Love My Country, Loathe My Government: sat

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Sunday, October 27, 2024

October, 2024, Political Class Insanity, Part 3: More Voting Corruption From The Tech Industry,More Failure From The Department of Education, More Violence From Biden's Failed Immigration Policies and More

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 efficiently operating any level of government in this country.

Even their best efforts are almost always 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 discussed dozens of times in this blog how the integrity of the voting processes in this country have become very biased, criminal, corrupted, and fraudulent. And while some of this corruption is generated by disgruntled individuals who are so passionate about an issue or candidate that they will go to great, and sometimes criminal lengths, to impinge on the voting rights of others who disagree with their views.

But much of the corruption of the voting processes in this country has been committed by the major tech platforms in the country: Facebook, Google, and Amazon. And apparently this corruption is still ongoing despite the false claims of executives of these companies.

Rather than trying to explain how they are still corrupting our voting rights, go to the following link to hear a high level Facebook executive, Jeevan Gyawali, brag about how Facebook is deviously affecting elections and in the process, violating the voting rights of you and me:

https://www.blabber.buzz/conservative-news/1061597-watch-meta-senior-engineer-caught-on-camera-admitting-to-this?utm_source=alert-Gmail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=alert&utm_content=5849caf1da9751245ab4d2608bd51513

Another very sad aspect of this behavior is that these folks corrupting our First Amendment rights, do not seem to have any remorse about how they are denying millions of Americans their right to control their lives and fate. Disgusting.

2)There is no doubt that public schools in this country, for the most part, are mostly failures in providing an adequate education to public school students. Our kids routinely perform below dozens of other countries when education attainment tests are administered. ACT and SAT scores have been declining for a long time despite the Department of Education in the Federal government spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.

And it is not just math and reading failures that public schools are responsible for:

Adolph Hitler was one of the worst tyrants and human beings to ever walk the earth.
His fanaticism led to World War II, the most deadly war in the history of humanity.
His hatred of Jews led to the needless deaths of 6 million Jewish people.
But a recent Daily Mail and J.L. Partners' opinion poll found that 21% of Generation Z thought that Hitler actually had some commendable ideas and “good points.”

So add history failures when discussing the failures in math and reading that our public government schools are creating, making the reformation of government public schooling that much more critical.

3)We recently discussed the reality that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, allegedly slugged his girlfriend in the face a number of years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. Obviously, slugging a woman in public should not be held in high esteem.

And apparently and allegedly his bad behavior with this one woman was not isolated to that one incident:

There are new news reports that while married to his first wife, Emhoff had an alleged affair with a teacher at his kids’ school
The teacher got pregnant and there are now accusations that Emhoff was “aggressive” with her, whatever that means.
The teacher eventually lost the baby but did manage to get an $80,000 Non Disclosure Agreement settlement, possibly hush money.

The real hypocrisy of this situation is that the press and Emhoff have tried to present him as a “feminist hero.” If the alleged incidents are true as they have been reported by the news reports and first victim, then the political hypocrisy is alive and real.

4)Over the past few months we have reviewed the havoc and violent crimes that have been committed against innocent American citizens by violent illegal immigrant criminals. These crimes have included rape, murder, and assault. The initial post on this topic can be accessed at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2024/07/bidens-failed-immigration-policies-and.html

A very basic function of any government entity is to protect the lives and property of the citizens they serve. Obviously, Biden's failed immigration policies have not allowed his administration to execute this basic governmental responsibility. And the violence continues as it pertains to illegal immigrants:

An illegal immigrant from Nicaraguan was recently arrested in southeast Florida and charged with assaulting an elderly American woman.
The alleged victim is an 80 year woman who was attacked in her own home after she fell and became unable to move.
The illegal immigrant, Erick Garcia-Gutierrez, was renting a room in the victim’s home and rather than call for help for the fallen woman, he allegedly sexually assaulted her despite her pleas to stop.
He was arrested and charged with first degree felony battery of a physically helpless person.

Another day another victim of Biden’s failed immigration policies.

5)Speaking of Biden’s failed immigration policies, it is not only violent criminals that are flowing into the country to cause havoc on American citizens:

Biden’s porous borders have allowed unimaginable amounts of deadly drugs like fentanyl to flow into the country.
Los Angeles police recently seized a load of fentanyl that was big enough to potentially kill every LA resident.
The police arrested Jose Alberto Soto and charged him with the sale of fentanyl.
A search warrant found over 50 pounds of powdered fentanyl, nine pounds of heroin and $14,500 in cash.
Those 50 pounds could theoretically kill 11 million people.
The street value of the fentanyl was estimated at $4 million.
Nationwide, fentanyl overdoses kill about 75,000 Americans a year.

A lot of people unnecessarily died as a result of Biden’s broken immigration policies with drug overdose fatalities just being one aspect of his policies. As with many other Biden’s failed policies, the basic function of government to protect the lives and property of American citizens is never a priority of his administration.

That will do it for today: violent failure of Biden’s immigration policies, Kamala’s husband is maybe not feminist friendly, public schools continue to disappoint, and Facebook and other tech companies continue to corrupt our voting processes and our First Amendment rights.

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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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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:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

mRNA

Thursday, October 26, 2023

October, 2023, Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Fleeing From New York, Failures of San Francisco Politicians, and the Department of Education's 44 Year Failure

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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