It isn’t the data they don’t like — it’s the results — lower inflation and higher real wages. The “affordability narrative” of the Democrats seems to be in jeopardy overnight. President Trump teased the American public on Wednesday night, hinting that the Labor Department’s inflation reports to be issued the next morning were going to be good news for America. What legacy economists and mainstream journalists are actually complaining about is that low-inflation numbers also mean rising wages go further. Trump said this in his prime-time address to the nation: “Tonight, after 11 months, our border is secure, inflation has stopped, wages are up, prices are down, our nation is strong, America is respected, and our country is back, stronger than ever before.” Mainstream economists had forecast inflation would rise in November. The estimates for the year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) among economists polled by Dow Jones ranged from 2.9 percent to 3.2 percent, with the media forecast coming in at 3.1 percent. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, was forecast in a very tight range of 3.0 percent to 3.1 percent. The legacy media immediately mounted a campaign against the president’s inflation claims: the year-over-year inflation figure in September had come in at 3 percent and had been rising since May. The Trump administration’s tariff policies were quickly made the culprit for the increase in prices. What was not pointed out was the fact that tariff-affected categories like durable goods were up a mere 1.8 percent through September, while core services were up 3 percent. If legacy media were not imbued with an immunity to shame, they might have realized that the president receives important economic reports the afternoon before their release. When Trump was alluding to his administration’s accomplishments vis-a-vis inflation, he was already aware of the “good news.” What the Labor Department Report Actually Says Fast forward to Thursday morning: Trump’s touting of significant progress on inflation appeared prescient. The Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index rose just 2.7 percent over the 12 months through November. Core CPI (absent food and energy) rose by just 2.6 percent, the slowest pace of inflation since March 2021. In other words, the pace of inflation has declined below where it has been throughout the Biden presidency. The Democrats’ decision to shut down the government in October and keep it closed through early November meant that much of the data for October’s CPI was not collected. As a result, there was no October report, and the November report does not include the standard month-to-month inflation figure. Instead, we have a two-month figure for inflation, measuring what happened to prices between September and November. The numbers, for the most part, are good news. The seasonally-adjusted two-month change in overall CPI was an increase of only 0.2 percent. Core CPI was also up by just 0.2 percent. If we annualize the three-month growth of CPI, prices are up at a 2.1 percent pace. The six-month annualized rate of inflation is just 2.8 percent. For core CPI, the three-month annualized figure is 1.6 percent and the six-month annualized is 2.6 percent. If one measures inflation limited to the Trump presidency only (beginning February) the result is an annualized rate of 2.2 percent. These numbers indicate that there is collectively very little — if any — excess inflation over the Fed’s 2 percent target. President Trump seems to be on solid ground: excess inflation has been curbed. Grocery prices, one of the most salient for public sentiment about the economy, are up just 1.9 percent compared with a year ago. That’s the lowest rate of grocery price inflation since February. So, what happened to the vaunted theory of tariff-led inflation? Core goods, which exclude energy, have seen prices rise just 1.4 percent from a year ago. Apparel prices are up just 0.2 percent. New vehicle prices are up 0.6 percent. Durable goods prices are up 1.5 percent. Appliances are up 0.5 percent, and major appliances are up 1.2 percent. A note of caution: this is not to say that tariffs aren’t raising any prices. They certainly are raising prices for some items — furniture prices are up 4.6 percent — but these price increases are offset elsewhere. Tariffs — when they aren’t absorbed by foreign producers or U.S. importers — tend to affect categories rather than broad price levels throughout the economy. It Isn’t the Data Mainstream Economists Don’t Like — It’s the Results Many economists opposed to Trump’s tariffs are quick to suggest that there may be discrepancies in the data due to the shutdown. They suggest that the government had to impute (make assumptions) about what may have happened in October and even November. Also, some prices were collected later in the month, which might have the effect of distorting the index because merchants may have discounted more heavily as we moved toward the holidays. Rents and other retail prices are often lower toward the end of the month when landlords and merchants try to clear inventory. While all of that is true, there’s good reason to suspect that if the inflation report had come in worse than expected, much of the “skepticism” about flawed data would not have received mention. Consider the fact that analysts who were making forecasts were quite aware of all the data issues they now introduce as problematic. Their forecasts used the same information that the Trump administration used (including the shutdown issues), and yet, they complain because this report still came in better than expected — better than they had hoped. And if we zero in on indexes likely to be less distorted by shutdown data issues, the picture is the same. Core goods less food, energy, and used cars were up just 1.1 percent year-over-year. What legacy economists and mainstream journalists are actually complaining about is that low-inflation numbers also mean rising wages go further, and this plays well with what Trump has said his tariff policies would do for the average working American. Things are more affordable. In the 12-months through November, the median weekly earnings of Americans employed in the private sector rose 3.5 percent, which means they outpaced inflation by 0.8 percent. Those real wage gains are likely to go a long way in assuaging affordability concerns, no matter how frequently the media raise the false alarm over tariffs, or left-wing economists tell the public to believe the “noise,” and just ignore the data. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: It Is Not Time to PAUSE Immigration, Again The Netflix-Warner Bros. Merger — Is ‘Going to the Movies’ Over? The British Need a Sixth Amendment, Badly

In December 2012 I testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee as Pennsylvania’s secretary of human services and delivered an unvarnished message. The Affordable Care Act was a fiscal and administrative catastrophe in slow motion. Its mandates were crushing, its deadlines pure fantasy, its cost estimates deliberate fiction, and its promise of permanent 100 percent and later 90 percent federal funding rested on the fantasy of endless Washington surpluses that never existed. I warned that states would be forced to spend hundreds of millions just to comply with the non-expansion requirements, that Medicaid would devour every other budget priority, and that the enhanced federal match was nothing more than a teaser rate. States begged in 2012 for flexibility, block grants, broad waivers, and genuine partnership. We were told top-down central planning would work better. Fifteen years later Washington is once again wrestling with a full-blown health-care crisis. Hospitals are closing, premiums are rising at double-digit rates, physician shortages have reached historic levels, emergency rooms remain in permanent boarding status, half of rural hospitals are losing money, Democrats are renewing calls for single-payer, and Republicans are searching for something bold yet politically survivable. Against that backdrop every major warning I sounded in 2012 has come true, and most have proved worse than I feared. The money first. I told Congress Pennsylvania would need more than $260 million in state funds in the first two fiscal years simply to meet the dozens of new IT, eligibility, provider-screening, billing-edit, and data-hub mandates unrelated to expansion. The final tab for Pennsylvania alone topped half a billion state dollars. Across the 50 states the non-expansion compliance bill exceeded $100 billion, a figure the original Congressional Budget Office scores simply pretended would not exist. Enrollment exploded beyond any model. I projected roughly one million new Medicaid enrollees in Pennsylvania and a post-expansion program covering more than 25 percent of our citizens. Today 3.6 million Pennsylvanians, almost 28 percent of the state, are on Medicaid or CHIP, and the program now consumes roughly 40 percent of the state-funded budget. Higher education, infrastructure, pensions, public safety, and virtually every other priority have been starved for years to keep the Medicaid beast fed. The identical pattern repeated in nearly every expansion state. I called the 90 percent match unsustainable. With the national debt now past $36 trillion and annual deficits still running above $1.5 trillion, every bipartisan fiscal commission and every state budget office quietly assumes the enhanced match will be slashed or eliminated in the 2030s. The only open question is how brutal the reckoning will be. The insurance exchanges have fully vindicated Governor Corbett’s 2012 decision to stay away. Pennsylvania and most states remain on the federal platform because the promised state-based authority was always illusory. The handful of surviving state exchanges live on broad taxes against all insurance policies or perpetual federal life support. Hospital Disproportionate Share (DSH) payment cuts were premised on the fantasy of universal coverage. Congress has delayed them seven separate times, yet the lingering threat has helped drive waves of rural and safety-net hospitals to close labor-and-delivery units or shut their doors entirely. Those closures have contributed directly to the maternity-care deserts and broader access crisis dominating headlines today. The temporary primary-care payment bump that expired in 2014 became permanent because no legislature could face the backlash of cutting doctor rates. A short-term federal gift turned into tens of billions in permanent state obligations. The labor-market distortion I flagged in 2012 never reversed. Businesses locked in the shift to part-time work to avoid the employer mandate, and a decade of peer-reviewed studies has confirmed the ACA pushed hundreds of thousands more Americans onto Medicaid than the rosy enrollment models ever admitted. As policymakers in 2025 argue over how to rescue a health system staggering under 10 to 20 percent annual premium increases, record emergency-room boarding times, and a primary-care workforce on the verge of collapse, the ACA’s legacy is impossible to escape. It delivered neither affordability nor stability. It simply transferred enormous costs to state taxpayers, distorted labor markets, and created an entitlement so large and politically radioactive that no one dares reform it, even as the bills come due and the federal trust funds hurtle toward insolvency. States begged in 2012 for flexibility, block grants, broad waivers, and genuine partnership. We were told top-down central planning would work better. The crisis unfolding today is the direct, predictable result of that arrogance. The Affordable Care Act was sold as the final solution to America’s health-care problems. Fifteen years later it looks more like the opening act of an unaffordable tragedy whose next scene both parties are terrified to write. READ MORE from Gary D. Alexander: The Bureaucracy Has Become the Mission Reclaiming America’s Graduate Pipeline Gary D. Alexander served as secretary of health and human services in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.  

Buyer beware. Seems like common sense. We’re wary when we buy a power tool on Facebook Marketplace. We don’t assume quality; we investigate. We double-check. We’re worried about getting scammed. Resources flow toward administrators who manage accreditation paperwork instead of teaching and student success. Innovation is discouraged, conformity rewarded. But that instinct seems to vanish when it comes to picking a college. For this, we’re all in, despite the price tag, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is skyrocketing. Just look, for example, at a private liberal arts school like Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. The total annual cost is a whopping $92,751 a year. And what does the buyer get at this price point? Well, buyer beware. Earlier this month, Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform and a longtime education policy reformer, published a report for the American Enterprise Institute titled “Rethinking Accreditation in Higher Education.” Allen, who has spent decades demanding accountability in education, including time as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education, offers a blunt conclusion about the accreditation process that certifies institutions, describing it as a “compliance maze that neither ensures quality nor empowers consumers.” Voluntary accreditation has served as a gatekeeper in higher ed since the 19th century, but it gradually grew more regulatory and bureaucratic over the 20th century. Since 1992, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) has been responsible for the approval process, which Allen sees as “opaque, political, and fundamentally misaligned with student needs.” The NACIQI can recommend action, but it lacks enforcement power, so blatant failures are not linked to accountability. So students are asked to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education, yet almost no one tells them what they are actually buying. Are they paying for learning? Job-ready skills? Long-term economic mobility? Or are they simply purchasing a seat and a certificate? Accreditation has long been treated as a guarantee of institutional quality — but is it? Allen puts it candidly: “Today, accreditation largely rewards seat time, inputs, and bureaucratic conformity — not value, performance, or opportunity.” If accreditation is supposed to guarantee quality education, her words should be unsettling to every parent, student, and taxpayer. So whose feet are held to the fire? No one, really, Allen writes, as accreditors seldom revoke institutions’ approval when it is explicitly linked to academic failure. The NACIQI can recommend action, but it lacks enforcement power, meaning even apparent failures rarely result in accountability. So how do “customers” know what they are buying? Allen believes that kicking the tires at college or university is difficult, as federal tools such as College Navigator and College Scorecard offer incomplete and inconsistent data, leaving families without clear information about post-graduation outcomes. Students remain blind to the very question that, for most people, matters most: how will my education help me get a job? Allen’s findings make clear that accreditation’s failures also leave taxpayers holding the bag. Because accreditation unlocks access to federal aid, colleges continue drawing taxpayer-funded dollars even as students fail to graduate, learn, or find work. Accreditors rarely pull approval for academic failure — why would they? They’d lose money. Pell Grants and federally backed loans keep the cash flowing. This could be an issue with the rise of AI, as Allen notes the increase in large numbers of “Pell runners,” students enrolling simply to secure aid and letting AI do the work, as Allen notes. Even when students are caught plagiarizing, they remain on the rolls, and the money keeps flowing in. What incentives would the institutions have to cut them off? This seems like a bubble waiting to burst, with taxpayers, of course, left with the bill. Allen labels these pathologies a “compliance economy.” Resources flow toward administrators who manage accreditation paperwork instead of teaching and student success. Innovation is discouraged, conformity rewarded. The process “consumes billions in time, talent, and tuition,” she writes. The knock-on effect comes in a wave of school closures and mergers. According to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 607 colleges closed or merged between 2014 and 2020. The 2018–19 academic year saw 236 closures  — the highest on record — the system is buckling. Allen offers sound advice to fix the broken accreditation process. She recommends a federal “outcomes-based” eligibility standard managed by the Treasury, coupled with a database that follows “earnings, employment, completion, and value” of students. She also wants to give states autonomy to approve their own accreditation paths. This reform is already underway with the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), a first-of-its-kind accrediting body founded by six state university systems in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. If colleges want to operate like businesses, which they clinically seem to be doing, then they should be held to business standards. A company that sells a defective product eventually loses customers. But it looks like the diploma mill will keep turning — something has to give. Buyer beware. READ MORE from Pete Connolly: Beyond the Gridiron: The Army–Navy Honor Code Walz Can’t Escape the Somali Fraud Scandal America, Please Put Some Pants On

As 2026 looms, the voyage of Sen. John Husted’s (R-Ohio) Children Harmed by AI Technology (CHAT) Act from proposal into law seems likely to carry on apace. The bill — which would, under the banner of protecting children, require a staggeringly broad array of artificial intelligence (AI) services to enforce age verification upon their users — merits no commendation, except perhaps for its sponsor’s intentions. The CHAT Act benefits from one of the oldest biases in politics: lawmakers project hosts of imagined virtues and benefits that are to be created by their proposals, no matter how uncertain, overlooking or neglecting to mention shortcomings that, to more candid observers, seem likely or even sure to damage the interests or liberties of their constituents. “No difficulties occur in what has never been tried,” as Edmund Burke observed. Proposed children’s online safety legislation, moreover, enjoys a greater degree of deference than most, for who in good faith could object to protecting children? (RELATED: Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online) Age verification … amounts to a show-your-papers regime, threatening to precondition Americans’ access to many ordinary digital services on their submission to that regime. Even still, a closer look at the CHAT Act’s form and structure, its logic, and its individual provisions, reveals that it would in fact endanger not only children but all Americans. The bill’s central provision, age verification, to which all Americans, irrespective of age, would have to submit, contains double cause for worry. To determine which users have yet to reach the age of majority, all must submit to age verification. Age verification — which generally requires users to offer up government documentation or to undergo a facial scan — amounts to a show-your-papers regime, threatening to precondition Americans’ access to many ordinary digital services on their submission to that regime. That alone ought to bring out Americans’ well-developed skittishness about governmental encroachments into their lives and liberties. (RELATED: Conservative Principles Lost in Tech Regulation) Practically, age verification, which requires the collection and storage of personal information, imperils the privacy of every user subjected to it. Troves of data maintained by technology platforms routinely fall victim to hacks, data breaches, and other cybersecurity incidents. So too do third-party vendors that purport to offer secure identity- and age-verification services. (RELATED: EU Censorship Metastasizes) “Outabox, which provided facial-recognition services to various in-person businesses, announced a massive cybersecurity breach in 2024 resulting in the piracy of more than one million consumer records. AU10TIX, an identity-verification service used by recognizable platforms like Uber, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn, is another victim of cybercrime,” the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, my employer, noted in an amicus brief at the Supreme Court last summer. (RELATED: Britain’s Online Safety Act Might Come to America) Then fall came, vindicating our argument: In October, Discord made public the breach of a third-party vendor, reporting that “approximately 70,000 users…may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.” As Justice Samuel Alito put it, pithily, in a January 2025 oral argument, “There have been hacks of everything.” The privacy and data-security dangers inherent in age verification are particularly acute for children, a demographic already beset by identity theft. “Minors are appealing targets for identity thieves,” the R Street Institute found, continuing: “The problem is so extensive that research by Experian suggests that 25 percent of children will be victims of identity fraud or theft by the time they are 18.” Enforcing age verification and ensuring that cybercriminals and their clientele have ready access to children’s personal information is a gust of wind that can only feed these flames, likely to transform an already substantial fire into a runaway blaze. (RELATED: Washington’s Reverse Midas Touch) Parents, too, have little reason to welcome the CHAT Act’s innovations. After determining a prospective user to be underage, the bill would require AI models to “obtain verifiable parental consent … before allowing a minor to access and use the companion AI chatbot.” The data collection needed for simple age verification pales by comparison with the data collection necessitated by an enforced parental-consent process, which, perforce, involves a determination not just of age, but of identity — the identity of the parent, the identity of the child, and the veracity of the parent-child relationship. The amount of data that the CHAT Act proposes to collect is immense and, in light of the attendant cybersecurity and privacy risks, somewhat shocking. The divergence between advocates of so-called child safety legislation and those opposing these proposals has little to do with whether children ought to be protected online; all agree that they must be. Instead, on one side of this divide stand those who cannot see the second- and third-order effects of their favored policies; on the other, those who are sensible of those dangers and who seek better means to secure a common end. READ MORE from David B. McGarry: Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online Conservative Principles Lost in Tech Regulation When Government Competes, America Loses David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

Salvadoran with lengthy rap sheet repeatedly released into Virginia sanctuary county

Throughout American history, individual states have been the birthplace of significant national movements, shaping the nation’s social, political, and cultural landscape. These local initiatives often serve as catalysts, inspiring broader reforms and conversations that resonate across the country. By examining these state-originated movements, we gain insight into how localized actions can ripple outward, altering the ...

from vivafrei: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform: The chart below is a fascinating snapshot of the last 75 years in the demise of the American empire. There are currently 164 million people employed in America. About 34 million of those are employed part-time. When you understand the working age population is 275 million and your friendly […]

President Trump on Saturday endorsed Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman for Governor of New York. Trump’s endorsement follows Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) suspending her campaign and announcing she will not seek re-election in Congress. BREAKING: Elise Stefanik Suspends Campaign For New York Governor, Announces Decision On Congressional Future "Bruce is MAGA all the way, and has been with me from the very beginning. As Nassau County Executive, he is working tirelessly with the Brave Heroes of ICE, Border Patrol, and Law Enforcement to Keep Our Border SECURE, Stop Migrant Crime, Safeguard our Community, and Ensure LAW AND ORDER," Trump said on Truth Social. "As your next Governor, Bruce will continue to fight hard to Grow the Economy, Cut Taxes, and Regulations, Promote MADE IN THE U.S.A., Champion American Energy DOMINANCE, Strengthen our Military/Veterans, Advance Election Integrity, and Protect our always under siege Second Amendment!" Trump continued. "Bruce Blakeman is a FANTASTIC guy, will win the big November Election and, without hesitation, has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Governor of the ONCE GREAT STATE OF NEW YORK (IT CAN BE GREAT AGAIN!). BRUCE BLAKEMAN WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" he added. Full post: Fox News shared further: Blakeman serves as Nassau County Executive, leading New York’s largest suburban county. He has positioned himself as a tough-on-crime executive and a vocal critic of New York’s immigration and criminal justice policies. Trump framed the endorsement as part of a broader effort to reclaim what he described as a state in decline under Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul's leadership. "I am grateful and blessed to have the endorsement of President Donald J. Trump," Blakeman said. I am grateful and blessed to have the endorsement of President Donald J. Trump. pic.twitter.com/S4n6PcfYSs — Bruce Blakeman (@NassauExec) December 20, 2025 More from the New York Post: The president’s unequivocal praise came after he spoke highly of both candidates for the previous two weeks – and could serve to discourage any further primary drama or even clear the field, after Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) left the door open to taking another look at the race. “I’m going to take a little bit of time before I comment further as to what I may or may not do,” he told CNN in the minutes after Stefanik’s shock Friday announcement. Lawler had earlier endorsed Stefanik. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment Saturday. Hochul accused Blakeman of “taking presidential a**-kissing to new heights.” “Donald Trump endorsed Bruce Blakeman for one reason: he’ll put Trump first, New York last, and leave families to foot the bill. Take it from Trump, Blakeman is ‘MAGA all the way’” Hochul Campaign Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.