The New Art of Avoiding Fiscal Responsibility

What makes America great is the freedom of political choice. What makes America headed for the dust bin is the ability to escape the responsibility for exercising those choices. No, this goes far beyond the recurring successive voter approved tax increases in Oregon always done by noting that only a small portion of the voters will actually have to pay the tax – tax the rich.

But we have now moved past that abuse and moved on to the next step which is for progressive government to bury their failures by shifting responsibility for its financial ruin to those who have no say – no vote – on the excesses. For instance, former Chicago Mayor Rohm Emanuel, who followed a succession of Chicago administrations in providing gold plated healthcare for city workers, recognized the unsustainable financial burden that it imposed on Chicago taxpayers. Rather than taking the fiscally responsible path of reducing other expenditures and negotiating to reduce the cost and/or benefits for public employees, Mr. Rohm transferred the public employees from its current system to Obamacare and thus transferred the responsibility for funding the city’s pubic employees healthcare to the federal government. Hardly anyone noticed. A mess created solely by the Chicago electorate by continuing to elect grossly incompetent demagogues is now the responsibility of all Americans and virtually none of them had a choice in the matter.

And now we have other examples. California frittered away its massive economic advantage by spending its resources on virtually everything but the fundamentals of government – public safety, ensuring the delivery of public services, managing public resources and promoting economic stability. They embraced alternative energy and now suffer recurring outages; they sought to create high speed rail more for bragging rights than actual benefit; they focused education on diversity, equity and inclusion rather than reading, math and science, and they gave way their public areas, including streets, sidewalks and parks to the bums, addicts and mentally incapacitated. All of this while the feces piled upon the streets and fuel load grew in its forests. So when the homeless overwhelmed the system and the forest fires burdened them due to the lack of water and water delivery systems, California’s progressives led by Gov. Newsom demanded that the federal government and thus you the taxpayers, bail them out. Bail them out without any chance to weigh in on those who brought about these catastrophes – or even hold them responsible in the aftermath.

You can through the mess of bizarre choices by the progressive leadership of America’s major cities and the same is true. They are all in the same condition – bankrupt or nearing bankruptcy. They have already taxed their own citizens to the point that there is nothing left in the tank and that the next increase will swell the ranks of the those leaving. And in each case they demand that the federal government – that means you and all the rest who had no chance to vote on the leadership or their spendthrift ways. You have these cities and states being run by people who cannot balance their own checkbook, who have never created a job and never accomplished a thing other than being elected to one successive public office after another without learning a thing or accomplishing a thing. They are basically clones of Kalamata Harris, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke or Barack Obama – educated but unemployable except for public office.

This is the new form of taxation without representation. People in rural Montana are now being forced to pay for the outrages of fiscal irresponsibility in the nation’s progressive sanctuaries.

It’s intoxicating to recognize that you can reap a benefit at the expense of another by simply voting to take money from one person and giving it to another. But like other intoxication it is also deadly. Alexis de Tocqueville, fascinated by the American experiment in democracy noted:

“A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.”

Later he said:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

De Tocqueville didn’t so much criticize America’s democracy as much as he chronicled the logical extension of its virtues. Those who hate America’s success – particularly those who live here feeding off its wealth and its largesse, are among those most willing to use the excesses of its democracy to plot its failure.

While I write this column Zohran Mamdani, a socialist at best and a communist at worst is winning the election to be Mayor of New York City. The financial capital of the world will soon be a heaving mess – Portland, Oregon on steroids – and Mr. Mamdani will be demanding that the federal government clean up the mess he will make. I can only hope that President Donald Trump acts early and often to deny federal aid and assistance to an administration hell bent on destroying America.

In closing Mr. de Tocqueville stated:

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”