Corporations pull back on Pride sponsorships, leaving budget gaps for LGBTQ events
Corporate sponsorship for Pride events across the U.S. has dropped sharply, leaving major cities like San Francisco with six-figure budget gaps. Organizers are relying on local donors and community support as brands retreat from activism amid political and economic pressures. (AP Video: Haven Daley)
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New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Why there's no shame in corporate America boycotting LGBT Pride Month
'Private companies can do whatever they want,' leftists once snorted in defense of companies like Facebook banning conservative speech. But now the tables have turned, and LGBTQ activists have found themselves in a state between panicked and sulky as their fair-weather friends in corporate America are pulling sponsorships of Pride celebrations this month. As a result, Pride events across the nation are facing budget shortfalls, and activists are blaming everyone but themselves. Advertisement 8 LGBT Pride events across America have seen millions of dollars in sponsorship deals dry up since President Trump returned to the White House, according to reports. lazyllama – At least 14 companies — including Pepsi, Citi, MasterCard, Nissan, Garnier, and US defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. — have dropped or greatly scaled back their financial contributions to annual Pride events nationwide. Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud Light, has also backtracked on Pride sponsorship — and for good reason. The company lost an estimated $395 million after its botched partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney led to a nationwide boycott in 2023. Advertisement Ever since, Bud Light has struggled to reposition itself as the good ol' boys, God 'n' guns beverage, to lukewarm reception. The numbers are grim: Heritage of Pride, organizers of New York City's festivities, by far the largest in the nation, faces a $750,000 shortfall this year after nearly a quarter of corporate donations dried up. This follows years of operating at a loss: In 2022, the group was $2.7 million in the hole, and another $1.2 million the following year. 8 At least 14 companies, including MasterCard, have scaled back on their financial contributions to annual Pride events nationwide. 8 Pepsi has also decreased its financial contributions to Pride events around the country. Advertisement 8 Nissan is also including in the group of companies that have either scaled back or dropped their contributions for national Pride events. Christopher Sadowski In California, longtime corporate donors ran for the hills when San Francisco Pride executive director Suzanne Ford reached out begging for money. Twin Cities Pride has seen longtime corporate sponsors in Minnesota shift into retreat mode, and now the group is scrambling to meet a $200,000 goal. Organizers in Washington, DC, Milwaukee, and St. Louis all have reported being ghosted by big companies they once relied upon. All of this is occurring at a time when a dozen companies have withdrawn participation from the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, a shakedown scheme used by the LGBT nonprofit behemoth to enforce woke capitalism. For LGBTQAI2S+ activists, the reason for all this is simple: It's Trump's fault. Advertisement 8 Trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney set off a billion-dollar backlash against her 2023 sponsorship program with Bud Light Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/MEGA 8 'There's a lot of fear of repercussions for aligning with our festival,' Wes Shaver, president of Milwaukee Pride, said. Wes Shaver 'There's a lot of fear of repercussions for aligning with our festival,' Wes Shaver, president of Milwaukee Pride, told The New York Times, joining others who believe companies fear they may be penalized by the White House if they donate to Pride events, citing the administration's effort to curtail DEI initiatives. (When asked about this, the White House didn't respond to multiple requests for comment from The Post.) What's equally likely is that everyone just has gay fatigue — a collective eye roll at the oversaturation of LGBT themes in culture, combined with all the negative connotations now associated with Pride. Once a niche event of subculture fun and revelry, it's devolved into a mainstream, month-long orgy of far-leftism that looks more like a tent revival beckoning an impending open-borders transgender race war. Rage-hungry conservative influencers have latched on to videos of public nudity and shameless parents forcing Pride spectacles onto their children. Transgender insanity has swallowed the entire movement and, in doing so, repelled middle-of-the-road Americans. Simply put, it's exhausting. Advertisement And what company, in its right mind, wants to be tied to all that? While activists say companies are afraid of Trump, the same could have been true about Biden. Businesses certainly felt the Democrat gun in their back to start coughing up their woke bona fides during his term. Overall, the corporate retreat from Pride is a good thing for everyone, and it ought to continue. The grotesque parade of political and corporate pandering that's defined Pride over the last two decades is embarrassing, as any honest gay person will admit. 8 Trump has set his sights on banning identity-based initiatives and organizations, according to reports. AP After all, who wants their sex life validated by junk food companies and bomb-makers? Advertisement It's also alienated plenty of old-timers. 'The cold corporations are more important to the rotating Heritage of Pride than the actual surviving Stonewall veterans. Plenty are still alive and kicking,' former New York City Pride Grand Marshall Williamson Henderson, of the Stonewall Veterans Association, and who participated in the original Stonewall rebellion in June 1969 (the reason Pride Month exists), told The Post. 8 NYC Pride alone has seen nearly a million dollars in funding losses. Some community observers, however, suggest the Pride event has become over-commercialized. Getty Images Corporate America is a shallow and skittish place, and only the most destructive HR managers want their businesses butting in on the culture wars. Advertisement Rather than blaming Republicans for a long-deserved pushback against Rainbow Totalitarianism, LGBT activists ought to do a better job policing themselves, embark on a little soul searching as to how they became so toxic, and maybe even re-examine their unbridled love of money. That last one might be a tough sell. Free Love? Not anymore. It's just about free stuff.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump's tariffs could pay for his tax cuts -- but it likely wouldn't be much of a bargain
WASHINGTON (AP) — The tax cuts in President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would likely gouge a hole in the federal budget. The president has a patch handy, though: his sweeping import taxes — tariffs. The Congressional Budget Office, the government's nonpartisan arbiter of tax and spending matters, says the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by the House last month and now under consideration in the Senate, would increase federal budget deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. That is because its tax cuts would drain the government's coffers faster than its spending cuts would save money. By bringing in revenue for the Treasury, on the other hand, the tariffs that Trump announced through May 13 — including his so-called reciprocal levies of up to 50% on countries with which the United States has a trade deficit — would offset the budget impact of the tax-cut bill and reduce deficits over the next decade by $2.5 trillion. So it's basically a wash. That's the budget math anyway. The real answer is more complicated. Actually using tariffs to finance a big chunk of the federal government would be a painful and perilous undertaking, budget wonks say. 'It's a very dangerous way to try to raise revenue,' said Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model, who served in President George W. Bush's Treasury Department. Trump has long advocated tariffs as an economic elixir. He says they can protect American industries, bring factories back to the United States, give him leverage to win concessions over foreign governments — and raise a lot of money. He's even suggested that they could replace the federal income tax, which now brings in about half of federal revenue. 'It's possible we'll do a complete tax cut,'' he told reporters in April. 'I think the tariffs will be enough to cut all of the income tax.'' Economists and budget analysts do not share the president's enthusiasm for using tariffs to finance the government or to replace other taxes. 'It's a really bad trade,'' said Erica York, the Tax Foundation's vice president of federal tax policy. 'It's perhaps the dumbest tax reform you could design.'' For one thing, Trump's tariffs are an unstable source of revenue. He bypassed Congress and imposed his biggest import tax hikes through executive orders. That means a future president could simply reverse them. 'Or political whims in Congress could change, and they could decide, 'Hey, we're going revoke this authority because we don't think it's a good thing that the president can just unilaterally impose a $2 trillion tax hike,' '' York said. Or the courts could kill his tariffs before Congress or future presidents do. A federal court in New York has already struck down the centerpiece of his tariff program — the reciprocal and other levies he announced on what he called 'Liberation Day'' April 2 — saying he'd overstepped his authority. An appeals court has allowed the government to keep collecting the levies while the legal challenge winds its way through the court system. Economists also say that tariffs damage the economy. They are a tax on foreign products, paid by importers in the United States and usually passed along to their customers via higher prices. They raise costs for U.S. manufacturers that rely on imported raw materials, components and equipment, making them less competitive than foreign rivals that don't have to pay Trump's tariffs. Tariffs also invite retaliatory taxes on U.S. exports by foreign countries. Indeed, the European Union this week threatened 'countermeasures'' against Trump's unexpected move to raise his tariff on foreign steel and aluminum to 50%. 'You're not just getting the effect of a tax on the U.S. economy,' York said. 'You're also getting the effect of foreign taxes on U.S. exports.'' Smetters at the Penn Wharton Budget Model said that tariffs also isolate the United States and discourage foreigners from investing in its economy. Foreigners see U.S. Treasurys as a super-safe investment and now own about 30% of the federal government's debt. If they cut back, the federal government would have to pay higher interest rates on Treasury debt to attract a smaller number of potential investors domestically. Higher borrowing costs and reduced investment would wallop the economy, making tariffs the most economically destructive tax available, Smetters said — more than twice as costly in reduced economic growth and wages as what he sees as the next-most damaging: the tax on corporate earnings. Tariffs also hit the poor hardest. They end up being a tax on consumers, and the poor spend more of their income than wealthier people do. Even without the tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill slams the poorest because it makes deep cuts to federal food programs and to Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans. After the bill's tax and spending cuts, an analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found, the poorest fifth of American households earning less than $17,000 a year would see their incomes drop by $820 next year. The richest 0.1% earning more than $4.3 million a year would come out ahead by $390,070 in 2026. 'If you layer a regressive tax increase like tariffs on top of that, you make a lot of low- and middle-income households substantially worse off,'' said the Tax Foundation's York. Overall, she said, tariffs are 'a very unreliable source of revenue for the legal reasons, the political reasons as well as the economic reasons. They're a very, very inefficient way to raise revenue. If you raise a dollar of a revenue with tariffs, that's going to cause a lot more economic harm than raising revenue any other way.''
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump's tariffs could pay for his tax cuts -- but it likely wouldn't be much of a bargain
WASHINGTON (AP) — The tax cuts in President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would likely gouge a hole in the federal budget. The president has a patch handy, though: his sweeping import taxes — tariffs. The Congressional Budget Office, the government's nonpartisan arbiter of tax and spending matters, says the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by the House last month and now under consideration in the Senate, would increase federal budget deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. That is because its tax cuts would drain the government's coffers faster than its spending cuts would save money. By bringing in revenue for the Treasury, on the other hand, the tariffs that Trump announced through May 13 — including his so-called reciprocal levies of up to 50% on countries with which the United States has a trade deficit — would offset the budget impact of the tax-cut bill and reduce deficits over the next decade by $2.5 trillion. So it's basically a wash. That's the budget math anyway. The real answer is more complicated. Actually using tariffs to finance a big chunk of the federal government would be a painful and perilous undertaking, budget wonks say. 'It's a very dangerous way to try to raise revenue,' said Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model, who served in President George W. Bush's Treasury Department. Trump has long advocated tariffs as an economic elixir. He says they can protect American industries, bring factories back to the United States, give him leverage to win concessions over foreign governments — and raise a lot of money. He's even suggested that they could replace the federal income tax, which now brings in about half of federal revenue. 'It's possible we'll do a complete tax cut,'' he told reporters in April. 'I think the tariffs will be enough to cut all of the income tax.'' Economists and budget analysts do not share the president's enthusiasm for using tariffs to finance the government or to replace other taxes. 'It's a really bad trade,'' said Erica York, the Tax Foundation's vice president of federal tax policy. 'It's perhaps the dumbest tax reform you could design.'' For one thing, Trump's tariffs are an unstable source of revenue. He bypassed Congress and imposed his biggest import tax hikes through executive orders. That means a future president could simply reverse them. 'Or political whims in Congress could change, and they could decide, 'Hey, we're going revoke this authority because we don't think it's a good thing that the president can just unilaterally impose a $2 trillion tax hike,' '' York said. Or the courts could kill his tariffs before Congress or future presidents do. A federal court in New York has already struck down the centerpiece of his tariff program — the reciprocal and other levies he announced on what he called 'Liberation Day'' April 2 — saying he'd overstepped his authority. An appeals court has allowed the government to keep collecting the levies while the legal challenge winds its way through the court system. Economists also say that tariffs damage the economy. They are a tax on foreign products, paid by importers in the United States and usually passed along to their customers via higher prices. They raise costs for U.S. manufacturers that rely on imported raw materials, components and equipment, making them less competitive than foreign rivals that don't have to pay Trump's tariffs. Tariffs also invite retaliatory taxes on U.S. exports by foreign countries. Indeed, the European Union this week threatened 'countermeasures'' against Trump's unexpected move to raise his tariff on foreign steel and aluminum to 50%. 'You're not just getting the effect of a tax on the U.S. economy,' York said. 'You're also getting the effect of foreign taxes on U.S. exports.'' She said the tariffs will basically wipe out all economic benefits from the One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts. Smetters at the Penn Wharton Budget Model said that tariffs also isolate the United States and discourage foreigners from investing in its economy. Foreigners see U.S. Treasurys as a super-safe investment and now own about 30% of the federal government's debt. If they cut back, the federal government would have to pay higher interest rates on Treasury debt to attract a smaller number of potential investors domestically. Higher borrowing costs and reduced investment would wallop the economy, making tariffs the most economically destructive tax available, Smetters said — more than twice as costly in reduced economic growth and wages as what he sees as the next-most damaging: the tax on corporate earnings. Tariffs also hit the poor hardest. They end up being a tax on consumers, and the poor spend more of their income than wealthier people do. Even without the tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill slams the poorest because it makes deep cuts to federal food programs and to Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans. After the bill's tax and spending cuts, an analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found, the poorest fifth of American households earning less than $17,000 a year would see their incomes drop by $820 next year. The richest 0.1% earning more than $4.3 million a year would come out ahead by $390,070 in 2026. 'If you layer a regressive tax increase like tariffs on top of that, you make a lot of low- and middle-income households substantially worse off,'' said the Tax Foundation's York. Overall, she said, tariffs are 'a very unreliable source of revenue for the legal reasons, the political reasons as well as the economic reasons. They're a very, very inefficient way to raise revenue. If you raise a dollar of a revenue with tariffs, that's going to cause a lot more economic harm than raising revenue any other way.'' Paul Wiseman, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
