1) Deportations Are a Republican Disaster

Trump did better with Hispanic voters than any Republican presidential nominee in at least 40 years, and perhaps ever.

It's no exaggeration that without Hispanics shifting to Trump, Kamala Harris would be president today.

So why are Republicans deporting them? The "D word," deportation, is toxic in Hispanic neighborhoods where ICE raids are happening.

One reason Republicans have been wiped out in the off-year elections in Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia this year is that his support among Hispanics has cratered.

Yet we still hear some conservative groups urging Trump to “speed up mass deportations.”  That’s political suicide.

A smarter immigration strategy is to keep securing the border (border apprehensions are down 92%) and don’t deport migrants who are working, but the bad guys: criminals, gang members, potential terrorists and those that illegally receive welfare payments.

If the GOP takes that advice, next year voters will rightly deport Republicans from office.  

2) Speaker Johnson Goes Small

We loved the go-big health care bullet points Speaker Johnson circulated last week, so we can't muster more than one cheer for the modest legislation he's now slated for floor consideration this week.

All of these provisions are changes in a positive, pro-market direction that will tend to lower costs and increase choices. But they are modest. Transparency is limited to PBMs only and none of our other checklist items are here. The chief advantage of the plan: no extension of supersized Obamacare subsidies. Let's hope that feature can survive attempts to amend the bill on the House floor.

3) $162 Billion in Federal Fraud Last Year: Even Barbie and Ken Got Money!

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst chaired a hearing last week revealing that federal agencies shoveled out $162 billion in improper payments last year. That's billions with a B.

Federal programs that loan out money to "socially and economically disadvantaged businesses" were a rich target for fraudsters, a particular magnet for fraudsters.  

The Feds even lent out money to scam artists who used pictures of dolls for IDs. As Ernst puts it: "Imagine giving Barbie or Ken a taxpayer-funded loan."

Scamsters who claimed to be over 115 years old scored loans worth $333 million, including $36,000 to a 157-year-old.

Auditors also found that $79 billion - nearly half of the improper payments - could have been prevented if simple fraud-detection questions had been asked of applicants:  

• One, is the applicant's Social Security Number valid?

• Two, does the name connected to that number match the name on the application?

• Three, does the birthday match?

• And lastly, is the individual alive?

Ernst's investigation found that Elon Musk, the former leader of DOGE, was absolutely right to target "tens of millions" of dead people over 100 years old who were listed as "alive" by the Social Security Administration. They stole almost $72 Billion between 2016 and 2022.

"The Christmas story about the Ghost of Christmas Past is all too real at Social Security, which paid out tax dollars to actual ghosts," Ernst noted at the hearing. "The best present we could give the American people is to build an airtight 'Do Not Pay' list that stops the checks from going out the door."

4) Chile’s New Free Market President Has a Mandate To Go for Growth

We’ve been predicting on these pages that in the months and years ahead we would see Trump-type free market populists elected around the world. It’s happening at a pace even faster than we thought, with Ecuador and Bolivia most recently electing free market governments.

The latest domino to drop is Chile where yesterday free marketeer Jose Antonio Kast won a landslide election for president of Chile on a platform of promoting economic growth, curbing crime and restricting illegal immigration. His 58% of the vote is a repudiation of the existing leftist government and a mandate for growth.

Regular readers of these pages know the peaks and valleys of the Chilean economy. Chile became the jewel of South America starting in 1980, when it lowered tax rates, privatized industries, curbed inflation and moved pensions from state control to personal retirement accounts. Poverty fell from 45% in 1980 to 6% in 2019, and per capita income tripled to $24,000 a year.

But in 2021, Chileans elected a leftist government that nationalized companies, increased welfare payments, raised taxes and saw unemployment hit 9% as economic growth plummeted.

That gave Jose Antonio Kast an opening to propose a pro-growth platform similar to that of Javier Milei - slashing regulation, cutting corporate taxes and slashing public spending by 7% in one year.  

It could also again provide a shining example for Latin American nations who want to expand economic liberty and improve relations with the U.S. Next up: Columbia and Venezuela.

5) DEI Is RIP at the NIH

Kudos to our friend Jay Bhattacharya for banishing racially discriminatory research at the NIH. Dr Jay laid all this out with his deputy Matthew Memoli at the Spectator:

The NIH will not fund research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, nor will we fund studies exploring broad, poorly defined concepts such as racial microaggressions or implicit bias...

So that the NIH never again strays from its mission, we have established new formal priorities for the NIH, with DEI removed and gold standard science leading the way. Scientists will no longer have to mouth DEI shibboleths to garner funding but instead propose excellent science.

Hooray!

6) Who Says Inflation Is Out of Control?

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