☕️ COMPLICATIONS ☙ Saturday, July 5, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

More OBBBA wins: states now own welfare costs; Ivy League gravy train derailed; green energy chopped; judges dodge SCOTUS; Powell on the spit; the Times admits Trump was right about the gangs; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the Weekend Edition roundup: more Big Beautiful Bill goodness and folks start to unpack what it really means; first up—the federal government sheds costs to states that can pay for their own citizens’ welfare if they want to; OBBBA’s massive assault on the Ivy League is good news for taxpayers and gullible students; green energy falls onto the Big Bill’s chopping block, and the political ramifications are wonderfully encouraging; liberal judges find workarounds to evade SCOTUS’s national injunctions decision; the slow roast of Fed Chair Jerome Powell has begun, and the clock is ticking; and the Times hangs out a limited admission that Democrats lied about the Venezuelan gangs taking over Colorado apartment buildings.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Our first story was a perfect illustration of the inside-out absurdity of modern media, but in spite of it, we are starting to get an idea of why President Trump is so pleased about the OBBBA’s passage. The New York Times ran an OBBBA article yesterday headlined, “States Brace for Added Burdens of Trump’s Tax and Spending Law.”

Traditionally, a “tax and spend” bill means the federal government is raising taxes to fund new or expanded programs— pork-barrel projects, entitlements, or some vote-buying boondoggle. But, putting the lie to the headline, the article described the exact opposite. “State governments,” the Times admitted, “are bracing for impact as Washington shifts much of the burden for health care, food assistance and other programs onto them.”

In other words, the headline is 100% fake news. The article is actually about states crying about all the cuts, not about raised taxes or any new pork, like the headline claimed.

Indeed, the cuts are massive, even historic. “Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona,” the article continued, “has warned that even her state’s $1.6 billion emergency fund will be insufficient to weather what’s coming, because ‘even if we cut every single thing in the state, we don’t have the money to backfill all these cuts.’”

Wait— I was wrong. These cuts are not just historic. They represent a seismic rollback of the post-New Deal welfare state, arguably the biggest since the 1960s.

Since LBJ’s Great Society, the federal government has steadily expanded its role in health care, welfare, and income support. Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and other federal-state entitlements relentlessly grew under the assumption that Washington always foots the bill, while states got to administer the money.

OBBBA doesn’t just reform the welfare state; it deconstructs it. It’s the first major paradigm shift since LBJ. And it’s political genius, because the states must now shoulder the blame for cuts. The biggest reason nobody ever cut federal Medicaid before was to avoid being blamed.

In other words, Trump offloaded the political cost. The feds pulled back the money hose, but left the governors holding the empty bucket. Governors now have to decide exactly what programs to cut.

Thanks to the Times’ fake news headline, skimmers will come away thinking Trump just passed some kind of bloated welfare expansion. In reality, he detonated a $1 trillion cut to federal transfer payments. But the Times doesn’t care; it’s panicking. This is not about informing readers— it’s about desperately sacrificing logic to the gods of narrative.

The OBBBA piles on top of cuts the Administration was already making without needing a law change. “Even before the bill’s final passage,” the Times said, “state capitals were contending with a slowing economy and federal spending cuts.” Haha, a slowing economy. Nice try. (Nothing in the article ever argued that point; it was just a drive-by lie.) By the Times’ reluctant admission, federal spending cuts were already underway— even before Trump signed OBBBA.

According to the story, the OBBBA cuts an awe-inspiring $1 trillion from state transfer payments over the next 10 years. Since the affected programs include Medicaid subsidies, states must decide whether they want to cut coverage, cut provider reimbursement rates, or backfill the shortfall with new taxes raised from their own overtaxed citizens.

🔥 The cuts are so steep, so foundational, that key progressive figures aren’t just objecting to the pain— they’re mourning it as though it were a philosophical defeat. “What’s happening in Washington, D.C., is undermining everything we’ve been working on,” grieved Governor Laura Kelly (D-Kansas).

Governor Andy Beshear (D-Ky.) called it “the worst piece of legislation I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Adding insult to injury, the OBBBA smartly shifts the burden of administering the modified programs onto the states, so that the new OBBBA provisions didn’t add any federal costs to the law. For example, food stamps (SNAP) now have a work requirement, but the states must enforce the new federal requirement, or lose subsidies. Same with the Obamacare exchanges; states must take over more of the paperwork and begin enforcing new eligibility criteria.

Don’t feel bad for them. States got a record amount of money during covid. Some states, like Florida and Illinois, were fiscally prudent and are now sitting on giant piles of emergency reserves. Other states (cough, California, cough) went wild, funding every liberal dream program (via sketchy no-bid emergency contracts) and are pretty much broke. In California, state officials cried that OBBBA would “most likely” cause 3.4 million people to lose their (free) health insurance and at least 735,000 people to lose (free) food stamp benefits.

So that’s one. There were others.

🔥 Second, corporate media complained about even more cutting. The Times ran the story yesterday, headlined, “What Trump’s Big Bill Means for Colleges, Student Loans and Grants.” The Times darkly prophesied that the OBBBA had “far-reaching implications.”

Once again, we find the OBBBA shoring up federal revenues rather than depleting them. And not by taxing grandma’s groceries, but by targeting the wealthiest, most bloated, most ideologically sold-out, and least accountable institutions in America: elite universities.

First of all, and most deeply encouraging, “the bill would expand the tax on endowments.” Finally! These university hedge funds-with-classrooms have been hoarding tens of billions in tax-sheltered wealth, while jacking up tuition and peddling cheap Chinese grievance studies. The OBBBA flips the board. It tells Harvard and Stanford: fine, if you want to operate like a hedge fund, we’ll tax you like one.

The Times, without offering any specifics, suggested taxing endowments would somehow reduce student financial aid, a preposterous claim that made me choke on my coffee laughing.

Let’s get real: Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. That’s not a rainy-day fund— it’s a financial Death Star. If the university gave every single undergrad free tuition forever, it wouldn’t even dent the principal. The bizarre idea that taxing a tiny sliver of that mountain of money will cause some poor kid in Peoria to lose a Pell Grant is not just unserious— it’s a parody of propaganda, decorated in ivy.

Haha, but what it might reduce is the endless gravy train of diversity czars, DEI bureaucrats, and six-figure vice provosts for student safe spaces— the elites’ continuous employment system. And that’s why they’re squealing. They’re not worried about poor students. They’re worried about losing the taxpayer-subsidized funding model that lets them warehouse surplus woke graduate degrees in meaningless administrative fiefdoms. The OBBBA doesn’t just threaten their money —which is bad enough— but it threatens their jobs program.

A Senate amendment spared colleges with fewer than 3,000 students from the tax. And the endowments will only be taxed at a fraction of personal income tax levels. But it’s enough to cause the progressive establishment to predict catastrophe.

Anyway, for Portland readers: taxing Ivy League endowments does not increase the budget deficit or debt. It helps. The Times admitted that, according to CBO’s conservative estimates, “The student loan changes are expected to save the government more than $300 billion over a decade.”

🔥 But there was more cutting in education: to federally subsidized student loans. The OBBBA now caps the amount the federal government —our tax dollars— can use to backstop unpaid student loans. It’s win-win-win! The only group that loses is the same arrogant, elitist university system.

Let us count the ways. First, taxpayers win, because they can stop footing much of the bill for worthless trans-in-media degrees. Students win, because they won’t get fooled into borrowing six figures for a useless gender theory major. And they also win because market pressure will finally return to higher Ed, which must now deliver more value and become more efficient in order to compete.

Even the lenders win, since they can still offer guaranteed returns to their investors, albeit on lower amounts, which helpfully reduces the rate of defaults.

The only group that loses is the same arrogant, elitist universities that inflated tuition by soaking up limitless loan money like a sponge without growing value or services. For decades, they jacked up costs, confident Uncle Sam would foot the bill. Now they’re howling because the gravy firehose is getting kinked.

But wait. There’s more. More cutting.

🔥 The Times admitted the OBBBA will “remake American energy.” Its article ran below the dramatic headline, “How the G.O.P. Bill Will Reshape America’s Energy Landscape.”

You might well ask, how is the OBBBA “poised to remake American energy?” The Times supplied the answer: “by slashing tax breaks for wind and solar power and electric cars.” (Side note: cutting electric car subsidies is undoubtedly one of Elon’s biggest beefs with the bill.)

Portlanders, take note: “slashing green tax breaks” means increasing federal tax revenues— again showing that the OBBBA is not a “spending” bill, but more of a revenue-realignment bill. It’s another strategic step in reducing the deficit without raising tax rates on productive citizens.

But zoom out further. There’s a deeper pattern emerging: the OBBBA systematically cuts funding pipelines to key progressive power centers, like state welfare transfers, universities, climate lobbies, and left-leaning nonprofits masquerading as energy startups.

These sectors weren’t just bloated— they were financial laundromats, funneling taxpayer money into ideological projects and washing part of it right back into Democrat coffers via consulting fees, campaign donations, and cushy board seats.

The OBBBA doesn’t just cut spending— it cuts the hose. And right in time to start the 2026 midterms fundraising cycle.

🔥 The Times is starting to realize there was a rope-a-dope, and it was the dope. Yesterday’s furious headline screamed:

And there it is. This is why I held off commenting on all the tumult and public conflict as the bill worked through the process— because most of it was theater. Fake conflict. Fake resistance. Real strategy.

House Freedom Caucus members and GOP “budget hawks” put on a master class in misdirection. They loudly criticized the bill, publicly aired grievances, and repeatedly threatened to kill it— right up until the moment it passed, right on schedule.

The Times, just now catching up, is calling it “a routine” at the Capitol:

They’re close, but they’re still missing the bigger picture: it might have been ‘a routine,’ but it wasn’t routine. This was classic Trump 3-D chess. Put on a show of losing and internal conflict. Lull your enemies. Then … TAW!

While Democrats and their media allies were busy counting Republican defections and popping popcorn, the trap was already slamming shut. And now they’re stuck explaining how the biggest rollback of progressive spending in decades passed while they were still smirking on MSNBC.

And remember the Planned Parenthood cuts— another strike at progressive fundraising. The progressive project might not be dead, but it is badly wounded. And it might even die.

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We all saw it coming. Justice Alito practically telegraphed it in his special concurrence. On Thursday, Politico dropped a story with the telltale headline, “Judges are finding workarounds to Trump’s big Supreme Court win.”

Last Friday, SCOTUS finally killed off the bizarre and legally suspect practice of nationwide injunctions— a made-up judicial power that let a single district judge in Penciltucky shut down national policy. The Court put a stop to that nonsense. But the resistance bench is already testing the perimeter.

“While the absence of that tool is clearly a sea change for the judiciary,” Politico sneered, “early results indicate that judges see other paths to impose sweeping restrictions on government actions they deem unlawful.”

Specifically, at least one judge in one of the affected cases promptly countered SCOTUS by immediately approving a class-action (poof! national scope restored). Two other judges shifted their rulings to rely on the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires the government to follow strict rules when making substantial changes to existing rules and regulations.

In many other cases, the DOJ and the suing plaintiffs are duking it out with competing motions based on the new Supreme Court guidance, each trying to define how far the new ruling actually goes.

In short, this is the predictable and necessary outcome from the new ruling. As aggravating as it is, it will have to play out. As someone smart once said, our legal system may not be the best imaginable system, but it’s the best system anyone has come up with yet.

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Trump is turning up the heat on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and he’s starting to cook. The Hill ran the story this week, headlined, “Trump says Powell should ‘resign immediately.’”

The Federal Reserve Act says the President can remove a Fed Governor (including the Chair) “for cause.” But “cause” is undefined, and no Fed Chair has ever been fired in U.S. history. So we’re in uncharted territory— which is a perfect region for President Trump.

The fracas involves “renovations” to the Fed’s D.C. headquarters. The tab just for renovations is an eye-watering $2.5 billion dollars. For context, the entire Pentagon was built for around $2.2 billion (adjusted for inflation). The Burj Khalifa —the world’s tallest building in Dubai— cost $1.5 billion to build from scratch. Opulent Trump Tower only cost $300 million to build from the ground up.

So what in unholy technocratic hell is the Fed doing with $2.5 billion?

The awkward comparison got Congress’s attention. Legislators performed an occult summoning ceremony, and Jerome was recently forced to appear in a cloud of sulphuric smoke and testify about the largesse. Lawmakers probed the Fed Chair about the plans, which included “amenities” such as private marble elevators leading directly to Fed officials’ offices, multiple “wellness centers” (including a “yoga room” and “meditation spaces”), imported rare marble, and a rooftop garden.

Powell flatly denied those amenities were in the final plans. But it turns out he lied. Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency Director, produced the evidence and publicly accused Powell of lying to Congress. Pulte demanded a formal congressional investigation. Powerhouse Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said this week that lawmakers will “look at” the calls for an investigation.

This could spiral fast into a full-blown ethics scandal, and maybe even a test case for whether “perjury before Congress” constitutes enough “cause” to remove a sitting Fed Chair.

I’m old enough to remember when federal government buildings were made of grey prefab concrete, not Italian marble, and decorated with lowest-bidder furniture just above the quality of a Walmart folding chair. We used to flip out over $600 government hammers. Now, billion-dollar yoga gardens are what our selfless, apolitical, hardworking federal officials think they deserve.

Who are these people? Reptilians? Where did they come from? Can we ship them back?

Anyway, if I’m reading the headlines right, the long knives are out for one Jerome Powell, and unless he finds a way to get on board fast, he may be trading that private marble elevator for a very steep political escalator going down.

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Remember that ‘conspiracy theory’ Trump was peddling about Venezualan gangs ‘taking over’ Colorado apartment buildings. Welp. This week, the New York Times ran a long-form story headlined, “Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated.” So complicated.

“The presence of young men with guns in the apartment complex, called the Edge at Lowry,” the Times admitted, “was not a rarity.” In other words, it was bursting with gang members. The article nonchalantly detailed shootouts and assassinations in the hallways— just regular Tuesday night activities in Aurora, apparently. Complicated ones.

When Trump held a rally in Aurora, Democrats sneeringly dismissed it as racist fearmongering. But it backfired. A legal immigrant —described by the Times as a “lifelong Democrat”— showed up, heard Trump out, and promptly switched parties, saying Democrat denials turned her against the party. She lives there. She knows.

According to a story from the Denver Gazette, local police began requesting information about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TDA) from federal agencies as early as 2023. Locals say police routinely ignored reports of gunfire and violence.

The apartment management company even informed police through its lawyers that TDA was using the complexes for prostitution, sex trafficking, and that gang members were extorting half the tenants’ rent. The same day, the Times reported, “the mayor brushed the report off.”

The story is significant because President Trump specifically identified TDA as a rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a law allowing him to summarily deport foreign nationals linked to an international cartel. Democrats laughed like meth-addled donkeys at the idea that gangs were “invading” American towns. But “the truth is more complicated.” Meaning, it’s true.

It also seems significant that the Times is, however belatedly and ham-handedly, finally admitting that Trump was right. Is it a limited hangout now that the election is over, trying to claw back a shred of credibility? Or could it be that the Times is finally getting that people are sick and tired of the gaslighting?

One thing is clear. The Democrats lied about TDA, and everybody knows it. It’s making their situation very … complicated.

Have a wonderful weekend! Mark your calendar to be back here on Monday morning, to kick off another terrific week of essential news and commentary.

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