Harvard’s Contradiction

Powerline has a piece that has Harvard seemingly talking about setting up a conservative center on its campus as a balance to its strongly Leftist bent. (Such a center would, supposedly, cost up to $1 billion. I note that that’s less than 2% of its endowment, eliding that much of that endowment is targeted IAW the requirements of the donors who made and make that portion of the donations.)

Say, though, that the scuttlebutt is accurate, and Harvard is serious about setting up such a center. Harvard has also said, per The Telegraph, that

it refused to change its hiring, admissions, and other internal procedures following demands by the Trump administration….

Those hiring, admissions, and other procedures, though, are based entirely on its determined DEI practices, which are nakedly racist and sexist, and drive Harvard to hire only left-leaning or outright leftist personnel of merit ranging from none to quite a bit.

Given that, on what basis would Harvard hire actual conservative personnel for its claimed conservative center?

A Tax False Premise

A letter writer in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered an alternative to the provider tax so many States assess. The provider tax is a tax States levy on hospitals that, in the depths of the scam, the States use to get a larger allocation of Federal fund transfers into their Medicaid programs, which then reimburse those hospitals for their provider tax remittances to the State.

The letter writer suggests

If states collected taxes from other sources, channeled the revenue into their Medicaid programs and continued to provide the same services, they would be entitled to the same federal matching as they are today. Nothing would need to change.

The false premise from which this letter writer proceeds is this: the need for those tax dollars in the first place is not at all established. On the contrary: Medicaid is a State-run program and its payouts are entirely controlled by that State. As such, each State’s Medicaid program should be funded entirely and exclusively by the citizens of that State. There is no need for the Federal government to transfer the tax remittals of the citizens of any other State (much less all of them) to any State for its Medicaid program.

Indeed, were each State to retain those tax dollars rather than sending them to the Federal government, the citizens of each State would be better able to fund their State’s Medicaid program.