Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

 February 25, 2025 The Federal Budget by Lynne Weikart Both Houses of Congress wrestle with passing a Budget Resolution - the financial goals for their budget, and their goals are deep cuts in Medicaid, which is health care for the poor. Congress refuses to discuss revenue; its focus is spending cuts.  There are two sides to a budget - the revenue side and the spending side. Before cutting spending, why not examine what can be done on the revenue side? Congress avoids discussing revenue because it wishes to extend the Trump tax cuts that expire at the end of 2025.  In FY2024, we collected $4.92 trillion in revenues. Republicans will not look at the revenues.  Let’s look at the revenues.   The expenditures were $6.752 trillion for a deficit of $1.83 trillion in FY2024. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), permanently extending the expiring Trump tax cuts would cost $4 trillion over the next 10 years or $400 billion per year. That $400 trillion is m...

  What most people don't know. Our federal government employees' salaries take up only a tiny proportion of the federal budget. Our spending on employees is relatively small. In FY2022, the federal government only spent $271 billion to pay 2.3 million civilian workers. In FY2024, our federal government spent $6.9 trillion. Do you really think cutting this tiny portion of federal salaries will make a dent in our federal budget? Our national budget is really just an insurance company with an accompanying military expenditure. The majority of spending is mandatory in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, not employees' salaries but payments to citizens. It's like insurance. This attention to our minuscule federal workforce is misplaced and disastrous for our citizenry because it takes away from the real problem, which is the extraordinary shift in wealth in this country from the working and middle class to the rich. The country's focus should be on the revenue s...

 In an article in Patch , Riverhead  Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard released a statement Friday stating that despite recent federal executive actions, police will not detain anyone for suspected violations of immigration laws. Other East End towns, Shelter Island and Southold, have also made similar pronouncements. Some have yet to act to protect their neighbors and their service workers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents (ICE). There is no legal requirement for state, municipality, town, or other non-federal entities to assist or cooperate with such federal round-ups.  We need not and should not participate.   New York State has enacted a law, the Protect Our Courts Act, that keeps ICE officers from making civil arrests in and around NYS Courts, including City and other Municipal Courts. That is the extent of the restrictions on ICE. Consequently, ICE officers can go to our schools, homes, and places of business and arrest anyone they choose. But...

 January 25, 2025 Trump has fired seventeen independent Inspectors General, flouting a law passed in 2022 that requires 30-days notice and explanation of the firing to be given to Congress,  according to Reuters. The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires the president to give both houses of Congress reasons for the dismissals 30 days in advance. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An inspector general is an independent position that conducts audits and investigations into allegations of waste, fraud and abuse of power. Agencies are pressing ahead with orders from Trump, who returned to the presidency on Monday, to   reshape the federal bureaucracy   by scrapping diversity programs, rescinding job offers and sidelining more than 150 national security and foreign policy officials. According to Meidas Touch,  the firing happened after the Pete Hegseth confirmation to Secretary of State because Senator Chuck Gra...

 January 25, 2025 " Atul Gawande, a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and former United States Agency for International Development official, took to social media over the weekend to sound the alarm.  "I ran USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US," Gawande said. "Citing some purported "examples," Gawande said the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a mpox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination ...