Tag: blue state

The Reckoning

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I am fascinated by the spectacle of the deep blue states like California and New York.  These places are something like 60% Democrat, 40% Republican so there is no meaningful hope of conservative policies being enacted.  Even when they elect a Republican as governor it’s with a Democrat super-majority in the legislative houses.  So, nothing will change the social policies and even the ruinous fiscal policies can only be tweaked slightly because the public sector unions won’t allow their gravy trains to be interfered with and these entitlements make up an enormous part of the state’s fiscal burdens.

And with all that said, it looks like the days of reckoning may finally be upon these places.  I watched the New York State Governess Hochul begging former New York billionaires who’ve moved to Florida to forgive her and her exorbitant business taxes and ruinous environmental policies and absurd energy costs and come back to New York.  Pretty please with sugar on top.  This was during an interview on Politico about the eroding tax base and its impact on the progressive agenda that New York City Mayor Mamdani was proposing and for which he needed Hochul to approve even more ruinous increases in taxes on corporations and the wealthy.  She tried to explain to the doofus from Politico that places like Florida and Texas don’t have state income taxes and lure corporations like J P Morgan and Tesla out of New York and California by letting them keep most of their money in exchange for bringing jobs and prosperity to their neighborhoods.

And I noted that the two highest ranking candidates in the field for the California governor’s primary are both Republicans.  And since they’ve combined all parties in the primary and then allow only the two highest vote getters into the general election it’s possible that no Democrats will get on the ballot.  Now of course the Democrats in a place like California will do whatever they have to do to rig the election so I’m sure they’ll have a Democrat on the ballot.

But that’s neither here nor there.  The interesting situation is that both of these states (and several other deep blue states) are staring down a complete fiscal meltdown of such mammoth proportions that junk bond status for their state debt is the least of their worries.  And honestly if the Republicans had any brains at all they would refuse to even run any candidates for state office at all.  They should just walk away and let this catastrophe hit their states right between the eyes.  There are so many facets of their situations that are dysfunctional that the next four years may finally wipe out all trace of credibility for the Democrat party.  With the banks leaving New York and the tech companies abandoning California I foresee all those public union retirement funds going completely unfunded very soon.  And with all those baby boomers retiring it will sound like a convention of scorched cats outside the offices in Sacramento and Albany for the foreseeable future.

So, Republicans, get wise to the situation and just step back and watch these bozos get what’s coming to them good and hard.

Snow and Sales and the Death of Cities

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A very interesting day.  We got about a foot of snow and the wind has been pretty wild so I decided to wait until Tuesday to move the white stuff.  Wednesday I’ve got to bring Camera Girl’s car to a new mechanic and then go to work so it’ll be a quiet day on the site.  The price reduction on the e-book of “The Sniper” is starting to have an effect.  I reached 500 on the techno-thriller list and got below 100,000 on the Amazon overall book sales list.  I know it’s not something to write home about but it was a big jump.

Hans G. Schantz, a science fiction author I correspond with kindly reposted my announcement on X about the e-book price drop on his X feed.  And since he has orders of magnitude more readers that I do I got hundreds of people looking in and one fellow not only reposted but also bought a copy of the book.  So that was fun.

I was looking around on YouTube and my feed included a video from someone called Sophia Miller entitled “Mayor Mamdani ERUPTS After BlackRock OFFICIALLY Exits New York For Good!”  Well, I watched that video and then I watched one about Chicago and then one about Illinois and two about California.

And you know, it occurred to me that the blue states are getting ready to either implode financially or confiscate the value of the homes of their citizens to pay off the public sector pension plans they’ve underfunded.

That’s a remarkable situation.  The blue states have driven away all of the corporations that used to pay the taxes that allowed them to buy the votes of municipal and state employees who now are ready to retire on gold-plated pension plans.  Things are about to get very, very ugly.  Chicago doubled the property taxes on some working-class Chicagoans.  Mamdani is talking about raiding the New York City workers pension plans and raising property taxes by 10%.  But along with that increase will come extremely frightening revaluations of homes.  Couple this with the flight out of the city of many of the Wall Street banks and financial companies like Black Rock and JP Morgan and what is coming up is a New York City budget gap in the billions of dollars.  And that will begin the death spiral for New York as the financial capitol of the world.  Without Wall Street, New York is a basket case with eight million people living in a crime ridden environment that suffers from expensive, crumbling infrastructure that it can no longer afford to maintain.

Well, maybe that’s why Mamdani is mayor.  Maybe they needed a stooge to absorb the punishment.  This will be an awful crash for the people living there and horrible for the people who didn’t vote for this idiot.  But it has to be done.  My only worry is that Trump will try to step in and save the idiots from themselves.  This needs to be allowed to play out to the final iteration.  Because the sinking of New York City will also sink New York State, Kathy Hochul needs to be destroyed in this disaster too.  All of them deserve it and their downfall will provide a powerful lesson for idiots all across the country.  Stupid kills.

 

 

 

 

 

Good Luck Then!

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Rolling blackouts, whole towns burned off the face of the Earth, multimillion-dollar shacks, endemic rampant crime, homeless encampments everywhere, endless drug addicts, legislated anti-white hate, LGBTQ lunacy, hopeless energy policies and an unaffordable cost of living.  I could go on but why bother?  California has become emblematic of absurd progressive policies and the disastrous effects they’ve caused.

And now when the wealthier parts of Los Angeles are literally going up in smoke some people are wondering if this is the moment when the Californians will turn away from the Democrats and bring in the Republicans to fix the mess.  Well, they might.  But if the Republicans are smart, they won’t sign up for the job.  Specifically, no Republican in his right mind should run for or even accept if appointed to the governorship of California.  Well, let me qualify that.  If the citizens of California also elected a majority of Republicans to the legislature too, then it might have some value.  If all of the insane laws that have been passed in the last thirty years could be cancelled and the state could be put back onto a rational basis then it might work.  But short of that it’s a death trap.  Look what happened to poor hapless Arnold Schwarzeneggar.  The voters elected him to clean up the mess from their previous feckless Democrat governor but basically all he could do was preside over the freak show that the Democrat super-majorities in the legislature ordained.  Of course, he really didn’t put up any fight at all.  So, nobody remembers him fondly.  And the state continued its slide into ruin right on schedule during his term.

Just as when we talk about New York trying to save a sinking ship, the reality of who the voters are in California has to be faced.  The state has an enormous illegal alien population and an equally enormous population of people living off the government in one way or another.  None of these people will ever vote for a Republican or anyone else who promises to balance the books.  No, the system will have to crash so hard that the welfare checks stop getting delivered before the bread and circus crowd will pay attention to how bad things are going.

So where does that leave things?  Well, it looks like any frame houses in Los Angeles are just waiting for the wind and the arsonists to find them.  If I lived in LA, I think I’d get together with my neighbors and cut down all the trees and shrubs in the neighborhood and haul them away.  Then I’d invest in fire-proofing materials to protect my house.  But most importantly, I’d sell my house at whatever price I can get and move out of the Golden State as fast as I possibly could.  Because every time some new atrocity appears on the ground everyone declares that it can’t possibly get any worse and in fact this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and things will get better.  Well, I don’t think that is even remotely the case.  I think it will get phenomenally worse as more people leave.  The tipping point is already here and we’re just waiting for something like this fire season to find out things like there’s no water in the fire hydrants and the firefighters are now overweight lesbians who won’t be able to carry anyone out of burning buildings and the city has cut the budget for the fire department to pay for DEI training.

And that’s just for something minor like wildfires.  What happens when there’s a major earthquake?  Good luck then.

Scenes from a Family Gathering

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I was at a gathering of the clan today and that’s always fun.  The younger generations are beginning to take their place at the table and unsurprisingly they’re beginning to sound almost as cynical as their ancient ancestors.  I spent a goodly amount of the day just enjoying the banter and intra-familial mockery.

But I did find the time to check in with some of the folks I don’t have a chance to see as often.  And this was interesting.  These are folks who aren’t constantly obsessed with the political situation.  They’re busy with work.  They live in the belly of the beast in NYC and they have no illusions about changing the political status quo.  But even among these folks there was a deep abiding anger and a sense that we’re reaching a breaking point.

One guy in particular was very angry about the sexual “transitioning” of children.  He was incensed that medical associations and world-renowned hospitals were championing what he considered criminal malpractice against children.  I had no idea how upset he was about this.  He said he hoped that these hospitals and the doctors involved would be sued into bankruptcy and would even face prison sentences for what was in his mind medical child abuse.

I told him that this one aspect of the woke culture seemed to be the one that was most likely to be rejected out of hand by people and even governments because it had the potential to cause a revolt of a clear majority of the population.  And I wondered if it could be the trigger for rejecting other parts of the woke agenda.

Another conversation I had today was about the story of the homeless guy who robbed and beat up the man who gave him the coat off his own back.  Apparently, the comments by Mayor Adams trying to excuse the crime as being the result of “pain” had outraged large sections of working-class New Yorkers and reinforced the nature of the broken criminal justice system in the city.  This other fellow I was talking to was of the opinion that it would be very hard to get a jury to convict the subway Samaritan, Daniel Penny because all of the witnesses in the subway car are adamant that he was justified in subduing the berserk homeless man who was terrorizing the women on the train.  And many of these witnesses were minorities.

I told him I wasn’t so sure of that.  After all the prosecution will probably be allowed carte blanche in cherry picking the jurors for the sake of diversity.  But I did agree that conditions in New York were getting so bad that even leftists were losing patience with the revolving door arrests, rampant shoplifting and terrifying violent lawlessness.

And then we finished with the meal and moved on to the desserts.  I confess to eating way too much cake and washing it down with good coffee.  The long drive home gave me a chance to think a little bit about how the current chaos is playing inside the blue bastions like New York City.  It’s starting to get to them.  The damage being done is substantial and even the true believers are getting punchy.  Will this change the votes in November?  Nope.  But it also tells me that the breaking point is getting much closer.  And when it finally cracks things will change, one way or the other.  What’s the expression?  What can’t continue, won’t.

A Capitalist Tells CNN the Truth About Investing in Blue States

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Don Lemon and his colleagues sit in shock as Kevin O’Leary tells them the sad truth that states like NY, NJ, MA and CA are dead zones for capital investment and new businesses.  Shockingly Lemon seems like the most realistic of the three “journalists” getting the news.  Pretty funny to watch.

The Absurdity of Republican Governors in Blue States

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The linked article describes how Andrew Cuomo’s refusal to resign following his twin scandals of killing off all of New York State’s old people with COVID and groping all the women who work for him has opened up an opportunity for a Republican to be elected as Governor next year.  Oh, joy.

I lived for decades in a state that typically goes through a cycle of one or two terms of a Democrat governor followed by four or five terms of Republican governors.  How it works is that a Democrat governor does so much fiscal and public safety harm during just a few years in office that even the ideologues in the blue state population realize that their livelihoods and lives are at risk.  So, they allow a Republican to come in and right the ship.

But the Republican governor is so grateful to be allowed to fix their mess that he bends over backward to be indistinguishable from a Democrat on social issues.  The state I refer to is Massachusetts and they brought in William Weld and his two subordinates and then Mitt Romney to clean up the Mike Dukakis mess.  Then after they let the Barack Obama Mini-Me (Deval Patrick) crash the Massachusetts Miracle for eight years they had to bring in Charlie Baker to stop the hemorrhaging and allow the state to revive.

Why exactly Blue State Republicans are willing to fulfill this role for their progressive constituencies is a mystery to me.  I suppose they are attached to their homes and always hope that a permanent equilibrium is possible.  But this is a fool’s hope.  Just looking at Massachusetts, or even more vivid, New York City’s mayoral history will demonstrate that the fiscal and public safety sanity that a Republican leader provides will eventually convince the progressive population that they have nothing to fear by installing a lunatic like Deval Patrick or Bill de Blasio.  And once the inevitable happens they still only grudgingly accept the prescription that a Republican reformer brings to them and chafe at its requirements to hold people accountable regardless of favored racial and sexual status.

So, you get this predictable oscillation, up and down, for crime and poverty and chaos.  The question remains why the Republicans bother.  It will never get better and they will never get credit for keeping their constituencies from destroying themselves.  Places like California, New York and New England should be allowed to destroy themselves without interference from the people they so obviously despise.  This is the accelerationist argument and over time I’ve come to adopt it wholeheartedly.  It will only be after one of these places crashes completely that the people who are left might learn enough to know that the things they believe in are irrational and unsustainable in the real world.

So, I wholeheartedly agree with ridiculing the people who run these states and highlighting for everyone to see how awful the outcomes of their policy choices are.  But I object to the Right, such as it still exists in these places, pulling their chestnuts out of the fire.  Things need to get so bad that even the elites that formulate these nonsensical polices are made to suffer the consequences.  Probably, from my point of view, the perfect outcome would be for the inhabitants to revert to cannibalism and eat Bill Gates and Nancy Pelosi off of a spit.  In that way they could see the racial justice they strive for brought to fruition and also do their part for sustainability.  After all, in California there is an almost inexhaustible supply of white progressives and I can think of no higher use to put them to than as entrees on a community barbecue menu.