This That And The Other Thing

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Good Morning. Happy July. Are you ready for the High Holy Holidays?

I am giving the house (back for a little while) a good drubbing, because that’s what I do before the 4th. On the 4th I just go for fireworks with friends, watch Independence Day and generally relax.

The other high holy holidays, the celebration of Valley Forge and the crossing of the Delaware that involves a fast and all, broken on Christmas Even starting with hessian soldier cookies (you bite the head off, of course!) and a freedom tree (It’s a little artificial oak, that gets decorated in American flags.)

Before you ask, yes, I might be completely insane.

On the BBB I have this to say, and Elon frankly should be saner than this: Cutting taxes is not spending money. Cutting taxes is mitigating the amount of stealing the government does.

NO ONE EVER has grown the economy by keeping taxes high or increasing them. In fact, every time we cut taxes the amount of taxes collected GROWS. Which is good and bad. Good only if we apply it to reducing the debt.

But in any case, to calculate the budget we is doing it wrong. Cutting taxes is not and never has been a debt-increasing move. The Congressional Budget office needs a rolled newspaper taken to it. And as for the parliamentarian they need to eff right off. Never in the history of ever have illegals been entitled to Health Care or Welfare. TBF no one is THIS IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL FUNCTION OF OUR GOVERNMENT. Let private charities take care of those in need. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul is always and has always been a bad idea that leads to destruction of society, morals and productivity.

However I can see how one could “sell” the need to take care of our own. But if we’re going to rob our citizens to look after the world, we’re going to bleed out and the world will be no better. Which is what’s been happening.

Oh, I do understand how we got here. I almost started this post with “The whale is a fine fish, and the tears of it are wet” because yesterday on Twitter I came across a tweet that encapsulated what the younger generation have been taught and how bizarrely stupid it is.

I’m not going to reproduce it, but if you’re on xeet, you’ll find my answer in my timeline, likely. I’m not going to reproduce it since I suspect the original post was made by a hard core racist. And it’s sad to say this but “the racist had a point.” Mostly the point the OP had was that no, slaves did not build our infrastructure or — it was unclear — much less that of the UK.

One of the lies that has grown, as tenacious and stupid as the idea that the USSR won WWII for the allies, is the idea that the west is wealthy and safe etc. because enslaved Africans built everything. This is utter and complete nonsense.

I don’t know if England used slaves for construction — it’s to be fair possible, though unlikely — but even if they did their work would not be the main portion of it. The US really didn’t. Most slaves were employed in farming.

And while on that, slavery is so fracking inefficient as an economics thing, that … well, slaves might cost more money than not, as we’re finding out by relying on China’s effectively slaves for our labor. Because while slaves can produce a lot of things cheaply, they both produce things CHEAPLY (meaning the labor isn’t very good) but also delay and discourage innovation/better processes/higher efficiency.

This is why the South where most enslaved Africans were was for a century or so after their manumission poor, backward and economically distressed. Yes, yes, the reconstruction and carpetbaggers and all that might have driven poor Dixie down, but poor Dixie was already vulnerable and not very economically viable due to a reliance on the inefficiencies and shoddy labor of slaves. Kind of like yeah, pneumonia might make you very ill, but it only got an in because you were already overworked/stressed.

So the OP was wrong in saying that it was amazing how Africans could build all the infrastructure in the West, while their own lands didn’t rise above grass huts.

There is a built in racist assumption in that — that the “not rising above” grass huts has something to do with innate capability — but it’s not wrong on the substance.

Of course the reason most of Africa doesn’t “rise above” grass huts is that grass huts are perfectly suitable for the climate, and no more is required. I remember driving across a substantial portion of African (dear Lord, I’m old) almost 50 years ago, and seeing what looked like 19th century illustrations of native villages, but they had cars parked around, and antennae on the roofs of the huts for television reception.

It’s just that like the unheated/unairconditioned houses of my youth were quite sufficient to the Portuguese climate — while in most of the US they’d be death traps — grass huts are perfectly fine for most climates in Africa. And humans tend not to build/create more than needed.

Whether Africans who move to Europe or America are capable of building better has to do with the individual African and how much of Africa’s short-term thinking and tribal culture they bring along with them.

BUT the answer to that OP was even crazier. Some guy — British by the wording — said the reason that the Africans hadn’t built the infrastructure in their nation was that “someone keeps nicking their stuff.”

I’d be wondering what he meant if I hadn’t read my kids’ school books. If I hadn’t seen it printed out that the reason other continents/the third world are poor is because we stole their “raw materials.”

This is stupidity on stilts. I answered in my normal calm fashion by pointing out this guy is an idiot. Because

a) Africa is not a country, but a continent. The genetics are more varied in it than in any other region of the world. And the climates and cultures are very different too.

b) No one nicked their stuff. When the Marxists try to explain how we “stole” things it’s all on the power differential of industrial states trading with tribal states.

c) Africa is still, in natural resources, the richest continent on Earth. (I remember, as a little kid, hearing relatives who lived there talking about how you could LIVE from a one acre plot, because you got FOUR crops a year. Etc.)

d) what holds Africa back is tribalism. Until Africa conquers tribalism and other holes in the head caused by culture, it will remain backward. (And is now exporting its backwardness to Europe. Because Barbarism, like Slavery is an infectious disease of the human mind.)

The problem is that people were taught this. Just like they used to be taught that whales were fish. And most people don’t look at what they were taught and analyze it for mistakes.

So a generation raised on the idea our wealth exists because we stole it — I remember a friend’s kid, coming back from a religious mission to Africa, telling me how guilty he felt that we were so rich at their expense. I don’t know if I convinced him this was bs. I don’t know if it was possible to — thinks it’s only right we be despoiled and reduced to the same wasteful misery as the rest of the world, to somehow atone.

Which is what giving welfare to — and for that matter opening the border to — the multitudes of the third world seems just and right to a lot of people, some of them very religious. (Some of them even my religion.)

It’s bullshit. Our making our lands into hell won’t make theirs into heaven. Or even improve for a moment their wretched lot.

In fact, it will make them poorer and more wretched as right now the US is the engine of innovation and improvement in the whole world.

So, the BBB — which I’m told just passed by the skin of its teeth — if flawed, yes. Very. We really need to get all these financing the third world boondoggles out for our sake and the sake of the third world, frankly.

BUT as is, it might be the best we could do. And it is NEEDED.

Guys I think we’ve passed the event horizon when we could pay off the debt through austerity. I think we passed it somewhere in the reign of the autopen.

The only way we save ourselves now is by growing the economy. And that means honestly reducing the tax burden on this nation, and reducing as many regulations as humanly possible, and set us free to grow and produce and innovate.

So. Let’s do that.

And while on it, and because you’ll be wondering — yes, I’ll be doing the annual (hopefully the only this year) fundraiser. Because of the traveling, it will start on the fourth this year.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why I’m doing it — not the need, but the philosophical reason — and also how I intend to make up by how poorly I treated my substack subscribers this year. That was mostly due to illness and I’m glad to report this last round of almost-anti-human antibiotics seem to (caveat I only finished three days ago) have vanquished the NINE MONTH LONG sinus infection. Which means I can sleep without coughing. And there should — truly — be an earc on substack this week, and I’ll reinstate the memberships of those who lapsed because they’re entitled to the earc, since they paid for a year already.

I’ll also have a simpler financing mode this year, etc. BUT I’ll explain that tomorrow.

For now: We have our butts in a bear trap as a nation. The bear trap is debt and senescence and the corruption of relying on tyrannical states.

The only way we escape it is by working really hard and being massively creative.

Fortunately both of those are basically what Americans do.

So go build under, over and around. And get ready to take the weight when the conventional structures collapse.

Go do it.

128 thoughts on “This That And The Other Thing”

  1. If you just went through a massive antibiotic regimen, you probably need a massive probiotic infusion as a counter. But the standard OTC stuff won’t do much; you need to get the kind that is spore-encapsulated or similar, so that it can get past the stomach digestive juices and to where it needs to go.

    (This is coming from someone who had a short-term nuke of the gut flora, and a month of yogurt and the like did bupkis. But the spore kind did a reset and made me much happier. Do be aware that many of the brands are proprietary and the Amazon links are to fraudulent types.)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I can attest to that; a 6-month stint of antibiotics back in 1999 to address a fairly severe staph skin infection (the 3rd type tried – Ceftin, IIRC – that was blue and tasted like mold, knocked it out in one 10-day session). For me, the OTC probiotics from a pharmacy worked for recovery, although they were a bit pricey. Not a pleasant experience overall.🤢

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Amen to that. You absolutely need to get your gut biota back in order after antibiotics. Take a look at Dr. William Davis on YT, as well as his book “Supergut”. His use of “yogurts” that use different human gut bacteria will give you massive doses of the beneficial bacteria you need to replenish, far more than you get in pill form (as good as those can be). And it’s the kind of bacteria that survive transit through your stomach and get into the small intestine where they are really needed. Regular yogurt strains like L. bulgaricus don’t survive and provide very limited benefit.

        You make the “yogurts” yourself, and they are really tasty.

        Like I say, go check out his YT channel. You won’t regret it.

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  2. There are times when I wish we could deport the Lefties.

    Of course, who would want them?

    Most of the places to send them have more “home-grown” Lefties of their own.

    Oh, Canada has made it clear that they don’t want our Lefties. [Twisted Grin]

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Some countries where our leftist self deported to are regretting they let them in. My response? No send backs. You let them come. You get to keep them. – Very Big Grin 😁-

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  3. “slavery is so fracking inefficient as an economics thing, that … well, slaves might cost more money than not, ”

    I remember debating this issue with a co-worker when I was in college.

    I submitted that, with the advent of things like the cotton gin and other time and labor-saving devices, slavery would die out because it was cheaper to run those machines than it is to house, feed, and clothe the number of people necessary to do the same amount of work.

    Co-worker did not debate the economics of the position, only asked if I would have been willing to wait for that to happen if it had been me, or my family that were being held as slaves.

    I don’t recall the rest of the conversation. Only that it never got heated.

    I didn’t learn that from anything I’d been taught in school, I learned it from my fiscally conservative parents.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “…only asked if I would have been willing to wait for that to happen if it had been me…”

      I hope your bro there got slapped by his philosophy teacher. Feeeeeelings is not an argument.

      This is why I don’t talk to people much. So, so often I run into something like that, where they default to making you wrong for considering the practicalities of the situation. For f- sake, what is so hard about considering an economic notion that you must default to “YOU’RE EEEEVILE!!!!!” as a retort?

      “You want to end slavery? Good, me too. How about we make it brutally impractical for the slavers, hmm? So much so that they stop doing it on their own because there’s no money in it? Would that be okay with you?”

      [spit!]

      Liked by 1 person

    2. The cotton gin freed up much of labor in processing picked cotton making it profitable, but it didn’t pick the cotton nor hoe the weeds. This required cheap labor from former slaves or share croppers or large families.

      The tractor, trucks, advance irrigation systems, the seed drill, the stripper, the baler/module maker and spray rigs really cut down on the manual labor aspect of cotton farming.

      My mom’s was the last generation that had to pick cotton by hand, this was in the ’50-60s.

      I do laugh at the 4th generation urban black politicians that complain that “Deporting the illegals will force blacks to pick cotton again for the masa’.” Please, you couldn’t tell a hoe from a ho. Nor could you survive living on a modern farm, let alone one from 50 years ago.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin in 1794. Cyrus McCormick patented his mechanical reaper in 1834. Steam traction engines were in use in the 1850s. With attachments, they also did reaping, husking, and milling.

        You could buy a machine and it would just sit there in a barn when you weren’t using it. You didn’t have to feed it or worry about it attacking you in your sleep. The culture and economy of the American South were already well on their way to oblivion by 1861; even if they had passed laws against mechanized agriculture, there was no way they could compete against their neighbors to the north and west who could take advantage of that particular phase of the Industrial Revolution.

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    3. Seriously, though, there’s a strong argument to be made that the automatic dishwasher, clothes washers, and vacuums have done more to alleviate slavery than any social movement.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Add in Washers and Dryers (and blended fibers that take the washing and drying better with less need to iron) and you probably have removed 50-75% of the things that ate large parts of domestic time or needed some domestic help. I Still Await Protean Pete, Musk/Tesla seem to be approaching it, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. All you have to do in regards to clothing is look at how automatic looms and sewing machines democratized the availability of people to have clothing in the 18th and 19th centuries…

          Liked by 2 people

    4. Ask him how many innocent people — people who had nothing to do with his being held a slave — he would be willing to murder to go free.

      Liked by 2 people

  4. Can’t really get into the Southern example because it’s too close to Forbidden Topics, but you are right about the incredible inefficiency. I do believe that the plantation economy was going to collapse in fairly short order whether or not Fort Sumter got fired upon. It simply would not be sustainable in a period of rapid technological progress in mechanized farming. Now what happens at that point…forbidden topic and one we thankfully never had to find out.

    Liked by 3 people

  5. Happy Dominion Day, all you American peeplez.

    July 1st is Canada’s national holiday, celebrating some historical even I can’t remember. Something that happened in a smoke filled room with a bunch of geezers sitting around a table in 1867, making a deal to fleece the peasants more efficiently.

    Lately the #Liberals are pleased to “rebrand” it to Canada Day and celebrate whatever their fuss-of-the-moment is, thereby cutting us all off from what has gone before, in the hope that we’ll all sit still for what’s coming. This year we expect a lot of palestine flags. Last year it was trans flags. Year before it was rainbow flags.

    Frankly I like your national holiday better. (Except in Phoenix, where spent bullets are known to fall on my house because morons can’t understand “what goes up must come down” even when you explain it in Spanish.)

    Today I will ignore it all and go for a rip on my bike down to Port Dover, to be surrounded by My People. Meaning all the other maniacs who still ride past 65. Hell yeah.

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    1. We were in Nova Scotia on the 150th anniversary (?) of Canada Day. We were treated to an afternoon of patriotic Canadian songs.

      I’m sorry, but “lame,” is the most positive comment I can come up with.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Canada has some good patriotic songs, but many of them are only in the folk tradition now.

        I imagine there are non-lame rodeos and games/sports somewhere.

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      2. Canada has some good patriotic songs, but many of them are only in the folk tradition now.

        I imagine there are non-lame rodeos and games/sports somewhere.

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    3. Shooting “in an upwards direction” is utterly moronic. Save those leetle boolets for proper target shooting to keep in training, for shooting goblins what want to ventilate you for yous wallet, or the simple joy of putting itty bitty holes in target paper from a stupidly long way away.

      Eh, I still maintain we’d take bits of Canada if’n they wanted to be a state. Not the Quebec fools, that’s crazy talk. But the good ‘uns? Heck yeah. Between the two of us, maybe we can stomp the lefties into a bad memory.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. There’s like four tiers of Canadian province to admit to statehood

        Sure Why Not: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon

        Eh maybe with some tweaks: Manitoba, Prince Edward Islands (sorry liked Anne of Green Gables :-) ), Northwest territories

        More Trouble than their worth (and only to join up with Greenland or Alaska) : British Columbia, Nunavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick

        Not in a million flipping years: Ontario and Quebec

        I vacillate on BC, If we could exclude or neuter Vancouver, it could be moved into the “with some tweaks” category. I’d vote to let Quebec go it on their own they’ll collapse in less than 50 years. Ontario is like our blue states squared mixed with the US D.C. Suburbs, we have plenty of that in the New England and Northern states that need major fixing, let alone the California/Oregon/Washington coastal corridor no sense compounding it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Dude, if you figure out how to neuter/exclude Vancouver the rest of BC would do whatever tweaks you wanted out of sheer gratitude.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Matthew I’m glad I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee when I read your reply. I’m sure residents of eastern Washington and Oregon, inland California, Illinois outside Chicago, Upstate New York and most of the New England States outside the cities would like to know too. Sadly Blue cities are nearly as hard to get rid of as bedbugs or cockroaches.

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            1. To be clear, I live just outside Van and commute in to work (at a gov’t job, no less -sigh-). I would *love* for the watermelons and granolas to just… go away. Go in peace, but go.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. From your lips to the Authors ears. Here in Massachusetts inside the 495 belt its watermelons and granola types as far as the eye can see, so I feel your pain :-) .

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          2. I think that making Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, possibly Edmonton, into provinces would be the power move. Do anything you want in your own province, leave the rest of us out of it.

            I also feel that almost everything we suffer from in Canada these days could be cured with a tax cut of sufficient size.

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  6. You say that we can’t get out from under the debt by reducing expenditures but only by growing the economy. You may be right. However to me, the most important thing about DOGE is/was cutting funding to our enemies, rather than saving money. That is more important than immediately growing the economy as it stops our enemies from preventing that growth.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Oh, I didn’t say that at all. Only that I don’t think we can do it fast enough. I DO want to reduce expenditures and stop funding the bs.
      I JUST think that reducing taxes shouldn’t come under “debits” because it’s never been.
      And I think the only thing that saves us FAST ENOUGH is growing the economy.

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      1. I agree about the economy and taxes. I do think that bs is far too kind a word. It is crippling our ability to make the changes needed to grow the economy and thus needs to be eliminated before the economy can grow.

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    2. But- but- if the economy grows, the ‘wrong’ people might profit! Like all those Eeevul Straight White Men! Better to destroy the economy for everybody than let them make a few bucks!

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  8. Nothing sends me more spare than over-credentialed idiots and racemongers claiming that slavery built the US.

    Nope, nope, nopedy nope. Chattel slavery permitted in a portion of the US contributed to a limited portion of the agricultural economy: cotton, rice, indigo, tobacco, and enslaved labor possibly built some of the Federal buildings early on. Otherwise, little to do with establishing industry, commerce, the western expansion, trade, expanding the railroad, canals, shipping. the various metal rushes in the west. Slavery did nothing much for those aspects, and can be argued to have severely retarded development in those parts of the country where it had been allowed.

    Immigrants to the US in the early part of the 19th century took their brains, ambition and labor mostly to where they didn’t have to compete with slave labor.

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    1. My large intestine told me that the Planters built all of the railroads with skilled laborers fresh off of the boat from Congo.

      (Which is to say that I concur, but sarcastic like.)

      Liked by 1 person

  9. I realized yesterday that I’ve been in an exhausted fog for a while. I tried IV out of desperation and woke up feeling normal. No brain fog, no exhaustion, I did some research, checked timelines to figure out how long this has been going on. At least two months, probably closer to six. My last spontaneous writing was two months ago.

    Could easily be placebo affect, but “normal” felt amazing. Now to figure out what’s going on while I can still think.

    (Sorry if this turns out to be a duplicate, I’m not sure whether I submitted or not)

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  11. Finished Thomas Sowell’s Ethnic America a few weeks ago. One thing that struck me was his comment that black people descended from the West Indian blacks who emigrated to America form a sort of upper class, being considerably more successful than American-born blacks. He suggested the reason was while the British were much harsher to their slaves on the sugar plantations they insisted the slaves grow their own food. Meaning they had to learn farming techniques and had a powerful motivation to be innovative, work hard and think. American slave owners very carefully provided their slaves with necessities in order to keep them utterly dependent on their owners.

    It really doesn’t seem the Democrats have changed very much. (Another case of culture surviving through generations?)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. “American slave owners very carefully provided their slaves with necessities in order to keep them utterly dependent on their owners.” Which is also why slave labor was horribly inefficient for industrial purposes. Most slave owners did not want to teach valuable skills, or even reading, to their slave. No skills, no ability to read instructions, no ability to operate or repair complex machinery.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Would you trust resentful slaves to operate expensive machines? When just a leetle inattention to details could cause damage to the machines, the materials they’re processing, or anything else that might be handy? The machines probably cost more than the slaves!

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        1. This is why slaves entrusted with jobs requiring responsibility were rewarded for showing it.

          OTOH, remember the slaves weren’t cheap. A traveler who saw slaves throwing cotton bales to Irishmen who stowed them on the boats had it explained that when the bales knocked a man into the river to drown, or broke his back, their owners were apt to make a fuss. No such luck for the Irishman.

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    2. There used to be differences between the descendants of people who worked in the Carolina Coast, growing rice and other things that used the task system (do what’s needed for the day and season, then have time to self) versus the gang system (constant work almost every day, closely supervised.) People from task-system areas were more self reliant, because when the official work was done, the slaves were encouraged to do crafts, grow produce, and other things. Their owner kept a percentage of the income, the slave kept the rest, and could save the money, or buy luxuries, or tithe and build churches, or lots of other things.

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      1. Another thing Sowell pointed out was the difference between cotton and tobacco farming. The work for cotton can be easily overseen and punishment inflicted at once. Tobacco required more judgment on the part of the slave, who could slack or even sabotage unseen. Consequently it was easier to reward the slaves for a good harvest than to try to oversee them and punish them for failure.

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  12. Marxism (and all its offshoots) is just “scientific” tribalism. And that’s one of the plagues sweeping through Africa.

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    1. The impact of Marxism on former colonies is probably the single strongest argument against colonialism. Whatever the local cultures were doing suboptimally when the frogs, limeys, etc showed up, the local cultures hadn’t invented marxism.

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    2. Slight disagreement. Tribes co-opted Marxism, consumed it, and use it as a crutch to support tribalism. Marxism is academic laziness writ large. It’s freshman English term paper quality, complete with the crap citations and obfuscatory language covering up a lack of substance. It has so many handles, every tin pot dictator sees it as a way to control the masses.

      Tribalism is simpler, but there is a powerful draw in that simplicity. Tribalism is “all for the tribe, and everything not-tribe is prey.” The tribe is all. Everyone else is against the tribe. That’s powerful, to reiterate. Conformity is lethally enforced in the tribe. As is loyalty.

      But the tribe is functionally, and in actuality weak economically, militarily, and most especially anti-civilization. The tribal mindset doesn’t play well with others save in the inter-tribal context, wherein tribes can ally together to sweep across “enemies” as a horde. But internecine fighting always occurs once the tribe “wins.” Everybody loses when the tribals “win.”

      Tribes like Marxism because it gives them a simple tool for control and a club to beat their “enemies” in one easy package. They do not understand, nor do they particularly care about, Marxism itself. It’s magic words, more or less, that bring them money.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. Scientific tribalism? I’ve never heard it called that before. It does resonate. I may have to think about it some before I decide how useful it is as a description of Marxism.

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      1. I called it “scientific” (gotta have the quotes) tribalism because, like Lysenkoism, Marxism wraps itself up in the trappings of science without adhering to the rigors of real science. All tribal societies have the same two ideas in them. Those of the tribe are “The People” and those not of the tribe are not “People” thereby enemies and not human. Marxism expanded on these tribal ideas. Oppressor vs oppressed. Oppressed being “The People” and oppressors being not people. And since oppressors are not people, Marxists feel any injury to oppressors is wholly justified and correct. Unlike actual tribes, which are extended families, Marxists are tribes of ideas. This makes unpersoning easy since one must remain within the orthodoxy of the the tribe to remain a member and thereby a person.

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  13. I’m fully with you on this, Sarah. The 4th is the most important secular holiday in the US, and deserves every bit of reverence it gets from those who remember its meaning. Sort of like Easter for Christians.

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      3. Hear! Hear! As a resident of Massachusetts and a resident of one of the towns that sent folks to Concord/Lexington, I applaud this. With its position just about midway between President’s Day/Washington’s Birthday and Memorial Day it also fills a need that the johnny come lately June Holiday can not. And it is a critical day in our (and world) history, there is a reason it is referred to as “the shot heard ’round the world”.

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  14. I have never heard a Democrat say that anybody should pay less taxes. They sometimes single out some group (‘The Rich’, ‘oligarchs’, et cetera ad nauseum) but somehow it’s only ‘fair’ that they should pay more taxes, not that the rest of us should pay less. Here in Kalifornia they’re always stoking resentment over Proposition 13 and how it ‘unfairly’ benefits long-term homeowners by limiting property tax increases. Somehow, they never propose that it would be fair for everybody to pay those lower tax rates.

    Not long ago I heard some Democrat congresscritter ranting about how “Tax cuts are being imposed on the backs of the American taxpayers!” Dumbass needs to learn about what taxes are, and how they work, before being stupid in public.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Regarding CA Prop 13, Oregon measure 5 and 47 – similar. Except property tax base doesn’t reset when home is sold.

      What is happening in Oregon, given the current market, people aren’t selling. Why? Number of reasons.

      1) At best will have to pay as much or more for new house to buy if staying in the same area. Might (maybe) leaving the area find a home less expensive, if so see point #3.

      2) Odds are your property taxes do go up, because didn’t properly vet the new property location. And if your taxes are just county (like ours) newer properties it is really difficult to stay out of cities. Junction City up the road touts 4% total taxes (between county and city, I think they are missing a period in there somewhere). Um. Newer builds make sure to do the math.

      3) Even with the primary home exclusion, a lot are facing long term capital gains tax if they don’t spend the money made. PTB are trying to scare the elderly into selling with the last, especially widows/widowers. For the latter, the scare is false since when your partner dies, the house basis resets to the inherited values at time partner died (same when anyone inherits).

      Note, points #1 and #3 are mutually exclusive. Both cannot apply.

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    2. And none of the golden state moneygrubber kvetching ever mentions that assessed-vale-resets-to-sale-price-on-sale part of Prop 13, which only has a few exceptions (parents selling to kids, for example). What this means is the Prop 13 “basis” value across all CA homes is always moving up towards market, albeit slower than the market moves. But every time a property sells it resets.

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      2. Not in Oregon. We got that one right.

        “In Oregon, the assessed value for property tax purposes does not automatically reset to the sale price upon the sale of a property. Instead, Oregon’s Measure 50 limits annual increases in assessed value to a maximum of 3%.“

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    3. From things my in-laws and Democratic acquaintances have said, many of them see taxes as the dues for membership in their club (the U.S.) A gentleperson pays his or her club dues on time and without complaint. To do otherwise is to be gauche.

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        1. Hear! Hear! I am a free citizen. Not some boot licking, backside kissing, gutless < unprintable for several lines due to this being a family blog> subject of some state. As for being a gentlebeing I do consider myself one (perhaps I err) but I bow to no one other than my Lord and Savior.

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      3. Dear Board,
        I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.
        Sincerely yours,
        Groucho Marx.

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      4. The Dems in California can’t afford it. They’re too beholden to special interests to cut anything in the budget. And the state’s balance sheet has been dipping in and out of the red quite a lot over the last few years.

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          1. A mere Peccadillo. The country is well over 36 Trillion in debt about 3 orders of Magnitude worse(https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/). We have an approximately 29 Trillion dollar GDP. If we had a balanced budget that would be unpleasant debt level but survivable. The problem is we’ve been running 1-3 Trillion Dollar/Year debts since 2020 (with 2020 the peak at 3.1 Million during Trump 45’s last year). We have not run a surplus since 2001 (and that a measly 130 Billion or so). Debt service now runs about $780 billion/year about 16% of the budget. Income for 2024 was ~4.9 Trillion so a total tax rate of ~17% of the GDP, In general history has shown if you push past 19% or so your income flags as folks start avoiding taxes in any way they can so larger taxes (the traditional Democrat solution) will likely not work. We spend approximately 3.6 Trillion on debt and Social services (look at the earlier website I referenced but change the ending to /federal-spending/ take that word press!!!). That leaves us ~ 1.3 trillion for discretionary spending and the National defense and VA take about .9T of that. Both of those have A LOT of deferred maintenance that needs doing, So it looks like we really need to look at doing something about social services (Social Security, Medicare, Health and Income security e.g. welfare). DOGE was poking at this, but that got even stronger responses than axing USAID, Seems likely something is screwy there, but politicians depend on those payments as vote getters. Not sure WHAT the answer is but running deficits above 1 Trillion for the next 10-20 years is NOT the answer.

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    4. I have absolutely no idea why “Parlimentarian” is apparently a lifetime appointment. Fire the current occupant whenever leadership changes for criminy’s sake. Or just fire them on alternate Thursdays. It’s a leadership appointment. So leadership a bit, morons. Jeez.

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    5. Russian serfs, before manumission, were sometimes sold to factory owners. Entire villages were uprooted and moved to new factories farther east, or in the Don River valley. Some were productive, probably as much as free labor would have been. Others were not so great. Whether that would have been true elsewhere? The underlying culture seems to have played a huge role in things.

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    6. A number of Africa’s problems are geographic. There are no major rivers other than the upper Nile that can be used year-round for trade and transportation. The rainforests in the central part of the continent harbor tsetse flies, which meant that horses and most cattle can’t be used for traction because of disease. The Sahara doesn’t help transportation, either. On the coasts, especially eastern coast, slave raids from Arabia and Zanzibar discouraged a lot of development in places aside from Ethiopia, and they were mostly landlocked. Resource development tended to be piecemeal, ditto technology, and language barriers didn’t help.

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    7. Sarah, the Reader agrees with you that we need an ‘all of the above’ effort to grow out of our debt. He sees two challenges.

      First, we need an all out DOGE level effort on regulations both at the Federal and state levels. The Trump administration realizes this, but most of the bureaucratic state’s power originates in those regulations so the fight there will be long and hard. At the state and local levels, blue state economic regulations are so convoluted (see CA, NY and others) that no business actually knows if it is in compliance, and small businesses are smacked the hardest (lawyers to fight the state are expensive). Even in the red states, most governments are go along with their decades of embedded regulations (FL being a notable exception). This is the work of decades at all levels of government.

      Second, we need to realize that at the end of the day ‘human’ capital is the only capital that exists, and that it needs to be grown in quantity and quality. We have been doing the opposite for most of the Reader’s lifetime. Shrinking the birthrate and destroying our education system at every level have been as big if not bigger impact to our anemic economic growth than the ever growing thicket of regulation.

      We have to address these fast enough to stay ahead of the debt bear. The Reader sees interesting times ahead.

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      1. Throwing ‘The Rich’ out of the wagon to appease the Debt Bear is neither sustainable nor survivable.

        ‘The government’ has run up a debt of $37 TRILLION!! Did you vote for that? I know I didn’t. I say the politicians that voted for all that debt should be put on the hook for it.

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    8. Well, strictly speaking, some of the failure of locals to invest in business in Africa is due to people nicking their stuff.

      But, largely ‘kinsmen’ doing the nicking, under the tribal rules.

      America prospered because it was harder for your cousin, or the local university faculty to outright rob you under color of the law.

      UK’s academia? Large class of people, self dealing to each other, and very invested in making sure that they get their cut from the ‘uneducated’.

      US situation is also bad.

      My energy has just run down, otherwise I would not have the sense to avoid ranting.

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      1. You beat me to it. That idiot was almost right, but he was wrong about who was doing the “nicking”. And often it’s not, technically, stealing, as nobody is actually going in and taking your stuff without your permission. Rather, it’s relatives demanding handouts because you have more than they do, and you’ll get shunned if you refuse to give it to them. Which means that the guy who’s trying to start a small bodega-style store never gets a chance to build up inventory, because the moment he starts accumulating money, down come the family vultures to strip it away. So the small business doesn’t get started, the local community has fewer options for buying groceries, and he doesn’t provide income to one or two employees. Multiply that by thousands and you get the tragedy of Africa.

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        1. In Senegal, if I’m remembering right, the Mauritanians were the merchants because of exactly the dynamic you describe.

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          1. In other parts of Africa it’s the Chinese who are running businesses. Elsewhere it’s the Indians, I think. (In neither case could I tell you exactly which parts, I’m just repeating generalities I’ve heard). The common factor is that they’re outsiders, without local connections that would suck out all their investment and leave their business dead.

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            1. It’s “known” that Portuguese only become successful overseas or in lands they immigrate to. This is due to the fact that a) Portugal can be a lot like Africa in “you have to look after all your relatives.) and b) working hard renders you suspect of being a secret Jew. (No, seriously, the expression when I was growing up was “works like a Jew.”)

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              1. Frontier Effect – being shunned, or even a cousin showing up, is less of a thing if you first walked west to Illinois before starting your enterprise.

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                1. perhaps this, combined with my previously identified mother-in-law effect, explains why humans walked out of Africa in the first place.

                  ”Another cousin? And your mother is driving me nuts! That’s it! Get the kids, I’ll get our chipped flints, we are LEAVING.”

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                  1. One of the problems we have is that we are running out of frontier, because part of that Frontier Effect is that your cousin can’t lose track of you. And yes, your cousin can get government help in that task.

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              2. I noticed in Thomas Sowell’s essay “Are Jews Generic” in which he discusses the position of “middle man minorities” that several of the examples he gave are folk who are not generally that successful at home: Chinese in southeast Asia and Lebanese in Africa in particular. He doesn’t go into that (not the point of the essay) but I think that it’s a matter, at least in part, of their achieving economic success when they get out of the “crab bucket.”

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                1. One interesting relationship between the Jewish people, the Indian Hindu culture and the Asian Confucian/Buddhist cultures is they all have a high respect for learning, particularly from reading scripture or similar texts. The early Christian church also has similar views, and the focus of Luther and the reformers on having the people read the scriptures for themselves strongly influence the Northern European cultures. Basically you get more of what you value. Sowell’s “Middle man minorities” seem to come out of this set of cultures that favor learning.

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            2. IIRC eastern and southern Africa had more Indians. When Idi Amin expelled the Indian businessmen from Uganda, it helped collapse his economy.

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        3. Which is why in many of these places, community outsiders are the only ones who can act as successful merchants.

          Of course, that has a whole passel of other issues in a tribal society…

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          1. And even some that considered themselves not so tribal. That “outside merchant” was one of the roles played by Jews historically, and they paid the price in pogroms up to the present day.

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    9. Top Ten Sites That Were Built By Slaves(i) For All Modern Anthropologists Can Tell

      (i) Okay, as far as USAID funded Archeology and Anthropology Faculty can tell their modern freshman and graduates, these sites were built by Bantu slaves from South Africa transported around the world on cold fusion powered clipper ships.

      1. The Cahokia Mounds
      2. The neo-con aboriginals of Thule were colonized by Vulcans, and built some of the finest jet turbine engines used by the Lemurian civilization.
      3. Macho Pikachu
      4. Around 69,000 years ago, a Korean people near Greater Slave Lake had Bantu slaves who grew indigo.
      5. The Gaza Sphinx
      6. 140,000 years ago, near modern Timbuktu, free-will Libertarians used slave labor to build a number of semiconductor fabrication sites.
      7. The Great Wall of China
      8. The sunken civilization of Gatlantis, off the coast of Sicily and Normandy, was known for its crystaline spires, its Toga wearing citizens, and that every citizen carried an automatic pistol in a pancake holster.
      9. Stonehenge
      10. 256,000 years ago, near modern Peking, minarchist anabaptist duckmen built a bunch of graphite moderated fission reactors that had a very high positive void coefficient.

      Word Press Delenda Est (screwed up my formatting)

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    10. Though, there is a joke in going around the Midwest, looking at ghost towns, searching for the most ruined sites, and going “try to tell me that the same civilization built Hoover dam”.

      There are some reasonably hilarious arguments to be made in selecting artifacts that we can verify are of US manufacture during period, and playing the ‘these are nothing alike’ game.

      But, maybe only most amusing when you have an audience that can fully appreciate the jokes.

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    12. It’s not just tribalism. It’s also the lack of the Tenth Commandment. They feel freely to take from people who have stuff whether those people belong to their tribe or not.

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    13. Spending money on ‘the poor’ is never any use. We’ve spent most of that $37 trillion on the poor, and they’re still poor. Just like every other aspect of socialism, Leftroids keep doing the same stupid things, over and over, expecting the laws of nature to suddenly change in their favor.

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      1. We define “the poor” as the bottom fifth of population by economic status. Tht value gets adjusted every year.

        If we were a nation composed entirely of billionares, 1/5 of them would have less billions than the other 4/5ths have. Thus they are “poor” by definition.

        Didnt folks see that one? Like all our other post-WW2 wars, there is absolutely no intention of ever -winning- “the war on poverty”, just always we shall -fight- it, thus it shall never end, so the war profiteers and congresspeeps can flourish forever.

        LBJ did not want to be known as the first US pesident to lose a war, yet did everything he could to ernsure anything with the word “war” attached was utterly unwinnable.

        Didnt mind losing, apparently, as long as someone else got to hold the bag.

        Asshole. (spit)

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          1. Therefore, logically, Somebody has to make sure that everybody gets exactly the same size slice so there will be no poor! Doesn’t matter how miniscule the slices are so long as everybody’s slice is the same!

            The government can’t turn failure into success, but it sure can turn success into failure.

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      2. We’ve spent most of that $37 trillion on the poor, and they’re still poor. 

        Social Security, just because of the way it’s marketed isn’t being directed at “the poor”, as one counterexample. Same for Medicare.

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    14. Slavery had nothing to do with European infrastructure. Slavery wasn’t a thing in Europe after about 1000 AD or so. As of the Conquest, one in ten inhabitants of England were “servi,” but I’m not sure if that meant “slaves” as we understand the term.

      For that matter, slavery wasn’t a big thing in ancient Egypt (the Book of Exodus notwithstanding; it was written centuries after the events described and I doubt that anything it says is true). Those huge monuments were built by peasant labor during the flood season, when they couldn’t work the fields and floating big stones from quarries down the Nile to where they were needed was easy. Peasants had it rough, but no rougher than in other places, and were not bought and sold like slaves in classical Greece and Rome.

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      1. Between Christianity, developments within the feudal system, and a few other things, slavery in Western Europe became something unfortunate, not “ho hum, welcome to the club.”

        Unfortunately, the repeated collisions with the Seljuks and Ottomans, plus someone during the Renaissance deciding that “if slavery was good for the Romans, it will be good for us, and the Ottomans are doing it to us anyway …” brought it back in Western Europe to a degree, although not “at home” so much as on ships and “over there.” And if fellow Europeans were enslaved, it was called something else, at least in England – penal contract servitude, some forms of indentured servitude.

        Eastern Europe … serfdom was considered a solution to a labor problem, which is why it came back in parts of Brandenburg and Poland after the Thirty-Years-War. And Russia had slaves until Peter the Great ended the practice for tax purposes (slaves didn’t pay taxes), then enserfed all the peasants into collectives, which were taxed. [Russian slavery was seriously strange, at least compared to what everyone assumes. People enslaved themselves in order not to starve, and having slaves was seen as an act of moral goodness and charity. Some jobs required that a person be enslaved, especially property managers. And soldiers were enslaved, but not slaves in the usual sense.]

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    16. It’s bullshit. Our making our lands into hell won’t make theirs into heaven. Or even improve for a moment their wretched lot.

      Crab bucket.

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      2. Honestly there are days I think a mischievous 6′ tall rabbit would be far preferable to autocorrect or WordPress. At least a púca (aka Pooka) might go out for a bit of whiskey if you offered, and occasionally (though not often) might be helpful. They are also purported to manifest as horses, dogs, ravens, foxes, and cats (that last shape seeming particularly suited to their nature to my taste). I have a black cat and sometimes wonder if he is a púca, although he has never asked for nor taken a dram of whiskey, nor is he particularly helpful.

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