Connexion
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian was at the White House on Thursday to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris about criminal justice reform — a subject that has long been a favorite personal cause for Kardashian. The event featured four individuals who
The post Kim Kardashian Meets With Kamala Harris about Criminal Justice Reform appeared first on Breitbart.
If Merrick Garland did not comply with the subpoena, he would face contempt of Congress proceedings, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan said.
The post Merrick Garland Defies Final Warning to Comply with Biden Audio Subpoena or Face Contempt appeared first on Breitbart.
At least 13 financial institutions are being investigated for colluding with the federal government to spy on Trump supporters.
The post Nolte: Report Says 13 Banks Helped Feds Spy on Trump Supporters appeared first on Breitbart.
Rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West is looking at broadening out his business interests with a dedicated Yeezy Porn studio, working alongside adult film producer Mike Moz, who used to be married to Stormy Daniels.
The post Kanye West to Launch ‘Yeezy Porn’ Site with Stormy Daniels’ Ex appeared first on Breitbart.
During an appearance on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" on Monday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) argued Americans were seeing through these prosecutions that he deemed to be efforts to undermine Trump's reelection bid.
The post Jim Jordan: Trump Is ‘Going to Win’ — ‘People See Through’ Prosecutions appeared first on Breitbart.
Apartments in Madrid. Golden visa programs are being phased out or shut down around Europe.
"Mike Johnson has handed the speaker's gavel over to the Democrats," Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said Saturday.
The post Exclusive — Jim Banks: Speaker Johnson ‘Handed the Speaker’s Gavel Over to the Democrats’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said he has "never seen a bigger flip-flop in politics" than he has with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
The post Exclusive — Jim Banks on Mike Johnson: I’ve ‘Never Seen a Bigger Flip-Flop in Politics’ appeared first on Breitbart.
MSNBC contributor Claire McCaskill said Friday on "Morning Joe" that former President Donald Trump does not know what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or the Affordable Care Act dubbed Obamacare were.
The post McCaskill: Trump Doesn’t Know What FISA or Obamacare Are appeared first on Breitbart.
A hotel in Amsterdam’s red-light district, where the city has tried to limit crowds.
On the way to class in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The delayed vaccines means that girls in countries such as Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Mozambique who are now 14 will no longer be eligible for vaccination when these campaigns finally start.
Attorney General Merrick Garland received a final warning Tuesday to comply with subpoenas for the audio of President Joe Biden's interview with the special counsel Robert Hur.
The post Garland Gets a Final Warning to Comply with Biden Audio Subpoena or Face Contempt appeared first on Breitbart.
A Saudi royal official says Iran “engineered the war in Gaza to destroy the progress in relations” between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The post Saudi Official: Iran ‘Engineered a War in Gaza’ to Ruin Saudi-Israel Relationship appeared first on Breitbart.
Florida gets all the attention. The GOP power center of the future is closer to D.C.
The Ohio River tears westward through the Pittsburgh suburbs, whisks into West Virginia, cuts on through Ohio, capstones Kentucky, indexes Indiana, and terminates in Southern Illinois. In the end, it marries the mighty Mississippi. The Ohio River once marked the frontier—a land of second chances and poseur aristocrats.
Now they just call it Trump country.
By twofold, Louisville, Kentucky, is the most populous city on the river. Bourbon country’s finest is followed by Pittsburgh, and then ever so closely by Cincinnati. Hunter S. Thompson, a native, declared Louisville “a Southern city, with Northern problems.” A Cincinnatian in the know told me his hometown is the inverse.
You see it when you’re there. Moving east and south across Ohio, Cincinnati is no Toledo. There is no quick-and-easy explanation of a glass industry gone away, no Detroit-style misery in miniature. Cincinnati is not comparable to Cleveland-Akron, Ohio’s Dallas-Fort Worth. Cincy has never suffered such a collapse in prestige. One hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the United States—more fearsome than American-ancient Boston or nouveau Los Angeles.
Cincinnati is also not Columbus. First, Cincinnati is more likely to keep its name. (Roman generals are grandfathered in; explorers of the last six hundred years are not.) Second, unlike Columbus, Cincinnati is not anchored to a benign cult: the Ohio State University.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote that Ohio “has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to.” But these places are not so satirical. After all, there are hipster bars that could have been ripped from Hollywood (or anywhere these days). And there are early 20th-century homes (though often on German-named streets) refurbished by under-40s that could double as S.F. Victorians in a pinch.
More than anywhere else in the state, Ohio’s capital Columbus (and its more transient population) often seems intent on breaking its Midwest mold in such a fashion. Though such maneuvers all feel very self-aware—which is perhaps even more Midwestern.
Columbus is the fastest-growing city of significance in the state, though such materialist markers of success haven’t stopped many Ohioans from spouting complaints that could be heard in Northern Virginia, the Atlanta suburbs, and scores of towns across Texas, Florida, and anywhere in 21st century America that’s actually growing.
Last, and not least, and barely in the state, is Cincinnati and the overlooked Ohio River.
It still bears emphasizing: Eight presidents of the United States have hailed from Ohio. And seven were born in the state—including the seven that occupied the Oval Office from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties. Seven in half a century.
In contrast to the general understanding of American oligarchy, Ohio has been more important on the level of presidents than Harvard. Ohio politics in the Gilded Age was plausibly more important than the Democratic Party’s. And Ohio backrooms were nearly interchangeable with the GOP’s.
The last representative of this Ohio old guard was Senator Robert Taft, who in the early 1950s substituted “sane analysis for expediency” (his words), argued China not Russia was enemy number one, and exhorted Europe to be vaguely self-reliant.
Taft was defeated in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 by the most plausible heir to George Washington to date: Dwight Eisenhower. Taft’s ideas seemed, for a lifetime, to be settled business, as defeated as the druids.
Robert Taft’s father had been president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Kids from even Southern Appalachia (a land of confusion and confused loyalty), like this writer’s grandfather, were named for the old man. For more than seventy years, to use a 21st century phrase, Robert Taft has been treated like the geopolitical version of a failson.
Even his father William Howard Taft, that stout figure who served between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was seemingly abandoned by history.
Yet along the Ohio River, up a road in Cincinnati named for the 27th president, there is a man some now think will be the 48th, and possibly the youngest ever.
In 10 years, Ohio has swapped places with Virginia on the political map. Now it is Ohio that is a soft red state a stone’s throw from Washington.
Sure, Akron is not Arlington-close, but there are portions of Virginia that are further west of Detroit. It’s not Arizona or Wyoming. And Ohio has the arsenal of would-be commanders-in-chief to match this new prestige that comes with being important, safe for the GOP, and an hour flight from power.
Before this shift, but after Taft, Ohio had a generation of usually Democratic grandees that seems strange and supine now.
There was Democratic Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and not the last to run a weird and blighted campaign for president. There was Republican Governor and before that Congressman John Kasich, reportedly brilliant and temperamental, but brilliant and temperamental about balanced budgets (fair) and Ukraine aid (much less so). It was a different time; it was certainly a different GOP.
There was Speaker John Boehner, beloved by the Washington press corps and the maître d’ at the Met Club. His tenure now is set to be lost in the noise of the Newt Gingrich revolution, the Dennis Hastert catastrophe, the Nancy Pelosi stints, the Paul Ryan story, and what could still be the GOP’s Year of Five Speakers.
There were more. Ted Strickland, Democratic governor in the Noughties and an ordained minister, was on Barack Obama’s vice-presidential search list when the Democratic Party felt the need to strike a middle ground in the culture war.
Notably absent from the Ohio national profile in these pre-Trump years was anything in the way of an effective punch on the issue of deindustrialization. It all went down, after all.
At the commanding heights, it was a process. As Charles Bukowski wrote in 1986: “Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are [laid] off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: ‘I put in 35 years…’ ‘It ain’t right…’ ‘I don’t know what to do…’”
Especially after the collapse of communism, most statewide Republicans were tacitly for international laissez-faire. Both Democratic Senators at the time (including Glenn) and 11 of 19 congressmen voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement’s ignoble ratification. Among the Republicans voting in favor were Kasich and Rob Portman, the latter a Bushie U.S. Trade Representative and later U.S. senator.
In the meantime, many Democrats were content to rally support on these issues at the polls while often eliding immigration. They, too, seemingly achieved little.
By the late 1990s, dissent on these subjects was marginalized to such voices as James Traficant (the “oracle from Youngstown” to some, a convicted racketeer to others) and Dennis Kucinich (more on him a little later). In Britain, these figures would have been written off as “the loony left.”
This line of thought is certain to resurface this year as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown seeks another term in office. He’s considered a state great, having been in elected office since the Seventies.
To his most cynical Republican critics, who have possibly been feeding lines to his opponent Bernie Moreno, Sherrod Brown is great like Elizabeth II was great. Like the late monarch, Brown is impossibly long in tenure and has been an overseer of precipitous decline.
For now, the old statewide consensus—what MAGA populists would now call “the uniparty”—is preserved in amber in the form of current Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Presently, he is probably best described as an anti-anti-Trump Republican. Like the current president, DeWine’s been running for office since the ’70s. This is his last gig.
For the establishment, at least: après moi, le déluge.
West of Columbus and Northeast of Dayton, there is Jim Jordan, the congressman who in many ways was first on board with the new tendency. An unremitting presence on cable news, in office since 2001, Jordan’s tradecraft has left him open to the critique that he is agnostic on governing.
In recent years, Jordan has sought—or been compelled by circumstance—to correct this impression.
The current chair of the influential House Judiciary Committee, Jordan attempted a bid for speaker in the mad scrum last autumn. If Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure collapses before the November general election, Jordan may well be the odds-on favorite to succeed him.
Southwest in the Eighth District is below-the-radar player Warren Davidson. A West Pointer and former Army Ranger, the congressman’s “your word is your bond” personal style may be better suited for whatever comes after the Trump restoration—or the attempt at it that may soon end.
It is not unimaginable that Davidson could wind up a senior national security official under a President Trump next year. The former president has gone out of his way to show he means business this time, to the delight of both the right and the liberal press who have papers to sell.
On foreign policy, especially, the ex-president is short on allies and frankly running out of neocons he hasn’t fired. If a Senate vacancy opens up next year, Davidson could run for the upper chamber (he looked but passed on a run this year).
In the meantime, Davidson could take down a speaker of the House. Like a realist Georges Danton, no single member of Congress has communicated so proudly the imperative to end the old ways. That starts with bringing the war in the east to a close, or at least American sponsorship of it.
Dashing back to Columbus now is Cincy native and overnight Republican rock star Vivek Ramaswamy. The entrepreneur-turned-politician relocated back to Ohio in recent years. His wife is a physician at OSU. Ramaswamy passed on the 2022 Senate race only to dive headfirst into the 2024 presidential contest.
Ramaswamy has been compared derisively to Pete Buttigieg, another millennial Ivy League “gunner.” Past the mistiest similarities, it is an inaccurate comparison.
Buttigieg’s support was often bolstered by voters older than him. Ramaswamy, by contrast, seemed to rattle many establishment Baby Boomer conservative sensibilities while he built a youth fanbase online.
Buttigieg is taciturn. Ramaswamy is saber-rattling. Buttigieg is the bête noire of the Bernie Sanders wing. Ramaswamy is all in on Trump and Trumpism.
The Senate nominee this year, Moreno, is perhaps the biggest unknown.
A Hispanic-American and a career car dealer, Moreno’s background is plainly that of the kind of striver his party both seeks to attract and increasingly has come to represent. In his primary night victory speech, Moreno castigated the U.S. trade deficit with China.
Moreno has the staunch backing of much of the most populist and nationalist infrastructure in Washington, DC. But he does not have much in the way of an independent brand—it is one he will swiftly have to develop.
After all, a five-alarm fire, with way more than a whiff of the political dark arts, erupted at the eleventh hour in Moreno’s primary race. A 16-year-old alleged gay dating profile on an adult website. Was it Moreno’s?
“I reviewed all the available information and it showed that the account had only a single visit, no activity, no profile photo, consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site. That’s it,” said AdultFriendFinder founder Andrew Cornu, denouncing the story. “It’s important to recognize that even temporary access to an email account is sufficient to create a fake dating profile in someone else’s name.”
For a party and a country seemingly debating abortion and gay rights this year with a fury not seen in decades, the impression of hypocrisy or even pathology could mean Senate control.
Even if one concedes the Republican talking point that Sherrod Brown is not all that he seems, the fact remains he has seemed just fine to voters. They have only once rejected him, in an Ohio secretary of state’s race over thirty years ago.
Coincidentally, Moreno is also the new father-in-law of Republican Congressman Max Miller. Both are from the Cleveland area. Miller, a 35-year-old freshman representative, is a Trump White House alum, a stalwart ally of Mar-A-Lago, but not generally associated with the party’s reformist wing.
Indeed, during the battle over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, Miller broke with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, the anti-McCarthy ringleader, in furious terms. His critics see him as a grandiose foreign policy hawk. He said shortly after the October 7 Hamas atrocity that Israel should be bound by “no rules of engagement.”
Miller is running for reelection this year—against Kucinich (!), last seen running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Kucinich left the RFK team in mid-October, as the candidate left the Democratic race to run as an independent.
Some near the Kennedy orbit have commented privately that Kucinich’s exodus lines up with RFK’s foreign policy post–October 7. Remarkably, on the Gaza war, Kennedy is arguably now the most hawkish of the three leading presidential candidates.
As Trump has urged Jerusalem to “finish up” and Biden has increasingly ceded ground to his progressive left, Kennedy has overtly rejected ceasefires and truces. This has won him plaudits from such arch-hawks as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“I don’t even know what that means right now,” Kennedy said in March of a potential stoppage in fighting. Each such cessation “has been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?”
Surely these issues will soon come up on the campaign trail between Miller and Kucinich.
All these tensions, open disagreements and questions of authenticity and how they are settled—or not—will determine how much the Republican Party has really, truly changed.
No discussion of Ohio, of the Republican Party, or American politics is complete any longer without addressing Senator J.D. Vance.
For the subject at hand, he’s the 800-pound gorilla. Except what a poor analogy that is: the senator looks to be down about thirty pounds. The question of the hour is if he is, indeed, “central casting” to be Donald Trump’s second running mate.
At first, Vance might not make all that intuitive sense for the role. Shouldn’t Trump select a woman or a minority?
That is easier said than done, actually, as President Joe Biden found out in 2020. First Biden committed himself to the selection of a woman—it was a killing stroke to win the primary against Bernie Sanders in the waning normal days of 2020 (mid-March). By summer, the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd compelled Biden to select an African-American, ruling out white Minnesota politicians and former prosecutors such as Amy Klobuchar.
Trump has shrewdly not hemmed himself in so tightly, but another Biden-style precedent looms. Major party presidential nominees usually don’t select non-politicians or even backbench congressmen for a reason. Statewide politicians—elected senators and governors—are more heavily vetted, and are demonstrated survivors. Yet even selecting a governor of a less populous frontier state is fraught with risk, as John McCain learned with Sarah Palin.
Under this rubric, and ruling out clear apostates such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the list is winnowed considerably: Vance; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Florida Senator Marco Rubio; North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
With Rubio, the main problem is logistical. Both he and Trump are residents of the same state. Would Trump move his legal residence? Amidst a sprawling dragnet of criminal indictments related to his business and political practices? Would Rubio resign his Senate seat and move to another state for a race he might well lose?
Noem is bedeviled by a whisper campaign about marital infidelity. More significantly, Noem is in a double bind politically on social issues, cutting into her appeal as a feminine complement to Trump.
On the one hand, social conservatives view Noem as not hardline on the transsexual issue. In 2021, Noem declined to sign a transgender sports ban in college athletics, purposefully avoiding a fight with the NCAA. She cited her small state’s tourism concerns and her duty to her constituents. Conservatives such as Tucker Carlson disagreed, and the matter culminated in a Fox News showdown.
On the other hand, Noem signed into law an abortion ban that wiped away exceptions for rape and incest.
Noem gave a striking, inspired answer to Carlson a year later on the subject of Ukraine:
The primary external threat to the United States in Communist China. Our opposition to Russia has heightened this threat… The American people didn’t get us into this war. Joe Biden did. Biden has this fantasy that he can do the same kind of thing to Russia that Ronald Reagan did to the Soviet Union. … We’ve already overextended ourselves in our largesse to Ukraine.
But it’s likely, though not certain, that she’s staked out ground that has bled too many would-be allies.
Burgum is a dark horse in Vance’s way. It’s difficult to see what Burgum—Midwestern, tall, business experience, brains—brings that Vance doesn’t also while legitimately exciting people. Trump is said to fear anointing a successor. But picking the little-known if probably safe Burgum risks jumping the shark. Trump once also thought highly of Rex Tillerson.
The other question for Vance: Should he want the number 2 slot?
It is not a secret The American Conservative is a longtime confederate of the junior senator from Ohio. The upside is clear: No politician in America is as staked out as clearly on the stalwart issues of foreign policy realism, trade realism, and immigration restriction. No one. If Vance becomes vice president, he will be the runaway favorite to succeed a reelected Trump.
There is also the potential extraordinary circumstance that Trump wins but is forced from office by legal or financial issues or poor health (with a presumably corresponding set of pardons solving some of these issues). Vance, who turns forty in August, would become the youngest president in American history.
Yet, if Trump loses, or if he loses badly, not only does Trump go down but the most credible populist in the country is badly tarnished by a rout. Only one losing vice presidential nominee in over a century has later become president: Franklin Roosevelt. And it took FDR 12 years and the crisis of the Great Depression to recover politically from his loss on the 1920 ticket.
For Vance, then, this is a vabanque political moment less than two years into his Senate career.
It is especially so attached to a personality like Trump’s. The former president is the consummate gambler. Untold numbers of individuals have flamed out of his orbit.
Is this the move?
The personal fealty between Vance and the Trumps seems genuine. Vance is clearly tight with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. Few have been able to strike the delicate balance between Trump’s personal affairs and Trump’s political prerogatives. Has Vance found it? It would be a major asset in office.
Much has been made of Vance’s highly bespoke political call in 2016: enthused and sympathetic about the issues Trump was raising, opposed to his becoming president.
Five years later, in autumn 2021, Vance (before he was a senator) told me Donald Trump would be reelected and inaugurated in January 2025. Back then, I ferociously disagreed. A major horseshoe political miss that Vance has recovered from could soon be capstoned by powerful prescience very few had.
It could make Vance the second most powerful person in the country.
Back when I started in journalism, I worked with the longtime columnist Michael Barone. In vivid contrast with most others I met, those who warned what a tough business media was, Barone reported the industry’s upsides. Barone had predicted Mitt Romney would win 315 electoral votes in the previous election with nary a professional consequence.
But Barone is hardly out to lunch, even if he joined organized conservatism’s strange sanguinity about the electoral appeal of Mitt Romney. He quickly followed up.
In his 2013 work Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, Barone put forward the case (which would have huge relevance in 2016) that the Midwest is the most dovish region of the United States. The Midwest was notably settled by immigrants fleeing the wars of Europe. The Germans and even the Irish-Americans in the region were less likely to support any foreign policy perceived as too pro-British, which was increasingly a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy after the Civil War.
“Southernization” has defined U.S. demography and its politics for nearly a century and especially much of the last fifty years. Americans continued (and continue) moving south and west. Between 1976 to 2004, it became conventional wisdom that any Democratic ticket that had a prayer would have to feature a Southerner, probably at the top (Carter, Clinton).
From 1980 onwards, Republicans always featured a Southerner (and a Bush) except for 1996, an election in which the party was totally swarmed. The 1992 presidential race featured two Texas millionaires against the governor of neighboring Arkansas. The winning Democratic ticket of the 1990s was united by the Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis that links Tennessee and the Razorback State.
And then, all at once, the South disappeared from the big game.
In 2008, McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden skipped the region (unless you’re catching the current president on the occasional day he feels inclined to remind you that Delaware was a slave state). In 2012, Romney and Ryan were two Yankees. Parts of Indiana are arguably the South, but Mike Pence is not from that part.
And no Southerner is in the top tier of Trump vice presidential aspirants (Miami is not the South). Three Midwesterners (Vance, Noem, Burgum) are.
Given both the obscene housing crunch now hitting Florida and even Texas and the clear problems of the West Coast, the continued U.S. national move south and west may be no fait accompli. Much like Russia, the Midwest hopes to be a moonshot beneficiary of climate change.
Demographics could match political reality in the coming decade. For now, political reality is already here.
Midwest political influence—and Ohio Republican power, particularly—is back on the scene.
The post How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World appeared first on The American Conservative.
An image taken from video shows people standing around the debris of a missile that the Jordanian forces intercepted over Amman during Iran’s bombardment of Israel early Sunday.
Utah state Rep. Phil Lyman (R) said on Breitbart News Saturday that Gov. Spencer Cox (R) is more of a "Gavin Newsom 2.0" than a Republican.
The post Exclusive — Phil Lyman: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox More of a ‘Gavin Newsom 2.0’ than a Republican appeared first on Breitbart.
Democrats want former President Donald Trump "confined to a courtroom" instead of on the campaign trail, but that will not be the case, Karoline Leavitt, national spokeswoman for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
The post Exclusive — Karoline Leavitt: Democrats Want Trump ‘Confined to a Courtroom’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The mainstream media is "complicit" in President Joe Biden's border invasion, Karoline Leavitt said on Breitbart News Saturday.
The post Exclusive — Karoline Leavitt: ‘Mainstream Media Complicit’ in Border Invasion appeared first on Breitbart.
Conservatives and progressives on Friday are demanding that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) allow for amendments to curb surveillance abuse during next week's spy powers reauthorization fight.
The post Conservatives, Progressives Demand Amendments During Spy Powers Fight to Curb Surveillance Abuse appeared first on Breitbart.
The probe into the DOJ underscores the ongoing House impeachment inquiry's investigation into President Joe Biden and his family members involved in the Biden business.
The post Republicans Demand Garland Reveal if DOJ Investigating Biden Whistleblowers appeared first on Breitbart.
The next president of United States should be a transgender "woman," comedian Ramy Youssef said during his SNL monologue.
The post ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host Ramy Youssef Wants Next President to Be a Transgender ‘Woman’ appeared first on Breitbart.
It turns out that housing subsidies make the housing crisis worse.
According to a principle enunciated by Ronald Reagan, “If you want more of something, subsidize it.” Real-world examples of this phenomenon abound, from electric vehicles to solar panels, but broad generalizations inspire a search for exceptions. Is it true in all cases? And if not, what causes the results to differ?
Affordable housing is a fitting subject to test the theory, as it can be divided fairly neatly into opposing categories, public and private. A privately owned apartment building financed with funds from a privately owned institution can be as affordable to tenants as a project financed with government loans, grants, and subsidies, but the former will not typically be counted as progress towards an affordable housing goal. Why not? Because it won’t be the scene of a ribbon-cutting or ground-breaking ceremony, or provide a naming opportunity for a politician, living or dead. Does the rule that you get more of something if you subsidize it apply equally to the public and private sectors?
No, because of the countervailing principle known as “the Bureaucratic Rule of Two.”
Formulated by the late economist Thomas Borcherding, this theory concluded empirically that “removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit costs of production.”
Affordable housing provided by the public sector is, despite the label, not very affordable. As a result developers are starting, in Nancy Reagan-fashion, to just say no to public funding. In Los Angeles, where a 2016 bond issue for low-income housing raised $1.2 billion, the city of San Jose found that affordable housing units funded in part by tax credits cost an average of $939,000 per unit. The end result of this well-meaning effort? The number of people living on the streets actually grew by 60 percent. By contrast, a private fund raised by SDS Capital Group that did not use this subsidy was able to build comparable units for only $291,000 per unit.
What accounts for the difference? There are several contributing factors. One is the necessary complexity that public funding adds to the cost of such projects. Some of these factors are intrinsic to government; you don’t want to hand out credits that can be used to reduce taxpayers’ liability on a dollar-for-dollar basis without legislative safeguards to prevent abuse by the rich. On the other hand, losing tax revenue is hard-wired into subsidized housing programs; in 2023, the low-income housing tax credit cost around $13.2 billion in lost revenue according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, and that figure is expected to increase by $2 billion by 2025. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois said, a billion here, a billion there—pretty soon you’re talking real money.
The utility of low-income housing tax credits is limited to those with large tax liabilities and high disposable income, however, which means—the rich. Investors buy the credits at a discount—currently around 90 cents on the dollar—with the net funds flowing into the project. Before those monies are spent on land, labor and building materials, however, they must run through a gauntlet of service providers—“syndicators, general partners, managers, and investors,” in the words of a Tax Policy Center study—that is longer than a comparable private sector project would face. Each of these players—plus the usual crowd of lawyers, accountants, consultants and appraisers—takes a whack at the pork at it scurries by.
Then there are the public policy encumbrances that are added on to serve social goals that may be laudable in the abstract, but which can have unintended negative consequences. Take, for example, project labor agreements that mandate all building trades on a job be union shops. This requirement operates to exclude most minority-owned contractors; in New Jersey, for example, 98 percent of African-American and Hispanic construction companies are non-union. Some public sector competitive bidding laws have the perverse effect of raising construction costs by requiring separate sub-contractor bids, thus ruling out innovative construction methods such as so-called “design-build,” which allows private sector developers to have a single point of responsibility for an entire project.
Viewed in perspective, then, the benefits of affordable housing subsidies flow in a pattern that resembles a snow-boarder’s half-pipe: on one high side, dollar-for-dollar reductions in taxes paid by the rich; on the other, housing for the poor; that big dip in between means nothing for the middle class.
So what is to be done? Ask developers and they say their comparative advantage over the public sector would widen even further from streamlined permitting. How to protect the interests of tenants from private landlords who don’t maintain their properties? The amount of subsidies sloshing around in the low-income residential real estate market—expected to grow to $15.2 billion next year—would pay for a lot of housing inspectors.
Many years ago I was a legal tyro in a law firm that specialized in subsidized housing. A fellow associate would sometimes spend the night, burning the midnight fluorescent bulbs. When I commiserated with her and told her she should ease up for the sake of her health and well-being, she said her work was fulfilling because she was helping poor people.
I recalled for her the investor list from a recent deal I’d worked on: It included movie stars, name-brand musicians, big-time real estate investors, and other high-net-worth types. What about them? I asked. Who’s looking out for their interests?
She thought for a moment, then an expression of enlightenment slowly crept across her face: “I guess I am.”
The post A Reaganite Approach to the Housing Crisis? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The view from inside a C-130 military aircraft as the Jordanian air force dropped supplies over northern Gaza on Thursday.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) launched an investigation into the recently announced National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center.
The post Rep. Jim Jordan Launches Investigation into Biden Administration’s Red Flag Law Center appeared first on Breitbart.
The aftermath of an Israeli strike on Wednesday in al-Habbariyeh, in southern Lebanon. Lebanon’s Ministry of Health said it hit an emergency medical center and killed seven people.
Demonstrators protesting in support of Gaza near the Israeli Embassy in Amman, Jordan, early on Wednesday.
House Republicans fired another shot Monday in their ongoing war with President Joe Biden's Department of Justice (DOJ).
The post Jordan, Comer Threaten Garland with Contempt over Special Counsel Hur Interviews appeared first on Breitbart.
A-List actress Sharon Stone has recently spoken out on abuse she claims to have suffered in Hollywood, and comedian Dana Carvey is apologizing for an act he feels may have harmed her.
The post Dana Carvey Apologizes for SNL Skit Where He Played an Indian Making Sharon Stone Take Off Her Clothes appeared first on Breitbart.
West Virginia conservative Derrick Evans said on Breitbart News Saturday that Rep. Carol Miller (R-WV) is not a "RINO," she's an "undocumented Democrat."
The post Exclusive — West Virginia Conservative Derrick Evans: Congresswoman Carol Miller Is Not a ‘RINO,’ She’s an ‘Undocumented Democrat’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the “manic move to electric vehicles" will "destroy" the U.S. auto industry and greatly benefit China.
The post Exclusive – Ohio GOP’s Bernie Moreno: ‘Manic Move to Electric Vehicles’ Will ‘Destroy’ U.S. Auto Industry appeared first on Breitbart.
Ohio Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday he is going to expose his “anti-worker” opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who has done "everything possible" to harm the nation's workers.
The post Exclusive – Ohio GOP’s Bernie Moreno: Sherrod Brown Does ‘Everything Possible’ to Hurt U.S. Workers appeared first on Breitbart.
"In the arc of history the good guys win," Gen. Michael Flynn, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News.
The post Exclusive — Gen. Michael Flynn on Being a Deep State Target: ‘In the Arc of History the Good Guys Win’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Deep State is at war with "America and the American people," Gen. Michael Flynn said, previewing his upcoming documentary film.
The post Exclusive — Gen. Michael Flynn: Deep State at War with ‘America and the American People’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arriving in Cairo on Thursday to discuss the war in Gaza with Mideast leaders.
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