RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/431954-cohens-best-shots-at-trump-miss-their-mark

After bilking corporations out of millions of dollars for “insight” into his client, failing to pay his taxes, trying to entrap his client, and pleading guilty to lying to Congress, now-disbarred attorney Michael Cohen took his best shots at President Donald Trump, calling him a liar and a cheat. The testimony brought Congress to a new low after years of dead-end investigations of supposed Russia-Trump conspiracies.

Yes, Trump was behind payments to women who may have had stories to tell. He and his counselor, Rudy Giuliani, already admitted they reimbursed Cohen for any payments he made. The stories these women had to tell were embarrassing but were not about any illegal behavior. It was not a crime to pay for their stories at any time, in any way. They were personal, not campaign expenditures.

This legal point was litigated in the past with the trial of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, and the FEC has ruled that the Edwards payments — even from donors — were not campaign contributions. His checks to his paramour were not campaign expenditures.

https://www.city-journal.org/heating-new-york-natural-gas

Governor Andrew Cuomo recently said that population losses in New York State—which has the highest outmigration in the U.S.—are “climate-based.” The state’s demographic problem, he claims, is not caused by its crushing tax burden—also the highest in the country—or by restrictive business regulations, but by the weather. It’s too cold.

If the governor is right, and frosty winters are indeed driving people out of New York, the state needs a way to warm things up, and quickly. Fortunately, a bonanza of cheap, clean heat is available: the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which range from Kentucky to Ontario, are two of the largest sources of natural gas in the world. And they pass directly beneath western, central, and Southern Tier New York—the poorest (and coldest) parts of the state. Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas from the shale beneath these struggling regions could help solve their heating and economic problems simultaneously. If New York’s abundant shale-gas supply can help attract new industries and employment opportunities, it might even reverse the state’s loss of population. Several studies over the last decade agree that shale-gas development could create billions of dollars in new economic activity, along with tens of thousands of jobs.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/27/californias

Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?

California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent.

In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000—a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.