Saturday, November 8, 2025
I am a person of infinite patience. My friends compliment me on my ability to patiently listen to ideas from both sides of the aisle. I love watching the daily news on my laptop and on my cellphone. I read opinion columns, and occasionally get to read a nonfiction book on some current topic. But I must confess that I am now in a state of news overload.
I’m not quite sure when this illness kicked in, but if you think about all of the news events in recent weeks, you’ll easily understand why I, or anyone, could easily fall into a state of media-nausea. I think the first story that engulfed my ability to digest facts was President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Shortly after it passed in the House of Representatives, my phone began ringing off the hook with calls from important clients, asking about the impact of the budget cuts on Medicaid, SNAP and other significant programs.
Alerted to the terms of the bill, I began a line-by-line review, and became more horrified once I understood the scope of the cuts. I couldn’t understand how the House could find billions of dollars to cut from Medicaid and claim that they were all related to rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.” Taking food away from children isn’t the way to save taxpayers real money. By mid-June I was wilting under the barrage of calls asking for advice on how to get the attention of the region’s federal officials.
Always looking on the bright side, I was pleased that the bill included such items as raising the state-and-local-taxes deduction cap to $40,000, and reduced taxes on tips and Social Security and many other goodies that were consistent with promises Trump made. I assumed that the Senate would support many provisions of the House bill and trim the Medicaid cuts. I assured many of my callers that there was hope that cooler heads would prevail, and the Senate bill would be palatable.
Come July, the Senate bill was ready for a formal vote, and its contents were even uglier. Rather than scale back the Medicaid cuts, the Senate found ways to increase them. The promised expansion of the SALT cap was altered to providing three years of an expanded credit and then reducing it to the old $10,000 cap. The elimination of taxes on Social Security disappeared, and the no-taxes-on-tips provision is scheduled to expire after 2028.
The torrent of calls asking for my opinion had just about ended when New York City Democrats chose the inexperienced Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor. When the final results came in on primary night, I shut down my cellphone. Dozens of friends and neighbors wanted to know how to stop Mamdani. Ironically, many of them didn’t vote in the primary because they were registered Republicans or independents, and in some cases they were registered Democrats who failed to vote. I refused to console any qualified voter who failed to vote.
Now, weeks later, I’m being asked who I favor in the contest between Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams. I have no preference between the two, but there appears to be no way to beat Mamdani unless there is one independent candidate. At this point, neither Adams nor Cuomo shows any signs of getting out of the race in the interest of harmony. If both stay in, there’s no chance that Mamdani can be stopped.
Burdened by all of these panicked calls, I decided that the best thing I can do for my wife, Suzan, and I is to go away for a week or so and maybe shut down my phone. I can check messages from time to time, but that’s it. We’re leaving in search of a change of scenery.
No sooner I had made our airline reservations than the Jeffrey Epstein saga erupted. I told callers that we weren’t interested in visiting Epstein’s island or anywhere else attached to his name. My cellphone is now in the freezer, so don’t bother calling.
