TheRanter

Every weekday I sort the news by where it takes your money: medical bills, rent, power bills, fees, and what Congress said that morning next to the record. No receipt, it stays off the tab. On Your Tab: theranter.com/extraction-board/today/

A 10-7 vote in the 5th Circuit: people here 14 years, working, with citizen kids, can be held until deported with no bond hearing. Federal judges had ruled against that policy in more than 5,000 cases. Only deporting criminals they say.

DOJ gave Santa Clara County 48 hours to hand over Social Security numbers for 902 voters it flagged as likely noncitizens. Flagged and found are two different numbers. Watch which one comes back.

Rural hospitals rarely close anymore. They shrink. 720 are on the at-risk list, and the ones that drop inpatient beds to become emergency only never count as a closure.

The marketplace head count shows it too. Enrollment on those plans went from 22.1 million in 2025 down to 19.2 million by this February, and there is still no official count of how many of them just went without.

Open enrollment starts November 1. By June, individual market enrollment was down over 4.6 million people, 18% in a year. The enhanced tax credits died at the end of 2025. www.medicarerights.org/medicare-wat...

151 grocery companies. Where their money went. Want to spend your money where it does not work against you?

The deficit came in at $1.99 trillion. The administration calls it a blip and points at tariff refunds. Back the refunds out and it still grew. Interest alone ran $1.143 trillion, more than Medicare. finance.yahoo.com/economy/poli...

Cool site tracking Trump's Flip Flops. www.habibicode.org/trumpositions

Making American Great Again. Let's bring back public executions.

Work three, paid for five? The last productivity boom already answered that. Since 1979, output per hour is up 93.7 percent while typical worker pay is up 32.7 percent. The gains showed up. The paycheck never got the memo, so the three-day week comes with a three-day check.

Funny how that works: home and auto claims closing with zero dollars keep climbing, and the industry's underwriting profit nearly tripled in the first half, past $31 billion. Warren and Hawley agree on almost nothing, and they both want State Farm and Allstate to explain it.

Rob a bank, you do time. Be a bank, your case gets dropped. 205 companies had federal enforcement closed, dismissed or reversed, 14 of them walked on straight pardons, and banks and finance were first in line with 51.

Eight of every ten gallons of home heating oil is burned in the Northeast, go check your oil tank. Heating oil is running 21 to 50 percent higher this winter depending on who does the math, and at the high end that's about $878 more a house. Now they want to put in trucks ? Not going to get cheaper.

For-profit water: $823 a year. Public: $494.

Depends what counts as a human. Cigna's PxDx allegedly let doctors deny claims by the hundreds of thousands at around 1-1.2 seconds a review. Technically a person made every call.

Federal onshore oil paid a 12.5% royalty from 1920 until the IRA raised it in 2022. OBBBA put new leases back at 12.5%, and the new Senate Democrats' report counts that as a payoff. It is one. The repeal it recommends on page 56 was in Biden's 2021 budget and never made the IRA.

On Aug. 31, McCormick said data centers and AI are 20/80 in the US and blamed China. Now "many of them are very popular." PJM's market monitor ties $29.4B of the last four capacity auctions to data center demand. People don't need a foreign campaign to read their electric bill.

41 states just got $694 million back from a subprime auto lender that scored its own loans for what percent it could collect. Also, made some loans it predicted would not even repay the principal, and let dealers pack on service contracts buyers never agreed to.

Oregon didn't wait for Congress. Data centers over 20 megawatts pay for their own grid upgrades, sign 10 to 30 year contracts, pay for 90 percent of the power they reserve whether they use it or not, and eat an exit fee if they walk.

His own one pager calls it a 'light touch approach' and a 'federal recommendation.' Neither document mentions that a state is excused entirely if it already held a proceeding about it. 417 to 3 on Wednesday, blocked in the Senate on Thursday. This Congress passes nothing useful.

The people who would have to write this check are not selling it. Collins chairs Appropriations and says extraordinarily costly, no income cap she can find. Cruz wants it turned into a tax refund for people who work. Thune, asked if the Senate passes it: He said we'll cross that bridge.

Michigan's regulators and the grid operator both signed off on closing this plant. The Energy Department called it an emergency and held it open anyway. Consumers Energy put the bill in its own SEC filing: $259 million net through June. A federal court threw the order out Friday.

Massachusetts just did the binding version. Healey's order, signed September 8: data centers over 25 megawatts fund the full cost of the energy infrastructure, get local approval first, and pay into a Ratepayer Protection Fund if they do not. H.R. 9340 asks states to consider it at 100 megawatts.

Doug Parker ran American Airlines. He was asked on a podcast this week how airline pricing works: "start with basic and then build up on those with as many tiers as you can possibly create to get people to pay what they're willing to pay." Airlines Confidential, September 9. Not hidden fees. Addons

Treasury's deficit page reads $1.80 trillion for FY26 through July, up $170 billion on the same ten months last year. A 10% increase. The reconciliation bill that carried the spending cuts scores at plus $3.4 trillion over ten years, per CBO. What happend to balance the budget?

The Ratepayer Protection Act got narrowed at markup to name data centers specifically. So any other industry no issue. The Data Center Coalition objected to being singled out. Steel and industrial energy users backed the change. Cleared committee 52 to 0, floor vote next week. H.R. 9340.

California made it law. A quart of water an hour, shade over 80, ten minutes off at 95. None of it stops the work at any temperature. The federal rule has been a proposal since August 2024, and federal law exempts farm work from overtime with no hours ceiling. Hour twelve pays the same as hour one.

Buybacks were not illegal before 1982, just risky enough that firms avoided them. Rule 10b-18 gave them a safe harbor: follow volume and timing limits and it counts as clean sale. Volume exploded. Congress taxed it 1% in 2022. The narrowed the scope in 2025. This is an easy fix

Texas can now enforce the ID-match requirement. Kansas already did this from 2013 to 2018. It blocked 31,089 eligible voters from registering. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, reviewed how it went: "It didn't work out so well."

Patriot interceptors are down two-thirds since the war started, about $4 million each. We fire them at attack drones that run $20,000 to $50,000. The Pentagon has failed eight straight audits with 26 material weaknesses, so nobody can tell you what is left on the shelf.

New York already caught them at this. DoorDash was counting your tip against the base pay it was supposed to sit on top of, the AG settled for $16.75 million in 2023, and the apps built the next version anyway. To a company that size that is a line item. They budgeted for it.

Those little arrows on the bottom of everything were never a recycling program. American Plastics Council notes say what they were for in plain English, "to prevent bans," and 39 states then made the symbol mandatory. Ban insurance, printed on the bag.

Everyone's arguing about what gets taught. The biggest single thing this department holds is a $1.72 trillion loan book with 42.6 million people on it, so the fight is really over who inherits that, plus IDEA and the civil rights office.

Undue Medical Debt files audited financials. One recent year: they spent $15,453,205 and abolished $3,337,752,724 in face value. That is 216 dollars of debt for every dollar spent. Half a cent. open.substack.com/pub/therante...

FIFA is a registered non-profit. The sale needs a yes from its 211 member associations, and FIFA is offering each one up to $20 million in one-off capital. At the ceiling that's $4.2 billion routed to the people whose votes decide it. Congress votes in Morocco in March.

The Secretary of Defense wants $1.5 trillion for FY2027. The department he is asking for just failed its audit for the 8th straight year, under three administrations. The finding: a disclaimer of opinion. Accountant for "we can't tell you what this is." 24 must pass. One never has.

17 of the 50 largest Fortune 500 companies appear on state rosters of top SNAP employers. The wage stops short of the grocery bill, and the federal budget covers the rest. Amazon is one line on the invoice.

The FY2027 ask is $1.5 trillion, about a 50% jump, partly to replace what the Iran campaign burned through. In 1964 the Army swapped the M16's powder for a cheaper propellant and approved it without retesting in the rifle. It ran hotter. Rifles jammed in combat. The men were told it was user error.

The Pentagon wants $1.5 trillion next year. It has failed eight audits in a row and still cannot reliably say what equipment it owns. The person applying for food assistance has to account for every dollar to qualify. We audit the hungry. We hand the Pentagon a raise.

Iowa banned spread pricing in its Medicaid contracts in 2019. The middleman bills your plan more than it pays the pharmacy and keeps the gap. A June state audit says PBMs moved it to year-end accounting. Every claim looked compliant. One PBM cleared about $100 million. bit.ly/4fmS8UV

The software NJ just restricted works by feeding on rival landlords' nonpublic rent data, then recommending a price to all of them. Separate landlords, one number. DOJ's active RealPage case calls that algorithmic coordination. A state made the tool unlawful before the case even lands.

People paid a down payment on a house to sit at that final. Worth reading where the money landed. FIFA is a nonprofit association under Swiss law, pays no dividends, and its own 2024 report shows over $33 million in compensation for senior management and Council. The nonprofit that priced you out.

You did the responsible thing. Called the student loan servicer, asked what to do, took what they offered. Then the balance went up. Forbearance was less work for them than the plan that helps you. 39 states, $1.85B settlement over that steering. Help was a trap. open.substack.com/pub/therante...

Amazon buried the Prime cancel button for six years, got caught, settled for $1.5B in refunds capped at $51 a head. Then read the order: any money nobody claims reverts to Amazon. Filing honestly for $51 takes more jumping through hoops than most people will take. ftc.gov/amazon

'For whom' has a paper trail. That student debt got bundled into bonds, $626B of SLABS issued since 1988. Servicers get paid to collect it either way, and investors get paid as long as it's collected. A record in defaults doesn't dent the cash flow. It moves from your paycheck to a bondholder.