Every month we devote posts to just general political class insanity that is running rampant through the country. The members of the American political class continue to show that they are incapable of efficiently operating any level of government in this country.
Even their best efforts are almost always ineffective at resolving any problem facing Americans. They spend a great amount of time not trying to improve the lives of their citizens but continually ensuring their reelection and enriching themselves, their families, and their friends in the process, all at taxpayer expense.
1)One of the major failures of the Biden administration is that he has allowed our borders to be extremely porous to illegal immigrants and tons and tons of illegal drugs. Well over 100,000 Americans probably died from drug overdoses in 2023 (final numbers are not in yet) and there is no reason to think that never will go down any time soon since Biden has shown no desire or ability to lock down the border.
And a recent incident on the border indicates how bad the problem continues to be:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers recently checked out ONE vehicle at the border and found it had about $1.1 million worth of methamphetamine.
Meth is a major driver of overdose deaths in this country.
The $1.1 million worth of meth comes out to about 120 pounds of the drug.
This seizure follows on the heels of another bust in California where 3,000 pounds of meth was hidden in a shipment of carrots.
In the past six months the Customs agents have found 49,000 pounds of meth, more than 24 TONS.
The good news is that 49,000 pounds of illegal drugs never made it into the bodies of drug addicted Americans. The bad news is we have no idea how many other tons of illegal drugs did not get intercepted as it came across Biden’s porous borders.
As we have said so many times, a very, very primary duty of any government entity is to protect the lives of the citizens it supposedly serves. In this case, Biden is a failure relative to this basic government tenet.
2)What really happened on January 6, 2021? Did Trump tell his followers to invade the Capitol Building? Or did the Swamp set Trump up as a fall guy? Your answer probably depends on what you think of Trump. But recent accusations appear to lean towards that the whole January 6 incident was a set up by the Deep State:
It appears that the FBI and ATF had at least 20 of their people embedded in the crowd in the Capital that day.
The Capital Police had at least three of their people embedded in the crowd.
At least one of these folks was the first to breach the Capitol Building.
According to the Epoch Times: “At least 20 FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives “assets” were embedded around the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a defense attorney claimed in a court filing on April 12. The allegation was made in a motion seeking to dismiss seditious conspiracy and obstruction charges against 10 Oath Keepers defendants in one of the most prominent Jan. 6 criminal cases.David W. Fischer, attorney for Thomas E. Caldwell of Berryville, Virginia, filed a 41-page motion to dismiss four counts on behalf of all Oath Keepers case defendants before U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington.”
So what really happened that day? We will probably never know. But we now know that the FBI and ATF had agents in the crowd and may have been the instigators. We know that Black Lives Matter and Antifa had their own people inside the Capitol building that day. The corruption of the Washington political elite apparently knows no bounds including faking an ”insurrection.”
3)We once reported on how the political class at the Maryland state government level had raised the tax rate on millionaires living in the state. The faulty economic theory was that simply raising the tax on incomes that exceed a million dollars will get more tax money for the state government. A few short years later it turns out the total tax revenue coming from the state’s millionaires was actually lower than before the tax rate was raised.
So they raised the tax rate and got less taxes? Very simply, millionaires have the resources to move to lower tax states which is what they did. Thus, the windfall the politicians anticipated from their faulty economic sense never materialized and, in fact, reduced their tax revenue.
Which is just one example which constantly shows how our politicians have very little knowledge or common sense when it comes to economics. And another example is likely beginning to unfold in New York City:
Many people commute into NYC for their jobs and for entertainment.
These folks have a lot of options to get into the city including their cars, buses, and rail.
But the most convenient of these options is to travel by car since it gives the commuter the convenience of coming and going on their schedule and not relying on bus and train schedules.
And the political economic giants in the city want to take advantage of this convenience by imposing a new and additional $15 fee on anyone driving into the city in the southern half of Manhattan.
This new $15 fee would be in addition to the existing $15 toll that many commuters already pay.
The money from this new fee/tax would theoretically be used to improve the city’s mass transit system.
This was given the marketing name “congestion pricing” since it would be imposed when traffic congestion is at its peak.
Larger vehicles would pay more than the $15 while motorcycles and those coming into the city in off peak hours would pay less.
While other world cities have already implemented this process it is new to this country.
Someone who commutes into the city for their job five days a week, this new fee will theoretically add over $3,500 in commuting costs to this person’s budget
This could get very interesting, given the current situation in NYC and New York state:
According to USA Today reporting, almost 550,000 New Yorkers left the state in 2022.
In all likelihood, the high tax burden and high crime rates in the state and NYC were probably the main drivers.
And now the NYC politicians want to add to that tax burden with their new inbound car toll.
Given what happened in Maryland when they raised taxes, the following scenario has a very good chance of going down in NYC:
People who travel into NYC will likely try and minimize this additional tax burden by not going into the city as often or will start using mass transit more often.
Thus, the city politicians probably will not have their revenue expectation met since people will start to curtail their inbound traffic and which may also cause the revenue from the current toll to drop.
People will not only curtail their work travel into the city but will likely also curtail their pleasure travel into the city given that that travel toll wise has increased 100% to $30 and they will be more likely to stay local to get their dining out and entertainment experience.
This will reduce the business that in-city businesses receive, e.g. restaurant patrons, which will put a financial strain on city businesses and eventually city business tax revenue.
If enough commuter workers complain about the new toll burden, then in-city businesses will either give more permission to work at home, reducing toll revenue, or will move their businesses out of the city altogether, reducing all kinds of tax revenue to the city and state as businesses vacate their city offices.
Now, I could be wrong. Maybe those commuters going into NYC who currently pay $15 in toll will not mind paying twice that much. But given what happened in Maryland, I would bet that inbound commuters will find ways to stay and work at home more often and will curtail their pleasure visits into the city, all of which is going to have a negative impact on all types of city taxes.
Also keep in mind that this potential new toll revenue will go to make mass transit better for city residents. A worker coming into the city will be paying the toll and not really getting thinking back in return, all the more reason to avoid the new levy as much as possible.
4)People like Biden want us to rush headlong into solar and wind energy to replace carbon based fuels under the guise of “climate change.” We will not get into a discussion of whether or not climate change is a man-made danger or not but rushing headlong into solar energy has a lot of downsides, downsides that Biden and others are not willing to discuss.
But consider a new downside that hit Texas a short time ago:
Parts of Texas are famous for ferocious hail storms.
Apparently a solar farm in Texas did not take this into account since when a giant hail storm came through recently it severely damaged a 3,000 acre Texas solar farm.
Apparently, some Texas hail storms have hailstones big enough to break glass which is what this one did to the glass solar cell tops.
It resulted in the solar farm to operate at “reduced capacities.”
Not only has the glass been broken on hundreds of panels but there is a fear that there are potentially toxic chemicals from the broken panels leaking into the soil and groundwater.
The solar farm company denies that there are toxic chemicals leaking out of the broken panels.
Even if there are no chemical leaks, we now see another danger to so-called clean energy, building solar panel farms where there are a lot of hail storms and tornadoes risks putting electric power availability at risk.
And since China is the source of a lot of components of solar technology and actual solar panels, as tensions rise with that country relying too much on the availability of solar technology could be very dangerous.
Who would have thought hail storms could wipe out a good part of our energy grid? Obviously, Biden and others like him did not.
That will do it for today: solar has a new downsize, NYC plays tax roulette with a new toll tax, the FBI and ATF had dozens of agents embedded in the January 6th crowd, and illegal and deadly drugs continue to flood through Biden’s porous border.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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