Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left: HERE.
After losing billions to Somali fraudsters, Minnesota’s radical leftist Democrat-Farmer Labor Party is proposing a wealth tax to raise another $290 million. The wealth tax would strip away all assets to generate only a fraction of the billions stolen by the Somali fraudsters benefiting from this mass taxation. It would cover the $250 million Somali meal fraud that got the ball rolling on the wave of convictions, but wouldn’t even touch the scale of the autism and other frauds.
Where did Minnesota’s money really go and why is the party responsible for the fraud raising taxes?
In 2019, when Gov. Tim Walz first took office, Minnesota’s budget was around $48 billion. Last year’s was $66 billion. Compare that to Missouri which has a larger population and a $54 billion budget. Or Colorado, slightly smaller, which has a $38 billion budget.
To break down where the money was really going in Minnesota, welfare spending grew by 42% in 20 years. Health and Human Services spending, the political piggybank that was raided by the Somali fraudsters, went from a quarter of the budget to around a third. Per person welfare spending rose to around $35,000 per person. And covering all that requires raising taxes.
‘Tax the rich’, invariably means ‘steal the money’ and hand it over to your political cronies.
New York and California are the two states where socialist sloganeering about taxing the rich has resounded the loudest.
They’re also the two states with some of the worst out of control spending.
New York’s budget shot up from $140 billion in 2015 to $254 billion last year. That $114 billion increase paved the way for the latest state Democrat budget deal for a whopping $268 billion.
Not only did the New York State budget go up 81% in a decade, but at this rate of increase, the state will run out of any money to tax. This rate of increase will mean that New York will have a half a trillion dollar budget within a decade with a $342 billion budget by 2030, $463 billion by 2035 and $626 billion by 2040. Since state GDP isn’t growing as fast as the budgets, either the government will have to cut its spending or dig into new sources of tax revenue.
Even as spending rose 81%, the state population only had a net increase of 200,000. How does a state spend over $100 billion more while adding only 200,000 people?
Over the last decade, as costs rose and quality of life declined, the middle class has been drifting out of New York State with some of the highest declines taking place among people earning from $100,000 and upwards. The very top and the bottom, those earning less than $5,000, and the so-called 1%, have been the most stable categories. That’s why there’s a push to tax the latter because taxes on the middle class are proving to be less effective.
Middle class households used to make up half the state. It’s now down to around 40%. The 10% decline has been more than made up for by third world immigrants and other welfare cases. During this same period that the middle class became hollowed out, Democrats enjoyed a virtually uncontested political control over not just urban areas, but all of state government.
The ‘Californication’ of New York State led to a one-party state, skyrocketing budgets, growing corruption and ever more expensive social problems that never seem to get resolved. All of these are not unrelated phenomena, but the terrible package deal of the blue state model.
In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a $113 billion state budget for California. Up less than $20 billion from its $92 billion budget in 2005. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s current proposed budget is $348.9 billion. That’s a 279% increase in two decades with an even higher annual percentage growth than New York State and spending under Newsom that has increased 63%.
Future projections suggest that California’s budgets will cross the half a trillion dollar mark by around 2031, followed by a $658 billion budget in 2035 and then a budget that approaches $1 trillion early in the 2040s.
No wonder, California socialists are pushing a wealth confiscation tax on the ballot.
Like New York State, California’s middle class is in decline, falling from around 48% to around 40%. California’s middle class is leaving for more affordable states with better quality life. The state has lost 200,000 people since 2020, but its budgets continue skyrocketing.
Why do state budgets not just increase, but skyrocket, even as the population fails to meaningfully grow? Much of the spending correlates with New York and California’s transformation into corrupt one-party states. That’s why 576 California officials have been convicted on federal charges. It’s why much of the spending into both states remains unaccounted for. Billions simply disappear from social welfare spending and remain unfound.
New York, California and other blue states are Minnesota on an even larger scale and with less accountability. ‘Tax the rich’ is the last ditch effort by corrupt states to keep stealing money.
And the money raised from ‘taxing the rich’ wouldn’t even begin to cover the fraud toll.
California’s proposed wealth tax wouldn’t even begin to cover the cost of its systemic frauds like the state’s $32.6 billion to unemployment fraud. But the fraud is the point of the whole exercise.
Like every socialist banana republic, New York, California and Minnesota’s regimes are seeking more money to steal. To paraphrase Thatcher, ‘socialism works fine until you run out of money to steal in exchange for services that you never actually provide.’ Blue states keep raising their budgets, claiming that they need to cover the cost of education, homelessness and assorted social problems without ever having any sustainable meaningful improvement to show for any of it. The money isn’t actually being used to solve any social problems, but to the corrupt regime.
Photo Credit: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
