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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
McCAUGHEY: Democrats waging war on small-town values and property values
Across the U.S., Democrats are waging war to crush a lifestyle they abhor. Call it small-town America: Single-family neighbourhoods, quiet streets, town centres stamped with their historic character and almost no signs of the vagrancy and homeless encampments that plague cities. Democrats want you to have none of this. If you've worked for years to save up for a home in one of these havens, forget about it. The Democratic Party is using brute legal force to remake towns using a cookie-cutter formula that forces each to have the same proportion of houses and apartments, the same mix of low-, middle- and upper-income residents and the same reliance on public transit, all controlled by state politicians. Any town that resists gets shamed as 'segregated', though this isn't about race, and 'snobby.' On May 31, the Connecticut legislature passed H.B. 5002, which should be called the Destroy Connecticut Towns Act. It's headed to Gov. Ned Lamont's desk for a signature. The new law dictates how many low-income and moderate-income apartments each Connecticut town must provide and mandates that towns also foot the bill for the schools, parks, public transportation and other services low-income residents will need. Local taxes will soar. The bill explicitly says its purpose is to ensure 'economic diversity' in each town. This is about social engineering, not remedying housing shortages. Democrat Bob Duff, the state senate majority leader, says 'it's extremely important … that we don't segregate people based on a ZIP code.' Everyone, regardless of income, should have the opportunity to choose to live in any town. The bill mandates that the wealthiest towns, mostly in lower Fairfield County, provide most of the new housing, even though that raises the cost. Land costs less in other towns and lower-income people, who this bill is supposed to serve, are more likely to find bus transportation and affordable stores in these other towns as well. Connecticut lawmakers are nixing local rules. Ordinances that protect the appearance of a town have to be overruled. The bill states that multifamily buildings of up to 24 units will no longer have to provide off-street parking. Envision cars lining every residential street. Towns will also be forced to welcome vagrants who want to sleep in parks and public lots. The bill outlaws 'hostile architecture,' meaning park benches with armrests and divided seating, or stone walls with spikes on top that deter sleeping in the rough. Instead, the bill launches a program of mobile showers and mobile laundry services on trucks to serve the homeless wherever they choose. Picture the mobile showers pulling up to Greenwich Common Park on the town's main street, or Waveny Park in New Canaan. How can kids walk around town with their pals if there are homeless encampments? Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute think tank, points out that the homeless amount to 1% of the population in Los Angeles but commit 25% of the homicides. Inviting the homeless means inviting crime and drugs. Californicating the small towns of Connecticut by encouraging public camping and vagrancy 'is frightening,' says Glock. New York Democrats are also taking aim at small-town living. A bill sponsored by state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal would outlaw local towns from setting minimum lot sizes over one-eighth of an acre near the town centre and a half acre everywhere else. Postage stamp sizes. Riverhead, New York, town supervisor Tim Hubbard is vowing to sue. 'We're trying to keep our community as rural as it can be … We don't think the state should be zoning our town.' Hoylman-Sigal chooses to live on the west side of Manhattan, but who is he to impose a population-dense lifestyle on small-town New Yorkers? Similarly, in New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Tim Murphy is pushing lawmakers to override local ordinances and impose the same kinds of 'reforms' as those in the Connecticut bill. In all these states and across the country, small-town Americans need to fight back. There is no constitutional right to live in a wealthy town with single-family homes and leafy, quiet streets. It's something you earn. Once you've purchased a home, you have the right to protect its value. It's time to put blue-state politicians on notice that their battle to destroy our suburbs and small towns will be resisted at the voting booth and in court.
New York Times
5 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Trump's ‘Nihilistic' Crusade Against Harvard Is About Much More Than Harvard
Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, is not a left-wing academic. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the editor-at-large of Compact, a heterodox online magazine that leans to the right. In the case of Trump v. Harvard, Conti believes that the university, 'is close to being an appendage of the Democratic Party.' Harvard and units within it, Conti wrote in Compact, have issued numerous public statements during the Great Awokening that aligned the organization with left-wing causes (a practice which Harvard has since ended). Self-censorship is generally prevalent on campuses across the nation, but is much higher among conservatives, who rightly sense that the university is largely hostile to their views. Despite Conti's indisputably conservative credentials, he has come to believe that the Trump administration's approach to higher education — and toward Harvard in particular — not only violates due process but threatens to destroy the reputation of the United States as an international center of learning. 'It now looks like the administration has decided,' Conti wrote in a more recent essay in Compact, 'A Dangerous Turn in Trump's War on Universities,' 'that it will simply bludgeon Harvard, inflicting a lot of senseless damage until the latter makes a 'deal' of some sort.' As a consequence, Conti continued, 'it is now within the realm of possibility that a fate I never thought I would see may come about: an end to American pre-eminence in science and scholarship. Such a result would be a tragedy not only for scholars, but for all patriotic Americans.' In an email, Conti described the revocation of Harvard's certification to participate in the Student and Visitor Exchange Visitor program as a 'capricious and illiberal action, which one might fairly say borders on the nihilistic.' I asked Conti whether the administration wants to bankrupt Harvard and other Ivy League schools as a demonstration of conservative muscle. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How affirmative action failed Black Americans, according to author and WSJ columnist Jason Riley
In 2023, after the Supreme Court said universities could no longer use race when considering potential students, Jason Riley watched with interest as proponents of affirmative action spoke in 'apocalyptic' terms of how this would affect Black Americans. It wasn't a viewpoint he shared. That's because Riley, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, knew the history of Black advancement in the United States — how, for example, the poverty rate among Blacks had fallen in the decades preceding the era of affirmative action policies. At the same time, most Black Americans were enjoying the benefits of what some now call a hallmark of 'white privilege' — a two-parent home. The gap between white and Black earnings was closing as affirmative action policies began to take hold across the U.S., along with other social programs that were expected to help lift Black families economically. But instead, they wound up harming the people they were supposed to help, Riley argues in his new book 'The Affirmative Action Myth.' 'The point here is not to in any way downplay or romanticize the country's awful history of slavery and racial segregation, or to imply that racism is over and done with. Racism still exists, and I don't expect to live to see the day when it doesn't,' Riley writes in the book. But, he said, 'the relevant question is to what extent does past or current racism, in whatever form it takes, explain ongoing racial disparities, and to what extent are racial differences in outcomes being driven primarily by other factors that don't get nearly the amount of attention that racial-bias explanations have received,' Riley writes. One of those oft-overlooked factors, Riley said in a conversation with Deseret, is the decline of the two-parent family, which he said has become unfashionable to address in some political circles. Meanwhile, another form of affirmative action — diversity, equity and inclusion programs — proliferated across the U.S. after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Such programs have pushed aside the concepts of color-blindness and equality to the detriment of Black Americans, Riley writes in the book. Moreover, 'affirmative action has been given undue credit for the Black upward mobility that has occurred.' Riley, who is married to Deseret contributor Naomi Schaefer Riley, and whose previous books include 'Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell' and 'Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed,' spoke with the Deseret News about the trajectory of the Black middle class in America, the costs of racial preference programs and how both Black and white elites helped promote affirmative action despite these policies' unpopularity among ordinary Americans. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. DN: It's been a little more than 10 years since your book 'Please Stop Helping Us' was published. What has changed for Black Americans since that book was published? JR: I did cover some of this material in 'Please Stop Helping Us,' but that was also about other issues — minimum wage laws and school choice and all kinds of different policy efforts to help the Black underclass. This is a deeper dive into racial preferences. The impetus was the Supreme Court decision in 2023, striking down racial preferences in college admissions. The decision was not particularly surprising, but there was all kind of apocalyptic talk about how the end of racial preferences would impact Blacks. People were saying this will be the end of the Black middle class, that racial preferences had created the Black middle class and that college campuses will be whitewashed, Blacks won't be able to get ahead in this country. And I said, wait a minute, there was a significant Black middle class long before affirmative action policies became commonplace, and it was growing at a much faster rate than it was growing during the first few decades of affirmative action. So the idea that the Black middle class existence is based on the existence of racial preferences and affirmative action was just not something that comported with the track record, with history. DN: Since it's just been two years, it's too early to tell if any of those apocalyptic predictions will come true. At what point can we be sure that there was no harm from the ruling? JR: It's just been two years since the Supreme Court decision, but keep in mind that 9 or 10 states had already banned racial preferences in higher education, going back decades — California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Michigan — so we have some idea of what higher education will look like without racial preferences in college admissions. We don't have to guess what will happen. California, way back in the 1990s, passed a ballot initiative that ended racial preferences in college admissions. Initially, Black enrollment at the most selective colleges in the system — Berkeley and UCLA — dropped. But throughout the University of California system, Black enrollment and Hispanic enrollment increased. Not only did enrollment increase, but so did Black graduation rates and grade point averages, by a lot in both cases. So more kids were going to UC-Santa Cruz, UC-Riverside, UC-Santa Barbara and so forth, where they were better matched with the other students, and were apparently thriving. They were also graduating from the more difficult disciplines at higher rates — science, engineering, math. 'Affirmative action is sold in the name of helping the Black poor, but in practice, it has helped Blacks who were already well off become even better well off.' Jason Riley What this shows me is that a policy that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the Black middle class had in practice been producing fewer Black lawyers and doctors and physicists and engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy. I'm not at all concerned about what will happen if Yale and Georgetown and Duke can no longer admit Black students with SAT scores 300 points below those the average student at the school just because they want more Black faces on campus. I think we have plenty of evidence of what will transpire when those policies go away. DN: Can you talk about the proliferation of DEI initiatives across the country? Were they a kind of a replacement for affirmative action? JR: DEI is affirmative action in a different guise, lowering standards, a focus on outcomes rather than opportunity; DEI shares the same goals, and methods frankly, as affirmative action. The biggest reason they took off might be the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, which gave DEI a lot of legs, not only on campus but in the corporate world and in the nonprofit sector. Let me add, I don't think the folks pushing DEI or racial preferences are going to give up, just because of this ruling. I liken it to what took place after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on school desegregation. It's not as if the southern segregationists threw up their hands and said, 'Oh well, I guess we're going to have to desegregate, the Supreme Court has spoken.' We had decades of further segregation and judicial rulings and lawsuits and so forth in an attempt to enforce Brown vs. Board of Education. Similarly today, you have a progressive left that is adamantly opposed to color-blind policies. Color-blind has become a dirty word on the political left today, so I don't expect them to give up. You're going to see them trying to find end-runs around race, perhaps using class as a proxy for race, and you'll see a continuation at the K-12 level, trying to get rid of test schools, high schools that use entrance exams, getting rid of gifted and talented programs … anything that results in any kind of racial disparity, anything that emphasizes objective standards, meritocracy, will be under attack, and I think they will continue to fight this, and those of us who oppose these policies cannot let our guard down going forward. DN: Another policy that keeps coming back is reparations, which are in the news again, even as DEI policies are being rolled back under the Trump administration. JR: The reparations folks are really asking a bit too much of the American public in the year 2025. Most white Americans today trace their ancestry to people who came here after the Civil War, so the reparations folks are really asking white Americans who aren't even descendants of slaveholders to pay reparations to Black people who were never slaves. And I don't think this argument is going to get very far. The other problem I have with the reparationists is that, to me, the policy amounts to yet another huge wealth redistribution scheme. And we've had that in this country, time and again. That's what the Great Society programs were all about in the 1960s and early 1970s. If we could address social inequality with government checks in the mail, we would have solved poverty a long time ago. And I am not at all convinced that one more huge wealth redistribution scheme will get the job done. There does seem to be an appetite for it on the progressive left; you still see popular writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of 'The 1619 Project,' pushing for it — in fact, 'The 1619 Project' is now part of the K-12 curriculum in thousands of school districts all over the country. So I think the issue will, for no other reason than that, continue to germinate. I just don't see it going anywhere. I think it's a political loser for Democrats, but right now, progressives still seem to be firmly in control of the Democratic Party, so you're going to see issues like reparations continue to percolate. DN: Can you talk a little bit about the role the media plays in perpetuating — in your language — the 'myth of affirmative action'? JR: The doomsday chatter around the Supreme Court decision in 2023, a lot of that was coming out of the elite Black left — Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, cable news personalities, Black politicians, Black academics. The reason is because they have been the ones who benefited from the policies, to the extent that these policies have done any good. Affirmative action is sold in the name of helping the Black poor, but in practice, it has helped Blacks who were already well off become even better well off. If you look at income data from the late 1960s through the first 25 years or so of affirmative action, you'll see that the highest earning Blacks, the top 20%, saw their share of income grow throughout the '70s, '80s and early '90s — about the same rate as top-earning whites. Among the bottom share of Blacks, their income fell in that same period at more than double the rate of the lowest earning whites in this country. So affirmative action, to the extent that it benefited anyone, benefited Black people who were already better off, and those are the ones who defend these policies. The media has played a role in this because it has often turned to Black elites to serve as spokesmen for all Blacks — in many areas, not just affirmative action. It's clear that the opinions of Black elites are not the opinions of rank-and-file Blacks, and oftentimes, Black elites want to go in a completely different direction … For example, while the elites were denouncing the Supreme Court decision and continuing to express support for racial preferences, polls showed that most Blacks were opposed to affirmative action and agreed with the Supreme Court decision. ... Look at an issue like voter ID laws in this country — Democrats love to rail against voter ID laws, but a majority of Black people support voter ID laws. Look at charter schools, tax credits, again, opposed by Black elites, supported overwhelmingly by Black people. So the media has continued to turn to these Black spokesmen to speak on behalf of Blacks and given the general public the impression that the average Black person shares the agenda of the NAACP or Al Sharpton or Black Lives Matter, when in fact, that oftentimes is simply not the case. So I do blame my own profession for keeping these folks on speed-dial when they're not representative of most Black people. DN: In the Daily Wire film 'Am I Racist?' Matt Walsh talked to ordinary people who found the (racial justice) concepts he was presenting to them ridiculous … The film 'American Fiction' also made fun of elite attitudes about race. How much can movies like this, and Hollywood in general, make a difference in the national discourse about race? JR: I've seen both of those films, and they're not just highlighting the disconnect between Black elites and Black rank-and-file, but also the disconnect between white elites and white rank-and-file. The 'Am I Racist?' film, I think does a very good job of that, talking to everyday people who are clearly not on the same page as your average liberal professor at Columbia or Yale. When I describe how out-of-touch Black elites are, I really am describing how out-of-touch intellectual elites of any race are, compared to everyday folks in this country. There's a long history of intellectuals as a class being generally far to the left of everyday voters and that continues to be the case in America today. My general thinking is, and others have said this, that Hollywood is sort of downstream from culture; it's not driving it, it's reflecting it. If you go back, there are some films that have made a huge splash – Al Gore's environmental film, for example — and Hollywood is a medium that the left likes to use to try and advance its agenda. But it's hit or miss how much Hollywood drives the discussion, as opposed to reflecting the discussion that's already taking place. DN: You talk in the book about what has been called the 'privilege' of growing up with two parents. What can we do to reclaim that privilege for children of all races? JR: One thing we can do is start talking about how important it is, and I'm not being snarky here. This is a conversation people don't want to have on the political left. Melissa Kearney published a book, 'The Two-Parent Privilege,' and she says in the book, that when she was doing research, her academic colleagues discouraged her from writing about this … (saying) you don't discuss family formation when you discuss what's driving income inequality in this country. That is absolutely insane. We know all of the negative outcomes associated with absent fathers in the home, not only in the household income being lower, but also bad outcomes for children: more teen pregnancy, higher high school dropout rates, involvement with the criminal justice system, and on and on. And yet we're not supposed to talk about fathers not being involved with their children? One thing we can do is to start discussing these things more openly and honestly than we have been. Just to illustrate how important it is, one of the things that was happening in the late '60s, is that you had a convergence of Black and white incomes that was occurring; the white-Black gap in income was narrowing. But right around the late 1960s, this trend starts to slow, and one of the reasons it slows is because around this time, you begin to see a proliferation of Black single-parent homes. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, there were far more Black two-parent homes; Black marriage rates exceeded white marriage rates. Single-parent homes can't compete economically with two-parent homes. You can see how family breakdown has led to all kinds of bad economic outcomes. Affirmative action was not going to be able to make up for that.
Fox News
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Beyond anti-DEI: The case for a durable civil rights compromise
In just a few short years, the tides have turned against racial preferences, in areas ranging from college admissions to corporate hiring. The Supreme Court has taken a far more skeptical stance toward the practice. The second Trump administration has launched an all-out war on DEI, which stands for the once-popular euphemism "diversity, equity, and inclusion." These moves align federal policy with public opinion, the principles of nondiscrimination and meritocracy, and the actual text of our key antidiscrimination laws. But their supporters should ask what comes next—how to maintain these victories in the years and decades ahead as political winds inevitably shift. In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, I review how we got here and ask what a durable compromise on civil-rights law might look like. I propose ways to fight racial bias, regardless of group targeted, while encouraging the use of transparent, objective, fair processes. Our core antidiscrimination statutes, passed in the 1960s, clearly prohibited racial discrimination in employment, housing, and programs receiving federal funds (which includes most colleges). They didn't make exceptions for so-called "reverse" discrimination. It was executive agencies and courts, not the people's representatives, that took the lead in legalizing such efforts. In employment, for example, look to the Supreme Court's decisions in United Steelworkers v. Weber and Johnson v. Transportation Agency, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidance on affirmative-action plans. In college admissions, look to University of California v. Bakke, which began the line of higher-ed cases the Supreme Court essentially overturned in 2023. Somewhat more complex is the doctrine of "disparate impact," which the Supreme Court endorsed in its 1971 decision Griggs v. Duke Power, but which Congress wrote into American employment law two decades later. Under this rule, employment tests and other selection methods are presumptively illegal if different demographic groups pass them at different rates—which is inevitable in a world with tragic racial gaps in academic achievement and obvious sex differences in physical strength. This saddles employers with the burden of defending their tests on a highly technical level amid the stigma of discrimination lawsuits, while praying courts will take their side, even if there is no evidence whatsoever of ill intent. That, in turn, creates a clear incentive for employers to choose their hiring practices based on their racial effects to begin with. With this history in mind, recent developments in the Supreme Court and the Trump administration are worth celebrating. The Court was right to strike down preferences in higher ed, and the Trump administration is right to enforce the written law against DEI-practicing companies and colleges. Regarding disparate impact, private litigants may still pursue cases rooted in the doctrine, but the Trump administration has publicly vowed to deprioritize such cases in its own enforcement efforts—a defensible approach to a bad and arguably unconstitutional rule. But let's not kid ourselves: The political winds will shift back eventually, and victories won through the executive branch are particularly fragile, as any future administration can undo them. Even the balance of the Supreme Court will flip someday. And elites on the left have always been favorable to racial preferences even if the public has not. Are there ways to make these victories a little more resilient? I propose that the key might lie in a broader colorblindness agenda. Conservatives have long chafed at affirmative action, for good reason. But a level of anti-Black bias persists today, too, and this may present an opportunity for a lasting compromise. Yes, this bias is far weaker than it once was, and it's hardly a full explanation of America's ongoing racial gaps in important outcomes such as earnings and imprisonment. But as I detail in my report, there's good evidence that some employers still do hire whites more easily than they hire blacks. In decades' worth of "audit" experiments, for instance, otherwise-similar applicants of different races have applied to jobs to see if employers favor those of one race or another. Like all social science, this body of work has its flaws. For example, there are signs of "publication bias," in which some studies with undesirable results are simply never published; also, many studies rely on stereotypically "white" or "black" names to signal applicants' race, but these names can signal social class as well. But in my view, considering the literature as a whole, this work suggests that being black can still be a moderate disadvantage in some segments of the job market. I believe that conservatives' anti-DEI efforts will succeed best if paired with a sincere campaign to stop this kind of behavior. In the short term, the Trump administration should be sure to pursue and publicize traditional civil-rights cases amid its war on DEI, to drive home a message that fair, evenhanded enforcement is the goal. In the longer term, Congress—if it's even capable of passing laws on controversial topics anymore—should fix the statute books. Clearly ban affirmative action and minimize disparate-impact liability in all areas of the law, while funding rigorous audits and other measures to address disparate treatment by race, regardless of which race is targeted. If nothing else, a bill of this nature would force its opponents to explain what's wrong with colorblind policies backed by thorough enforcement. For too long, American civil-rights law has actively discouraged meritocratic hiring, while making it effectively legal to discriminate against whites and other "overrepresented" groups. Good riddance. But bringing the DEI era to an end permanently will require reforms that are both broader and deeper.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Medicare Advantage plans may cover things like pet food, golf fees and ski passes
Some Medicare Advantage plans are offering enrollees surprising supplemental benefits to boost their health, though a new report notes that those benefits have been extended to expenses with a less direct impact on health — such as golf equipment, pet supplies and more. A report in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal notes that Medicare Advantage, which was devised as a way to make Medicare more cost-efficient by having private insurers manage the health coverage of enrollees, has seen the expansion of its supplemental benefits over time. The program saw steady enrollment gains and yielded savings in the mid-2010s by rooting out unnecessarily expensive procedures and using those funds to offer enrollees more affordable premiums and reduced out-of-pocket costs. Medicare Advantage's supplemental benefits were initially limited to additional benefits such as dental and vision plans that had a connection to health. Congress enacted changes to Medicare Advantage plans through the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which broadened the definition to allow them to offer supplemental benefits that had a "reasonable expectation of improving or maintaining the health or overall function" of enrollees dealing with chronic illnesses. Dr. Oz Uncovers Shocking Medicaid Flaw That Is Costing Us Billions, Warns People Are 'Gaming' The System While the supplemental benefits were still required to be related to health or hospitalizations, the looser definition allowed those benefits to be used on expenses like groceries, as well as sporting and social activities that could offer a less direct boost to an enrollee's health. Read On The Fox Business App The particular benefits in Medicare Advantage plans vary by provider, but the City Journal's report noted that some offer greens fees at golf courses and ski passes, as well as food and supplies for pets, hunting licenses and entry fees for social clubs. The Federal Budget Deficit Keeps Growing And The Congressional Budget Office Has Solutions Eligibility for Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI), as the benefits are known, has grown as the majority of Medicare beneficiaries have chronic medical conditions, while plan payments have gone up. Coding has also become more complex, and increased enrollment by relatively younger, healthier enrollees has created a dynamic where the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission noted that it "overpays for beneficiaries who have very low costs, and underpays for beneficiaries who have very high costs." That has resulted in Medicare's payments to Medicare Advantage plans increasing from 112% to 120% of the program's estimated costs for directly paying for beneficiaries' medical services from 2015 to 2024. Additionally, the report noted that overpayments to plans increased from $18 billion to $77 billion each year, which was attributed in part to expanded supplemental benefits. Cbo Says Us Budget Deficits To Widen, National Debt To Surge To 156% Of Gdp "Medicare Advantage was intended to be a cost-saving alternative to traditional Medicare. But overpayments to plans have left taxpayers on the hook for an additional $1 trillion over the next decade," wrote Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Pope. The report noted that the idea of cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage has received bipartisan support in Congress and could provide spending reductions in congressional Republicans' tax cut package to offset some of the lost tax revenue under the proposal. "If Republicans want to make a real dent in the budget deficit — and head off Democratic plans to redirect the savings into expanding other social programs — they should move to rein in payments and use the savings to ease the burden on taxpayers," Pope article source: Medicare Advantage plans may cover things like pet food, golf fees and ski passes Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
