Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Editor, Times-Union:
These measures signed into law (and/or promoted by our President’s Big Beautiful Bill) by our Republican governor, Mike Braun, supposedly will make Indiana great … falling in line with Donald Trump’s Project 2025 blueprint for making our entire country great.
“Funding was nixed entirely for trails, public broadcasting, and musician-philanthropist Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library — which mails free books to children up to 5 years old to promote literacy.” (How great is that?)
Indiana’s new budget “gives the Department of Corrections, the Department of Child Services and the Family and Social Services Administration a combined augmentation fund of $300 million … Money will be distributed at Braun’s discretion. (Great! Braun will make the decisions? Based on what?)
“In the Indiana budget’s second year, Indiana will drop remaining income limits and move to a universal taxpayer funded ‘school choice’ voucher system.” (Couple that news with Trump’s declaration that his administration would withhold nearly $7 billion in federal funding from state and local schools, and you can pretty much kiss public schools goodbye.) — Times-Union
“County health departments across Indiana are reeling after lawmakers slashed public health funding by 64% .... threatening “critical community programs and … recent progress made under the Health First Indiana initiative.” —Indiana Capital Chronicle 5/2025 (Couple that with the imminent cuts in Medicaid and Medicare as a result of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and you can forget about “making America/Indiana healthy again.”)
No tax on tips? Read the fine print. “Indiana law allows employers to claim a tip credit.
“Tipped employees can be paid a lower cash wage than the standard Indiana minimum wage, as long as they earn enough in tips to bring their hourly rate up to the Indiana minimum.” — nolo.com Indiana employers can now take credit card tip money out of their employees’ hourly wage. (We can all combat this by just tipping in cash.) Also, even though the Big Beautiful Bill may say no tax on tips, workers who depend on tips will have to use what money is saved on taxes to pay for health care and food due to cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP programs. In addition, they still have to pay state and local taxes on those tips.)
Indiana Governor Braun has issued executive orders (just like his mentor) ending D.E.I. initiatives in all executive branch agencies — including the Department of Education — with the threat of losing government funding. (There goes the need to learn about the differences in all human beings, to respect those differences, and to include everyone in spite of those differences.)
“Indiana has ranked among the top 10 states for clean-energy job growth since Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed.” Now Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has put $7.8 billion at risk for Indiana’s clean energy investments and future job growth, and could “drive up household electricity costs by hundreds of dollars…” — Indiana News Service
How much more greatness can we tolerate?
Jeanne Tuka Schutz
Winona Lake, via email
