On May 12, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.
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Axis in Africa
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Deadbeat California
The injustices pile up so thick and fast that one can’t really keep track. Some state governments are especially prolific in producing them. Governments like the Deadbeat State, formerly known as the Golden State.
Now businesses in California must pay the price for the state government’s profligacy during the pandemic, when it borrowed $20 billion from the federales to help pay unemployment benefits. California is refusing to repay.
In the budget proposal for 2023-2024, $750 million had originally been set aside to begin repaying this debt. But Governor Gavin Newsom killed the provision. So, in accordance with federal regulations, businesses must take up the slack. Starting in 2023, the unemployment tax rate that businesses will pay, which had been 0.6 percent, is being increased by 0.3 percent until the loan is repaid.
“California is just not really an employer-friendly state,” says Marc Joffe of the Cato Institute. “This one thing will not be a difference between a business remaining open or closing, but it’s just another burden on top of the many burdens the state puts on employers.”
A major contributor to the size of this debt is the state’s failure to act to prevent massive fraud in filings for unemployment benefits. LexisNexis estimates that fraudulent payments amount to more than $32 billion.
California taxpayers must pay for this unsalutary neglect one way or another. But what Newsom has done ends up penalizing businesses in particular.
Yet another reason to avoid doing business in the state.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Alfred Hitchcock
We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.
Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1965).
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Union, disunion
On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. State.
Nine years later, to the day, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s independence and neutrality were affirmed in the Second Treaty of London.
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Here-at-Home Problem
The China problem is “not just a distant ‘over there’ problem,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) recently argued. “As the spy balloon incident as well as the illegal CCP police stations on American soil illustrate, it’s a ‘right here at home’ problem.”
It’s also a just-north-of-us problem. Canada is currently expelling a Chinese diplomat and dealing with the fallout over China’s interventions in Canadian politics, along with big financial gifts to a foundation for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father.
An article in The Globe and Mail nonchalantly explained the reasons China is engaged in trying to control the speech of every one of the planet’s inhabitants. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many international goals:
- “build acceptance abroad for its claims on Taiwan, a self-ruled island that it . . . reserves the right to annex by force.”
- “play down its conduct in Xinjiang, where the office of former UN Human Rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet last year said China has committed ‘serious human-rights violations.’”
- “generate support for a draconian 2020 national-security law to silence opposition and dissent in Hong Kong.”
- “quell foreign support for Tibet, a region China invaded and annexed more than 70 years ago, and to discourage opposition to Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea and sweeping maritime claims in the region.”
Having committed a long list of crimes against humanity, the CCP understandably demands that everyone keep their mouths shut.
Rep. Gallagher believes the U.S. should improve “our deterrent posture across the Taiwan Strait” and communicate “in clear terms that we will not stand idly by while the CCP continues to increase its aggression internationally” — while President Biden has repeatedly pledged U.S. military support for Taiwan.
But for some reason, Biden has never discussed the prospect with the American public.
As if it weren’t our concern, too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Orson Welles
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
Orson Welles, in an interview from Hollywood Voices (1971), Andrew Sarris, editor.
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Victoria Woodhull
On May 10, 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman nominated for President of the United States.
In a landmark Supreme Court decision on May 10, 1893, the tomato was ruled a vegetable, not a fruit.
One shouldn’t need the latest ratcheting-up of the culture wars to oppose what we call, in America, “public radio and TV.” Taxpayer-subsidized broadcast media is a bad idea. Period. Full stop.
Defund NPR. Defund PBS. No more state-run or -subsidized media.
And, thankfully, that point was made by Governor Kevin Stitt when he vetoed the Oklahoma legislature’s renewed funding for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority.
“OETA, to us, is an outdated system,” he told Fox News. “You know, the big, big question is why are we spending taxpayer dollars to prop up or compete with the private sector and run television stations?”
But he didn’t stop there. “And then when you go through all of the programing that’s happening and the indoctrination and over-sexualization of our children, it’s just really problematic, and it doesn’t line up with Oklahoma values.”
What this implies is that wasting taxpayer money on “public supported” media was fine with Republicans like Stitt. Until a really flagrant violation of their sensibilities.
Sure, the current gender and “critical race theory” nonsense that taxpayer-subsidized media pushes is beyond the pale.
But so is the smug establishment progressivism of “public media” culture more generally.
The whole point of taxes and government spending is to promote the general welfare, or so the standard theory runs. But there’s nothing “general” about the extreme sectarianism of “public radio and TV,” with less well-to-do taxpayers subsidizing the far wealthier public media audience.
It would have been far more inspiring had Governor Stitt dared oppose factional subsidies prior to the latest culture war strife. Indeed, maybe we wouldn’t be now enduring CRT and transgenderism and other aspects of cultural Marxism had conservatives actually stuck to republican principles long ago.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Alfred Hitchcock
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
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John & José
On May 9, 1800, abolitionist hero and revolutionary (and, depending upon your point of view and certain definitions, insurrectionist, perhaps even terrorist) John Brown was born.
In 1883 on this date, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was born. He is most famous for his book The Revolt of the Masses.