More political class insanity from across the country:
1)We have often debated what government entity is the worst run entity operated by the most inept politicians. Candidates for the worst include the states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California. Candidates for the worst run cities include NYC, Baltimore, and San Francisco.
But that discussion almost always leads us to the disaster that is the city of Chicago and it's totally incompetent mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Chicago continues to lead the country when it comes to homicides and the wounding of residents in violent gun crimes. Businesses are leaving the city because of a number of factors including high taxes and the dangers posed by the violence directed at their employees. Residents are leaving the city for the same reasons. Lightfoot totally bungled the whole pandemic effort in the city.
But her latest effort is possibly her worst priority to date for those businesses and residents still in the city:
Rather than hire more police officers, hire more teachers, reduce taxes, and do other projects that might actually improve the quality of life of the city’s folks, Lightfoot recently announced a plan to spend anywhere from $900 million to $2.2 billion to keep the NFL’s Chicago Bear team in their current city stadium, Chicago’s Soldier Field.
The Bears have played their home games in Soldier Field for over 50 years.
However, they are aggressively looking to move their home and their games to a sparkling new stadium in the Chicago suburbs, 30 miles outside of the city limits.
She worked on this project, using city resources and taxpayer wealth despite the fact that the Bears have publicly stated that they are not interested in any renovations of the stadium: “As part of our mutual agreement with the seller of that property (in Arlington Heights, Illinois), we are not pursuing alternative stadium deals or sites, including renovations to Soldier Field, while we are under contract,” stated the team.
Besides getting out of the crime riddled city, the Arlington Heights city has a robust median income over $100,000 and only 4% of the area lives in poverty, certainly an attractive market.
The median income in Chicago is $62,100 and more than 17% of residents live in poverty.
Add the reality that about 800 city residents are likely to be murdered this year and thousands will be wounded and the logic for moving out of the city is obvious.
Lightfoot also had her employees make a website to support her multi-billion dollar effort, “Re-Imagine Soldier Field.”
Keep in mind that the Bears organization is worth about $4.1 billion and earns about $370 million a year in revenue and yet Lightfoot wants to spend a bunch of taxpayer money for the team.
Such a sad, sad set of priorities. Spending possibly over $2 billion while the city schools, city police force, and city financials are spiraling down the drain. Insanity.
2) We have previously discussed the quite disgusting situation in the city of San Francisco where the local political class decriminalized public urination, public defecation, and the public use of illegal drugs. As a result of this insanity, city streets are littered with urine puddles, piles of poop, and used and dangerous drug needles.
This stupidity has caused the city to hire people to build a website so that local city residents could report piles of poop and hire more people to go out and power wash the poop down the sewer drains. This in turn has polluted local streams and rivers, endangering the health of local residents and the health of agricultural products that depend on the water from those streams to grow. A total disaster and waste of taxpayer wealth and health.
And yet, unbelievably, another American city has gone down the same disgusting path despite the incredible and likely negative impact on the quality of life of city residents:
The local politicians in Kalamazoo, Michigan recently decided to decriminalize public urination, public defecation, and littering.
How can any sane person, even a politician, put forth such a law, given that other cities were turned into public cesspools when they made the same decisions?
To justify their thinking, a local politician put forth this type of tripe: “I definitely empathize with the downtown business owners too. They have invested a lot to be in downtown, and a lot of those spots are mom and pop shops where that is their life income. We want to be respectful of that. We hear them. We are listening to them, and we care a lot, but we care about everybody in the community,” City Commissioner Christ Praedel said.
In other words, they know what a disservice we are doing to the majority of the city residents, they know this approach imperils the very existence of the city’s small businesses but they went ahead and did it anyway.
City residents and business owners are not happy, as described by city business owner Becky Bill: “People have to clean up where they have defecated right in front of your door of your business. We can’t have that downtown.”
Cherri Emery, owner of Cherri’s Chocol’art: “I don’t understand why it would be proposed that the law would be less restrictive than it is now. I don’t understand why we would make it easier for them [those that defecate, urinate and litter in public.]
Allowing someone to defecate wherever they want does not solve any problem that this person is having be it mental illness, homelessness, etc. It just enables them without helping them.
Instead, it gives them carte blanch to do what most in society would consider deviant behavior and destroy the quality of life for the rest of the city residents. A classic example where the political class tried to address a societal problem and actually made it worse, not better.
And just like the bungled city governments in San Francisco and Chicago, people and businesses will start to leave and look for a better quality of life for their businesses, employees and families, reducing the tax base and resulting in an eventual financial death spiral. So stupid.
3) Everyone knows that gas prices have skyrocketed since Biden took office due to his stupid, short sighted and ignorant energy policies and plans. And just to be clear, the skyrocketing gas prices started long before Russia invaded Ukraine, an act that Biden and his henchmen are trying to blame for their ineptness when it comes to energy policy.
And one of the most inept of those folks is Biden’s own Secretary of Energy, Pete Buttigieg. Prior to his current government assignment, he was the mayor of a third tier town in Indiana. I do not believe that he has any education, experience, and or skill when it comes to energy but that did not stop Biden from putting him in this critical job.
And like most people in the political class, such as the mayor of Chicago, and the morons in Kalamazoo, they are so out of touch with reality and the issues facing Americans today. As gas prices started to skyrocket, Buttigieg came up with this not so brilliant insight and out of touch attitude that people worried about high gas prices should just buy an all electric car and they would never have to worry about high gas prices again.
A couple of things wrong with this pompous attitude from someone that is likely making several times more than the average American worker:
Electric cars are expensive, much more expensive than regular gas cars so there is a big upfront investment for the consumer who goes electric.
Electric cars do not run on fairy dust, they need electricity, so it is true you will not be paying high gas prices, high prices that people like Buttigieg and Biden caused, you are going to have to pay for the electricity you need to power your gasless car.
And since you can energize a gas car in minutes, you need hours to energize an electric car which wastes your life and your time both of which certainly have a price tag.
Since electric cars cannot go as far as a gas car before needing to be juiced up, this is more time and life wasted.
The resale value of an electric car falls much quicker than the resale value of a gas car, given that at some point an electric car is going to need a massively expensive battery replacement.
Higher upfront investment that tens of millions of Americans cannot afford, low resale value, wasting of valuable time, paying for the electricity to be used in the electric car, etc., does not sound like a good tradeoff. Which brings us to the eternal question we have often posed about American politicians: are they really that ignorant about the world or do they thnk that we are so stupid that we will believe whatever fairy tale they tell us which suits their needs and covers up their failures? We may never know.
That will do it for today: politicians that are out of touch with the economic struggles of most of America, politicians that do stupid stuff even when similar actions to theirs have already destroyed the quality of life elsewhere, and politicians who cannot resolve the big issues facing Americans so they focus on wasting taxpayer wealth on stupid but higher profile actions like subsidizing an NFL football with billions dollars that could be spent elsewhere and do so much more for those in need.
