Penna Dexter
In an election year, the economy takes on heightened importance in voters’ thinking. A good question to ask is: are my elected officials wasting my money? Are they using taxpayer dollars responsibly?
David Ditch at The Daily Signal, tries to answer that question at least as it pertains to the current administration’s “4 worst wastes of 2023.”
Waste #1:How can we forget the $1.9-trillion-dollar spending package passed — without a Republican vote – in 2021? It was the third massive stimulus done as “COVID response.” David Ditch writes that $350 billion of it went to state and local governments who spent “much of it on golf courses, tourism, food stamps for the rich, bonuses for government workers, a pickleball complex,” — in other words they didn’t really need it. The unspent funds, tens of billions of dollars, were supposed to expire this year. But the administration quietly issued a rule to give states more time to figure out how to spend this “hoarded” money that was slated to go back into the federal treasury.
Waste #2In June, the administration lost its attempt at the US Supreme Court to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt, which, of course, means taxpayers would have funded it. Mr. Ditch reports that the administration still found ways to “force taxpayers to cover the cost of other people’s degrees” to the tune of $132 billion, “more than $1000 for every household in the country.”
Waste #3This past September, the US Centers for Disease Control ordered 20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine for kids. David Ditch emphasizes the waste: This is “several times larger than the number of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines administered to date.”
Waste #4After Congress nixed a plan for an environmental jobs program called Climate Corps, the administration unilaterally revived 20,000 of those positions.
Thanks to The Daily Signal for alerting us to this waste. Americans should tell their leaders they’re sick of it.

Kerby Anderson
Students and others chanting in the streets to support Hamas often do not even understand what the slogans mean. Last month, I cited a survey done by a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who hired a survey team to poll 250 students.
He found that less than half (47%) of the students who chanted the slogan (From the River to the Sea) were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea, and the Atlantic. These students obviously need an education, which apparently isn’t being provided in the public schools.
You might criticize the survey since it was a small sample and only focused on current politics and geography. That is why I wanted to devote the rest of my commentary to the most extensive survey done in recent years about the Holocaust.
A few years ago, the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany conducted a survey in all 50 states to document what younger Americans (under age 40) knew about the Holocaust. They found that two-thirds (63%) did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In fact, over half of them thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million.
They also found that half (48%) of the younger generation could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration camps or ghettos established by the Nazi government. Even more shocking was the fact that a small percentage (10%) did not recall ever having heard the word “holocaust” before. And if that is not shocking enough, they also found a small percentage (11%) who believed that Jews caused the Holocaust!
The obvious implication of all of this is that we need to teach history and geography in the public schools, including the horrible facts about the Holocaust.