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Not All Medicare IDs Will Be Reissued

Question: I recently saw an article that Medicare is issuing new ID cards due to a data breach. When will mine arrive? Answer: You did hear correctly that there was a data breach and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will be issuing new Medicare cards to everyone that was impacted. What is significant to understand is that there are over 67 Million individuals on Medicare and issued Medicare cards. Only 103,000 will be issued NEW Medicare numbers and therefore new cards. So that is NOT a lot. This does not mean you aren’t one of the Americans enrolled in Medicare who are ...

Fair Food And Fun

Next week is the Warren County Fair. I have been involved with it for a long time. When my children were young, they showed dairy animals. It was a lot of work, but the experience was worth it. There were chores to be done early in the morning to get the animals ready for the show. My children were quite young at the time thet they showed. It was up to mom to help. Never in my marriage agreement did I promise to trim tails and whiten hooves! When they were in high school I worked in the ice cream booth because they were members of the Eisenhower marching band. I always took a day as ...

The Downside Uncertainty Of Tariffs

The Trump administration’s levying of tariffs is a form of taxation, essentially a tax hidden from public view. They are imposed before the final sale of a product. In essence, tariffs are a pre-sales tax, levied at a port-of-entry on goods coming into the country. They are included in the price being paid by Americans for whatever the product is. So, for example, let’s say a carpet made in Vietnam comes into the Port of New York for ultimate sale here. The cost of the carpet goes up 20% when the federal government slaps a tariff on it in New York, and then it comes here where an ...

Critical Need For Job Training

Wells, the ice cream maker, formerly known as Dunkirk Ice Cream, told the newspapers recently that Wells almost did not commit to its current $425,000,000 investment in Dunkirk due to a concern over a lack of labor force here. Wells anticipates needing 270 more workers because of its expansion. In the past 15 years Chautauqua County’s labor force (those working or looking for work) shrunk from about 68,000 to about 54,000, down by 14,000, a shocking 20%. What are the possible explanations for this collapse of our labor force? First, when companies like Truck Lite left Falconer ...

The 100-Year Shadow Of The Scopes Monkey Trial

“At the present time there exist upon the earth five races… each very different from the other. The first is the Ethiopian or Negro type originating in Africa and finally . .. the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.” This brazen racist quote contradicted the biblical teaching of humanity originating from one set of parents, Adam and Eve. The anti-biblical quote came from the public school biology textbook at the center of a firestorm which resulted in a historic court case known as the Scopes or Monkey trial in ...

Allies Must Bear Their Share Of World Leadership

CHAUTAUQUA—Oren Cass is the chief economist at the American Compass. But, he notes, he’s not an economist in the sense of having an economics degree or writing papers about economics. Meanwhile, Dennis Wilder, a professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., is a former senior American intelligence officer and policymaker. ♦♦♦ Delivering the July 25 morning-amphitheater lecture at Chautauqua Institution, Cass rightly recalled Americans’ buying inexpensive steel from steel manufacturers in a particular country. The country happens to ...