YouTube / Governor Kathy Hochul
Eye on Albany: Hochul’s Budget Con(fusion)
“Governor Hochul’s plan to mail $500 checks to millions of households has a problem: the sales tax ‘surplus’ she wants to dish out doesn’t exist,” snarks the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. And though “inflation is responsible for a portion of the recent increase in sales tax receipts,” it’s “nowhere near $3 billion.” Hochul may be confusing “state tax receipts unrelated to the sales tax coming in $2.9 billion higher than forecast in the spring.” Maybe she realizes that a growing share of state tax revenue is coming “from more volatile earnings,” so is reluctant “to let another $3 billion slide into the state’s spending baseline.” But her refund proposal “would still be dreadful public policy.”
Campus beat: Fix Higher Ed, Save Civilization
“The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation,” but as young people turn to alternative forms of education and the Trump team takes power, “it seems inevitable that universities will need to change or shrink,” observes Joel Kotkin at Spiked. “Americans are increasingly losing faith in the universities to deliver” high-paying jobs, since “degree-based hiring is being replaced with skills-based hiring” in fields like “manufacturing and construction.” Under Trump, “the disruption” of higher education “is likely to continue,” and though “the educrats will fight like mad dogs” against reform, “a change of direction is all too necessary” to “rescue our kids and our civilisation.”
Conservative: Time’s Desperate Trump Ploy
“In a desperate push for relevancy, Time magazine has chosen Donald Trump as its Person of the Year for 2024,” notes USA Today’s Nicole Russell. But “with cynicism and leftism on their side, the article’s authors cast doubt on America’s choice,” questioning “Trump’s tactics, staff and history” and fearmongering about constitutional norms “without mentioning the many norms that Biden, Harris and the Democratic Party tore to shreds this year.” “Time is trying to capitalize on Trump,” but while this cover paints him “as stoic and powerful,” the mag “also has often portrayed him negatively,” including “as a melting orange blob.” Yet his landslide win shows that “it’s Trump’s world now: We all just live in it, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Time magazine.”
From the right: Liberalism Got Hacked
The values of liberalism have “been hacked by ideologues operating on the inside,” argues UK opposition leader Kemi Badenoch at The Free Press. Authoritarian leftists “speak the language of the civil rights movement, but they aim to resegregate us. They preach about social justice, but they do not believe in the most basic ideas of fairness and equality. They demand our tolerance even as they seek to undermine the very culture and institutions that create that tolerance in the first place.” To fix it, we must “explain the value of liberty” and “stop the expansion of the state.” “We have a job to do, and it’s not just to win elections.” “It’s to champion and defend the world-transforming values that allow those elections to exist in the first place.”
FBI watch: Wray’s Enduring Disgrace
“Few exiting officials merit fiercer censure” than FBI chief Christopher Wray, declare the Washington Examiner’s editors. “He came into office promising transparency, candor, competence, depoliticization, and systemic reform. He has produced none of it.” And “neither his word nor his judgment can be trusted.” E.g., “in 2022, it came to light that an internal audit three years earlier showed that FBI personnel broke the rules at least 747 times in only a year and a half in ‘high-profile’ investigations,” yet Wray only addressed the problems “more than a year after the audit was publicized.” He “lied to Congress about the extent of the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics for ‘threat mitigation’ and prevaricated about the FBI investigating parent activists as domestic terrorists and about whether the FBI helped censor speech on social media platforms.” In his wake, “the FBI needs a serious disinfectant.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board