Category Archives: politics

An Interesting Exercise

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

In parallel with that and for each of those same five years, she needs to release detailed line-item actual expenditures, supported by receipts for each expenditure, for every step of the supply/expense chain from allocation through intermediate purchases/expenses—including identifying intermediate and final suppliers, wages suppliers paid for production of each item at that stage of the chain, the services and hard goods bought, the date of each purchase, the date of actual delivery of each purchase—through to final allocated-for product delivery and the date of that final delivery. For those projects not yet completed and those items not yet finally delivered, she needs to release the originally scheduled dates, their current status, and concrete, measurable reason(s) for the delay, if any.

The exercise, also, would be as informative as it would be interesting.

Trump’s “Chaotic exit from White House”

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That’s opening of the subheadline of a Wall Street Journal article concerning former President Donald Trump’s (R) last days in office. One remark jumped out at me, though, from a former aide.

If you only start packing with two days left to go, you’re just running low on time. And if he’s the one just throwing things in boxes, who knows what could happen?

Aside from the foolishness of assuming Trump was the one doing the packing, this is a canonical example politicians and bureaucrats (and pressmen) being unable to understand moving at the speed of business rather than at the speed of politics. A hectic departure, most probably, but there’s no reason to believe chaotic. Not by a businessman.

A former Trump aide, though? Trump isn’t perfect; his White House staff and the Executive Branch agencies for which he was responsible for staffing consisted of hundreds of persons, if not thousands. Nor has Trump been perfect in his selections—see his initial choice for Attorney General and his choice for FBI Director for a couple of his more famous personnel mistakes.

What’s the basis for claiming chaos out of hecticality? Besides the claimants’ (assuming this unidentified source actually exists) confusion, I mean.

Just the News Has a Question

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The news outlet ran a poll over the weekend. The question was this:

How concerned are you that additional IRS funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will lead to more audits for typical taxpayers?

As of Sunday morning, the enormously unscientific poll—consisting solely of JtN readers—was running 96% Extremely concerned.

Keep in mind that the IRS has been targeting Conservatives and conservative organizations at least since early in the Obama administration (if not sooner; that’s just when it became exposed).

Keep in mind, too, that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, since Obama’s first Presidential campaign, have characterized typical taxpayers as merely bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country, as irredeemable and deplorable, as 15% of us being just no good.

How is this even a question?

It’s Not Just the Moms

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First, the President Joe Biden/Attorney General Merrick Garland (each Progressive-Democrats) Department of Justice designated angry and enthusiastic mothers at school board meetings as domestic terrorists and Garland had his FBI begin investigating them as such.

Now the Biden administration are hinting around that average Americans who are angry over the FBI raid in former President Donald Trump’s (R) Mar-a-Lago home and the exploding security failure at our southern border might be terrorists, also.

Americans angry about the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida estate and insecurity at the southern border pose an increased risk of domestic terrorism, the Biden administration warned in a series of bulletins sent to federal and local law enforcement over the weekend.

And

“Last night, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice issued a Joint Intelligence Bulletin, accessible via the Homeland Security Information Network, providing information on the potential for domestic violent extremists to carry out attacks on federal, state, and local law enforcement and government personnel or facilities,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus wrote in a memo to 60,000 employees.

This is a general warning about all of us Americans, not just the tiny few who are prone to violence. A tinier few than the antifa, BLM, Ruth Sent Us, Jane’s Revenge, et al., arsonists, rioters, terrorists toward whom Garland and his FBI have chosen to turn a blind eye.

Magnus, again:

Since the search, the FBI and DHS have observed an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities.

Yet, the FBI has chosen, repeatedly, to not “observe” the violent threats posted on social media by individuals who engaged in mass shootings or those posted by antifa, BLM, Ruth Sent Us, Jane’s Revenge, et al.

We’re all terrorists, those 10s of millions of us average Americans who won’t kowtow, according to this Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled government.

0% Inflation

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That’s what President Joe Biden (D) said, just a few days ago, when overall inflation came out unchanged in July vs June. (I’ll elide, here, the year-on-year inflation rate of 8.5% in July, which is a little different from 0%.)

Today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Here is what that means: while the price of some things went up last month, the price of other things went down by the same amount.

Among those things whose price went up is food, which all of us need for survival, even as we don’t need gasoline or airline tickets just to survive.

…in July, food prices accelerated further, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday. The food at home category, which tracks the cost of groceries, surged 13.1% over the last year, the most significant increase since March 1979. On a monthly basis, prices jumped 1.4%.

The increase in the cost of food for our families was somewhat more than zero. In fact, annualized, that 1.4% month-to-month increase works out to 18.2%, even larger than that realized annual increase of 13.1%.

Biden is determined to make a big deal about one short-term inflation statistic, and he’s equally determined to pretend another short-term inflation statistic, one that’s critical to families, doesn’t exist. He’s speaking Newspeak, not English.