“Taxpayers fronted nearly $500 million for a new professional football stadium in Minneapolis that opened just seven years ago. Now, they could be on the hook for as much as $280 million more in ongoing maintenance costs over the next decade.”
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“Another reason why these public projects so rarely “pay for themselves” is that cities often grant huge property tax breaks to the stadiums. In New York City, for example, a recent report from the city’s Independent Budget Office found that the four major stadiums in the Big Apple—Barclays Center, Citi Field, Madison Square Garden, and Yankee Stadium—are exempt from roughly $377 million in annual property taxes.
While Madison Square Garden’s situation is weird and unique, the other three stadiums are exempt because they “were all built on publicly owned land that is exempt from property taxes,” according to the IBO report. But there’s nothing actually “public” about a stadium—they’re not parks that anyone can visit whenever they’d like or use for a variety of purposes—and cities should stop engaging in the fiction that they are.”
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“Taxpayers are forced to cover stadium construction costs with the promise of economic growth that doesn’t materialize, then sometimes get hit up for ongoing maintenance costs that can’t be covered by the economic growth that didn’t materialize, and all this happens while the supposedly public stadiums are not generating property tax revenue to help offset their public costs. It’s a bad deal for just about everyone—except for the stadium design firms that get to decide how much extra cash taxpayers will have to pony up to maintain a facility that’s still basically brand new.”
“Florida legislators are considering several bills that would target undocumented immigrants and the Floridians who interact with them. One of the more controversial measures, which is wrapped into Senate Bill 1718, would make it a third-degree felony for Floridians to conceal, harbor, or shield—or transport “into or within” the state—a person who they know “or reasonably should know” is in the United States unlawfully.
“With this legislation, Florida is continuing to crack down on the smuggling of illegal aliens,” said Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R–Spring Hill), who introduced S.B. 1718, said the bill “should be the model for all 50 states going forward.”
S.B. 1718’s supporters have painted the bill as a way to protect Floridians and their rights. But some religious officials in Florida are worried that if S.B. 1718 passes, their work with undocumented immigrants could be criminalized—something they say would represent a violation of their religious liberties.
Joel Tooley takes issue with the bill being framed as an anti-trafficking effort. Tooley is a pastor at Melbourne First Church of the Nazarene and a consultant with the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of evangelical churches and organizations that advocates for immigration reform. S.B. 1718 “is actually a bill that criminalizes normal activities that are irrevocably natural expressions of the work people do as a response to their spiritual calling to show compassion for those in need,” he tells Reason.”
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“Federal law already prohibits people from transporting undocumented immigrants “in furtherance of such violation of [immigration] law,” but S.B. 1718 has a lower threshold, applying to more routine activities. The bill would make it a third-degree felony for someone to transport or harbor an undocumented immigrant that they know or suspect is undocumented. Under Florida law, that would be punishable by up to five years in prison (and up to 15 years if the transported migrant is a minor). The bill wouldn’t apply to migrants who overstayed their visas.”
“Esformes was not convicted of the most serious charges leveled against him. The government failed to convince a jury, for example, that he committed conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. So his 20-year sentence—handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola of the Southern District of Florida—may appear grossly disproportionate to his convictions.
Until you realize the judge explicitly punished Esformes for charges on which the jury hung.
That is not an error. “When somebody gets sentenced [at the federal level]…they get sentenced on all charges, even the ones they’re acquitted on, [as long as] they get convicted on one count,” says Brett Tolman, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah who is now the executive director of Right on Crime. It is a little-known, jaw-dropping part of the legal system: Federal judges are, in effect, not obligated to abide by a jury’s verdict at sentencing. They can, and do, sentence defendants for conduct on which they were not convicted. In this case, Esformes was already sentenced—and had that sentence commuted—for the crimes that the DOJ now wants to retry.
“This defendant, as much as you might not like him…do you think he should be punished two or three times for the same conduct?” asks Tolman. “I don’t find anybody who thinks that’s fair.””
“To pretend that Social Security and Medicare shouldn’t be touched is nothing short of political malpractice. Over the next 30 years, the two programs will run a $116 trillion shortfall. This number accounts for the significant amount of interest payments on the debt the government will ring up in the process. While we might be able to stumble along indefinitely, all that borrowing will slow—perhaps even halt—our economic growth, making funding the programs that much more difficult.”
“The Biden administration has framed its new, tighter “Buy American” regulations as a way to bolster domestic manufacturing and benefit parts of the country that have been left behind by technological innovation.
To many of those same communities, the White House has promised better connectivity and higher internet speeds. The bipartisan infrastructure plan signed by President Joe Biden in 2021 dedicated $42 billion to expanding broadband access, with much of the funding aimed at laying fiber optic lines in parts of the country where they don’t exist.
There’s one small problem with all this: Finding enough fiber optic cables that comply with the Buy American rules.”
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“Under Biden’s Buy American rules, 55 percent of the component parts of any product used in a federal construction project must be sourced in the United States. That disqualifies any imports of finished cable, but it also wipes out most of the available American-made supply since many of the component parts are sourced overseas.”
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“Another problem, according to a Bloomberg report earlier this week, is that building a fiber optic network requires more than just fiber optic cable. You also need switches, terminals, routers, and other pieces of tech that are mostly imported or manufactured with imported components. In both cases, the Buy American requirements mean broadband companies can’t use those parts for projects funded with federal funding from the infrastructure bill.
That means less infrastructure gets built, and lots of perfectly good American-made fiber optic cable doesn’t get purchased, simply because less than 55 percent of its components happened to come from somewhere else.”
“Oklahoma’s attorney general has filed a motion to overturn the capital murder conviction of Richard Glossip, who has spent almost 26 years on death row. The move comes after the release of a new report detailing considerable issues in the state’s case against Glossip, concluding that he was “deprived of a fair trial.””
“”A bloc of at least eight corn belt Republicans are a hard ‘no’ on” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R–Calif.) bill to raise the debt ceiling unless proposed cuts to ethanol tax credits are removed from the package, Axios reported Tuesday. That group reportedly includes all four members of Congress who represent Iowa and at least four other Republican lawmakers from other “corn belt” states.
Because Republicans have a slim 222–213 majority in the House, any group of five lawmakers can hold considerable leverage by threatening to vote against a bill.”
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“this is yet another warning about the dangers of creating government subsidies in the first place.
Even though they cost taxpayers billions of dollars every year, federal ethanol subsidies and tax credits are a tiny chunk of the overall federal budget. Yet they are incredibly valuable to the farming communities that reap those benefits—and that vote to elect lawmakers who promise to keep the federal cash flowing. For the members of Congress from Iowa and other Midwestern states, voting to cut those subsidies could be a career-ending move. On the other side, there’s no significant voting block demanding the removal of ethanol subsidies—even though biofuels are expensive, ineffective, and bad for the environment—so the lawmakers more intensely committed to their special interests usually get what they want.”
““Prime Minister Abiy used existing cracks within the EOTC and the influence of new evangelical movements to consolidate his power.
After he received praise for supposedly unifying a divided Church in 2018, the EOTC is now more divided than ever, most notably in Tigray and Oromia.
The role of the EOTC, with its radical Mahibere Kidusan group—along with the rise of Pentecostals and the Prosperity Party—has been both a causative factor and fueling contributor to the Tigray war, and has produced a split within the Church in Tigray.
Beyond the role of Ethiopia’s institutions in fomenting divisions, the Tigray war has also seen priests systematically targeted and religious artefacts destroyed. According to a leaked official church letter, at least 78 priests were massacred in one zone in Tigray.
In addition, the Waldeba Monastery, the oldest in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the al-Nejashi Mosque, one of the first mosques in Africa, were attacked, with the former destroyed and its monastic community brutally massacred.
Thus, while conflict in Ethiopia is typically framed according to its political and ethnic dimensions, religion and religious institutions have also played a central role.””