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)We have often discussed the real possibility that a major city or a whole state will quite soon have to declare bankruptcy. The politicians that run these government units have been hopelessly lost in providing efficient and effective government services.
As a result, businesses and residents have been fleeing these cities (Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco) and states (California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois) for places that are safer, have a better quality of life, and have less onerous tax burdens. As businesses and residents leave they take with them jobs and tax revenue which results in tax revenue shortfalls for cities and states. Rather than become more efficient or reduce government spending to match their lower tax revenues, the politicians in these cities and states just continually raise taxes. This drives more businesses and residents out of the cities and states which further reduces the tax stream and the financial death spiral is in full force.
Recent analysis by SmartAsset easily proves the point why many, many businesses and residents are leaving New York City and New York state, given the ridiculously high taxation rate on New York residents:
In 2023, over 100 Wall Street companies left NYC and resettled in south Florida.
According to SmartAsset, a Wall Street type professional earning $650,000 a year in NYC would save a whopping $195,000 a year by moving to Florida, a state with no state income tax and a generally lower cost of living.
People earning that much money and living in New York would have a combined tax burden of 45% (including Federal, state and local taxation) while living in Florida that burden would be only 35%.
In other words, that person living in New York would be almost paying HALF of what they earned in taxes.
Even someone earning much less would save a lot of money.
According to the SmartAsset analysis, that $150,000 would save $50,000 a year by living in Florida.
The cost of living in Manhattan in NYC is a whopping 137% above the national average.
Now, if you were paying high taxes and getting great value for those taxes such as low crime rates, first class infrastructure, clean streets, little or no homelessness, etc. it might be worthwhile. But that is not the case in NYC where your high taxes still leave you with skyrocketing crime, crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, subway system), poor sanitation, high levels of homelessness).
The death spiral is already underway in some cities such as New York City, it is now just a question of when one of these cities will go bankrupt as people and businesses leave for greener and less taxation areas. And the politicians that run these failing cities and states will never see it coming.
2)Another city whose politicians are driving into bankruptcy court is San Francisco. Their problems are extensive and mostly self inflicted by the politicians they elect:
The city is experiencing skyrocketing crime rates, especially organized retail theft rings.
Many workers have not come back to downtown offices after the pandemic since the pandemic showed that the same work that could be done in an office building could be done at home.
This lack of business people foot traffic has had devastating effects on local downtown businesses which has driven these businesses into extinction or caused them to leave the city and often the state, reducing the tax base, with 17 major businesses (e.g. Whole Foods, AT&T) having left the downtown area of the city in the past three years
There is a massive homelessness problem in the city which is intertwined with a massive drug addiction problem, with 84 people dying from drug overdoses in a recent month.
The city has always had a high cost of living and a high taxation rate.
The homelessness problem has resulted in public defecation, urination and drug use which has resulted in city health and quality of life problems.
High crime, high homelessness rates, public health issues and other problems has caused many major retailers to close down their operations in the city which has meant lost jobs and the loss of more tax revenue.
Yes, the politicians in this city have also done a fine job in making life miserable for the city’s residents and businesses which is reducing the tax base which will eventually lead to San Francissco going bankrupt.
In the face of all these failures, the city politicians apparently still have no clue on how to fix what they broke. Which has led to the following non-government effort:
The city has used private donations to hire a public relations firm to shine up the city’s image.
The public relations firm that was hired for low six figures is LaunchSquad.
Its objective is “to paint the city in a positive light and counter narratives that might be detrimental to how the city is seen.”
Their “success” stories so far include getting a New York Times article and Bloomberg article written about the city, again for a low six figures retainer.
Now while PR fluff pieces are always nice, they do NOTHING to fix the underlying core problems: crime, quality of life, homelessness, drug addictions, high taxes, etc. But that would require brainpower and courage on the behalf of the local politicians, two qualities that have been seriously lacking, given the current horrid conditions of the city.
3)According to a web search, the Federal Government will have spent about $90 billion in 2023 on education:
https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget24/summary/24summary.pdf
That is a lot of money but education is vital to a democracy and the prosperity of a nation. The Department of Education was created in 1979, over 44 years ago and has been spending untold hundreds of billions of dollars since then on education efforts.
For those hundreds of billions of dollars,one would hope that the Washington political class and the bureaucracy it oversees would be producing top notch education results. And as always when dealing with Washington, hoping for the best is always a fruitless exercise:
The ACT testing process is a college admissions testing process that seniors in high school take and include as part of their college applications.
It tests the cumulative education and knowledge of senior high school students up to this point in their lives.
The average composite ACT score dropped from 19.8 in 2022 to 19.5 in 2023.
This is the sixth straight year where scores dropped year over year.
More students met NONE of the ACT benchmarks compared to the previous year.
This continues a long term and distressing trend since the current ACT scores are at 30 year lows despite having a Department of Education that has been spending hundreds of billions of dollars on education for over 44 years.
2023 marked the second year in a row where scores hit their lowest mark in over 30 years.
In announcing these horrible education results, ACT CEO Janet Godwin stated the obvious: "We are also continuing to see a rise in the number of seniors leaving high school without meeting any of the college readiness benchmarks, even as student GPAs continue to rise and students report that they feel prepared to be successful in college. The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career. These systemic problems require sustained action and support at the policy level. This is not up to teachers and principals alone — it is a shared national priority and imperative."
The College Board, which administers another college proficiency education test, the SATs, also reported a year over year drop in test scores, with the average score going from 1050 in 2022 to 1028 in 2023.
Just another failed Federal government bureaucracy despite untold billions of dollars being spent. There are about 23,500 secondary schools in this country. If we could somehow distribute the Department of Education’s $90 billion across those schools , each school would receive a block grant of about $380,000. This could be spent on teacher training skills, technology, better books, better education materials. How much worse could that approach be vs. what we have wasted 44 years worth of taxpayer wealth doing via Washington?
That will do it for today: the utter failure of the Federal Department of Education, the utter failure of the San Francisco political class, and the utter failure of New York politicians to understand basic economics.
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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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