Tag Archives: political parties

Punishing Success

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Los Angeles has decided that the successful are too successful, and they must be knocked down. To that end, the city’s government has decided to tax the sales proceeds of the wealthy’s homes at 4% on homes sold for $5-$10 million and at 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. This is on top of the real estate brokers’ ordinary 6% fee, and it’s paid by the buyer. Not that that will have any impact on the seller’s ability to sell at a fair price, or anything.

LA isn’t alone in this “mansion tax” move, either. Other jurisdictions, mostly at the State level (it won’t be long before California broadens LA’s move), are doing this, also. They’re all Progressive-Democrat-run, too, all but one of them exclusively so.

  • Connecticut: 2.25% on properties surpassing $2.5 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • District of Columbia: 1.45% on properties sold for $400,000 or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, City Council
  • Hawaii: Marginal rates ranging from 10% to 20% for estates valued over $5.49 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New Jersey: 1% on real estate transactions exceeding $1 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New York: 1% to 3.9% on residential acquisitions of $1 million or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • Vermont: 16% on properties valued over $5 million. Republican Governor, Progressive-Democrat Senate, House
  • Washington: Graduated rates starting at 1.28% for properties sold at a minimum of $500,000. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House

And, to repeat,

  • Los Angeles: 4% on homes sold for more than $5-$10 million and 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. Progressive-Democrat Mayor, City Council

This is behavior of the green-eyed jealous politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party: seizing the produce of success and redistributing it for their own political gain. It’s also just one more incentive for the successful to leave these jurisdictions altogether.

Whine, Whine, Whine

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Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson has joined the Whiners’ Chorus. Now he’s accusing Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott of “attacking” the United States itself.

We have a governor—a governor—an elected official in the state of Texas, that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago where we have homelessness, we have mental health clinics that have been shut down and closed, you have people who are seeking employment.

Leave aside, as Johnson does, the fact that these illegal aliens are volunteers to travel—at Texas’ expense, mind you—to Chicago, and to New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere throughout our nation. Nor are they particularly tired, or cold, or hungry, or traumatized—they’re fed before they get on the bus, and they’re fed on the bus, which itself is warm and the seats sleepable.

The larger, overarching, fact is that Johnson and his cronies in those other cities—Progressive-Democrat Mayors Eric Adams, Karen Bass, et al., are actively inviting, calling come one, come all, those illegal aliens into their cities by loudly proclaiming them to be sanctuary for all illegal aliens. Even at that, the numbers of illegal aliens that these sanctuary cities receive over a period of months is what Texas’ (and Arizona’s) border towns—not even cities, many of them—receive in the course of a day or two to a week.

If Johnson and his were serious about their cities’ claimed level of ability to deal with what they have, with the influx of illegals overlaid, they’d take at least a first step and stop being sanctuaries and instead help get the for illegals deported.

Johnson, in particular, seems to have joined the Let’s Go Brandon chorale.

Eric Adams Has Given Away the Left’s Game

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New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams says he’s down with raising New Yorker’s already sky high taxes along with firing city employees, including cops—[Asked “where the layoffs would begin,” Adams only repeated, “Everything’s on the table”]—and he’s blaming the Federal government for his budget failures. His statement on that last is the tell-all:

Our insurance policy was the federal government. They’re not paying us[.]

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Impeaching Mayorkas

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House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R, TN) is bent on impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his palpable, and dangerous, failure to perform. This is, at best, a fool’s errand since the votes don’t exist in the Senate to get even a serious trial, much less a conviction.

I have a better idea, because of course I do.

Instead of wasting time on impeaching Mayorkas, Green, and the House at large, should exercise the House’s Constitutional control over government spending and move to cancel all funding for much of the Department of Homeland Security until Mayorkas and his Deputy and Assistant Secretaries are gone and the Department has materially improved its performance related to keeping illegal aliens from entering our nation.

Specific DHS agencies that should receive full, if not increased, funding include these:

  • United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • United States Coast Guard
  • US Customs and Border Protection
  • Federal Emergency Management Agency
  • US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
  • United States Secret Service
  • Transportation Security Administration
  • Office of the Inspector General

All the other agencies—and there are 16 more of them, including such strongly overlapping agencies as the Management Directorate, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Partnership and Engagement, and the Office of Public Affairs (there’s a hint there regarding how bloated the Department has become)—should have their funding zeroed out.

Further, the House should refuse to pass any DHS-related bill that does not include these funding reductions.

Red Sea and Political Timidity

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In the wake of repeated Houthi terrorists’ rocket, missile, and drone attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden approaches to the Sea, BP has decided to abandon (BP is saying it’s a “pause”) this shorter and cheaper route and instead to go around Africa altogether to get to the Mediterranean Sea and to ports in Europe. Maersk has already made that decision; other shippers will follow, I predict.

BP’s statement, in part:

The safety and security of our people and those working on our behalf is BP’s priority. We will keep this precautionary pause under ongoing review, subject to circumstances as they evolve in the region.

The safety and security of commercial shipping in international shipping lanes also is the claimed purpose of the US Navy’s Freedom of Navigation operations, wherein our Navy often sails the sea lines of communication, often explicitly sailing contested routing through international waters. Simply sailing through, though, without doing anything other than being momentarily present, doesn’t accomplish much, as the terrorists’ actions in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are so clearly demonstrating.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is pretending to be trying to establish a coalition to protect trade through the Red Sea, but in the meantime, he’s not allowing the Navy to do anything more than shooting at those rockets, missiles, and drones that a couple of its ships can reach after those weapons already have been fired. Biden is not allowing our Navy to take overt and aggressive action to prevent those weapons from being launched in the first place. He’s not, for instance, allowing our Navy to destroy the Houthi’s launch sites throughout Houthi occupied Yemen, much less respond reactively to destroy those facilities involved in a particular attack.

Nor is he allowing our Navy to destroy Iran’s Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman ports, thereby seriously limiting Iran’s ability to supply the terrorists in Yemen.

Regarding his pretend coalition effort, Biden isn’t even working with Saudi Arabia in their effort to defeat the Houthi terrorists and restore the government of Yemen, which currently is resident in Saudi Arabia.

For those who object to the US acting as, spending treasure and equipment to be, the world’s policeman, what’s going on in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is a clear and present demonstration of what happens with a President too timid to act, of what happens when we stop being the world’s policeman.

The US needs to act, whether other nations have the courage to do so or not. If we act, they will follow, or if they don’t, we still will have acted. And we don’t have to extend as much support as we do to those nations happy to freeload off our efforts or too timid to act themselves, even in concert with us. The spending on that support can be reallocated to our policeman role.