Political class insanity continues to ravage the country as our politicians continue to be ignorant, stupid, greedy, and have horrible sets of priorities:
1)We have often talked about the concept of the “financial death spiral” that many states and cities are close to or who have already entered. The financial death spiral unfolds as follows:
The local political class, city or state, spends more money than they collect in taxes and do not spend that money efficiently.
As a result, the quality of life for businesses and residents go down because of government incompetence, reduced government services that increase crime and dangers to businesses, employees and citizens.
As a result, businesses and residents flee the state or city, taking their business and resident taxes with them, reducing the government tax stream.
This reduced tax stream requires the government entity to further raise taxes and cut services which further reduces the quality of life of the remaining businesses and residents.
The increased taxes causes more business and residents to leave, all of which reduces the tax steam further and the death spiral is gaining steam.
It has always been our opinion that the top cities that are mostly likely to get caught in a financial death spiral and eventually go bankrupt are Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Given a recent article by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, it looks like San Francisco might be in the lead for city bankruptcy:
The Chronicle is calling the situation in the city a potential economic death spiral.
According to the Chronicle: "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it. Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral."
As more people continue to work remotely the city does not collect as much taxes from both these remote working and the city businesses (e.g. restaurants) that these people would have normally used.
How bad is the remote worker and resulting tax base loss: according to the Census Bureau, between 2019 and 2021, the number of remote workers who originally worked in San Francisco increased sevenfold to a whopping 46%, i.e. the number of people commuting into the city and working in the city has been almost cut in half.
Millions of square feet of office space are now vacant and many of the city’s tech companies have moved out altogether.
Estimates find that the city has lost almost $3 billion in commuter and city workforce spending, a decrease that eventually results in much lower city tax collections.
Very sad that a once great city is now likely in its financial death spiral which will bring less tax dollars to the city government which will result in less money for police, fire, schools, and EMTs which will reduce the quality of city life and increase crime which will drive more businesses, workers and residents out of the city and the death spiral is in place.
And as always, there does not appear anyone in the local political class has a clue or a plan on how to fix what they likely had a big part in causing.
2)This blog has never been a fan of Nancy Pelosi. She has been around long enough and held enough important Congressional positions, including Speaker of the House, to be a primary cause why the national debt is over $31,000,,000,000,000. She has made herself and her family very wealthy via any number of actions including the VISA IPO, insider trading connected to pending legislation, and inserting a provision into the COVID relief legislation that provided over a million dollars to her husband’s business.
And she recently showed how ignorant she was of our legal system despite being in government service for decades:
As most people know, the NYC district attorney has indicted Trump on some very flimsy criminal charges.
This is viewed as a sham legal exercise to try and prevent Trump from running for President in 2024.
In light of this effort, Pelosi put out a statement on the effort which showed how ignorant and hateful she is relative to Trump: "The Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law," Pelosi wrote. No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence."
So rather than know that the very foundation of our legal system for hundreds of years is that every American is assumed innocent until proven guilty, she thinks, incorrectly, that Trump is assumed guilty and must prove his innocence.
However, according to www.uscourts.gov, the burden of proof is ALWAYS on the government to prove the defendant is guilty, not the other way around.
Journalist Liz Peek summed Pelosi’s stupidity quite nicely: "You are embarrassing yourself @SpeakerPelosi – this case is totally political & you know it."
So sad that someone with her tenure and her power is still nothing more than a petty, and ignorant, politician. No matter your opinion of Trump, he is an American and the onus is on the government to prove guilt, not on Trump to prove innocence.
3)As we have pointed out many times, consider the difficult plight that millions of Americans are facing today:
On any day, there are about 500,000-600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets of the country.
Millions and millions of Americans are food challenged, i.e. they are struggling to put enough food on their family tables.
Millions of Americans are struggling with drug addiction problems.
And yet, certain politicians insist that it is far more important to take American taxpayer wealth and not address these suffering American problems but use the money to make life easier for illegal immigrants, as witnessed again in Massachusetts:
The state Massachusetts government is going to spend almost $30 million to provide state driver’s licenses to the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants living in the state.
The former Republican governor of the state had the good sense to veto the bill but was overridden by the Democratically controlled state legislature.
As with most government programs, the original estimate was going to be $10 million but will end up costing upwards of three times as much.
In 2022, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found nationally that there were more than 17,500 drunk convictions of illegal immigrants in the country, 17,500 instances where Americans had their lives endangered by a drunk driver who should not even be in the country.
So, while Americans continue to go hungry, homeless, drug addicted, and having their lives endangered by drunk driving illegal immigrants, the state’s politicians want to spend almost $30 million on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Horrible, horrible set of priorities.
That will do it for today’s insanity: drivers licenses for illegal immigrants are more important than the needs of struggling Americans, Nancy Pelosi has no concept of how our judicial system works, and San Francisco takes the lead in the race to be the next municipal bankruptcy.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
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