There is a lot going on in the world: Obama and Russiagate findings, Middle East powder keg, the Russian/Ukrainian war, etc. But through all this, the American political class continues to constantly deliver its own special brand of insanity, stupidity, wasteful taxpayer spending, and ineffective government programs:
1)We have frequently talked about our theory on how a major city or an entire state government is likely to go bankrupt in the not too distant future: high taxation rates, high government regulation rates, high crime rates, and other nasty situations are driving residents and businesses out of these cities and states in search of better quality of life situations. They have finally decided that the city and state politicians in their lives have neither the ability, the smarts, or desire to fix what they have broken.
A strong contender to go bankrupt has always been and is still the state government of California. High crime rates, high homelessness rates, some of the highest taxes in the country, very high energy costs, the list seems endless. As a result, California has been losing both residents and businesses over the past few years including Tesla, State Farm,Toyota, and hundreds of other businesses of all sizes.
And apparently another born and bred California business is also getting ready to exit the state, taking a lot of tax dollars with it:
The president and heiress of the very popular In-N-Out burger fast food chain is moving the company headquarters out of California and taking it to business friendly Tennessee.
She summed up a few of the reasons for leaving the state quite nicely: "There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here now."
Her family and business roots run deep with her but she is still packing up and leaving.
She is moving the headquarters operation out of California to a new 100,000 square foot facility in Franklin, Tennessee.
In an interview she cited a specific case with one of her stores that also probably contributed to her decision to get out: "There was actually — gunshots went through the store, there was a stabbing, there was a lot. For the safety of our associates, we just felt like, this is not OK."
But violent crime was just one of several factors: "There were so many pressures and just hoops we were having to jump through. You’ve got to do this, you have to wear a mask, you gotta put this plastic thing up between us and our customers and it was really terrible."
You cannot keep raising taxes, piling on more and more regulations, not getting crime under control and still expect people and businesses to sit there and take it. Eventually, the desire for a better quality of life in many ways causes people to up and leave, taking their tax dollars with them, and keeping California in contention to be the first state to go bankrupt as a result of inept politicians.
2)It seems that the COVID government policies implemented in the Biden administration days continue to haunt American tax pacers: fraud, ineptness, bad accounting, you name it. And the COVID fraud continues up in Minnesota:
Federal authorities recently indicted 70 people for a COVID fraud scheme as it related to children’s nutrition programs during the pandemic.
FBI Director, Kash Patel, had some pretty strong words of disgust with the fraud, calling it “as shameless as it gets. Stealing over $250 million from hungry kids during a pandemic to fund mansions and luxury cars… I’m proud of the FBI and our partners for dismantling this web of corruption.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed non-school based food distributors to participate in the feeding of kids during the pandemic but the oversight of the dollars being spent was quite lax.
Those induced allegedly submitted false attendance records, false invoices, and fake meal claims for children that were never fed.
At the peak of COVID, over 300 food distribution sites were thought to be operating around the state but in reality many of the food sites did not exist, they were fictitious and used to launder taxpayer money.
More than half of those indicted, 38, have already pleaded guilty and others are awaiting trial.
As always, it is great that this fraud was identified and those guilty of denying food to kids are hopefully all going to prison. The unsettling aspect of this case, as always, these guys got caught stealing taxpayer wealth. How many other criminal schemes are still unpunished?
3) The Biden administration, as with many other presidencies, launched many programs that fell flat on their face from an implementation and benefits perspective. Biden wanted the Post Office to buy thousands of electric powered Post Office vehicles but at last count, only dozens had been ordered and put in service despite spending billions of dollars. Biden wanted to get fast Internet service to rural America but despite spending billions of dollars, no one has seen that service.
Which brings us the latest Biden program failure:
Previously we had reported how the Biden administration had lost track of possibly over 300,000 illegal immigrant children.
This incompetence has probably caused many of these kids to fall into the hands of sex traffickers, pedophiles, workplace traffickers, and other criminal activities.
In recent Congressional testimony, it was uncovered that while Biden had set up a hotline to help illegal immigrant kids report abuse or seek help for themselves, for 18 months, from August 2023 to when Biden left office, that hotline had been staffed with exactly one person.
The testimony claimed that 65,000 calls to the help hotline went unanswered.
According to testimony, these calls included a boy who called and left the message that “grown men were coming into his room at night, and they were touching him. Nothing happened with that call.”
So disgusting on how the entire Biden administration neglected the needs, safety, and lives of untold thousands of kids, just disgusting.
4) As we have discussed a number of times previously, Zohran Mamdani is the leading candidate to become the next mayor of New York City. He is, in reality, a Communist, who intends to execute the following expensive, incoherent, and/or freedom destroying practices:
Provide free transportation for everyone in the city.
Provide free health care for everyone in the city.
Provide free daycare for everyone in the city.
Destroy the Second Amendment and violate the Constitution by prohibiting the ownership of guns in the city.
Open city owned and operated grocery stores, driving out all other grocers and retail food suppliers resulting in vast food desserts in the city.
Tax the wealthy even more than now, driving wealth and tax dollars out of the city.
Impose rent control/freezes on rental units, causing landlords to cut back on maintenance requirements and reducing the quality of life for those in rental units.
He is against Jews and Israel.
Partha Chakraborty recently wrote an article on the idiocy of his proposals that much more elegantly outlined why they are so stupid and unworkable. Some of her quotes:
“Small grocery stores in the city are primarily run by immigrants, a stepping stone in their American dream. They do have to pay rent and property taxes [unlike Mamdani’s city grocery stores], and muddle through city bureaucracy making them vulnerable to government overreach.”
“Whenever used in the U.S., state-run grocery stores were a cesspool of mismanagement.”
“The proposal to freeze rent is as thoughtless as it gets. It's said that rent control is the most effective way to destroy a city, except for bombing it to smithereens. The housing stock of New York City — especially at the lower end — needs serious investment. Most are managed by mom-and-pop owners, who have labored under onerous regulations making any capital improvement a burden. Many are still reeling from arbitrary rules from the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rent-freeze in a market already at a breaking point will drive existing stock into further decay and cease any fresh supply.”
As I said, the writing of Partha Chakraborty on the issues is much more elegant than my take on the insanity. And she covers other topics as well, e.g. the stupidity of free public transportation, in the following link:
Enough insanity for today: California loses another major business and its tax dollars, more COVID corruption, Biden's lost kids, and why a Communist should not run NYC.
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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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