April 15, 2025

Trying To Figure Out How Much Of The Government Grants Goes To Left-Wing Causes And Propaganda

April 15, 2025/ Francis Menton

Back on February 14, I had a post titled “How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?” The post asked that question about a sample of issues held dear by the Left: migrant caravans, services in the U.S. to illegal aliens, DEI and climate alarm.
Over the intervening weeks it has become clear that the general answer is “a lot of it,” but the details will be slow to emerge. For example, you can go to the website of DOGE and get an endless list of hundreds of contracts and grants that have been reduced or canceled. But they all seem to have legitimate headlines or titles, even if they were wasteful.
How much of this money was getting diverted to an NGO, and from there to another NGO and then another until it ended up funding migrant caravans or pro-Palestinian propaganda or some other such cause. There is very little indication.

April 11, 2025

Is There Any Fraud In The Medicaid Program? Here's A Place To Start Looking

April 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency, has asserted that his goal is to cut some $1 trillion of “waste and fraud” from annual federal spending.
Skeptics of the effort say that that’s just not possible, mainly because almost half of federal spending constitutes the “entitlements” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some smaller health insurance programs — and President Trump has pledged not to cut those. Add something close to $1 trillion for defense, and another close to $1 trillion for interest on the national debt, and the remainder (less than $2 trillion) doesn’t leave nearly enough room for a trillion of cuts.
But here’s the missing piece: What if there are large amounts of fraud in the entitlement programs? Trump hasn’t pledged not to go after that. Could the amounts of such fraud be significant in the context of the huge numbers at issue?
I don’t fully know the answer to that question; but today I’ll look at one example involving very big numbers where obvious fraud is hiding in plain sight.

April 08, 2025

April 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

While I have spent the past couple of weeks writing about conspiracy theories and the Kennedy assassination, the rest of the world has been consumed by the news of President Trump and his big tariff gambit.
After talking at length during the campaign about imposing a new and expansive tariff regime, Trump announced the details of his big move on April 2 — tariffs on everything, from all countries, of at least 10%, ranging up to 50% or more on some countries (e.g., China) and certain products. All of this is to be done by Executive Order, said to be based on a declaration of “emergency” under a collection of pre-existing statutes (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977; the National Emergencies Act; and the Trade Act of 1974).
The stock markets have reacted with turmoil. Various indices were down 10% or more over the past week, and, after initially gaining, have fallen further today. Liberal media outlets, including the New York Times gleefully foresee impending economic damage. (From today: “Investors overwhelmingly believe that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, and retaliation from U.S. trading partners, will lead to higher prices, slower growth and possibly a global recession.”).
Regular readers here will not be surprised to learn that I am not a fan of what Trump is doing on the tariff front.

April 05, 2025

April 05, 2025/ Francis Menton

After today I promise to move on to other topics. But for today, some final thoughts on the Kennedy assassination and conspiracy theories.
Prolific commenter Richard Greene points out that immediately after issuance of findings by the Warren Commission, something like 87% of Americans accepted those findings. Today, it is more like 30%. What happened?
Put aside for the moment the “anomalies” that I have identified in this series. They are significant, but they are not the most important reason for the change. The most important reason for the change is that we have learned from bitter experience that the criminal justice and national security agencies of our country are only too willing to use their powers to seek to control who runs the government.

April 01, 2025

April 01, 2025/ Francis Menton

From reading the comments on this series, it appears that several people are eagerly awaiting my pronouncement of which theory of the Kennedy assassination I think is correct.
Unfortunately for those commenters, as I said back in Part I, “I don’t have any clear belief as to whether the official version of the events is correct or whether there was a conspiracy.” That remains the case. I have not intended this series as the way to advocate for my own preferred theory, although perhaps inevitably it would be perceived that way. Instead I have intended this series to use the Kennedy assassination as a vehicle to explore the question of how we know what we think we know.
The Kennedy assassination provides an excellent illustration of the proposition that, in considering the truth of a hypothesis, the accumulation of facts consistent with the hypothesis is not nearly as important as those facts, even if few in number, that are at least arguably inconsistent with the hypothesis.

March 30, 2025

March 30, 2025/ Francis Menton

These Kennedy assassination posts have generated large numbers of comments. Most of the commenters, and certainly the prolific ones, have studied up on the issue and have formed firm opinions of their view of the facts. But then there is a large gulf of disagreement between those who have accepted the “Oswald acted alone” theory and those who have rejected it.
The smallest camp is those who admit they don’t know the answer. That’s my camp. Many people understandably do not feel comfortable with ambiguity in situations like this.
Back in Part II of this series, I expressed the view that biggest problem for those who support the official narrative of “Oswald acted alone” is that there are multiple factual anomalies that are at least potentially inconsistent with that theory.