Monthly Archives: May 2026

Symptomatic

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Alex Shepherd, writing in the 7 May edition of the Left-wing The New Republic, exposed the core position of the Progressive-Democratic Party going into this fall’s mid-term elections and the continuing run toward the 2028 Presidential election.

…the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.

That’s it. That’s the sum of what Party has on offer for the coming election cycles. No substantive policies to tout and to contrast with Republican or Trumpian policies. Nothing to say about how their positions are better than Republicans’ or Trump’s for our nation.

Just anti-Trump, no to all things Trumpian or Republican, Never Trump.

A party with no substance, only anti-ism and hate, is a party that cannot be trusted with the reins of power.

“Politically Viable Tax”

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That’s what New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Party and Democratic Socialists of America Party mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking for in order to address the city’s budget shortfall.

This is yet another installment in Party politicians’ cynical (I say) effort to raise ever more taxes in order to cover ever more spending, or as so often is the case with Party’s resolutely profligate spending, to “chip away” at the budget deficits and resulting debts that Party’s habits create.

It’s instructive that Mamdani wants to raise taxes in whatever way he can get away with. It’s further instructive that he can’t—no Party politician can, it seems—conceive of cutting spending, if not overall, at least in those areas not part of his social(ist) program, in order to free up non-deficit and -debt inducing spending for his goals. Mamdani can’t even conceive of simply reallocating existing spending goals to achieve his social(ist) goals.

This ever-increasing taxing is what New York City voters affirmatively chose to inflict on themselves, and it’s a threat the rest of us face if we don’t choose more wisely in our own coming elections, from the national level on down to our city and village levels.

New Style Job Hunting

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FCC commissioner and sole Progressive-Democrat agency member Anna Gomez wrote a letter in her official capacity to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro (Disney owns ABC) advising him that the FCC’s investigations of ABC were nothing more than a weaponization of the FCC and a campaign to censor news media.

It’s bad enough that a Federal government bureaucrat would so blatantly seek to blow up an agency action with which she disagrees, and she should be fired on that ground alone.

It gets worse, though, as the news writer at the link noted at the end of his piece.

In her letter, Gomez pledged to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

Gomez knows full well that she won’t successfully block the FCC’s investigation; she can only cast those public aspersions. This isn’t an FCC Commissioner seeking fairness and justice in a government action. This is a Federal government bureaucrat trying to burnish her resume and set up her job hunt, first with Disney or ABC, for when she leaves government. This is abusive even for revolving door bureaucratic practice.

Don’t Mention Cutting Spending

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Don’t you dare. The newly proposed Australian budget contains some tax cuts here, some tax structural changes nearby, and some tax increases there.

The tax cuts and structural changes are small steps in the right direction. The tax increases, though, are rationalized in this way: Saul Eslake, ex-Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in Australia is claiming, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

If the process of reform is to be extended from here, policy makers should consider increasing and/or broadening the country’s goods-and-services tax to repair the revenue side of the federal budget and help ease the significant tax burden faced by wage earners and companies[.]

“Repair the revenue side?” What’s to repair? It isn’t the government’s money; it belongs to the good citizens of Australia. Their government only takes the money away from them; any seeming shortfalls in collections are nothing less than more money in those citizens’ hands.

And this from Shane Oliver, AMP Ltd‘s Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist:

If you do one reform without looking at income tax, then you miss the bigger picture[.]

There are two things wrong with these criticisms. One is the utter lack of justification for the amount of money the government collects through its taxing regime, whether current or as proposed. That “need” is simply assumed as received wisdom. The other is the equally utter lack of consideration of government spending cuts. The supposed necessity of current (or increased) spending levels also is simply assumed as received wisdom, albeit the spending is occasionally weasel-wordedly justified by announced social need—but even that isn’t seriously justified, merely announced from on high.

If Australia—and others, including us—want serious, durable prosperity, it’s necessary to cut taxes and cut spending further. That’s not austerity, no matter how hysterically the Left generally proclaims it to be. Leaving more money in the hands of the citizens is not austerity being inflicted on them, it’s their prosperity being restored to them. And that’s the bigger picture that Oliver is missing.

British Local Elections

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The UK just concluded a round of local elections, and the wreckage was extensive for the nation’s two (now erstwhile) dominant political parties. Those local elections were wide ranging. Of the total number of local seats (of all types of “local”), 40% or 5,000 were up for grabs. Those 5,000 ran the local gamut:

Every level of government below the London parliament was up for grabs: the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales; the patronage-rich regional assemblies and mayoralties of the English provinces; the big-city, big-spending borough councils of London, Manchester, and Birmingham; and the hundreds of village and neighborhood wards.

The outcome was

  • Reform UK: additional 1,453 seats, control of 14 councils
  • Liberal Democrats: additional 155 seats
  • Greens: additional 441 seats, control of five councils
  • independents [sic]: additional 34 seats, now totaling 205
  • Conservatives: lost 563 seats, 6 of their 15 councils
  • Labour: lost 1,496 seats, 38 of their 66 councils
  • 64 councils now have no overall control

Some 3rd grade arithmetic. Reform UK’s 1460+ seats represent 29% of the seats up for grabs. That’s almost 12% of the total such seats.

If that momentum continues, it’ll likely be bye-bye to both Labour and Conservatives in ’29, which is the latest by which this British Government must call elections, a call that’s controlled by the majority party, so far, Labour. That deadline stands unless Labour can engineer a successful no-confidence vote against their current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. That, though, would bring forward the demise of Labour and Conservatives both.

Would Labour dare? It’s already about to become irrelevant as its internal civil war over who will lead the party (much less be the government’s Prime Minister) is beginning to generate the party’s rapid unscheduled disassembly. Still, there is an upside to a successful no-confidence vote; the ensuing general election will drag the Conservatives into the dust bin with them. Labour, after all, would be loathe to see the Conservatives survive them.