Upside Down

The world seems to be upside down right now and the decade is off to a choppy start.  First, House Democrats are still frantically trying to undo the 2016 election.  Then we had the press panicked over the killing of Soleimani and worries that it would touch off WWIII. And now we have a threatened pandemic.  The Doomsday Clock has been moved forward to 100 seconds before midnight.  But it moved toward midnight when Reagan got elected and we actually moved away from Doomsday, so I don’t fret too much.  Still, little Greta has given us 8 years until the world collapses, and I would feel silly if Greta turned out to be too optimistic.

We spent billions of dollars and put all of our citizens on the line with a nuclear umbrella to protect Western Europe from an invasion from the Eastern Bloc for 45 years.  Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s the Eastern Bloc countries that are having to defend themselves from the dictates, policies and attempted forced immigration mandated by Western Europe. 

The EU is now keeping open the threat of sanctioning Poland over its the independence of its judiciary, threatened Hungary for its resistance to taking in large Muslim populations, yet resisted imposing sanctions on Iran. 

And after taking out Soleimani, the Democrats and MSM heaped criticism on Trump as if we had taken out a head of state, when in fact he was responsible for killing over 600 of our soldiers.  After the seizing of our embassy in 1979 and attacking our embassy in Iraq, Trump decided he had had enough.  From the caterwauling of Democrats and the MSM you would have thought that Trump nailed the French foreign minister.

Closer to home, Illinois has inverted the American Dream.  For decades government subsidized and encouraged home ownership, fostering the desire of all Americans to own their own home.  Illinois now has the 2^nd highest real estate property taxes in the country (and now threatening a progressive income tax).  Coupled with the federal tax law that caps the deductibility of local property taxes, Illinois has lagged behind the entire country in price appreciation.  In Illinois, the American Dream is to be able to SELL your home.

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot (Motto: I’ll focus on ANYTHING but pension reform) announced that she was supporting contract set asides for LGBT owned companies.  Now, this leads to some interesting questions.  Since gays outearn heterosexuals, why the need for set asides?  Second, how do you certify/verify?  Do you send in video clips?  And doesn’t this discriminate against individuals that would prefer to keep their sexual orientation private?  Finally, who ranks higher in the set aside hierarchy if this moves forward, blacks or gays? 

And now that Illinois has legalized weed sales, politicos are scrambling to try to get more minorities into the recreational marijuana business.  But with Cook County layering on yet another tax, bringing the total tax on weed to 41%, government has now assured that there will be a vibrant black market.  I predict there will be more minorities exercising their entrepreneurial skills in the black market than in the licensed market.  Interestingly, much is being made of expanding minority business ownership in the weed business but there is not a single black owned bank in the Chicago area.  So the message from Illinois politicians to minorities seems to be, “We want you in the weed business, but in lending and finance—meh.”

We seem to be living in a real life Poseidon Adventure.