THINGS ARE BEST OUT WEST
Report from Montgomery Country
By Peter Huessy
California Dreamin’
Victor Davis Hanson is America’s premier military historian of ancient Greece and Rome but also has a daily podcast or essay on current events. He lives in California on a farm where he was born and where his family have lived for multiple generations. This link is to his comments this week about what he sees on a daily basis on and around his farm.
West Coast, Messed Coast™: Minimum Wage Rises, Thousands Lose Their Jobs, Democrat Elites Laugh by Victoria Taft, PJ Media, April 6th, 2024
California increased its minimum wage for fast food business to $20. Leading up to when the increase went into effect, (April 1), Pizza Hut and Roundtable Pizza laid off 1,500 drivers up and down the state. Those restaurants joined Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon in pre-announcing staff cutbacks. In Redding, California 18 Subway sandwich shops, family-owned, closed overnight. “This is just a harbinger of things that will come,” said one business owner. That was echoed by a Los Angeles restauranteur who warned America that, "This man [Gavin Newsom] is destroying California."
Economic News—Debt and Jobs
The $34 trillion debt in this country which some academic banana heads like AOC in Congress ( AKA Occasional Cortex,) think can be run up free of charge, is costing the country $1.6 trillion a year. Can you imagine what important things the American people could actually invest in with that kind of money—about $83 billion a month and proportionately in Maryland that’s $1.6 billion a month?
Here are the numbers in chart form telling us that every year we will be paying $1.6 trillion in interest payments on the total national debt. The House Budget Committee says the Biden Administration has informed Congress that the debt every 90 days is expanding by $1 trillion. The US Department of Defense budget is around $890 billion a year of which around $320 billion is research, development and procurement, meaning the development of new weapons systems and their acquisition. The rest is pay, health care, operations and maintenance and military construction (housing and buildings).
This means that there are between 36 and 43 states performing better re GDP growth, loss or gain of population and employment growth over the past decade. On the other measures Maryland ranks dead last re right to work liberties, and inheritance tax. As for the overall tax burden and income tax rate, Maryland ranks 42-43, meaning there are only 7-8 states with a worse tax burden and a higher income tax rate.
There is now an economic profile of all 50 states. Here are the numbers for Maryland
https://www.richstatespoorstates.org/states/MD/
Cumulative GDP Growth, 2012 – 2022 41.40% 37th
Cumulative Domestic Migration, 2013 – 2022 -244,294 44th
Non-Farm Employment Growth, 2012 – 2022 5.01% 41st
Claw Black Fraud
The US government paid out between $200 billion and in some estimates $1 trillion in bogus CV-19 relief payments to small time crooks and criminal cartels from Nigeria. The Feds announced they have recovered $1.4 billion and have forgiven another $1.4 billion.
Blue State Follies
The news is from the Daily Mail, across the pond in England. Seattle closed its gifted and talented schools because they had too many white and Asian students, with a school board member complaining that the program does a “masterful job of tokenizing a really small community of color.” Article by Rachel Bowman for the Daily Mail, April 3, 2024
Blue State Progress
However, a bipartisan group of legislators in Maryland’s House of Delegates have put a bill together that bans transgender surgeries and treatment for minors without parental permission.
Jobs Report
Well folks, the number of full-time jobs fell in March by 6000; all the increase in jobs were part-time jobs, a trend that has been gathering steam this past year. And ironically, the jobs are going to foreign born Americans as this graph tells us: (remember the 8.5 million illegal aliens allowed into the country (processed says HLS) have also been given work permits, access to Medicaid and food stamps, and are living in hotels in our major cities, flown there courtesy of a free flight from Uncle Sam. Here are the two charts. Payrolls are up 1.9% this past year but full-time jobs are down 1.35% while part-time jobs are up 7.5%. And native-born folks have fewer jobs and foreign born have more.
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Peter Huessy is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee. Since 1981 he has been President of Geo-Strategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland. He was a former special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior and consultant to the US Air Force.