MAGA Report Cards — Taxes

John James Pitched Repealing Michigan's Marijuana Tax at a Fundraiser the Industry Threw Him. It Raised Nearly $90,000.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:56:10 +0000

In July, executives of the JARS Cannabis dispensary chain hosted a campaign fundraiser for Michigan's Republican nominee for governor. About 100 people came, by one attendee's count. It brought in nearly $90,000.

At that fundraiser, according to a longtime marijuana advocate who was in the room, the candidate told the industry exactly what it wanted to hear about the new state tax on its product.

"He was clear as a bell: He wants to get rid of that 24% tax," Tim Beck told Bridge Michigan.

Weeks later, in mid-August, John James said it in public: he would "repeal or sharply reduce" Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax.

What that tax was for

The 24% wholesale tax is not a stray line in the budget. It was a central piece of the bipartisan road funding deal Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed last year — the deal meant to put $2 billion a year into fixing Michigan's roads.

The House Fiscal Agency projected the marijuana tax alone would bring in $420 million a year toward that.

It has not. State budget officials reported it produced just $73.4 million in its first six months, below even the revised estimates. James points to exactly that shortfall as his argument for killing it.

Here is what he has not done. James has not said how, or whether, he would replace the road money if the tax goes away. His campaign did not respond to Bridge Michigan's requests for comment.

So the plan, as it stands, is: remove a revenue source dedicated to roads, and leave the roads question blank.

The industry says the arrangement was clear

The people who would benefit are not being coy about it.

Robin Schneider, executive director of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, attended the JARS fundraiser. Her association gave James $1,000. She told Bridge that the James campaign came to her about the tax issue before the fundraiser.

"We didn't do anything," she told Bridge. "They made it clear that they support us."

Beck, a member of the association who owns no marijuana business himself, said he feels owners are "pretty united" around James.

Schneider also said her association reached out to the Democratic nominee, Jocelyn Benson, "repeatedly," and has not heard back. Benson has not taken a firm position, calling the tax a "new and emerging issue" and saying she wants to know where the money is going before making changes.

That contrast is the point. One candidate has not committed. The other committed at a fundraiser the industry organized for him, and then said it out loud.

He was against legalization before he was for its tax break

In 2018, Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana with 56% of the vote. James was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, and he said he would vote against the proposal — while promising to respect the result if it passed.

Eight years later, he says "state government has a responsibility to respect" the voter-approved law while keeping products from children and enforcing the law against bad actors.

There is a version of that evolution that is just a politician learning. There is another version, and the industry group suing over the tax has articulated it: the group argues the wholesale tax violates the will of the 2018 voters. James has landed on the side of the argument that his donors are making in court.

This is the pattern

James' record on who gets heard is already documented here.

He took utility cash while Michigan electric bills kept going up. He says his data center priority is "frankly local control," but he voted three times in committee to bar states and towns from regulating AI for a decade. He attacked an opponent for getting rich in office while his own net worth grew by as much as 1,000% during his time in Congress.

The $90,000 fundraiser was a fraction of the nearly $1.2 million James raised from late July onward. That is the part worth remembering. It did not take much to get a public commitment on a $420 million tax.

Adding it up

Marijuana industry executives hosted a fundraiser for John James in July that raised nearly $90,000, and a participant says James told the room he wanted Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax gone. In mid-August he publicly pledged to repeal or sharply reduce it. That tax was written into the bipartisan road funding deal and projected to raise $420 million a year for Michigan roads. James has not said how he would replace that money, and his campaign did not answer questions about it.

Source

Bridge Michigan, John James pitches marijuana tax repeal, courts industry donors. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press, via Bridge Michigan.

State of the State: Texas Is 40th Overall. Greg Abbott and Texan Republicans in Congress Aren't Helping.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:59:28 +0000

Texas is big and Texas is rich. But on the things that decide whether a Texas family gets by — enough food on the table, safe care for a pregnant woman, a fair start for a kid — Texas keeps landing near the bottom.

Click for sources

Add up the 17 measures we track across all 50 states and Texas ranks 40th. That number describes where the state already is. It does not, by itself, prove any one politician put it there.

Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015, and many of the decisions behind those numbers are his rather than Washington's: whether Texas expands health coverage, who regulates the grid, where school money goes, what a doctor is allowed to do for a miscarrying patient.

Republicans also hold 24 of Texas's 37 filled U.S. House seats, both of its Senate seats and the attorney general's office. One House seat is empty, and that's a story too. Here is what all of them did on top of the numbers above, and what each has been busy with instead.

What Texas's Republicans in Congress voted to cut

Texas is already 49th of 50 states on food insecurity, from the USDA's own data — second-worst in the country at feeding people — and it already has the highest uninsured rate of any state, for children and adults alike. Its Republicans in Congress then voted for a budget bill that cut both health coverage and food assistance. Take them one at a time.

KFF's allocation of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates projects that Trump's budget bill will leave 480,000 more Texans without health insurance by 2034 — 1.4 million once you count the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025 and that the bill did not extend. Texas also stands to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

That lands on a state where, in 2024, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey put 13.6% of Texas children and 21.6% of working-age Texas adults without any coverage at all — the highest rate in the country in both cases, against national rates of 6.0% and 11.3%. And the hole is not only Washington's doing. Texas, under Abbott, is one of the few states that never expanded Medicaid, which the Texas Tribune reports has contributed to that rate. Turning the expansion down was a decision made in Austin, and it is his.

Another $10 billion is stuck on top of that. The Trump administration is holding up Medicaid payments Texas hospitals were counting on, which the Texas Hospital Association counts at $27 million a day. Ken Paxton fought that exact case against the Biden administration, won it, and put out a news release calling it a "major nationwide legal victory." Against this administration, he has filed nothing.

On food: 1 in 4 Texas kids faces hunger, and about 3.47 million Texans — 11% of the state — get SNAP benefits every month. The same bill squeezed that program too.

Every Texas House Republican named below voted for it.

What 49th on women's health looks like

Texas ranks 49th of 50 states on women's health and reproductive care, from the Commonwealth Fund's state scorecard. Second-worst in the country. Here is part of why.

Texas has a near-total abortion ban, and Abbott signed it. On May 19, 2021 he signed the law that banned abortion after about six weeks and paid members of the public at least $10,000 to sue any doctor who performed one. "Our creator endowed us with the right to life," he said at the signing ceremony. The law took effect that September. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a criminal law followed, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison.

Doctors then started waiting. ProPublica's statewide analysis of hospitalizations for second-trimester pregnancy loss found that after the ban, the rate of sepsis in those cases jumped more than 50%.

Josseli Barnica's case is what that waiting looked like. She was 28, a mother, and 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to a Houston hospital on September 3, 2021, days after the law took effect, with a miscarriage her doctors recorded as "in progress." More than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica that her doctors should have emptied her uterus then to head off an infection. Instead her husband arrived from a construction site to hear what she said the medical team had told her: "They had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion."

She waited 40 hours. Three days after she delivered, she died of an infection — sepsis, her autopsy said, with "retained products of conception." The experts who reviewed her records called her death preventable, and called the case "horrific," "astounding" and "egregious."

Barnica never asked for an abortion. Neither did Nevaeh Crain, who was 18, or Porsha Ngumezi. Texas's own Medical Board has since disciplined three doctors over the care those last two received — one for discharging Crain while she had a 103-degree fever and had screened positive for sepsis. Each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education.

Even the Republican-led Legislature conceded something was wrong and passed a bill to clarify the ban's medical exceptions. The ban itself stands.

The data centers

The biggest new fight in Texas isn't in Washington. It's over giant warehouses full of computers that run artificial intelligence, and the electricity and water they drink.

Greg Abbott spent years bringing them here. In November 2025 he stood next to Google's CEO and called Texas "the epicenter of AI development." The grid operator now says companies have asked to pull 474 gigawatts off the Texas grid — more than five times the most electricity Texas has ever used at once — and about 90% of those requests are data centers. We laid out that record here.

Then, in August of an election year, Abbott announced a pause and an audit. Regulators set the delivery date for the report at December 10. Election Day in Texas is November 3. Texans vote 37 days before the state tells them what it found.

Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner, a Republican, called the pause "smoke and mirrors" and said Abbott is stalling so his donors' projects can be grandfathered in.

The public schools

More than nine in ten Texas kids sit in a public school. The state spent this year moving money the other way.

The private school voucher program is Abbott's. He campaigned on it, and on May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion bill creating it, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. Texas launched the program for 2026-27 with that $1 billion. In September 2026 the state's comptroller, Don Huffines, asked the Legislature to double the program's base funding to more than $2 billion. Nearly 110,000 students have been funded and more than 106,000 families are on the waitlist. Paying for the waitlist too, the comptroller's office said, would come to about $4 billion over two years.

Here is the part that decides who this is for. State data shows that 70% of the families who have joined the program or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home-schooling. This is not mostly money helping kids leave a failing public school. It is mostly money for families who had already left.

Meanwhile the public schools are cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, educator training and special education, and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. Before last year's bill, Texas students had gone six years with no comprehensive funding increase at all.

And Texas is short of teachers. The state employs more educators on H-1B visas than any state in the country, and districts use those visas for jobs they have already tried and failed to fill locally — above all bilingual education, which sits on Texas's own official teacher shortage list, in the state with the largest share of students learning English in the country. Abbott says he wants "exactly zero", and he wants it to reach the teachers already standing in Texas classrooms. In the rooms Texas cannot staff, it would become illegal to keep the teacher who took the job.

Three of the Texans below — Keith Self, Randy Weber and Brandon Gill — went a step further and cosponsored a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

Texans are still paying for the last grid failure

Before the data centers, there was Winter Storm Uri. 246 people died. Craig Goldman chaired the Texas House Energy Resources committee in the session that followed, and his committee advanced a bill that put $3.5 billion of the gas companies' storm costs onto customers' bills through April 2039. The weatherization rules passed after the storm have caught almost nothing, and a 2025 state audit found why: regulators issued two violations across 8,732 inspections, and never compared what companies actually did to the state's own best practices. The gas companies set their own standard, and passed.

Texans will be paying that off for another 13 years, while the grid takes on the biggest new load in its history.

The agency that let that happen is Abbott's too. He appoints the Public Utility Commission's board, which was expanded from three members to five after Uri, and the Tribune reported that he took over the search for the grid operator's chief executive — a process he has no formal role in — with one person involved saying he had "total veto power."

What it costs to live here

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Abbott named the thing Texans tell pollsters they care about most and promised to fix it. "Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability," he said. He has been governor since January 2015. Here is what those eleven years did to three of the bills that arrive at a Texas house.

Property taxes. Abbott signed an $18 billion package in 2023 and called it the largest property tax cut in state history. By the comptroller's own count, statewide property tax levies were $51.2 billion in his first year in office and $89.4 billion in 2025. He is now running on cutting them in half by zeroing out school property taxes on homesteads, a promise that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the state's 4.1 million renters.

Homeowners insurance. "The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said on August 24, 2026, ordering the insurance commissioner he appointed to do something about it. In 2025 the Legislature killed both bills that would have addressed it: a roof-hardening grant program that passed the House, and a rate-approval bill that passed the Senate. Insurance was not among the seven emergency items Abbott named that February, and not among the eighteen reported on his summer special session call either.

The electric bill. The data centers above run on a sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost the state $3.2 billion over two years, and the grid operator's own $33 billion transmission expansion shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers. Abbott now says data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers." He also wants to break up the San Antonio utility that says it has the cheapest residential rates in the state, on behalf of retail providers whose political action committees have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Three bills, one shape. The problem built for a decade while he held the office that could act on it, and the answer arrived in the campaign.

The seat that isn't being filled

On April 14, 2026, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned from Texas's 23rd District. He quit amid allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer who later took her own life, an affair he had denied and then essentially admitted in a talk-show interview. Abbott has still not called a special election, and the seat is not on track to be filled until January — roughly 260 days empty. A Democrat resigned in California the same day. Voters there have already picked his replacement.

That is the empty seat: about 800,000 Texans with nobody voting for them.

The Republican nominee waiting for that seat is Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber who called a child a "c*m trophy" while attacking Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook shooting. When reporters asked Texas Republicans about it, they walked away. He has also called Social Security "a joke" after his own campaign website promised to protect it.

The rules of the election itself

Texas ranks 46th of 50 on voter turnout. Its Republicans have spent the year working on the map and the polling places rather than the turnout.

In 2025 the Legislature redrew the congressional map mid-decade to target five Democratic-held seats. Two federal judges blocked it, finding "substantial evidence" that it was racially gerrymandered in a 160-page opinion. The Supreme Court cleared it for use in the 2026 midterms anyway, over the dissents of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson.

Underneath that, the same work is happening county by county. Galveston County held its March primary under one map and adopted a different one in June, telling a court the reason was to "increase partisan performance." Tarrant County's Republican majority voted to cut 92 Election Day polling places, taking the state's biggest swing county from 316 sites in 2022 to 224 this November.

The rolls themselves are moving too. More than 1.2 million Texans sit on the state's voter suspense list, over 6% of all registered voters, with the election weeks away. Abbott has said Texas caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls. His own office had confirmed 581.

The candidates up for reelection

Texas sends 24 Republicans to the U.S. House. The seventeen running for reelection in 2026 have a report card on this site. Here's something about each of them:

August Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee and wrote the blueprint for the next budget bill, saying the point of the process is that Democrats can't block it.
Beth Van Duyne called this "the golden age of DOGE." The Government Accountability Office then reported that DOGE couldn't show its work on 96% of its claimed grant savings.
Brandon Gill filed a bill to stop people from buying a hot meal with food stamps. The option he calls a loophole exists for SNAP recipients who are elderly, disabled or homeless.
Brian Babin's campaign paid the Federal Election Commission $26,700 after a donor pleaded guilty to funneling $37,000 in corporate money to it through his own employees.
Craig Goldman — the Uri bill above. His one law in Congress so far killed an efficiency rule the Energy Department said would save $1.3 billion.
Jake Ellzey announced a "historic investment" in rural health care. He voted twice for the law that made it necessary, which cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid.
John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013. When 150 constituents held one for him, they brought a life-size cutout.
Keith Self calls the national debt "an existential threat to our Republic," voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Lance Gooden is under House Ethics investigation. The committee won't say what it's about; Gooden says it's his spending. His first move was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."
Michael Cloud wrote a bill that would put every federal agency on a countdown to abolition — including the ones that warn Texas about hurricanes.
Monica De La Cruz told donors on leaked audio that "it's not that people don't like me, it's that people don't know me yet." She has never held an in-person town hall.
Nathaniel Moran spoke against site-neutral Medicare payment, the one change that would lower what patients pay for the same service. The hospital lobby has given him $20,000.
Pat Fallon sits on the Oversight panel built to work hand in hand with DOGE and went on Fox Business to call it a chance to "fix our Republic".
Pete Sessions put it in writing that a $7 billion Ponzi schemer was "a man of great strength, character and financial stability".
Randy Weber has represented the Texas coast for 13 years. He called $5 million for the Ike Dike a win; the barrier carries a $35 to $57 billion price tag.
Roger Williams, a second-generation auto dealer, slipped an exemption for car dealers into a rental-car safety law at midnight. It got him an ethics investigation and was stripped out.
Ronny Jackson kept paying for a private Amarillo dining club with campaign money after the ethics office told him to stop, and changed what he called it.

And the party's Senate nominee is Ken Paxton, the sitting attorney general, whose own party's voters picked him over a record of indictments, an impeachment and abuse-of-office findings that we laid out in full.

Above them all on the ballot is Greg Abbott, who has been the Governor of Texas since 2015. He signed the six-week abortion ban that pays strangers $10,000 to sue a doctor, in the state that ranks 49th on women's health. He signed the $1 billion voucher bill, where 70% of the families taking the money had already left the public schools. He spent years recruiting the data centers, then flip-flopped when it became politically convenient. And he is running on affordability after property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion in his first year to $89.4 billion, and home insurance premiums rose 79%.

Compare Texas to Other States →

Greg Abbott Signed the 'Largest Property Tax Cut in Texas History.' Texans' Property Tax Bills Went From $51 Billion to $89 Billion.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:00:04 +0000

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Greg Abbott stood in front of cameras and made Texans a promise about the thing they say they care about most: what it costs to live here.

"Texas ranks number one in the United States for the most jobs," he said. "We rank number one as the best economy in the United States. Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability."

The centerpiece is property taxes. Abbott says he will cut them by half. He would do it by requiring two-thirds voter approval before any local tax increase, letting voters roll back taxes, capping how fast a property's appraised value can grow at 3% a year, and above all by wiping out school district property taxes for homeowners entirely.

"What I say is, the state of Texas should assume that full responsibility of funding public education, not your homestead," Abbott said. "Instead of you paying whatever you pay right now for your homestead for public schools, that amount should be zero going forward, ensuring that your property taxes will be cut by more than half."

It is a big promise. He has made a version of it before.

He already signed the "largest property tax cut in Texas history"

On August 9, 2023, Abbott signed an $18 billion package and said this: "Today, I am signing a law that will ensure more than $18 billion in property tax cuts—the largest property tax cut in Texas history."

His office put a number on what it would do for you. Senate Bill 2, the release said, would "save the average Texas homestead owner over $1,200" for tax year 2023, and over $1,400 for homestead owners over 65 or with a disability.

His campaign is still running on it. The affordability page on his own website leads with the claim that he "delivered the largest property tax cut in Texas history — $18 billion," alongside raising the school homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000.

So the question is not whether Abbott has tried this. It is what happened after he did.

What actually happened to the bills

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts tracks how much every taxing unit in the state collects. Here is what Texans were billed, in total:

Year	Statewide property tax levy
2015, Abbott's first year in office	$51.2 billion
2019	$66.5 billion
2023, the year of the "largest cut in history"	$81.4 billion
2025	$89.4 billion

Those are the comptroller's own figures, compiled by Texas Policy Research, a group that describes its work as "independent analysis based on liberty principles" and lists "Eliminate Property Taxes" as one of the ten planks in its platform. This is not a critique from the left.

Texas has grown, and prices have risen, and much of that increase is simply more people in more houses. But not all of it. The same analysis ran the comparison: "If levies had simply tracked population growth and inflation, 2025 collections would be roughly $58 billion. Instead they are $89.4 billion." Over the longer run, it found levies up more than 378% since 1998 against population and inflation growth of about 210%.

Abbott does not set local tax rates, and he will tell you so. That is the point. He has spent eleven years promising a cut the state cannot actually deliver, because the bill that lands in your mailbox is set by school districts, cities, counties and special districts, and it kept going up anyway.

Nearly 4 in 10 homesteads already pay zero

The headline promise is that your school property tax goes to zero. For a lot of Texans, it already is.

In the first week of September 2026, the office of state Senator Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Local Government Committee, presented that committee with data his staff had spent about four months pulling from all 254 Texas counties. It found that 39% of Texas homesteads now owe no school district property tax at all. Among homeowners 65 and older or with disabilities, it is roughly 61%.

That is what the $140,000 homestead exemption already did. And it is why the next step buys less than it sounds like it does. Once a home's value is fully covered by the exemption, raising the exemption again does nothing for that household. That was the concern raised at the hearing by state Senator Molly Cook and by nonprofit representatives: diminishing returns for the homes already exempt, and nothing at all for renters, who get no homestead exemption in the first place.

Texas has 4.1 million renters. The plan skips every one of them.

Abbott's proposal covers homesteads. A homestead exemption is something you can only claim on a house you own.

Texas has 4.1 million renters, and more than half of them are now cost-burdened, meaning rent eats more than 30% of their income. Before the pandemic that share was about 48%. Median rent in Texas grew 9.1% after inflation between the five-year periods ending in 2019 and 2024. Renters are the Texans losing the affordability race fastest, and they are outside this plan.

They would also keep paying. The Texas Tribune noted that under Abbott's proposal, owners of apartments, stores, factories and warehouses would still owe school property taxes. Apartment buildings are business property. The tax on them does not disappear. It stays on the building the renter lives in.

Where the $17.5 billion comes from

If homeowners stop paying for schools, someone else starts.

The Legislative Budget Board put the cost of replacing all school property taxes at $39.5 billion in tax year 2023. Abbott is not proposing that. He is proposing to zero out the share paid by single-family homeowners, which the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association put at about $17.5 billion in the same year. Every Texan, running the numbers on the current version of the plan, estimates a hole of roughly $20 billion a year, or $40 billion every two-year budget cycle.

Abbott says the money is already there. He has said there is no reason to raise the sales tax, and that Texas has the money to cut property taxes right now.

Every Texan cites the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association's calculation of what the sales tax route would actually take: raising it from 8.25% to 13.63%. That is a tax that falls hardest on people with the least, which is the same group that doesn't own the homestead being exempted.

The experts who study this for a living are not persuaded that the money is sitting there. Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the package "basically a collection of the worst types of policies meant to constrain property taxes." Shannon Halbrook, a fiscal policy expert at Every Texan, said the proposal may be in Abbott's platform "for the purpose of messaging, but is not a realistic proposal."

The appraisal cap is the part that lasts

The other half of the plan gets less attention and would reshape more. Abbott wants to drop the annual cap on how much a property's taxable value can rise from 10% to 3%, extend it to every kind of property, and reappraise only once every five years.

Tax policy experts told the Texas Tribune the idea strongly resembles California's Proposition 13, the 1970s ballot initiative that put tight limits on property value growth and tax rates there. Manish Bhatt, senior tax policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a conservative group, put it plainly: "Bringing California-style property tax reform to Texas is just not sound policy." Langley described what it produced there. "It's very common to see identical, side-by-side homes with one person paying taxes that are more than five times higher than their neighbors."

The reason is simple. A cap on value growth rewards whoever has owned longest and punishes whoever bought most recently, because the new buyer resets to market value while the neighbor stays frozen. Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, called it "a pretty anti-family policy," one that hinders young families trying to buy a first home.

"The state should assume full responsibility of funding public education"

That is the sentence to hold onto, because Abbott has been governor for eleven years and Texas has not done it.

Texas has had a chance. The state's teachers union kept a running tally of what he did with it: sitting on a record $33 billion surplus, Abbott "was holding public schools hostage to his voucher priority", and when the vouchers failed the extra school funding died with them. At that point the basic allotment, the per-student money a district can actually spend on staff, buses and keeping the lights on, sat at $6,160 and had not been raised since 2019.

He got the vouchers. On May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion law creating the program, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. In September 2026 the state comptroller asked the Legislature to more than double it to over $2 billion, with nearly 110,000 students funded and more than 106,000 families waitlisted. Seventy percent of the families who joined or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home schooling.

Meanwhile the public schools are still cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, training and special education — it raised the basic allotment by $55 a student — and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. And the classrooms Texas cannot staff are the ones Abbott wants to make harder to staff: Texas schools employ more teachers on work visas than any state in the country, and he says he wants "exactly zero".

A governor asking to be trusted with the entire cost of educating Texas's public school children is asking on a record of withholding their funding to win a different fight.

He is taking credit on data centers too

The property tax promise was not the only one Abbott made in Lubbock. He also took credit for protecting Texans from the electricity costs of data centers, saying he had put in place the most comprehensive data center rules and guardrails of any governor in the country.

Texas Democratic Party spokesman Jacob Long answered that one directly: "You don't get to give data centers some of the largest tax breaks in the nation and vow to turn Texas into an AI epicenter, then shrug your shoulders and play dumb once Texas communities start asking legitimate questions."

We have written up that record three times. Abbott spent years selling Texas to the data centers before asking for credit for slowing them down. The audit he ordered to answer Texans' questions about them reports 37 days after Texans vote. And Texas's own Republican agriculture commissioner said the pause is stalling so Abbott's donors can get grandfathered in.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott has been governor of Texas since January 2015. In that first year Texans were billed $51.2 billion in property taxes. In 2025 they were billed $89.4 billion, about $31 billion more than population growth and inflation would explain, two years after he signed what he called the largest property tax cut in state history. He is now running on cutting property taxes in half by ending school property taxes on homesteads, a change that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the 4.1 million Texans who rent, and that leaves the state owing schools roughly $20 billion a year, which he says is already sitting in the budget and which the analysts who have run the numbers say is not.

Source

Mateo Rosiles, USA TODAY NETWORK, Texas Gov. Abbott pitches 50% property tax cut in affordability plan, September 8, 2026. Photo: USA Today Network.

Joe Lombardo's Ad Attacks Aaron Ford for Voting for Nevada's Biggest Tax Increase. The Man Lombardo Made His Chief of Staff Voted for It Twice.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:23:30 +0000

A campaign ad for Joe Lombardo flashes a line across the screen about his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford:

"FORD VOTED FOR THE LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN NEVADA HISTORY."

That is true. It is also a Republican achievement, and the man Lombardo picked to run the governor's office voted for it too.

What the 2015 tax package actually was

Nevada's largest tax increase was enacted in 2015 and valued at $1.3 billion at the time. It created a gross receipts tax on business, raised the payroll tax, extended taxes that had been due to expire, and raised the cigarette tax.

It was spearheaded by Republican Governor Brian Sandoval, working with the gambling and resort industry. Republicans controlled both the Nevada Senate and the Assembly at the time, and the package cleared the state constitution's two-thirds requirement in both chambers comfortably.

The Senate voted on it twice, and the tally was 18 to 3 both times. Ford voted yes both times. So did eight Senate Republicans, Nevada Current editor Hugh Jackson wrote on September 6 — among them Ben Kieckhefer.

Kieckhefer voted for the package on final passage on May 15, 2015, and again on June 1, when the Senate accepted the Assembly's version and sent it to Sandoval. He went on to become Joe Lombardo's first chief of staff, ran the governor's office through the 2023 legislative session, and stepped down in January 2024.

Jackson's column names a second man, James Settelmeyer, and on that one the record is split. Settelmeyer voted for the package on May 15. On June 1 he was one of the three no votes on the version that actually became law: the Senate journal records "NAYS—Goicoechea, Gustavson, Settelmeyer—3." Lombardo appointed him to run the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources on January 6, 2023, less than two months after his Senate term ended, and he stayed there until March 27, 2026, when he left to run — unsuccessfully — for the Republican nomination in Nevada's 2nd Congressional District, with Lombardo's backing.

If casting that vote disqualifies a person from being governor of Nevada, Lombardo handed his own office to a man who cast it twice.

The other ad has no receipts

A second anti-Ford ad, from the Lombardo-aligned Better Nevada PAC, says Ford voted to raise taxes 15 times, totaling $3 billion.

Jackson asked the political consulting firm November Inc. — whose Jeremy Hughes leads Better Nevada PAC, per the firm's own website — to identify each of those 15 votes and their dollar amounts. The firm did not respond.

At least two of the votes, and about half of the $3 billion, appear to be the 2015 Sandoval package again. Which is to say: about half the ad's biggest number is one Republican governor's tax bill, counted twice.

Hughes also managed Sandoval's 2014 reelection and consulted on Mark Hutchison's campaign for lieutenant governor that year, according to the firm's website. Hutchison, later a Better Nevada PAC fixture, came to the lieutenant governor's office straight from the Republican side of the state Senate and was a vocal supporter of Sandoval's 2015 agenda.

The data center half of the same ad

The ad's other charge is that Ford is bad because he has supported tax breaks for data centers.

Lombardo supports data centers. He said so on video on May 14, 2026: "I support data centers because they bring jobs, investments, and economic growth to Nevada."

He said it three days after AI investor Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia gave Better Nevada PAC — the same PAC now running the tax ad — $1 million. A week later the wife of Switch's founder gave $1 million more. We laid out that timeline last week.

So the ad attacks Ford for a policy Lombardo holds, using money from the industry that policy benefits.

What it adds up to

Joe Lombardo's campaign is attacking Aaron Ford for a 2015 vote that a Republican governor asked for, that eight Senate Republicans cast alongside him, and that the man Lombardo would later hire to run the governor's office cast twice. The same ad attacks Ford over data center tax breaks that Lombardo publicly supports, and the PAC behind the companion ad took $2 million from data center money in the two weeks around Lombardo's endorsement of the industry. When a reporter asked for the receipts behind the ad's "15 tax increases" claim, the firm running the PAC did not answer.

Source

Joe Lombardo and the largest tax increase in Nevada history by Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current, September 6, 2026. Photo: Nevada Current.

Ashley Hinson Says She Is 'Laser Focused on Lowering Taxes for Working Families.' She Signed a Letter to Save a Tax Break for Private Equity Managers.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:55:15 +0000

Ashley Hinson is running for Joni Ernst's open Senate seat in Iowa, and her campaign website says she is "laser focused on lowering taxes for working families."

In April 2025, she signed a letter asking the chairman of the House's tax-writing committee to protect a tax break that goes almost entirely to private investment managers.

Mother Jones reported the letter on September 4, along with the money that has followed.

What the tax break does

Private equity managers get paid two ways. They take a fee for managing a fund, and then they take a cut of the profits when the fund's assets are sold. That cut is called "carried interest."

The management fee is taxed like a paycheck. The cut of the profits is not. It is taxed at the lower rate reserved for long-term investments, even though it is compensation for doing a job.

Oscar Valdés Viera of Americans for Financial Reform put it plainly to Mother Jones. If you get a bonus at work, he said, you pay tax on it at the rate for your income. Fund managers should be no different.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that closing it would raise about $13 billion over ten years.

This is not a partisan question among people who study taxes. Jonathan Choi, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, surveyed American tax law professors and got 167 replies. On carried interest, 143 said it should be taxed as ordinary income. Ten said it should not. He calls it "the single policy on which tax professors are most strongly agreed."

It is not much of a partisan question among presidents, either. Obama tried to close it. Biden tried to close it. Trump tried to close it in 2017 and again in 2025 — he once said private equity executives were "getting away with murder."

What Hinson signed

In 2025, Trump signaled again that he wanted it gone. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said all options were "on the table."

Hinson joined a few dozen other House Republicans in a letter asking Smith to leave it alone.

"We recognize that the issue of carried interest has been heavily politicized and frequently mislabeled as a loophole."

The letter called it "a critical, longstanding investment management tool beneficial to our nation's economy," and warned that closing it would "harm millions of partnerships in real estate, private equity, and venture capital by disincentivizing entrepreneurial risk-taking and investment, potentially jeopardizing jobs in every state and district."

Choi's response to that argument is worth quoting in full, because he does not really disagree with the wording:

"The funny thing is, in some sense, I agree with the letter — it's not a loophole. It's not a loophole anymore because Congress has considered it and decided to leave this terrible policy on the books so many times. At this point, it's intentional malfeasance on the part of Congress."

The letter also argued that America would fall behind other countries if the break went away, and named the United Kingdom. This year the United Kingdom moved carried interest into its income tax system, taxing it as trading profit rather than as an investment gain.

Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee dropped the idea. The break survived.

Who is paying for her Senate campaign

Hinson's race against Democrat Josh Turek is close, and the money behind her is not coming from Iowa.

A hybrid super PAC called Fight On Iowa has raised $1.77 million to boost her. $1.5 million of that came from a single donor: Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire. The second-largest contributor is a California hedge fund manager who gave $100,000. The third-largest individual donor is a banker from Connecticut.

Mother Jones found that none of that $1.77 million came from anyone living in Iowa, and none of it from named individuals outside the financial services industry.

Griffin has also given $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which is running ads for Hinson. He is one of the biggest Republican donors of this cycle, with a reported $40 million spent on the midterms so far — the same donor who put $10 million into a PAC backing Byron Donalds in Florida's governor's race.

Her own donations tell the same story. Democrats have criticized her for taking $30,000 from Apollo Global Management's chief executive Marc Rowan and other Apollo employees — the private equity firm that owns a group of struggling Iowa health care facilities. She took $26,500 from Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who once compared Obama's attempt to close this very loophole to Hitler's invasion of Poland, and later apologized for it.

Across her three previous campaigns, Hinson raised more than $1 million from people and PACs tied to the securities and investment industry.

We have written before about the nearly $90,000 she and her PACs took from billionaires named in the Epstein files, Schwarzman among them — $30,500 of it while she was refusing to sign the petition that would force those files into the open.

The contrast she set up herself

Six months after arriving in Washington, Hinson ran an online video ad asking for grassroots donations. Democrats, she warned, "believe that with their outside money, and their deep-pocketed donors, they can spend their way to a victory."

Her own Senate super PAC has raised $1.77 million and $1.5 million of it came from one hedge fund billionaire who does not live in Iowa.

This is a pattern on her record rather than a single episode. Her first Senate ad promised she would take on big insurance — and her husband, it turned out, had arranged the insurance lobby's meeting with Iowa's House delegation, including her. Her 2025 financial disclosures show he owned between $1 million and $5 million in privately held stock in High Street Insurance Partners, a private equity-backed insurance brokerage.

She has also backed major cuts to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street, and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which handles complaints about scams and bad financial products.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson campaigns on lowering taxes for working families. In April 2025 she signed a letter asking House Republicans to preserve a tax break that lets private investment managers pay the investment rate on money they earn for doing a job — a break the Congressional Budget Office says costs about $13 billion a decade, and that surveyed tax law professors said should be taxed as income by 143 to 10. The committee killed the repeal. A hedge fund billionaire has since put $1.5 million into the super PAC boosting her Senate campaign, which raised that $1.77 million without a dollar from anyone in Iowa.

Source

Ashley Hinson Fought to Save Private Equity's Favorite Loophole, Mother Jones, September 4, 2026. Photo: Charlie Neibergall / Getty.

Tom Tiffany Campaigns as a Small-Business Success Story. He Paid Wisconsin No Personal Income Tax at All in Six Different Years.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:25:03 +0000

Tom Tiffany's campaign for governor is built on one story. He ran a boat.

"Tom and his wife Chris owned and operated Wilderness Cruises in Wisconsin's beautiful Northwoods for 20 years, and he served as the dam tender on the Willow Flowage for 29 years," his campaign website says. "Yes, he was a dam man!" His television ads run with the slogan "Time to send in the dam man."

It's a good story. A small-business owner from up north, someone who met a payroll and knows what things cost. That's the pitch for why he should be trusted to run the state's finances.

On August 26, 2026, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published what the state's own tax records show about that business. Tiffany and his business went years without paying state income taxes.

What the Department of Revenue records show

Wisconsin's Department of Revenue tracks a line on every return called "net tax" — what you actually owe after your deductions and credits are applied. Here is Tiffany's:

2005: he paid $681 in personal state income taxes.
2006 through 2010: he had zero net state liability. He owed nothing, and he paid nothing. That's five years in a row.
2011, the year he was sworn into the state Assembly: $2,212.
2012 through 2018: between $1,680 and $2,445 a year.
2019: zero again.
2020 onward, after he was elected to Congress: between $4,613 and $8,432 a year.

That is six separate years — 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2019 — in which the man now asking to run Wisconsin's finances owed Wisconsin's treasury no personal income tax at all.

The businesses are a more complicated story, and the paper spells out why. Tiffany ran two of them, one after the other. Willow Inc. ran the boat on the Willow Flowage; it owed and paid the state no income taxes for more than a decade through 2016, then paid $65 in 2017, $308 in 2018 and $240 in 2019. Wisconsin River Cruises Inc., which took the operation to the Wisconsin River in Rhinelander in 2007, owed and paid no state income taxes at all between 2007 and 2013 — but it was an S corporation, and an S corporation's income and losses pass through to the owner's own return instead of being taxed at the corporate level. Willow Inc. was a C corporation, which does owe tax in its own right.

Sixty-five dollars. That is what the C corporation at the center of his campaign biography paid Wisconsin in income taxes in 2017.

What Tiffany says

Tiffany, 68, didn't dispute the records. He told the Journal Sentinel that the tour boat business had hard years, and he pointed at the economy.

"As any small business owner will tell you, it isn't always easy. During the times surrounding the financial crisis and recession, times were tough for all businesses, especially seasonal businesses like ours that relied on tourism."

He said the business averaged about 15 employees a year, and that before he and his wife took home a dollar there were employees, fuel, boat repairs and equipment to pay for. He said they paid property taxes, personal property taxes, unemployment insurance and payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare. And he said the zero year in 2019 came from depreciation on the boat and other equipment.

That is a real answer, and part of it checks out. Rachel Detert, an accounting professor at Marquette University and a certified public accountant, told the paper that a tax loss doesn't automatically mean a business was failing — taxable income is calculated under tax rules and can differ from what a business actually takes in. Depreciation lets a business write off the cost of equipment over time, and Wisconsin lets losses be carried forward against income for as many as the next 15 tax years.

But Detert was careful about how far that goes. Without the underlying corporate and individual returns, she said, she could only offer "viable explanations rather than definitive conclusions." Those returns are not public.

Scot Ross — a Democratic analyst who ran the liberal group One Wisconsin Now when it found Willow Inc. had no tax obligations going back to 2001 — put the blunt version on the table:

"Either Tiffany schemed to avoid paying his taxes or he was lying when he said he was a successful business owner."

Ross also noted that Tiffany's business had no state tax liability under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It wasn't one bad quarter.

The part that matters for the rest of us

Wisconsin runs on income tax. It pays for the schools, the roads, the university system, the plow that comes down your road in February, and the share of Medicaid the state has to cover. When one person owes nothing, someone else covers it. That is the whole arrangement.

And Tiffany is not running on a promise to leave taxes alone. In April 2026 he pledged to end Wisconsin's state income tax on tips and overtime if he's elected governor, telling a Wausau audience that "whether you're a food server, a bartender, waitress, nurse, construction worker, a machinist, you're going to see more money that's going to come back to you."

Set that beside the record. The nurse and the machinist paid their state income tax every one of those years. Tiffany, in six of them, did not.

This is the same shape as the rest of his campaign. He says he would end the subsidies Wisconsin hands data centers — while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. He introduces himself as a dairy-farm kid who understands working people, and he has cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage. The words are always about the person working the shift. The record is always somewhere else.

What his opponent's records look like

The Journal Sentinel pulled the same records for the other candidate, and the comparison is not close.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, 40, the Democratic candidate for governor, owed and paid no state income taxes for exactly two years — 2006 and 2007, when he was 20 or 21 years old. Every year since, he has owed between $380 and nearly $8,000.

Tiffany is not the first Wisconsin candidate to face this. In 2010 the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Terrence Wall, a millionaire real estate developer, hadn't paid personal state income taxes in nine of the previous 10 years. In 2021 the Journal Sentinel reported that Sarah Godlewski, then running in a Democratic Senate primary and now running for lieutenant governor, owed and paid no state income taxes in 2017 and 2018.

What's different here is the campaign built on top of it — the ads, the slogan, the biography.

The bottom line

Wisconsin Department of Revenue records show Tom Tiffany had zero net personal state income tax liability for 2006 through 2010 and again in 2019 — six years in which that line came to zero. Willow Inc., the C corporation that ran the boat on the Willow Flowage, owed nothing for more than a decade through 2016 and then paid $65; Wisconsin River Cruises, an S corporation whose income and losses pass through to his own return, owed nothing from 2007 through 2013. He is running for governor on that business record, and on a promise to cut the income tax for tipped and overtime workers who paid theirs every one of those years. The returns that would explain it are not public.

Source

Mary Spicuzza, "Tom Tiffany touts business success, but for years owed no taxes", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 26, 2026. Photo: Hannah Schroeder / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Trump Promised to Wipe Out the $19 Trillion Debt in Eight Years. This Week It Passed $40 Trillion.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:04:11 +0000

On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years, or $4.1 trillion once the interest on that borrowing was counted. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. Counting the growth added about $125 billion to the cost, because the bill's effect on interest rates outweighed its effect on the economy.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was seven words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, recessions land on whoever happens to be in office, and a new president inherits the last one's budget.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year is locked into mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care among them — that grow on their own to keep pace with the cost of living. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $4 trillion.
Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about five hundred words and never mentions the deficit once.
Tim Burchett said he'd probably vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added about $1 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.

Andy Biggs Wants to Erase a Third of Arizona's Budget and Says No One Will Pay for It

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:47:38 +0000

On August 17, Andy Biggs posted a video of himself sitting in a car at a gas station, making his pitch to Arizona voters:

"I want to eliminate the state income tax and without raising any other taxes. That's where I am."

Two things about that sentence deserve a closer look. The first is the math. The second is the gas station.

The $6 billion hole

Repeal would strip almost $6 billion in state revenue — one-third of the current state budget, critics told 12News. The Legislature's own budget staff back that up: individual income tax brought in $5.48 billion in fiscal 2025, against $16.59 billion in total general-fund revenue — 33 cents of every dollar the state collects.

Biggs has been making this pledge since the night he won the Republican primary on July 21. He has not presented a full plan. What he has said is that he'd do it "incrementally," and that the replacement money would come from three places:

eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" in the state's Medicaid program
"streamlining government"
and, per a spokesman, "better utilization of state resources like land and minerals"

That is a third of a state budget being covered by two slogans and some mining rights.

David Lujan, who runs the Arizona Center for Economic Progress and Childrens' Action Alliance, was blunt. He is a former Democratic lawmaker who served in the Legislature alongside Biggs:

"It's not a plan. It's really just a tax shift to everyday Arizonans."

"You're going to have to fill that gap someplace. It's either going to come from cuts to schools and public safety or you're going to have to shift the tax cut to somewhere else, and it's most likely going to be an increase in the sales tax."

What happens to your city

Here's the part that doesn't fit in a gas-station video.

Arizona's income tax funds state shared revenue — the checks the state writes to cities and towns. Take away the income tax and you take away the checks.

Arizona cities could lose $900 million a year, according to Dallin Overstreet, an independent public finance analyst:

"Eliminate the income tax and you eliminate the largest slice of the checks that fund municipal police, fire, and streets, unless the state backfills them."

Note the last four words. If the state does backfill them, the $6 billion hole gets bigger, not smaller.

And if Arizona tried to replace all that lost revenue through sales taxes, Overstreet's analysis finds the state would end up with the highest sales tax rates in the country. Sales taxes hit low- and middle-income families hardest, because they spend a larger share of what they earn.

So the "no other taxes" promise runs into a wall: either services get cut, or somebody's taxes go up. There is no third door.

Who actually gets the money

Even if the plan worked exactly as advertised, it wouldn't work for most Arizonans.

According to estimates from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, with no state income tax:

Household income	Tax cut
$65,000	$730
$450,000	$7,500

A household making seven times as much gets a cut ten times as large. That's not an accident of the design — it's what happens when you eliminate a tax that scales with income and lean on one that doesn't.

The one-way ratchet

Lujan raised a point Arizona voters should sit with, because it outlasts any one governor.

In Arizona, a simple majority of the Legislature can cut taxes. Raising them requires two-thirds of each chamber — and three-fourths if the governor vetoes. (12News reported the threshold as 75%; the state constitution says two-thirds.)

"If this turns out to be a mistake, which I think it will be, it is a very difficult mistake to erase."

Repeal the income tax and you have effectively written a permanent, one-third-smaller state budget into Arizona law. Schools, universities, public safety and the shared revenue that keeps cities solvent would be competing over what's left, more or less forever, because putting the tax back would need a supermajority that essentially never exists.

About that gas station

Biggs chose to film his affordability message at a gas station. In the video he claimed Gov. Katie Hobbs "wants to double your gas taxes."

That refers to a bill Hobbs cosponsored eight years ago as a state senator, which would have raised Arizona's gas tax from 18 cents to 36 cents a gallon to maintain highways. It never got a hearing.

Meanwhile, the actual price on the sign behind him: according to AAA Arizona, unleaded in Phoenix averaged $4.48 on August 17 — more than a dollar a gallon higher than a year earlier, driven up by President Trump's war in Iran.

Biggs picked a backdrop that documents a real, current price increase Arizonans are paying right now, in order to attack an eight-year-old bill that never received a hearing.

The federal version of the same idea

This isn't a new instinct for Biggs. In Congress, he cosponsored the "Fair Tax Act," which would abolish the federal income tax and replace it with a 23% national consumption tax — a bill that has been introduced in every Congress for more than 25 years and has never gone anywhere.

The difference is that in Washington the idea was symbolic. As governor of Arizona, with a Republican Legislature, it wouldn't be.

The rest of the record

Biggs spent 14 years in the Arizona Legislature, rising to Senate president, then 10 years in Congress. Arizonans have a long record to judge:

Arizona doctors have publicly warned voters about his health care record.
He tried to ban abortion nationwide, and now wants to govern a state whose voters approved abortion rights.
The Republican who wrote a bill to rein in abusive local police in Colorado City says Biggs killed it: "Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys."

What Arizona should ask

The question isn't whether Arizonans would like to pay less tax. Of course they would.

The question is the one 12News put in its headline and Biggs still hasn't answered: how would he cover the $6 billion hole?

Until there's an answer, "eliminate the income tax without raising any other taxes" isn't a plan. It's a sentence.

Arizona deserves a governor who shows the arithmetic before asking for the job.

Source

Andy Biggs pledges to repeal Arizona income tax. How would he cover the $6 billion hole? — 12News (KPNX), August 2026.

Six Companies Got $83 Billion in Tax Breaks Last Year. That's Almost $1 of Every $5 the Government Collects From All Corporations Combined.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:25:38 +0000

When Republicans sold Trump's budget bill, the promise was that cutting business taxes would come back to you — in wages, in prices, in jobs.

The receipts for 2025 are in. Here is where the money went.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has tracked $204 billion in federal tax breaks disclosed by publicly traded U.S. companies for 2025 so far. Six companies took $83 billion of it:

Company	2025 federal tax breaks
Microsoft	$18.7 billion
Alphabet (Google)	$18.4 billion
Amazon	$17.4 billion
Meta (Facebook)	$13.7 billion
JPMorgan Chase	$8.3 billion
Nvidia	$6.8 billion

Microsoft's $18.7 billion is a record high for single-year federal tax breaks for one publicly traded company. Not a record for Microsoft. A record, period.

Put $83 Billion Next to What the Government Actually Collects

Here's the number that should stop you.

That $83 billion — six companies — "represents nearly 18 percent, or almost $1 out of every $5, of total federal corporation tax collections."

Read that again. The breaks handed to six firms are worth close to a fifth of everything Washington collects in corporate income tax from every corporation in America.

It is also more than the entire annual discretionary budget of the U.S. Department of Education.

"This is an extraordinary concentration of tax benefits among some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world," said ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner.

And 88 Profitable Companies Paid Nothing at All

The $83 billion is the top of the pile. The bottom is worse.

At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025, on more than $105 billion in U.S. pretax income.

Profitable. Not struggling, not losing money — profitable, to the tune of $105 billion, and their federal income tax bill was nothing.

The list includes Tesla ($5.7 billion in U.S. income), United Airlines ($4.3 billion), Southwest Airlines, Yum! Brands, Live Nation, PayPal, Block, Honeywell, HP, CVS Health, Walt Disney, Palantir, Coinbase, 3M, Duke Energy, Halliburton and others.

If you worked a full year and paid federal income tax, you paid more in federal income tax than Tesla did.

Where This Came From

ITEP names the cause. Corporate tax avoidance, it writes, "appears" to have increased in the most recent year, and "this is at least in part due to two separate packages of corporate tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration": last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The specific machinery, per ITEP:

Accelerated depreciation — used by more than half of the 88, cutting $11.4 billion
The new R&D expensing provision — 30+ companies, $4.4 billion
Research and experimentation credits — 40+ companies, $1.6 billion
Foreign-Derived Deduction Eligible Income — 10+ companies
Executive stock option deductions — more than a dozen companies

That last one deserves a sentence of its own. When a company's stock goes up and executives cash in their options, the company gets to deduct it. The richer the executives get, the smaller the company's tax bill.

Separately, ITEP found four big tech companies avoided $51 billion in taxes and paid a combined effective tax rate of 4.9 percent — with much of that "likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act".

4.9 percent. Lower than the rate on a part-time job.

What Was Cut to Pay For It

None of this happened in a vacuum. The same budget bill that produced these breaks paid for them.

It cut Medicaid. It cut food assistance. And Republicans then let the health insurance tax credits lapse, which is why premiums are spiking for millions of people who buy their own coverage.

And it was written in a way designed to keep you from reading it. One provision buried on page 1,081 carried a 10-year prison sentence — for leaking tax return information.

A year on, Wisconsinites marked the bill's first birthday by parking a decommissioned ambulance outside Republican Party headquarters.

The Promise and the Receipt

The argument for all of this was never "let's hand Microsoft $18.7 billion." It was that lower business taxes would lift everyone — that the money would flow into higher pay, more hiring, cheaper goods.

Check your own numbers against that promise. Groceries. Rent. Your premium. Your paycheck.

Then look at the table at the top of this page.

The money did not trickle anywhere. It stopped at six companies, and it is worth almost a fifth of what the entire American corporate sector pays in federal income tax.

That was not an accident or a loophole nobody noticed. It is what the law does. It is what it was written to do, and every Republican who voted for the budget bill voted for this outcome — whether or not they told their voters that's what it was.

Sources

As Americans Struggled to Buy Basics, These 6 Companies Got $83 Billion in Tax Breaks Last Year — Common Dreams, August 2026
Six Companies Reaped $83 Billion in Federal Tax Breaks in 2025 — Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, August 14, 2026
At Least 88 Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Zero Federal Income Tax in 2025 — ITEP

In January Jim Pillen Said Nebraska Had "Bushel Baskets and Bushel Baskets of Money." In August His Agencies Proposed Employees Sleep in Their Cars.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:52:56 +0000

On January 20, 2026, Jim Pillen held a telephone town hall and told Nebraskans the state's budget shortfall was something the press made up.

"Quite simply, we've got bushel baskets and bushel baskets of money. And when these people try to make it like we're broke, it's just crazy. It's unacceptable."

Six months later, in July, Pillen sent state agencies a memo. His State Budget Division would withhold at least 5% of their monthly allotments, and most state hiring was frozen.

On Friday, Nebraska Public Media obtained the agencies' written responses. This is what bushel baskets of money look like when the bill arrives.

What agencies said they would do

The Nebraska Board of Barber Examiners proposed doing fewer inspections to save on travel — and that when employees do have to travel, they sleep in their cars instead of getting hotel rooms.

The State Electrical Division will reissue used uniforms rather than buy new ones, so long as they're still clean.

The rest of the list:

The Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired will discontinue a pilot Support Services Provider program for the DeafBlind community.
The State Fire Marshal will cut a full-time deputy position and an accountant, and limit staff training.
The Nebraska State College System will freeze 14 full-time positions and leave 12 more vacant.
The State Historical Society will cut about $240,000 by eliminating positions — then raise museum admission from $5 to $7 for adults and from $3 to $4 for children, and double the History Nebraska magazine from $35 to $70.
The Department of Revenue proposed closing its offices in North Platte and Norfolk.
The Tourism Commission will eliminate positions.
The Public Employee Retirement Services will install software to pre-answer calls so it needs fewer call-center staff, and cut back in-person seminars for members — even though the educational outreach is required by statute.

And a string of new fees on Nebraskans: insurance licensing fees up $2.2 million a year, contractor registration up from $25 to $40 (the Labor Department wants the Legislature to take it to $100 for a year), broker-dealer and adviser fees up more than $3 million over the next few years, and $325,000 in unspecified fee increases at the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment.

Pillen's office called all of it "hypothetical fiscal restraint considerations" requiring "substantial analysis." He asked for the plans. His agencies wrote them.

The one that hits hardest: seniors and disabled Nebraskans would start paying property tax

Buried in the Department of Revenue's response is the most consequential item.

Nebraska's homestead exemption relieves property taxes for seniors and people with disabilities, and the credits have been based on income — the lowest earners have received a 100% exemption. Revenue's proposal narrows eligibility so that everyone with a homestead exemption would pay at least 10% of their property taxes before credits apply.

That means the poorest elderly and disabled homeowners in Nebraska, who currently owe nothing, would start owing something.

Remember what Pillen ran on. Property tax relief is his signature issue — it is the first item on his report card, and the story there is that he promised to fix property taxes and reached for sales taxes on nearly everything else instead.

Now the budget squeeze he ordered has produced a proposal to raise property taxes on disabled Nebraskans and low-income seniors — the narrowest, most sympathetic group the state protects.

Where the money actually went

Pillen keeps describing this as a spending problem. It started as a tax problem.

Nebraska walked into the 2023 legislative session with a record $1.9 billion surplus — nearly 17% of a year's budget. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documented, that surplus came from one-time federal pandemic relief, not from recurring growth.

Lawmakers spent it anyway — permanently. LB 754 lowered both personal and corporate income tax rates to 3.99% by 2027. LB 243 expanded property tax credits and pulled funding away from public schools.

The promised boom did not arrive. Revenue slowed, costs rose, and to get through last year lawmakers flat-funded most agencies and raided $150 million from cash funds, including the rainy day fund. When a bill came up — LB 171 — that would have simply paused the next round of income tax cuts, the Legislature declined to consider it.

As CBPP put it: when one-time money is used to fund permanent tax cuts, the math doesn't hold, and the bill eventually comes due.

Nebraska is now $208 million in the hole this year and facing an additional $840 million deficit in the next two-year budget. The income tax rates keep stepping down on schedule.

A Republican auditor told him no

The sharpest response in the whole cache came from Mike Foley, Nebraska's auditor of public accounts — and a Republican who spent eight years as lieutenant governor under Pete Ricketts before voters returned him to the auditor's office.

Foley refused, over five pages. He listed what his office has caught — state employees using state vehicles for personal use, ineligible former employees claiming benefits, nonprofits misusing funds — and pointed out that a 5% cut would cost him at least three auditors.

"Such a 'penny-wise and pound-foolish' approach to budgeting would unquestionably jeopardize countless taxpayer dollars by dramatically increasing their risk of undetected (much less unprevented) loss or misappropriation."

Foley also described what happened when his office audited the WIC nutrition program: rather than answer the findings, he wrote, Department of Health and Human Services managers "enlisted Federal bureaucrats in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade this office from publicizing some of the more startling details contained in the document."

Foley did not object to the policy itself — he told Pillen the call for fiscal restraint was prudent and timely. He objected to taking it out of the office that finds the waste.

Secretary of State Bob Evnen declined to propose reductions too. And four of the largest agencies in state government — Health and Human Services, the State Patrol, Administrative Services, and Motor Vehicles — didn't submit plans at all.

Meanwhile the Military Department warned that the Governor's Emergency Fund, which pays for disaster response, cannot absorb more cuts. It projects just $1 million left in fiscal year 2027-28, assuming no new disasters.

Nebraska is a state with floods and tornadoes. One million dollars is not a disaster fund.

The pattern

This is the same governor who, in January, told a phone line full of his own constituents that the shortfall was a press invention — on the same call where he used an ableist slur three times and proposed cutting roughly $152 million from the agency that runs Medicaid, child welfare, and services for people with disabilities.

It is the same governor who turned down $18 million in federal money to feed low-income Nebraska kids over the summer because, as he put it, "I don't believe in welfare." He reversed only after a petition and after sitting down with children who were going hungry.

The through-line isn't fiscal discipline. Pillen is not asking wealthy Nebraskans to give back any part of a tax cut that is still phasing in. He is asking a state agency's inspectors to sleep in their cars, asking children to pay a dollar more to see the state museum, asking disabled homeowners to start paying property tax, and asking the state auditor to fire the people who find waste.

He is running for a second term in 2026. The bushel baskets are gone, and Nebraskans can see who is being handed the empty one.

Source

Nebraska Public Media, "Following Pillen's budget memo, Nebraska leaders detail plans to cut staff, increase fees" by Jackie Ourada and Noelle Annonen (August 15, 2026). Photo: Nebraska State Capitol / Nebraska Public Media.

Tracey Mann Manages an Opportunity Zone Tax Fund. He Voted to Make the Tax Break Permanent.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:54:14 +0000

There's a tax break in the federal code called the opportunity zone. Here's the short version of how it works.

You sell something for a profit — stock, a building, a business. Normally you owe capital gains tax on that profit. But if you take the money and put it into a fund that invests inside a government-designated "opportunity zone," you get to put off paying that tax. And if you hold the investment for ten years, the profit you make on that investment comes out completely tax-free.

It was sold to the public as a way to get money flowing into poor neighborhoods.

Tracey Mann doesn't just invest in opportunity zones. According to his own filings with the Clerk of the House, he runs one.

What his financial disclosure actually says

Mann's most recent annual financial disclosure, which he signed on August 1, 2025, has a section near the back listing every organization where he holds a position. Three of the entries are opportunity zone vehicles:

Manager — Castle Rock QOF, LLC
Member — AMA Austin QOF, LLC
Member — Del Monte Partners QOZB, LLC

"QOF" is a Qualified Opportunity Fund. "QOZB" is a Qualified Opportunity Zone Business. Mann's own filing describes Del Monte Partners as a "Qualified Opportunity Zone Business investing in property in Austin, Texas."

He isn't a passive investor who bought into somebody else's fund. He is listed as the manager of one of them.

The properties held through those funds are spelled out too. Del Monte Property 1, Property 2, Property 3, and a parcel called Stiles Cove — all in Austin, Texas.

That's worth sitting with for a second. Mann represents the Big First, the 60-county district covering most of western and central Kansas. Not one opportunity zone property on his disclosure is anywhere near it.

Neither is much of the rest of his real estate. The filing lists rental and development property in Austin, Texas; Liberty, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri; Merriam, Kansas; and Topeka, Kansas. Merriam is a Kansas City suburb. Topeka is 100 miles east of Salina, where Mann lives. His real estate portfolio is an eastern-Kansas-and-Texas portfolio. The people he represents live west of all of it.

He also carries nine separate commercial real estate loans on that filing — six from Keystone Bank and three from Central Bank of the Midwest — four of them in the $250,001–$500,000 range.

In 2021, he cosponsored a bill to extend the break. A watchdog called it out.

On June 30, 2021, Mann signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 970, the Opportunity Zone Extension Act of 2021. Congress's own summary of the bill opens:

"This bill extends for two years the election and capital gain deferral periods for qualified opportunity zones."

That is the exact tax benefit Mann's funds exist to capture.

Mother Jones caught it, and in February 2022 KCUR followed up. Its report noted that Mann's disclosure at the time showed he held as much as $515,000 in opportunity zone ventures.

Donald Sherman, senior vice president and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, put it plainly:

"Mr. Mann stands to benefit significantly from the extension of these tax benefits. And it's fair to question why he would co-sponsor legislation that has such a significant impact on his own bottom line."

Sherman's prescription was that Mann get out: "I think disinvestment would be the cleanest and, sort of, the 'highest' standard of ethics."

Mann did not respond to KCUR's request for comment. And he did not take Sherman's advice. Three and a half years later he was still listed as the manager of one opportunity fund and a member of two more entities.

The program's critics say it mostly funds nice buildings

The pitch for opportunity zones was investment in struggling communities. Brett Theodos of the Urban Institute, who studies this program for a living, told KCUR what it turned into:

"It's a really open-ended tax incentive, so you could use it for things that might be considered in the community's interest. But, you can use it for things that you might begin to question why it is that we're subsidizing these as a government. Like, luxury housing, or you know, high end spaces, or other things like self-storage lockers."

There's no requirement that an opportunity zone project help anybody who already lives in the zone. There's no requirement that it create a job. The tax break is the tax break.

Then he voted to make it permanent

The opportunity zone program was written with an expiration date. It was supposed to wind down.

It doesn't anymore.

On July 3, 2025, Mann voted for Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 218 to 214. Buried inside that bill was a rewrite of the opportunity zone rules. The IRS explains the result: the bill made the tax break permanent, scrapping the sunset that would have ended it. Governors start nominating a fresh batch of zones on July 1, 2026, the new map takes effect January 1, 2027, and a new round follows every ten years after that, forever.

A tax shelter that was scheduled to close is now a permanent fixture of the tax code. Mann, who manages a fund built on it, voted yes.

That same bill is the one that cut Medicaid and food assistance. Mann told KSNT in May 2025 that Democrats warning about Medicaid cuts "continue to lie and fearmonger." Then he voted for it anyway.

He is also, as of May 2026, a co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Real Estate Caucus — a commercial real estate broker by trade, helping steer the House's real estate agenda.

He has filed for a late-disclosure extension every single year

Members of the House have to file an annual report of what they own. It's due May 15. You can ask the Ethics Committee for up to 90 more days.

Mann has asked for the maximum every year he has been in Congress:

Report year	Due	Extension requested	New deadline
2021	05/15/2022	05/12/2022	08/13/2022
2022	05/15/2023	04/27/2023	08/13/2023
2023	05/15/2024	05/06/2024	08/13/2024
2024	05/15/2025	04/16/2025	08/13/2025
2025	05/15/2026	05/06/2026	08/13/2026

Five for five. Every one of them pushed to the last day the rules allow.

Look at what that meant this year. The report covering 2025 — the year he voted to make his own tax break permanent — is due August 13, 2026.

Kansas Republicans voted in their primary on August 4, 2026. Mann won it.

His voters went to the polls nine days before they could see what he owned during the year he cast that vote. Nothing about that is against the rules. He's allowed to ask for the extension, and he asked for it.

But he asked for it every year, always for the full 90 days, always landing after the moment it would have mattered most.

This keeps happening

Mann is not the only one. We've written about Nick Begich, who owns up to $1 million in Bitcoin and then wrote the bill ordering the U.S. Treasury to buy 200,000 coins a year. We've written about Vivek Ramaswamy's plan to wipe out Ohio's capital gains tax, which would have saved him roughly $5.8 million on the gains in his own released tax returns.

The pattern is always the same. The policy is described in the language of helping ordinary people — investment in poor neighborhoods, growth, opportunity. The person pushing it happens to be positioned to collect.

Mann has been told about this, by name, by an ethics watchdog, in public, four years ago. He was told the clean move was to get out.

He is still the manager of the fund.

Source

Steve Kraske and Zach Wilson, "U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas supports bill that could lead to conflict of interest," KCUR, February 28, 2022. Photo: Ike Hayman / U.S. House of Representatives. Mann's holdings and positions are from his own filings with the Clerk of the House.

700 People in Casa Grande Lost Their Jobs. Six Weeks Later, Juan Ciscomani Brought the Speaker of the House There to Celebrate.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:07:00 +0000

On June 23, 2026, Lucid Motors told its workers in Casa Grande, Arizona that about 700 of them were losing their jobs. The electric-vehicle maker was cutting 18 percent of its U.S. workforce. The company said the move was about aligning production with demand, reducing inventory and adapting to "declining market conditions."

Casa Grande is a small city in Pinal County, and Lucid was supposed to be its future.

On August 5 — six weeks later — Juan Ciscomani brought Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Casa Grande for a roundtable about how well the economy is going.

Not to meet the laid-off workers. To a different factory, to talk about the tax law that Ciscomani had voted for.

What the town actually looked like that summer

Local TV went to Casa Grande the same day the layoffs were announced and talked to people.

Melody Johnson's husband was one of the workers who lost his job.

"Every time we were holding our breath. We're still in shock and we have to figure out how we're gonna pay our mortgage and get insurance again. That's been the biggest thing. We've taken a huge hit and we're just trying to pick up the pieces right now."

Michael Hill manages the Cook-E-Jar Bakery and Cafe. He said Lucid workers had been as much as 15 percent of his regular business. He also said he knew bartenders who had landed jobs at the plant and were thrilled about it, "only to be let go shortly after."

Roy Delsi, a longtime resident, put it shorter: "If you want to get laid off, work there." And: "Now it looks like it's gonna be a black eye to the community."

That's what 700 jobs leaving a small city sounds like from the inside.

The part Ciscomani owns

Casa Grande is in Ciscomani's district. He says so himself — his own office titled the August press release "Ciscomani Hosts Speaker Johnson, Secretary Bessent at Rural 6th District Manufacturing Facility."

He also voted, as part of Trump's budget bill, to phase out the clean-energy tax credits that had been fueling the electric-vehicle business — including the credit of up to $7,500 people got for buying one, which the IRS says is "not available for vehicles acquired after Sept. 30, 2025."

What happened next is not a matter of opinion. Cox Automotive, which tracks car sales for the industry, found that electric vehicles were 10.5 percent of new U.S. vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2025 — and 5.8 percent in the fourth, immediately after those incentives were revoked at the start of October. Q4 EV sales came in at 234,000 vehicles, 36 percent below the year before.

Lucid saw it coming. As E&E News reported in July, the company warned investors in February that the tax law's elimination of the EV credit and of penalties for emissions violations, along with other factors, could "reduce demand for our products and have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, results of operations and financial condition."

Ciscomani saw it coming too. Before the final vote, he was one of 13 House Republicans who signed a letter urging the Senate to scale back the clean-energy cuts in the bill they had just passed.

Then he voted for the bill anyway. Asked about it afterward by E&E News, he said: "I'm very proud of that whole bill."

It is not the only Ciscomani claim that comes apart when somebody checks it. His campaign's ad against JoAnna Mendoza put a word in her mouth that she never said.

He wasn't the only one who noticed the timing

The day Johnson and Bessent flew in, Senator Ruben Gallego sent Bessent a letter asking him to spend part of the trip somewhere other than a photo op.

Gallego wrote that since June, multiple clean-energy manufacturing and generation companies had announced cancellations and workforce cuts in Pinal County, and that "over 700 workers have been laid off in just the last two months." Nationally, he put the damage at 223 manufacturing, clean energy and industrial projects facing cancellation or delay, at least $82.8 billion in capital investment, and as many as 111,765 jobs.

"These job losses will negatively impact the entire local economy," he wrote.

The roundtable was closed to the media, and according to the Arizona Daily Star, about 10 business leaders took part in it — including Frito-Lay and Lucid itself. The people Lucid had laid off six weeks earlier were not among them.

What they said instead

Here is Ciscomani, in his own press release, from the town where 700 jobs had just vanished:

"I'm incredibly honored to have welcomed Speaker Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Arizona's Sixth District to see the real, tangible impact of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. Manufacturing has long been a cornerstone of rural Arizona's economy, supporting hundreds of local jobs and strengthening communities across our district."

Speaker Johnson said American manufacturing is "roaring back to life."

Bessent said "the promise of the American Dream is extending to every factory floor."

Six weeks earlier, on another factory floor in the same town, 700 people had been told to clear out their lockers.

Why this one matters

Every politician holds events at factories. That's not the story.

The story is that Ciscomani had a choice about which factory. One of them is a Frito-Lay plant with a good news release attached. The other is an EV plant where his own vote helped knock the legs out from under demand, and where Melody Johnson's family is now trying to figure out the mortgage.

He picked the one with the Speaker of the House in it.

When the tax credits propping up his district's electric-vehicle plant were on the chopping block, Ciscomani wrote a letter saying cutting them was a bad idea, voted to cut them anyway, and now says he's proud of the whole thing.

Voters in the 6th District will decide in November whether "proud of that whole bill" is what they wanted their vote to buy.

Sources

Lucid Motors will be laying off about 700 people at its factory in Casa Grande — KJZZ, June 23, 2026
'Still in shock': Casa Grande feels impact after Lucid Motors layoffs — Micaela Marshall, Arizona's Family, June 23, 2026
Megabill vote plagues Arizona moderate's reelection fight — Timothy Cama, E&E News by POLITICO, July 17, 2026
Speaker Johnson echoes Trump's communism rhetoric in Ciscomani stump — Hannah Cree, Arizona Daily Star, August 6, 2026

Photo: Arizona's Family (KPHO).

Sarah Sanders Gave Arkansas Two Voucher Programs. A Republican Wants a Third — and the Selling Point Is That It Has Fewer Rules.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:32:22 +0000

On August 3, the Arkansas House and Senate education committees met at the state Capitol. The next day, the news out of that meeting was that a legislative panel had approved a request to study a new $100 million tax credit for private school and homeschool families.

That would be Arkansas's third program for subsidizing private education costs.

The state already runs Educational Freedom Accounts, the voucher program Sarah Sanders created with the LEARNS Act in 2023. Arkansas has also opted into the new federal private school voucher that starts January 1. Now a Republican state representative wants to add a third — and his argument for it is worth reading closely, because he is not hiding what it's for.

What's being proposed

Rep. Brit McKenzie of Rogers asked for the interim study. The proposal outlines:

A tax credit worth up to $3,000 per child for education expenses — tuition, fees, textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, educational therapies, transportation, and technology.
A $100 million program starting in 2027.
Expansion to "uncapped universal availability" in 2029.
The credit would be refundable — meaning, per the study proposal, families could claim it even if they have no income tax liability at all, and get the balance as a payment.

McKenzie has not written a bill. "I would love (lawmakers) to consider" it, he said, but added: "I have no bills drafted for next session." What he has is a study, approved, with a mandate to gather input from state agencies, education providers, parent advocacy groups, and other states.

The pitch is that it skips the paperwork

Here is McKenzie's stated reason for wanting a second state program alongside the one Arkansas already has:

"Basically, this would be for anyone interested in school choice and not in EFA."

He said lawmakers have heard from homeschool families reluctant to apply for Educational Freedom Accounts because the program "did create regulation whereas they didn't have it before."

That is the sales pitch: a version with fewer rules attached.

It's worth knowing how few rules we're talking about. Educational Freedom Account families do have to take a norm-referenced test each year — but they get to choose which test. In June, lawmakers tightened things slightly: no using the money on sports that "limit participation based on tryouts or ability," and pre-approval now required to be reimbursed for anything the Arkansas Department of Education doesn't count as a "core educational expense."

Those are the "regulatory hurdles" the new program is designed to route around.

McKenzie's own framing was blunt: "My main thing is, I want a buffet of education freedom in Arkansas."

Meanwhile, the first program keeps growing

Arkansas is not short on ways to spend money on private education right now.

Educational Freedom Accounts opened to every K-12 student in the state last year. Lawmakers have approved up to $379 million for 2026-27, with most participants getting $7,208 each, and more than 54,000 students have applied.

Getting there took three separate votes. As the Arkansas Advocate laid out, lawmakers budgeted more than $187 million for the program in April 2025 — then had to add $90 million that June and another $32 million in January 2026 when that wasn't enough. Final cost for the year: more than $309 million. The governor's budget then asked for at least $309 million again, plus $70 million more set aside from surplus for "anticipated program growth."

The Advocate reports bipartisan worry about this. Democrats and rural Republicans have raised concerns about what else in the state budget gets squeezed, and the paper notes a similar program has contributed to budget problems in Arizona.

Into that, a proposal for $100 million more — heading for "uncapped."

Who the money has actually been going to

The case for vouchers is that they rescue kids from bad public schools. Arkansas's own numbers say otherwise.

According to the state Department of Education, 95% of participants in the voucher program's first year had never attended a public school before receiving a voucher. The state's most recent annual report says 12% of 2024-25 participants had previously attended a public school. The program is not moving children out of struggling schools. It is paying tuition bills for families who had already chosen private school.

And oversight of where that money lands has been thin. A private school in the Delta collected more than $300,000 in voucher money while its founder directed students to attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — she pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and the state has no record of ever visiting the school or investigating it.

That is the program a new proposal would sit beside, with fewer requirements.

Even a conservative school choice group says no

The most interesting opposition isn't from the left.

Opportunity Arkansas, a conservative advocacy group that supports school choice, came out against the idea. CEO Nic Horton said the group stands "in full support of protecting and preserving" the Educational Freedom Account program, and added: "We see no reason to change course now."

Horton's other objection is about money. He argues state leaders should stay focused on eliminating the Arkansas income tax — and that a new personal education tax credit would slow that down. Sanders has approved four income tax cuts since taking office in 2023 and has pledged to phase the income tax out.

That is the collision at the center of this. You cannot promise to phase out the income tax, run a voucher program that has already needed two emergency funding votes on top of its budget in a single year, and bolt on a $100 million refundable credit headed for "uncapped," all at once. Something gives.

From the other direction, Rep. Jessie McGruder, a Democrat from Marion who sits on the Education Committee, put it simply:

"I can't understand why we need another tax credit."

He also went after the premise directly. Money going to private schools and homeschools should face more scrutiny, not less: "I do not think we need fewer hoops to jump through. I think we need more hoops to jump through, because when we're spending taxpayers dollars, we need to have accountability in place."

Where the governor stands

Sanders has not endorsed this. Her spokesman, Sam Dubke, said she is interested in the study's findings, and declined to say whether she'd support the program. His full statement was a résumé:

"Governor Sanders has supported education freedom by establishing the EFA program, now used by nearly 50,000 students to attend the school of their choice, and by opting Arkansas into President Trump's federal tax credit scholarship program for school choice, and looks forward to reviewing this study's results when it is complete."

Read that again. It is not a position on the proposal. It is a list of the two reasons this proposal exists.

Sanders built the first program. She opted Arkansas into the second in January, saying she was "excited to see that with President Trump back in office, he's taking the education freedom movement nationwide." That federal credit — the first national private school voucher in American history, with no cap on what it can drain from the Treasury — starts in Arkansas on January 1.

A third program is now a live idea in the legislature because the first two made it one. "Looks forward to reviewing this study's results" is what a governor says when the answer is probably yes and the price tag isn't public yet.

Nine out of ten American children go to a public school, and Arkansas is no exception. Their families have spent three years watching the state build program after program for the other one in ten — each one bigger than the last, each one carrying fewer requirements than the state program that came first, and each one drawing on the same budget that pays for their kids' classrooms. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by Josh Snyder for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Arkansas legislative panel approves study of proposed $100 million school choice tax credit." Photo: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe.

Adrian Smith Advertised His School Voucher Bill as '$10 Billion in Annual Tax Credits.' The Version Congress Passed Has No Limit at All.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:17:48 +0000

In less than five months, a brand new federal program starts handing out money. Twenty-seven states have already signed up for it. It is the first national private school voucher in American history.

Most people have never heard of it.

That is not an accident. It was not passed as an education bill. It was slipped into the tax section of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the giant budget bill Trump signed on July 4, 2025. If you were following the news that summer, you were hearing about Medicaid cuts and food aid. This was in the same bill, on a different page.

Here is what it does, in plain English — and what it takes out of all our pockets.

How it works

Starting January 1, 2027, you can give up to $1,700 to a nonprofit called a "Scholarship Granting Organization." That group hands out scholarships — vouchers — that families use for private school tuition and other school costs.

Then the federal government gives you the entire $1,700 back on your taxes.

Not a deduction. Not a percentage. The whole thing. It is a dollar-for-dollar credit worth 100% of what you gave, and it comes straight off your tax bill. You are not richer than before — you gave away $1,700 and got $1,700 back. But the donation cost you nothing. The government paid for it.

There is no other charity in America that works this way. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy put it, there is no other cause — "not children's hospitals, veterans' groups, or disaster relief" — where the federal government picks up the entire tab for your gift.

A few details that matter:

The $1,700 is per person, regardless of filing status. A married couple filing jointly gets $1,700, not $3,400.
It is nonrefundable. You need to owe federal income tax to use it. If you owe little or nothing, this tax break is not for you.
Contributions have to be cash. An earlier version let people donate stock, which would have let wealthy donors dodge capital gains taxes on top of everything else. That part got cut.
You claim it when you file your 2027 return, in 2028.

This is not like the state voucher programs you've heard about

A lot of states run vouchers. Arizona started the first tax-credit scholarship program back in 1997, and by August 2025 there were 22 such programs operating across 18 states.

But every one of those is a state program, paid for out of a state budget, on terms a state legislature wrote. Most cap the total credits they hand out in a year, and those caps run from under $2 million up to $540 million; some states set no cap either. Lawmakers argue about that number every session, and voters can throw them out over it.

The new federal program has no cap at all.

Not a small cap. Not a generous cap. None. Each person is limited to $1,700, but there is no limit on how many people can do it, and no limit on the total amount of money it pulls out of the U.S. Treasury. The more people who claim it, the more it costs — forever, with no vote required.

That was a choice, and it was made late. The version the House passed had a safeguard: total payouts capped at roughly $5 billion a year. The bill's own author had written a $10 billion annual cap into his original version. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled the provision broke the chamber's budget rules, and senators rewrote it to survive — a rewrite that threw the cap out entirely.

The House version would also have expired after a few years. The final one is permanent.

What it costs all of us

Congress's own scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates the program will drain about $26 billion from federal revenue over ten years. That is the official number.

Outside analysts think it could be far bigger, because with no ceiling, the cost depends entirely on how many people sign up — and there is a large, well-funded movement whose whole job is getting people to sign up. ITEP ran the math. If roughly 59 million taxpayers who like the idea of vouchers all claimed the credit, it would cost $101 billion a year. If only half of them do, it is nearly $51 billion a year. Even if just 5 million people participate — roughly the number of children already in private school — it runs past $8 billion a year.

Put the high end next to what the federal government actually spends on schools:

Program	Annual federal spending
Title I, for schools serving low-income kids	$18.4 billion
IDEA state grants, for kids with disabilities	$14.6 billion
The new voucher credit (high estimate)	up to $51 billion

One uncapped tax credit for private schools could cost more than the two biggest federal K-12 programs combined — the money for poor districts and the money for children with disabilities.

And here is the part that reaches everyone: your state does not have to opt in for you to pay for this. States choose whether to participate. But a taxpayer in a state that opted out can still donate to a scholarship group in a state that opted in, claim the credit, and shrink the federal Treasury by $1,700. The families in the non-participating state get nothing. The bill still comes to everybody.

"Low-income" can mean half a million dollars

The program is sold as help for low-income families. Read the definition.

A student qualifies if the household earns up to 300% of the area median gross income. Not 300% of the poverty line, which is what most state programs use. Three times the median — the middle — for wherever you live.

The Congressional Research Service spells out what that means. If the median income in your area is $60,000, a household making $180,000 qualifies. If the median is $100,000, a household making $300,000 qualifies. In 2025, the highest area median income in the country was $195,200, in Santa Clara County, California. Three times that is more than $585,000.

One more wrinkle: area median income does not change based on how many people are in your household. A single adult and a family of six face the same cutoff.

Nobody has to answer for the money

State voucher programs usually come with strings. Private schools taking the money might have to be accredited, run background checks, or give students the state test.

The federal program has none of that. The Congressional Research Service notes that the law does not place any "requirements on private schools that enroll scholarship recipients." No accreditation. No state tests. No background checks. And a private school does not have to take a scholarship student at all — it can say no and keep taking everyone else's money.

The scholarship groups themselves face a thin set of rules: be a 501(c)(3), keep the money in a separate account, serve at least 10 students at more than one school, and spend at least 90% of the money on scholarships. They keep up to 10% for overhead.

And they must give priority to students who got a scholarship the year before, then to those students' siblings — before any new family is considered. Whoever gets in first stays in first.

We have written about what happens when nobody is watching. An Arkansas private school taking state voucher money had students attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — and the state has no record of ever visiting or investigating it. The Wichita school Iowa candidate Zach Lahn co-founded never sought accreditation, which left it free of state regulation, state tests and any duty to hire licensed teachers.

Where the money actually goes

Every state that has opened vouchers to everyone gets the same result. The money goes to families who were already paying private tuition.

In Arkansas, 95% of voucher users in the program's first year had never attended a public school.
In Florida's first universal year, 69% of new recipients were already in private school. Only 13% had ever attended a public one.
In Iowa, about two-thirds were already in private school.
In Ohio, the share of voucher students who had been in private school the year before jumped from 7% in 2019 to nearly 55% in 2023 — and in Cleveland, the share of voucher users who were low-income fell from 35% to 7%.

For the kids who do switch, the research is not kind. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State professor who spent years evaluating these programs before turning against them, says studies of vouchers in Washington D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio found some of the largest test score drops "ever seen in the research record" — on par, he writes, with what the pandemic did to test scores.

Who wrote it

The House bill behind all this is H.R. 833, the Educational Choice for Children Act. Its author is Adrian Smith, who represents Nebraska's 3rd District.

When he reintroduced it in January 2025, Smith said it was about giving students "a brighter future, no matter their background or address." His press release listed 30 House cosponsors and endorsements from former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and more than 150 national and state groups. It also described his bill as providing "$10 billion in annual tax credits" — a number, a ceiling, a limit.

The law that passed has no such number.

Nebraska voters had already weighed in. In November 2024, they voted to repeal their own state's private school scholarship program, killing its $10 million a year. Colorado and Kentucky voters turned down voucher measures the same night; Nebraska's margin was the widest of the three, 65% to 35%. Nebraska has since opted into the federal program anyway.

The vote, and what happens next

The final bill cleared the House on July 3, 2025 by 218 to 214. Republicans voted 218–2 for it. The Senate had split 50–50 two days earlier, and Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

The Treasury Department is still writing the rules; officials said in June that full guidance is expected by the end of September. Democrats have introduced a repeal bill in both chambers — the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, S.4297 and H.R.9289. Both were referred to committee on the day they were filed and have not moved since.

Meanwhile the state-by-state fight is live. Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity, running for governor, was asked whether her state should join and answered "I would a hundred percent". In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn's push to expand vouchers drew $3 million from Club for Growth and billionaire Jeff Yass. This program is the quiet half of a much louder campaign to take apart the Department of Education.

About 49.6 million American kids go to a public school — around nine in ten. Those schools have to take every child who walks in the door: rich or poor, disabled or not, any faith or none. They are the only schools that do.

Congress just built an unlimited pipeline out of the Treasury and pointed it somewhere else, and it never had to say out loud what it was doing. We deserve better.

Source

Details of the program from the Congressional Research Service report on P.L. 119-21 and The Hechinger Report's explainer, "10 things to know about Trump's new school voucher program." Photo: Alex Brandon/Getty Images.

Keith Self Calls the National Debt "an Existential Threat to Our Republic." He Voted for the $3.4 Trillion Bill, Then Introduced a Bill to Stop Bills Like It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:49:26 +0000

There is a page on Keith Self's official congressional website titled "National Debt." Here is the whole thing:

"Since I retired from the military in 1999, the national debt has tripled. The careless spending by the federal government has led to an existential threat to our Republic. I am committed to promoting pro-growth tax policies, cutting federal spending, and removing burdensome regulations. We must change the trajectory of the national debt before it is too late."

An existential threat. Not a problem, not a concern — a threat to the survival of the country. That is what he tells his constituents the debt is.

Now here is what he has done about it.

2023: he voted no because the deal cut too little

In May 2023, the House passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act — the bipartisan deal that ended the debt ceiling standoff and capped federal spending. It passed 314 to 117.

Seventy-one Republicans voted against it. Self was one of them, and the reason he gave was that the deal cut too little: the day before the vote he called it "the Sleight of Hand Spending Bill," "essentially a spending freeze at the much higher, post-Covid spending levels rather than the lower, Fiscal Year 2022 figures."

That is a hard vote to cast. It meant breaking with his own Speaker on the deal that kept the country from defaulting, and it is the vote of somebody who is at least behaving like the debt is what he says it is.

Hold onto that, because two years later the same congressman faced a much bigger number and did the opposite.

2025: he voted yes on the biggest deficit increase in years

On July 3, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 218 to 214.

Self voted aye.

The Congressional Budget Office's final score of that law, released July 21, 2025, found it would add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years — and leave 10 million more people without health insurance.

Three point four trillion dollars. From the man whose website says careless federal spending is an existential threat to the Republic.

There is no version of the 2023 argument that survives this. If the Fiscal Responsibility Act was too loose to vote for, a bill that adds $3.4 trillion is not a close call. He didn't break with leadership this time. He went along.

2026: he introduced a bill to stop bills like the one he voted for

On July 22, 2026, Self introduced H.R. 9879, the Super Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2026.

Its stated purpose, in the bill's own text, is to amend the existing pay-as-you-go law so that:

"new direct spending and revenue reductions are more than fully offset by reductions in direct spending, increases in revenues, or a combination thereof"

and

"to reduce the accumulation of Federal debt by requiring legislation affecting direct spending or revenues to produce net deficit reduction."

Read that against the calendar. Twelve months after voting for the single largest deficit increase in years, he introduced legislation designed to make that exact kind of bill impossible.

He is not proposing to undo the $3.4 trillion. He is proposing a rule for everybody's future bills, having already gotten his own through under the old rules.

The law he wants to strengthen is already cutting Medicare because of his vote

Here is the detail that makes this more than an ordinary flip-flop.

The Super Pay-As-You-Go Act does not create pay-as-you-go rules from scratch. It amends a law that already exists — the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010. Under that law, when Congress passes something that increases the deficit and doesn't offset it, automatic across-the-board cuts kick in.

Trump's budget bill increased the deficit by $3.4 trillion and was not offset.

So the existing PAYGO law is now pointed at Medicare. According to the Congressional Budget Office, absent future action by Congress, the bill will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to 2034 — because of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010.

That is the same statute Self's July 2026 bill is written to amend and toughen.

He voted for the bill that pulled the trigger on $490 billion in Medicare cuts under the pay-as-you-go law. Twelve months later he introduced legislation to make the pay-as-you-go law stricter. He is not proposing to undo the $3.4 trillion, and he is not proposing to spare Medicare from what his vote set in motion. He is proposing a tighter rule for everybody's future bills, having already gotten his own through under the old one.

This is a pattern, not an accident

Self is not the only one running this play, and we've documented enough of it now to call it a genre. Aaron Bean co-founded the House DOGE Caucus over the national debt in November 2024; twenty months later the debt was $3.9 trillion higher and he had voted for the bill that grew it.

What sets Self's version apart is the paperwork. He didn't just keep saying the words. He wrote the enforcement mechanism, filed it in the House, and put his name on it — twelve months too late to have applied to himself.

If the debt really is an existential threat to the Republic, then July 3, 2025 was the day to act on it. He had a vote that day. He used it the other way.

Sources

Rep. Keith Self's official National Debt issue page and his May 30, 2023 statement on the Fiscal Responsibility Act. House roll call 243 of 2023 (Fiscal Responsibility Act) and 190 of 2025 (One Big Beautiful Bill Act). Bill text of H.R. 9879, the Super Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2026, introduced July 22, 2026, via GovInfo. Photo: Official congressional portrait, 118th Congress.

Ken Paxton's Affordability Plan Is a Tax Break Nine Out of Ten Texans Can't Use

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:20:54 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, Ken Paxton stood on stage at White Oak Music Hall in Houston and told a crowd he had a plan to make life cheaper.

Give him this much: he said the word out loud. President Trump has spent the summer dismissing "affordability" as a word "made up by the Democrats", and told his own Cabinet last December that "the word 'affordability' is a con job by the Democrats." Paxton at least admits the problem is real.

Then he told Texans what he'd do about it. And that's where it falls apart.

What's actually in the plan

Paxton's "Protecting the Texas Promise" agenda is a stack of new tax deductions. According to the rollout, it includes:

A $25,000 deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses and insurance premiums — plus another $25,000 per dependent
A $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers and for down payments when you move to a new primary residence
A $5,000 deduction for "healthy living" expenses — gym memberships, nutrition, sports for your kids
Doubling the child tax credit from $2,200 to $4,400

It sounds generous. Read the fine print.

The catch: you have to itemize

Three of those four are deductions, not credits. To claim a deduction, you have to itemize your tax return instead of taking the standard deduction. Only the child tax credit — the one item on the list anybody can claim without itemizing — escapes what follows.

Almost nobody does that anymore. In tax year 2022, about 10 percent of taxpayers itemized. The other 90 percent took the standard deduction and moved on.

And here's the part Paxton doesn't mention: his own party is why. The 2017 Republican tax law nearly doubled the standard deduction on purpose, so most families wouldn't have to keep shoeboxes of receipts. It worked. The share of returns that itemized fell from 31 percent in 2017 to about 10 percent in 2022.

So who's left in that 10 percent? The Tax Policy Center breaks it down, and it is not close:

In tax year 2022, nearly two-thirds of tax returns reporting adjusted gross income (AGI) over $500,000 itemized deductions, compared with 10 percent of those with AGI between $50,000 and $100,000 and two percent of those with AGI under $30,000.

Read that again. If you're a Texas family making under $30,000 a year — the family most crushed by grocery prices and rent — there is a 98 percent chance you cannot use a single one of those deductions. The deductions are aimed at the two-thirds of $500,000-and-up returns that itemize.

There's a second catch. Most of this already exists. The IRS already lets you deduct medical and dental expenses above 7.5% of your income — if you itemize. Homeowners can already deduct mortgage interest and property taxes. Paxton isn't opening a new door for working Texans. He's widening a door most of them can't reach the handle on. We've seen this move before: a candidate builds a campaign around a tax break that's already on the books and that he never bothered to claim himself.

Conservative economists say it will make prices go up

You don't have to take a liberal's word for it. The Washington Examiner reported that "supply-side economists are panning" the plan because it "cuts against the long-sought Republican goal of broadening the tax base while lowering overall rates."

Adam Michel of the libertarian Cato Institute told the paper the proposal is "a distinct departure from the traditional Republican tax reform agenda." Will McBride of the Tax Foundation was blunter: "this is piling on subsidies on top of subsidies … it's like trying to put out a fire by setting the place on fire again."

The reason is basic. Housing and healthcare are expensive because there isn't enough of either. Handing people more money to spend on a fixed supply of houses and doctors doesn't lower the price — it raises it. That's not a Democratic talking point. That's what the Republican tax world is telling him in public.

George Callas, who spent 15 years on Capitol Hill and served as senior tax counsel to Republican Speaker Paul Ryan, told the Houston Chronicle the agenda is "not only ineffective, but counterproductive." He also said Paxton isn't the inventor of this genre: "He's not a pioneer here." Callas traced it to "Trump's lack of interest in good tax policy and successful campaigning on 'no tax on "blank."'"

That's the whole playbook. Pick a thing, promise not to tax it, don't ask what happens next. Republicans have been running the same script on tips for two years.

His answer on how it gets paid for is that it pays for itself

Paxton has an answer, of a kind. He told reporters in Allen, per the Dallas Morning News, that "I never believe that tax cuts necessarily mean you have less money in the Treasury, because often if people are able to keep more of their money, they spend it, and it runs through the economy." The Mercatus Center's Joshua Rowley, in the same story, said his proposals "aren't things that are going to expand the size of the economy, especially relative to the revenue loss." That matters right now more than it usually does.

The Congressional Budget Office projects the federal government will spend about $1.0 trillion on interest payments on the national debt in fiscal 2026 — more than the $885 billion it spends on national defense. All that debt pushes interest rates up. Higher interest rates mean higher mortgage rates. Higher mortgage rates mean the house Paxton says he wants you to buy costs more every month for thirty years.

A $50,000 down payment deduction you can't claim doesn't fix that. It makes it worse. This is the same trick we've documented from Republicans who call themselves debt hawks right after voting for trillions in new debt.

Now look at Paxton's actual record on these exact issues

The plan is a bad plan. What makes it worse is that Paxton has spent eleven years as Attorney General doing the opposite of what it promises.

On medical costs. Paxton wants to give you a deduction for out-of-pocket health expenses. As Attorney General, he led the multi-state lawsuit to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act — the law that caps out-of-pocket costs and bars insurers from turning you away. The Texas Observer reported at the time that more than 4.5 million Texas adults under 65 have pre-existing conditions that would likely have made them uninsurable without those protections. Texas already has the highest uninsured rate in the nation for both kids and adults — 13.6% of Texas children and 21.6% of Texas adults, both roughly double the national rate. On top of that, KFF projects that 480,000 more Texans will be uninsured by 2034 because of Trump's budget bill, and that Texas will lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years. A $25,000 deduction does nothing for a person with no insurance card.

On housing. Paxton is offering a $50,000 tax break tied to your primary residence. Public records show that Ken Paxton has claimed three different properties as his primary residence on mortgage documents — one outside Dallas and two in Austin — which the Associated Press reports locked in lower interest rates. On two other properties, the AP found the Paxtons may have broken mortgage terms by renting them out, including a "5 bedroom luxury cabin" in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, carrying a $1.2 million mortgage and listed on Airbnb. Knowingly making false statements on mortgage documents is a federal and state crime, and Paxton's office is one of the primary agencies tasked with investigating mortgage fraud in Texas. He wants to write "primary residence" into the federal tax code. He has a documented history with that phrase.

On the grocery bill. Paxton cheered on the DOGE cuts and attacked fellow Texas Republican John Cornyn for questioning them. Those cuts gutted the programs that had kept the flesh-eating New World screwworm out of the United States since 1966. In June 2026 the USDA confirmed the first Texas case in sixty years, in a calf in Zavala County. Texas has a $15 billion cattle industry, and beef prices were already at record highs before any of this.

On who he actually works for. When Paxton does move fast on someone's costs, it tends to be someone who wrote a check. The chair of the Texas Tech Board of Regents gave $274,300 to a committee backing his Senate run, and one day later Paxton's office sent the Big 12 a letter warning that sanctioning Texas Tech would be "unlawful" and could cost the conference "substantially more than $200 million." Meanwhile the broader Republican donor class has been ducking his calls because of his scandals.

What a real affordability plan would look like

Callas pointed to bipartisan permitting reform — making it easier to build power plants and transmission lines, which is how you actually lower an electric bill. The column lists three more: end the war in Iran so fuel and fertilizer move again, drop the tariffs that tax everything you buy, and pass an immigration bill so the people who build houses, grow food, and staff hospitals can legally do it.

None of that is on Paxton's agenda. Every one of those requires taking on Trump.

That's the tell. Paxton's plan isn't designed to lower your costs. It's designed to let him say the word "affordability" in a campaign ad without ever crossing the man who runs his party. We deserve better.

Source

Evan Mintz, "Ken Paxton's economic agenda could actually make things more expensive," Houston Chronicle, August 10, 2026. Photo: Jacob Lujan / Houston Chronicle.

James Comer Wrote a Bill to Take D.C.'s Tax Code Away. DoorDash Wrote In to Back It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:17:19 +0000

On July 16, 2026, James Comer introduced a bill to take the District of Columbia's tax code away from the people who live there. Six days later his committee advanced it on a party-line vote.

He said at that markup what it was for. Not a budget crisis, not any particular tax — the next set of people D.C. voters had just elected. The bill, Comer said, "enhances Congress's constitutional oversight authority over D.C. to restrain irresponsible policies pursued by future socialist and ultra-progressive D.C. Democrats." A month before he filed it, D.C. Democrats had picked a democratic socialist, Ward 4 Council member Janeese Lewis George, in a primary she is expected to win in November.

Nine days before he filed it, the D.C. Council had voted to add a 20-cent fee to third-party food deliveries. Twenty cents. Not a tax on income, not a tax on property. Two dimes on a burrito. DoorDash — a company with an $81 billion market capitalization and $14 billion in annual revenue — had fought that fee at the Council and lost, with a petition, social media ads, a commissioned poll and a mobile digital display parked outside the Wilson Building.

So when Comer's bill reached markup, DoorDash wrote in to back it, and Comer entered the company's letter into the official record.

What the Bill Actually Does

Right now, when the D.C. Council changes a tax, the change takes effect after a 30-day window unless Congress votes to stop it. Congress already has a veto. It just has to bother using it.

Comer's bill flips that around. Under H.R. 9720, no tax or fee change in the District could take effect at all unless a joint resolution approving it passed both chambers of Congress within 60 days and was then signed into law by the president. Debate would be capped at one hour per chamber.

Think about what that means in practice. A city government would need the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate to stop what they're doing and hold a vote before it could adjust a parking fee.

D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson wrote to Comer to point out the part Comer's own framing leaves out: the bill applies to decreases as well as increases. It would, Mendelson wrote, "straightjacket the District because it would paralyze our tax code," and would "also freeze our General License Law." He warned it would likely trigger a downgrade of the District's bond rating.

At-Large Councilmember Robert White put it more plainly:

"It would let a Congress that can't even keep its own government open decide whether D.C. can fund its own police, schools, and services. … It's a veto over our own city … We've balanced our budget more than 30 years running. We've earned the right to run our own city."

The bill was also opposed by AFSCME, which said it "endangers public services in D.C.," and by the League of Women Voters, which called it "the latest in a long line of attacks on DC's democracy and the stability of its finances."

The Oversight Committee reported it out 23–18 on July 22.

The Company That Wrote In to Back It

Comer framed the bill, on the day he filed it and again at the markup, as a fight against ideology:

"Radical D.C. Democrats want to solve their spending problem by reaching deeper into taxpayers' pockets and driving further on the path to socialism."

But the loudest voice on the bill's side isn't a taxpayer. It's a corporation with a delivery-fee problem.

DoorDash's head of North American policy, John Horton, sent Comer a letter on July 22 backing H.R. 9720 — and Comer entered it into the committee record. Horton's letter described the bill as requiring congressional approval "before the District of Columbia can impose or increase a tax or fee."

That description leaves out the half that Mendelson flagged in his own letter to Comer. The bill reaches everything in title 47 of the D.C. Code — taxation, licensing, permits, assessments, and fees — in both directions. A tax cut would need the same act of Congress as a tax hike.

Horton is a lobbyist. Before DoorDash, he lobbied for the vaping company Juul and for Lyft, after working on Capitol Hill for a House committee chairman.

Residents noticed. The group Free DC launched a campaign asking people to delete the DoorDash app and post screenshots of their cancellations. Horton, in a statement to WUSA9, said DoorDash supports D.C. Home Rule — while his letter backing a bill to override home rule sat in the committee record.

Comer Helped Blow the Hole He Says D.C. Should Have Fixed by Cutting

Here is the part that makes this more than a bad bill.

Comer's argument is that D.C. has "a spending problem" and, as he told the Washington Times the day he filed the bill, that "the D.C. Council has rejected necessary spending reforms and is instead now considering tax increases that would punish residents, burden businesses, and further weaken the District's economy." The District does have a budget hole of more than a billion dollars. But the reason it opened up is not a mystery, and Comer had a hand in it.

D.C. lost about 22,356 net federal jobs in 2025, jobs that carried $3.66 billion in annual pay, according to federal personnel data reviewed by WTOP. Federal workers make up roughly a quarter of D.C.'s workforce, against about 1.4 percent nationally. The city's chief financial officer projected D.C. would lose more than $1 billion in revenue compared with earlier estimates, and forecast a mild recession in the District.

Those cuts were DOGE. And Comer wasn't a bystander to DOGE — he was its partner in Congress. As Oversight chairman he told his committee in February 2025:

"This committee intends to work in partnership with DOGE. We want to reinforce its efforts, and not blunt the momentum it's generating."

He created a subcommittee dedicated to working with DOGE — the one that later spent a hearing on the exhibit labels at a Smithsonian museum — and in June 2025 his committee held a hearing titled "Locking in the DOGE Cuts: Ending Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for Good."

Mayor Muriel Bowser made the connection when the committee advanced Comer's bill. The D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act, she said, "would render the District incapable of recovering from the debilitating impacts of COVID, federal remote work and DOGE."

That's the sequence. Help cut tens of thousands of federal jobs out of a city's tax base. Watch its revenue fall. Then introduce a bill to stop it from replacing the revenue, and call the shortfall a spending problem.

Nobody He's Regulating Can Vote Against Him

The residents whose tax code this bill would freeze have no vote in the House or the Senate. That's the whole point of the D.C. House Voting Rights Act, a bill that would have given D.C. a voting House member — it passed the House in 2007 and the Senate in 2009 and still never became law.

So there is no accountability loop here at all. Comer represents Kentucky's 1st District. If D.C. residents think this bill is an outrage, there is nothing they can do about it at the ballot box, and Comer knows it.

Compare that to how he treats the constituents who can vote against him. When Kentuckians in his district organized a town hall in July 2025 and reached out to his office eight times looking for a date, Comer neither attended nor sent a staffer. When protesters showed up outside his Paducah office in chicken suits asking him to face voters, his spokesperson said he "does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome."

He won't hold a public meeting in Paducah. He will hold a markup on Paducah's behalf about a fee on burritos in Washington.

What It Costs Us

It is easy to file this under "D.C. problem" if you don't live there. It isn't one.

The precedent is the point. A city government's power to set its own taxes and fees becomes something Congress hands back one vote at a time. The bill would not even undo the 20-cent fee — it applies only to acts D.C. sends to Congress after it becomes law. It reaches every tax and fee that comes after.

And look at who turned up for it. A corporation with $14 billion in revenue lost a 20-cent argument at a city council, and two weeks later was writing to a congressional committee to endorse taking that council's taxing power away. It did not have to ask anyone for the bill. The bill was already there.

Comer chairs the committee that is supposed to guard the public against exactly that kind of influence. He put the company's letter in the record.

Source

Washington City Paper, "House Committee Advances the D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act" (July 23, 2026); Hill Heat, "DoorDash Declares War on DC Home Rule Over A 20-Cent Fee" (July 22, 2026); The Washington Times, "Comer moves to give Congress veto power over D.C. tax hikes" — Mary McCue Bell, July 16, 2026; and NOTUS, "House Committee Advances Bill Limiting D.C.'s Ability to Raise Taxes" and "That Food Delivery Is Soon Going To Cost You a Little More in D.C." — Martin Austermuhle, July 22 and July 8, 2026. Bill text: H.R. 9720.

Florida's Own Economists Priced Amendment 3 at $11.86 Billion a Year. Byron Donalds' Answer: They're 'Often Wrong.'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:38:00 +0000

When the numbers say your idea is expensive, you have two options. You can argue with the numbers, or you can argue with the people who produced them.

Byron Donalds has picked the second one.

Speaking in Jacksonville, the Naples congressman and Republican candidate for governor went after Florida's Revenue Estimating Conference — the nonpartisan body of state economists whose job is to tell the Legislature what things cost.

"The Revenue Estimating Conference has been estimating revenue in our state for 30 years. They're often wrong."

"We've seen it in the Legislature time and time again. When I was there, we were told that there was going to be a revenue shortfall of about $3.5 billion that didn't happen. Right now, the Revenue Estimating Conference is estimating a $6 billion shortfall over the next couple of years, and we have to plan for that. But the truth is, they've been wrong about this several times."

Notice what is missing from that. Donalds says the state's economists are wrong. He does not say what the right number is.

The number he doesn't like

Amendment 3, which Donalds has made the centerpiece of his campaign for governor, would raise Florida's homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028.

The state's Office of Economic and Demographic Research ran the math. Its projection: a total of $11.86 billion a year eventually pulled out of local government budgets. The ramp looks like this:

Fiscal year	Revenue lost by local governments
2027–28	nearly $5 billion
2028–29	$8.775 billion
2029–30	$9.7 billion
2030–31	$10.751 billion

This is not a think tank's guess or an opposition campaign's talking point. It is the analysis produced by the state government Donalds wants to run, by the same office the Legislature relies on every year to write a budget.

And it isn't evenly spread. Commuter counties — the ones with less commercial property and more of their revenue coming from homes — take the worst of it proportionally. St. Lucie County could lose 35% of its property tax levy. Clay, Baker, Citrus and Hernando counties could each lose more than 30% of theirs.

The big urban counties lose the most in raw dollars. By fiscal 2028–29, according to the Florida Association of Counties: Miami-Dade down $445 million, Hillsborough $353 million, Broward about $326 million, Duval $277 million, Orange $253 million.

Under the amendment, what local governments are allowed to fund would be limited to public safety, infrastructure, schools, debt service and pensions, plus county constitutional officers. Everything else a county does comes out of a much smaller pot.

"Often wrong" is not a number

There is a version of this argument that would be legitimate. A candidate could say: here is where the state's model is flawed, here is the assumption I think is bad, and here is my own estimate. Donalds did not do that.

What he offered instead was an anecdote — that during his time in the Florida House he was told to expect a roughly $3.5 billion shortfall that never materialized — and a conclusion drawn from it, that therefore the current estimate is inflated. He did not say by how much. He did not say which projection he was recalling.

That is not a correction. It is a permission slip to ignore the only official cost estimate that exists.

It also cuts both ways. If the Revenue Estimating Conference is unreliable, then the $6 billion shortfall Donalds cites in the same breath is unreliable too — and so is every revenue projection a Governor Donalds would use to write a budget. He is discrediting the instrument he'd have to fly by.

The part where he proposes a graduated tax

There was a second notable thing in those remarks.

He floated replacing Florida's uniform property tax with a tiered one — different treatment for counties with big tax bases than for counties without:

"We have one property tax system that governs Putnam and governs Duval. I think in 2026, that doesn't make much sense at all. Especially considering the fact, again, we have supercomputers in our pocket. I think we can design a taxing system that recognizes a fiscally constrained county versus a county that has large economic development."

That is a proposal to have wealthier counties carry counties that can't fund themselves. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has already balked at the amendment, calling it "poorly designed" and warning that it would put Florida "on the slippery slope of a progressive property tax regime."

So the position is: the state's nonpartisan economists are exaggerating the cost of the amendment I am campaigning on, and also, I would like to redesign Florida's property tax into something the Wall Street Journal calls progressive.

Why this matters beyond one ballot measure

Attacking a nonpartisan estimating body is not a small thing. The Revenue Estimating Conference exists precisely so that Florida's budget is written against a shared set of facts rather than whatever number is convenient for whoever is in charge that year.

Donalds isn't disputing a methodology. He is telling voters to discount the referee three months before they vote on a measure he has spent millions promoting.

Florida voters decide on Amendment 3 in November. The people who will find out whether the estimators were right are the ones who call 911, drive on county roads, and use the libraries and parks that fall outside the amendment's protected list.

Source

Byron Donalds Attacks Nonpartisan Revenue Estimating Conference — FlaglerLive, August 9, 2026, republishing reporting by A.G. Gancarski of Florida Politics, August 4, 2026. County-by-county figures: Florida Association of Counties property tax map. Photo of Donalds via Facebook, published by FlaglerLive.

Steve Womack Just Introduced a Bill to Fix the National Debt. A Year Ago He Voted for $3.4 Trillion of It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:39:00 +0000

On June 24, 2026, Steve Womack introduced the Budgeting for a Better America Act, a bipartisan bill to fix how Congress handles money. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the bill would move Congress to two-year budget resolutions, add debt and deficit information into the budget process, create a "Fiscal State of the Nation" hearing, and set up a commission to recommend how to get the deficit down to 3 percent of the economy within ten years.

The budget watchdog group praised it. Its president, Maya MacGuineas, said the members behind it "deserve real credit for putting forward a serious bipartisan bill to help Congress budget more responsibly."

This is Womack's brand. He chaired the House Budget Committee in the 115th Congress. He co-chaired the 2018 Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform with Democrat Nita Lowey, and its recommendations make up much of this bill. He is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the national debt.

So let's talk about what he did on July 3, 2025.

The $3.4 trillion vote

That day, Womack voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump's budget bill. The Congressional Budget Office's final score found the law will add $3.4 trillion to the debt over ten years, and that's before counting the extra interest owed on all that new borrowing.

Womack put out a press release the same day. It is about five hundred words long. It lists the tax provisions. It lists $9 billion for servicemember quality of life, $21 billion for munitions, $12 billion for readiness, $7 billion for air superiority. It lists $46.5 billion for border barriers, $4.1 billion for Border Patrol hiring, $6.1 billion for border technology, $12.5 billion for air traffic control.

Count the mentions of the deficit, the debt, or how any of it gets paid for.

Zero.

The closest it comes is a section header claiming the bill "prevents waste, fraud, and abuse." What's under that header isn't waste or fraud. It's Medicaid work requirements, Medicaid cost-sharing for people just above the poverty line, and new SNAP restrictions. That's not eliminating waste. That's taking health coverage and food away from poor people and calling the savings a cleanup.

Here's Womack's own quote from that release:

"I'm proud to vote for this bill that delivers on the clear direction Americans gave us in November."

The man who chaired the Budget Committee, on the largest single addition to the national debt in years, had nothing to say about the debt.

The part where the trap closes

Read the first bullet of his own press release. The bill works by:

"Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent—protecting the average taxpayer from a 22 percent tax hike."

Womack voted yea on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on December 20, 2017, when it passed the House 224–201. Then in 2025 he voted to make those cuts permanent — which is the single biggest reason the bill scores at $3.4 trillion.

And now, eleven months later, he wants a commission to figure out how to close a hole that size.

Think about the order of operations. First you lock in the tax cuts forever. Then you set up a bipartisan commission with a mandate to get deficits down to 3 percent of GDP. The revenue side is off the table by law. So there is exactly one place the commission can look.

It can look at the spending. Which means Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food assistance, and housing — the same programs Womack has already been cutting with his own gavel.

He's already showing us what he'd cut

You don't have to guess. Womack chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that writes HUD's budget, and this June he brought forward a bill that cuts homeless assistance grants by $256 million and public housing by $1.3 billion — while finding $875 million to prepare for the 2028 Olympics.

He also voted for the health care provisions that, together with the health insurance tax credits that expired at the end of 2025, will leave 28,000 more people in his own district uninsured by 2034 — and in January 2026 he joined every Arkansas Republican in voting against restoring those credits.

That's the actual fiscal philosophy. Borrowing for tax cuts and border walls is prudence. A rent voucher is a spending problem.

Why this matters more from him than from anyone else

Plenty of members of Congress vote for debt and then complain about debt. What makes Womack different is that he has spent his career claiming the referee's jersey.

He chaired the Budget Committee. He co-led the budget-process reform committee. He belongs to the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum. When the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wants a Republican to stand next to, they call him.

That reputation is worth something, and he spends it. It's how a $3.4 trillion vote gets waved through as a serious person's decision. If the House's designated deficit hawk says the bill is fine, who's left to say it isn't?

Process reform is not nothing. Biennial budgeting and better debt data are genuinely reasonable ideas. But a commission is also the oldest move in Washington: it converts a choice you already made into a problem someone else has to solve later — usually by cutting something from people who don't have lobbyists.

The bottom line

Steve Womack has represented northwest Arkansas since 2011. The last in-person town hall on his own congressional calendar was in Harrison on September 3, 2019 — seven years ago. Since then he has taken constituents' questions down a phone line.

If he did hold one, somebody would surely ask the question his press releases keep dodging:

If the debt is the emergency you say it is, why did you vote to add $3.4 trillion to it — and why is the plan to pay for it always our health care, our food, and our housing, and never the tax cuts you made permanent?

Source

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "Bipartisan Fiscal Forum Leaders Introduce Budgeting for a Better America Act", June 24, 2026. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

Tim Burchett Said He'd Vote No if the Bill Added to the Deficit. Trump Signed His Nameplate. He Voted Yes.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:46:44 +0000

Tim Burchett built a brand on one thing: he is the Republican who will vote no on spending when his own party says yes.

He has the receipts. In April 2023 he was one of only four Republicans to vote against the Limit, Save, Grow Act, his own party's debt-ceiling bill, because it raised the debt limit without a balanced budget. Six weeks later he voted no again on the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the deal that actually ended the standoff.

He talks about it constantly. Here he is on NewsNation in June 2025, as The Hill reported, on whether the country is serious about debt:

"America's got to take this serious, or we're going to become a third world country."

So it's worth watching what he actually did when the test came.

June 16, 2025: the line in the sand

Trump's budget bill had squeaked through the House in May, 215-214. Burchett voted for it — reluctantly, by his own account — and it went to the Senate.

Chris Stirewalt asked him on NewsNation's "The Hill" whether he could get to yes on whatever the Senate sent back. Burchett's answer:

"If it's more deficit spending, then probably not. I think we need to really take that serious."

That was not a vague reservation. He was describing a specific, checkable condition: if the Senate makes it more expensive, I'm a no.

At that point the House-passed version was projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years before interest, or nearly $3 trillion once interest was counted. The Senate Finance Committee had just released its version — which, as The Hill noted in the same story, raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion instead of the House's $4 trillion.

The Senate made it bigger. Exactly the thing he said would make him a no.

July 2, 2025: the meeting

The Senate passed its version. Holdouts in the House were summoned to the White House.

Burchett went. He sat in the Cabinet Room for about two hours with Trump and Vice President Vance. And the name placard at his seat was misspelled — it was missing an "R."

What happened next was reported by The New York Times and written up by HuffPost on July 3, 2025. Trump wrote the missing letter in by hand. Then he signed both sides of the corrected placard and handed it to Burchett as a souvenir.

Trump, Burchett said, "signed a bunch of stuff" for him. He called that "cool too."

And then there was this, in Burchett's own words about the meeting:

"The president was wonderful, as always. Informative, funny — he told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was kind of cool."

July 3, 2025: the vote

The next day, the House took up the final bill. It passed 218-214.

Burchett voted Aye.

The bill he voted for is the one he said he'd probably oppose. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a nonpartisan deficit watchdog, the kind of group Burchett quotes when he's on TV about the debt — put the final law at $4.1 trillion in additional borrowing through 2034 once interest is counted, and "more than $5.5 trillion" if its temporary provisions are made permanent.

Not less than the House version he'd already called too expensive. More than a trillion dollars bigger.

The condition he set in June was met. The vote he promised in June was not.

What that money bought, and who paid

This isn't a story about one man's consistency. The bill funded its tax cuts by taking things away from people, including people in Tennessee's 2nd District.

The Bipartisan Policy Center's breakdown is blunt about the trade: $917 billion taken out of Medicaid, $320 billion out of student loans and $187 billion out of SNAP food assistance — cuts that cover only about a quarter of what the tax cuts cost. We've written about what that looks like on the ground — a 1,000-mile road trip through the states whose Republicans voted for it, including Tennessee, found people who can't afford toilet paper and a woman selling her blood twice a week.

Burchett had leverage. He'd publicly staked out a position that gave him leverage. On a 218-214 vote, a single member who meant it could have forced changes.

He got a signed nameplate instead.

He isn't shy about the price of things

The bitter part is that Burchett is right about the debt. It is real, and most of Congress isn't serious about it.

He was serious enough to be one of four Republicans against his own party's debt bill in 2023, when the person asking him to fold was Kevin McCarthy. He was serious enough to vote to remove McCarthy as Speaker months later.

When the person asking was Trump, the seriousness lasted from June 16 to July 3.

Meanwhile his constituents can't put the question to him directly. In April 2025, about 250 people held their own town hall in downtown Knoxville to ask Burchett questions. He didn't show. They set up cardboard cutouts of him holding a sign: "Sorry ... I'm out of the office today."

We deserve better.

Source

Lee Moran, "Big, Blundering Typo Kicked Off Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' Meeting With GOP Rep," HuffPost, July 3, 2025, and Sarah Fortinsky, "Burchett says he's 'probably' a no on Trump bill if it means 'more deficit spending,'" The Hill, June 16, 2025. Roll calls from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

California Wants Billionaires to Help Pay for the Health Care Cuts. Kevin Kiley Wrote a Bill to Stop It.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:45:00 +0000

Here is the setup, and it's worth getting the order of events right.

Congressional Republicans passed a budget bill that cut federal health care funding. California, like every state, has to figure out what to do about the hole that leaves. A union — the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West — is pushing a ballot measure called the Billionaire Tax Act for this November. It would charge California's 200-plus billionaires a one-time 5% tax on their net worth, and use the money to backfill those cuts for middle-class and low-income Californians.

Kevin Kiley voted for the budget bill that made the hole. Now he has written federal legislation to stop California from filling it.

The bill, and why he says he wrote it

Kiley's measure is called the "Keep Jobs in California Act of 2026." It would prohibit any state from levying taxes retroactively on people who no longer live there — which is the mechanism the Billionaire Tax Act relies on to keep billionaires from simply moving out before the vote.

He was direct about what prompted it. He said he drafted the bill in reaction to reports that several of California's most prominent billionaires — including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — are planning to leave the state ahead of the tax.

His argument:

"California's proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state's poor policies. Many of our state's leading job creators are leaving preemptively."

And on the House floor:

"A wealth tax is not merely the taxation of earned income, it is the confiscation of assets."

Call that what you want, but be clear about who it protects. The one-time 5% tax applies to people with a billion dollars. There is no version of this bill that helps a nurse in Roseville or a rancher in Alpine County. It exists so that a specific, named group of the richest people on Earth can leave California without paying it.

"Confiscation of assets"

That phrase does a lot of work, so let's look at it.

Kiley did not use the word "confiscation" about the Trump budget bill he voted for — the one that, according to the Congressional Budget Office and independent analysts, takes health coverage away from millions of people. Losing your Medicaid coverage is also, in a real sense, having something taken from you. It just isn't a yacht.

He also had nothing like this urgency about California's actual affordability crisis. He has spent no comparable effort on rent, groceries, or premiums for the people who live in his district. The emergency arrived when three billionaires said they might move.

He does this from a committee he was given back

Kiley is the only independent in the House. He dropped the "R" in March 2026 after redistricting made his seat harder, told NPR he wasn't changing any of his positions, and got his three committee assignments back from Republican chairs a month later.

This is what the independence produces. A bill written for Mark Zuckerberg.

Who is paying for the campaign

You don't have to guess at whose interests Kiley is representing. It's in the filings.

More than $800,000 has been spent on his behalf by super PACs, which face no limit on what they can spend. According to FEC-derived data, only 17% of his money came from small grassroots donors, while 70% came from PACs, super PACs, and large donors. Among the outside spenders:

Morning in America PAC spent $96,000 supporting him — a super PAC funded almost entirely by $5 million from Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow.
A super PAC calling itself "A Strong Innovation Economy Requires Strong IP Protection" spent $241,649 on his behalf, funded entirely by the Council for Innovation Promotion, the patent lobby.
Americans for Prosperity Action — the Koch network's super PAC — spent $182,471.
Google's NETPAC gave to him directly, while he sits on the Judiciary Committee that writes the rules for tech platforms.

That last one deserves a second read. Kiley wrote a bill triggered by reports that Google's two co-founders might leave California, and Google's political action committee is among his donors, and he sits on the committee that regulates Google.

And the billionaires are not sitting this out. The Los Angeles Times reported, citing a disclosure reviewed by the New York Times, that Sergey Brin is donating $20 million to a California political drive to defeat the wealth tax. Kiley's bill and Brin's $20 million are aimed at the same target from two directions.

What California is actually deciding

The Billionaire Tax Act may pass or fail in November. Reasonable people disagree about wealth taxes — Sen. Bernie Sanders held a rally for it, Gov. Gavin Newsom has opposed it, and it has split California Democrats.

That argument belongs to California voters. Kiley's bill is an attempt to take it away from them — to use federal law to make a state ballot measure inoperative before anyone gets to vote on it.

For a congressman who just rebranded himself as the guy who works "for the country, not one political party or the other," it's a revealing first act: helping three of the richest men in the world get out the door before the bill for his own vote comes due.

We deserve better.

Source

"Rep. Kevin Kiley measure would block key element of proposed California wealth tax," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2026.

Mike Johnson Came to Omaha to Sell Brinker Harding's Voters on 'No Tax on Tips.' The Same Bill Has Already Taken Food Assistance From 18,000 Nebraskans.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:20:00 +0000

On July 18, 2026, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson walked into WheatFields Eatery and Bakery in Omaha, stood in front of about 100 people, and made the case for Brinker Harding.

The event, the Nebraska Examiner reported, was built around a single provision of Trump's budget bill: no tax on tips.

"This is a big thing. It's not just campaign rhetoric. We've delivered for the people," Johnson said. "The no tax on tips helps servers and waitstaff, like millions and millions of people across the country, keep more of their hard-earned dollars and not send it to Washington."

Then he framed the November election:

"It's a contrast election between common sense and crazy, and this is your common sense candidate."

Let's take the contrast seriously, then. Because the law Johnson came to Omaha to brag about did a great deal more to Nebraska than tips.

What that same bill is doing to Nebraska

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the law that contains the tip deduction. It is also the law that:

Puts Nebraska on track to lose up to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with an estimated 55,000 Nebraskans projected to lose health coverage.
Cut food assistance. About 150,600 Nebraskans receive SNAP benefits each month — and roughly 18,000 have already lost that help under the new restrictions. That's not a projection. It already happened.
Delivers roughly $1 trillion in tax cuts to the richest 1%.

Johnson came to a breakfast spot to talk about the one part of that bill that sounds good to a waitress. He did not, according to the Examiner's account of the event, mention the other parts.

And the tip break is smaller than it sounds

It isn't even what the name says. As the Economic Policy Institute lays out, the law "did not eliminate taxes on tips. It created a temporary income tax deduction for a subset of tipped workers."

Who actually gets the money:

"Employers of tipped workers are the biggest beneficiaries; the deduction gives them more room to hold down or cut base wages. Some tipped workers benefit, but only those in eligible occupations who owe federal income tax. Many tipped workers earn too little to qualify, and lower-income workers benefit the least."

Read that again. A tax deduction only helps you if you owe federal income tax in the first place. A server scraping by on a tipped minimum wage often doesn't — so she gets nothing, while her employer gets a new argument for why her base pay doesn't need to go up.

EPI's assessment of the whole package is blunt: "The bill's harms dwarf any small, temporary benefits for workers."

And EPI notes the deduction is temporary by design — one of a class of tax breaks that "are often temporary and provide larger benefits to higher-income tax filers." The Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the same law are not temporary.

What Harding says he'll be in Washington

Here's why the guest list matters.

When the Nebraska Examiner's voter guide asked candidates about Congress's role, Harding answered:

"Congress is the first branch of government and it needs to act like it. ... Congress still needs to pass budgets on time, maintain genuine oversight and reassert its Constitutional authority. A strong Congress checks executive overreach regardless of party. I intend to do my part."

Good words. Now look at who he asked to headline his campaign.

Mike Johnson is the Speaker who has run this House. He's the one who decides what gets a vote and what doesn't. Nebraskans watched that machinery up close in July 2025, when House Republican leadership blocked the bipartisan effort to force out the Jeffrey Epstein files on a 211–210 vote — and the files stayed buried for another eleven months, until the President signaled it was fine to release them.

That's not a Congress reasserting its constitutional authority. That's a Congress waiting for permission.

If Harding genuinely intends "to do my part" checking executive overreach, the Speaker who has spent this term running interference for the executive is a strange person to put on stage.

The rest of the pitch

Johnson also asked the crowd whether they wanted "the next chapter of America" to look like New York under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The crowd yelled no. "I would rather it be like the heartland," Johnson said.

Earlier that same week, he was in Iowa telling Christian conservatives that Republicans face "a spiritual battle" in November.

None of that is about Nebraska. None of it lowers a grocery bill in Omaha or puts a single one of those 18,000 Nebraskans back on food assistance. It's a national message delivered to a swing district, and Harding stood next to it.

A senior adviser to Democratic nominee Denise Powell put it this way: "It's not surprising that Brinker would bend over backwards to welcome Mike Johnson to Nebraska."

What we already know about Harding on this bill

This isn't the first time Harding has praised a law that cost his neighbors. He told Roll Call in April 2026 that Trump has been "doing great things," adding: "We've got tax relief for families. We've got 'no tax on tips.' I can go through the list."

Nebraskans can go through the list too. It includes $4 billion in Medicaid, 55,000 people losing coverage, and 18,000 who have already lost food assistance.

The Speaker of the House flew to Omaha to talk about one temporary tax break and skip the rest. Brinker Harding smiled and stood beside him. We deserve better.

Source

US House Speaker Mike Johnson says Brinker Harding is 'common sense' candidate for NE-02 — Juan Salinas II, Nebraska Examiner, July 18, 2026. Photo: Juan Salinas II / Nebraska Examiner.

Brad Little Cut Idaho's Budget to Pay for Trump's Tax Bill — Then Bragged About the Leftover Cash

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Here is a straightforward story about where money goes.

In 2026, Idaho matched its state tax code to the federal tax cuts in Trump's budget bill. That's called conformity, and it isn't automatic — the Legislature has to vote for it. Idaho did, through House Bill 559, and made it retroactive to 2025. The cost to the state budget: a $155 million reduction.

That money had to come from somewhere. It came out of Idaho.

The cuts

On March 16, 2026, Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1331, the 2026 Idaho Rescissions Act. It cut 4% from most state agencies in the current fiscal year and 5% in the next one. K-12 schools, Medicaid, the Idaho State Police, and the Department of Correction got a smaller 3% cut instead of the full 4%.

The stated reason was exactly what you'd expect: conforming with the federal tax cuts in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, plus revenue uncertainty.

It barely passed. The Senate approved it 18–17 on March 2 — a single vote. The House followed 48–22 on March 6.

House Majority Leader Jason Monks, a Republican, described the bill he was asking his own members to vote for:

"a crappy bill that we have to vote on, but it's a necessary bill"

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow put the responsibility where it belonged:

"Gov. Little knows these cuts will hurt Idaho families because his own administration warned they would."

Little's own statement on signing it was about efficiency:

"Idahoans expect their state government to operate efficiently and effectively, and the balanced budget we approved for the current fiscal year delivers on both fronts."

Who actually absorbed it

"Most state agencies" is a phrase that hides the specifics. Here's what got hit, according to Idaho Education News:

Idaho's public colleges and universities took it worst. A 4% cut this year, then 5% for four-year universities and 3% for two-year schools next year. A $9.5 million line item meant to cover enrollment growth was zeroed out entirely.
Students got the bill. Tuition went up $350 to $425 — the largest increase in three years. That's a state cut converted directly into a household cost.
Idaho Launch, the program that helps Idaho kids pay for training and college after high school, was cut $10 million this year and $10 million next year.
The Idaho Digital Learning Alliance had its budget cut roughly in half, a $13.4 million reduction that eliminated elementary programs and state funding for driver's education.
K-12 was flat-funded at $2.75 billion for fiscal 2027 — the second consecutive session with no discretionary increase, which with inflation is a cut in everything but name. Districts were also left with a $9 million shortfall in employee insurance funding.

Remember where Idaho was starting from. It already spends less per K-12 student than any other state in America, and ranks 48th of 50 for public education. This is the state that decided it had room to trim.

Then he showed everyone the leftovers

Now the part that makes this a story about Brad Little's priorities rather than Idaho's finances.

On July 23, 2026, Little announced that Idaho closed the fiscal year with a $250 million positive cash balance. He called it discipline:

"Some decisions were not easy but they were the right ones. We stayed disciplined, and as a result Idaho protected its priorities, maintained healthy reserves, and finished the year in an even stronger financial position than anticipated."

Then he told Idahoans not to get any ideas about that money:

"Some may look at the year-end cash balance and conclude that Idaho should restore spending reductions or significantly expand government. We won't."

Read those two quotes together. The state cut driver's ed, cut Idaho Launch by $10 million, zeroed out enrollment funding, raised tuition on Idaho families by up to $425 a student, and left school districts $9 million short on employee insurance — and then finished the year with a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank and announced that none of it is coming back.

That's not a state that ran out of money. That's a state whose governor decided the cuts were the goal.

He knew how to intervene when he wanted to

Little wasn't powerless here. He proved it in the same session.

When the Legislature tried to cut $478,600 from medical residencies, Little issued a line-item veto, writing that defunding eight residents mid-residency would signal "that the state may not honor its commitments" while Idaho faces "one of the most severe physician shortages in the nation."

He was right about that. He simply chose not to apply the same reasoning to the college students, the high school kids losing Idaho Launch money, or the districts carrying an insurance shortfall.

And this is not the first time Little has taken money out of Idaho's classrooms by choice. In February 2025 he signed House Bill 93, a $50 million program handing private- and home-schooling families up to $5,000 per student in taxpayer money — two days after telling reporters the bill didn't meet his own accountability standard: "There's not enough accountability in it." He signed it anyway. In 2026 the Legislature cleaned that tax credit up and expanded who qualifies.

So in the space of about a year: $50 million out the door to private schooling, $155 million out the door to match federal tax cuts, and 4-to-5% off the top of nearly everything the state does.

The trade

The federal law Idaho chose to match, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cuts taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. Idaho conformed to it, took a $155 million hit doing so, and then made college students, school districts, and state agencies cover the difference.

Brad Little is asking Idahoans for a third term this November. This is what the last one bought them.

A governor who cuts your kid's school to match a tax cut written in Washington, then sits on $250 million and says the cuts are staying, is not being disciplined. He's choosing. We deserve better.

Sources

Idaho governor signs additional budget cuts for current fiscal year 2026 into law — KMVT, March 17, 2026. Photo: KMVT.
Little lauds Idaho's bottom line — but downplays how Idaho got there — Kevin Richert, Idaho Education News, July 23, 2026
Find out what passed and what didn't. A look back to the 2026 legislative session — Idaho Education News

Andrew Garbarino Held Up the Whole Bill for a Tax Break. Then He Slept Through the Vote.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:30:09 +0000

At 6:54 in the morning on May 22, 2025, after an all-night session, the House passed Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." The official roll call says it passed 215 to 214 — a one-vote margin.

Two Republicans didn't vote at all. Andrew Garbarino was one of them.

Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters why:

"Andrew Garbarino did not make it in time. He fell asleep in the back. No kidding, I know. I'm going to just strangle him, but then, he's my dear friend."

Johnson said it as a joke. It isn't one. The congressman for New York's 2nd District, on Long Island, was not on the floor for the biggest vote of his career because he was asleep.

He wasn't protesting. He wanted it to pass.

There's a version of this story where a member misses a vote because he's torn, or hiding, or trying to have it both ways. That's not what happened here.

Garbarino put out a statement the same day, and it's worth reading closely. He did not deny falling asleep. He didn't mention sleep at all. What he said was:

"I was moments away from the House floor, to vote 'yes,' when the vote was closed. While I am frustrated that the vote was closed before I was able to cast my vote, I am proud of the work we accomplished to deliver huge results for Long Island."

So: he was for it. He wanted it. He was frustrated that the House didn't wait for him.

He didn't just support the bill. He wrote part of it.

This is the part that makes the nap more than a punchline.

Garbarino was one of five Republicans who spent months holding the entire bill hostage over one issue: the cap on how much state and local tax — SALT — people can deduct from their federal taxes. The Washington Examiner later reconstructed the negotiation from interviews with the people in the room. Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Young Kim, and Tom Kean had a group chat. Kim said it was called "saltiest."

LaLota described the five of them as the "ride-or-die group" that "weren't going to cave in until we got the $40,000 that we were bargaining for."

Garbarino was blunt about how far he'd go:

"Would we have voted against the bill if it didn't have SALT in it? I would. I know I would have. I mean, if it kept the cap at 10, I would have had to have — I would be packing my desk up already."

He got his number. The final deal raised the cap from $10,000 to $40,000. Garbarino was pleased: "I think we're very happy with what we got, rather than $30,000 forever, because the $40,000 really covers a lot of people, especially my district and other districts."

After the deal came together, he and a few others walked over to Joe's Seafood, a high-end spot near the White House. "It was mentally exhausting, so we went and had a nice cocktail afterwards — we earned it!" he told the Examiner. (The Examiner's account doesn't say which night that was.)

Threaten to quit over it. Win it. Celebrate it. Then sleep through the vote on it.

What he was fighting for, and who gets it

The SALT deal Garbarino called a big deal for his district comes with a catch he acknowledged himself: it's temporary. The $40,000 cap runs 2025 through 2029, and the Tax Foundation notes that starting in 2030 it "will revert to its prior law value of $10,000 for all filers" — permanently.

And the money doesn't reach most people. The Tax Foundation ran the numbers on this exact proposal — a $40,000 cap with a $500,000 income phase-out — two days before the vote. Their conclusion: "the top 20 percent of taxpayers would be the only group to meaningfully benefit," and "the bottom 80 percent of earners would see no benefit."

Garbarino himself pointed out, as an argument for the bigger number, that the standard deduction for a married couple is now "just over $32,000." That cuts both ways: a deduction only helps you if your itemized deductions beat that, which is exactly why the Tax Foundation found the benefit stops at the top fifth of earners.

Meanwhile, the health care cuts in the bill he was bargaining over will cost his own district. The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates that in New York's 2nd District, 33,957 people lose health insurance — 3,300 losing ACA marketplace coverage and 30,657 losing Medicaid.

That was the trade: a five-year deduction that skips most of Long Island, in exchange for nearly 29,000 of his neighbors losing coverage. He negotiated it personally. Other Republicans are still defending the same trade a year later, as clinics in their districts close.

What he told his constituents six weeks earlier

On April 9, 2025, Garbarino held a telephone town hall — 10,281 people dialed in. His office put out a release with the highlights.

On SALT, he promised: "if it's not something I can be proud of, I'm not going to vote for it."

He was proud of it. He didn't vote for it.

On Medicaid, he told the 10,000 people on that call:

"You may have seen commercials or social media posts claiming that I voted to cut Medicaid. That accusation is categorically false. There's been a lot of misinformation flying around, so let me be clear — there was no legislation voted on that would cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security."

Read that carefully. On April 9, the bill hadn't come to the floor yet, so "no legislation voted on" was technically true — and useless to the person asking. Six weeks later the bill he'd been negotiating did exactly what the ads said it would.

The vote he did cast

None of this cost the bill anything. It passed by one. And on July 3, 2025, when the Senate's version came back to the House, Garbarino was awake and voted Aye.

So the record is not "he opposed it." The record is that Andrew Garbarino helped write this bill, threatened to quit over one piece of it, won that piece, celebrated it, missed the vote, and then voted for it anyway five weeks later.

Not showing up is the pattern

Long Island has noticed. On April 5, 2025, an estimated 2,000 people protested outside his Patchogue office on Oak Street. A month later, nearly 2,000 constituents filled the Patchogue Theatre and an overflow venue nearby for an in-person town hall — held by a congressman from Maryland, because their own wouldn't hold one.

"I know I'm not your first choice — it would have been better to have your own representatives here," Rep. Jamie Raskin told the crowd, naming Garbarino and LaLota. The New York Post noted that Republicans had been "dodging local public town halls in favor of tightly controlled teleconferences or private events."

He isn't the only one. Tom Tiffany told a TV station he backed a big housing bill and then didn't vote for it three separate times. Lauren Boebert spent a week pushing a military amendment and then missed the defense bill vote entirely. Showing up is the one part of the job that can't be delegated to a press release.

Garbarino wanted credit for the deal. He got the celebration, the interviews, and the "huge results for Long Island" statement. The one thing his constituents actually sent him to Washington to do — be in the room and press the button — is the thing he didn't do.

We deserve better.

Source

N.Y. Rep. Andrew Garbarino slept through "big, beautiful bill" vote that passed by just 1 vote, speaker says — Jesse Zanger, CBS New York, May 22, 2025. Photo: Getty Images, via CBS New York.

Bobby Charles Made an Ad Promising to Cut Your Property Taxes. He Never Signed Up for the Tax Break Maine Already Offers.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:12:00 +0000

Bobby Charles sits behind the wheel of his SUV in a new campaign ad. He points out that the vehicle is a 2015 with 260,000 miles on it. It still runs better than the Democratic state government, he says.

Then he makes a promise.

"I'm going to cut your property taxes by raising the homestead exemption."

Earlier in the same ad, he tells Mainers: "I pay property taxes that keep going up, just like you."

There is a problem with the ad. The tax break Charles is promising to expand is one Maine has offered for nearly thirty years — and according to his own town office, he has never claimed it.

What the homestead exemption actually is

Maine's homestead exemption knocks up to $25,000 off the value of your home for property tax purposes. For most homeowners that works out to savings of a few hundred dollars a year. It isn't a loophole or a program you have to fight for. You fill out a form.

To qualify you have to be a permanent Maine resident who has owned the home for at least 12 months, and it has to be your primary residence. Second homes and camps don't count.

The program has existed since 1998. The amount was last raised in 2020, when the maximum went from $20,000 to $25,000.

In the 2025 tax year, more than 327,000 Maine taxpayers claimed it. The state pays municipalities back for 76% of the revenue they lose to the program — a reimbursement that came to $82 million in 2025.

So this is not an obscure break. It is one of the most widely used tax programs in the state. Roughly a third of a million of Charles's neighbors are already in it.

He isn't

Charles grew up in Maine. But he spent most of his career working for the federal government and running a consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. Property records show he has owned his home in Leeds since 2006 — and that he didn't move back full time until 2022, the same year he sold a home in Maryland.

Staff at the Leeds town office say Charles has not claimed a homestead exemption since he moved back.

His campaign doesn't dispute that he's eligible. It says he doesn't rent or own homes anywhere else, and that he qualifies for the program. The explanation offered was that his accountant made an oversight, and that he plans to use it going forward.

Here is how his senior strategist, Vincent Harris, put it:

"He's going to get it and will save whatever money he's able to save going forward, which is not enough because he's suffering under these crazy, insane property taxes put on Mainers by the incumbent insider politicians."

Read that again. The defense of a candidate who never filed for an available tax break is that the tax break is too small to matter.

Both of his opponents in the November race already receive the exemption, according to property tax records in their hometowns — Democrat Hannah Pingree in North Haven and independent Rick Bennett in Oxford.

The part where the math doesn't show up

All three candidates for governor have pledged to expand the homestead exemption. What separates them is whether they've said how.

Pingree has proposed doubling it to $50,000, paired with a change to state law letting towns tax second homes owned by non-Maine residents at higher rates. Bennett has proposed raising it for Mainers 65 and older and increasing the state's reimbursement rate to towns by three percentage points a year until the program is fully state-funded.

Charles wants to raise it to $100,000 — four times the current level. Asked how he would pay for that, his campaign said details would be released soon.

That is a real question, not a gotcha. The state currently reimburses towns for 76% of what the exemption costs them, at $82 million a year. Quadrupling the exemption without a funding plan doesn't make the cost disappear. It moves it — either onto the state budget or onto the towns, which raise property taxes to cover their gaps.

And it lands on top of everything else Charles has promised to cut. His campaign platform pledges to abolish the state income tax outright and to slash regulation. That platform contains no dollar figures, no percentage targets, and no accounting for what replaces the revenue.

A spokesperson for Pingree, Mary-Erin Casale, put the objection this way:

"You can't promise a $4 billion budget cut and a tax break at the same time. The math doesn't work, and Maine families deserve a plan that does."

This is the pattern, not the exception

The homestead ad is a small thing on its own. What makes it worth writing down is that it is the same move Charles has made all year: a confident number, delivered with certainty, with nothing underneath it.

He has promised to end the income tax that funds schools and roads. He has promised to slash regulation and wasteful spending. He has now promised to quadruple a property tax break. Not one of those promises has arrived with an explanation of what gets cut to pay for it.

Maine's affordability problem is real. Property taxes here genuinely do keep climbing, and people genuinely are being squeezed. That's exactly why a plan needs to survive contact with a calculator.

There is also something worth noticing about who Charles is describing when he says "just like you." He is a lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of State who spent most of the last three decades working in and around Washington. He didn't live in Maine full time until four years ago. The 2015 SUV in the ad is doing a lot of work.

We've seen this shape before. Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan sells himself as a blue-collar everyman who "learned the value of hard work early" — and chartered a $23,000 private jet while quietly flying his own helicopter. The persona is the product. The record is the thing to check.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles is running an ad promising to cut your property taxes by expanding a program that 327,000 Mainers use and he doesn't. When a reporter asked why, his campaign blamed an accountant and said he'll sign up now.

He wants to raise that exemption to $100,000 and hasn't said how he'd pay for it. He wants to eliminate the state income tax and hasn't said what replaces it.

Mainers deserve a governor who does the arithmetic before he films the ad. We deserve better.

Source

Rachel Ohm, "Bobby Charles wants to expand Maine's homestead exemption. He doesn't use it." — Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2026. Image: screenshot via the Charles campaign.

Byron Donalds Is the Loudest Voice for a Tax Cut Even Ron DeSantis Won't Campaign For

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0000

Amendment 3 has become something close to a political orphan in Florida. The governor who spent a year pushing for it says he'll vote yes but won't campaign for it. Law enforcement groups are against it. A judge just ruled its ballot language is misleading and ordered it rewritten.

Byron Donalds has made it the centerpiece of his campaign for governor.

POLITICO reported on August 6 that Donalds "appears to be sliding into the role of chief cheerleader by default" — encouraging voters to back it, running television ads promising to cut property taxes, and pledging to keep cutting after that.

"I'm voting yes because the people of Florida are not a never-ending piggybank."

That's Donalds at a rally in The Villages last week. His campaign has spent at least $10 million on ads, according to the tracking service AdImpact.

What the amendment does

If Amendment 3 passes in November, it raises the homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028.

State economists project it would cut funding to local governments by as much as $12 billion a year starting in 2031.

Twelve billion dollars a year is not a rounding error. It's police, fire, ambulances, parks, libraries, road maintenance, water systems — the things cities and counties actually do with property tax money.

The sheriff who endorsed him calls it a train wreck

Here's the detail that should carry the most weight, because it isn't coming from a Democrat.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd endorsed Donalds earlier this year. This week, Judd stood at a news conference and tore the amendment apart:

"We all want reasonable tax relief, and that's possible. This is the most ludicrous piece of unresearched stuff I've seen."

Judd warned it would hit everything from law enforcement response times to funding for parks and libraries. The Florida Sheriffs Association has raised objections. Local officials from both parties have. Ron DeSantis — whose idea this originally was — said "what the Legislature did wasn't my proposal" and made clear he wouldn't lead the campaign for it, adding he wasn't sure it would even hit the 60% threshold.

DeSantis walked away from it. Donalds picked it up and started running.

Renters get nothing

Florida is the worst state in the nation for renters, according to a Consumer Affairs analysis published in April. Rent eats 37.4% of the typical income here — the most cost-burdened renters in the country.

The homestead exemption is for people who own the home they live in. If you rent, you don't get it. Not a dollar.

What renters do get is the other end of the equation. When cities lose $12 billion, they look for it somewhere else.

"Renters are not going to receive the homestead exemption. A landlord might get a tax benefit, but there is absolutely no guarantee that a renter sees a lower rent payment," said state Rep. Rob Long. "At the same time, cities are going to have to increase fire assessments, utility charges, or other fees to keep services running. And those costs will likely still be passed along to tenants."

Kelly Lynch works in Gainesville and can't afford to live there. She drives more than 20 miles each way from Bronson, in Levy County. She and her husband want to buy a house someday.

"I know plenty of people that work full time. Single moms living in Gainesville that would honestly face eviction or homelessness if their rent increases or their cost of living increases any more. None of us can comfortably afford an increase."

Donalds is selling Amendment 3 as an affordability plan. For the most cost-burdened renters in America, it is the opposite of one.

Even the ballot language didn't survive

A circuit court judge in Tallahassee ruled this week that Amendment 3's ballot summary is misleading, and gave Attorney General James Uthmeier until August 14 to rewrite significant portions of the title and summary.

That matters for the polling Donalds is riding. A James Madison Institute survey of 1,400 Floridians found 74% support — comfortably above the 60% needed. But when voters were told passage could mean less funding for local government services, support dropped to 55%. Below the threshold. It fails.

"Education equals opposition when it comes to this amendment," said Jackson Peel of the Save Our Services — No on 3 coalition. "When people hear what this bad policy will do to their communities, they reject it."

So the measure passes if Floridians don't learn what's in it, and fails if they do. And the man spending $10 million on ads about it is the one whose ads say "cut property taxes" while he plays basketball with his sons.

Who Donalds actually answers to

This is a familiar shape for Donalds.

He co-sponsored a bill to strip heat protections from Florida's outdoor workers — blocking the first-ever federal rule protecting people from dying of heat on the job, in the state where that happens.

And his campaign runs on money most Floridians will never see the likes of: Citadel's Ken Griffin wrote a $10 million check to a PAC backing him, the single biggest contribution of the race.

A billionaire's $10 million, a $10 million ad buy, and a constitutional amendment that hands money to homeowners and bills to renters.

Donalds has also promised that if Amendment 3 fails, he'll ask the constitutional revision commission that convenes in 2027 to do a "top-to-bottom property tax overhaul" anyway. And if it passes, he says he'll build a funding formula so small and rural counties don't get wrecked — a formula that does not exist, for a shortfall he is campaigning to create.

Florida's primary is August 18.

Source

POLITICO, "Donalds takes role as biggest backer of Florida's property tax measure," by Gary Fineout, and Florida Phoenix, "No on 3 campaign focuses on the pain for renters if property tax cut passes," by Mitch Perry, both August 6, 2026.

Mike Lindell's Plan: Cut Minnesota's Budget in Half, and Fill the Hole With His Own Charity

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Mike Lindell released a 72-page plan for what he'd do as governor of Minnesota.

The headline is eliminating the state income tax. The arithmetic underneath it is cutting the state general fund budget in half.

Minnesota's primary is August 11. Voting has already begun.

What gets cut

In some places the plan is very specific:

Education: $4.9 billion, roughly 19% of what Minnesota spends on schools.
Healthcare: $11 billion.
Public assistance programs: $3.6 billion.

That's $19.5 billion out of schools, hospitals and help for people who can't make rent.

Minnesota is a state that has, historically, taxed more and gotten more for it — better schools, better healthcare, better roads, parks, social services. The plan's argument is that the extra spending hasn't produced better results, and it cites Mississippi's recent early-literacy gains at far lower spending as proof.

Set aside whether that comparison holds. Ask instead what happens to a Minnesota school district that loses a fifth of its money, in a state where the federal government is already pulling out. Under Trump's budget bill, Minnesota is set to lose $15.4 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade, and an estimated 152,000 to 253,000 Minnesotans will lose health coverage.

Lindell's $11 billion healthcare cut would land on top of that.

Where the money comes back from

Here's the part that deserves the closest reading.

Lindell doesn't claim the state can simply do without the $19.5 billion. He proposes replacing $16.5 billion of it with something the plan calls the "Lindell Direct Assistance Program" — his own charitable model. The claim is that "services can be delivered with private sector sponsorship for 40% less than government assistance."

Read that again. A candidate for governor is proposing to take $16.5 billion of Minnesota's public services — the hospital funding, the school funding, the assistance programs — and hand them to a privately sponsored charity operation named after himself.

There is no statute for this. No agency. No accounting. It is a line in a campaign document.

The rest of the gap gets filled with "dynamic scoring" — the standard tax-cutter's assumption that cutting taxes generates so much growth it pays for itself. The plan books $3.9 billion in revenue on that basis.

So: $19.5 billion in real, specified cuts, offset by a charity that doesn't exist and a growth projection that assumes the cuts work.

Whether he can run a charity is a fair question

This is where Lindell's own record stops being background and becomes the point.

A Star Tribune investigation published in July found that creditors are chasing MyPillow in court for more than $25 million in unpaid bills — including a $15.4 million default judgment to a footwear supplier and an $8.8 million default judgment to FedEx, which accused Lindell of misrepresenting the company's ability to pay. Most of the judgments were defaults, meaning MyPillow didn't show up to defend itself. MyPillow told a court that if a levy on its Amazon account wasn't lifted, the company "could go out of business."

Lindell has since stepped down as CEO of MyPillow to focus on the governor's race.

And last week, an administrative law judge found probable cause that Lindell broke Minnesota campaign finance law — by having his campaign buy 2,500 pillows from his own company and throw them off a parade float.

That is the operator being proposed as the backstop for $16.5 billion of Minnesota's schools, hospitals and safety net.

Who actually pays

Eliminating an income tax doesn't make government cheaper. It moves who pays.

Minnesota's income tax is progressive — higher earners pay a higher rate. Delete it and the revenue has to come from somewhere else, or the services go away. In Lindell's plan, the services go away.

The people who lose the most are the ones who use public services most: families whose kids are in public school, people on Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare, the 452,600 Minnesotans who receive SNAP, the 1 in 6 Minnesota kids who faces hunger.

The people who gain the most are the ones with the biggest incomes.

Lindell's plan would make Minnesota the 10th state with no income tax, joining South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Florida and the rest. Those states are not, generally, known for their schools or their hospitals.

Minnesota is. That's the trade on the ballot Tuesday.

Source

Minnesota Reformer, "Lindell releases plan to eliminate income tax with massive cuts to education, healthcare spending," by J. Patrick Coolican, August 6, 2026. Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.

Missourians Crushed Amendments 4 and 5 by 80 and 83 Percent. Their Congressmen Helped Build the Gerrymander Behind One of Them.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:23:15 +0000

On Tuesday, August 4, Missouri voters did something you almost never see. They took two constitutional amendments put on the ballot by their own Republican supermajority and buried them.

Amendment 4 lost 80% to 20%. Amendment 5 lost 83% to 16%. Every single one of Missouri's eight congressional districts voted no on both.

That last detail is the joke. Amendment 4's whole purpose was to give any one of those eight districts a veto over what the rest of the state wants. It lost in all eight.

What Amendment 4 was actually for

Right now, if Missourians gather signatures and put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, it passes with a simple statewide majority. One person, one vote.

Amendment 4 would have changed that. A citizen-led amendment would have needed a majority statewide and a majority in each of the eight congressional districts. Win the state. Win seven of eight districts. Lose the eighth by one vote, and you lose.

Here's the part they didn't put on the yard signs: the new rule applied only to amendments citizens put on the ballot. Amendments the legislature sends to voters — including Amendment 4 itself — would still pass with a simple statewide majority. Politicians kept the easy rule. Citizens got the hard one.

The Missouri Independent reviewed certified election returns and found Amendment 4 would have blocked every citizen-led constitutional amendment Missouri voters have approved since 2020. Medicaid expansion in 2020. Recreational marijuana in 2022. Sports betting and abortion rights in 2024. All passed statewide. None carried all eight districts.

No other state in the country requires a ballot measure to win in every congressional district. Not one.

And Gov. Mike Kehoe didn't leave the timing to chance. He moved Amendment 4 off the November ballot and onto the August primary, when turnout is smaller and more Republican. Missourians turned out anyway and beat it four to one.

The eight districts were drawn by Republicans, for Republicans

This is where Missouri's congressmen come in.

The districts Amendment 4 would have handed veto power to are not neutral lines on a map. They were redrawn in a special legislative session in September 2025 — at the behest of President Donald Trump, who spent last year prodding Republican-run states to redraw their maps before the 2026 midterms. The same special session produced Amendment 4.

The map's target was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City–based 5th District, the seat held by the first Black mayor of Kansas City. The plan chopped it up, tied a piece of it to rural counties, and scattered the rest of Kansas City into neighboring districts. The Missouri House passed it 89–63.

Four of the five Republicans this site tracks in Missouri's U.S. House delegation lined up behind that redraw.

Bob Onder was the loudest. A state senator during the failed 2022 push for the same 7-1 map, Onder told St. Louis Public Radio in August 2025 that he wanted it done:

"We are a Republican state. Republicans have supermajorities in the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate. Republicans hold all of our statewide elected offices, including, of course, governor. And I believe that we should pass a congressional map that reflects the values of the state of Missouri."

Asked whether mid-decade redistricting might backfire, Onder said the math was easy: "we have seats that have wide enough margins that I think it's pretty straightforward math to draw seven very safe Republican seats."

He also got exactly what he asked for. The new map put all of St. Charles County into Onder's 3rd District — a long-standing goal for Republicans there.

Ann Wagner, Jason Smith and Eric Burlison joined Onder in supporting the redraw. Wagner's 2nd District picked up part of Jefferson County plus all of Washington, Gasconade and Crawford counties.

Mark Alford was the outlier, and only barely. He told St. Louis Public Radio he was neutral on whether to redraw the map — while conceding his own district would likely become more competitive as a result. The map handed him a chunk of Kansas City.

So: Missouri Republicans drew themselves a map at a president's request, then asked voters to make that same map the gatekeeper for every future citizen initiative. Missourians said no by 60 points.

Then they blocked the vote on the map itself

Missourians never got to vote on the gerrymander. Not because they didn't try.

A group called People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December to force a referendum on the new map. Local election authorities spent hundreds of hours checking whether the signers were registered voters.

On Tuesday afternoon — a few hours before the polls closed, on the last legal day he had to decide — Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins declared the whole petition unconstitutional. He refused to tell reporters whether it had enough valid signatures.

"Whether they had one signature or 500 million signatures doesn't really matter because they are unconstitutional," Hoskins said.

He rejected a second citizen petition the same day, one that would have limited the legislature's power to rewrite measures voters had already passed.

Missouri House Democratic Leader Ashley Aune called Hoskins a partisan rather than an election official, saying he "has engaged in obstruction and dishonesty to stop Missourians from exercising their constitutional right" to vote on the gerrymander.

People Not Politicians sued that night. And there's a live question hanging over Tuesday's results: in a May ruling, Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ginger Gooch noted that if the referendum power does apply to redistricting, the 2025 map would never have taken effect at all — meaning Tuesday's primary was run in district lines that were never legal.

Amendment 5: a tax cut for the top, paid for by everyone else

Amendment 5 was the other half of the ask. It would have phased out Missouri's individual income tax and handed the legislature the power to raise and expand sales taxes to replace it.

The income tax is about 64 percent of Missouri's general fund — the money that pays for schools, roads, health care and public safety. Neither the legislature nor the governor explained how they'd replace it. Voters were asked to approve the swap first and find out later.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ran the numbers on who wins and who pays:

The top 1 percent would get an average tax cut of almost $40,000.
Middle-class Missourians making roughly $50,000 to $80,000 would pay about $535 more per year.
Seniors would take a net tax increase of about $335 million, averaging $365 more each — because Social Security benefits, active-duty military pay and military pensions are already exempt from Missouri income tax. Cut a tax they don't pay, raise one they do, and they just lose. For a middle-income senior earning between $49,100 and $79,700, ITEP put the hit at $1,600 a year.

Amendment 5's backers had the money. Missouri Promise PAC — funded entirely by groups that do not disclose their donors — outspent the opposition by more than 2-to-1 overall and nearly 4-to-1 on broadcast ads, and doubled its ad spending in many markets in the final week. It lost 83-16.

Kehoe's response to being outvoted five to one was to promise he'd keep going. "I believe our work is far from over," he posted after the results came in.

Missouri keeps voting. Republicans keep overriding.

None of this is new in Missouri. It's the pattern.

Voters expanded Medicaid in 2020. Voters passed Amendment 3 in 2024 to put abortion rights in the state constitution — and Republicans moved immediately to override them, with the Missouri Supreme Court reinstating the ban in May 2025. Voters approved a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave in 2024, and lawmakers repealed the sick leave part.

Amendment 4 was the logical endpoint of that pattern: stop losing the arguments by making it nearly impossible for voters to have them.

Meanwhile, the same delegation that backed the map has been busy in Washington. An estimated 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under Trump's budget bill — the Medicaid coverage Missourians voted themselves in 2020, now being taken back by the people they sent to Congress. Jason Smith, who chairs the House's tax-writing committee, used that same bill to bury a doubled prison sentence for leaking billionaires' tax returns on page 1,081. Eric Burlison, told by hundreds of his own constituents that they opposed a local data center, wrote a letter supporting it anyway.

The through-line is simple. When Missourians get a direct say, they use it — and Republicans keep trying to take the say away. Amendment 4 was that attempt written into the constitution. It's the same instinct driving the manufactured "voter fraud" panic nationally: if you can't win the vote, change who gets to count.

On Tuesday, Missourians got one clean shot at it and hit 80-20. The referendum on the gerrymander itself is now in court, where the people who drew the map would very much like it to stay.

Source

Rudi Keller, Missouri voters reject income tax phaseout, initiative petition changes, Missouri Independent, Aug. 4, 2026. Photo: Gov. Mike Kehoe votes in Jefferson City (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent).

Big Companies Are Getting Their Tariff Money Back. You're Not.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:55:00 +0000

For two years you paid more. More for coffee. More for shoes. More for a washing machine, a set of tires, a kid's video game console. You paid it at the register, a little at a time, and nobody handed you a receipt that said "tariff."

Then in February the Supreme Court ruled that the whole thing was illegal — that the 1977 emergency law President Trump used to tax nearly everything coming into the country never gave him that power in the first place. The government now has to give the money back.

$166 billion of it.

Here's the punchline: it isn't coming to you. It's going to Amazon, Apple, Ford, General Motors and Nike.

The refunds are real, and they're enormous

Because tariffs are technically paid by the company that brings the goods across the border, the company is the one legally owed the refund. And the checks are clearing. As of the end of June, Customs and Border Protection had authorized $104.29 billion in refunds and actually paid out $71.06 billion, according to the Cato Institute's tracking of the court filings.

Look at who's cashing in, as reported by Newsweek this week:

Apple — up to $2.2 billion, which helped power what the company called its strongest June quarter ever
Ford — $1.3 billion
Nike — nearly $1 billion
Amazon — about $600 million in one quarter alone
General Motors — $500 million

And it's not spread evenly, either. Cato found that while CBP had approved refunds covering nearly 60 percent of the total money owed, those approvals covered only 30 percent of the actual import entries. Translation: the giants got processed first. As Cato put it, "the deck is stacked against small firms that lack the resources to fight for and obtain what the government owes them."

The big guys have trade lawyers. The corner store had to close.

You paid it. That part isn't in dispute.

Nobody serious argues otherwise anymore. A study by the Kiel Institute that examined $4 trillion in shipments found foreign exporters absorbed only about 4 percent of the tariff burden — the other 96 percent got passed on to buyers here. The researchers described the roughly $200 billion collected in 2025 as "a tax paid almost entirely by Americans."

The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab put the average effective tariff rate at 16.8 percent — the highest since 1935 — and estimated the price increases cost the typical household about $1,700 in 2025 alone.

So: you were charged. The charge was ruled illegal. The refund is going to somebody else.

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said it about as plainly as it can be said this weekend: "Corporations passed on the cost of Trump's tariffs to working people, consumers. They will pocket the refunds. More profits for corporate shareholders and we get screwed. Again."

Some companies are sharing. Most aren't.

Credit where it's due — a handful said they'd pass something back. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company had identified a "limited set of circumstances" where it charged customers an import surcharge, and promised: "When we receive those refunds, we will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them." FedEx, UPS, Walmart and Costco have all said they'll return value to customers in some form. Costco CEO Ron Vachris told investors in March that "our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members."

Notice what pushed Amazon there, though. It wasn't conscience. It was class-action lawsuits and public pressure.

Now the other side. Apple says the refund will go toward its investment projects and hasn't committed to sharing a dime with customers. And Nintendo argued last month that when you paid the higher price, you agreed to it — so you're "not entitled" to any of the rebate.

Read that again. You paid an unconstitutional tax through a higher sticker price, and the company's position is that the checkout screen was a contract.

Congress could fix this in an afternoon. It won't.

There is a bill. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Frank Mrvan introduced the Tariff Relief for Consumers Act in March. It's simple: any company collecting more than $5 million in tariff refunds has to pass an equal amount back to consumers as discounts or rebates on things like groceries, infant formula and hygiene products — and can't shovel the refund into stock buybacks and dividends until it does. Small businesses under $10 million in revenue are exempt so they can recover in full.

Its status, five months later: referred to the House Ways and Means Committee on March 5, and nothing since. One action on the docket. Three cosponsors. Republicans run that committee and they have not moved it an inch.

And before anyone says this is just Democrats writing press releases — the same thing happened to the Republican version. Sen. Josh Hawley's American Worker Rebate Act, which would send tariff money back to families as rebate checks, was introduced on July 28, 2025 and referred to the Senate Finance Committee. More than a year later, the bill's record shows exactly one action, zero cosponsors, and nothing since. Republicans control that committee too.

A Republican senator's own bill to give this money to workers has been sitting untouched in a Republican committee for over a year. That's not gridlock. That's a choice.

Remember the $2,000 check?

In November, Trump posted on Truth Social: "A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone." It got wall-to-wall coverage. People planned around it.

It doesn't exist. There's no law, no appropriation, no check. Yale ran the numbers and found a $2,000-per-person rebate would cost about $450 billion — roughly twice all the tariff revenue expected in 2026. Trump also claimed the government took in "more than 600 Billion Dollars in Tariffs." The Bipartisan Policy Center put 2025 gross tariff revenue at $289 billion; CBP's own number was closer to $200 billion.

Columbia Business School economist Brett House was blunt about the whole framing: "It's not a dividend when you give money back to people that they paid earlier."

He's right — and it's worse than that. They're not even giving it back to the people who paid it.

How we got here

None of this was an accident, and Congress was not a bystander. When the tariffs were in force, House Republicans didn't just decline to stop them — they rewrote the rules so nobody could vote on them. On September 16, 2025, on a 213–211 vote, they passed House Resolution 707, which switched off the section of the National Emergencies Act that lets Congress force a vote to end a president's emergency — all the way through March 31, 2026. It was the second time they'd pulled that lever. Only three Republicans voted no: Thomas Massie, Kevin Kiley and Victoria Spartz. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who voted against it, called it "capitulating to the largest tax increase on Americans in history."

That's the pattern, and we've written about it before. Congress holds the tariff power under the Constitution. Republicans hold Congress. Every time there was a chance to protect their own constituents from this tax, they used the rulebook to make sure the vote never happened.

Meanwhile the administration is now in court fighting parts of the refund order, which Cato — a libertarian think tank, not exactly a left-wing outfit — warns could let the government "end up keeping tens of billions of dollars that it unlawfully confiscated."

The bottom line

Strip away the trade jargon and here's what happened to you:

Republicans in Washington let a president levy a tax that Congress alone had the power to levy.
You paid it — about $1,700 a year — every time you checked out.
The Supreme Court said it was illegal.
The refund is going to Apple, Ford, Nike, GM and Amazon.
The bills to send some of it back to you are sitting in Republican-run committees, untouched.
The $2,000 check you were promised was never real.

We all got screwed. Big business cashed in. And the people who could have stopped it at any of those six steps are the same people asking for your vote in November.

Source

"Tariff refunds split companies as consumers demand share of $166B," Newsweek, August 3, 2026. Photo: Wolf von Dewitz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP.

Jason Smith Buried a 10-Year Prison Sentence on Page 1,081 of Trump's Budget Bill — For Leaking Billionaires' Tax Returns

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:30:00 +0000

In May 2025, Republicans dropped a 1,082-page budget bill on Congress late on a Sunday night. Buried on page 1,081 — the second-to-last page — was a provision that had nothing to do with the budget.

It would double the maximum prison sentence for leaking someone's tax return, from 5 years to 10. It would raise the maximum fine from $5,000 to $250,000 for every single violation. And it would add criminal penalties for anyone who helps "print or publish in any manner" that leaked tax information.

The Intercept found it and asked the man behind it — Missouri Congressman Jason Smith — a simple question: is a decade-long prison sentence really something that belongs in a budget bill?

His office wouldn't answer.

"Wish I could be helpful, but that's a question for the Senate parliamentarian," Smith's communications director wrote back.

That's the whole answer. From the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — the most powerful tax-writing committee in Congress — about a provision his own committee wrote.

Who the leak law actually protects

Let's be clear about what this is about, because it isn't about you.

The reason Republicans care so much about tax-return leaks comes down to one man: Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor who leaked Donald Trump's tax returns to the New York Times and a huge cache of data on thousands of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica. That data is how the country learned Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency.

Littlejohn pleaded guilty. And here's the part that matters: he already got the maximum sentence. In January 2024, Judge Ana Reyes sentenced him to the full five years — plus three years of supervised release and a fine — even though federal sentencing guidelines pointed to a fraction of that. The judge went well above the guidelines and gave prosecutors everything they asked for.

Republicans on Smith's committee had written to the judge the week before asking her to do exactly that. When she did, Smith put out a press release praising her:

"I commend Judge Reyes for imposing the maximum sentence of five years... punishing Mr. Littlejohn with the maximum allowable sentence still sends a strong message that the U.S. judicial system takes these crimes seriously."

So by Smith's own account, the existing law worked. The judge used it. It sent a strong message. He said so himself.

Then he spent the next year and a half trying to double it.

He already tried this the honest way. It failed.

Smith didn't have to sneak this into a budget bill. He had already run it as a regular bill.

In 2024 he introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act — the same 10-year sentence, the same $250,000 fine. The House passed it in September 2024, and then it went to the Senate and died. Nobody picked it up.

That's how the process is supposed to work. You write a bill, you make your case, and if the other chamber isn't convinced, it doesn't become law.

So the following spring, Smith took the bill that failed and slipped it into the back pages of a must-pass budget package — where no senator would get a clean vote on it, and where it would ride to the president's desk attached to the biggest tax package in years.

Even the referee said it didn't belong there

Budget bills like this one move through a special fast-track process called reconciliation. There's a rule — the Byrd rule — that says you can't stuff things into these bills that aren't really about money. It exists precisely to stop this kind of maneuver.

The Joint Committee on Taxation scored Smith's leak provision as having "negligible" effect on federal revenue. In other words: it doesn't raise money. It just puts people in prison longer.

Budget experts said at the time it would almost certainly get thrown out. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress put it to The Intercept:

"Slapping on a jail sentence is about punishment for offenses, not about changing dollars and cents coming in or out of the government."

He was right. When the final law came together, the provision raising those penalties was stripped out. It never became law.

So this was never serious legislating. It was a chairman using the one lever he controls — the text of the bill — to try to get something he'd already lost.

The part that should make Missourians angry

Here's where it goes from silly to insulting.

Two months before Smith wrote a 10-year prison sentence for anyone who exposes taxpayer data, he stood up in his own committee and told his colleagues to stop worrying about who was walking around inside the IRS.

On March 12, 2025, Ways and Means Democrats brought two resolutions asking for documents about DOGE — Elon Musk's operation — getting into Treasury and Social Security systems. Smith opened the markup with a statement calling the request "manufactured outrage":

"No hard evidence has been presented that accusations of illegal access to taxpayer information by DOGE employees are true or based in fact... All Democrats have are insinuation, rumor, and hearsay."

Republicans on the committee voted both requests down along party lines. No documents. No hearing. Nothing.

Read those two positions next to each other:

An IRS contractor exposes a billionaire's tax return? Five years isn't enough. Make it ten. Fine him a quarter million dollars per person. Go after the publishers too.
A team of outside engineers is nosing around the systems that hold your tax data? Insinuation. Rumor. Hearsay. Motion denied.

The privacy of your tax information is apparently a national emergency in exactly one direction.

And it didn't stay hypothetical. By the summer of 2025, the IRS was building an automated system to hand your confidential home address to ICE on demand, according to reporting on an internal blueprint. When the acting IRS general counsel refused to turn over addresses for 7.3 million taxpayers — saying "there's just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that's a fantasy" — he was forced out of his job within weeks.

That is millions of taxpayers' confidential information moving out the door. Smith wanted 10-year sentences for one contractor. For this, he has had nothing to say.

What he could have put on page 1,081 instead

Jason Smith represents Missouri's 8th District. He's been in Congress since 2013 — 13 years — and he chairs the committee that writes the nation's tax laws. He had 1,082 pages to work with.

Here's what that bill did to the people he represents:

An estimated 32,167 people in MO-8 are projected to lose health coverage — 13,500 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 18,667 losing Medicaid — according to the Joint Economic Committee.
37,855 households in the district — 12.3% of them — rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including more than 16,000 households with kids and more than 16,000 with someone 60 or older, per USDA data.

And here's who the bill was actually built for. The Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on the House-passed version — the exact draft with page 1,081 in it. Averaged over 2026 through 2034:

Households in the lowest tenth of the income scale lose about $1,559 a year.
Households in the highest tenth gain about $12,044 a year.

(CBO's own interactive tool, figures in 2025 dollars.)

So the bill takes health coverage and food from people in southeast Missouri, hands five figures a year to the richest households in America — and on the second-to-last page, adds a decade in prison for anyone who might let the public see those households' tax returns.

That's not a coincidence of page numbering. That's the whole design, printed in order.

The question his office wouldn't answer

Smith's spokesman said the parliamentarian would have to decide whether a prison sentence belongs in a budget bill. The parliamentarian's job is procedure. It was never the question.

The question was why the chairman of Ways and Means — with the power to write tax law for 330 million people — spent that power on protecting the tax secrets of the very wealthiest ones, using a back door, after losing in the front.

He still hasn't answered it.

Source

Shawn Musgrave, Why Does GOP Budget Bill Focus on Punishing People Who Leak Tax Returns?, The Intercept, May 21, 2025. Photo: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images.