1) Why Johnny Can't Read Part 6

One of the few bright spots in Washington DC's checkered (to put it kindly) K-12 education landscape has been Alice Deal Middle school, where reading proficiency rates at 80% are double DC's District's abysmal 38% average.

But now, we learn Alice Deal Middle school has decided to remove all full-length novels from their eighth grade English curriculum.

The educrats behind this move claim that moving from full-length books to section readings - will better prepare students for High School.

How is it better for reading proficiency and knowledge-gathering to read excerpts from Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, not the whole book?

Why not just give the 13-year olds the cliff notes version of The Scarlet Letter?

Reading a full-length novel is now presumably too heavy a lift for an 8th grader.

This is yet another sad example of subjecting our children to the soft bigotry of low expectations in the government-run schools.

It comes at a time when poor states like Louisiana and Mississippi have returned to the basics and have seen miraculous jumps in their reading scores. They are now beating out higher-income blue states.

2) Punt Lawyers and Unions Out of College Football

Despite college football’s new pay-to-play (NIL) rules and the new transfer portals allowing players to sell their services to the highest bidding at the end of each season for millions of dollars, the game is popular as ever.

The 2025 season has been one of the most unpredictable in recent memory with upstart teams like the Indiana Hoosiers now ranked #1 with a legitimate shot at the national championship. (Don’t get us started on the preposterous injustice of allowing a mediocre Alabama team with three losses into the playoffs over Notre Dame.)

But college football is BIG money and BIG business with TV rights in the billions of dollars.

Remember, the NCAA and the hundred or so schools are technically “nonprofit” organizations. Really? They are about as nonprofit as ExxonMobil, as the chart below shows.

To bring some order to the chaos, Republicans in Congress, led by House majority leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana have proposed the SCORE Act, which they claim is “the free market fix” to college athletics.  

It’s far from perfect, but it does protect the players from being required to join a union and pay union dues. It also prevents trial lawyers from suing the schools under archaic antitrust laws.

With college football so profitable, every interest group in Washington (from the unions to the lawyers to the lobbyists) want a piece of the pie. The money should go to the amazing athletes and the schools who recruit and now pay them, not the economic parasites in Washington who want to ruin this great game.  

Here are the top 10 college football franchise values based on comparable pro team financials, as calculated by The Athletic:

3) Shall I Compare Thee to the Price of Special K?

This is the start of the “affordability tour” and so the Trump administration put out this chart on the price of breakfast items:

As for who’s responsible for the overall rise in the price of food in recent years, this chart tells the story pretty well:

4) Liz Warren Lobbies for Price Controls on Financial Aggregators

We previously covered the nonsensical Biden regulation that mandates a zero price for fintechs to access bank APIs for customer data. Elizabeth Warren is still banging the drum for a zero price mandate, most recently in a letter to acting CFPB director Russ Vought:

We’ve learned that CFPB may make one of its last orders of business before shutting down on a Warren-light version of a price cap.

That would be better than a zero-price mandate but is unnecessary and contrary to free-market principles. The fintechs have proven more than capable of negotiating data agreements with the banks. The most rational response to Warren's letter is to do exactly the opposite of what she demands and impose no price regulation of any kind.

5) Jamie Dimon on Why "Europe Is Getting Poorer”

It takes 27 nations to make a decision. They let their military drop dramatically. It's very bureaucratic. It's part of the reason that they lost Britain... we allowed Europe to fall apart... they've gone from 90% of the GDP of America to 65. That's not because America did anything bad to them. It's their own bureaucracy, their own cost... They do some wonderful things on their safety nets, but they've driven business out, they've driven investment out, they've driven innovation out.

6) The First Amendment In Britain

Interested in booking us for a media appearance? Send an email with the link below.

Know anyone else who would appreciate the Hotline? Please direct them to subscribe at: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/hotline/
 

Have an idea for an item that should be in our newsletter? Send us any charts, statistics, heroes/villains, or humor that you’d like to see featured!