Here is my wish list for the incoming Trump administration to make America healthy and prosperous and great again in 2025.
1.Slash Job-Killing Regulations
The regulatory state is a $2 trillion tax on the American economy. We all want worker safety, a clean environment and consumer protections, but in too many cases the costs of regulations far outweigh the societal benefits. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to slash 10 rules for every new rule. Just do it, Mr. President.
2. Make The Trump Tax Cuts Permanent
As JFK, Ronald Reagan and others have proven throughout history, lower tax rates lead to more growth, more investment and more jobs. The Trump tax cuts meant that a typical family of four earning $75,000 a year saw their tax bill fall by half — a benefit valued at more than $2,000. And the corporate tax rate fell from 35% — the highest in the world — to 21%, bringing jobs and capital to America. Trump has promised to make all these tax cuts permanent. Why? Because they worked almost exactly as we anticipated they would.
3. Replace Welfare With Work
Growth will require more able-bodied Americans getting off welfare and into jobs. Welfare — which includes cash assistance, public housing, food stamps, disability payments, unemployment benefits and Medicaid — needs to be a hand up, not a handout.
4. Use America’s Abundant Natural Resources
America has well more than $50 trillion of natural resources that are accessible with existing drilling and mining technologies. This is a vast storehouse of wealth that far surpasses what any other nation is endowed with. We can use the royalty payments and leases to reduce our national debt while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
5. Cut Medical Costs by Demanding Health Care Price Transparency
One of many ways to bring health care costs down to consumers (and taxpayers, who pay half the costs) is to require hospitals, pharmacies, doctors and health clinics to list prices for what they are charging. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimates that $1 trillion to $2 trillion could be reduced from health care costs, with no reduction in the quality of care, by allowing consumers to shop around on the internet for the best price — just as we do when we buy groceries, a home or a car. This will foster free market competition and lower prices.
6. Allow School Choice for All Families
Test scores in America have been plummeting. Kids are graduating from high school — if at all — without even being able to read the diploma. America no longer ranks in the top 10 in many academic achievement ratings.
A child can get a better education at half the cost in the Catholic school system and in many charters.
Trump has endorsed universal school choice for all children regardless of income or ethnicity or race. This is the civil rights issue of our time.
7. Implement A Pro-America Immigration Policy
Trump’s committed to securing our border, but we also need legal immigrants through a merit-based immigration system. This visa system would select immigrants based on their skills, talents, investment capital, English language ability and education level. These characteristics all presage success in America.
8. Revive America’s Great Cities
Our once-great cities in America — from New York to Chicago to Detroit to San Francisco to Seattle — have come to look like war zones. Crime has run rampant. Businesses and people and capital are fleeing and leaving the poorest Americans — mostly minorities — stranded with tragically limited opportunities other than working at Walmart or McDonald’s for minimum wage. Since 2020, our major cities have lost nearly 1 million residents. And tens of thousands of businesses.
Trump wants to revitalize our cities and abandoned rural areas through deregulation, reduction in tax rates, changes in zoning policies and infrastructure investments.
9. Pull the U.S. Out Of The Paris Climate Change Treaty And Other Anti-America Agreements
We must end American participation in globalist treaties that hurt America most. This includes the Paris Climate Accords — a treaty with which most other nations have failed to comply, yet which places huge burdens on American companies and workers. Trump also has pledged to end global taxation — such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s global minimum tax. Do we even need a United Nations?
10. Finally, Drain The Swamp
There is a reason why three of the five wealthiest counties in America are in or around Washington, D.C. Washington is getting rich at the expense of the rest of us. Fewer than 10% of overpaid federal workers (of which there are more than 2 million) are working full time in the office even though COVID-19 ended three years ago. These are swamp employees that often get paid $150,000 or more a year. Fire them if they don’t show up. And relocate federal agencies in other cities.
These are admittedly bold aspirations for an economic transformation toward freedom and free enterprise. But the one person who can get it done is Trump.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
The community school model establishes school-based health clinics and is championed by entities such as the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, big pharma, and Community-Based Organizations. This model is rapidly being implemented nationwide, leaving no state untouched. It increases governmental and powerful non-government organization (NGOs) control in K-12 public schools while driving a wedge between parents and children.
Concerns surrounding school-based health clinics include adopting models like the Whole School, Whole Community, and Whole Child (WSCC). These “community schools” serve as conduits for expanding governmental control over children. Of particular concern are issues related to parental consent and notification rights, especially concerning Medicaid billing and medical procedures carried out without parental knowledge or presence.
A Kentucky mom recently told her story on social media after her child saw a school dentist without her consent. The school authorized her daughter to receive anesthesia for a procedure the mother never agreed to. The family dentist later stated that her teeth were healthy and did not need the school’s dental care. That’s bad enough, but these government-run school-based health clinics are far more invasive than this.
This sounds eerily like a socialist healthcare agenda, particularly the Whole Child-Whole Community model advocated by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This model not only undermines parental authority but introduces socialized healthcare into schools. Concerns include the potential for these programs to expand Medicaid coverage under the pretext of health equity.
School-based health clinics are backed by federal grants and championed by government organizations like the CDC. They aim to offer comprehensive primary health services directly within school campuses, encompassing physical and mental health care. The allocation of federal grants, such as the $50 million earmarked for school-based health services, and philanthropic investments of $23 million from entities like Melinda Gates’ company and Mackenzie Scott into organizations like the School-Based Health Alliance fuel apprehensions about these programs’ growing influence.
Funding for full-service Community Schools in the 2025 U.S. Budget has intensified these concerns. Such initiatives can deepen the medicalization of K-12 education and extend Medicaid coverage under the guise of health equity, potentially entangling the government further in family affairs. Recent developments include Biden’s expansion of Obamacare and the integration of mental health services into schools. Might this include a surveillance system akin to China’s social credit system?
Meanwhile, the partnership between schools and HRSA-supported health centers seeks to enhance access to comprehensive primary healthcare services for students and communities. These collaborations assert that they exist to promote health equity for families without healthcare. Yet, recent national survey data show that the uninsured rate among children (ages 0-17) fell from 6.4 percent in late 2020 to 4.5 percent in the third quarter of 2022. In addition, it appears to justify significant government spending by pulling on heartstrings.
In Arizona, efforts to address students’ mental health needs directly on school campuses are underway through partnerships with organizations like Touchstone Health Services and Valle Del Sol. These services, also funded through tax dollars, cover a spectrum of mental health concerns, from anxiety and depression to social isolation and stress. In rural communities like Graham County, telehealth options like Dialogue by DialCare have been deployed to overcome shortages of mental health professionals, granting students access to licensed counselors through virtual or telephonic counseling sessions. These developments raise the red flag of school-based counselors engaging in conversations or therapy with students without parental knowledge or consent.
Then there are school-linked services, facilitated by school nurses and School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs), which aim to improve student and family access to health and human services by providing comprehensive, accessible, and coordinated care on and off school grounds. Again, these initiatives are touted as prioritizing students’ health and well-being. That sounds like the role of parents, not schools.
Arizona Women of Action is very concerned about the impact of Community Schools on families and education. These schools prioritize health-related issues over the traditional primary focus on academics in education. We encourage the ADE to reassess contracts with Medicaid and Public Consulting Group, considering the troubling implications of their equity-based approach.
In response to the growing presence of School-Based Health Clinics meddling in family affairs, one vigilant mother from X has issued a cautionary message and actionable steps for parents to take. She advises parents to request a comprehensive list of all personnel, including representatives from Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), who have access to students on school campuses and to actively engage in posing questions to school officials to monitor the funding sources entering their children’s schools closely.
Schools do not exist to function as health clinics, and parents should scrutinize the details of any forms or school registration documents, ensuring they understand the implications of granting access to various personnel and services regarding their child.
Tamra Farah has twenty years of experience in public policy and politics, focusing on protecting individual liberty and promoting limited government. She’s served at the director level at Americans for Prosperity-Colorado, FreedomWorks, and currently with Arizona Women of Action.
The people of Arizona do not want to turn our state into the next California. But just a few weeks into her reign as governor, Katie Hobbs has made it clear—that’s exactly what she intends to do. Last week, Hobbs released her first budget plan, and it’s nothing more than a liberal wish list of big spending, extreme proposals, and corporate welfare designed to reward her special interest friends.
Her first target is education, and she wasted no time going after Arizona’s expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Yes, the program that is so popular that it overwhelmed the Department of Education’s website immediately after launch—the one that even some Democrats have openly supported. Despite being a private schooler herself, Hobbs wants to dismantle school choice for all with a full repeal of universal ESAs. And that’s just the start…
One of the things I appreciated most during my 30 years practicing medicine in community hospital ERs was that race just didn’t matter very much. ERs were open to all, and there was one standard of care for all races and classes.
That was then. Today a wave of intolerant wokeness is sweeping over our healthcare system, insisting that medicine is shot through with systemic racism and that research and education efforts must be diverted from medical science to “dismantling white supremacy” in medicine.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently introduced their new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) guidelines, which require that all medical students be taught to practice “allyship” when “witnessing injustice such as ‘microaggressions.’”
Residents are told to use their more advanced knowledge of intersectionality in making clinical decisions. (Just when you thought that race-based medical protocols were in our dark past.). Faculty are charged with teaching how “systems of power, privilege, and oppression inform policies and practices.”
Medical schools are enthusiastically falling in line. Examples abound. In 2021, the Anti-Racism Task Force at Columbia and the Diversity Task Force at Indiana University, joined by the University of Texas and other medical schools, endorsed the recommended AAMC “competencies.” “Health equity” concepts have become a prominent component of medical education.
The University of North Carolina is one of many schools that not only teach “social justice” and “anti-racism,” but use medical school applications to ensure compliance with principles of diversity in race, gender, and sexual orientation. Applicants who demonstrate reluctance toward the DEI agenda are weeded out in the application process. Oregon Health and Science University faculty are among those evaluated on their “DEI, anti-racism, and social justice core competencies” in performance appraisals.
The University of Arizona is on board too, with some additional twists. All faculty and staff are required to complete six hours of DEI training and complete one Implicit Association Test annually (in spite of its dubious relevance). Each of 17 clinical departments is required to hold three DEI credit-eligible events per year. All departments also have designated “diversity champions” to oversee compliance and round up laggards.
This is bad, very bad news for medical education, future doctors, and patients. Even before DEI was a thing, the quality of medical instruction had been in decline. Incoming students are less qualified and fail rates on board exams are climbing, partly because some students from groups that have been historically underserved are either allowed to skip the Medical College Admissions Test or are admitted with lower scores than those required from white and Asian applicants.
But instead of beefing up instruction in anatomy, physiology, and other disciplines that might come in handy when actually practicing medicine, medical schools are spending instructional time on such matters as white privilege and anti-racism, including Critical Race Theory (CRT).
CRT includes the notion that white people are inherently prejudiced against people of color and that there really is nothing they can do but acknowledge their defect, apologize, and grant compensating privileges to people of contrasting skin color, who by definition are incapable of bigotry. Dissenters from this new orthodoxy can be accused of “micro-aggressions” and “repressive practices” with ominous repercussions for their careers.
This intellectual intolerance also extends to those skeptical of “gender affirming care” for adolescents. This new practice provides permanent medical and surgical alterations to gender-confused school children for the rest of their lives so they can pretend to be the gender they choose when a teen. What could go wrong?
Several countries, including the U.K., Sweden, and France are now pulling back from relying on the judgments of impressionable adolescents for such drastic remediation, but dissenters in the U.S. are still punished.
Medical educators who teach students that racism and mutilation are okay when officially approved should humbly recall the history of their own profession. Modern medicine has been of immeasurable benefit to mankind. But when evidence-based science is ignored and authority replaces free inquiry, bad things happen.
Bleeding and purging, eugenics, thalidomide, lobotomies, and nonsterile wound probing are among the historical results. It is the duty of the medical profession to protect us from such horrors, not promote them.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
