Tag: taxes

The Empty Outrage Over Medicaid Cuts

Democrats bemoaning the loss of Medicaid coverage are glossing over a critical fact: States could fund the program themselves if they wanted to. The truth is, Medicaid is not nearly as popular as the taxes needed to keep it afloat.

There is a lot to complain about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), signed into law last week. For example, it will add trillions to the deficit while allocating billions to be used for deporting hard-working immigrants and even American citizens. Yet Democrats are denouncing it not for its lack of fiscal responsibility, but rather for one of its only positive provisions: its reforms to Medicaid.

Original versions of the bill included various reforms to Medicaid, like work requirements for some able-bodied adults and provisions limiting funds for undocumented immigrants and gender transition procedures. To this, Democrats responded with instant outrage: “Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of kids, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities in our states and nationwide. Republicans’ proposed cuts would be disastrous.”

The final version of the bill eliminated some of the more thorny cost-saving provisions while keeping the work requirements in place. Yet Democrats are still dissatisfied with the bill, with California Gov. Newsom claiming that “the President and his MAGA enablers are ripping care from cancer patients, meals from children, and money from working families.”

You can tell this is nothing more than political posturing because there are no cuts to Medicaid to begin with. The OBBB only reduces the rate of growth of Medicaid spending, but the overall cost of the program to taxpayers will continue to increase. Cutting means getting rid of something, not reducing the rate at which you add stuff.

Maybe we should not be too hard on the semantics. After all, Americans have very little experience with Medicaid cuts. Throughout its 60-year history, the only time Medicaid spending was truly cut was in 2006, by a mere 0.25%. This should come as no surprise since Medicaid promotes excessive spending by design.

Medicaid is structured in such a way that for every $1 that states spend on Medicaid, the Federal government matches it by up to $9. This design allows state politicians to grant their constituents $10 in political goodies (Medicaid) while only incurring $1 of political cost (higher taxes). Where does the rest of that money come from? Federal taxes and debt.

Now that Washington is cutting back its match rate, this windfall of benefits without costs to states will slow down. States must choose between filling the funding gap themselves (by raising taxes) or reducing coverage. State officials (many of whom will be facing reelection in the next few years) would rather do neither and keep this party going.

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Gavin Newsom Personally Secured Nonprofit Cash For Anti-Law Enforcement Activists

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom asked nonprofits to donate at least $610,000 to groups that call for defunding or abolishing law enforcement since 2023 before distancing himself from such stances.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center (IDLC) and Immigrant Legal Defense (ILD) received $500,000 in 2023 and $110,000 in 2025, respectively, at Newsom’s request, according to state records first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. IDLC has advocated for defunding the police and worked to free illegal immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while ILD “prioritizes abolishing immigration detention and reimagining the U.S. immigration system entirely,” the group’s website says.

Newsom said in a March interview that proposals to defund police after the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam in 2020 were “lunacy.” He also declared in a July 14 interview that he is “happy to advocate for eliminating sanctuary policy,” referring to laws in Democratic-leaning areas that prohibit police from helping ICE catch illegal immigrants. The governor’s recent push toward more moderate rhetoric on major issues has fueled speculation that he plans to run for president in 2028.

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Debunking the 100,000 Medicaid Deaths Myth

“More Americans will die—at least 100,000 more over the course of the next decade,” wrote Yale law professor Natasha Sarin in a June 9 Washington Post column about the Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“That isn’t hyperbolic,” Sarin added. “It is fact.”

The average reader might be inclined to believe Sarin, who holds a Harvard Ph.D. in economics as well as a Harvard law degree, and served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration. But contrary to her characterization, her claim is both hyperbole and not “fact.”

Sarin’s assertion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “statistical lives saved.” In particular, she and several other prominent journalists misinterpreted a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

As a professional debunker of bad research, I can say with some authority that the authors of that study, Dartmouth economist Angela Wyse and University of Chicago economist Bruce D. Meyer, wrote an excellent paper—a rarity among academic studies these days. But the University of Chicago’s press office trumpeted the paper’s findings, declaring, “Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act saved about 27,400 lives between 2010-22,” which is highly misleading. 

That take was echoed in coverage of the study by major news outlets. “The expansion of Medicaid has saved more than 27,000 lives since 2010, according to the most definitive study yet on the program’s health effects,” reported Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times. Their May 16 article was headlined “As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives.” 

The story was also picked up by Time (“Medicaid Expansions Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives, Study Finds”), NPR (“New Studies Show What’s at Stake if Medicaid Is Scaled Back”), NBC News (“Proposed Medicaid Cuts Could Lead to Thousands of Deaths, Study Finds”), and several other news outlets. These journalists either didn’t read the study, didn’t understand it, or willfully misrepresented its findings for partisan reasons. 

In the past, conservative opponents of Medicaid have been equally guilty of misconstruing academic research to support their policy views. That is what happened with the most famous study on the subject, The Oregon Experiment—Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes, which The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published in 2013. The NBER and NEJM papers offer a similar account of Medicaid’s impact on health, but both have been misinterpreted.

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Pete Buttigieg Spent $80 Billion on DEI, Zero Progress on Air Traffic Control Systems

Department of Transportation records and airline industry sources show that under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the agency funneled more than $80 billion into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives while delaying critical air traffic control system modernization, as reported by The New York Post.

Federal data reviewed from 2021 to 2024 indicates that nearly 400 DEI-related grants were awarded by the Department of Transportation during Buttigieg’s tenure, a substantial increase from the 60 similar grants awarded under the previous administration.

The funding, drawn heavily from the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, accounted for over half of the DOT’s annual budget across several fiscal years.

Airline officials told The Post that Buttigieg demonstrated “little to no interest” in advancing air traffic control modernization efforts.

One executive recounted a meeting in which Buttigieg reportedly remarked that system upgrades would just help airlines “fly more planes,” questioning how that served his interests.

The failure to prioritize modernization left the FAA reliant on systems dating back to the Carter administration, contributing to staffing shortages and travel disruptions. “He was definitely pushing an agenda,” an industry official stated.

In April 2024, a coalition of aviation trade associations sent an urgent letter to DOT leadership, warning that at the FAA’s current hiring pace, it could take nearly 90 years to fully staff critical air traffic control centers in the New York region.

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USDA ends Biden-era disaster relief program standards for farmers based on race, sex: legal watchdog

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has ended the Biden-era disaster relief program standards for farmers based on race and sex, which was praised by a legal watchdog that had been fighting the policies in court.

The USDA “has independently determined that it will no longer employ the race- and sex-based ‘socially disadvantaged’ designation to provide increased benefits based on race and sex in the programs at issue in this regulation,” the department said in its formal notice earlier this month.

The Southeastern Legal Foundation said  the USDA’s notice was in direct response to the watchdog’s victory in court in the case Strickland v. USDA. SLF’s lawsuit stopped eight disaster relief programs from the Biden administration that gave funds to farmers on the basis of race and sex, excluding white male farmers.

The USDA said that “the Strickland decision catalyzed the changes USDA is making in this rule to comport with the Constitution.”

SLF President Kim Hermann said in a statement: “This is a big win for SLF, but most importantly it is a huge win for America’s farmers. We are very thankful for the USDA’s revisions to these programs, and we are incredibly proud that we were able to play a part in protecting America’s farmers from race- and sex-based discrimination.

“Farming is one of the most important and difficult occupations in the world, where their hard work directly impacts everyone. They have to be able to do their jobs without having to worry about DEI nonsense, and we hope to see any forms of discrimination in federal programs come to a complete halt.”

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California High-Speed Train Boondoggle Reveals Collusion of Blue Government and Environmentalists

Socialists and Communists love trains for the masses.  They go where they are told, and Citizens do not have the freedom to change their mind and go somewhere else.  Cars and Freeways allow too much freedom.  The utopia of passenger trains in America was supposed to be the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles with over 800 miles of tracks.  From 1981 to 2008 plans were made and a vote to proceed was approved by Californians with funding via a state bond plus Federal Funding.  In 2015 the initial construction commenced.

Fortunately, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and President Trump brought an end to this insanity and announced on July 16 that the Federal Railroad Administration was terminating and clawing back approximately $4 billion in unspent federal funding for California’s High-Speed Rail debacle.

Secretary Duffy’s announcement said, “After 16 years and roughly $15 billion spent, not one high speed track has been laid by the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA). The $135 billion projected total cost of the project could buy every San Francisco and LA resident nearly 200 roundtrip flights between the cities.

Secretary Duffy went on, “This is California’s fault. Governor Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years. Federal dollars are not a blank check – they come with a promise to deliver results. After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget.  It’s time for this boondoggle to die.”  Governor Newsom recently appeared on the Shawn Ryan show and lied about all the progress on the CHSRA project.

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New York Has Awarded $600 Million To Sanctuary Groups Resisting Trump

New York’s city and state governments have given more than $600 million of taxpayer money to legal and immigrant-advocacy groups fighting President Trump’s immigration agenda.

One group, the Bronx Defenders, has received more than $500 million in city contracts since fiscal year 2018 to provide legal services to migrants.

Other groups, such as Make the Road NY, have received tens of millions of dollars in contracts as well.

Make the Road organized a rally at the state capitol last month in support of a sanctuary bill. Protesters chanted, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”

The New York Immigration Coalition received $46 million in taxpayer money.

“New York City should not be in the business of carrying out Donald Trump’s mass disappearance agenda, which is in fact illegal under our local laws,” Tweeted Murad Awadeh, executive director of the NYICC.

These groups have been pushing a statewide sanctuary bill called the New York for All Act that would prevent state and local law enforcement from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. This would include providing ICE with information, as well as turning over or deporting illegal immigrants.

Another bill in the works, the Dignity not Detention Act, would ban local jails from renting space to ICE for detention of migrants.

Neither bill has yet passed the state Senate.

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Mexicans in US can avoid remittance tax with government Finabien cards, Sheinbaum says

President Claudia Sheinbaum on Friday promoted a government bank card that can help Mexicans living in the United States avoid the new remittance tax.

Sheinbaum recommended the new services available with the Finabien bank card, originally created in 2024 by the federal government’s Financial Institution for Well-being (Finabien), brandishing a card for the cameras during her morning press conference.

“It’s a very simple way to send remittances electronically and avoid making cash transfers,” Sheinbaum said.

The newest service offers direct deposit operations, allowing cardholders’ wages to be sent directly to the card by employers or transferred using authorized institutions. Additionally, remittances can be made more economically and will allow cardholders to circumvent the U.S. remittance tax, the president said.

The new tax — which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2026 — is a federal excise tax applied directly to outbound money transfers. Essentially, it is a fee charged across the board to each person who sends funds out of the U.S.

The Finabien card can be acquired at 53 consulates in the U.S., by mail or via digital application at miconsulado.sre.gob.mx. And accounts can be accessed at 1,700 sites in Mexico.

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U.S. to Charge Travelers $250 ‘Visa Integrity’ Fee — Experts Say It Could Raise $30 Billion Over Next Decade

The United States will soon begin charging travelers a $250 “visa integrity fee” in order to enter the country.

The rule, which was included in the recent budget reconciliation package, will apply to all visitors who need nonimmigrant visas to enter and cannot be waived.

However, some travelers eventually may be able to get the fee reimbursed.

CNBC provides more details:

The fee will be at least $250 during the U.S. fiscal year 2025, which runs from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025. However, the secretary of Homeland Security is free to set the fee higher, according to the provision.

Thereafter, the visa integrity fee will be adjusted for inflation.

The “visa integrity fee” applies to all visitors who need nonimmigrant visas, which includes tourists, business travelers and international students.

Some visitors, including those from Australia, Japan and many nations in Europe, may not need visas to enter under the Visa Waiver Program.

The fee is paid when the visa is issued, according to the provision. Thus, visitors whose visa requests are denied will not be charged.

To be eligible for a refund, visa holders must meet the conditions outlined in the visa, including not engaging in unauthorized employment and not overstaying the visa’s expiration date by more than five days.

While illegal immigrants are largely the result of people crossing the southern border, many also enter the U.S. on tourist visas and then disappear indefinitely after securing cash in hand employment.

According to some experts, the fee may raise as much as $30 billion over the next decade, which could be used to pay down the national debt.

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Congressional Cuts To PBS, NPR Could Unravel Leftist Propaganda Nodes Nationwide 

The Republican-controlled House delivered the final blow with a 216-213 vote on Thursday night to eliminate $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports leftist propaganda networks such as NPR, PBS, and affiliated stations nationwide. Attached to the bill was also an $8 billion cut targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been accused of corruption.

The New York Times penned an article for its readers, offering multiple graphics that paint a grim picture of areas nationwide at risk of losing access to public radio and television. What the NYT fails to acknowledge is that the $1.1 billion in funding cuts to NPR, PBS, and affiliated stations represent a major blow to the leftist propaganda matrix—in other words, the information war of misinformation and disinformation waged by the left is about to crack a whole lot more.

“Failing stations will create a cascade effect in this highly connected and interdependent system, impacting content producers and leading to the potential collapse of additional distressed stations in other areas of the country,” Tim Isgitt, CEO of advisory firm Public Media Company, told the NYT.

Let the dominoes fall—this development could trigger a mass unraveling of the government-funded propaganda nodes nationwide that have brainwashed millions of Americans with toxic wokeism.  

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