Category Archives: jobs

Funding the Police

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Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) wants to do that, so he’s introducing the David Dorn Back the Blue Act that would authorize DoJ to

raise the salaries of state and local police forces all across the country—except in cities that have chosen to defund law enforcement in the wake of nationwide protests and riots.

And

If the bill becomes law, police departments will have new federal funding at their disposal allowing them to increase the salaries of officers “up to 110 percent of the local median earnings, and would exclude cities that defund their police[.]”

Hawley is on the right track, but there needs to be an important adjustment to his bill. Rather than simply providing Federal funding to those cities, those funds should be matching funds, requiring the cities to put up their own salary-increasing funds before getting any Federal monies (I claim the matching ratio should require the receiving city to put up at least 50% of the increase). Otherwise, the city would simply shift the cost of the increase onto taxpayers from other States, taxpayers who have their own police departments to support.

Protection

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…and extortion. Leaders of many unions are threatening exactly that if they don’t their way.

Unions representing millions of workers, from teachers to truck drivers, pledged to ramp up protests in the leadup to the presidential election, with walkouts aimed at forcing local and federal lawmakers to pass police reform and address what they described as systemic racism.

Actually, it’s the union leaders:

…labor leaders from America’s biggest public and private sector unions said they would organize walkouts….

More the public sector than private sector unions: AFSCME, SEIU, and NEA.

And here’s the crux of it; “systemic racism,” “police reform,” these are just smoke screens:

…redistribute the stolen wealth of the billionaire class….

Pay the vig, suckas. Nice business, nice economy you got there….

Let Them Pound Sand

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Here is the Marie Antoinette double standard of the Progressive-Democratic Party rubbed in our faces. In Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) San Francisco, yet.

Gyms within government buildings in San Francisco have been open for months, despite privately owned establishments being ordered to close due to the coronavirus.

Wow. The brazen chutzpah of Party.

An Urging

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New York State’s governor, Andrew Cuomo (D), has taken to asking those who’ve left the State to return—especially the rich and especially to New York City.

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio (D), has taken a more blasé attitude. He’s in the What, Me Worry? camp; folks will come back. Even the rich.

I have to ask, though.

Why would anyone want to return to New York City? De Blasio has made the place unlivable, and the Internet has made the place unnecessary.

Student Debt

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In an article about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s plan for reducing student loan-centered debt, The Wall Street Journal asked

What do you think would be an effective way to reduce student loan debt in the US?

Getting government out of the way of the economy so graduates can get jobs and pay their debts is the first and most critical step.

For the future, we need to require colleges and universities to publish the median and mean first-five-year annual incomes for their various majors.

In addition, we need to require colleges and universities, either individually or as consortia, to be the sole lenders of last resort to their students

We also need to remove government altogether from the student loan industry, as lender, as loan guarantor, and from any other role.

Finally, the only legitimate way for graduates to reduce their student loans short of repayment is through ordinary bankruptcy. We need to force our government to eliminate its ban on bankruptcy discharge of student debt.

Biden’s “plan” unfairly singles out private colleges/universities by not having their students’ debts ameliorated, a deliberate attempt to punish them; he’ll only mitigate the student debts for graduates of public schools and those who were cheated (under his definition of cheating) by for-profit schools.

Even worse, by making it so students don’t have to repay all of their debt through his forgiveness bit, Biden will greatly diminish, if not destroy, the student loan market, shifting the whole thing onto the backs of taxpayers, unless the methods outlined above are enacted.