Our school choice coalition with ALEC and state groups around the country is hoping that 2025 is the biggest year yet for the expansion of school choice options for kids living in failed school districts. Trump is FULLY on board.
But we're pleased to announce that North Carolina's legislators got a head start in recent days by voting to expand the state's popular Opportunity Scholarship Program.
After the legislature voted last year to bring the program to all families in the state, demand was so significant that more than 55,000 families had to be waitlisted for the program after funding ran out. In response to this high demand, lawmakers in the Tarheel state voted for expansion, but Governor Cooper - whose own kids attended private schools - vetoed the bill.
We are pleased to announce that the legislature voted to override Cooper's veto - thus freeing up nearly $500 million in funding that will clear the waitlist.
Representative Tricia Cotham, a champion for education freedom who left the Democratic Party last year over their opposition to Opportunity Scholarships, gave a tremendous floor speech this week in support of the program. She hits the nail on the head: "This shouldn't be a straight partisan issue...This bill is about kids, their families, and their future and what is right for North Carolina."
2) The Other Big Election: Americans Voting With Their Feet Against High Taxes
We are excited to announce that Unleash Prosperity will be releasing our new state-of-the-art interactive website called VoteWithYourFeet.com early next year. It will document how high taxes and regulations affect where Americans move to and from.
The website will use the most comprehensive data from IRS and Census, but for a preview of what we may see here is the latest data from a smaller survey, the American Community Survey, as a sneak preview of the kind of data we are assembling and presenting.
Look at the top destination states. They are among the lowest-income tax states in the nation.
More remarkable is that the six highest tax states in the country are ALL losing people at record amounts.
You might say people are voting with their feet against high taxes and lousy government services.
Kudos to our friend Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia who has transitioned VA from net out-migration to net in-migration in three short years.
3) Work for Welfare Requirements Reduce Dependency
Steve Scalise said this week that Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied, working-age adults are being considered for inclusion in the reconciliation bill that would extend the Trump tax cuts. In 2023 House Republicans backed off work requirements on Medicaid, housing subsidies, and food stamps in the debt ceiling deal. The Left hates work rules in exchange for benefits.
Polls and ballot questions have repeatedly shown that more than two-thirds of voters (including most liberal voters) agree that people who are capable of working should be required to work or participate in job training as a condition of receiving welfare benefits.
In April 2023 in Wisconsin, 79% of voters supported work requirements in a ballot referendum the same day they were electing a Democrat to the state Supreme Court.
But liberals in Congress have already started their usual distortion campaign:
Conservatives should not be scared off, but should calmly explain that work requirements benefit the people on welfare programs by incentivizing them to get into the workforce and onto the ladder of economic opportunity that will lead to higher income and get them off Medicaid and other welfare programs. The Left's distortion about children and seniors shows that they have no real defense of not requiring work or job training for prime-age, non-disabled adults without dependents.
Work requirements work and if liberals doubt that, they should ask Bill Clinton who with a Republican Congress enacted them in 2016 thus reducing welfare dependency by almost half.
4) Will the Last Millionaire in London Please Turn Out the Lights?
We mentioned the other day in the HOTLINE that Britain's new Labour government is raising capital gains and death taxes at its own peril. The Brits are conducting a fascinating experiment: how many millionaires can they drive out of the country? At least one British betting shop is discussing offering odds on the number.
The investment firms of Henly & Partners and New World Wealth have issued a report predicting that Labour tax hikes will drive more than 9,500 millionaires to decamp by the end of December. Two-thirds of them are headed for the European Union, with favorite destinations including Italy, Malta, Portugal, Switzerland, Monaco, France, and the Netherlands. Some 800 are likely to move to Dubai and another 720 to the United States.
One of the most punitive tax measures Labour is enacting is to end special rules that exempted much of the worldwide income of wealthy residents who are not considered permanently settled in Britain. The Adam Smith Institute estimates that the change will wipe out 23,000 British jobs due to lost investment.
Britain is going to have to relearn a painful lesson it was taught in the 1970s before Margaret Thatcher's election: capital and wealth flow to where they are treated well. Britain's new taxes on the rich will simply mean fewer rich people to tax. Duh!!
5) UP Senior Fellow David Simon Defends Milton Friedman's Good Name
In case you missed in on the WSJ letters to the editor page, Simon explodes that absurd assertion from Stanford professor Jennifer Burns that Milton Friedman would have backed the large transfer payments that enabled COVID lockdowns:
The Covid relief transfer payments were massive new welfare-state programs that the federal government used to soften the ruinous consequences of one of this nation's worst exercises in central economic planning: the federal and state governments' shutdowns of the economy. Friedman vehemently opposed both central economic planning and expansion of the welfare state. Had governments adhered to Friedman's admonitions, they wouldn't have been able to justify--and he wouldn't have supported--Covid relief transfer payments.
