As Annual Medicaid Spending Approaches $1 Trillion, How Much Of It Is Legitimate?

/
As Annual Medicaid Spending Approaches $1 Trillion, How Much Of It Is Legitimate?

  • Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that?

  • A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart:

  • Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most recent year. Another is two particularly rapid periods of growth, first in the 1990s (Bill Clinton was President), and then again in the most recent period of 2020-2024.

Read More

Two Bets On The Future Of Wind Energy: Who Is Right?

/
Two Bets On The Future Of Wind Energy: Who Is Right?

  • Two articles from the New York Times in the past couple of days describe the widening divergence between the approaches taken by the U.S. and China on the subject of wind energy. I apologize that these pieces are behind the Times’s paywall, but remember that I subscribe there so that you don’t have to.

  • On Monday (May 4) the article was about the status of wind energy development in the U.S., with the headline “More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays Reviews.”‍ ‍Tuesday’s (May 5) piece covered the same subject in China, headline “China’s Big Bet on Wind Power Is Paying Off.”‍ ‍

  • These articles once again illustrate the extent to which the U.S. and its people are uniquely blessed in the world.

Read More

What Will The Future Look Like After Louisiana v. Callais?

/
What Will The Future Look Like After Louisiana v. Callais?

  • On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. That’s the case where the Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create a second “majority-minority” Congressional district because “[t]he Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

  • A “majority-minority” district is one that has been gerrymandered to include sufficient numbers of the designated minority group as to make it nearly certain that a member of that group will be elected to represent the district.

  • The case arose out of the redistricting process following the 2020 census. Louisiana initially came up with a map containing only a single such “majority-minority” district. Plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed challenged the map, and a District Court judge in Louisiana entered a preliminary injunction requiring Louisiana to create a second such district.

  • After the case went into what Justice Alito’s opinion describes as a “legal limbo,” Louisiana then adopted a new map with a second “majority-minority” district; but that map was then promptly challenged by another group of plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed. This second challenge then became the Callais case.

  • The left-wing press has gone into apoplexy over the Callais decision.

Read More

Inside The New York City "Budget Crisis": PreK-12 Education

/

  • You may have heard that New York City has a “budget crisis.” The reason you may have heard that is that our new Mayor Mamdani has been loudly proclaiming that mantra to anyone who will listen.

  • After taking office on January 1, Mamdani promptly came up with the “budget crisis” theme during his first month in office, of course blaming the supposed crisis on his predecessor Eric Adams; and he has been repeating the mantra regularly ever since.

  • From a Mamdani press release on January 28: TODAY, Mayor Zohran Mamdani outlined the “Adams Budget Crisis,” a fiscal emergency driven by years of staggering mismanagement under former Mayor Eric Adams. . . .

  • It’s not just a “crisis,” but also an “emergency.” And moving forward to two days ago, there was Mamdani once more, this time in the City Hall rotunda, harping on the same words again — and using them to demand that the state Legislature and Governor enact new taxes to provide him with additional revenue. From NBC News, April 28:

  • "New York City faces a budget crisis of historic magnitude," Mamdani said Tuesday during a joint press conference. "We've inherited a deficit larger than any since the Great Recession. Years of mismanagement and chronic under budgeting, alongside a structural imbalance between what New York City sends to the State and what we receive in return, have taken a toll. We cannot close this deficit with savings alone. We need new revenue.”

  • So has New York City actually been the subject of “chronic under-budgeting” as Mamdani asserts?

Read More

Co-op City: What It Looks Like When Energy Reality Catches Up To You

/
Co-op City: What It Looks Like When Energy Reality Catches Up To You

  • Co-op City, located (like the Yankees) in the New York City borough known as The Bronx, is the largest co-op apartment community in the City, and indeed in the United States. Built in the 1960s and 70s, it has more than 15,000 residential units in some 35 high-rise buildings, plus a smaller number of townhouses.

  • Co-op City has now suddenly become ground zero in the clash between energy fantasy and reality that is starting to come into focus as the deadlines of the State’s and City’s 2019 climate statutes start to get closer. The New York Post reports on the reality side of the story in a large piece today with the headline “NY’s climate mandates may send fees in affordable Co-Op City complex soaring from $950 to $4K.”‍ ‍

  • But before getting to that, let’s look at the fantasy side of the story. . .

Read More

So How Is Zohran Mamdani's New Pied-à-Terre Tax Supposed To Work?

/
So How Is Zohran Mamdani's New Pied-à-Terre Tax Supposed To Work?

  • Here in New York, we continue to wait for the announcement of the annual budget that was due on April 1. Negotiations among the Governor and legislative leaders continue, with one big open issue being the potential extension of the “net zero” deadlines of the Climate Act.

  • While many issues may remain open, one thing on which there appears to be agreement is what they are calling the “pied-à-terre” tax — a real estate tax surcharge on New York City apartments valued at $5 million and up that are owned by people who are not permanent residents of New York. We know that that tax is an agreed part of the budget package because Mayor Mamdani bragged about it in his cringey video of April 15, which I covered (and linked) in my April 17 post.

  • Both Mamdani and Governor Hochul have asserted that the new tax will raise approximately $500 million per year in new revenue for the City. However, neither Mamdani’s video nor anything else has disclosed the details of how this new tax will be implemented.

  • At first glance, implementation might seem easy.

Read More