Trouble Brewing

One of things you cannot help but notice is that pretty much everything in America is some sort of scam run by the managerial class to extract money from the rest of us. The most common way to do this is via cost shifting and you see it in the so-called non-profit rackets. Everywhere you look, non-profits are working the tax code so that Cloud People can live self-actualizing lives, while we get to pay for it. It looks like that scam may be reaching its end.

When New Haven Mayor Toni Harp gazes out her office windows, she can see across the street to Yale University’s idyllic buildings and grounds — none of which are on her city’s property tax rolls.

Yale, a nonprofit despite its $25 billion endowment and sprawling property (it owns about half the land in the city, Harp says), doesn’t pay property taxes. And some officials in Connecticut, including Harp, would like to see that change.

They aren’t alone. City and state officials in other parts of the country, including Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey, also are questioning whether they can continue to allow wealthy schools like Yale, or big nonprofit hospitals, to remain off tax rolls while they scramble for money to pay for police, fire, streets and other infrastructure and services.

In some cases, they are looking for ways of taxing what until now have been tax-exempt sacred cows.

For a long time now, the Federal government has strong armed states into going along with policies they would never implement on their own. They do this by threatening to withhold Federal funds for thing like roads and education. The result is state budgets have swelled as they take on the burden of the the Progressive fantasies, while the Washington politicians strut around like heroes for having cooked up these programs. The states are now running out of money to pay for this crap, so they are look for new taxes.

Of course, these colleges are working the same rackets. Yale could offer free tuition to its undergrads. They could expand their undergrad population and thus reduce tuition costs. Schools like Yale have the same sized student body they had after WWII, when the country was a third of its current population. Instead of doing those things, they have turned Yale into a five star resort whose primary purpose is to be a money laundering operation for the super-rich, looking to avoid taxes.

All of these cost shifting schemes have something in common and that’s leverage. State governments have been able to hide the cost of social programs through debt issuance. Colleges have become luxury resorts by passing those costs onto graduates in the form of student debt. Young people are holding north of $1 Trillion in debt at the moment, with close to 20% of it technically in default. What that is telling us is that this form of cost shifting is reaching its end as well.

There’s a Assembly of Notables vibe to stories like this because what we are seeing is the beneficiaries of the system desperately trying to keep the plates spinning. The people in power, the members of both parties, all know that either government spending at all levels is sharply reduced or that taxes are sharply increased. In all probability, both will be necessary. The trouble is the people with the money to be taxed are rich and powerful. Yale does not want to pay taxes and it does not want its patrons to pay them either.

As was the case in the French Revolution, what we are seeing in America is the use of debt to perpetuate a system that was evolved for a bygone era. Social democracy, which is what we have in America, is a 19th century concept implemented in the 20th century. Big parts of it are no longer useful, but no one knows how to reform it. There are millions still making a nice living doing busy work in the system and they will fight anything that resembles reform. The result is endless haggling over how to make 2 + 2 = 5.

The most likely outcome of this is we first see state governments begin to buckle. California is, for all practical purposes, insolvent. Illinois is probably going to be the first state to face defaulting on its pension obligations. All but a handful of states are facing very serious debt problems that will require doing what they previous assumed was unthinkable, like taxing hospitals and colleges.colleges. Next up will be a push to get rid of the tax breaks for charitable deductions. That’s when the whole non-profit racket collapses.

What will be interesting to watch is what happened when the people on the fringe of the managerial class start to be cut loose to save money. When hospitals need to cut costs, they will not be laying off nurses and doctors. They will go for the diversity coordinator and the patient liaison officer. Colleges are not going to drop the football team, but they will get rid of the Transgendered Studies people. A whole lot of people in self-actualizing careers will find out they are luxury items, not necessities. That’s when things could get fun.

80 thoughts on “Trouble Brewing

  1. When hospitals need to cut costs, they will not be laying off nurses and doctors. They will go for the diversity coordinator and the patient liaison officer

    Wrong. Really wrong. That’s what you’d hope they do. First, they lay off the maintenance and as much of the janitorial staff as they can. Then they defer needed maintenance. Then they start laying off nurses aides, then nurses. They’ll go bankrupt before they get rid of any administration staff- they’re all needed to run the remaining staff through the mill.

  2. Spending will not decrease. Ever. Taxes on IRA accounts will happen. Low rates at first, of course. A VAT tax will also be implemented, at some point. The VAT will be on top of all other personal taxes, not to replace them. It may replace the personal tax for a few years, then return in graduated form. Officials will still be talking more money is needed for infrastructure, education, poverty even after all the new taxes are raised. It will never end. In 50 years, the average personal income tax rate will be 50%. Taxes on miles driven will be appearing on the horizon. Of course Federal Politicians and bureaucrats will be exempt from all the new taxes. It will be argued that this step is needed to attract the best and the brightest. Perhaps the New King will throw some crumbs to the crowd. We will have reached Nirvana. Shotgun anyone?

  3. Debt plus Taxes equals the essence of Government. End the debt-based financial system and tax exemptions as described above, eliminate taxes on productive labor and tax the bejeezus out of administrative work and a workable society might be the result.

  4. One short term solution would be that every dollar they get has to be spent within a time frame. Say five years. If they raise more money they can keep going but every dollar is time limited or taxed and given back to whoever gave it to the institution or their recitatives.

    I used to look up to Gates until I heard him say that none of his charities would go to White people. That…really…pissed…me…off. As far as I’m concerned every dime should be taxed under those conditions.

  5. Sorry.
    If you think that the gender studies or diversity hires are going before the nurses, teachers or janitors then you haven’t been watching the way the progressive elites actually work.
    What part of protected class don’t you understand? The lay off list is complied in order of loyalty, top down.

    • As I like to say, in the hour of their greatest need people will call out for a nurse, not a diversity manager.

  6. I may stir up some hornets, but along with other nonprofit owners of valuable untaxed property there are the churches. They receive the same services and infrastructure as the private schools and hospitals, but pay no tax. About one third or more of Boston is tax free property. Even if donations remain untaxed as charity donations, they should be required to pay property tax and income tax on gambling and business income. The only thing is I doubt this would relieve the burden on the “dirt people,” but just allow the managers to find more ways to spend it.

    • Half the churches I’ve been in lately would be bankrupt in a year with that scheme. They would literally be handing the keys to the buildings over to the towns – who would then wonder how to maintain or dispose of a landmark historical building in their center.

    • Most of those those Boston churches anymore are endowments without congregations, essentially NGO’s. That would be like the State taxing itself. The universities are also working to further the state, obviously. This is why so target rich an environment will remain just as it is.

      • If they could somehow limit it to only the Catholic churches, I’m sure the MA elite would be on board with this scheme. Everyone else is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Prog.

  7. You should read up on what the French are currently implementing. A tax free year in 2017! Why? Because in 2018 they’re going to force people to submit their taxes via the internet. Employees in France currently pay taxes a year after their income is earned, but the French government is looking at implement the withholding tax system similar to what the Americans currently use on payroll earnings. What that boils down to is in 2017, French workers will pay their taxes on their 2016 earnings and in 2018, they will begin paying taxes on a monthly basis in real time.

    On cool quiet evening, if you listen carefully, you might just hear the screams.

    • I would be a writer but the whole business of tax in the UK for authors (and as far as I know, people in other branches of the arts and entertainment industry) is that taxes on any monies earned comes two years later after publication. There are probably good reasons for this as no doubt the caring ‘n’ sharing arts — many being socialists to the core — like to hold money back from the providers for as long as they can, though I do accept that my planned thirteen-volume world best-seller would take take time to print and distribute.

      Tangentially related: Most workers in the UK (back when we had workers) were paid weekly and for that they queued (waited in line) at a small window where brown packets with cash were handed out. If you were going to rob anyone you usually would want to do it early on a Thursday evening when most workers were going home with their full pay packets. Thursday was pay day because Friday was reserved for people going back and complaining their pay didn’t match their pay slip.

      Then businesses discovered monthly pay, and overnight companies went from handing out weekly brown envelopes to putting numbers monthly in a bank somewhere. That meant that the workers had to endure three weeks without any income, and even if you were given advance warning this was going to happen three months ahead (and many workers were given very little notice) it was hard to skim some of the weekly money off and save it up for the next ‘famine.’

      That may be one of the reasons that credit mushroomed in the UK and people, needing to stay alive for reasons beyond the bosses, had to resort to borrowing cash from loan sharks. Trouble is that the need to borrow, once established, has never gone away.

  8. Z Man. Forget the French, think Henry VIII. When he was broke and the Church was in turmoil generated by the Reformation, hence not all that popular, what did he do_? He started his own church and went where the money of his era was, namely Church lands. He took them all and gave/sold them to new owners i.e. his buddies in exchange for service or money, mostly money.

    The parallel here_? A national Community Chest for all charitable work funded with a small residue of the confiscated endowments of ALL NGO’s and universities. The Daviosie think having to pay taxes on the privileged holdings is terrible. When they figure out that their holdings are the target, they’ll be sorry they baulked at taxes.

  9. “If the direction American societies took combined the right of total command with the capacity of total execution freedom would soon be obliterated in the New World”–Tocqueville. . More important by far than dealing with government’s spending hunger is severely limiting it’s abilities to tax, or you have, at best (and there will be no best), only entered a cycle. Tocqueville spotted this peculiarly (at the time) American flaw in 1831. “In New England, it is the township assessor who fixes the taxes, the collector who raises them, the treasurer of the township forwards the receipts to the public treasury and any claims arising are submitted to ordinary courts. Such a manner of collecting taxes is slow and awkward; it would constantly constrict the progress of any government with extensive financial requirements. But it will always be simple for central government , such as it is organized in America, to introduce, when the need arises, more vigorous and effective methods of action.”
    “I have made the distinction between two types of centralization; the one called governmental, the other administrative. The first exists solely in America; the second is almost unknown there. In the United States, the majority, which often has despotic tastes and instincts, still lacks the most developed tools of tyranny.
    If the direction American societies took combined the right of total command with the capacity of total execution freedom would soon be obliterated in the New World.”

  10. These assorted Foundations and other non-profits have become much like the medieval Christian Church, soaking up and retaining vast wealth needed by the other estates. King Henry solved his problem by seizing the Church holdings. It may be time for us to consider dissolving the Ford, Carnegie, and other Foundations, and nationalizing their assets. Colleges such as Harvard, Yale, etc. might be seriously taxed, or stripped of their endowments. These colleges would need to cut back on expenses, preferably by eliminating fluff departments and returning to traditional core subjects, and also paying their professorate at rates more according to someone who chose his career for its intellectual stimulation instead of wealth. Return to the ideal of “genteel poverty, the old scholar who wore elbow patches on his tweedy jacket not because it was fashionable.

    • It’s a thrill to hear the truth spoken bluntly in an age of lies. That’s why Trump is doing so well.

  11. “When hospitals need to cut costs, they will not be laying off nurses and doctors”

    The characteristic failure mode for a post-mature institution is *exactly* to cut essential functions to maintain growth of parasitic overhead at its historic rate. This is why the VA is spending big bucks on solar panels and art while letting patients die for lack of funds. It’s why the CDC has endless money for silly-season studies and sincerely pleads poverty as an excuse for never having thought about Ebola.

    That’s what a dying system *is*: One where bullshit *is* the essential function. One where the guy in charge says “Why do I have to waste my money on treating a bunch of dumbass redneck vets when I could be spending it on awesome stuff real people care about, like solar panels and shitty art and black lesbians in management?” So, naturally, he concludes that the only way to achieve the VA’s goals is first to be responsible and lay a solid foundation of diversity and sustainability.

    And when the dumb rednecks die of whatever shitty conditions they were dumb enough to volunteer for, it’s not his fault. You didn’t fund that stuff. All you funded was the basics. He HIRED the lesbians. He did his job. If you want to treat veterans too, for some crazy reason, fine — go start a fucking agency or something.

    • My last job, there were four waves of layoffs of IT and revenue-producing types before a single manager was laid off. She did do some stats work. Part of her severance package was a job offer at a higher salary, as a pure manager with no stats duties. I got zapped in that wave (#5). A friend survived to wave seven or eight. He said it was three IT guys and forty managers. Hilarious. Predictable.

      No manager will lay off anybody useless. That’s too close to the bone. Start laying off useless people, and YOU might be next. Unthinkable.

      • 3 IT guys and 40 managers? Holy hell, what was the original ratio? One manager per worker?

        • At the time I was hired, something like that. They were already doomed by then. They’d been acquired by some UK corp with deep pockets and some billionaire’s semi-retarded son for a CEO. The parent lost hundreds of millions on that disaster IIRC. They didn’t really miss it.

      • Sorry, Z Man, you missed it on this one. Wilbur is correct. Hospitals and clinics have been underpaying and underhiring and overworking nurses for quite a while. The humongous chemical corporation where I spent 30+ years working as a technician started doing the same thing in the Carter and Reagan years. Managers are the very last to go. Peons are expendable and replaceable at lower salaries. Until you have a company with nobody left who actually knows how to do anything.

    • NHS in Britain verifies your statement.
      Admin to providers ratio, 9 to 1.
      The largest employer in the UK, with standing queues, Third World doctors, filthy facilities, and the NICE euthanasia program.

  12. Good. Tax them all. I would wager that 99% of the nonprofit and/or tax exempt sector has been co-opted by the left-leaning, globalist, political elite and serves primarily to keep themselves in power. There’s no coherent justification to give them a tax break for doing so.

    In practice, the elites will keep the plates spinning until the dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency, at which point the system collapses. This will be a long, grinding process of federal encroachment on state and/or local governance in exchange for financing from the federal government. This process inherently favors the Democrats, and they will dominate electoral politics at the national level for the foreseeable future. The Republican party has no future as a national party.

    Assuming Hillary wins, which appears to be a fair bet right now, look for the feds to offer a pension reform plan in which public and private entities can dump both assets and liabilities onto the federal government. It will be financed by taxing (read confiscating) individual IRA assets, increasing employment taxes, and borrowing (read printing) money. Republicans will sign on to the plan at the behest of their corporate masters, who will dump their pension obligations into the system.

    America’s national debt is at approximately 100% of GDP, courtesy of the $10T in debt added by the Obama administration. Japan’s national debt is approximately 230% of Japan’s GDP, and they can still raise capital. Japan’s experience implies that if America adds $1T in debt/year then we have a solid 15-20 years before we reach Japanese levels of debt, assuming a nominal level of GDP growth.

    Weimar Germany had debt of approximately 900% of GDP before their government printed their way out of debt and into hyperinflation, but the gold standard was still in place then. In our Matrix in which central banks create credit from thin air the truth is that nobody knows what the upper limit of debt:GDP is, or whether an upper limit exists. As long as producers of goods in the private sector continue to exchange real goods and assets for credit money the plates will keep spinning.

  13. Oh, by the way. I disagree with your idea that the diversity coordinator will be the first to go. The universities are running much of health care these days. I just retired from a university system. Look at the colleges. Administration never seems to shrink. With university-run health care systems the lines just get longer. Try ten hours in an ER with an asthma attack three hours before being seen by a doctor, if at all, and going home with a three thousand dollar bill that would have been two hundred ten years ago.

  14. Good points as always, Z. I recently read Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution (please forgive the pretentious name-dropping), and was struck by similarities with our present situation.

    Broadly speaking, they had the same crisis of the elite we have. The whole machinery is make-believe, what Carlyle might call quackery, and as such is destined to fall apart. Quackery is not self-sustaining. The Davoisie, or at least half of them, didn’t get where they are by actually contributing to society. They are parasites on an increasingly frail host. Now, as then, they rely on a mountain of debt.

    What we don’t yet have that the French had is material shortage. Church and State were able to carry on in France until a drought and ensuing hunger exposed the failure and mismanagement of their government. Modern Americans accept far more “tyranny” than the founding generation ever put up with. Lucky for the smart set we’re currently too fat and contented to get off the couch and decorate a lamp post or two. How long that holds is the big question.

  15. Or some state governor and state house finally get tired of the blackmail and push back. They refuse to obey some unfunded mandate and when the Feds threaten to stop the payments, they order the state’s employers to stop paying income tax withholding to the Feds and to put them in a state escrow account instead. At that point, the Feds have two choices: fight or acceed to the new order. It’s John Lackland and the barons all over again. Maybe we could call the new compact the Great Charter.

  16. From a letter in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars Vol. 28 No. 4 p. 397: “The uber dream job of today’s Ivy League grad is to be the highly paid president of a liberal nonprofit like, say, the Ford Foundation. Think about it! Riding limos to endless soiree’s and galas, inhabiting a world of corner offices and penthouse apartments, owning the status and wealth of a Wall Street banker, and reveling in the fiction that you have bettered the world without ever getting your hands dirty. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the president of an Ivy League university.”
    The analogy to the french Revolution fits. I have about fifty books on the revolution and others that deal with the prior 100 years of history, as well as books dealing with revolution theory and am slowly working my way through them. The lead-up to a revolutionary period seems to me to take a couple hundred years (the American Revolution and the Glorious revolution of 1688 in England are not included in this, French, Russian, and Cromwell are). The ingredients needed are 1. Establishment of ranks. These need not be completely hereditary. 2. Use of ranks to achieve economic supremacy. 3. Centralization of government power to the point of absolutism, or the desire for it and the possibility of getting it. 4. Use of the centralized power to purchase even more power by bribing both elites and the lower classes. 5. Accrual of debt beyond the means to repay, accompanied by frenzied attempts to find new sources of revenue. In every case, the middle classes have been shouldering the burden and the ability to throw around more bribes hoping for returns that will put off a day of reckoning are met with the realization that all of the potential sources of revenue are tapped out. 6. Military adventurism in hopes of economic windfalls and as a means of distracting the public from the troubled economy. 7. Inevitable failure of the military ventures to achieve the desired aims. 8. Belated attempts at reform, which, even if there is a reasonable pathway to resolution, no one has much hope for because of loss of public trust in the regime. 8. Revolution begins as in-fighting amongst the elites and eventually spreads to all classes. Those who find themselves in charge after the first phases are always replaced by groups more radical that their predecessors until there is an effective counter-revolution that brings about order, but never returns things to the original status quo.
    To my mind the primary problem is the establishment of special privileged classes. French nobility was exempt from many taxes that the common man was required to pay. Today privilege is handed out in many ways, but 501(c)3 corporations including hospitals, universities, philanthropic organizations, etc., are the biggest recipients of government-distributed privilege. Occupational licensing is another form of privilege. Having a government job, pension, and health benefits that Joe Sixpackbelly isn’t eligible for is another (note that the elite answer for the health care mess is not to remove privileges and monopolies, but to give us Medicaid, not civil service quality health insurance). What happens in the two hundred year lead up to revolution is that privilege is so widely distributed that any attempt to reform it is met with massive resistance from all quarters, because so many, even poor people, are recipients, and they don’t want to see even their little pittance of privilege disappear. Buckley was right about one thing: the sky is literally black with criss-crossing dollars.
    So at base the problem for us specifically is the fact that our social compact, which states that all men are created equal, has been broken by the fact that our government no longer sees us that way. We are categorized and treated according to our categories, not as individuals. More and more become aware of the lie at the root of our system every day. The problem is in getting them to realize what is needed to repair it. The elites, having benefited from it, are not going to be the source of any true reform.
    Here’s where a possible interpretation of the Alt Right and trump comes in. The unprotected classes in this country are those without special recognition by the government and without special treatment. They make up a portion of what in the french revolution was called the Third Estate. I will be more specific. To me they are the Sanscullotes. The difference being that rather than being concentrated in the capital city, they are scattered across the continent. Up to now concerted action was impossible. Until the internet.

    • I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Jewish revolts. What is interesting is that regardless of who is doing the talking — Jesus, the Essenes, the revolutionaries — the audience that they are addressing is the “meek,” the “poor,” etc. The Pharisees and the Saducees are seen the managers and Cloud People. The leaders of the various opposition factions took great care to identify themselves as carpenters, fishermen, or stone cutters (Phineas during 66-70 AD).

    • I liked it, but had to copy it into Word and break it up into paragraphs and numbered bullet points so I could read it.

    • teapartydoc… there are parallels yes, but… There was nothing in France, pre-revolution like our Federation of State Governments, no? Now the younger generation hasn’t had much civics in school and the progressives try they’re best to minimize it, BUT our country is founded on a Union of States. If there is trouble ahead, it will likely more resemble a convention of states or states banding together to tell the Feds to get bent. Also, property ownership in the US would tend to limit a revolution as too many have too much to lose. Interesting to ponder all the same.

      • Actually France was a conglomeration of former kingdoms that had been incorporated into the larger kingdom slowly over centuries. The provinces were made up of the more centrally located Pays d’Election which were taxed more directly and the more peripheral Pays d’ Etats which had more recently come into the union, so to speak, and were slightly more independent. They each had their own governors and parlements and local municipal governments. They came more and more under the direct tutelage of the king and royal administration as time progressed.

  17. The scheme operates as follows: The federal government taxes individuals and other entities and uses those monies to bribe to the states to tax the individuals/entities once again to fund programs and services that the federal government prefers.

    I suppose that’s preferable to federal courts ordering local schools to provide expensive educational benefits of little efficacy, such as mainstreaming non-mainstream students. But I remain unconvinced. If we had entirely local schools, we would lose all the taxes provided by bus companies and their employees.

    Then, how should we categorize all of the expenses imposed by the regulatory agencies controlled by the executive branch of the federal government? Title IX, where the regulatory agencies determine what the law is, employs the services of the courts to extract even more funds from the locals is but one example.

    We could tax the rich, but that is more illusory than real. If we were to use Bill Gate’s $90 billion dollars as an example, we have to realize that even if Gate’s had $90 billion in cash and we took it all, it would fund the government for less than 11 days. In fact though, Gate’s has $90 billion in assets, not cash, so all of his assets, buildings, patents, employees, distribution channels, intangibles, etc., would have to be sold off to raise the cash.

    Now if we were to do that to Gate’s, who exactly is it that would have the funds necessary to buy all of those assets? Worse, who would have the funds and still be stupid enough to place himself as the next target of big government?

    Needless to say, taxing the rich won’t generate anywhere near the amount of money needed to fulfill the federal government’s goals. So, the federal government will say it is taxing the rich, the rich will transfer their assets offshore out of the reach of the federal government and the federal government will quietly increase the taxes on the middle class, using state governments as the surrogate tax man.

    The middle class will lose the jobs, training and income from all those jobs transferred offshore so the federal government will just have to visibly tax the rich even more while secretly add more taxation upon the middle class.

    As the middle class loses income and grows ever smaller, the federal government will vociferously proclaim how large the income gap grows due to the evil rich, therefore, we need to tax the evil rich even more and I think we can see the pattern here.

    • Not the rich. The Connected.
      Those who, having no production cost, no cost of goods sold.
      No cost means 100% profit (or 10,000%, as in the prohibition industry).
      No costs or risk means endless demands.

  18. I was in New Haven not long ago with my mother. We were there to go to the local IKEA, undoubtedly built with state subsidy as an urban renewal project. This, I will note, is the only reason we ever go to New Haven and I am from Connecticut. Observations:

    1. I took the train there from NYC. I always like taking the train, because the tracks run along the back of buildings, so you see things people normally don’t. The Connecticut shoreline has stunning, beautiful, wealthy areas next to pockets of third world level dysfunction and poverty. It is quite jarring to watch the transition.

    2. Yale looks totally out of place in the city. It’s beautiful and lavish and old and the rest of New Haven seemed deserted. It took some time before I realized that many of the houses weren’t deserted, but the residents had blackout shades in all the windows, so you could only tell if they were occupied if you passed at just the right angle and saw the tiniest silver of light. It felt like people were living under siege.

    3. My baby had been sick on the way out if the IKEA parking lot, but the whole city gave off such a scary vibe that we left her in the back, dirty and screaming until we arrived in a neighboring town. We didn’t feel safe pulling over earlier, as two white women alone with an infant.

    • New Haven, exactly so. And to think these dens ‘teaching piracy’ (as Zman accurately puts it) have the gall to accuse us Dirts of the rising inequality.

      I see two simple strategies at play.
      The first, of course, is repeated Pump and Dump.
      The other is Smash and Grab.

      For instance, use ‘public’ money’s to herd a bunch of undesirable cattle into a valuable area, eventually the real estate will will be very cheap- then you can make profit rebuilding it, as well.

  19. I think you underestimate the type of narratives these institutions will push to protect the managerial class. They will cut the systems that support their institutions to make them appear woefully underfunded. If you cut their budget they will release critical low level staffs and stop performing maintenance. So functionality is greatly reduced and signs of decay start to show. The budget cut will always be trotted out as the reason why things are terrible. They will hope public backlash will be sufficient to have their budgets restored if not actually increased.

    Only if the initial gambit fails will any non-profit institution actually make meaningful changes towards being independently solvent.

    • @Chad

      You are correct. That is always plan A with those types.
      An excellent counter-gambit would be to publicize full, itemized, & detailed: salary, benefit, pension & perk info (limos, junkets, theater tickets, etc) for all employees of the institution targeted.
      The court of public opinion will not be pleased with the shocking largess bestowed upon these pigs at the trough.
      A line item listing their “duties” would be helpful, as well.
      In Wisconsin, full info on all public employee compensation was (still is) available online. Unless you or a member of your family were on the gubbmint tit, there was NO sympathy for the public sector unions when “Act 10” (dramatically clipping union power & money) was passed.
      The more info the merrier. There is no justification today for the kind of pay, benefits & pension most college & public sector peeps are getting. And they know it. To practice up for the fight ahead, take a toy from a 3 year-old and brace for the reaction.

      • A public prospectus.
        I want to know who spent what, who got what, who individually signed the order.
        A wiki of the Connected Industry, down to the dogcatcher.
        It’s our money, we are the owners.

        The often suppressed guy touting knowledge of the CAFR system, (Comprehensive Annual Financial Review), says They already have such a listing.
        ‘Legislative law lists’ shows everybody on the secret payola payroll- and, that means everybody in the system, from the governor on down. Occasionally, they’ll hang some poor schlubb at the bottom of the ladder to keep up the pretense of legitimacy. The Mob runs everything.

        • Did you hear the story about California recently? They passed a law instituting an over watch authority on the budget for the “hi speed railway boondoggle”, actually passed in looney state. Gov. Moonbeam vetoed the idea and said the project needed no more oversight and was doing fine! How’s that for “transparency from the Dems/Libs? The citizens, both left and right are concerned about the cost of this project, and it has only just started, and the Governor say STFU, to everybody!

    • Agree with Chad. I was thinking the exact same thing. The PC mindset is devoid of reason. The doublespeak is strong in those circles and I seriously doubt “hard choices” would be made “rationally”. There will be pain… and we will all be made to care.

      • That apparently hardwired idiocy is the result of: indoctrination and paycheck bias.

        It is very hard to doubt something that gives you a paycheck. Even more so in hard times. People will go to great extremes to feel good about themselves, even while being parasitical thieves who are destroying the systems which brought us out of serfdom – constitutional democracy and free markets

    • As a professor at one of these schools I agree. I teach stats and programming. I think I am pretty useful as a teacher-at least my students tell me that the courses were useful in their jobs. I am also sure that my school would find a way to cut my tenured job before they cut the diversity coordinator or the Assistant dean for black student affairs or the assistant dean for latinx student affairs. Yes those are all real positions that make far more than all faculty.

    • Perhaps a tax on ‘government’, the Connected, rather.
      This is, after all, supposed to be a place where the citizens are in charge.

    • Tax sales rather than income. If rich people are not spending their money, they are not hogging resources. If they are spending, they are creating jobs – and by spending more frugally than govt, they are spreading the wealth to the most efficient and productive.

      We’d also have to prohibit deficit spending / sales of bonds/ money printing(QE) – that is where the crooks hide the worst of their theft. Just increase the sales tax every time deficit spending occurs.

      If we outlawed debt and income tax, the sales tax would have to be about 160%, I guess, based on pre-Obama level spending. Make people notice the reason the (D)irtbags have so much wealth to blow

      • This is an incredibly stupid idea. Move to EU and see how you like paying 18% on top of all the other taxes.

  20. We are a body of people whistling past the graveyard of the truth. We forget our past at our own peril. Our origins as both a culture and an idea also. The solution, the remedy lies within each of us. It all begins with each of us. Not the State or any component of government. Not politics, or ideology. It all begins with each of us. The entire construct of the state has nothing to do with peoples self determination and self reliance. It is entirely without exception anathema to the entirety of primal natural sovereign state of the individual. The level of administrative centralized tyranny of our governments is directly proportional to the level of loss of the principles of self sufficiency and determination of every single person in this country. There are no exceptions. There are no excuses.
    The only viable recourse that is going to work is when a cascade preference of dirt people begin to return to and incorporate those first principles of liberty into their lives. It is the only way effective change will begin.
    It is exactly because as a people far too many have forgotten or ignore our past, our founding principles, that we are fast approaching the unmitigated disaster we face. The power of true effective change and sustained motive power of political might has always been contained in the body of the people. Our culture is such that it is indeed our culture which is upstream of all politics. And that power begins and ends with each of us just as our liberty does.
    What is such a profound concept, idea, truth really, is it is as simple as it all begins with each of us. That self determination, individualism, is an incredible thing, for to be self determining, to possesses individualism, does not mean to be alone. It requires only a tiny minority, an indomitable plurality of dirt people to create a paradigm. It is where sea changes in a society originate. That is a power unlike any on Earth. The power to effect change and it all starts with each of us.
    It is why the State and it’s actors. That power, of such humble roots and beginnings is the only force that existential to to our government, it’s actors. It is why those actors and their regime of administrative centralized power is what it is. It can not brook or withstand that power of consent and will of the governed, so it must disabuse us of and obsfucate that truth about us to inhibit us from exercising that inherent self determination and power of consent in the first place. The gravy on the tyrants plate is the ability to fleece us and strip mine us of our wealth as a matter of course in the absence of our self determination and self sufficiency.

    • I’ve heard it said that mongrels are heartier dogs than pure breeds. Perhaps that’s one reason Americans have always been so resilient. We’re mongrels, having only just come into being through uncontrolled cross breeding for a couple of centuries. We haven’t been around long enough to be overly fine-tuned into a pure breed.

      What this means is that we, because we still have feral instincts for survival, are innovative, resourceful and determined. When the reset button is hit – many, many Americans will shift into plan b mode. There are many untold stories of plan b implemented during the horrors of Katrina. Stories of survival by the individual, independent free thinkers. The kind of outlier thinking that socialists hate.

      That is why the ideology of ‘make everyone the same‘ will always meet with resistance in a country made up of one-of-a-kinds.

      • Right! As you say about that innate character of dirt people. I think what your saying speaks volumes about the charity of dirt people and the selfless compassion they go to amazing lengths in helping others. It is the stuff that comes from the self, and from the heart too. It begins with each of us. A body of like minded people are naturally indomitable also.
        It is The Honorable Resistance.
        We recently had terrible flooding here in WV recently. The outpouring of charity and caring for others was awesome. That charity happened as natural as the sun rises, it was just there right from the start. Everyone helping out. Volunteer fire stations and back woods churches filled to over flowing with clothes, food, housewares, people organizing things to get stuff to those in need. Makes you proud and humbled at the same time.
        Until the federal government showed up. Talk about nasty arrogant display of contempt. It was palpable.
        First thing they did was declare everything, to the last crumb people donated, along with their spirit of charity, Condemned. Before the feds did anything they had 30 yard dumpsters arriving to cart it all away. It had to be pre-planned. Those people don’t work that fast. They then began to condemn peoples homes. They used the carrot and a stick tactic. Walk right onto your property and inform you uninvited like lords of the realm, you take our money, and you can’t take anything off your property, or you get nothing.
        The common refrain going around regarding the feds was “Got no use for Them”, and spit on the ground.

        • This is exactly why I have always maintained that I would rather be left to my own devises in a crisis than herded by the government.

          • Meema you can join the Honorable Resistance like my family and I have, friends, neighbors. It works, it is contagious. It is like becoming part of a tribe where everyone is looking out for each other. The Honorable Resistance is making the choice. People are beginning to get it. We don’t need no steenkin’ government. All it really does when you get past the fig leaf of legitimacy is steal from you.
            As a fellow I know who told me in these exact words said:
            “The fundamental human right to self-defense and its tools does not stem from any piece of parchment or other act of man.
            It is much more elemental than that.
            I have more principled reasons for my stand on owning firearms, and I don’t care one whit in the world for the Second Amendment. It means nothing to me. My rights have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, and when it dawns on people that it has finally been erased — the principal danger of all political premises posed as “social contracts” — my rights will still validly exist, even if I die defending them. I own firearms because I have a right to private property. That is the First Thing.
            …As the Regime takes off the gloves, every day it creates tens of thousands more American Patriots who realize yes, it really probably is going to get that bad, so really, they may not have that much to lose after all.
            So why not stop being afraid and stand up to the Regime?
            Join the honorable Resistance, or make your own. Garden, cook at home, teach your children, and get right with the Lord. Cut expenses, avoid taxes, learn new skills, and build savings of tangible real assets. Train, stockpile, recruit, prepare, guard, protect, and defend.
            Make this your finest hour.”

        • Judas frickin’ Preist, Doug. That is an open and astonishingly brazen display of pure criminality.

          • If you ever wanted to kick start tax change, REAL change, in this country, you would have to do little more than compel every American to have to write a big-ass check to the Feds every year like the self-employed do instead of making American employers do the dirty job of tax collecting before the paycheck is issued.

            You’d have pitchforks and torches if people had to watch that money actually come out of their own hands.

          • Been saying the same for 20 years now and heard similar arguments in law school while arguing tax policy. Deductions on a pay stub simply don’t have the same mental and emotional impacts as writing out a big check that depletes, if not wipes out, one’s savings at each tax filing deadline.

          • Worse than that Al, I’m a died in the wool deplorable. Get’s worse, I’m a despicable deplorable. But it gets even more deplorable, I’m a white right wing, Christian, raaaacist radical mind you. I’m an Alt-Right, 3 percent, AR15 toting’, sovereign, bitter clinging, tea bagging, domestic terrorist yankee who escaped from Yankeedom, crossed south of the Mason Dixon line into Appalacian trailer trash territory, WV of all places, plus I fly a Confederate flag in my front yard. And to top all that cultural marxist apostasy, I’m a heterosexual male and a global warming heretic, a coal miner.
            (I’m not joking either, that is all the truth.)

          • Late in the thread, but I think I know what’s happening to coal.
            It’s the same thing happening to our California Central Valley farmland.

            It’s the Smash and Grab.
            Eventually, the coal mines will have new owners- and they will be mostly Chinese or New Party Democrats.

          • Very late, sorry- oil rights, farmland and water right- NP Dems, Chinese, Mexican Cartel
            (oil squashed and water stolen, til the small holders are gone and the price is right)
            The Chinese generals are taking their money and fleeing Xi’s consolidation, the Cartel is arm in arm with the Pelosi-Brown mafiosi, the black Dems are still doing their diminished part but will never compete with South American and Asian money laundering, excuse me, foreign direct investment.

        • Same thing happened here in louisiana, people showed up with food, guv turned them away, said it had to guv approved

          • These example are some sick shit for sure. I would tell them “These are our families, friends and neighbors. Who the f*&k are you, Stranger? GTFO!”

        • People will, if left to their own choices, always rally round to help people. Has always been thus, which is why in so many parts of the world, irrespective of whoever runs the government under whatever pretext, ordinary people when encountering the plight of a fellow human will do what they can to help. The problem comes when official ‘help’ is forced upon people in the name of ‘the approved good.’

          Government can only arrange numbers and set quotas and therefore has to spend a lot of time measuring and counting so things can be apportioned ‘fairly’ from which they also have to extract some recompense for all their counting.

          So what are paying the government for is their skill at being to add up and the desire, through taxation, to take away. Division comes later after they have multiplied what they shouldn’t.

      • Meema, got any good references/books on the subject. Of course, all we get in da media is gun grabbing and feckless FEMA being a week late with H2O. They gots to organize and account for everything you know but when it comes to billions in foreign aid or other monies disappearing, well, never mind. I’d prefer the attitude of Larry the Cable Guy “Git ‘er done!”

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