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Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition
Issue #1212
02/28/2025 - 03/02/2025
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1) Trump Is Right To Drain This Swamp
Lost in all the hullabaloo about the mean people at DOGE who are cutting the bloated federal workforce, is how much this fatted cow has grown. As we showed in HOTLINEs past, government hiring under Biden far outpaced private hiring. The federal workforce is now larger than the number of workers in construction, manufacturing, mining, and logging - combined.
Not all federal workers are doing jobs that are redundant, unnecessary, obsolete or wasteful... but too many are.
The problem is we can't just downsize the federal bureaucracy through attrition - because government employees seldom leave. Their quit rate is less than one-half as high as in the private sector. The old joke is that it takes a blowtorch to get a federal worker to leave voluntarily.
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2) Republicans Have an Earmarking Addiction
Our friend and the former chairman of Open the Books, Tom Smith, is on a crusade to end the scourge of spending earmarks. Earmarking is when members carve out projects - airports, parking lots, courthouses, sports stadiums, bridges to nowhere, green energy grants - for their own districts. Sometimes, as we learned this week about Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, they enrich their own family to the tune of millions of dollars.
Smith finds that last year, “the top 62 earmarkers in the House were Republicans. Eight of the 10 earmarkers in the Senate were Republicans. Senator Collins voted for earmarks equivalent to $2,640 for every family in that state. Several Republican senators voted tens of millions of dollars to airports and universities that are now named after them. In the Senate, the largest earmarker was Mitch McConnell whose earmarks totaled $498,935,000."
John Hart of Open the Books finds that this pork-barrel spending is on the rise again and is approaching pre-ban levels:
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Trump and DOGE should bring it to an end. Supporters of earmarks say the savings are minimal. Wrong. When earmarks were banned, taxpayers saved $141 billion. The late Senator Tom Coburn was right: "Earmarks are the gateway drug to spending addiction."
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3) California Is Getting Rich Off of Medicaid
Our friend Paul Winfree at EPIC reports that California is expecting to take in almost $120 billion in federal Medicaid funds in the coming fiscal year - a gift from Uncle Sam. That's up 23% over two years.
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This staggering number is hard to believe, but it's right in Newsom's budget:
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California will receive more in federal Medicaid funding next year than Florida's entire state budget - and just the increase they want is more than Nevada's entire state budget.
And here's the kicker, from Winfree again: California openly brags about using a provider tax scam to avoid paying what is supposed to be the state share:
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4) Halfway There on Saving Gas Water Heaters
The House voted yesterday 221 to 198 to overturn Biden's ban on gas-fired tankless hot water heaters.
These 11 Democrats joined all Republicans voting yes.
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Congratulations to our friend Rep. Gary Palmer of Alabama for leading the charge.
Next stop is the Senate, where the bill is privileged under the Congressional Review Act and therefore needs only a simple majority to pass and head to the president's desk.
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5) We May Have Been Too Tough on CBO
We are adamant that the more than $4 trillion revenue loss expected in the Congressional Budget score of the Trump tax plan is preposterously too high. But we were reminded by CBO officials who read the HOTLINE that CBO does not generate the revenue projections. Those revenue forecasts come from The Joint Committee on Taxation..
Sure enough, the JCT is now run by bean counters who always overestimate the "cost" of cutting taxes.
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Time to clean house.
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6) The NGO Racket
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