Posted on July 21, 2026 by John Hinderaker in Economy

What’s Affordable, What Isn’t

This graphic has been all over X for the last few days, and I have been meaning to get to it. It is similar to many other charts I have seen over the years. We all know that the cost of living has been rising, especially during the Biden administration. But many are not aware of how targeted those increasing costs actually are. Many goods and some services have gotten notably cheaper, compared to incomes, over the last 25 years. Conversely, some services–hardly any goods–have gotten much more expensive.

One way to look at it is that the most labor-intensive services are the ones that have gotten unaffordable. The other factor is that everything the government has tried to make more affordable, has gotten much less affordable. There is no mystery here: if you subsidize something by adding many billions of dollars on the demand side, and don’t do anything to eliminate obstacles on the supply side, you obviously are going to increase prices. And then, if you are a Democrat, demand even more subsidies:

The world would be a different place if the majority of people had even a primitive grasp of economics.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Democrats, Education

The Democrats’ Most Loyal Voters

When I was trying civil jury cases, the conventional wisdom was that plaintiffs wanted jurors who were mad at the world because they thought their merits had not been sufficiently rewarded. The classic plaintiff’s juror, I was told, was a guy with a PhD in comparative literature who was driving a taxi. Conversely, the ideal defense juror (I am talking about civil cases, not criminal cases) is a happy person, someone who has succeeded in life and thinks the world is a terrific place. A classic defense juror is a guy who graduated from high school and started a used car lot. Twenty-five years later he owns three automobile dealerships. Coming into court, he wears a plaid sport coat, a tie that doesn’t match, and a smile.

You get the picture: you can plug “liberal” and “conservative” into those stereotypes. They are as true today as they were when I was picking juries.

Thus:


In general, going to college evidently has a negative effect on one’s understanding of political issues. That reinforces the conclusion that our society would be better off if fewer people went to college.

The other element, always, is economic self-interest. I wonder whether it is true that people who graduate from college are more likely than high school graduates to be public employees, or to be in jobs where government spending (nurses) or government regulation (lawyers) provides an economic benefit. Someone should try to figure that out.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in California, Crime, Fraud, Medicaid, Minnesota

Feds Suspend $1 Billion in Medicaid Funds to California, Minnesota

In a long-overdue action, the federal government is moving to protect taxpayers against systematic fraud in California and Minnesota:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday he’s stopping more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over suspected fraud.

“We are not sending Medicaid dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately,” Kennedy said at an announcement on Tuesday.

That certainly isn’t happening now.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is deferring over $200 million and over $867 million in federal Medicaid payments for Minnesota and California, respectively. The hold will be in place while federal officers review “high-risk Medicaid claims” and document deficiencies.

In Minnesota, the funding involves 14 high-risk areas that were identified as suspect because of vulnerabilities or evidence of fraudulent activity.

Tim Walz will claim that the feds are depriving poor people of health care, but that isn’t true. The 14 “high risk” programs do not pay doctors or hospitals for providing health care. They cover things like giving advice to homeless people on how they might find housing, at $70 an hour (seriously). These are the 14 Minnesota programs:

In December of last year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson told a press conference that of the $18 billion spent on those 14 programs over the past several years, at least half–$9 billion or more–was fraud. In one of the programs, Housing Stabilization Services, investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office found that it wasn’t clear a single dollar was ever spent properly. The entire program, which has now been shut down, may have been fraudulent.

So don’t pay any attention to the Democrats who will shed faux tears over poor people going without health care. It isn’t going to happen. There is plenty of fraud in Medicaid, much of it committed by doctors, clinics and hospitals, but that isn’t the issue here. What is going on here is a belated effort to close the barn door after billions of dollars have been blatantly stolen by criminals.

What about California?

CMS officials suspect the questionable spending in California is rooted in in-home services. Over the past two federal fiscal years, California’s spending in these programs went up 24%, while the rest of the country’s average was 12%, according to CMS administrator Mehmet Oz.

“So California increased spending at twice the rate of the average of the rest of the entire nation,” Oz said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

The public is fed up with state governments enabling the theft of many billions of dollars in federal taxpayer money, likely as a way of buying the loyalty of political constituencies. Everyone should applaud this relatively small-scale effort by the Trump administration to protect taxpayers.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Immigration, Law, Media, Minnesota, Thanks for clearing that up

Fox News covers “depraved rag”

Twenty years ago I covered Keith Ellison’s first campaign for Congress extremely closely. I talked to sources all around the United States in the course of the campaign. I have an Ellison file six inches thick deriving from my work on that campaign.

Star Tribune reporter Rochelle Olson covered that campaign for the Star Tribune. Her coverage essentially performed public relations on its behalf. Her motto was not there’s no cheering in the press box. That much I can tell you. To take just one example of her malicious and misleading work, see my October 2006 post “Errors and omissions.”

A day or two after Ellison defeated his Republican opponent in that campaign I appeared on a panel with Olson to discuss the election results. She went ballistic when I undiplomatically described the nature of her reporting on the campaign. She thought she had done a good job.

That is my personal contribution to some ancient Olson history. More recently, Olson sported her Team DNC badge with her Star Tribune collegues when they traveled to Chicago to cover the coronation of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Good times.

The Star Tribune has now rewarded Olson with a position on the editorial board and with a column focused on politics and governance. In a recent column Olson congratulated Walz’s defense of his vote to pardon Tou Vue Vang. Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Natalie Hudson voted with Walz to pardon Vang in their capacity as the Minnesota Pardons Board. Vang had pleaded guilty to raping a 10-year-old child over a two-year-period and lost his legal status following his conviction. With the pardon Walz, Ellison, and Hudson unsuccessfully sought to help Vang escape deportation by the Trump administration.

Don’t pardon the Minnesota Pardons Board. They should live in infamy.

It’s almost funny that Olson congratulated Walz with standing by his idiocy. Has Walz ever publicly admitted he made a mistake? Kamala Harris came closer to admitting a mistake with her selection of Walz than Walz has ever come in admitting any mistake of his own. Another personal note: I facetiously urged Harris to select Walz in the Free Beacon column “Take My Govenor — Please.”

Bill Glahn has covered the pardon story for us on several occasions. Jenna Gloeb covered it for Alpha News. (Jenna points out that Vang never served a day in prison.) I wrote about House Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s concise condemnation of the Star Tribune as “this depraved rag” yesterday. Emmer represents Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District.

As I have repeatedly observed, the Star Tribune is an incessant and increasinbly bizarre supporter of illegal immigration. Olson is a case in point.

Olson has now drawn the attention of Fox News with the reaction to her comments cheering Walz for defending Vang’s pardon. Peter D’Abrosca covers the story in “Firestorm erupts online after Minnesota paper praises Tim Walz’s clemency for child sex offender” (“The opinion column compared the rape case to January 6 pardons, drawing widespread condemnation”). The New York Post also published D’Abrsoca’s story here.

The Star Tribune gave Fox News a statment for the story: “The Minnesota Star Tribune regularly publishes a wide range of opinions across the political spectrum. In this case, our opinion columnist agreed with a unanimous pardon by the Minnesota state board of pardons, including Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson.”

I’m filing this under Thanks For Clearing That Up.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Donald Trump, Media, Taxes

Sentence affirmed & unreported

Surely you don’t remember Charles Littlejohn. He is the guy who was nabbed for leaking the tax returns of President Trump to the New York Times. He also leaked tax information of thousands of the most successful and wealthy Americans including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett to ProPublica. He pleaded guilty to only one crime, but he committed many.

Ira Stoll reports this underreported sequel for the Washington Free Beacon in “Appeals Court Affirms 5-Year Prison Term for Source who Leaked Tax Info to NY Times and ProPublica” (“IRS leak was ‘attack on our constitutional democracy,’ with aim ‘to influence an election through illegal activity”). This is the good news of the day — let it be known. Stoll writes:

* * * * *

A federal appeals court is affirming a five-year prison sentence for Charles Littlejohn, a consultant to the IRS who leaked President Trump’s tax return information to the New York Times and tax information about thousands of the richest Americans including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett to ProPublica.

The 16-page opinion by a three-judge panel—Justin Walker, Neomi Rao, and Judith Rogers—found that the sentence was reasonable. It offers a scathing narrative of Littlejohn’s behavior. At this writing, the decision hasn’t been reported in either the New York Times or ProPublica, which describes itself as “a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that exposes corruption.”

“In 2017, Charles Littlejohn obtained a job as a consultant to the Internal Revenue Service so that he could steal and leak the tax returns of President Donald Trump,” the opinion says. “Two years into his elaborate scheme, in 2019, Littlejohn gave President Trump’s tax return and return information to a reporter for the New York Times. He then helped the reporter analyze the data and leaked more tax returns and return information to supplement his original leak. Finally, just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Times began publishing articles based on what Littlejohn had stolen,” the opinion says.

It continues, “he used his ‘skills to systematically violate the privacy of thousands of innocent people’ by stealing the tax returns and return information of about 600 entities and about 7,600 of the wealthiest Americans. He then leaked what he stole to ProPublica, which used data regarding at least 152 of his victims in about 50 articles,” the opinion says. A company I owned was among those affected.

“As a result of Littlejohn’s crime, his victims lost business. They were disparaged countless times. And their families were physically threatened,” the opinion says. “To this day, ProPublica is sitting on the private, as-yet unpublished data of other taxpayers stolen by Littlejohn. But those taxpayers continue to fear that ProPublica will publish their data in the future.”

Read the whole thing here.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Culture, Movies, Music

One-Trick Pony

TCM is playing Paul Simon’s film One-Trick Pony (1980) at the moment. I was one of the few who found Simon’s film to be terrific. I should probably shorten that to say I was one of the few who found his film, period. I loved it, complete with the guest appearances of the Lovin’ Spoonful and Sam & Dave (below). Sam & Dave were barely talking to each other by this time, but they had a brief revival thanks to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Here is a wake-up call for you and me.

Robert Hilburn’s biography of Simon reports that Simon felt insanely guilty about the money lost by the label on the movie-related album. Hilburn writes that Simon told Warner Bros. CEO Mo Ostin that he’d pay it back one day: “No other artist had ever even brought up the subject of paying back the company. The guilt over the album’s poor sales was one in a series of issues that caused Simon to go into the deepest depression since his struggles with fame and insecurity in the early 1970s.”

He wrote the screenplay, he starred in the film, and — one-upping Woody Allen — he wrote the songs featured in the film. I love the title track (video below) and several other numbers, including “Late In the Evening” and “How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns.” In the video Eric Gale is on lead, Richard Tee on keyboards, Tony Levin on bass, and Steve Gadd on drums.

Posted on July 20, 2026 by Bill Glahn in Great Britain

7th Prime Minister in 10 years

From NBC News,

‘King of the North’ Andy Burnham to become 7th UK prime minister in a decade.

The 7th in ten years, dating back to David Cameron in 2016. By my count, only Burnham’s immediate predecessor, Keir Starmer, took office immediately following a general election.

Burnham and four others first assumed office following something like a palace coup. Until recently, Burnham was the Mayor of Manchester. A month ago, Burnham was elected to Parliament and sat as one of the 650 members of the House of Commons. Burnham received just under 25,000 votes in a special election to replace a backbench member of the Labour Party, who stepped aside to enable Burnham’s elevation.

Those 25,000 voters, somehow, got to select the Prime Minister of a nation of 70 million. The next general election is not scheduled until August 2029, more than three years from now.

Keep this in mind as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.