🤘 Happy Wednesday! See more photos from Monday's Foo Fighters concert on our Instagram page.

🌧️ Today's weather: Mostly sunny then chance of showers and thunderstorms, with a high of 81 and a low of 69.

🎂 Happy birthday to our member Dawn Roche!

Today's newsletter is 1,025 words — a 4-minute read.

Ohio taxpayers would pay nearly $1,700 each for President Trump's mass deportation push, per a new calculator from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Why it matters: The estimate fuels debate over whether billions of federal dollars devoted to deportations could instead fund other public priorities, such as health care or housing.

By the numbers: Instead of contributing nearly $6.9 billion, or $1,670 per taxpayer, on mass deportations, the calculator finds Ohio taxpayers could fund around 24,000 school teachers, 29,000 firefighters or 308,000 people on Medicaid.

• That money could also cover more than 3.1 million SNAP recipients or fund more than 240,000 public housing units.

How it works: EPI estimated each area's share of federal income taxes to calculate how much taxpayers in each state, county and city would contribute to deportation spending.

Context: The $268.9 billion the administration is slated to spend over the course of Trump's second term on deportations is from a combination of money from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, regular appropriations and other repurposed funds.

• The Department of Homeland Security told Axios in July that the government spends roughly $18,000 per non-voluntary deportation.

Zoom in: The Trump administration's immigration policies have thousands of Ohio's Haitian immigrants, many of whom live in Springfield, in a state of limbo.

• In June, the Supreme Court ruled the federal government can end legal protections of their temporary residency in the U.S.
• Last week, ABC News reported that hundreds of Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been fitted with ankle monitors by the DHS.

The big picture: American taxpayers would broadly pay about $2,358 each for Trump's mass deportation push, per the EPI's tool.

• Nearly 12 million could instead receive Medicaid using those funds.

What they're saying...

As violent crime continues to fall across many of the nation's largest cities, Cleveland's data remained largely unchanged in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year.

State of play: The homicides count through June was in fact identical — 48 this year and 48 last year.

• Rape and robberies declined slightly while aggravated assaults rose slightly, the Major Cities Chiefs Association's (MCCA) survey found.

The big picture: The nationwide decline in crime now spans two presidencies. It began falling under President Biden after the pandemic-era surge, and has kept dropping under President Trump.

By the numbers: An Axios analysis of the MCCA survey found significant drops in the first six months of 2026 compared to last year.

• Homicides fell 17.2%.
• Robberies dropped 16.6%.
• Rapes declined 6.2%.
• Aggravated assaults fell 5.7%.
• Taken together, the four categories were down about 8.3%, for roughly 14,200 fewer reported violent crimes compared to the same period last year, according to the Axios review.

Zoom out...

⚠️ The defining quality of U.S. Rep. Max Miller (R-Bay Village) is the "shocking consistency" with which he "gets away with stuff," friends and former classmates contend. (American Prospect)

📉 Rocket Mortgage's office space in Cleveland is set to shrink by two-thirds, five years after receiving city and state financial incentives to expand. (NEOtrans)

• 😡 Flashback: Sam sharply criticized the city's $975,000 handout to Rocket Mortgage in a 2021 column. (Cleveland Scene)

🍹 Great Lakes Brewing Co. and Columbus' Watershed Distillery have teamed up on a new canned cocktail brand, ASplash. (Columbus Business First 🔒)

Dave Grohl was focused on honoring the old-timers during Foo Fighters' concert at Huntington Bank Field on Monday night.

What he said: "If we play a Foo Fighters song you know, sing along with me," he insisted.

• "If we play a Foo Fighters song you don't know … ask your dad. Yes, your dad was cool once."

State of play: Grohl and his bandmates (along with opener Queens of the Stone Age) proved they are still cool after 30-plus years for what is Cleveland's final stadium show of the year.

• Granted, the venue wasn't as full as recent gigs featuring Usher and Chris Brown or Post Malone and Jelly Roll, but the crowd made up for it with a frenzy of screams throughout.
• It also helped that the band played hit after hit during a setlist bookended by "All My Life" and "Everlong."

Zoom in: When Grohl opened the show with the obligatory, "Hello, Ohio," it meant more.

• The two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and Warren native revealed he spent his day off visiting his old stomping grounds and his grandparents' gravesite.

The bottom line: Monday night was a nostalgia trip for older fans, many of whom brought children ranging in age from young adults to babies (yes, babies) rocking headphones at their first show.

👋 Sam here. Mac's Backs Books in Cleveland Heights is relocating across Coventry this fall and is currently hosting a massive $5 book sale to clear out inventory before the move.

State of play: I descended into the store's basement this week to see what treasures awaited, and walked away with seven titles:

📰 "The World According to Breslin" by Jimmy Breslin.

🎩 "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall" by William L. Riordan.

💣 "Nuclear Ethics" by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

📡 "The Origin of Radar" by Robert Morris Page.

🇺🇸 "In the Heart of it All" by Richard F. Celeste.

🇬🇹 "Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States (1944-1954)" by Piero Gleijeses.

🪖 "The Blast of War 1939-1945" by Harold Macmillan.

Stop by: The selection, at least this week, skewed toward the political and social sciences, but dozens upon dozens of boxes of books remain.

• I can't wait to return in a week or two for another haul.

Go deeper...

🎓 Sam is reading Tyler Austin Harper's viral essay on the woke excesses of academia during the early 2020s.

💰 Troy is taking his shot at $1 billion by buying his first Powerball ticket in, like, forever.

This newsletter was edited by Tyler Buchanan.