Posts published in “Guest”

The Supreme Court struck a symbolic blow to Harvard University this June by declaring its racial admissions preferences illegal. It remains to be seen what stratagems Harvard will use to try to continue engineering racial diversity. One thing is certain, however: the university will pay no price in reputation or in philanthropic support for the Court’s rebuke.

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history.

Griffin’s cumulative giving to the school now totals over $500 million, spread between the education, law, and business schools, as well as other entities. In exchange for this latest gift, Harvard renamed its graduate division the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Business as usual, you may think; another billionaire plowing treasure into an institution whose values are, at best, in tension with American traditions and, at worst, antithetical to them. But Griffin is a conservative.

● Read in City Journal

● Read excerpt in The Wall Street Journal

● Read here on The Red Line

The Teamsters Local 671 of Bloomfield is teaming up with the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to recruit individuals to infiltrate businesses with the explicit objective of unionizing the workplace.

● Read at Yankee Institute

● Read here on The Red Line

The other day Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the refusal by Republicans in Congress to raise the debt ceiling would cause a “constitutional crisis” that might cripple the economy and financial system as the government ran out of money and defaulted on some of its bonds.

Nonsense. Because it retains the power of money creation, the federal government can never run out of money. It can create money to infinity. The government prefers not to create money so frankly, since it might be inflationary, but the government has the power.

● Read in Journal Inquirer - 2nd of two-part column

● Read here on The Red Line

President Biden portrays House Republicans as hostage-takers for demanding that deficit savings accompany any debt limit increase. He maintains that “clean” debt limit bills reflect typical Washington practice.

The president's position is the one that actually represents the departure from Washington norms and precedents.

For decades, the debt limit served as a legitimate tool for both Republicans and Democrats to address budget deficits. Indeed, of the eight largest deficit-reduction laws since 1985, all eight were attached to debt limit bills.

● Read in Daily Beast

● Read here on The Red Line

If Connecticut had even average annual investment performance from its underwhelming pension funds, our tax burden would dramatically decrease.

Connecticut’s previous treasurers provided this state, consistently, with one of the single worst investment track records of all 50 states, as our Yale research team found through an original, comparative 50-state analysis of state pension fund investment performance.

● Read in CT Insider

● Read here on The Red Line

Last year, President Biden presided over a record crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico. This year, by every conceivable metric, that crisis got far worse.

In the 2021 fiscal year, we had more than 1.7 million encounters at the Southern border. That was a record … until this fiscal year, when it rose to almost 2.4 million. And the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October, has already seen more than 500,000 encounters — putting us on track to exceed this year’s record.

That’s not all. In 2021, there were nearly 390,000 known “gotaways” — migrants we know evaded U.S. Customs and Border Protection and slipped into the country; this year, the number of gotaways grew to more than 600,000. In 2021, there were 15 terrorism watch list arrests at the border; this year, that grew to 98 (and who knows how many violent criminals were among the gotaways).

As bad as that is, things are about to get worse when Title 42 — the Trump-era public health order that has allowed border officials to turn away hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants to prevent the spread of covid-19 — expires on Dec. 21. When migrants can no longer be expelled under this order, even more will try illegal crossings — and the floodgates will truly open. Yet the Biden administration is pushing for a cut in funding for detention beds in the omnibus spending bill from the current level of 34,000 to 25,000 just as the need for these beds will dramatically increase.

● Read in Washington Post

● Read here on The Red Line