1) What's French For Rip Off?

The French are pushing to increase their digital services tax (DST) from 3% to 15%. This would be the highest tax on tech companies in the world. The U.S. imposes no such tax.

These taxes only apply to the largest tech companies by global income, all of which are American.

If you don't think this discriminatory tax is aimed at America, consider that when it was originally proposed and enacted in 2019, the nickname for the tax around Europe was the "GAFA tax" - Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Gee, what a surprise. All these are USA tech companies.  

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith warns that the French tax "would be an unwarranted attack on America’s digital companies and leave the U.S. Congress and the Trump Administration with little choice but to pursue aggressive retaliatory actions."

Like most of Europe, France’s high-tech strategy is: if you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.

2) Largest Government Worker Union Says "Ends This Shutdown" - With FULL Back Pay

The American Federal Government Employee has decided it's time for Congress to approve a clean budget resolution and end the government shutdown.

"No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay -- today," says Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 820,000 government workers.

What a shock that the Union wants the shutdown to be a one-month paid vacation for their “non-essential” workers. By the way, one of the multitude of reasons our government is $38 trillion in debt is because the pay and benefit package of federal workers is 25% to 40% higher for government than comparable workers in the private sector, as Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute has shown:

3) 14 Reasons Voters Should Love the Trump Tax Bill

The latest polls show that voter support for the Big Beautiful tax bill that passed back in July has turned slightly negative.  A high percentage of Americans are buying the media/liberal  spin that this was a "tax cut for the rich."  As we've explained many times, that attack is fatuous because as IRS data show definitively, the share of taxes paid by the rich has risen, not fallen, as a result of the 2017 Trump tax cut, which this bill makes permanent.

But, as usual, Republicans have done a poor job of selling the virtues of the tax bill, so we will once again try to do their job for them. We've modified and updated our earlier "hidden gems" in the tax bill, and so here is the latest version:

How The Trump Tax Bill Benefits ALL Americans

• Prevents a $4 trillion tax increase

• Reduces by half the number of families paying the unfair death tax

• Suspends the hated Alternative Minimum Tax

• Implements work requirements for able-bodied Americans receiving taxpayer-funded benefits

• Saves the average family between $1,500 and $2,000 a year in reduced income taxes

• Opens federal lands and waters to oil, gas, coal, and mineral leasing

• Extends the 20% tax reduction for small businesses

• Allows 100% immediate expensing for business equipment, software, and qualified production facilities

• Cancels Biden's illegal student loan bailouts

• Expands health savings accounts to give Americans greater health choices

• Includes the largest federal expansion of school choice scholarships for low-income families in American history

• Ends Biden's EV mandates

• Saves $10s of billions of dollars by ending green new deal mandates

• Ends Medicaid for illegal immigrants

4) Nuclear Power Costs Are Plunging... In China

Here's a depressing chart from The New York Times. While the costs of building nuclear reactors in the United States have skyrocketed, China is headed in the opposite direction.

And in the last 13 years, we've built just the two reactors at Vogtle in Georgia, while China has commissioned 13 reactors and has another 33 under active construction.

5) This Just in From the Washington Post: Beware Your "Carbon Hoofprint"

Here's a new level of climate derangement: The Washington Post still wants you to quit eating beef to slow the rise of the oceans, but if you must have the red meat, you should move to Chicago - and this isn’t a parody:

Ben Goldstein, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, said in an interview that when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, "beef is still the main culprit" regardless of how it's produced...

"If you're that dedicated to beef," Goldstein said, "move to the Upper Midwest ... go and eat the culled dairy cattle, which has lower carbon emissions."

6) How To Reduce the Deficit

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