THE PLUNDERING BARONESS PELOSI:
Nancy Pelosi triples her loot since the banksters
nearly destroyed America’s economy and demands endless hordes of illegals to
keep wages depressed!
MAKES YOU WONDER HOW MANY ILLEGALS SHE EMPLOYS AT HER
ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY …. The same county where an ILLEGAL started a fire that
killed dozens and did millions of dollars in property damage!
May 30, 2018
The left's newest aggrieved minority in need of emergency liberal help: Millionaires
CNBC reports that some blue-state governors are now concerned that since their states' high taxes can no longer be fully deducted from federal income taxes, some of their wealthy residents will leave. Thus, millionaires are the new minority in need.
One of the core beliefs of the Democratic party is fairness. Tax the rich, help the poor and spread the gains of a growing economy more widely. It has been a consistent message by federal and state lawmakers alike. Until now. On the heels of the new Republican tax law, blue state Democrats, who until recently were advocating higher taxes on the rich, are suddenly fighting to protect their own members of the top 1 percent from higher taxes. Some Dems are even proposing both – raise taxes on the wealthy with one hand and help them with the other.
According to CNBC, a number of states have passed laws that allow the well heeled to make tax-deductible charitable donations to groups that support government activities, such as education. The irony is rich.
All of these special laws are aimed squarely at helping the wealthy. It's chiefly the high earners and affluent who suffer from the SALT deduction cap of $10,000. According to one analysis, nearly 60 percent of the added revenue from the SALT changes will come from the top 1 percent. While the Democratic politicians still say they're fighting for fairness, the gap is more political than economic – the red-state rich will get a big tax cut while many of the blue-state rich will pay more.
Among the victims of this discrimination is House minority leader and multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi. The Washington Free Beacon highlighted her personal efforts to save her family's $137,000 deduction on their three luxury homes.
Like many taxpayers with big property tax bills across the country, the Pelosi's in late December prepaid the second half of their 2017-2018 property tax bills for their $7.2 million estate in San Francisco's tony Pacific Heights and Napa vineyard and residence worth more than $4 million, according to San Francisco city-county and Napa county property records.The couple paid the full annual property taxes on their luxury Washington Harbor condo on the Georgetown waterfront before the tax bill became law.Paying the taxes earlier than the 2018 bills require is a smart accounting move that could save the Pelosi's tens of thousands of dollars. However, it also illustrates a Republican talking point about the tax bill: that the new law is eliminating tax breaks that primarily benefit the wealthy.
These shenanigans, however, may be the germ of an interesting conservative concept. By selecting charities that support specific government activities, donors are indirectly earmarking their taxes. There's a thought: a federal budget built around the activities of government that are most popular – a "People's Budget." That's exactly why the courts will likely strike these plans down.
Now pretty much every American is, in some way, shape, or form, "Hey, Big Brother, can you spare a dime?"
THE
INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA
De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton
Reprinted from Hoover.org.
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs
agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce
Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time
that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in
America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic
San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker,
the Valley was invisible.
BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on
the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards,
dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture
industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a
third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag
industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and
cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives
and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those
who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the
latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by
the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible
Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the
deepest-blue
state, Valley residents constantly see
their concerns, beliefs, and needs
seldom taken
into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats
in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about
twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states
nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two
Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in
the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared
to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in
danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent
Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected
Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the
politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second
term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and
priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the
quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow
from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously
impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water.
Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4
trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish.
Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated,
all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even
after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water
allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund
and $10 billion over budget just for construction of
the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State
Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is
pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest
highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our
Democratic governor’s
high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are
being
squandered to create an unnecessary link
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead
of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of
mismanagement and waste
is the romantic
environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left.
They serially
support government projects and
regulations that impact the poor and the aged,
who
are left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on
energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the
country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in
cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500
a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income
twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and
working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where
temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast,
where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of
Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the
Valley, is
the second most impoverished city in the
poorest region of a state that has the
highest
poverty levels in the country and one of the
highest rates of income
inequality. Over one-fifth
of its residents live below the poverty line, and it
The greatest impact on the Valley’s
deteriorating quality of life,
however, has been
the influx of illegal aliens. Some are attracted by
plentiful
agriculture and construction work, and
others by California’s generous welfare
transfers
— California is home to one in three of the
country’s welfare
recipients— all facilitated by
California’s status as a “sanctuary state” that
regularly releases felons rather than cooperate
with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement
(ICE). As a result, one-quarter of the country’s
illegal alien
population lives in California, many
from underdeveloped regions
of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural
mores and
attitudes to the law and civic
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are
found throughout
the state. But they are
especially noticeable in rural California. There
high
levels of crime and daily disorder—from
murders, assaults, and drug
trafficking, to
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs,
and ignoring
building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the
once-orderly farming towns that used to be
populated by earlier immigrants,
including
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over
a few generations of
sometimes rocky
coexistence assimilated to American culture
and society.
Marginalized Cultural
Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north
and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is
gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the
San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities
marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion,
guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor
progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in
common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they
do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university
(Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half
Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and
practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing
victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with
physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first
in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican
Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I
do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other”
California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities
of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim
they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water
policies that destroy
agricultural jobs, building
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing,
energy policies that increase their cost of living,
“sanctuary city” policies
that put back on the
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on
their
ethnic fellows, and economic policies that
favor the redistribution rather than
the creation of
wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live
in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste,
and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and
xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain
has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence
Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an
origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem
“wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did
so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities
beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans,
Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust
Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their
lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced
together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got
loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted
into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor
their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most
important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though
those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who
obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right–– and those we all
called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the
other.
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the
Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part
because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing
on the other side of the Coast Range.
ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom
Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of
Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of
nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on
Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's
Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press),
is now available for purchase.
California,
the Shithole State and Getting Worse by the Day.
By Wayne Allyn Root
Gateway Pundit,
California
is Exhibit A. It’s filled with immigrants. Ten million to be exact. Many of
them illegal. Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country?
Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California- where nearly one
out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau.
While California accounts for 12% of America’s population, it accounts for one third of America’s welfare checks. California leads the country in food stamp use. California has more people on welfare than most countries around the world.
. . .
If immigration is so great for our country and illegal aliens “contribute a net positive” to society…how do you explain what’s happening in California?
I haven’t even gotten to the taxes. The income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes and gas taxes are all the highest in the nation. Why do you think that is? To pay the enormous costs of illegal immigration. To pay for the education costs, healthcare costs, police, courts, lawyers, prisons, and hundreds of different welfare programs for millions of California’s illegal aliens and struggling legal immigrants too.
But you haven’t heard the worst yet. California- the immigrant capital of America- is filthy. Perhaps the filthiest place on earth. Filthier than the slums of Calcutta. Filthier than the poorest slums of Brazil and Africa.
NBC journalists recently conducted a survey of San Francisco. They found piles of smelly garbage on the streets, used needles, gallons of urine and piles of feces- all near famous tourist attractions, fancy hotels, government buildings and children’s playgrounds.
While California accounts for 12% of America’s population, it accounts for one third of America’s welfare checks. California leads the country in food stamp use. California has more people on welfare than most countries around the world.
. . .
If immigration is so great for our country and illegal aliens “contribute a net positive” to society…how do you explain what’s happening in California?
I haven’t even gotten to the taxes. The income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes and gas taxes are all the highest in the nation. Why do you think that is? To pay the enormous costs of illegal immigration. To pay for the education costs, healthcare costs, police, courts, lawyers, prisons, and hundreds of different welfare programs for millions of California’s illegal aliens and struggling legal immigrants too.
But you haven’t heard the worst yet. California- the immigrant capital of America- is filthy. Perhaps the filthiest place on earth. Filthier than the slums of Calcutta. Filthier than the poorest slums of Brazil and Africa.
NBC journalists recently conducted a survey of San Francisco. They found piles of smelly garbage on the streets, used needles, gallons of urine and piles of feces- all near famous tourist attractions, fancy hotels, government buildings and children’s playgrounds.
Laura Ingraham: ‘California
Is Almost Acting Like It’s a
Separate Country’
Earlier this
week on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham slammed
California and its leaders for its sanctuary city policies and its open
defiance of the federal government seeking to uphold existing immigration law.
Transcript as follows:
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