Search headlines

Fact check: Trump, RFK Jr. and others make false claims on night 2 of GOP convention

(CNN) — President Donald Trump delivered another rapid-fire series of false claims on the second night of Republicans’ midterm convention on Thursday. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his own barrage of wrongness. And various other speakers uttered statements that were untrue, misleading or missing critical context.Here is a fact check of some of the assertions from the final day of the convention. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of Thursday’s falsehoods.Trump’s many false claimsTrump made numerous false claims, some of which he also made in his longer speech Wednesday.Trump claimed that there were “no empty seats” in the Dallas arena as he spoke Thursday, which was visibly untrue. CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene, who was there, wrote in a live chat right after Trump made the claim that “I’m looking at rows of empty seats” and that “the idea that there are ‘no empty seats’ is just laughably untrue,” though she also said the room was mostly full. Trump has for years made false claims about supposedly never having had an empty seat.Trump further inflated one of his favorite fictional figures, claiming Thursday that “$22 trillion” in investment has come into the US; on Wednesday, he had put it at “over $20 trillion,” and even that lower figure has no apparent basis in reality. As of the time he spoke Thursday, the White House’s own website claimed there had been “$11.2 trillion” in “major investment announcements” this term, not “over $20 trillion,” and the White House figure was itself a major exaggeration of actual investment.Trump, talking about elections, lied that “there’s never been bigger cheaters” than Democrats; there is no basis for broadly describing Democrats as election cheaters. For the second straight night, Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration allowed “25 million people” to pour into the country, though that number is nowhere close to correct. Trump again falsely claimed that former President Joe Biden and other Democrats “created the worst inflation in American history,” though even peak Biden-era inflation, 9.1% in June 2022, was far from the all-time record of 23.7%; it was a 40-year high, but the rate then fell sharply before Trump returned to office.Trump also baselessly claimed that Democrats would “defund the police” and give “voting rights and welfare to 25 million illegal aliens” if they won the midterms. Republicans will still control the White House in 2027 and 2028 and the president would be in position to veto any such changes if a Democratic-controlled Congress sought to make them, but there is no indication that Democrats want to do so. Also, even groups favoring strict immigration policies estimate that the total undocumented population is far less than “25 million” or even 20 million.As he did Wednesday, Trump claimed the US now has the world’s lowest prescription drug prices. The assertion is so broad that it is unclear what exactly Trump is referencing. But experts told CNN they highly doubt that the prices for brand-name drugs in the US are generally less than they are in other countries, and the Trump administration has not provided details to prove the claim.“It’s tough to claim that you’re getting the lowest prices anywhere in the world and then also not have any evidence to support that,” said Andrew Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, while Diederik Stadig, senior healthcare economist at financial institution ING, said, “To say that the US now has the lowest drug prices in the world is at this moment not true.”And as he did Wednesday, Trump said “more Americans are working today than ever before” – which is true but nearly meaningless, since the number of people working in the US generally rises over time simply because the population rises over time.“There are more Americans working because there are more Americans. That’s the entire analysis,” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor of public policy and economics, wrote in his newsletter in August.RFK Jr.’s false claims on the pandemic, Trump’s record and moreFalse claim about Democrats and the 2024 electionKennedy unsuccessfully ran for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination before withdrawing to run as an independent and then eventually endorsing Republican candidate Donald Trump. In Kennedy’s Thursday convention speech, he complained of how the Democrats handled the nomination race.At one point, he said, “For the first time in history, they cancelled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris, no elected delegate was ever consulted; the party of ‘No Kings’ simply anointed a queen.”Kennedy is entitled to express unhappiness about how quickly Democratic leaders coalesced around then-Vice President Harris after Biden unexpectedly dropped out of the race in July 2024, after the primaries were over and less than four months from Election Day. But it’s not true that the party canceled its convention or that delegates didn’t get any say.The convention was held; it was a four-day event in Chicago in August 2024. Democratic convention delegates officially nominated Harris in a virtual roll call vote in advance of the convention. It’s true that Harris was the only candidate on the roll call ballot, but that’s because she was the only candidate who gathered enough delegate signatures to appear on the ballot.It’s clear that party elites’ backing of Harris played a key role in the unusual nomination process. But Kennedy’s specific allegations that the convention was abandoned and delegates were cut out of the process are not true.False claim that Democrats closed ‘every church’ during the Covid-19 pandemicWhile attacking Democrats, Kennedy claimed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, “They closed every church in our country for a year.”It’s not true that every church in the country was closed for a year, nor even that every church in a Democratic state was closed for a year.Every state issued some type of guidance or order about social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic, but many states – including some led by Democrats and some led by Republicans – incorporated religious exemptions into those limitations on social interactions.According to a Pew Research Center analysis from April 2020, 15 states allowed religious gatherings to continue without a limit on their size. That set of states included Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which all had Democratic governors. And at least two states with Republican governors, Alaska and Idaho, were among the states that prohibited religious gatherings at least briefly.False claim that Trump ‘ended nine wars’Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has ended “eight wars.” Kennedy went one higher on Thursday, declaring, “President Trump has ended nine wars.”That’s false. Trump hasn’t even ended eight wars.Trump’s list of eight includes two situations that were never actually wars during his tenure: a diplomatic dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia and a mysterious supposed situation between Serbia and Kosovo. The list also includes a war, involving Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that hasn’t actually ended despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration.In addition, the list includes the war between Israel and Hamas, but Israel continues to conduct frequent attacks in Gaza despite a US-brokered ceasefire agreement. And it includes the brief 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran, though Israel proceeded to join the US in starting another war against Iran in 2026.Claim about reversing a decline in longevityKennedy speaking of the Trump administration, claimed Thursday: “We have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity. “Kennedy referenced preliminary data that he said he had received from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, but it’s unclear what metric of longevity he’s referring to.CDC data shows that US life expectancy had been steadily increasing for decades before a sharp drop during the Covid-19 pandemic. Life expectancy had already started to rebound in 2022, under the Biden administration, and reached a new record high in 2024 before Trump’s second term began.Preliminary data shared by the CDC in July suggests that life expectancy probably hit another record high in 2025.CNN has reached out to HHS for clarification on Kennedy’s comments.Claim that Democrats ‘lost 360,000 children’Speaking about Democrats, Kennedy said: “They somehow lost 360,000 children and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.”Trump and other Republicans have made similar claims. But there’s no basis for the assertion that Democrats “lost” so many children or that the federal government was engaged in human trafficking.A 2024 report from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – a period that, notably, includes two years and four months under the first Trump administration. The report also said that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children during this period were not given notices to appear in court.The report said that ICE had “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not say all the children were actually “lost” and did not definitively assert that any of them were trafficked – let alone that the government was somehow involved in a trafficking operation. And, again, the report spanned parts of both a Republican administration and a Democratic administration.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN in 2024: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the (Office of the Inspector General) are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”Vance on inflation, crime and taxes on Social SecurityA false claim about the media and Biden-era inflationVice President JD Vance mocked the media during part of his speech on Thursday. But he made a false claim about Biden-era inflation while lampooning how the media supposedly challenged him over another false claim on that subject.Vance said: “The president and I would go during a campaign, we’d say, ‘You know, inflation is as high as it’s been in 100 years,’ and the fake news would say, ‘No, no, no, it’s as high as it’s been in 68 years.’ That ain’t good, ladies and gentlemen.”Mainstream journalists, at least, wouldn’t say that inflation under Biden was as high as it had been “in 68 years.” Rather, CNN and others noted that peak inflation under the Biden administration, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in about 40 years.Vance is entitled to make his general point that this correction still doesn’t make Biden-era inflation sound good, but his specific number was, again, wrong. And he didn’t acknowledge that inflation fell sharply under Biden after hitting the 40-year high, declining to 2.9% in Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump and Vance were inaugurated.The rate was 3.4% in July 2026, the most recent month for which data is available.Trump didn’t end taxes on Social SecurityVance claimed, “We’ve ended taxes on Social Security.” Several other convention speakers, including Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, Rep. Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania and Ohio House candidate Derek Merrin, similarly said the administration has achieved “no tax on Social Security.”It hasn’t. The big domestic policy bill Trump signed in 2025 did create an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax deduction for individuals age 65 and older (which phases out for individuals earning $75,000 per year or more), but as the White House has implicitly acknowledged, millions of Social Security recipients will continue to pay taxes on their benefits even before the temporary new deduction expires after 2028.The Social Security Administration said in 2025 that “the bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits.Claim about violent crime rate under BidenWhile criticizing the Biden administration, Vice President JD Vance claimed Thursday that the US “became a country where violent crime exploded, unless, of course, you could afford private security.”But violent crime did not explode under Biden. In fact, as FactCheck.org reported last month, data collected and published by the FBI shows that the national violent crime rate was at a lower level in 2023 and 2024, the last two full calendar years of Biden’s term, than it was in 2020, the last full calendar year of Trump’s first term. The year 2020 was highly unusual in many ways – violent crime jumped amid the Covid-19 pandemic – but Biden nonetheless left office with violent crime lower than it was when he took over. In fact, the 2024 violent crime rate was even lower than the 2019 rate under Trump before the pandemic.There was an increase in violent crime during the earlier part of Biden’s term. But given the subsequent decline, it’s misleading at best to claim violent crime “exploded” with no further context.Asked earlier this month about Trump’s similar previous claims to have reversed a Biden-era upswing in violence, crime data expert Jeff Asher said in an email: “No, crime began dropping significantly in 2023 during the Biden administration. Murder fell at record rates in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and, while 2026 may not feature a record decline nationally, it is still on track to see a sizable double-digit decline this year. Violent crime similarly fell nationally in 2023 and 2024, though the drops were more muted than the decline that was recorded by the FBI in 2025.”Other GOP speakersMike Johnson’s false claim about the inflation Republicans inherited from BidenSome other speakers at the convention took aim at inflation under Biden. House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that “Republicans inherited from the Biden administration record-high inflation.”That’s not true. The inflation rate was 2.9% in Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump took over. That’s lower than the most recent rate, 3.4% in July 2026, and nowhere close to the all-time record of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980.Johnson correctly said moments later that inflation reached “a 40-year high of 9.1% inflation” under Biden. But a 40-year high is not an all-time record. More importantly, Johnson didn’t explain that 9.1% was much higher than the rate Trump inherited or that the 9.1% rate occurred in June 2022, with roughly two-and-a-half years left in Biden’s term.The cumulative increase in prices from the beginning of the Biden administration to the end was also not the highest in US history. Federal figures show that beginning-to-end inflation under Biden was less than half of that during Carter’s term.What Johnson left out of his claim about a congressional resolutionWhile attacking Democrats as extreme, Johnson said: “Just last week, nearly every Democrat in the House of Representatives voted against condemning socialism and Marxism. They voted against it.”But the resolution didn’t use the word “Marxism.” And Johnson didn’t mention that the resolution wasn’t only about condemning socialism. Rather, it contained other language that Democratic leadership said was the focus of the party’s opposition to the resolution.The resolution’s first provision said it “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.” But its fifth provision said it “calls for enactment of the SAVE America Act,” Trump’s favored elections bill, which contains various provisions opposed by many Democrats.So while it’s very possible many Democrats would have opposed the resolution even without its expression of support for the SAVE America Act, the call to pass this elections bill served as a poison pill that ensured most Democrats wouldn’t support it.“House Resolution 1490 explicitly calls for enactment of the so-called SAVE America Act, which is the top legislative priority of far-right extremists,” Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement last week.A New Mexico candidate left out key context in an attack on his opponentGreg Cunningham, a Republican House candidate in New Mexico, used some of his Thursday speech to criticize his Democratic opponent, Rep. Gabe Vasquez. Cunningham said of Vasquez: “He even voted against a resolution honoring the sacrifices and service of the brave men and women in law enforcement who protect, every day, our communities.”But Cunningham left out important context about the resolution. While its focus was expressing support for law enforcement, its preamble contained statements praising the Trump administration and criticizing “leftist activists,” “progressive politicians” and “sanctuary city policies” for allegedly making law enforcement less safe.In other words, a House member might vote against such a resolution, as the vast majority of Democrats did, because they disagreed with conservative components of it, not the general expressions of support for law enforcement. (CNN has reached out to Vasquez’s campaign and House office for comment on his vote.) It’s common for parties to write resolutions in a way that would make it difficult for opponents to support but would open those opponents to campaign attacks if they voted “no.”An Ohio candidate’s misleading attack about Democrats and votingMerrin, the Republican candidate running against Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur for a House seat in Ohio, claimed in his speech, “While Democrats talk about letting illegal immigrants vote in our election, Republicans fight for proof of citizenship, photo ID and fair elections.”It’s a big country, so it’s possible some Democrat somewhere is talking about letting undocumented people vote in some election. But Merrin’s claim is misleading at best. There is no proposal from Democrats in Congress to let undocumented people vote in the 2026 midterms – the election Merrin appeared to be referring to when he said “our election” – or vote in future federal elections.CNN has reached out to Merrin’s campaign for an explanation of his claim.House Majority Leader Steve Scalise invoked a similar theme in his speech Wednesday, claiming that Democrats had voted last week “to allow illegals to vote in our federal elections.” But there was no congressional vote on letting undocumented immigrants vote in any elections.Rather, there was a vote on the non-binding Republican resolution that included multiple provisions, including one that “reiterates the notion that American elections are for American citizens only,” one supporting Trump’s favored elections bill and one denouncing socialism.Opposing that multi-clause resolution doesn’t necessarily mean someone supports voting by any non-citizens, let alone non-citizens in the country illegally.This article has been updated with additional items.CNN’s Deja Oliver contributed to this report.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

Sep 10 • 9:46 PM EDT • Politics • applevalleynewsnow.com

Central Health to vote on proposed property tax increase for Travis County

Your property taxes could go up again next year. Central Health, which is the hospital district for Travis County, is proposing an increase to provide mental health services to those in crisis.

Sep 8 • 6:12 PM EDT • Health • fox7austin.com

Hendrickson: Taxpayer protections vital for Iowa’s business climate

This November, Iowans will be asked to vote on a simple constitutional amendment that would make it more difficult for the legislature to increase income taxes. Specifically, the amendment would

Sep 8 • 1:30 AM EDT • Business • telegraphherald.com

Carbon emissions and e-waste levies are favourites for new EU budget revenue

Ambassadors will discuss controversial plans for new EU taxes again on Tuesday

Sep 7 • 10:04 AM EDT • Politics • euractiv.com

Small businesses encouraged to apply for tax credit through KSBTC program

By Tom Latek Kentucky Today Gov. Andy Beshear is encouraging Kentucky small businesses that are creating jobs and investing in their communities to apply for a tax credit of up to $25,000…

Sep 7 • 12:42 AM EDT • Business • nkytribune.com

A $480,000-a-year pill reflects a new normal for cancer drugs

Cancer drug prices have steadily increased. The expense is borne by government programs like Medicare, employers, patients and Americans who pay taxes and health insurance premiums.

Sep 6 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • seattletimes.com

AI optimism vs. anxiety — podcasters debate this every night

President Donald Trump, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer and entrepreneurial “accelerationists” celebrate the AI revolution and the infrastructure data-center build-out. Cramer recently gushed, “I like data centers so much that I wish I lived in one.” Trump criticized any community that opposes them as losers who will lose jobs and taxes — and will weaken […]

Sep 6 • 2:45 AM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com

Central Health considers raising Travis County taxes for mental health resources

New revenue may benefit care for those in crisis, but some local leaders worry about an impact on taxpayers.

Sep 4 • 10:36 PM EDT • Health • kxan.com

‘There’s a desire to see steadiness’: Healey sounds pro-business note as he talks up growth

UK chancellor refuses to rule out higher taxes on banks in his first Budget, but tells FT he will press ahead with City deregulation drive

Sep 4 • 4:00 PM EDT • Business • ft.com

Even blue California wants lower taxes and smaller government

A new survey of Californians’ political views shows the Democrats are still dominant, but a majority of voters wants lower taxes and smaller government.

Sep 4 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • calmatters.org

2026 NH Democratic CD1 Debate: Health care plan

Carleigh Beriont, Sarah Chadzynski, Stefany Shaheen, Maura Sullivan and Christian Urrutia, the Democratic candidates to represent New Hampshire's 1st District in Congress, share the plan they would implement to tackle high health care costs, and whether that would mean higher taxes for the middle class.

Sep 3 • 8:16 PM EDT • Health • wmur.com

Burnham pressed on economy at first PMQs as UK borrowing costs rise

Burnham said he had already cut taxes, including VAT on energy bills and hospitality business rates.

Sep 2 • 12:27 PM EDT • Politics • bbc.com

August Monthly Review: ChatGPT In Epic

Death, taxes, another frontier lab healthcare launch inspiring truly insane LinkedIn takes. As much as I want to stay away, I repeatedly am the crewman unplugging his ears whenever we pass these sirens. So it’s not the first and probably not the last time we dial up the typewriter rather than tie ourselves to the mast. The full blow-by-blow timeline: Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe The End of the Standalone PHR (Jan 8): ChatGPT Health arrives for consumers, at the time powered by b.well. I was bullish on the approach in that the best way for the PHR to finally solve distribution was to meet consumers were they already are (i.e. When Horizontal Meets Healthcare (Jan 9): OpenAI for Healthcare puts out the shingle for enterprises, with SharePoint ingestion standing in for the EHR integration the product actually needed. Another One: Anthropic’s Healthcare Debut (Jan 16): Claude's version, on HealthEx rails instead of b.well, with Agent Skills for FHIR development as the one true vertical-specific investment. ChatGPT for Clinicians: The Trap Sprung (Apr 24): OpenAI filled in the missing GTM middle with a free product for verified clinicians, effectively peeling the enterprise wrapper off ChatGPT for Healthcare and taking the PLG fight directly to OpenEvidence. OpenAI’s Second Attempt at Health (Jul 31): a relaunch of their patient specific app, now branded Health in ChatGPT, where the privacy partition came out, the connectors thinned, and b.well disappeared in favor of first-party FHIR work against a smaller network Beyond a Shingle So what was announced now? Today, we’re introducing a new electronic health record integration that brings authorized patient context from Epic into ChatGPT for Healthcare, along with the Healthcare Public Data plugin for direct, structured access to official healthcare datasets like PubMed, DailyMed, and CMS Coverage. Together, these capabilities bring ChatGPT closer to the systems and sources healthcare teams trust, while supporting the controls and compliance healthcare work requires. The core portfolio is unchanged from prior announcements we delineated and discussed (aside from the relaunch of patient-facing). Since trade publications still seem to be confusing them by using the wrong names: Enterprise sales motion: ChatGPT for Healthcare Protecting their core product / PLG: ChatGPT for Clinicians Consumer/patient-facing product: Health in ChatGPT So really, this is a feature release (specifically for ChatGPT for Healthcare when it comes to EHR integration). What’s cool about it, though, is that we are moving beyond just putting out a shingle. Everything in the January enterprise launch was horizontalizable: Horizontal tech companies thus generally start verticalization with their “putting out a shingle phase”. Telling the world you’re open for business as a horizontal tech company reliably attracts early inbound interest from buyers who are already trying to force-fit horizontal tools into domain-specific workflows and are eager for any signal that the vendor intends to support their use case more directly. Nothing was really vertical specific, which is exactly what you'd expect from the ultimate hypergrowth horizontal company dipping their toes into specific industries. But eventually you have to stop changing the sign on the door and start changing the product. Can you guess where the horizontal product was going to run out of road? This is the core dilemma writ large: verticalization requires differentiation, while scale economics of consumer and horizontal push toward unification. I’ve buried the lede so deep here it will be painful to some readers, but what should be shocking to no one is that my perspective is that EHR integration is the only path that meaningfully resolves this tension for ChatGPT for Healthcare. Integration with Microsoft Sharepoint is fine, but it is categorically insufficient for any product that hopes to influence clinical decision-making. SMART Money Well here we are, eight months later! Real vertical investment has begun, which surprised a few people. One friend in the industry messaged me: “Absolutely no way Epic gave ChatGPT API access.” Looking forensically at the announcements, the integration is notably read-only across appointment notes, laboratory results, medications, and specialist documentation. So while I’m not a betting man, I'd wager the house this is a SMART on FHIR launch: That sounds a lot like USCDI! The recommended path for the workflow they outline would be SMART on FHIR Their Health AI lead’s post is evocative of both standalone and EHR launch SMART, which another termed “ChartGPT” and “EHR Plugin” The implementation burden for SMART on FHIR is the lowest of the available integrative paths This is the team who literally did patient-facing SMART on FHIR with Epic last month Most importantly, if you’re a horizontal company, you generally still haven’t taken the full plunge and thus (overly) value reusability. SMART on FHIR is the logical compromise: healthcare-specific enough to matter, but standardized enough to reuse. Nobody Asked Judy Another friend asked “I thought they had to go to each health system, or did they go direct to Epic and now health systems opt in?” Given the trust paradigms in healthcare, this functionally cannot be Epic hoovering up all the data for OpenAI and shoving ChatGPT in their customers’ faces (or they would revolt). However, I do believe the aforementioned terrible coverage by TechCrunch and other outlets is probably responsible for that question, given the 325 million reference. When using FHIR as a business associate to an Epic customer, there is no EHR gatekeeping to speak of, as that isn’t how fhir.epic.com works: You register an app You pick your APIs You test against the sandbox APIs You list as “Ready for Production” Hospitals pick your app You test and go live with them Bluntly, nobody had to say yes or no in Verona (nor were they given the chance). Vendor Services (their next developer tier up that I doubt OpenAI is using quite yet in this initial release) certainly has contractual paperwork that some resent, but even there, the twin pressures of mounting antitrust and information blocking make outright gatekeeping increasingly fraught. My friend’s sentiment is, to me, representative of a broader industry neurosis, perhaps a sort of scar tissue of prior eras: people assume the gate is still there and never actually try the door. There are certainly other ways Epic (and any EHR) can put its thumb on the scale, but they are not so dumb as to stand in front of a federally mandated API and play bouncer at this exact moment in time. So I think they can and probably should go deeper, as this release is at best parity and at worst behind vertical-specific competition. OpenEvidence did a basic SMART launch with Sutter Health in February, allowing for more convenient evidence search by providers. They then add patient-context (the equivalent SMART on FHIR flow to what we see here) when Cedars-Sinai went enterprise-wide in May. UpToDate has four distinct applications across deeper workflows like patient engagement listed in Epic Showroom and announced a partnership with Epic to power Art at UGM Abridge and other ambient scribes have invested deeply into the deepest bidirectional clinical copilot workflow with integrations well beyond SMART on FHIR. In that light, the “Who is OpenAI primarily targeting here?” is clear. This release brings them into striking distance of OpenEvidence, but not the others quite yet. They are the only one of the three you can reach without building something truly Epic-specific. When will they go further? Competition is a great motivator to overcome the horizontal demons and start building things that can’t be reused: not across industries, not across EHRs, maybe not past the customer you built them for. That’s the price of actually verticalizing. The question is if and when OpenAI will be willing to pay it. Month in Review Here is the monthly review. As a reminder, this is a regular round-up of the month’s posts and other content to surface things you may have missed across regulation, litigation, interoperability, and beyond. AI assistance is used in these bullet summaries so I can focus on articles. Articles Published: None this month Video Content: The Information Exchange: Standards-based Thruple Edition (Aug 14): Back to school for us too, with Brad reporting in from the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem’s one year anniversary in DC. We get into the January CMS-0057 deadline, the fall rulemaking reading list, and why enrollment still keeps most apps off FHIR. The Information Exchange: Epic Dúnadan Edition (Aug 25): A UGM roundup with Ryan Brickner joining for the first time to check our takes against what the building actually thinks. Rangers, Ergo sitting on top of EHI, and a down-market lineup that needs some cuts. Regulatory: Stacked Deck, Bad Hand (Aug 05): ONC’s website refresh took the entire HIT Policy Committee record with it, so I rebuilt the archive and went looking for the regulatory capture story everyone assumes is buried in there. Stacking the deck and winning the hand turn out to be very different things. The Sixth Generation of Patient Access (Aug 19): A quick catalog of the five generations of patient access we’ve layered on since HIPAA, and the two candidates now competing to be the sixth. One is planned. The other is the market routing around the plan entirely. Court cases: Three Cases Walk Into a Docket (Aug 06): Two surprise settlements cleared the board in a single week, and then Judge Maddox dropped ninety-four pages on Vyne v. Henry Schein. The sleeper is a DMCA holding that makes direct-to-database a considerably riskier business model. Epic v. Health Gorilla: Into the MDL (Aug 10): Nine class actions are headed to Miami, and the Panel signaled it wants to bring the case that spawned them along too. That would leave Epic arguing the requests were obviously fraudulent in one courtroom and unknowable in the other. Amazon v. Perplexity: Agents Are Legalized! (Aug 11): The Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction against Comet, holding that the user is the one accessing the servers rather than the company that built the agent. A real win for agentic access, and a much narrower one than the headline suggests. Veeva v. Epic: Come At Me, Bro (Aug 26): Epic’s response brief wants the dismissal affirmed and, unusually, wants the opinion published as precedent. Buried in it is Epic’s own description of what its non-competes actually prohibit, which current and former employees should read closely. EHRs: The Contract Epic Would Never Sign Today (Aug 04): A 1999 SEC exhibit catches Epic licensing nearly its entire product line, Tapestry included, to the company that became TriZetto. The marketing services menu attached to it is the part that will make you blink. Forecast from Verona (Aug 07): The Epic Almanac makes one argument six different ways: the AI is only as good as the networks behind it. Emmie headlines, Art’s context stack is the most ambitious part, and Penny finally gets an autonomous coding date on the calendar. Works With Epic MyChart (Aug 17): Epic’s first new Showroom category since the death of Workshop certifies hardware instead of software, badge on the box and all. Made for iPhone, but for blood pressure cuffs, and rough news for anyone selling the RPM stack sitting in between. UGM Hot Takes 2026 (Aug 20): Everyone else covered the AI announcements, so I went after Savvy deleting the payment gateway, Rangers as Boost with the timer removed, and a down-market lineup with too many entries. Plus the Health Grid tidbits I cannot help myself on. MyChart Central Grows Up (Aug 24): Device data and Emmie turn Epic’s identity hub into a full consumer platform, which is both a logical answer to ChatGPT and a bit of a mistake. It also happens to be the best scraping target Epic has ever shipped. Industry Analysis: The Wrong Yardstick (Aug 12): Vertical software keeps getting judged against Superhuman and Notion, which is the wrong bar entirely. Your user is comparing your product to a whiteboard and forty phone calls before lunch. Primitives vs. Abstractions (Aug 27): Developers want building blocks, systems of record prefer to hand out business logic, and both sides have a real case. There’s no test from the outside that separates the engineering reason from the competitive one, which is why this keeps ending up in court. Cross-industry Comparisons: The Two Kinds of Platform Power (Aug 18): Attention power and record power are different problems that keep getting handed the same regulatory toolkit. Congress’s latest swing at Big Tech shows both what’s possible and where it falls apart. The Dogs of (Platform) War (Aug 21): A CourtListener alert turned up a property management fight with healthcare’s exact shape and none of the Cures Act. Shell prospects, ghost accounts, a notetaker bot that came back to haunt someone, and a lawyer arguing both sides of the same theory in two states. Fractals All the Way Down (Aug 31): Yardi dominates property management right up until you zoom into one segment, where AppFolio owns it outright and Yardi doesn’t appear at all. Where you draw the line around a B2B software market is about to decide an awful lot of cases. Other News: If Judy Had the Courage (Aug 13): A short eulogy for the era when software was allowed to look insane: WinAMP, bold colors, and everything the grey chatbot era has taken from us. External Media: Portland Monthly Health Tech Meetup: Erin O’Brien channeled my own feelings - maybe it’s just because it’s August and beautiful, but the monthly edition of the PDX Health community meetup was a ripper. Make sure to reach out if interested to join for the next one. STAT’s Coverage of Epic This Month: Brittany Trang of STAT did a fantastic job of breaking the FTC investigation that’s been lurking, as well as UGM related coverage, so I had to give her her wish of a meme. Fall Conferences: I’m pumped to be kicking off my fall conference season in NYC at Nabla Accelerate next month, which Chrissy provided the link to apply for. Here’s the rest of my schedule in case you want to meet up: Commonwell (Redwood Shores, CA): Oct 13-14 Open@Epic (Madison, WI): Oct 21-22 eHealthExchange (Austin, TX): Oct 27 Sequoia Project (Austin, TX): Oct 28-29 HLTH (Vegas): Nov 15-18 RSNA (Chicago): Nov 29-Dec 3 Posts I Liked: HTI-6 Should Unbundle API Certification: Josh Mandel makes the case that HTI-6 should split (g)(10) into separate authorization and data certifications, so a PACS or a genomics platform can certify only the role it actually performs. Imaging is the urgent example, but the structure solves a much bigger problem. On implementing ePrior Auth with Epic: Scott Rossignol’s field notes from a live ePrior Auth build on Epic, including the two app registrations nobody warns you about and the CPT mapping problem waiting at the end. CMS-0057 implementations are going to be such a beast. Healthcare point solutions are starting to look a lot like streaming services: Spencer Dorn runs the cable-to-streaming arc against health IT and lands squarely on the bundling half of the cycle. Bundling can be good! It can also be bad! Life is nuanced. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Sep 2 • 5:05 AM EDT • Health • healthapiguy.substack.com

Andy Burnham promises more devolution and public control of essential services

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said Burnham was offering "more government control, more taxes and more politicians", as he addressed MPs for the first time as PM.

Sep 1 • 3:18 PM EDT • Politics • bbc.com

Champaign business owner, Mahomet resident charged with tax, wire fraud

URBANA, Ill. (WCIA) — A Mahomet man with a business in Champaign is facing federal charges for allegedly failing to turn over more than $800,000 in employment taxes to the IRS, and for “…

Aug 31 • 5:10 PM EDT • Business • wcia.com

Business Owner Charged with Tax Fraud, Wire Fraud Related to COVID Relief Funds

URBANA, Ill. (WICS/WRSP) - Hans Lee Grotelueschen, 56, of Mahomet has been charged with allegedly failing to pay employment taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and fraud related to Economic

Aug 31 • 4:01 PM EDT • Business • newschannel20.com

Illinois Quick Hits: Champaign business owner charged with COVID relief fraud

(The Center Square) – A Mahomet man has been charged with fraud and failing to pay employment taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Aug 31 • 3:30 PM EDT • Business • thecentersquare.com

New York business and wealth exodus threatens economic standing, George Pataki warns

Former New York Governor George Pataki joins Maria Bartiromo to discuss the business and wealth exodus from New York. Pataki warns that high taxes and crime policies are driving major job creators to Florida and Texas.

Aug 31 • 9:55 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Greg Abbott's Texas affordability plan tackles housing, taxes

Half of Texans struggle to cover essential expenses. Greg Abbott's proposals target housing and property taxes, while experts say other major costs remain largely untouched.

Aug 31 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • houstonchronicle.com

'Hercules' star Kevin Sorbo says California can keep its taxes, traffic and 'negativity': 'I'm done'

Aug 31 • 4:27 AM EDT • Entertainment • pagesix.com

Health taxes: Overcoming technical and political challenges, including illicit trade concerns, and lessons from country experience

A virtual side event ahead of the seventy-seventh session of the WHO Regional Committee for the Western Pacific will explore how health taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages can reduce unhealthy consumption, generate revenue and support health priorities. Aligned with WHO’s 3 by 35 Initiative, the session will share country experiences in tax modelling, revenue allocation and addressing illicit trade, while highlighting practical strategies for advancing health tax policies. The event will be livestreamed on X, Facebook, YouTube and the RCM77 web page.

Aug 30 • 6:15 PM EDT • Health • who.int

Alexandria Car and Business Tax Bills Due Oct. 5

ALEXANDRIA, VA — Alexandria has mailed its 2026 personal property tax bills to registered vehicle owners and businesses, with both due Monday, Oct. 5. The

Aug 30 • 3:24 PM EDT • Business • thezebra.org

Retirees are pouring into this coastal getaway – and it's feeling the strain

Sussex County, Delaware, saw 40,000 new residents since 2020, with retirees drawn by low property taxes and no sales tax straining healthcare and schools.

Aug 29 • 12:57 PM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Troops, taxes, war dominate Colorado’s 5th CD debate between Jeff Crank, Jessica Killin

Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank and Democratic challenger Jessica Killin on Thursday night clashed over the war in Iran, the federal budget and healthcare when they took the stage in Colorado Springs for a sold-out debate in the race to represent Colorado’s 5th Congressional District. The debate, which came just over five weeks before general […]

Aug 27 • 10:24 PM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com

We must deliver on cost of living

By Ryan Gonzalez Insurance premiums are on the rise. Property taxes are increasing. Groceries are becoming more expensive. Gas prices are reaching record levels. Housing costs are becoming unsustainable. These are the concerns I hear from people in my district. But these issues are becoming more common across the state as people continue to live […]

Aug 27 • 2:45 AM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com

Tom Tiffany touts business success, but for years owed no taxes

Tom Tiffany, now the GOP candidate for governor, and his business went years without paying state income taxes, Department of Revenue records show.

Aug 26 • 6:04 AM EDT • Business • jsonline.com

Dead billionaires should pay higher taxes

The rich are dying to avoid taxation.

Aug 24 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • vox.com

'Half my business will be gone' - firms in Canada and US fear trade war

Business owners in both countries are navigating uncertainty and worry as the tit-for-tat import taxes ratchet up.

Aug 24 • 5:47 AM EDT • Business • bbc.com

Building the beat: How New Orleans can grow the business behind the music

People dance to the music of the TBC Brass Band Photo by Michael DeMocker / The Times-Picayune This week New Orleans hosts the annual Cutting Edge CE Conference, which brings together members of the music industry, musicians, lawyers and others to learn about and discuss the latest changes in the business of making, producing and selling music. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-1492300'); }); The conference comes as AI and streaming are causing upheavals in the industry. Meanwhile, we’ve seen at least a partial collapse of the global festival industrial complex which has long been a key financial lifeline for many artists.All of that can feel a bit removed from life in New Orleans. After all, we are a city filled with music. On any given day or night, there are dozens of shows across the city, ranging from jazz and blues to hip-hop, bounce and house. Whereas in other cities kids dream of being the star of their local sports team, in New Orleans more often than not they dream of leading their own band.And music is a huge part of our economy. Before New Orleans was known as a foodie destination, it was already drawing millions of visitors from around the globe to experience our jazz, soul and funk scenes firsthand.But the reality is, if you want to make it big, you’re probably going to end up leaving the city. We’ve seen major performers like Lil Wayne, Master P and Jon Batiste (though he’s back on the Northshore) decamp to Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Likewise, up-and-coming musicians like Greer Grimsely, $leazy EZ and Lucky Daye have also left town in search of more profitable pastures.Meanwhile, our local universities train some of the best producers and engineers in the business — only to see them head to one of the big music industry cities after graduation.It’s not a new phenomenon, though the reasons have changed over the years. Like a lot of early jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong famously left New Orleans, first for Chicago before ultimately settling in New York City. But while those early migrations had more to do with racism, in today’s day and age, musicians end up leaving because New Orleans doesn’t have the industry infrastructure necessary to sustain the kind of growth and, well, success, a lot of folks dream of.It’s a hard, but very real, truth. Artists have to go to Nashville for publishing, Los Angeles for production, Atlanta to join a label or New York for representation. That, in turn, is a drain not only on the city’s talent pool but on money that could be staying here at home.Not being an industry town inevitably makes it that much harder for musicians who don’t leave to get the recognition and success they deserve. It also undoubtedly plays a part in keeping the wages working musicians in New Orleans make at their gigs here lower than in places like Austin or Nashville.That’s not to say we don’t have any of the infrastructure needed to make New Orleans a music industry town. We’ve got live music venues, studios, record labels, management companies, copyright attorneys ... all the various building blocks are there. We just haven’t ever built upon that solid foundation. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-1492297'); }); The question is how do we do that in a way that supports our existing industry and artists, respects our cultural traditions and ensures the wealth generated is equitably distributed so it isn’t just C-suite executives who end up reaping the benefits. And the time to start figuring out the answers is now: next year the legislature will focus on taxes and spending, making it vital that New Orleans leaders have a plan to try and secure funding to help grow our industry.So we asked a group of New Orleanians to give us their thoughts, ranging from industry attorneys and venue operators to working musicians and cultural advocates. Their answers point toward turning New Orleans into a music industry city without leaving musicians behind or abandoning what makes us the greatest music city on earth.If a dusty city like Austin can transform itself into a major hub not just for music but the industry behind it, surely the birthplace of jazz — and pretty much all modern music by extension — can figure it out as well. +3 Mailbox Money: The Recording Academy’s Reid Wick on supporting, and growing, New Orleans’ music industry Reid Wick has been a part of the New Orleans music landscape from virtually every angle. He'… California Dreaming: Pell discusses his time in L.A. and how New Orleans can help young musicians In 2015, New Orleans-born rapper Pell decided to make the move to Los Angeles. He was fresh … +2 Up from the street: To build a stronger music industry, support community first. At MaCCNO, most of our team aren’t just advocates, we’re also working musicians. Here are a … +2 Live and direct: Public investment in independent venues is key to a robust music economy. I’ve spent most of my adult life looking at the New Orleans music business from every side o… +2 Helping Hand: New Orleans doesn’t need more talent. It needs more infrastructure. People love to call New Orleans a music town. And they’re right. +2 \We out here: New Orleans doesn't need to be Austin. It's already a music industry city. +2 Futureshock: New Olreans has the music talent. Now it needs the innovation. New Orleans has long been known as a place for music creation and innovation. People travel … .donate-gambit-article-module-container { text-align: center; padding: 10px; /* background-color: #24da6d; */ background-color: rgb(153, 0, 0); margin-bottom: 20px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-title { font-weight: bold; color: #fff; } .donate-gambit-article-module-copy { color: #fff !important; font-size: 16px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-button { background-color: black; width: 50%; border-color: black; font-size: 16px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-button:hover { background-color: black; } @media only screen and (max-width: 600px) { .donate-gambit-article-module-button { font-size: 14px; width: 100%; } .donate-gambit-article-module-copy { font-size: 14px; } } BECOME A GAMBIT MEMBER AND JOIN OUR KREWE TODAY For more than 40 years, Gambit has covered New Orleans, for New Orleans. We’ve stood up to city hall with you, cheered the Saints with you, danced in the streets with you and cried over our collective loss with you. And we’re plannin’ on being here for 40 more. To do that, we need your help. Become a Gambit member today and help us continue our mission SUPPORT GAMBIT

Aug 23 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • nola.com

U.S. imposes 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products

President Donald Trump’s import taxes will hit about 5% of what Canada ships to the United States every year, including products ranging from hockey sticks to tongue depressors.

Aug 22 • 7:56 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

U.S. imposes 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products

President Donald Trump’s import taxes will hit about 5% of what Canada ships to the United States every year, including products ranging from hockey sticks to tongue depressors.

Aug 22 • 7:56 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

He Was Driving a $40k Car But Didn’t Have $5 for McDonald’s. Now He Runs a Multi-Million-Dollar Business.

At age 14, he didn't know what taxes were. Now he's championing financial literacy.

Aug 20 • 11:30 AM EDT • Business • entrepreneur.com

States pour taxpayer dollars into college sports as costs squeeze budgets

A growing number of states are providing tax dollars to university athletics. North Carolina and Louisiana are earmarking sports betting taxes for their universities.

Aug 20 • 7:51 AM EDT • Sports • spectrumlocalnews.com

Louisiana’s college sports programs are losing money. Can sales taxes save them?

University leaders are considering setting up economic development districts, like one LSU recently created around its Baton Rouge campus, that would give their school access to sales tax revenue already being collected.

Aug 20 • 5:00 AM EDT • Sports • lailluminator.com

Tijerina touts efforts to lower property taxes. Reality is more complicated

Tijerina is trying to oust longtime Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar in South Texas.

Aug 18 • 5:30 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

How health care costs are undermining America’s public-sector employers

Politicians are contemplating raising taxes and cutting benefits as the cost of health care for government workers surges.

Aug 18 • 4:30 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com

Prepare for taxes now, especially if you own a business

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) – With the summer sun upon us and school not even back in session yet, tax season feels very far away. But if you’re like a lot of us, we often wait too long to st…

Aug 16 • 8:45 AM EDT • Business • news10.com

'Ghost town?' Colorado business leaders weigh all options as DSA gains ground

Local business owners and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce discuss corporate taxes, rising costs and the future of free enterprise as DSA-backed policies gain momentum in Colorado.

Aug 14 • 6:48 PM EDT • Business • foxnews.com

Rock Creek Entertainment District is not 'no risk'

Nearly two years ago, Norman was told the proposed University of Oklahoma entertainment district and basketball arena tax TIF represented “no new taxes,” “no risk to the public,” and “no

Aug 13 • 6:30 PM EDT • Entertainment • normantranscript.com

Small Business Spotlight: Specialty dental practice takes root on Market St.

WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO OPEN BLUE HERON ROOT CANAL SPECIALISTS? OWNER SARAH ERMOSHKIN: “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. When I was 23 years old, I owned a cafe in Seattle, where I even fought to oppose oppressive sales taxes on espresso drinks. After selling that business, I got married and started a family. Once my children were in school, I attended dental school through the Navy Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), which covered my tuition and provided a stipend. From the beginning, my goal was to eventually own my own practice after completing my military service. The work I do is incredibly rewarding and being able to create an environment that puts patients first while helping employees grow professionally makes every day as a business owner meaningful.” WHAT DOES YOUR BUSINESS PROVIDE? ERMOSHKIN: “Endodontists are often called ‘pain doctors’ because our primary mission is to relieve pain and save natural teeth. We specialize in root canal therapy, retreatment of nonhealing root canals, treatment of root resorption, apicoectomies – microsurgical root-end procedures – and vital pulp therapy for children. Our goal is to preserve teeth that might otherwise need to be extracted and replaced with implants. Saving a patient’s natural tooth is almost always the best long-term solution for their oral health.” HOW DOES YOUR MILITARY TRAINING HELP YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “My military service taught me how to lead, collaborate and make decisions under pressure. I worked closely with senior leadership while treating a large patient population and collaborating with specialists across multiple disciplines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, (I) served a dual role as Navy dentist and as the public affairs officer for Naval Health Clinic Annapolis, where I helped develop medical and dental communications for the midshipmen and support staff, while coordinating with the broader Navy Capital Region. We worked closely with other military treatment facilities to share best practices and deliver consistent public health messaging. Those leadership experiences continue to shape how I lead my team and serve our patients today.” WHAT CHALLENGES ARE YOU FACING RIGHT NOW IN YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “One of our biggest challenges is overcoming the misinformation surrounding root canal treatment. Root canals are safe, effective and often the best way to relieve pain while preserving a natural tooth. Unfortunately, many people choose extraction because they believe it’s less expensive or because they’ve seen misleading information online. What they may not realize is that losing a tooth can lead to shifting teeth, changes in the way they bite and chew and significantly higher costs to restore their smile later.”

Aug 12 • 9:21 AM EDT • Business • wilmingtonbiz.com

An Overview of State-Directed Payments and Medicaid Provider Taxes: History and Potential Effects of the Working Families and Tax Cut Legislation on Health Care Costs

Health care provider taxes and state-directed payment policies in the Working Families and Tax Cut legislation are expected to reduce non-Medicaid prices by up to 3.5 percent in markets with provider taxes and reduce spending on Medicaid, commercial and Medicare coverage. Our spending estimates indicate that there will be an additional $29 billion in federal savings on Medicare and commercial coverage for each $100 billion that federal Medicaid spending is reduced.KEY POINTS

Aug 12 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • aspe.hhs.gov

Under 500 Employees, Over $500 billion: Small Business Payroll Taxes

Small businesses, those with fewer than 500 employees, are a pillar in the U.S. economy and account for a large share of federal payroll tax revenues. These taxes are paid by both the employer and employee and are primarily used to fund the Social Se

Aug 11 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • advocacy.sba.gov

My Dad Wanted Me to Take Over His Accounting Firm. I Built a $3.2 Million One Instead

Sherman Standberry's family business helps clients lower their taxes.

Aug 11 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • inc.com

The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized

Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA

Aug 11 • 6:33 AM EDT • Health • paulkrugman.substack.com

Opinion |Boston homeowners aren’t overtaxed. So why raise taxes on businesses?

New data show Boston homeowners are already among the least-taxed in the country, while businesses carry a disproportionate share of the city’s property tax burden.

Aug 10 • 12:43 PM EDT • Business • bostonglobe.com

Cook County moves to end decades-old tax buying practice

After Evanston homeowner Goyce Rates fell behind on her property taxes, two tax buyers in 2019 purchased liens on the home’s two parcels for a total of $9,025. By 2023, she was unable to redeem her property for the cost of back taxes and interest, enabling the buyers to win deeds for the property and evict her family in November that year.

Aug 10 • 9:45 AM EDT • Business • chicagobusiness.com

Vietnam proposes 30% income tax cut for small firms, business households

Vietnam's government plans to seek parliamentary approval for a ​30% cut in income taxes ‌for small businesses and household businesses with annual revenue of up to 10 ​billion dong ($380,000), as part ​of efforts to support growth, the ⁠government said over the weekend.

Aug 10 • 12:00 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Suburban business owner gets 15 months on prison for failing to pay taxes

A business owner from the Northwest suburbs was sentenced last week to 15 months in federal prison on charges he failed to pay the government more than $1 million in payroll taxes. George Dilles, 55, ...

Aug 9 • 1:38 PM EDT • Business • dailyherald.com

Flutter Entertainment Q2 Earnings Call Highlights

Flutter Entertainment (NYSE:FLUT) reported second-quarter revenue growth of 3% as strong customer engagement around the FIFA World Cup and acquisitions helped offset customer-friendly U.S. sports results and higher taxes in the United Kingdom. The company also announced that Chief Executive Officer

Aug 8 • 4:04 AM EDT • Entertainment • marketbeat.com

Flutter Entertainment Q2 Earnings Call Highlights

Flutter Entertainment (NYSE:FLUT) reported second-quarter revenue growth of 3% as strong customer engagement around the FIFA World Cup and acquisitions helped offset customer-friendly U.S. sports results and higher taxes in the United Kingdom. The company also announced that Chief Executive Officer

Aug 8 • 4:03 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

PENN Entertainment (PENN) Stock Profit Rebound Faces Lingering Digital Doubts

PENN Entertainment stock barely moved on the results, edging up about 0.3% to US$20.18, even though the earnings story was anything but sleepy. Q2 flipped back into the black with basic earnings per share of US$0.25 and net income of US$33.1m. Retail casinos produced record quarterly revenue and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and rent that management highlighted on the call. The market reaction looks muted for now. The real question for investors is how...

Aug 7 • 11:49 PM EDT • Entertainment • simplywall.st

In the decade since rate cuts began, NH business tax revenues grew by an inflation-adjusted $3 billion - THE JOSIAH BARTLETT CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY

In 2015, the year New Hampshire legislators began a series of business tax cuts, revenues from the state’s two primary business taxes were a combined $561.7 million. In the decade since, business tax revenues grew by more than $3 billion. From 2016-2025, the state collected $3.02 billion in new business tax revenue above the 2015 […]

Aug 7 • 3:52 PM EDT • Business • jbartlett.org

Downtown New Orleans taxes itself an extra $10 million a year. Here's where the money goes.

Check in with the chief of the Downtown Development District after one year on the job.

Aug 7 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • nola.com

Flutter Entertainment (FLUT) Stock Faces Margin Squeeze Despite Steady Revenue

Flutter Entertainment walked into this earnings print with a stock that has quietly drifted lower over the past month, yet the immediate reaction has been almost flat. The share price edged only 0.1% higher to about US$93, even as the company reported a sharp squeeze in adjusted EBITDA and a group net loss in the quarter. The market mood looks numb rather than shocked. Traders appear focused on the profit hit from heavier U.S. marketing and higher taxes. The more patient question is whether...

Aug 6 • 10:35 PM EDT • Entertainment • simplywall.st

Rice Man Faces Felony Charges Over Unpaid Business Taxes

(KNSI) - A Rice man has been charged with 22 felony counts after state investigators say he failed to file or ...

Aug 4 • 5:00 PM EDT • Business • knsiradio.com

T-Mobile’s $0-down financing plan bundles taxes and fees

No payment required at checkout.

Aug 4 • 12:07 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

'More akin to a political slogan': Judge orders rewrite of property tax amendment's ballot language

The amendment stays on the ballot, but Attorney General has 10 days to rewrite the sales pitch as a description.

Aug 4 • 8:21 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com

Shifting left, Democrats see universal health care, taxing the rich as 'essential,' Reuters/Ipsos poll finds

Liberal Democrats now make up a clear majority of their party ​and view universal healthcare, greater abortion access and higher taxes on the rich as essential political positions, underscoring how Democrats have moved ‌leftward in recent years, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Aug 4 • 6:03 AM EDT • Health • reuters.com

If Not AOC, Then Who?

What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

Aug 3 • 12:50 PM EDT • Politics • laborpolitics.com

California voters could make it harder to increase taxes with Prop 43

California voters will decide in November whether to approve Proposition 43, a measure that would make it more difficult to pass new special taxes in cities and counties.

Aug 2 • 11:25 AM EDT • Politics • kcra.com

Could lower property taxes come at a cost to children's healthcare?

On “Florida Matters Live & Local,” Mary Mayhew talked about the effects that property tax cuts may have on children's healthcare and Medicaid.

Aug 2 • 5:04 AM EDT • Health • wusf.org

Singer-actor Cha Eun-woo files appeal after paying $9 mil. in taxes

Singer-actor Cha Eun-woo has filed an appeal against the National Tax Service (NTS), after paying some 13 billion won ($9 million) in additional ta...

Aug 2 • 1:07 AM EDT • Entertainment • koreatimes.co.kr

Steve Moore says DSA politicians are making cities ‘unlivable’

Unleash Prosperity co-founder Steve Moore says high regulations and taxes are to blame for states that are economically struggling on ‘Life, Liberty & Levin.’

Aug 1 • 10:25 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Clinton, Obama-era Democratic heavyweights Penn and Emanuel rip NYC's Mamdani over taxes, Israel, blast DSA

Democratic power players Mark Penn and Rahm Emanuel publicly criticize NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani over his property tax plan and Israel positions.

Jul 29 • 9:47 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Holland & Knight Health Dose: July 28, 2026 | Insights

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a proposed rule that would establish new indirect hold harmless thresholds for healthcare-related taxes.

Jul 28 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • hklaw.com

He Sold His HVAC Business and Trucks in One Year. Two Years Later, Medicare Billed Him Like a Millionaire.

An HVAC contractor sold his business, paid his taxes, and booked a trip to Portugal. Two years later, Medicare sent him a premium notice sized for someone still running a seven-figure operation, and the clock to fight it was already running.

Jul 27 • 7:02 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

RELEASE: Gottheimer Hosts Telephone Town Hall to Discuss Health Care Costs, Medicare, Social Security, Utility Prices, Affordability in Jersey

Above: Gottheimer conducts a Telephone Town Hall with North Jersey families. WASHINGTON, D.C. — Last night, July 22, 2026, U.S. Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) hosted a Telephone Town Hall with thousands of North Jersey residents to discuss his bipartisan efforts to lower health care and prescription drug costs, protect Social Security and Medicare, cut taxes, lower […]

Jul 23 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • gottheimer.house.gov

California business owner says taxes and homelessness threaten his business

A ‘Fox News @ Night’ panel debates how the next California governor should address the economy and small businesses.

Jul 22 • 11:49 PM EDT • Business • foxnews.com

Politics in the Park: Property taxes, data centers and maternal care dominate House candidate forum

CASPER, Wyo. — Divisions emerged Wednesday as eight Republican candidates vying for four Wyoming House seats sparred over how deeply to cut property

Jul 22 • 11:25 PM EDT • Politics • oilcity.news

'The restaurant remains open': Gee, Ursula stunned by Capitol Hill business owner's alleged $1.5M tax scheme

A Capitol Hill restaurant faces scrutiny as its owner is charged with stealing $1.5M in payroll taxes from employees.

Jul 22 • 6:30 PM EDT • Business • mynorthwest.com

Old-guard WA Democrats stage an intervention as party tacks left

Two of Washington’s former governors have now called out their own party, the Democrats, for “out of control” spending and taxes in Olympia. Is the party cracking up?

Jul 22 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • seattletimes.com

Miami's cost of living now tops New York City's despite Florida's tax advantages

Rising property taxes, insurance premiums and 36% inflation since 2019 have pushed Miami's cost of living above New York City's for the first time on record.

Jul 21 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Hawai‘i comes in first — at being worst state for business

The fix for a bad business climate isn’t more bureaucracy. It’s less. Reducing taxes and regulations help revitalize the economy. If only our lawmakers would embrace those policies more often.

Jul 19 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • kauainownews.com

Hawai‘i comes in first — at being worst state for business

The fix for a bad business climate isn’t more bureaucracy. It’s less. Reducing taxes and regulations help revitalize the economy. If only our lawmakers would embrace those policies more often.

Jul 19 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • bigislandnow.com

As Democrats move left, Klobuchar makes a business-friendly pitch in governor’s race

Her pro-growth message comes as Democrats increasingly want corporations and the wealthy to pay more taxes.

Jul 19 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • startribune.com

Trump administration races to rebuild tariff wall knocked down by Supreme Court

The U.S. Treasury last year swelled with revenue from President Donald Trump’s double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country on earth. But the money dried up after the Supreme Court struck down the biggest and boldest of Trump’s tariffs in February. The question now is: Can the president’s trade team make good on its promise to replace the lost revenue?

Jul 17 • 5:23 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Ulster County Legislature approves tax surcharge on higher earners

The Ulster County Legislature on Tuesday approved the 'Ulster County for Fair Taxes Act.'

Jul 15 • 10:31 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Taxes, paid leave program on minds of N. Va. business leaders after General Assembly session

Optimism among Northern Virginia business leaders is improving, although some expressed worries about taxes and the state's approval of a paid family and medical leave program. That's according to the second-quarter 2026 Business Leader Survey released last week by the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce and public relations firm Pinkston, revealing the sentiments of the

Jul 15 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • ffxnow.com

'State of States' analysis shows Florida outperforms in small business development

Insurance costs pose a challenge, but that's largely mitigated by low taxes.

Jul 14 • 12:06 PM EDT • Business • floridapolitics.com

Bennett unveils tax plan in Maine governor’s race

Bennett said he also wants a state panel to study a program in Vermont that caps property taxes at a percentage of household income.

Jul 14 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Florida business establishment remains quiet on property tax amendment

Less than four months before Floridians vote on a proposal to phase out property taxes for homeowners, there’s no organized campaign seeking to move the measure past the 60% vote required for passage....

Jul 13 • 2:30 PM EDT • Business • yahoo.com

As small businesses beg for tax relief, Philadelphia sees a $100 million windfall

Mayor Parker’s push for Uber and Amazon taxes failed, but local businesses are paying more nonetheless after BIRT changes.

Jul 13 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • billypenn.com

Here's how Lindsey Graham influenced taxes, trade, and defense

Sen. Lindsey Graham served more than 30 years in Congress. The powerful lawmaker helped influence corporate tax, tariffs, and defense policy.

Jul 12 • 12:58 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

'Moana' is Disney's latest reminder that nostalgia isn't enough

Disney remaking its animated classics as live-action movies has become as much a certainty as death and taxes. It’s a big blue Will Smith genie we just can’t put back

Jul 10 • 7:46 PM EDT • Entertainment • centraloregondaily.com

NC budget raises sports-betting tax, adds prediction markets

New NC budget raises sports-betting taxes, redirects revenue to public universities, and creates a new tax on prediction markets.

Jul 10 • 11:06 AM EDT • Sports • carolinajournal.com

A Business Owner Paid Himself a Low Salary for Decades to Save on Taxes. The Trade-Off Shows Up Now, in a Smaller Social Security Check, and Selling the Company Won’t Fix It.

A 66-year-old business owner running an S-corporation for decades is planning his exit. A buyer is circling, and he expects the sale to fund retirement. When it came time for him to request his Social Security statement, the projected monthly benefit was lower than expected. Friends with W-2 careers and similar lifestyles were getting noticeably ... A Business Owner Paid Himself a Low Salary for Decades to Save on Taxes. The Trade-Off Shows Up Now, in a Smaller Social Security Check, and Selling

Jul 7 • 6:02 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Taste of Italy owner and wife owe over $377K in unpaid taxes

The Latham restaurant, owned by Frank Cappello, owes over $300K in unpaid taxes, with 17 active warrants against the restaurant, its corporations and its owners.

Jul 3 • 3:43 PM EDT • Business • dailygazette.com

IRS Launches "Direct Pay for Businesses"

Internal Revenue Service, Pay Business Taxes from Your Bank Account, IRS.gov (last updated June 27, 2026), https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-business-taxes-from-your-bank-account In a long-awaited update to its electronic payment systems, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officially roll

Jul 2 • 10:44 AM EDT • Business • currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com

A Nation Larger Than Its Politics

As America approaches its 250th birthday, I find myself wondering whether we have lost sight of something that earlier generations understood instinctively.Americans have never agreed on politics.We have argued over wars, taxes, immigration, religion, civil rights, economic policy, and the proper ro...

Jul 2 • 12:50 AM EDT • Politics • thefulcrum.us

Politics in the Park: Natrona County commissioner candidates talk taxes, energy, responsibilities

CASPER, Wyo. — Nine Republican candidates for the Natrona County Board of County Commissioners outlined their visions Wednesday for property taxes, energy

Jul 2 • 12:42 AM EDT • Politics • oilcity.news