1) Readers of this blog know that we have very little respect for most government functions and the politicians and bureaucrats that oversee their operation. The reason is very simple: these government functions almost always do their jobs ineffectively, inefficiency and waste a lot of time and taxpayer wealth in the process.
And apparently the Centers For Disease Control is no different:
- Apparently the CDC updated its covid death statistics recently.
- One would hope that the CDC knows how to count because a lot of their advice and statistics were responsible for shutting down the country and ruining lives, business, and well being of millions of Americans.
- But their latest update indicated that they had included 72,277 deaths due to covid in their analyses but that those 72,000 plus deaths should not have been counted.
- The reduction in deaths due to the disease impacted the covid death totals in 26 states and spanned all categories of Americans.
- They attributed the massive over counting of covid deaths to a :coding logic error,” i.e. their computer program had not been properly vetted before put in use.
- Children deaths due to covid were reduced significantly and now stands at just 1,341.
- The CDC now says that while children accounted for 19% of all covid cases reported and tallied by the CDC, only a tiny one quarter of one percent of those afflicted by covid actually died from it.
- Which raises the obvious and disturbing question: did we really have to shut down schools for months and months at a time, denying our kids an education when the childhood death toll from the disease was so so small?While most states had overstated their covid death totals, apparently New York state severely under counted its nursing home deaths from covid, by possibly as much as 50%.
- Recall that then New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered covid infected senior citizens to be shipped into nursing homes which resulted in a massive amount of nursing home deaths from those already infected interacting with healthy but vulnerable nursing home folks.
- Thus, while the New York state government says 17,425 people died from covid in state nursing homes the real figure, caused by Cuomo’s fatal decision, was likely between 35,000 and 40,000.
And in New York, ignorance or arrogance led to the under counting, or possibly cover up, due to Cuomo’s ignorant sheltering of healthy, vulnerable senior citizens with infected senior citizens. Failures all around.
2) Far too many times we have discussed the reality that the whole “defund the police” effort has been a huge and fatal failure. Fatal because the defunding and the disrespecting of police officers in many major cities has led to violent and rising crime waves that led to the unnecessary deaths of innocent residents of those cities.
We have always asserted that “defund the police'' was no more than a political slogan with no plan, no details, and no experience to support the slogan and ill fated movement. As a result, major cities across the country are dealing with soaring crime rates, rising homicide rates, early retirement for the beleaguered police force, and difficulty recruiting new police officers.
Finally, though, the same idiotic politicians that supported and acted on defunding their police forces, have now realzied that they made a huge mistake that has led to death and destruction in their cities. Consider one of the biggest perps in the defund the police movement:
- A couple of years ago, San Francisco mayor, London Breed, took a whopping $120 million out of her city’s police budget and used the money to fund addiction treatment for black drug users in the city.
- Specifically: “We will redirect $120 million from law enforcement to support these priorities over the next two years. Let me repeat that. This is $120 million.”
- She actually sounded proud that she had gutted her own police force.
- The year after she reduced the police force budget, the city experienced an annual 30% increase in homicides, a record.
- A year later, the homicide rate went up another 17%.
- In one city neighborhood, the Tenderloin district, violent crimes went up 121% from 2020 to 2021.
- Finally, in December, 2021, the mayor submitted an emergency funding request to the city council to send more money to the police force budget.
- She finally realized that her defunding the police effort was a huge mistake: “I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances [but] we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law. Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference…I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that.”
- As a result of the city government’s defunding the police hysteria, there are now 300 vacancies for city police officers after a whopping 50 resigned just in this past month alone.
Just like with covid, ineffective and stupid politicians and bureaucrats have endangered the lives and property of millions of Americans, an endangerment that has resulted in unnecessary death and destruction, a typical outcome of most efforts led by the American political class.
3) We have often discussed the real possibility that a major U.S. city or even a state government in this country is quite possibly already in a financial death spiral that will bankrupt that city or state. Cities most likely on the verge of financial collapse include Chicago (our best bet), New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few others.
States that we think will most likely soon enter into a financial death spiral include New York, Illinois, California, and New Jersey. This death spiral will likely unfold in the following manner:
- High taxes drive out wealth generating and tax paying families and businesses.
- This reduces the state government’s tax revenue stream that requires that government services be cut and taxes raised on the remaining families and businesses.
- These increased taxes in turn drive out more tax paying families and businesses which results in more government service cutbacks, degrading the quality of life in the state, and more tax revenue shortfalls which causes more taxation and the death spiral is in place.
Thus, one would hope that politicians in these cities and states would be smart enough to look at the numbers and realities and take steps to stop the out migration of families and businesses and the resulting loss of tax revenue. One would hope that is the case but apparently that is not the case in New York:
- Current New York governor, Kathy Hochul, is running for reelection in the state in the fall.
- She recently got her party’s nod as their candidate for governor.
- As the current governor, you would expect that she would know the deteriorating condition of her state government’s finances and would be trying to at least maintain the current tax base of families and businesses.
- But apparently that is not important to her as she recently announced that anyone in the state that disagrees with her policies, probably mostly Republicans (Hochul is a Democrat) should “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK? You are not New Yorkers.”
- That is certainly not leadership, that is certainly not representing all of the residents of New York and is certainly not a way to stop the out migration of your tax base.
- In the last year alone, over 45,000 New York residents moved to Florida to get away from the high taxation levels in the state and possibly the highly arrogant attitude of politicians like Hochul.
- And it is highly likely that the majority of those 45,000 movers were productive and quite likely paying high levels of taxes to the state government since they had the means and desire to relocate their families a thousand miles away.
- The state is expected to be short over $14 billion in tax revenue over the next five years so telling over 5 million of your taxpayers to jump on a bus and get out of town seems pretty stupid.
- But the numbers and realities are worse than 45,000 residents going to Florida.
- Over the past decade, 1;5 million New York residents have packed up and moved out of state.
- Public opinion polls consistently show that high taxes are the primary reason while New Yorkers are leaving, be they Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, etc.
And taxes will just go higher and higher if Hochul’s arrogance and hatred drive millions of more taxpayers out of state, constantly accelerating a financial death spiral that is probably already underway in the state. Just pure stupidity to tell millions of taxpayers to leave your state if you dare to have a difference of opinion with her.
A true leader would look to get viewpoints from a wide variety of sources in order to make the right decisions for the most people they serve. Hochul is obviously not a true leader, she is just another political hack who cannot stand to have her opinion challenged, a trait that may make New York the first state government to go bankrupt, thanks to her “my way or the highway” approach to government.
So we have a politician telling her taxpayers to go away, we have a city finally realizing that defunding the police is a stupid move, and the CDC cannot count.
So we have a politician telling her taxpayers to go away, we have a city finally realizing that defunding the police is a stupid move, and the CDC cannot count.
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