Seattle Is Following A Disastrous Route.

HOW TO DESTROY A MAJOR CITY: One Week After Passing Massive Head Tax, Seattle Democrats Consider Huge Property Tax Increase

Photo by Karen Ducey/Getty Images

ByBEN SHAPIRO

@BENSHAPIRO

May 23, 2018

One week after passing a head tax on major businesses located in Seattle, including Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks, the Seattle City Council is now considering an enormous property tax on the people who work at those businesses. According to Q13 FOX, King County homeowners already saw a bump of 17% in their property taxes in 2017, but City Council members want property taxes increased even more:

Council members Lorena Gonzalez and Rob Johnson are sponsoring the measure, which states the council wants to lift the limit on regular property taxes in order to levy additional taxes. … In 2014, Seattle voters approved a $58 million levy allowing low-income kids to go to preschool for free. Since 2015, the city says the program has allowed affordable or free preschool to 850 families. Now the city wants to send hundreds more to preschool. Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Office is also pushing to send high school graduates to community college for free.

The property tax would amount to, on average, more than another $250 per year for homeowners.

The homelessness problem in Seattle has continued to snowball (as John Stossel and Maxim Lott point out at Reason.com, Seattle’s building code is 745 pages, and the residential building code is another 685 pages); the Seattle City Council has focused far more on “road diets” — narrowing roads via bike lanes — than on the quality of traffic; King County has spent billions on useless light rail. But now they want to bust homeowners’ wallets again — after instituting a $15 minimum wage and a head tax.

This is how Leftist governance destroys thriving major cities. First, you create building codes. That raises rents. Then you increase minimum wage to compensate. That drives out small businesses. Then you tax the big businesses to compensate. So they leave. Then you tax homeowners to compensate. So they leave. Eventually, bad governance based on good intentions crushes growth. But so long as members of the Seattle City Council feel good about themselves, that’s what truly matters.

Where Are The Watchdogs? Apparently Asleep! No Wonder California Is In Such Trouble!

Meet The Los Angeles Firefighter Who Earned $300,000 In Overtime...By Working More Hours Than There Are In A Year

Photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

ByBEN SHAPIRO

@BENSHAPIRO

May 22, 2018

Firefighter Donn Thompson of Los Angeles earned some $300,000 in overtime in 2017, aside from his $92,000 salary. If that sounds like a lot of money in overtime, it is. In fact, as Transparent California reports, Thompson has pulled down $1 million in overtime since 2013. Eric Boehm of Reason.com explains:

Here's how the math breaks down. Thompson, like all firefighters in Los Angeles, works 2,912 hours every year. With a base salary of $92,000, that comes to an hourly rate of $31.60. That means Thompson would earn overtime pay at a rate of $47.40 per hour—that's one and a half times the base rate. But earning $302,000 at a rate of $47.40 per hour would require working more than 6,370 hours. Add that to the 2,912 hours he worked as a salaried employee, and you get more than 9,280 hours worked, despite the fact that there are only 8,760 hours in a year.

Thompson has a long history of working the system. From 1993 to 1995, Thompson made well over $200,000 in overtime; in 2008, he grabbed another $173,335 in overtime.

California excluded overtime from pension calculations only in 2012; that means that Thompson’s retirement pay will still be based on his overtime. As The Los Angeles Times reported in 2014:

A legal way to increase pensions by boosting the final pay of retiring state and local government workers could drive up public employee pension costs in California by as much as $796 million over the next 20 years, the state controller said Tuesday. … Two years ago the Legislature and governor overhauled public pension benefits for newly hired workers, but many critics called the legislation too little and too late.

Public employee unions have been bankrupting localities across the country. California’s unfunded pension liabilities are staggering:

CalPERS has unfunded liabilities — benefits promised compared with anticipated funding — of $136 billion, Nation says. For CalSTRS, the projected red ink is $87 billion. That's based on 2016 data, the latest available. If you total up the unfunded liabilities of all state and local public pension systems in California, the projected debt comes to around $333 billion, Nation says. But that's a conservative figure based on official reports. It could be up over $1 trillion.SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

That’s nearly $26,000 per household in the state.

This is what happens when a state is governed by unions, as California is: California unions elect public officials, who then sign rich contracts with the unions, who then elect public officials. The cycle creates debt and serious safety problems as well — if public employee unions strike, that’s a disaster area. We can love our firefighters, but these deals are destroying localities.

READ MORE: CALIFORNIA

Another Lie, Another Fraudulent Story. Meals On Wheels Will Be Just Fine

FAKE NEWS: Did Trump Just Kill Meals On Wheels? Not Even Close.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

BY:

 BEN SHAPIRO

MARCH 17, 2017

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It’s time for the media to portray President Trump as cruel and evil. It’s harder

 for the media to do this with Trump than it has been with other Republicans,

 simply because Trump constantly uses the rhetoric of big government, 

guaranteeing Americans that their entitlements won’t be affected in any serious 

way. But with the presentation of his proposed budget, Democrats and the media

 finally pounced: Trump wants to kill old people by cutting funding to Meals on 

Wheels!

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) babbled, “The Republicans in Congress and this

 White House, as we’re seeing now just in a few weeks, never miss an

 opportunity to suck up money from the middle class.” Senate Minority Leader

 Chuck Schumer (D-NY) followed the same tack: “Once again the Trump 

administration is showing its true colors: talk like a populist but govern like

 a special interests zealot.”

And Time headlined, “Trump’s Budget Would Kill A Program That

 Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens.”

So, is Trump actually killing Meals on Wheels?

Not even close.

The Trump administration proposed budget would kill the Community

 Development Block Grant, a federal boondoggle that’s largely been used 

for waste and fraud. It costs $3 billion per year. As the budget proposal

 stated, “The Federal Government has spent over $150 billion on this block

 grant since its inception in 1974, but the program is not well-targeted to the 

poorest populations and has not demonstrated results.” Nick Gillespie 

of Reason explains:

The money often is not going to Meals on Wheels or even to

the neediest communities. As a Reason Foundation analysis also

from 2013 shows, wealthier communities get the larger chunks of

the money, particularly counties that—what a coincidence!—are

in proximity to Washington, D.C….Check out this audit from

Riverside County, California, for their CDBG expenditures for

2016, and there's neither a meal nor a wheel to be found. Of the

$761,744 the county received, nearly all of it went to improve a playground and the sidewalks of a single local elementary school.

And note that the reason they were audited by Housing and Urban Development was because they hadn't provided proper

documentation of their expenses.

Meals on Wheels does get some money from the CDGB. But the vast majority

 of its funding comes from elsewhere, and as even the leftists over at Snopes 

state, “the effect of CDBG cuts on local Meals on Wheels groups is uncertain.”

 Only 3 percent of the Meals on Wheels budget nationally comes from the 

federal government at all, and only a portion of that comes from the CDBG.

 Walter Olson of the Cato Institute explains that 35 percent of federal 

funding for Meals on Wheels comes from the Older Americans Act, not the 

CDBG; no cuts have been contemplated to that program yet.

So, Trump isn’t killing Meals on Wheels. But the damaging media coverage

 has many Republicans cowering in fear. As usual.

Census Threatens People To Get The Information That Should Be Protected.

Another reason people don’t trust the government: Census uses legal threats to force survey response

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Ben Bullard

If you’re among the Americans who’ve received the U.S. Census Bureau’s supplemental American Community Survey (ACS) in the mail, you may have noticed that your response to the lengthy questionnaire is, uh, mandatory.

That’s because the Census Bureau is having trouble convincing people to trust the government with answers to personal questionsabout how much money they make and what their property is worth.

Instead of employing positive reinforcement to entice people to respond to the 30-page document, the Census Bureau opts to “favor the ‘stick’ above [the] ‘carrot’ when mailing out questionnaires,” as Reason’s J.D. Tucille puts it.

The Bureau’s Tasha Boone, the survey’s assistant division chief, outlined some of the challenges ACS faces in a recent presentation to the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations. She lamented in the accompanying document that the public’s “[p]erception of ‘irrelevant’ or unnecessary questions raises concerns about privacy” and that “[d]istrust of government is pervasive.”

“Just a thought, but a bit of self-awareness might be lacking in the preference she expressed,” wrote Tucille, “…for the existing [survey mailout] that threatens in bold, capital letters, ‘YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.’

“That should settle those privacy and trust issues.”

The ACS survey goes far beyond the basic decennial census, probingU.S. residents for information about their jobs, their healthcare, their property, their transportation and even their marital history.

The ACS survey has encountered strong opposition from constitutionalists who maintain the government simply has no business collecting highly personal information about people who reside in the U.S.

The Rutherford Institute slammed the survey in a 2012 letter to the Commerce Department, demanding that the questionnaire beoverhauled so that it asks “only questions on subjects covered by the census itself.”

The group also urged Commerce to stop threatening people with $5,000 fines for neglecting to comply.