2) Bring It on Home!

This table from Tax Notes is an astonishing testament to the positive feedback effects of the Trump tax cuts.  

It shows that prior to the lower corporate tax rate and the high tax rate charged on repatriated capital, only 48% of Google profits were from domestic activities.  But after the 21% corporate tax rate and the incentives to repatriate capital back to these shores, it jumped to 88%. Several other tech giants had similar increases.

Taxes really do have consequences.

These companies are the blue dashed line in the chart below:

3) One of Every Four Medicaid Dollars Was an Improper Payment

Republicans included significant savings in their budget plan through reductions in Medicaid spending. This incited outrage from the Democrats in the House who in one resounding chorus of indignation falsely claimed women and children would lose health care.

It turns out that simple fraud detection would yield all the savings needed. Official estimates show Medicaid had about $30 billion in improper payments last year,  but budget sleuths at the Paragon Health Institute and EPIC have pegged the real number at FIVE TIMES the official estimate:

The ACA's expansion of Medicaid caused the improper payment rate in the program to quadruple. The improper payment rate went from 6 percent before the ACA expansion of the program took effect in 2014 to over 25 percent in the two cycles fully audited in 2019 and 2020.

Got that? In the last audited years, one of every four dollars spent was in error.  But no problem for Biden - he followed the Obama precedent and ended eligibility audits.

4) The Myth of the Republican Gerrymander

Eric Holder, who served as Barack Obama's Attorney General and now runs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has railed for years over Republican gerrymandering of House seats.  He claims that Republicans "debase and dishonor" our democracy by the way they draw congressional districts.

We hate gerrymandering and the process that allows politicians to choose their voters, rather than the voters choosing the politicians.  Both parties have turned gerrymandering into an art form.  There's no reason that computers with random number generators can't draw the lines with no political interference.  

But what ISN'T true is the idea that the Republicans owe their House majority due to gerrymandering.  

Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Chris Warshaw have shown that in the 2022 and 2024 elections "the House exhibited no pro-Republican lean at all. Of course, Republicans won narrow majorities in 2022 and 2024. But they did so because they won narrow pluralities of the total House vote."

In 2024 the GOP won 51.4% of the two-party popular vote but only netted 50.6% of the actual seats.

The reason for all this is the number of highly partisan plans put into place by Democrats following the 2020 reapportionment. The Illinois gerrymander boosted Democrats by 3.5 seats on average. California's map was drawn by a commission formed with a DEI mandate. Its staff clearly leaned left and helped net Democrats roughly 4.5 bonus seats.

The bottom line: both parties gerrymander.

5) Killer Cuomo Bids for a Big Apple Comeback

Ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is attempting  a political comeback by running for mayor in New York City.

Cuomo is betting that city voters are so dissatisfied with the crime, corruption and countless efforts to tax and regulate them, that they overlook what even he admits are his "painful" mistakes.

But are New Yorkers suffering from severe amnesia? Cuomo was the governor who panicked in March 2020 with COVID lockdown orders that sent the whole country's response off the rails. His tragic nursing home "must-admit" order required nursing homes to accept residents even if they were testing positive for COVID-19. This caused thousands of nursing home deaths.

This was followed by a shameful cover-up, which Cuomo personally directed contrary to his emphatic denials.

In 2017, he issued a cease-and-desist executive order against ICE after it arrested illegal immigrants. He also made it easier for accused criminals to stay at large without posting bail.

New Yorkers are yearning for competent management of their city government. Here's hoping they choose wisely, because as Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco have shown, the consequences of "progressive" governance of our big cities has proven disastrous.

6) Accurately Defined

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