We have been spending a lot of time lately dissecting the race to bankruptcy court, i.e. what state government or city government will go bankrupt first. Many Democratic states and cities have already entered into financial death spirals as their taxpayer base erodes but the politicians running these cities and states cannot or will not reduce government spending or make government operations more efficient to cope with the shrinking tax base.
The last two posts on this topic can be found at the following links:
https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-proof-that.html
https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-california.html
However, we will take a break from this bankruptcy race and discuss some good old fashioned political class insanity for the next few posts.
1)One of the most idiotic movements over the past few years has been the "defund the police” hysteria. As a result of the George Floyd situation, many mayors and governors have pressed for massive reductions in police budgets and staffing in favor of having them replaced with social workers.
The faulty reasoning was that in many difficult situations a calm, unarmed social worker is better equipped to talk a crazy person into submission than armed, trained police officers. As a result of this hysteria, crime has risen significantly in cities like New York City and Los Angeles. Police enforcement and staffing has been severely reduced, with significant morale declines in police officers’ morale, without any alternative to cover for the situations that the police forces could no longer handle or were not allowed to handle.
And a nasty situation in Boston showed how stupid the defund the police actually was:
Boston police officers recently responded to a 911 call that claimed there were four people with guns in an apartment building.
Once police located the position, they called in a mental health social worker from Boston’s BEST program to help out in the dangerous situation.
The BEST program is supposed to make use of non-police social workers to “de-escalate” potentially violent and criminal situations.
Once on site, there were not four people but one individual involved inside a locked apartment.
The social worker spent upwards of an hour talking to the individual through the locked apartment door in an attempt to calm him and eliminate the situation.
Eventually, the individual opened the locked apartment door, brandished a sword, stabbed an accompanying police officer in the arm with the sword and knocked the social worker to the ground.
Police fired at the attacking, sword waving individual who eventually died from his wounds.
Both the stabbed police officer and social worker were taken to the hospital and treated for their injuries.
A great example of how defunding the police and replacing them with social worker types was and is not a good idea.Thank goodness the social worker had a police presence with them or who knows how seriously the sword waving individual would have injured/killed the unarmed social worker.
People in criminal or mental health situations are not likely to be calmed down very often by a social worker trying to reason with them. They are in a bad and potentially violent situation to begin with, they are unlikely to be easily talked down off the ledge without violence.
But politicians that have no experience in dealing with these types of situations forced the “defund the police” programs into reality, endangering citizens, social workers, and police officers. How would a “defund the police” advocate feel after they came face to face with a hysterical man waving a sword at them? I would bet their attitude and view of defunding would be changed.
2)Many of our recent posts discussing what state and city will go bankrupt first discussed the reality that one symptom of a state or city in a financial death spiral is that residents and businesses migrate out of the city or state to find less taxing and better quality of life options.
For example, we have often listed out the big corporations that have taken all or major portions of their business operations out of California: Tesla, Toyota, Chevron, Yamaha, Schwab and others. These businesses take their taxable income out of the state along with the taxable income of their employees that leave with them. This all reduces economic vitality and the tax base and accelerates the race to bankruptcy.
But it is not just the big businesses that politicians are driving out of their states and cities. While Portland, Oregon is not one of our prime candidates to go bankrupt very soon, the city has also begun its decline: businesses and residents leaving the city because of high taxes, high crime rates, high homeless rates, and dysfunctional politicians that have really messed up the police force via the defund the police obsession.
Consider the plight and final decision of a small business in Portland as they announced on their Facebook page:
“After 20 years of dedicated service, Hookset Automotive is permanently closing its doors. We are joining a mass exodus of small businesses fleeing this city—a movement the local news continues to ignore.
We are leaving because of the crushing weight of taxes, unsustainable prices, and rampant crime. However, the final deciding factor was the realization that there is absolutely zero protection from the authorities. In fact, our experience proved that the police will actively work against you.
The breaking point for us was a harrowing eight-hour ordeal where we were held prisoner on our own property from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. We were locked in like animals in a kennel, and when we reached out for the protection we are supposed to be guaranteed as citizens:
The Portland Police arrived, saw we were being detained, and then deliberately left us locked in.
The Police Sergeant blocked our rescue by labeling our captivity a "civil matter."
The Fire Department was ready to intervene until the Police Sergeant explicitly ordered them to stand down and abandon us.
I have released a full video detailing exactly what happened during those eight hours. You can find the video on YouTube, Spotify, or my public Facebook page under our podcast: Joints and Friends.
If the "idiots running this city" and the police themselves will watch business owners be held captive and do nothing, then you are no longer safe in Portland. We can no longer operate in a place where the rule of law has been replaced by state-sanctioned abandonment.
To our loyal customers: thank you for 20 years. We are leaving for our own safety and to find a community where businesses are actually protected.
Hookset Automotive is CLOSED. Portland is no longer a safe place to be.
PLEASE SHARE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
We need your help. There are a lot of good people left in this town and they need your help. Please help us by sharing this. It's the only way from stopping it from happening again.”
Again, Portland is not a top candidate to go bankrupt soon. But it is also having the symptoms of cities that are closer to bankruptcy: businesses fleeing to safer, better business environment situations. Whether city politicians figure out quick enough what they are causing to happen in Portland and other cities is open to debate: but if past ignorance of basic business and economic theory is any indication, the Hookset Automotive out migration will not be the last business fleeing the city, reducing the tax base and draining a little economic
vitality out of the city.
3)Based on the excellent work done by DOGE and journalist Nick Shirley, we are just beginning to understand how the American political class has allowed untold trillions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted over the decades via crime, corruption, and inefficiencies. In fact, we will be embarking on a series of posts soon in possibly a vain attempt to cover all of the wealth wasting that all levels of American government is causing.
But today, let’s discuss just one of the criminal efforts to steal American tax dollars:
A Federal investigation code named "Operation Never Die” has resulted in the arrests of a noted California psychologist and his wife.
Gladwin Gill and his wife, nurse Amelou Gill, allegedly ran a fake hospice operation, 626 Hospice Inc. that did business as St. Francis Palliative Care.
According to a Department of Justice report: “The Gills allegedly schemed to defraud Medicare by paying illegal kickbacks for the referral of patients who were not dying, The Gills also submitted more than $5.2 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare for hospice services that either were not medically necessary or were not provided. Medicare paid the Gills more than $4 million on these fraudulent claims. They then laundered the scheme’s proceeds and spent their ill-gotten gains on personal expenses such as mortgage payments, car payments, international flights, restaurants, and personal bills.”
The New York Post reported that Gill was not shy about showing off his ill gotten wealth, “posting photos alongside celebrities like Mario Lopez, George Clooney, President George W. Bush and Salt Bae.”
The Gills allegedly signed up people that were not terminally ill and then faked the medical records.
How many homeless folks in California could that $5.2 million fed and sheltered? How many people without health insurance could have gotten medical care with that $5.2 million? Disgusting what people will do to steal other people’s tax dollars and disgusting that the American political class has allowed it to happen for so long while millions of Americans are in need.
Enough political class insanity for today: just a single criminal operation in California stole over $5 million of taxpayer wealth, Portland is also in a financial death spiral, and more evidence that defund the police was a dumb and dangerous idea to implement without first testing its viability.
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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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