Unleash Prosperity Hotline - Weekend Edition Issue #676
12/16/2022, 12/17/2022, 12/18/2022
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1) Rand Paul: Only Five Senate Republicans Want to Cut Spending!
Two of our heroes came out strongly for strategy of Republicans enforcing the PAYGO budget rules and allowing $130 billion in automatic spending cuts this year.
That's the good news. The bad news? Rand says the last time there was a vote on enforcing PAYGO, he only got four senators on board. just FOUR OUT OF 50!
Instead Republicans want to pass a $1.7 trillion “Omnibus” end of year budget buster - with no cuts at all.
If just 41 of 50 Senate Repubs would vote to simply uphold the budget rules, there would be no way for Pelosi or Schumer or Biden to stop the cuts. These cuts are less than 1% of all the $4 trillion in spending Biden has secured. We will keep agitating - but right now we are not hopeful.
The GOP senators would rather play Santa with our money.
Virginia Gov Glenn Youngkin won $4 billion in tax cuts last year and now he wants more. His latest plan is to cut in the VA corporate tax rate from 6 to 5%. He also wants to shave the personal income tax rates and give small businesses relief as well.
Youngkin’s only been in office one year - but he’s off to a great start.
4) Biden Pension Bailout Another Giveaway to Unions
Last week, President Biden used COVID relief money for an $82 billion bailout of pension funds mismanaged by the Teamsters and other entities.
The taxpayer-funded bailout is one of the largest ever and a financial disgrace.
It also looks to be illegal.
Nicholas Novak, Inspector General to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, says the government may be making “improper payments” to some of the failing pension funds which “represent a risk to PBGC’s reputation for fiscal responsibility, technical competency, and integrity.”
Worse still, the rescue plan demands almost no reforms from the errant pension funds. The plan would not remove any of the trustees - the people who lost all the money - and it doesn’t require full funding going forward - so more bailouts will be required in the future. The pension funds will not be required to put bailout money into investment-grade.
We also worry this latest bailout could be the tip of the iceberg. Pension obligations are now roughly $12 trillion.
This week’s winner for our “You Can’t Make This S&*% Up” award is the declaration by American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten during a virtual educators event that:
“What you have done for American education…has been more than any president - even FDR.”
We hardly think FDR was any great hero of education, but how in the world is Biden a hero for schools?
Here are the education results under Biden as reported by A.P.
“Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds in the US fell between 2020 and 2022 by a level not seen in decades, a foreboding sign of the state of American education two years after the Covid-19 pandemic began.”
The results were part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend reading and math exams, often called the "Nation's Report Card."
We’d say that this education report card tells us that Biden deserves an F.
But Biden cares more about the teacher unions, which donated more than $12 million to Biden and Democrats, than he does school children.
