Hochul’s Budget Dilemma: Addressing Higher Education to Safeguard Our Future
Eye on Albany: Hochul’s Budget Con(fusion)
“Governor Hochul’s initiative to send out $500 checks to millions of households faces a major issue: the sales tax ‘surplus’ she intends to distribute simply isn’t real,” quips Ken Girardin from the Empire Center. While it’s true that “inflation has contributed to the rise in sales tax revenue,” it’s “far from the $3 billion figure she claims.” Hochul may be mixing up “state tax receipts unrelated to sales tax, which have come in $2.9 billion above spring forecasts.” Possibly, she understands that an increasing portion of state tax income stems from “more erratic earnings,” leading to hesitance in allowing another $3 billion to be absorbed into the state’s spending framework. However, her refund scheme would still represent “poor public policy.”
Campus beat: Reform Higher Education, Preserve Civilization
“The decline of higher education poses a risk to both the civic health and long-term economic stability of Western liberal civilization,” and as youths explore alternate educational paths amid the Trump administration’s rise, “it appears that universities will inevitably need to adapt or downsize,” remarks Joel Kotkin at Spiked. “Americans are increasingly doubtful that universities can provide” lucrative employment, as “skills-based hiring is replacing degree-based hiring” in sectors like “manufacturing and construction.” Under Trump, the “disruption” of higher education “is likely to persist,” and even though “educrats will resist reform fiercely,” “a shift is urgently needed” to “save our children and our civilization.”
Conservative: Time’s Desperate Trump Tactic
“In a frantic attempt to stay relevant, Time magazine has selected Donald Trump as its Person of the Year for 2024,” observes Nicole Russell from USA Today. However, “with cynicism and leftism at their disposal, the article’s authors express skepticism about America’s choice,” questioning “Trump’s tactics, staff, and history” and raising alarm about constitutional standards “without acknowledging the numerous norms that Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party disregarded this year.” “Time aims to capitalize on Trump,” but while the cover presents him as “stoic and powerful,” the magazine has often depicted him negatively, like “a melting orange blob.” Nevertheless, his overwhelming victory indicates that “it’s Trump’s world now: We merely inhabit it, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Time magazine.”
From the right: Liberalism Has Been Compromised
The core principles of liberalism have “been compromised by ideologues operating from within,” asserts UK opposition leader Kemi Badenoch at The Free Press. Authoritarian leftists “use the language of the civil rights movement but aim to resegregate society. They advocate for social justice but disregard basic tenets of fairness and equality. They demand our tolerance while actively seeking to dismantle the culture and institutions that foster that tolerance.” To rectify this, we must “articulate the value of liberty” and “curtail the state’s expansion.” “Our mission is not merely to win elections,” but to “champion and safeguard the transformative values that make those elections possible.”
FBI watch: Wray’s Lasting Disgrace
“Few departing officials deserve harsher criticism” than FBI Director Christopher Wray, demand the editors of the Washington Examiner. “He took office promising transparency, honesty, competence, depoliticization, and systemic reform, but has delivered none of it.” Moreover, “his statements and judgment are unreliable.” For instance, “in 2022, it surfaced that an internal audit from three years prior revealed that FBI staff broke rules at least 747 times in just eighteen months during ‘high-profile’ investigations,” yet Wray only addressed these issues “more than a year after the audit went public.” He “misled Congress regarding the extent of the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics for ‘threat mitigation,’ avoided the truth about the FBI’s investigation of parent activists as domestic terrorists, and misrepresented whether the FBI engaged in censoring speech on social media platforms.” In his aftermath, “the FBI requires serious cleansing.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
