Buy American - Remake America
And:
Beautiful Kayleigh at work doing her job:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/
Finally:
Once in love with Abrams, always in love with Abrams:
https://dailycaller.com/2020/
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Should we now resort to asking solvent states who adhered to budget restraints to bail out profligate states by elevating them to welfare status as we have people?
Should Florida Bail Out New York?
A comparative look at population growth and spending over 10 years.
The Editorial Board
Democrats want a $915 billion budget bailout for states and cities, and the leading lobbyist is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. His main public antagonist on the subject is Florida Senator and former Governor Rick Scott. Both men were first elected Governor in 2010, so let’s do the math to consider which state has managed its economy and finances better over the last decade.
In 2010 New York’s population of 19.378 million was larger than Florida’s 18.8 million. By mid-2019 Florida had grown to 21.48 million, according to the Census Bureau, while New York had barely increased to 19.453 million. Yet Mr. Cuomo recently signed a budget for fiscal 2021 of $177 billion that is even bigger than last year’s, papering over what was a $6 billion deficit before the coronavirus. Florida’s budget for fiscal 2021, not yet signed by new Governor Ron DeSantis, is expected to be about $93 billion.
Democrats in Albany are claiming to be victims of events that are out of their control. But they have increased spending by $43 billion since 2010—about $570,000 for each additional person. Florida’s budget has increased by $28 billion while its population has grown 2.7 million—a $10,400 increase per new resident.
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New York has a top state-and-local tax rate of 12.7%, while Florida has no income tax. Yet New York has a growing budget deficit, while Mr. Scott inherited a large deficit but built a surplus and paid down state debt. The difference is spending.
New York’s spending on worker retirement benefits has nearly doubled since 2010 and is six times greater than Florida’s. Its debt-service payments have also doubled. Albany’s biggest cost driver is Medicaid, which gobbles up 40% of the state budget—twice as much as education. Florida spends about the same on schools as on Medicaid.
Blame New York’s cocktail of generous benefits, loose eligibility standards and waste. New York spends about twice as much per Medicaid beneficiary and six times more on nursing homes as Florida though its elderly population is 20% smaller. Many New York nursing homes and hospitals are organized by unions, which use their political clout to drive generous pay and benefits.
Mr. Cuomo in 2014 expanded Medicaid as part of ObamaCare to able-bodied individuals earning up to 133% of the poverty line. Florida didn’t. While the federal government initially picked up 100% of the ObamaCare expansion tab, New York is now on the hook for 10%, which contributed to this year’s $4 billion Medicaid shortfall.
New York spends about $76 billion a year on Medicaid—three times more than Florida. Swelling Medicaid costs have squeezed spending on transportation, causing Empire State trains and roads to fall into disrepair. Florida has found money to pave potholes and increased transportation spending 10 times more than New York between 2010 and 2019.
Mr. Cuomo pleads poverty by claiming New York is a “donor” state to the federal government. But federal dollars account for about 35.9% of New York’s spending compared to 32.8% of Florida’s, according to the Tax Foundation. New Yorkers pay more in federal taxes than what Albany gets back because the progressive federal tax code hits high earners the hardest and New York still has many high earners. The “donors” are individuals, and the money isn’t Mr. Cuomo’s.
In any case, many high earners are moving to lower-tax states. New York lost $9.6 billion in adjusted gross income to other states in 2018 while Florida gained $16 billion. Workers are following jobs, and vice versa.
The rate of private job growth in Florida has been about 60% higher than in New York from January 2010 to January 2020. Finance jobs expanded by 25% in Florida compared to 9.7% in New York. By our calculations, New York would generate $10 billion more annually in tax revenue if its personal income had grown at the rate of Florida’s over the last decade.
New York’s future has been discounted before, but the coronavirus may be its most serious economic challenge. Many service businesses are learning they don’t need as many workers in the office and can save money by downsizing. Morgan Stanley has said it intends to reduce office space in New York City, and Twitter has told employees they can work remotely as long as they want. Many restaurants were struggling before the coronavirus due to New York’s high minimum wage, taxes, rents and suffocating regulation. Some may now close permanently.
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Mr. Cuomo no doubt realizes all this, which is why last week he cited a repeal of the $10,000 limit on the state-and-local tax deduction as his top request from Congress to keep more high earners from leaving. He also wants $61 billion in budget relief, which the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon notes would cover projected deficits for four years assuming spending increases by 4% annually.
The policy question is why taxpayers in Florida and other well-managed states should pay higher taxes to rescue an Albany political class that refuses to restrain its tax-and-spend governance. Public unions soak up an ever-larger share of tax dollars, but Albany refuses to change. Mr. Scott is right.
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More common sense from DOV:
DOV FISCHER
The strange state of politics in Israel and America
If you live in Israel, it is difficult fully to describe or explain Trump Derangement Syndrome
If you live in Israel, it is difficult fully to describe or explain Trump Derangement Syndrome ("TDS"). If you live outside Israel, it is equally difficult to explain Bibi Derangement Syndrome (the other BDS, or "TO-BDS").
Nevertheless, both these political-psychological phenomena continually emerge in the public forum to disrupt the great debates on the issues of the day. Simply put, TDS and TO-BDS strike certain conservatives, not others, and the impact is striking.
In the United States, for decades Republicans looked to great conservative pundits including Bill Kristol, editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, and George Will, long-time Washington Post columnist, television-news analyst, and author.
For me personally, I followed Will avidly, published articles in The Weekly Standard, and exchanged a few friendly emails with Bill Kristol. An early highlight in my career as a widely published opinion writer came when The Weekly Standard not only front-paged me but listed me above Charles Krauthammer. Only a week later, National Review began soliciting my articles.
And then came Trump. At first Will and Kristol simply became very outspoken opponents against the Donald Trump candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination of 2016. They were not alone; scores of highly regarded Republican conservatives shared their concerns, and for good reason. Trump was a blowhard with no formal political experience. He was insulting everyone around him, crafting childish nicknames and put-downs, and not clearly reassuring conservatives that any ideological underpinning guaranteed that, if elected, he would pursue a truly conservative agenda.
Trump entered the arena a mixed political background. Over the years he had donated heavily to Democrats, had mingled socially with the Clintons and their ilk. One time he was for the war in Iraq, then against it, but maybe still for it or maybe still against it. He was against Planned Parenthood for their encouraging abortions but said he would continue funding the rest of their agenda. He was against the way American leaders always would get outwitted by the Chinese in trade negotiations, but he and his family themselves were doing profitable business in China. He was good for laughs at the contentious Republican debates, a veritable Catskills-quality kibbitzer, but where did he really stand? If elected, how much he would veer leftward while in office? Would American conservatives be electing yet another Republican who would prove not much different from the rejected Democrat just rejected? Would it be akin to electing Ariel Sharon over Ehud Barak, ending up with Gush Katif handed over to Hamas?
So initially it was understandable why Kristol, Will, and other conservative intellectuals recoiled from Trump. But, little by little, Trump started sending signals that became increasingly reassuring to the Republican rank-and-file. He persuasively explained that, as a building-construction magnate in New York City, he was compelled by business realities to support the local Democrat politicians who run that city and its larger state. He staked out very firm positions on regulating immigration, particularly through America's porous southern border. He held steady and did not start shifting towards the political center as opponents started withdrawing from the race for the nomination. And, most memorably, he published a list of American jurists from which he would name future United States Supreme Court justices and elevate others to courts of appeal if elected. He won over the Republican base.
But not the small group of party elites who came to be known as the "Never Trumpers." One by one, as Trump glided to their party's nomination, these pundits very demonstratively abandoned the Republican Party. Even more glaringly – shockingly – they started announcing that they would vote for Hillary Clinton and other Democrat candidates that November. But what of the Supreme Court? With that body locked in a virtual 50-50 balance, with four conservatives, four liberals, and one unpredictable in the middle, the President elected in 2016 would have an historic opportunity to tilt the Court either to the right or to the left. Would these Never Trumpers really vote for a Democrat presidential candidate whose platform stood antithetically to everything these pundits ever advocated? Would they support expanded government interference and over-regulation of the economy? More restrictions on religious freedoms and interference with religious practice? A continued weak approach to the expanding ISIS caliphate in Syria, virtual capitulation to Iran under that terrible deal that Obama and Kerry crafted, more weakness at home and abroad? Would they really vote for Hillary and another four years of that?
Yes, they said. Yes they would. It did not matter that they were turning on everything they had propounded and professed for decades. Just . . . Never Trump.
They fell like flies: Kristol, Will, Joe Scarborough, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, John Kasich, Jeff Flake, David Brooks, Ana Navarro, and a whole long list. While scores upon scores of skeptical Republican conservatives initially had opposed Trump during the party's nomination process, these elite hold-outs lost their political moorings so inexplicably that many on the right have identified the phenomenon as "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
Whatever Trump touches becomes treif, akin to the Jewish dietary law about drinking wine from an opened bottle if poured or touched by someone ritually proscribed. Once Trump touched Jewish rights to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria by including that recognition in his so-called "Deal of the Century," sovereignty there during the remaining Trump years became non-kosher for Never Trumpers.
If you live in Israel and cannot fully grasp the nature of such a derangement syndrome, consider the great Israeli patriot Moshe Ya'alon. The man devoted his life fighting for his country and advocating an uncompromised Likud-oriented nationalist world view. Consider Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman, who has lived across the Green Line in Judea for more than three decades. In the abstract, it is hard to identify more conservative patriotic Zionists than they. Yet they hate Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu so passionately that, when faced with forming a unity government with Likud or aligning instead not only with their ideological antipodes, extreme leftists in Meretz, but even with anti-Zionist Knesset members from the Joint Arab List, including people who openly have voiced sympathies with Arab terrorists, Ya'alon and Lieberman chose the latter.
On the surface, such a choice is incomprehensible. Indeed, Ya'alon's own Telem Knesset partners, Yoaz Hendel and Zvi Hauser, ultimately had to break off from him and form their own two-man faction because they could not fathom participating with those committed to ending Zionism. But Ya'alon and Lieberman suddenly become quite understandable when viewed psychologically instead of politically. It is a derangement syndrome for our times. In America, TDS. In Israel, the other BDS. Hopefully, the vaccine for this one yet will be found.
Blame governors for the coronavirus deaths in nursing homes: Goodwin
An article in Nowhere Magazine several years ago explored the ways ancient cultures dispatched the elderly, a practice known as senicide. Author Justin Nobel recounted several gruesome rites that made the Inuit habit of putting Granny on an Arctic ice floe seem humane.
At one point, Nobel mentioned that his own grandparents had moved “to a fancy nursing home in the suburbs of New York City.”
That made me shudder.
If they are honest, historians judging the American experience during the coronavirus pandemic will excoriate our barbaric failure to protect the elderly. We think of ourselves as civilized, but mindless policies and bureaucratic indifference turned many nursing homes and rehabilitation centers into killing fields.
At least 28,000 residents and workers in long-term care facilities already have died from the virus, according to a New York Times analysis done more than a week ago. That represented one out of every three COVID-19 deaths recorded in the United States at the time and was likely an undercount because of reporting lags and varying state methods.
This massacre of a helpless population shames America and Washington must find out why it happened and who is responsible. Elderly people in these institutions could not protect themselves, and because most states banned visitors early in the outbreak, the institutions, their regulators and elected officials were fully obligated to shield them against infection.
They failed miserably.
The Times found 14 states where more than half of total deaths occurred in facilities for the elderly. It was 55 percent in Connecticut, 57 percent in Colorado, North Carolina and Kentucky, 58 percent in Virginia, 59 percent in Massachusetts, 61 percent in Delaware, 66 percent in Pennsylvania, 73 percent in Rhode Island and 80 percent in West Virginia and Minnesota.
The states with the most nursing-home deaths, New York and New Jersey, didn’t make the list because of so many other deaths, yet more than 10,000 people died in their facilities. The 5,500 nursing-home deaths in New York are more than the total deaths in all other states except New Jersey.
Many if not most could have been avoided. The earlier outbreaks in Asia and Europe demonstrated that the elderly were easy prey for the virus, doubly so when they have underlying health conditions. Everybody knew that.
Florida got the message and implemented a model response. Despite its vast enclaves of long-term care homes, it reported under 750 deaths in them, or slightly more than one for each of its 615 facilities.
The striking contrast between Florida on one hand and New York and New Jersey on the other can be traced largely to policy decisions by their governors. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey issued almost identical orders in late March requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. The orders barred the homes from even asking if the patients had the virus, lest they be discriminated against.
Those politically correct orders quickly became death sentences as infections spread like wildfire.
Florida, thankfully, followed a different path. Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state moved early to protect the elderly because statistics from South Korea showed “that not all age groups were equally at risk” and that most deaths happened to “folks 65 and up.”
As a result, he allowed his nursing homes to reject hospital referrals who were still infected. More recently, Florida started sending infected residents in the opposite direction, from nursing homes to hospitals.
“Our goal is to keep the virus out of our facilities,” one Florida nursing-home CEO told the Sun-Sentinel. “Hospitals are more concerned about their beds.”
Because Cuomo and Murphy had the same information as DeSantis, their ruinous actions remain inexplicable. They can’t say they weren’t warned.
On March 8, Dr. Thomas Frieden, former head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on CNN that “nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are ground zero.” On March 18, the CDC, in a study of the nation’s first large outbreak, in a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., told health officials, “Substantial morbidity and mortality might be averted if all long-term care facilities take steps now to prevent exposure of their residents to COVID-19.”
Yet seven days later, Cuomo issued his infamous March 25 order that said, “No resident shall be denied readmission or admission to NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
Six days after that, on March 31, Murphy used similar language in his order. Although it allowed carve-outs that enabled some facilities to dodge the bullet, the mandate had disastrous impacts overall, with more than 5,000 deaths recorded in New Jersey’s long-term homes.
One of the worst is the state-run Veterans Home in Paramus, which has recorded at least 72 deaths. A man who lost his 91-year-old Army-veteran father there was quoted as saying the home should be demolished and replaced with a memorial park. “It’s like a mass shooting,” he said.
Despite the surging death count, Cuomo defended his directive for more than six weeks. He reversed himself only last Sunday, ruling that patients must test negative before hospitals can send them to nursing homes. Yet he insisted that the initial policy “worked.”
If more than 5,000 dead was success, what would failure look like?
Cuomo’s reversal included forcing nursing homes to test staff and administrators twice a week, at the homes’ own expense. There was no explanation why testing was not required all along, or how it would work when labs say they cannot process the needed 410,000 weekly tests.
Despite the enormous consequences of Cuomo’s arbitrary decision-making, only a few New York lawmakers have dared to call for investigations about what went wrong.
Nursing-home executives, meanwhile, complain privately that Cuomo should have known his mandate would be a killer, but they were never consulted and got no notice before being swamped with infected patients. As one owner put it, long-time residents began “dropping like flies” soon afterward.
These same executives will not go public with their complaints because they fear Cuomo will punish them with fines and take their licenses. Some see the sudden testing regime and a probe he started with the state attorney general as a way to blame them for his mistakes.
All the more reason why federal officials with nothing to fear must step in and find the facts. A designated US attorney, for example, could use a grand jury to demand answers about why so many elderly people were put in harm’s way despite the warnings and simple common sense.
As for witnesses willing and eager to come forward, the feds should start with grieving families. For each of the 28,000 dead, there are relatives whose stories of heartbreak and rage will move the nation.
The families want answers and they want action. They deserve both.
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