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Linda McMahon, former administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/ZUMA Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse. America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda: Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan . McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post , after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”) But hey, she likes vouchers. Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress. When states expand voucher programs, shoddy and established school operators both cash in, and public schools and their students are the losers. And it’s still happening, de facto. ProPublica reported the other day that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregation academies”—of the 39 schools the reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half had reported to the federal government that their student bodies were at least 85 percent white. Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. They were talking about them when I was in grade school, and I’m a geezer. But now the messaging revolves around school “choice,” with proponents claiming that vouchers, which a number of states have revived in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), allow low-income parents to escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent. But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders neglect to mention that those public schools are failing in significant part because affluent families have fled en masse, and that their budgets have been gutted by, well, the same voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems championed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons, and affluent members of both parties. All this drainage leaves many public schools underfunded to the point that teachers literally have to beg for basic classroom supplies—as some did during parents’ night at the public high school my kids attended in Oakland, California. McMahon or no McMahon, vouchers have come back into vogue recently, likely in reaction to the educational upheaval of the Covid pandemic. “In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states,” notes a Brookings Institution report published last year. And sure, some low-income families will benefit from the programs, which channel money that would have gone to the local public school into private accounts (the ESAs) that can be used for private K-12 tuition and related expenses. But there can be a lot of collateral damage, notes the Brookings report. First, whenever you expand government payouts—and this is something the Republicans complain about in other contexts—fraudsters and opportunists will come out of the woodwork. The report cites research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, a host of “pop-up” private schools would follow, of which many fail quickly . “That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now,” the report notes. (Arizona, which in 2011 became the first state to offer ESAs for selected students, expanded its program in 2022 to all students—including those already enrolled in private schools—according to a subsequent Brookings paper that deems the program “a handout to the wealthy.”) Voucher programs also lead to tuition hikes by existing private schools, according to the Brookings report, “and that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage.” So, basically, shoddy and established operators alike cash in, and public schools and their students are the big losers. There are other consequences, too. From the report: The last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy . Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations. Vouchers, more broadly, are of a piece with what I’ve been calling the Plunder —the steady rigging of our economic system over the past four and a half decades to benefit people who need no government support at the expense of those who really do. This, as I argued in a recent piece , was a primary reason why Trump won a second term, as ironic as that may sound. I wrote about the rigging of our educational system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take the tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans our government offers. Like private retirement plans—401(k)s, IRAs, etc—these plans provide far more help to rich families than to poor ones. The example I used in my book involved two (fictitious) students living in Ohio, one rich, the other middle-class. The middle-class family could only afford to put $6,000 a year into their daughter’s 529—an investment fund that grows tax-free over the years and can be used to pay college tuition and qualified expenses when the child comes of age. And that’s good. They needed that assistance. But for some reason the rules also allow the rich couple in my example to frontload their son’s 529 with up to five years worth of the maximum contribution all at once. So, they put $150,000 into a 529 that they set up for him as a newborn, do this again during his fifth year, and then, when he’s 10, bring the balance up to maximum the state allows, beyond which they can contribute no more. With so much cash in their fund from the start, you can imagine how quickly the interest accumulates. Rich families gained yet another lucrative perk in late 2017, when Donald Trump signed his most notable first-term achievement , the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Beyond cutting taxes for wealthy folks and corporations, the TCJA stipulated that parents could now take up to $10,000 a year from their child’s 529 fund for private K-12 tuition. It’s worth noting that elite private high schools—where tuition typically runs between $40,000 to $60,000 a year—offer extensive college admissions mentoring, whereas a middle-class kid at an underfunded public school cannot use their 529 fund to cover expenses like SAT prep, college advising, or essay coaching that their school doesn’t offer in any meaningful way. When I crunched the numbers, here’s what I found: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5 percent for the students’ 529 funds, the rich family got some $117,000 in tax breaks, nearly seven times what the middle-class family received, not to mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had two and a half years of his private high school tuition covered by the taxpayers. He also ended up with a staggering $688,660 in his fund—likely enough to also cover the cost of law school or med school or business school should he choose any of those paths. Small wonder that, at the time I reported these numbers, the “ Ivy Plus ” colleges were enrolling more students from the top-earning 1 percent families than from the bottom 50 percent. And that, compared with kids with families in the bottom 20 percent of the wealth spectrum, the children of 1 percenters were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus college. Vouchers only add insult to this injury. They can be marketed to sound like a good and equitable thing—a perk for all Americans—when in reality, without serious means-testing, they end up delivering the most benefit to families who need it the least. They are but one of the levers (here’s another ) the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration may use to accelerate a plunder that has been in progress for decades, under the watch of both major parties. One can almost hear it now: the “giant sucking sound” that the late Ross Perot used to talk about, except in this case it won’t be the sounds of US jobs going to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle-class getting sucked ever upward and into the coffers of our most privileged.
Donald Trump asks Supreme Court to hold off TikTok ban so he can 'negotiate a resolution' By MELISSA KOENIG FOR DAILYMAIL.COM Published: 23:14, 27 December 2024 | Updated: 23:51, 27 December 2024 e-mail 25 View comments President-Elect Donald Trump has made a last minute plea to get the United States Supreme Court to halt implementation of a nationwide TikTok ban. Congress had passed a law earlier this year banning the popular video-sharing app as of January 19 if it is not sold by its Chinese parent company by then. Executives at the platform then made an emergency plea to the Supreme Court earlier this month to block the federal law, and on Friday Trump's legal team filed its own request to delay the implementation of the law. 'President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute,' D. John Sauer, Trump's lawyer whom he picked for US solicitor general wrote in the filing, according to NBC News. 'Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act's deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025 while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump's incoming administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in this case.' 'President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government - concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged,' Sauer continued. 'In light of these interests - including most importantly, his overarching responsibility for the United States' national security and foreign policy - President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at this juncture and seeks the ability to resolve issues at hand through political means once he takes office.' Trump has previously voiced his opposition to the Protecting Americans from Controlled Applications App, which President Joe Biden signed into law in April, and vowed on the campaign trail to 'save TikTok.' He even met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew earlier this month to discuss the issue, after proclaiming, 'I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points.' President-elect Donald Trump has has made a last minute plea to get the United States Supreme Court to halt implementation of a nationwide TikTok ban Congress passed a resolution earlier this year banning the popular video-sharing app as of January 19 if it is not sold by its Chinese parent company by then 'There are those who say TikTok had something to do with that.' Friday's filing even touted the future president as 'one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history. 'Indeed, President Trump's first term was highlighted by a series of policy triumphs achieved through historic deals, and he has a great prospect of success in this latest national security and foreign policy endeavor,' it says. Executives at TikTok have also pointed at Trump's sympathies in their own legal arguments, suggesting the trajectory may change when he takes office, The Hill reports. But the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments both from the government and the platform at an expedited schedule, starting on January 10. It would then only have nine days after oral arguments for them to issue an opinion or indefinitely block the Protecting Americans from Controlled Applications App - despite Trump not taking office until January 20 - one day after the platform must be divested from its parent company, ByteDance, or be banned in the United States. In the meantime, the company seeks to argue that such a law violates the First Amendment to the Constitution. Yet the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided to uphold the law, concluding that the government's national security justifications for banning the app - including concerns that the Chinese government could access data about American users and manipulate content - were legitimate. The United States Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments both from the government and the platform at an expedited schedule, starting on January 10 Some wealthy Americans have since expressed an interest in buying TikTok's US business , including 'Shark Tank' star Kevin O ́Leary. Big tech companies could also afford to buy the platform, but would likely face intense scrutiny from antitrust regulators in both the US and China. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick - who helped broker the $69 billion sale of his company to Microsoft last year - may have the resources to buy the Chinese app and the technological know how in order to create a new algorithm for it. Kotick floated the idea of buying TikTok in March to numerous people at a dinner, the Wall Street Journal reported, with one of them being OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Beyond Altman's $2 billion net worth, he is an attractive partner in the bid to acquire TikTok because he could give the eventual US version of the app a head start in training its AI models. Yet even if an American company does buy the platform, the China's Commerce Ministry would have to approve ByteDance's divestiture from TikTok - which the Chinese government has strongly opposed. TikTok US Supreme Court Donald Trump Share or comment on this article: Donald Trump asks Supreme Court to hold off TikTok ban so he can 'negotiate a resolution' e-mail Add commentHATTIESBURG, Miss. (AP) — Denijay Harris scored 29 points as Southern Miss beat Marshall 68-66 on Saturday in a Sun Belt Conference opener. Harris also contributed 10 rebounds for the Golden Eagles (5-7). Christian Watson scored 10 points while shooting 4 for 12 (1 for 5 from 3-point range) and 1 of 3 from the free-throw line and added five rebounds. Harris made one of two free throws for a 68-66 lead with 16 seconds left and Watson's steal with four seconds left sealed the win. Obinna Anochili-Killen led the way for the Thundering Herd (7-6) with 15 points, seven rebounds and three blocks. Mikal Dawson added 14 points and six rebounds for Marshall. Dezayne Mingo also had 14 points. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .