, where they were thoroughly tested and approved for use in Space in September 1965. In December 1967 he sold 400 Fisher Space Pens to NASA for $2.95 each. Lead pencils were used on all Mercury and Gemini space flights and all Russian space flights prior to 1968. Fisher Space Pens are more dependable than lead pencils and cannot create the hazard of a broken piece of lead floating through the gravity-less atmosphere. Paul Fisher continues to market his space pens as the writing instrument that went to the moon and has spun off this effort into a separate corporation, the Fisher Space Pen Co.: Space Pen   Sightings:  This legend was referenced in an episode of NBC's The West Wing TV series ("We Killed Yamamoto"; original air date 15 May 2002): https://youtu.be/LQy1DH38E5g Curtin, Ciara.   "NASA Spent Millions to Develop a Pen That Would Write in Space."  
 Scientific American.   20 December 2008. Garber, Steve.  "The Fisher Space Pen."  
 NASA.gov. The Moscow Times.  "Pencil Us in for the Next Y2K Disaster." 
 14 January 2000. On April 1, 2021, a rumor circulated online that billionaire rapper Kanye West bought Spotify, a popular music streaming platform with 155 million subscribers globally. The claim appeared to have originated with an article published by Thissongissick (TSIS), an online blog dedicated to music news. Thissongissick Its official: As of today, the fashion and music mogul has just acquired the ever-popular audio streaming platform, Spotify, wrote the website. Something big like this isnt unpredictable for West, but people are curious about his intentions for buying out Spotify.  Screengrab/Thissongissick  Thissongissick The article also claimed that the billionaire rapper was going to delete all songs but his own  a claim that sparked concern among some of the platforms 345 million active monthly users. Snopes contacted TSIS and Spotify for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication. Even so, we should note that the article was published on April Fools' Day, and news of the buyout did not appear in any other reputable news publications. And a look through the Spotify news releases through April 2 did not reveal an announcement that marked the alleged buyout. April Fools' Day news releases As such, we rate this claim False. According to a statement released by Spotify on March 18, founder Daniel Ek was still the platforms CEO and had been overseeing the audio-streaming subscription service since it was launched in 2006. Spotify is headquartered and legally domiciled in Sweden, and because it is a foreign company, it is not required to disclose the same information as U.S. firms concerning share ownership, reported the financial website Investopedia on Jan. 7. The site noted that the top institutional shareholders of Spotify include Ek, as well as Sven Hans Martin Lorentzon, Baillie Gifford & Co., Morgan Stanley, Tencent Holdings Ltd., and T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Still, no sign of West. Investopedia And though the Grammy-award-winning musician is indeed a billionaire (though not the richest Black man in American history), his personal fortune caps in around $1.8 billion. As of April 1, Spotify had a market cap valuation of over $52 billion, reported the investment company YCharts. richest Black man in American history YCharts Snopes staff also checked their own Spotify accounts, and found that the usual subscriptions, followers, and playlists were exactly as they should be. A common item of interest on social media is a rather gruesome anecdote attributed to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, which describes him purportedly plucking a live chicken in order to demonstrate "how easy it is to govern stupid people":  We found no sources for this anecdote that were contemporaneous with Stalin's life (he died in 1953), nor from the next few decades afterwards. The earliest recountings of it seem to date from the early 1990s or late 1980s, which is consistent with the following excerpt from a 1988 New Yorker article that attributes it to the mid-1980s writings of anti-Stalinist Soviet/Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov: With the new Party line established, editors around the country unleashed an extraordinary torrent of articles damning Stalin. A novelist named Chingiz Aitmatov wrote one of the most powerful. Aitmatov has a distinguished history as an anti-Stalinist. In the early nineteen-eighties, when discipline of all kinds was lax, he managed to get past the censors a novel called "The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years," which in elliptical, allegorical ways, attacked the Stalinist legacy, and sold five million copies. Now Aitmatov was free to use language as blunt as he liked. He began with an anecdote: Stalin called together his closest comrades-in-arms. "I understand you're wondering how I govern the people so that every last one of them ... thinks of me as a living god. Now I'll teach you the right attitude toward the people." And he ordered a chicken brought in. He plucked it live, in front of them all, down to the last feather, down to the red flesh, until only the comb was left on its head. "And now watch," he said, and let the chicken go. It could have gone off where it wished, but it went nowhere. It was too hot in the sun and too cold in the shade. The poor bird could only press itself against Stalin's boots. And then he tossed it a crumb of grain, and the bird followed him wherever he went. Otherwise, it would have fallen over from hunger. "That," he told his pupils, "is how you govern our people." Aitmatov appears to be the source of this tale, but as noted in the above New Yorker article and a 2008 Reuters obituary for Aitmatov, he wrote in "elliptical, allegorical ways," and his works "often interwove popular myths and folktales to create allegorical themes populated with down-to-earth characters." Aitmatov acknowledged that of himself as well, writing in the introduction to his novel "The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years": obituary As in previous works, here I also draw on legends and myths handed down to us from former generations; together with these, for the first time in my writing career I also use fantasy to form part of the story. But, for me, neither is an end in itself, simply a method of expressing thoughts, a means of identifying and interpreting realities. Given that Aitmatov is the apparent source for this anecdote, that it did not first appear until some 30 years after Stalin's death, and that Aitmatov was known for his use of allegory, most likely the tale is not a literal account of something Stalin did, but rather an illustrative sketch that Aitmatov either invented himself or heard elsewhere and subsequently attributed to Stalin. We therefore rate this claim "Legend." Cullen, Robert.  "Letter from Moscow."
  The New Yorker.  17 October 1988  (p. 100). Aitmatov, Chingiz.  The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years.
  Indiana University Press, 1988.  ISBN 0-253-20482-8. Reuters.  "Kyrgyz Writer, Perestroika Ally Aitmatov Dies."
  10 June 2008. In November 2015, a photograph began circulating online via sites such Imgur and Facebook showing a restaurant bill from a customer who purportedly stiffed his waitress and mocked her for being an immigrant: Imgur Facebook  The identity of the original friend of a friend who posted the image wasn't clear, but a FoxNews.com article provided some additional information about the circumstances under which the controversy began: article After serving a customer at Bamboo Thai Bistro in Redondo Beach, Calif., an Asian waitress received a short note scribbled on the receipt instead of a tip, according to NBC Los Angeles. It read, Tip for U.S. citizens only." The server is from Thailand and in the U.S. legally on a visa with the hope of obtaining a green card one day. According to NBC, on Nov. 11 a male diner paid for his meal of kung pao spaghetti that totaled $22.84 --which would have meant the server got $3.43. But after discovering the nasty note, it's believed another diner snapped a photo of the receipt, which included the man's name--and posted it online. An earlier report from Los Angeles television station KNBC included a brief video segment about the ensuing controversy: report Despite massive social media interest in the receipt and its unpleasant message, the man whose name appeared on the slip of paper hasn't responded to media requests for his version of events. He's neither confirmed nor denied he left the message, and hasn't e-mailed a response to any of the several media outlets covering the viral controversy. Although KNBC included CCTV footage of the man purportedly entering Bamboo Thai Bistro in Redondo Beach, California, on 11 November 2015, that clip didn't definitively indicate he signed a receipt (much less left a rude, anti-immigrant message on a piece of paper which included his full legal name). A report from the Daily Breeze of Los Angeles County's South Bay left it unclear whether the man was a take-out customer or a diner who was waited upon by the server: report A 15 percent tip would have been $3.43, but the male customer wrote Tip for U.S. Citizens Only on the tip line for his $22.84 receipt for kung pao spaghetti. It was really bizarre, said the owner, who asked to be identified only as Adison. She thought she did something wrong. She is one of the best workers here. The man ordered his food and got up and left. I went outside to go do something and, when I came back in, my waitresses were showing me the receipt, Adison said. This guy left this. Searches for Jason Naglich restricted to a few days before the 11 November 2015 date supplied by the restaurant revealed he had no Internet presence of which to speak. How a fellow customer who was not party to the transaction came to view the receipt (as the restaurant claimed) was unclear. The restaurant's owner later said he feared litigation as a result of the controversy. restricted So while the story has drawn massive interest from across the country, little about Naglich and the purported receipt (beyond the original assertion) has been confirmed. It's possible that a diner by that name chose to add insult to injury by stiffing his waitress and blaming it on her immigrant status. It's similarly possible that as with prior claims of this variety, someone somewhere along the line fabricated the slip's message. However, diners swept up in previous hoaxes have quickly spoken up to correct the story once it came to their attention, whereas Naglich has yet to address the rumor. fabricated The photo montage displayed above is one of dozens circulating online since 2009, purporting to demonstrate that 50-plus years of rule by the Democratic Party wrought a level of destruction on Detroit comparable to that caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Some versions have sought to make the case verbally, as well. For example:What has caused more long term destruction - the A-bomb, or Government welfare programs created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them? Japan does not have a welfare system. Work for it or do without. These are possibly the 5 best sentences youll ever read and all applicable to this experiment: 1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. 2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. 3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. 4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it! 5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.   The comparison of 2010 Detroit to 1945 Hiroshima is grotesquely forced, however, as is the implication that Democratic policies are wholly to blame for the Detroit's decline since World War II. We'll start our analysis with the images, some of which are inaccurately labeled. Beginning with the upper left-hand photo, it is, in fact, an aerial view of the hypocenter (ground zero) of the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, taken a few months after the fact. Here's a larger view of the image: hypocenter Working clockwise, the next image in the set supposedly depicts modern-day Hiroshima  except that it doesn't. It's actually a snapshot taken from the Landmark Tower Sky Garden in Yokohama, Japan much like this one from Flickr: Flickr   That having been pointed out, it's true that Hiroshima was rebuilt from its ashes and is now a beautiful and modern city. Nor is it too terribly hard to find an actual photo of it. rebuilt photo The photo at bottom-right  though taken in 2013, not 2010  does show a dilapidated building (of which there are plenty) on the east side of Detroit. It's the former Packard Automotive Plant, which closed in the late 1950s: plenty closed   However, the thing to note about the use of this image to portray Detroit as a locus of Hiroshima-like devastation is that all we actually see is one long-abandoned, crumbling building. It doesn't make the case. Lastly, we're shown a photo supposedly depicting Detroit in its mid-1940s heyday  except that it was taken in the mid-1930s. It's an aerial view of Navin Field (later Tiger Stadium): Navin Field   Granted, for the purposes of argument it doesn't really matter whether the above photo was taken in the '30s or '40s  the point remains that Detroit once had a teeming population, abundant jobs, and a booming economy. In 1950 it was the fourth-largest city in the United States, but no longer. The question is, who was responsible? There's no simple explanation (and therefore no single scapegoat at whom to point fingers) for Detroit's long, slow descent to bankruptcy. Scott Martelle, author of Detroit: A Biography, offered this capsule summary in an op-ed column published in 2011: column The collapse of Detroit has roots in intentional de-industrialization by the Big Three automakers, which in the 1950s began aggressively spider-webbing operations across the nation to produce cars closer to regional markets, and to reduce labor costs by investing in less labor-friendly places than union-heavy Detroit. Their flight was augmented by government policies that, in the 1970s and 1980s particularly, forced municipalities and states to compete with each other for jobs by offering corporate tax breaks and other inducements to keep or draw business investments, a bit of whipsawing that helped companies profit at the expense of communities. Another summary of Detroit's decline cited issues such as the city's dependence on a single industry (i.e., automobiles), decades of racial tensions, shortcomings of leadership (stretching back to the 1930s), and the lack of an efficient transit system. decline Did Democrats and Democratic policies play some role in the fall of Detroit? Surely they did. Every Detroit mayor since 1962 has been a Democrat, after all. But Republicans held the seat for the 12 years prior to that, from 1950 through 1961. The Packard plant whose hollowed-out remains were displayed above closed its doors during that time. Whatever blame is to be allotted to politicians must be shared by both Democrats and Republicans on the national level, as well. Detroit's decline since World War II took place during periods when both parties held the presidency and/or controlled Congress. Finally, the specific suggestion that Detroit's downfall was an unintended consequence of the spread of social welfare programs while Hiroshima's dramatic recovery is at least partially attributable to the lack of same in Japan is based on misinformation. Japan has maintained strong public health care and social welfare programs in one form or another since the 1920s. Yet Hiroshima was rebuilt and flourished just the same. maintained  Drury, Flora."A City Rebuilt from the Ashes."
Daily Mail Online.5 August 2015. Martelle, Scott."The Collapse of Detroit."
Los Angeles Times.27 March 2011. "Anatomy of Detroit's Decline."
New York Times.8 December 2013. "Zombieland: The Abandoned Buildings of Detroit."
Beaumont Enterprise.18 July 2013. Commenting on Gov. Greg Abbott pressing sheriffs to detain individuals living in the country without legal authorization, a reader brought up workers who groom the grounds of the Texas Capitol. Illegal immigrants mow the grass around the Capitol,said a Facebook commentposted Nov. 10, 2015, in reaction to theAustin American-Statesmans summary of the papers Nov. 5, 2015,news storyabout Abbott telling Texas sheriffs he might withhold criminal justice grant aid if they dont fully comply with federal requests for detaining criminal immigrants held in their jails. The newspaper published that comment, among others, prompting us to wonder: Do undocumented workers really mow the Capitol lawn? We attempted to reach the commenter to see how he reached his conclusion and didnt hear back. Nationally, according to a July 2015web postby the Pew Research Center, undocumented immigrants make up 5.1 percent of the nations labor force. In the U.S. labor force, the post says, there were 8.1 million unauthorized immigrants either working or looking for work in 2012. Among the states, Nevada (10%), California (9%), Texas (9%) and New Jersey (8%) had the highest shares of unauthorized immigrants in their labor forces. Closer to home, we reached the State Preservation Board, which manages the Capitol and nearby state facilities. By email, spokesman Chris Currens said the board contracts with a private company to care for the grounds and that company is required to use the onlinefederal E-Verify system, authorized by Congress in 1996, which enables users to determine whether employees are citizens or have a required visa to work legally here. In short,the government says, employers submit information taken from a new hire's Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification Form) through E-Verify to the Social Security Administration and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to determine whether the information matches government records and whether the new hire is authorized to work in the United States. U.S. employers submit the Form I-9 for each employee; on the form, an employee must attest to his or her employment authorization. In addition, agovernment summarysays, the employee must present his or her employer with acceptable documents showing who they are and that theyre eligible to work in the country. Documents that fit the description, according to the form, include passports and permanent resident or alien registration cards. A note: E-Verify may be a flawed method of weeding out ineligible workers. In a July 2015report,the Cato Institute pointed out that a government-commissioned analysis estimated that 54 percent of unauthorized workers submitted to E-Verify were incorrectly found to be work authorized because of rampant document fraud. The citedWestat report, published in 2009, elaborated: This finding is not surprising, given that since the inception of E-Verify it has been clear that many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify. An upshot,Alex Nowrastehof Cato told us by phone, is that even if workers cleared E-Verify, that doesnt mean theyre legal. Back to Texas: In December 2014, then-Gov. Rick Perry ordered agencies to use E-Verify. Perry told reporters then that 17 agencies already employed the system. Currens told us the State Preservation Board initially placed a clause requiring contractors to use E-Verify in April 2009 and grounds contracts have included the clause ever since. Also, Currens noted, each contract requires the contractor to certify that each employee is in compliance with federal immigration laws. The current Capitol groundskeeping contract, which is withClean Scapes, an Austin company, requires the contractor to subject employees to pre-employment and annual criminal background checks. The company also must obtain photocopies of the workers drivers license or state-issued photo identification and Social Security card or Resident Alien work visa/identification card. And the company  must provide documentation showing that this request has been met for all employees working on preservation-board-overseen properties. We asked the agency for the latest documentation. By email, Currens sent anundated noticeto the board from Marilu Sanchez, a Clean Scapes human resources specialist, stating the company had run E-Verify for six employees, each one listed by name. Currens said the notice was submitted to cover the workers at the Capitol in the fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 2015. By phone, Carmen Zayas, a Clean Scapes vice president, said the landscaping company has long checked all its workers through the E-Verify system. People are always going to make assumptions about the landscaping industry employing immigrants without legal permission to live here, Zayas said. We take that process as seriously as anyone can. By email, Currens told us the board is confident that the groundskeeping workers have proper legal status. Our ruling A Facebook comment published in theAmerican-Statesmansaid: Illegal immigrants mow the grass around the (Texas) Capitol. If so, such immigrants have fooled the federal E-Verify system and the agency that oversees the Capitol grounds. We rate the claim False. FALSE The statement is not accurate. Click here formoreon the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. In February 2021, social media users enthusiastically shared a meme that attributed the following quotation to the actor Keanu Reeves: shared "I don't care how much you don't like me. The last time I checked, the road to heaven wasn't through your yard."   It's very unlikely Reeves ever uttered or wrote those words, but we cannot rule out that possibility. As a result, we are issuing a rating of "Unproven," for now. The quotation itself has been around since 2018 at the latest, and appeared in numerous widely-shared memes that year. In the intervening years, it has appeared on T-shirts, and in various online forums devoted to "inspirational quotes." numerous appeared T-shirts online forums Only more recently has it been attributed to Reeves, a clear indication (though not definitive proof) that he did not come up with it. We found instances of its attribution to the actor as early as August 2019, and social media users continued to share it in 2020. For reasons that are not clear, the meme enjoyed a resurgence in February 2021.  August 2019 2020 February 2021 We could not find any evidence to support the attribution of the quotation to Reeves, despite checking a news archive that stretches back several decades. The meme strongly appears to feature a generic, unattributed quotation of the kind that is widely shared on social media, which was belatedly linked to Reeves online.  However, we cannot rule out the possibility that Reeves wrote or uttered those words in some source that has since become obscure. As a result, for now, we're issuing a rating of "Unproven." Texas remains home to a greater share of people in poverty than the nation as a whole,Bee Moorheadwrote in a September 2015,oped articlein theAustin American-Statesman. Not news? Well, Moorhead, executive director of the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy/Texas Impact, also wrote that according to U.S. Census Bureau figures, Texas once again outstripped the national poverty rate in 2014, as we have done since at least 1959. Thats 56 years--a long time to be better at poverty. We wondered. To our inquiry, Moorhead emailed us a spreadsheet,drawing on bureau figures, indicating that in select years, or each decade from 1959 through 2009, more Texans lived below the federal poverty level, by percentage, than Americans as a whole. According to the figures, which we confirmed on the bureau website, the share of Texans in poverty was greatest in 1959  31.7 percent, 9 percentage points greater than the 22.1 percent of Americans nationally in poverty. In the selected years, the smallest gap occurred in 1979 when 14.7 percent of Texans lived in poverty compared with 13.1 percent of Americans overall, according to the figures. Moorhead said she separately drew the 2014 Texas poverty rate (16.4 percent) from a chartfetchablefrom a bureau web page last updated Sept. 16, 2015. Nationally in 2014, the bureauannounced,the poverty rate was 14.8 percent, meaning 46.7 million people lived in poverty. Moorhead also pointed out abureau websiteenabling comparisons of poverty in a state to the nation each decade from 1960 through 2010, leading us to develop this Texas-U.S. comparison: SOURCE:Web page,Poverty Rates by County, 1960-2010,U.S. Census Bureau (accessed Oct. 7, 2015) Measuring poverty Through the bureau, the federal government has estimated residents living in poverty for more than 50 years, initially from a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate of how much income that families under economic stress needed in order to put food on the table. How the government defines poverty has changed a bit over the years, but generally,the bureau says, it uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. If a family's total income is less than the family's threshold, then that family and every individual in it is considered in poverty. The thresholds dont vary by location, the bureau says, but are updated for inflation. The poverty definition rolls in income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps), the bureau says. Each years national poverty estimates derive from the bureaus Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, which surveys about 100,000 households a year, asking about income from more than 50 sources,according tothe bureau. An experts look Moorhead did not delve into poverty rates for every year from 1959 on, so we asked Daniel Dillon of the University of Texas Child and Family Research Partnership for a look. Drawing from CPS data, heput together a chartsuggesting the Texas poverty rate exceeded the national rate each year from 1959 through 2014. But Dillon and bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein told us that comparative year-by-year figures start only in 1980. Since 1980, Dillon summed up, the Texas poverty rate has generally bounced between 15 percent and 17 percent with a few exceptions. The fact that is it so consistent means that the rate of growth in the general population is basically on par with the rate of growth in the poor population. Sometimes they dont change at the same rate though, like after the recession, where the number of poor shot up but population growth was stable. This caused the poverty rate to increase. So the poverty rate is reflecting the interplay between total population change and poor population change, the latter of which is generally more affected by fluctuations in the economy. Big picture: The 4.4 million Texans in poverty in 2014 was double the 2.2 million residents in poverty in 1980,Dillon noted. In the period, the states total population increased 87 percent, escalating from 14.3 million to 26.7 million, he noted. Dillon pointed out there were times the gap between poverty in Texas and the nation narrowed, including 2014. Broadly, he wrote, the gap grew through the 1980s until about 1988, at which point it peaked at a difference of 5 percentage points. Then the gap began to narrow, he wrote, expanding and contracting every few years until 2010 when it began to close. In 2014, Texas had a poverty rate 1.6 percentage points above the national rate, Dillon said. Thats the closest we have been to the national rate since 1984, when the gap was 1.3 percentage points. Several factors, Dillon said, explain why Texas has consistently had a bigger chunk of residents in poverty than the nation on average. The state is home to a larger foreign-born population than most states and is one of a few minority-majority states in that non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the residents, he wrote. In comparison to their numbers, minority groups in Texas tend to be overrepresented among the poor. Education level is also strongly linked to poverty status, and Texas is the near the bottom when it comes to the percentage of the adult population with a high school degree, Dillon said. Finally, Texas has a higher percentage of children than most states and child poverty has been on the rise. Today, a quarter of Texas children live below the poverty line. Dillon said the narrowing gap between the Texas and national poverty rates might be explained by the state generally growing faster than most states due both to new births and migration from other places. As long as the mix of people moving to Texas are more likely to be above the poverty line than below it, this will drive the poverty rate down. Similarly, if births to non-poor families outpace those to poor families, this will also drive the rate down, Dillon wrote. Another indicator We also askedLori Taylor, a Texas A&M University economist, to evaluate Moorheads claim. By phone, Taylor said that while its likely the Texas poverty rate has consistently outpaced the national rate, on average, its worth mention that the rate has always been calculated by assuming the same income levels put residents in poverty regardless of location. She said this has tended to lead to overstatements of people in poverty in lower cost-of-living parts of the country and understatements of residents in poverty in high-cost areas. Taylor and a colleague pointed out in aDecember 2014 articlethat in 2013, per the government's poverty threshold, a family of four with two children and a household income of $23,624 was classified as poor regardless of whether the family lived in rural Arkansas, where a typical two-bedroom apartment rents for less than $600, or in New York, where a two-bedroom apartment rents for more than $1,400. In the past few years, the census bureau has been developing its Supplemental Poverty Measure, which reaches its rates by taking into account regional differences in housing costs. And, Taylor noted, the bureaufound in its 2013 surveysthat Texas and the U.S. had the same 15.9 percent SPM rate. In contrast, the general 2013 poverty rate for the country was 14.8 percent and the Texas rate was 16.9 percent. By phone, Moorhead agreed that using a standard measure of poverty across the country is insufficient to characterize the complexity of regional economies. But the SPM is a new measure too, she said, and rates havent been calculated retroactively to cover nearly all the years included in her Texas-U.S. comparison. Our ruling Moorhead said Texas has outstripped the national poverty rate since at least 1959. Available poverty rates for select years through 1979 and for 1980 through 2014 back up this statement. Yet poverty rates dont appear to be available for many earlier years. Also, a new supplemental poverty measure makes a case for the same share of Texans and Americans lately living in poverty provided regional differences in housing costs are factored in. We rate this claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here formoreon the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. This appeal to help a child with cancer is merely yet another reiteration of a long-running class of hoax (often built around like farming), one which lures the gullible into spreading such messages by promising that some entity (such as Facebook) will donate money towards the medical treatment of a child with cancer (or some other disease) every time the message is forwarded, posted, liked, or shared. Multiple charities and companies have been unfairly dragged into such hoaxes over the years by being named in messages like these, causing them to have to spend considerable time and effort disclaiming them. hoax like farming The child whose photograph was appropriated for this hoax is not displaying visible symptoms of cancer.He's identified on multiple other online sites as a boy experiencing a reaction to the MMR vaccine and/or a case of rubella. identified reaction MMR vaccine rubella  Others versions of this hoax positing that Facebook will donate money every time such an item is liked or shared have circulated using a variety of different (unrelated) pictures: this child's got a cancer. facebook is ready to pay 3 cent for every share. we don't know is it true or not, but let's everybody share. maybe it's true and then...  >SHARE< for this baby PLEASE SHARE, THANKS! By: 999,999,999 people  She's suffering form cancer! Facebook has promisedto give $1.20 Dollars on each share! Please, share and make it.  On theaccount of:  Imran Khan  He is terribly sick :(What if this was your baby?  Would you care at all?Facebook will donate $1 for every share   This child has lost his 4 limbs in a school bus accident.Facebook will pay 1$ for every share..... "      Cook, Morgan.  "Mother Works to Stop Exploitation of Child for Online Hoax."
   North County Times.  9 February 2012. An interesting and highly lucrative con targeting those attempting to sell vehicles (and other high-ticket items) online works like the highly successful Nigerian scam, but while his bit of larceny also typically features businessmen from Africa intent upon closing odd-sounding deals, it plays on the victims' honesty rather than their greed: Nigerian scam [Collected via Facebook, May 2015]There is a scam going around and I was almost a victim of it today. I recently posted an ad on Craig'slist I was contacted by a person that sent me a check for 1500.00 for the item I was selling. When I received the check today it was for the amount of 4000.00. When I asked why the check was for so much they informed me that the extra money was to be shipped via western union to the shipper so the item could be picked up and delivered. I got suspicious and took the check to my bank to make sure this check was ligit. I was informed that it was in fact a fake. The bank told me that if I had cashed this check that it would have come back to me and I would be responsible for the 4000.00 and they would have access to all my banking information. I am asking everyone to please like and share this post to make it go viral so this does not happen to you or anyone you know or any hard working Americans. Here is a picture of the check below. Please take the time to like and share. Lets get this thing viral. [Collected via e-mail, 2003] My husband is currently selling his motorcycle online. Last week when he posted his bike he recieved an email from a hotmail account stating he was interested in buying his bike and he is located in West Africa. He mentioned that he knows someone in the US that owes him money and would like to get our address to meet and make the exchange and that he would pay for all shipping charges. Well, a friend of ours, his cousin is also selling his bike. And he got the same email, but from a different email and name. That sounds funny to me. Well, my husband re-posted his bike yesterday online and he received from another person just about the same email about him residing in West Africa. The scam works like this: Example 1: Dr. Dipo Morgans of Nigeria wants to buy your used car for $5,000. His friend, Mr. Okuta, will be sending you a cashier's check for $8,000. You are to keep $5,000 for the car and send the remaining $3,000 to Dr. Morgans. Example 2: Dr. Dipo Morgans of Nigeria wants to buy your used car for $5,000. He will be sending you a cashier's check for $8,000 on the understanding that you will forward $3,000 of it to the shipping company that will be transporting your car to Africa. In some versions of the scam, the buyer is not an individual but rather an agent for a firm that purchases cars on behalf of others, often diplomats stationed in foreign lands. This car broker is usually located in Africa. The "reason" for the inflated-value check will vary from one attempt to defraud to another. Currency exchange problems will be cited. Or a horrified buyer will realize he's had the check prepared for far too large an amount. Or the check is being sent by a third party for the full amount this other person supposedly owes the buyer. Or it's a refund check for a failed sale for something that would have cost more. Or it would take 30 days to clear a check from Africa, hence the need to have an American third party send the payment. The reasons are many. And varied. And false. Cars or motorcycles aren't the only items to attract this form of scam: those attempting to sell horses have experienced it too. It's not unreasonable to extrapolate those attempting to sell boats will be similarly targeted. What matters is not the nature of the item being offered for sale but its price  it has to be high enough to justify the seller's feeling comfortable in sending thousands of his own dollars to a stranger under the mistaken belief he's already holding an even greater sum in his hand. In another form of the scam, those advertising online for roommates are contacted by prospective apartment-sharers who want to send cashier checks to cover the first few months rent plus a few thousand extra and who require the extra be mailed back to them. Though nothing is being offered for sale, it's the same scheme  the check will turn out to be worthless, but usually only long after the roommate-hunter has mailed his own very good check to the con artist. The scam works because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) requires banks to make money from cashier's, certified, or teller's checks available in one to five days. Consequently, funds from checks that might not be good are often released into payees' accounts long before the checks have been honored by their issuing banks. High quality forgeries can be bounced back and forth between banks for weeks before anyone catches on to their being worthless, by which time victims have long since wired the "overpayments" to the con artists who have just taken them for a ride. Although this scam is in its infancy, real people have already been bilked out of thousands of dollars by it  in some cases tens of thousands. The con has claimed victims in communities across the USA, so don't let your not having heard about it before lull you into a false sense of security. That the game is new doesn't mean it's not dangerous. How to Avoid Falling Victim to Cashier's Check Scams: Additional information:   Espinoza, Richard and Dan Morgolies. "Latest Net Scam Preys on Honest Folks."
  Charleston Gazette.  1 June 2003  (p. D7). Flaum, David.  "Scam Hits Sellers Over Net."
  The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal.  2 March 2003  (p. G1). Jones, Matthew.  "Beach Police Officers Warn of Fake-Check Web Scam."
  The Virginian-Pilot.  9 January 2003  (p. B4). Kades, Deborah.  "Wisconsin Residents Fall Prey to Used Vehicle, Lottery Scams."
  The Wisconsin State Journal.  12 December 2002. Kristof, Kathy M.  "Nigerian Money Con Targets Small Firms."
  Los Angeles Times.  7 September 2003 (p. C3). Associated Press.
  "Missoula Credit Union Members Taken."  15 March 2003.