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 operating any level of government in this country.
Even their best efforts are almost always inefficient and 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)A continuing saga in this blog has been the race to see which liberal controlled city and state will go bankrupt first. Our leading candidates for cities most likely to go bankrupt first include New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and long shots Seattle and Portland. The states we think are most likely to go bankrupt first include New York, Illinois, California, and New Jersey.
These cities and states are already in or about to enter a financial death spiral from which there is probably no escape:
Politicians in a city or state continue to spend and waste more and more taxpayer wealth which makes living in that city or state more and more expensive.
To protect their wealth, residents and businesses start moving out of those cities and states.
This reduces the tax base and tax revenue.
Rather than reduce government spending to match their reduced tax revenue streams, these politicians raise taxes to make up for the shortfall.
This increase in taxes forces more residents and businesses to leave these cities and states, further reducing the tax base and tax revenue stream.
Politicians get desperate and start cutting services such as police, fire, and EMT, to make up for the ever shrinking tax base, reducing the quality of life, driving more residents and businesses out and further reducing the tax base.
And thus, the financial death is now feeding on itself.
State-wise, recent analyses show that California is still barreling down this financial death spiral path:
A recent analysis of Internal Revenue Service data confirms that California and New York lost the most in taxable income in 2021 because of out-migration to other states.
IRS data shows that California lost $340 million in tax revenue in 2021 from its tax base.
The study concluded that high personal income tax rates and high cost of living were two main drivers in the lost taxable revenue.
The state had a net loss of 700,000 taxpayers between January, 2020 and July, 2022.
A whopping 5 million residents left which was offset by fewer people moving into the state.
The so-called 2022 U-Haul Growth Index showed that California ranked last in the country for one-way U-Haul rentals out of the state.
All this ended up costing the state a Congressional seat, the first time this ever happened, all because of a reduced state population.
Other reasons driving the out-migration besides high taxes and high cost of living include a massive homeless problem, skyrocketing crime, and drug abuse, reducing the quality of life issue referred to above.
Despite the high state taxes and personal tax rates, the state government will still likely have a massive $32 billion budget deficit in the coming year.
While California was losing $340 million in taxable income, states with no personal state income taxes, Florida and Texas, were respectively gaining taxable income in the same time period.
People want to be free and that desire for freedom includes the ability to keep as much of their hard earned wealth as possible. This principle never seems to get through to the politicians running these death spiral candidate cities and states.
Rather than adjust government spending downward to their reduced revenue stream, they just make the situation worse by thinking that raising taxes is the solution. Instead, raising taxes just accelerates the financial death spiral. Or as the authors of the study concluded: “Money goes where it is treated the best.”
2)We have often discussed the reality that Biden’s border security policies have been a fatal joke in so many ways:
Fentanyl and other illegal drugs are flooding over the border, killing more and more Americans every day from their addictions.
Other Americans are dying and being victimized by Central and South American gangs who have come across the border and set up criminal gangs throughout the country.
Illegal immigrants are dying in so many ways trying to get through Biden’s porous borders, dying in trucks smuggling them into the country, dying from hot weather conditions trying to get into the country dying at the hands of human and drug traffickers, dying in Mexican shelters from horrible living conditions, etc.
Not only are people dying but Americans are directly and indirectly suffering as a result of Biden’s failed policies:
Untold billions of dollars a year from American taxpayers are being used to house, feed, give medical attention to and give cell phones to.
These are billions of dollars that cannot be used to house, feed, and provide drug addiction support to America’s homeless, hungry, and drug addicted.
Crime rates caused by illegal immigration are skyrocketing across the country, bringing violence, robberies, rapes, and other crimes to Americans who would never have experienced these episodes if the border was secure.
Politicians of so-called “sanctuary cities” have boasted about their compassion for illegal immigrants for years but now that these same immigrants are flooding their cities and overwhelming their resources, these boastful politicians are no longer so boastful or full of themselves.
In reality, these politicians talked big about being sanctuaries and now that you know what is hitting the fan, they are desperate to find easy ways, any way, to get out of the mess they created. And one state is suggesting the unthinkable burden it want to place on its American citizens:
The state government of Massachusetts is recommending that state residents accept illegal immigrants into their homes.
The theory is that these in-home accommodations of undocumented, unvaccinated, and unverified illegal immigrants would be for only a short time frame until the Massachusetts politicians who caused this illegal immigration problem can figure out a solution.
Apparently, so many of these illegal immigrants have fled to Massachusetts, a self proclaimed sanctuary state, that the state political class was not prepared to handle what they boasted about.
The state government and taxpayers are already paying 40 state hotels to house and feed the illegal immigrants in this sanctuary state.
The Boston Herald claims this will cost the state’s taxpayers $11 million a year.
State Rep. Peter Durant understands that every dollar spent on illegal immigrants is a dollar that cannot be spent on the homeless, hungry, and drug addicted in the state, accusing Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey of having a “woefully incomplete” approach to the current situation: “This is about what we’re spending in taxpayers’ dollars to house, feed, secure those who are in the country illegally.”
With a sanctuary plan that is woefully incomplete, the state government and state politicians are hoping that state residents will take illegal immigrants into their homes, a ridiculous approach to a serious problem. No one in their right mind is going to endanger themselves and their families by allowing an illegal immigrant or illegal immigrant family to move into their home. The insanity of the idea is mind boggling but the fact that it was the best idea that the state politicians could come up with is not.
3)Almost daily Joe Biden goes in front of reporters or the cameras and makes a fool of himself. He often cannot read and/or operate a teleprompter many times and he just collapses into talking gibberish. And it appears that his Vice President, Kamala Harris, is not much better when trying to simply state a few words in front of the cameras.
Consider her “word salad” insanity when doing a press conference with the President of Mongolia of all people [my emphasis added]: “In particular, we will discuss the work that we will do together to strengthen our space cooperation. What that means, in terms of your leadership and your vision for the future, and certainly, strengthening our space cooperation would be a part of that agenda — including, of course, using our space cooperation to think about how we strengthen the economic prosperity and development of our nations.”
Anytime she tries to communicate anything she just ends up going in circles, repeating the same phrase, in this case space exploration, over and over. I dare anyone to explain what point she is trying to make with the above paragraph.
The other obvious question to be asked, independent of another word salad episode from Harris, what possible space exploration upside is there going to come forth from partnering with Mongolia of all places? Of all the problems facing the country today, illegal immigration, fentanyl pouring over the border in record numbers, human trafficking at the border, homelessness, inflation, etc. why is she wasting time with the head of Mongolia talking about space? Horrible priorities.
Enough insanity: wasting time on idiocy with the President of Mongolia, California continues to self-destruct, and Massachusetts expects its citizens to fix what its politicians broke.
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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