Denny Hastert: Uh, About That $500,000 Statue…
Illinois state lawmakers are hitting the breaks on a proposal to spend half a million dollars for a statue honoring former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert after the Justice Department indicted the Illinois Republican on multiple charges Thursday.
About a month before the DOJ announced the indictment against Hastert,
Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan introduced a bill to allocate $500,000 from the Illinois Development Fund for a statue of Hastert, who represented Illinois’ 14th Congressional for 20 years after serving as a state representative.
Related: Lying, Cheating, Stealing: How Corrupt is America?
However, Madigan’s spokesperson, Steve Brown, said Hastert contacted lawmakers asked that they defer the proposal because of the state’s financial condition. Illinois currently is running a $9 billion deficit. Still, the bill, which passed through a house committee, was placed on the calendar for a third reading on May 18.
In the indictment released Thursday evening, federal investigators allege that Hastert paid $3.5 million in hush money to “cover up misconduct.” The money allegedly went to someone in Yorkville, Ill., where he previously coached high school wrestling. The seven-page indictment also accused him of lying to the FBI.
Following the announcement, Hastert reportedly resigned from his current position at Washington, D.C., law firm Dickstein Shapiro, as well as a board member at CME Group, according to Reuters.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
