Category: Massachusetts

Coronapanic continues in Maskachusetts

by philg

I’m back up in Cambridge to teach. I thought it might be worth checking out one of the places that made Cambridge pleasant (Darwin’s sandwiches/coffee is closed): the Regattabar live jazz venue. Here’s the web site, captured on 12/30/2022:

It’s been a three-year temporary closure (Yale graduates: note the failure to use the word “temporarily” by folks who sit three blocks from Harvard Yard).

For comparison, the schedule at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach:

What about Harvard’s American Repertory Theater? Before they began excluding audience members based on skin color (see this November 2021 post) I was a regular there. Their “plan your visit” page:

Followers of Fauci will be cheered to see that cloth masks meet the mask requirement (though N95 is recommended):

Here’s their “Blacks-only” policy from 2021:

What do people who refuse to sell tickets to white people call themselves? “Anti-racists”:

(They “pay respect” to the rightful owners of the land they occupy, but do not pay rent.)

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One year from unionization to shutdown for a Maskachusetts sandwich shop

by philg

My old neighborhood in Harvard Square was home to a 30-year-old sandwich shop whose workers took advantage of the coronapanic labor market to unionize in the fall of 2021. After 9 months of union bliss, they responded to Bidenflation by demanding higher wages. The employer’s counter-offer was to shut down entirely:

From the Harvard Crimson (November):

The popular Boston-area coffee chain Darwin’s Ltd. announced plans to close the store’s original Harvard Square location at the end of the month, prompting some workers to stage a protest at Cambridge City Hall on Sunday denouncing the move.

Darwin’s United — a union representing the chain’s employees — responded by organizing a protest at City Hall, where workers rallied on Sunday before gathering outside the Darwins’ Cambridge home.

“We have been offered no guarantees of jobs for those who want to stay, no guarantee that workers will have an income going into winter,” the union wrote in a Twitter statement. “We will not back down, we will not take this.”

At the rally, union members called on the Darwins to keep workers at the Harvard Square store employed if they wished to stay on and reiterated past demands for $24 per hour wages, three weeks paid time off, and zero-deductible healthcare for employees.

“We know that Steve has long been considering selling the business, but the timing really couldn’t be worse,” said Sam White, a Darwin’s United representative. “We’re telling him to come back to the bargaining table and respond to our proposals.”

A majority of workers at the four Darwin’s locations voted to unionize in September 2021 and began negotiations with management for a new contract for workers. Since then, talks have stalled, according to White. In March, workers at all four locations staged a mid-morning walkout to raise pressure on the owners.

Maybe things are more harmonious on the West Coast? The academics at UC Berkeley claim that they know what workers are entitled to and how to redress inequality in the United States. Yet their own workers had to go on strike to try to force the university to pay a fair wage. “University of California workers continue strike amid threat of arrests” (Guardian, December 10, 20220):

Tens of thousands of academic workers throughout the University of California are currently on their fourth week of striking for a new union contract and the situation is intensifying amid the threat of arrests after direct actions by some strikers.

The strike of 48,000 academic workers, including graduate workers, academic researchers, postdoctoral scholars and teaching assistants, began on 14 November and is the largest in the history of higher education in the US.

About 12,000 postdoctoral researchers and academic researchers reached a tentative agreement with the University of California on 29 November, which included pay increases up to 29%, but have continued striking in solidarity with other academic workers still pushing for a deal and while the agreement is put to the membership for a vote.

Graduate workers at UC have reported issues in affording rent, food and basic necessities in the cities they work and live in on salaries averaging about $23,000 annually.

If the politicians and academics in California are experts on fairness, why did their workers need to strike? University of California professor Robert Reich, for example, is fond of scolding America’s evil capitalists for underpaying workers. Why didn’t he pay his own slaves fairly?

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A crisis among the righteous

by philg

Excerpts from a mailing list for residents of our former suburb of Boston, in which Social Justice is the most important issue after maintaining the 2-acre zoning minimum that ensures people need at least $1 million to buy in. November 16:

Last night we heard erratic driving/wheel screeching outside of our home on Old Sudbury Rd. This morning we found our Black Lives Matter sign run over and deep tire marks where the truck bowled over the sign and our snow stakes. It was reported and I do believe there is no coincidence it happened shortly after Trump announced his presidential run. The sign is going back up

I am so sorry to hear that happened. I also found a raw egg thrown into my mailbox yesterday after dark on Sandy Pond Rd.

There is only one side of racism. There is only one side

We must all be vigilant and remain resolved to resist intolerance and
bullying. Ignorance and fear cannot be allowed to dominate.

Thank you all for both the love and the hate messages [via private email] I received about the BLM sign vandalism. Now I am more informed and glad that I chose speak out. Much progress needs to be made for our children’s future.

The kids will be prepared for that future by growing up in an all-white town!

And from the library, an upcoming event with an apparently unchanged signature from the spring:

Virtual Event: Settler-Colonist Ties to Thanksgiving and Columbus: Taking Back the Narrative

In this presentation, we will explore this colonial system through primary sources and examine how language perpetuates invisibility and how we can dismantle oppression to bring accurate counter-narratives to life.

Claudia A. Fox Tree (she, her) identifies as a multiracial Indigenous woman.

The Lincoln Board of Health (BOH) voted to rescind the town-wide indoor mask mandate effective Monday, March 14, 2022, in response to substantially improved and positively trending public health data, including Lincoln’s high vaccination rate.

Updated indoor mask use recommendation as of April 14, 2022: Due to recent data showing an increase in positive COVID-19 cases, the Board of Health members voted last night to strongly recommend that people wear masks in public indoor spaces until early May as we see how the infection rate from the new BA-2 variant evolves over the next few weeks after spring vacation.

What happens in Florida when a redneck in a pickup runs over your political and social justice signs? Nothing! Because, unless there was an election happening within the next two weeks, you didn’t have a sign in the first place. Here’s our late-November scenery:

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Why did 1 million poor people vote against a higher tax rate for rich people in Massachusetts?

by philg

People in Maskachusetts say that they’re “progressive”. Very few earn more than $1 million per year. Why, then, did more than 1.1 million people vote “no” on a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to ding the rich (more than $1 million/year in income) at a 9% rate instead of the 5% flat rate that prevails for the peasantry?

“Massachusetts passes Ballot Question 1 (Millionaire’s tax), AP says” (MassLive):

We are informed that it is only Republicans and married white women who are so stupid that they vote against their own interests. There are hardly any Republicans in Maskachusetts and a lot of the married white women have taken advantage of the state’s no-fault divorce system to head for a profitable exit. This ballot measure should have passed by at least a 30-point margin, not a 4-point margin.

How can we explain the race being close? How could so many peasants be against rich people getting closer to paying their fair share? (which actually should be at least 13.3% because that’s what rich people in California pay for state income tax)

It can’t be because people were concerned that inflation would lift them from the old 5% bracket into the new 9% one. The text of the ballot question explains that there will be annual inflation adjustments.

Separately, this was a great outcome for the luxury real estate industry in Florida! Rich bastards will need to pull up stakes in MA before the end of December 2022 if they object to paying their fair share. (See Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children )

Finally, the tax bump won’t be great for alimony defendants. “New Guidance on the Intersection of Alimony and Child Support” (Burns Levinson law firm, August 2022), quotes the law: “the amount of alimony should be determined with reference to the recipient spouse’s need for support to allow the spouse to maintain the lifestyle enjoyed prior to the termination of the parties’ marriage.” Alimony is now tax-free to the plaintiff and not deductible for the defendant. since most couples spend close to 100 percent of their income, the only way for a divorce plaintiff to enjoy the marital lifestyle is to collect close to 100 percent of the defendant’s income). So in setting the order, the judge has to make some assumptions about what tax rate the defendant will pay in order to figure out what the after-tax income is and make sure not to order the defendant to pay more than 100 percent of income. A high-income defendant in Massachusetts will have less after-tax income, but the court order to pay based on the old tax scheme can’t be changed without the defendant starting a “modification” lawsuit that could take years and cost $millions in fees to resolve.

Related:

  • Colorado FF, a proposition to hit those earning more than $300,000 per year with a stealth higher tax rate by reducing the deductions they can claim (it passed because lots of folks earning less than $300,000 per year voted for it!)
  • Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida (kids end up about 40% richer if a parent moves south and clings to life for 30 additional years)
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Massachusetts Migrant Welcome

by philg

“Battenfeld: Charlie Baker quietly sends migrants to Methuen hotel with no warning” (Boston Herald):

the Baker administration quietly bused scores of immigrant families to a questionable Methuen hotel last Friday without even telling local authorities.

The lack of transparency is shocking enough but what about the ethics of sending these hungry and confused immigrants, including more than 100 children, to a hotel without any initial support.

“Eight days later, there’s still no concrete plan on how to deal with it,” said Methuen Mayor Neil Perry after meeting with the state Department of Housing and Community Development on Thursday. “They didn’t even present, you know, how many of these school-aged children are what age, whether they would be going to Methuen (schools) or not.”

The state is providing no public explanation for why the migrants were sent to the Methuen motel, bypassing motels and hotels in more affluent areas like Andover and North Andover. It’s unclear whether the families and children are here legally or illegally.

“All families in the shelter program receive services through local service providers, including three meals a day, assistance with housing search, case management work, and DCHD is working closely with other state agencies, local entities, and service providers to address the needs of the families that are currently housed in Methuen,” a DCHD statement said.

The migrants are from Haiti, Colombia and Venezuela, according to Perry, and some came from outside Massachusetts.

Now they’re Methuen’s problem. Well done, Charlie.

Baker was among those who questioned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for sending dozens of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last month.

“Sending people all over the country, many of whom have no idea why they’re being sent where they’re going, isn’t a solution to the very screwed up immigration system we have in the U.S.” Baker said.

Now Baker has essentially done the same thing DeSantis did, providing no warning or explanation to Methuen officials and no plan for assimilating the migrants into schools and housing. The hotel the migrants are staying in is known for having safety issues, according to local officials.

“If the plan is to find them housing in the Methuen community, I have to respectfully push back,” Mayor Perry said. “Not that I don’t want them to have housing, I have housing needs of my own community today I’m not satisfying.”

It’s the last line that I find interesting. The guy who runs Methuen is a Massachusetts Democrat and, therefore, presumably as welcoming to migrants as anyone in the U.S. And in fact he says that he wants migrants to have housing… but not in his city. Where exactly are the next few million migrants going to live then?

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Someone smarter than I collected tens of thousands of dollars in pandemic unemployment benefits in my name; what next?

by philg

I got a letter from the Department of Revenue back in Maskachusetts. They were upset that I failed to report $12,600 in coronapanic unemployment benefits received in 2020. As I had not filed for unemployment nor received $12,600, this came as a shock. The claim did not start until mid-October 2020 so it is safe to assume that another $20,000+ was harvested in 2021.

When I tried to log into the Massachusetts unemployment web site with my Social Security number, I found that authorization was required from someone with a phone number ending in 1253 or an email address at barid.com, “the most functional webmail in the Arab World”:

My memory of 2020 is dim, so it is theoretically possible that I myself filed for unemployment in 2020. However, it is not possible that I was able to read and write Arabic in 2020. Therefore, due to my illiteracy in Arabic, I’m 99.99% sure that this is a fraud situation.

It is strange that the state couldn’t figure out the fraud by itself. During the purported period of unemployment, the employer (a small LLC) was continuing to make regular payments for unemployment insurance, state income tax withholding, etc. How is it possible that one agency within the state was receiving payments for an employed person while another one was making payments to an unemployed person with the same SSN and a presumably different mailing address? My phone number is readily available. The state government has enough money to pay out tens of thousands of dollars, but not to attempt to make a phone call to the person corresponding to the SSN and ask “Did you actually file for unemployment?” Nor enough money to compare SSNs in two databases?

[The same government that fails to question how someone for whom payroll taxes are being paid regularly can also be “unemployed” and entitled to unemployment checks is the one that we’re supposed to trust regarding how to prevent an aerosol virus that mutates constantly.]

Has anyone else had a similar situation? A friend who employs 25 people in Maskachusetts says that fraudulent unemployment claims were filed for 5 of his employees. I’m thinking that this will take at least 40 hours of time (which otherwise could have been billed to clients at $550 per hour) and $3,000 in fees to my accountant to untangle. So the cost to the U.S. economy of enriching a single Arabic speaker with $12,600 will be at least $37,600. And I will get to do it all over again for 2021. This is another cost of coronapanic lockdowns and everything that flowed from them. A smaller, poorer economy (let’s assume that the $12,600 actually ended up somewhere out of the U.S.) is one in which people will live shorter lives (income being positively correlated with longevity). I’m going to mark this down as evidence for my theory that the lockdowns will end up killing far more Americans than SARS-CoV-2 ever did or ever will. (The biggest killer will be of today’s children, whose adult lives will be shortened because they were deprived of a year of education in the States of Virtue.)

Readers: Any tips for fixing this?

Progress so far:

  • I filed an online fraud report with the Maskachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance
  • I called the customer service phone number, (877) 626-6800, on the Maskachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance web site. All of the state workers are out serving meals at the off-island internment camp for the Vineyard 50, it seems, as the wait time to talk to an agent was 42 minutes (I chose the offered callback option, but was never called back). The agency apparently is not interested in fraud reports as all of the numbers that can be pressed on the phone keypad are advertised as leading to different ways to get more money from the government. There is no mention of an option to (1) stop getting checks, (2) report having found a job, or (3) report fraud.
  • I called the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and waited on hold for about 15 minutes before being connected to an agent. She was able to look up the 1099G and determined that it had been sent to Loganville, Georgia. In other words, it seems that the state was receiving payments for unemployment insurance for someone who was actively employed in Massachusetts while simultaneously sending out money with the same SSN claiming to be unemployed in Georgia.
  • I called the MA Unemployment folks again and waited on hold for 30 minutes before being disconnected.
  • I called the MA Unemployment folks again and waited on hold for nearly an hour before being connected to a lady who explained that the department had allowed people to register for unemployment and request electronic documents. They never had to show up in person, never had to submit any ID (like for voting!), and just received a river of cash (ACH or debit card). The agency never made any attempt to cross-check with reports from employers regarding who had a job, either at the time the money was flying out the door or in a later reconciliation process. Fraud identification is left entirely up to the individual, she explained. Corrected 1099G forms aren’t sent out unless someone requests it and the 1099G correction is entirely manual. So the Massachusetts Unemployment Assistance folks, by leaving all of this inaccurate information out there, create a huge workload for the MA DOR and also for the federal IRS, spawning potentially hundreds of thousands of audits for Biden’s Army of 87,000 (the Spartans managed with 300).
  • The lady connected me to a fraud specialist within the Department of Unemployment Assistance who said that he had no idea how long it would take to issue a corrected 1099G. They would have to “investigate”.

Related:

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If the Migrants expelled from Martha’s Vineyard can afford lawyers, why not plane tickets back to San Antonio?

by philg

“Migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard have filed a lawsuit against Gov. DeSantis” (state-sponsored NPR, 9/20):

A civil rights law firm filed a federal class action lawsuit on Tuesday against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others for transporting around 50 immigrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, without shelter or resources in place.

Alianza Americas’ Executive Director Oscar Chacón said that DeSantis used the migrants to “advance a hate-filled agenda.” “That is why we have taken the steps to legally challenge what we view as not only a morally reprehensible action, but what we believe is also illegal,” he said.

Attorneys want DeSantis and his fellow defendants to be banned from “inducing immigrants to travel across state lines by fraud and misrepresentation,” as well as damages “for the harm suffered by the migrants.”

The migrants were harmed by being transported to a place that people were willing to pay $616 per night (plus taxes and the “resort fee” scam) to stay in (I checked the late-September Edgartown hotel rates a few days ago).

The Vineyard 50 have enough money, either in their pockets or via donation, to pay lawyers at least $500,000 to push a lawsuit through Federal court.

Is there a cheaper way to mitigate the harm that they’re suffering by being in Massachusetts surrounded by the fully vaccinated and masked applying “No Human Being is Illegal” signs and bumper stickers to lawns and cars rather than in Texas, which by implication is a superior place to live? If the Vineyard 50 can get from the off-island detention camp in which they’ve been interned to Boston’s Logan Airport, a one-way plane ticket back to the San Antonio paradise from which they were snatched is about $100:

For less than $6,000 every migrant could be back in San Antonio.

Perhaps the Vineyard residents who cheered as the migrants were bussed out of their upscale town could go to Logan Airport to see them off. Hawaiians have a tradition of hanging leis around the necks of people who arrive (“Nothing says Aloha like our Classic Orchid Lei”). The property owners of Martha’s Vineyard could establish a tradition of providing leis to migrants who are departing back to Texas and/or Florida (“Nothing says Adios like our Maskachusetts State Flower Lei made from mayflowers”).

From the Boston Globe recently, “Plane towing a banner reading ‘Vineyard Hypocrites’ circles Martha’s Vineyard”:

The last part is my favorite. Given an island whose real estate was already half empty due to the summer season winding down, it was a “herculean” effort for some of the country’s wealthiest people to shelter 50 migrants (out of millions) for two nights.

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The immigrant makes a foray into Cambridge

by philg

A friend who emigrated (“high skill”) to the U.S. from Eastern Europe (not Russia itself!) texted our chat group:

I drove into Harvard Square for the first time in about 3 years. Driving through Cambridge: George Floyd yard signs, fair share yard signs [extra tax on the rich], BLM, resist, persist, love is love … The city is as decorated as Red Square was on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution

What’s the “fair share” amendment? It will undo the injustice in the Maskachusetts constitution that prevents the nation’s most progressive state from imposing a progressive income tax:

To provide the resources for quality public education and affordable public colleges and universities , and for the repair and maintenance of roads , bridges and public transportation , all revenues received in accordance with this paragraph shall be expended, subject to appropriation , only for these purposes . In addition to the taxes on income otherwise authorized under this Article, there shall be an additional tax of 4 percent on that portion of annual taxable income in excess of $1,000,000 (one million dollars) reported on any return related to those taxes. To ensure that this additional tax continues to apply only to the commonwealth’s highest income taxpayers , this $1,000,000 (one million dollars) income level shall be adjusted annually to reflect any increases in the cost of living by the same method used for federal income tax brackets. This paragraph shall apply to all tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2023 .

I wonder what the base is for the inflation adjustment. The value of $1 million on Election Day 2022? The value of $1 million on January 1, 2023? The value of $1 million in April 2024 (the first time that the tax has to be calculated)? At current rates of inflation, this is an important question!

Some inequality in and near New Bedford, MA, 2020 (photo: my friend Tony; helicopter flying: me):

Needless to say, property owners and realtors in Florida will be delighted if this new tax passes! (See “The Flight of New York City’s Wealthy Was a Once-in-a-Century Shock” (NYT): “The Manhattan residents who moved to Palm Beach County had an average income of $728,351, IRS data showed.”)

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Migrants to Nantucket?

by philg

The 50 asylum-seekers sent to Martha’s Vineyard have reached sanctuary in the middle of a military base in the middle of an off-island forest. Where can the next group of migrants who want to escape to a properly governed Science-following state land? Here’s an email that I received today from an airfare alert service:

Only $234 for a migrant to start enjoying his/her/zir/their best life amidst the “No Human is Illegal” sign forest of Massachusetts, entering via an island of vacant-through-May mansions. Given TSA rules, perhaps this would work only for undocumented migrants who have documents such as passports.

I wonder if there will be a sufficient supply, though. “Migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard have filed a lawsuit against Gov. DeSantis” (state-sponsored NPR):

Attorneys want DeSantis and his fellow defendants to be banned from “inducing immigrants to travel across state lines by fraud and misrepresentation,” as well as damages “for the harm suffered by the migrants.”

“Advocates for migrants who were sent to Martha’s Vineyard sue Ron DeSantis” (Guardian):

According to the complaint, the Venezuelans, who are pursuing the proper channels for lawful immigration status in the US, “experienced cruelty akin to what they fled in their home country. Defendants manipulated them, stripped them of their dignity, deprived them of their liberty, bodily autonomy, due process, and equal protection under law, and impermissibly interfered with the federal government’s exclusive control over immigration in furtherance of an unlawful goal and a personal political agenda.”

If the cruelty here in the U.S., due to the existence of Republicans, makes life in the U.S. as bad as life Venezuela, why take the trouble to leave Venezuela? Or maybe the migrants will leave Venezuela, but stop and request asylum in one of the countries through which they would previously have simply passed?

  • “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐​Off: 2013” (CATO); Table 4 shows the dramatic superiority of being on welfare in Maskachusetts (spending power 1.2X what a worker at the median wage gets) compared to cruel Florida (only 0.4X the spending power of a median worker). The absolute dollar figures can be ignored because they are in pre-Biden money.
  • “Nantucket restaurant desperate to fill jobs, hiring 8th graders” (Fox Business, 2021)
  • a Massachusetts resident commenting in a chat group: “[folks on Martha’s Vineyard] have hundreds, maybe thousands, of empty beds and $9.8 million budget surplus in just one of the three towns alone to pay rental on those beds. What do they think other cities do? NYC pays $500 a night to house each person. They have the lowest tax rate of any town in the entire state and had tons of room to raise the property tax to replenish the surplus. Instead they called in a 125 person military response to remove them to an internment camp. So much for the yard sign virtue signaling. We need Martha’s Vineyard Airlift 2022 T shirts.” (the correct figure for empty beds on MVY is surely “thousands” not “hundreds” because the difference in in-season/off-season population is more than 50,000)
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Will Maskachusetts allow journalists into Camp DeSantis?

by philg

The arrival of one million migrants into Texas border towns is a minor issue. On the other hand, the arrival of 50 migrants into an island with vacant houses sufficient to hold 50,000 people (the summer population bump) was a crisis that required calling out the Maskachusetts National Guard. The 50 migrants are now off island in a concentration camp within a military base that is itself within a forest in the middle of Nowheresville, MA. Going forward, the only way that an elite Vineyard resident might encounter a migrant is if his/her/zir/their Gulfstream suffers a double-engine failure and crash-lands in the woods of the Inner Cape. Because the migrants arrived in Massachusetts originally on Air DeSantis, let’s call their final destination Camp DeSantis.

In order to disprove accusations of hypocrisy, if there is any access by journalists to Camp DeSantis, the images and reports will have to show that these are the best cared-for asylum-seekers in the history of humanity. On the other hand, if the Four Seasons-style rooms at Camp DeSantis and three-star catered meals are described and illustrated, people might begin to ask “Why isn’t this infrastructure used to care for the 18,000+ people in Massachusetts who are experiencing homelessness?”

What do readers think? Are we going to see regular reports on The Fifty and how great their lives are, courtesy of the open-hearted migrant-welcoming Democrats of Massachusetts? Something like the Theresienstadt documentary, but broken up into tweets?

Related:

  • Progressives in Maine want U.S. to admit more low-skill migrants… (August 2022): …. who will live somewhere other than in Maine.
  • What it takes to welcome refugees and other immigrants (2018): How can a town survive with 10 percent of its population being unskilled unemployed refugees with four kids each? I wonder if the answer is harvesting federal subsidies. Our poorest cities often have sparkling new hospitals, built by mining elderly citizens for Medicare dollars. Could it be that Erie is mining refugees for the Federal Welfare that attaches to them? Each refugee is entitled to housing, health care, and food, all of which will be funded nationally, but purchased in the local economy.
  • “Yes, Florida allocated $12 million to transport migrants out of the state” (CBS): Florida’s Freedom First Budget included $12 million for a program to “transport unauthorized aliens” out of the state, including locations such as Martha’s Vineyard. (in other words, it is not completely fair to credit DeSantis with “Air DeSantis” because the money was appropriated by the legislature)
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