1) The Left ❤️ Health Insurers

We at the HOTLINE have been beating the drum on the political reality that extending COVID-emergency supersized Obamacare subsidies will mostly benefit the insurance companies and prop up a failed health system with runaway costs.

We were happy to see that President Trump has picked up this message in his social media posts:

Chucky Schumer wants NO income limits on the Obamacare taxpayer subsidies that go to UnitedHealth and other health care conglomerates.

We like the Trump idea of replacing Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies with means-tested and tax-free HSA contributions that individuals own and control and can be used to buy direct patient care, traditional insurance coverage for hospitalization, and other deregulated options.

These simple reforms, along with health pricing transparency will expand coverage, drive down costs, and drain profits from the insurers.

2) You Want Lower Prices? Move to a Red State

The Left is crowing that they swept last week's elections by appealing to the middle class on the "affordability" issue.

So we thought we'd pick up that theme and find out which states have the highest and lowest cost-of-living. Several ratings are out there and they all pretty much draw the same conclusions.  Blue States are lots more expensive and Red States are more affordable.

The U.S. News ratings show nine of the 10 most expensive states are either blue or purple states. All 10 of the lowest cost states are red.

Some of the states with the lowest cost of living are the poorest and rural states - such as Mississippi and Arkansas. And the richest states, such as Massachusetts and California are among the highest cost states.

But the Blue States tend to have higher costs, not because they are richer, but because they have expensive green energy mandates, higher housing costs, higher taxes, higher minimum wages, more forced unionization, and more regulations.

What's undeniable is that if families are looking for more "affordability," red states are the place to go.

3) How New York's Election Laws Helped Mamdani Win

We've been wondering how it is that political newcomer Zohran Mamdani was able to raise and spend $12.7 million on his mayoral campaign. One major contributing factor was the city's lavish system of public matching funds, a long-time cause of left-wing groups.

Mamdani collected $8 in taxpayer money for every $1 he raised in small donations.

Another factor is ranked-choice voting (RCV), which voters approved in 2019 after a slick campaign financed by figures such as Jonathan Soros, son of billionaire George Soros. Mark Penn, who was Bill Clinton's pollster, laments that "the left has engineered voting rules in New York City" using RCV to have "left-leaning voters get a second vote, but not applying it in the general election, making it hard for moderates to coalesce around an alternative.

Mamdani financed his campaign with taxpayer dollars and we predict this will be a new crusade for the progressives around the country.

4) The Dallas Mass Transit Boondoggle

Here we go again.

Four suburban cities--Plano, Irving, Farmers Branch, and Highland Park--have scheduled a referenda in May to decide whether to withdraw from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system, the largest transit network in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

These cities contend that their sales tax contributions to DART far exceed the agency's spending. In 2023, the city's DART-dedicated sales tax revenue totaled $109 million, roughly $65 million more than the $44 million DART spent locally that year.

DART currently draws funding from 13 municipalities through a dedicated share of local sales tax revenue. Two cities have previously withdrawn from the system.

Although Dallas-Fort Worth is the nation's fourth-largest metropolitan area, DART's ridership lags far behind its scale. The agency operates what it calls the longest light-rail network in the United States, at 93 miles. But almost no one rides it.

Yet only 0.6 percent of commuters used transit in 2024, ranking Dallas-Fort Worth 49th out of the 57 major metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey--down from 1.2 percent in 2019 and 3.4 percent in 1980, the last year before voters approved DART's 1983 founding sales tax.

The latest work access data from the Census Bureau (2024) indicates that Dallas-Fort Worth has one of the lowest transit ridership rate in the country.

We wouldn't be surprised to learn if there weren't more Texans riding a horse to work than traveling on the multi-billion dollar rail transit lines.  

5) A Sad Evolution

• "The habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration... The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism."

  -George Washington, 1796

• "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they… can not do… for themselves."

  -Abraham Lincoln, 1854

• "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you've got."

  -Ronald Reagan, 1981

• "The era of big government is over."

  -Bill Clinton, 1996

• "We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about."

  -Zohran Mamdani, 2025

Mamdani's comment made us think of another famous bit of wisdom attributed to Lincoln:

• "I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday."

6) Now Where Will All the New York Refugees Go?

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