Category Archives: Economics

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Hold them accountable! No one is above the law, our good friends on the left said. That should include those who break our immigration laws, and those who enable them.

We reported on Tuesday how many law enforcement agencies in Kentucky were cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and now we’re seeing some of the same in the Keystone State. The activists are, of course, thoroughly incensed:

“We don’t need our local police enforcing federal law. It is not their job and has proven time and again to harm public safety,” said Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition. “ICE and billionaires profiting off federal contracts are making billions of dollars from kidnapping our people. They are terrorizing families and attacking our neighbors who are literally building our communities. We don’t need $240 billion of our tax dollars to go to ICE and [U.S. Customs and Border Protection]; we need that money to make education, healthcare, and housing affordable.”

It wasn’t that long ago that our good friends on the left were telling us that “no one is above the law,” during their efforts to put then-former President Donald Trump in jail. Now, returned to office, Mr Trump agrees with that statement, and is enforcing our immigration laws, and shazamm! the left are trying to say that illegal immigrants should be above the law! Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] to do things right

My good friend and sometime blog pinch hitter William Teach noted the Associated Press story, “ICE arrests jumped to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term.” That’s great, but let’s do the math. 50,000 arrests, and hopefully deportations, times 12 equals just 600,000 per year. In the 30 months remaining in President Trump’s term, that works out to 1,500,000, which would make a small dent in the population of illegal immigrants in our country. If we assume that J D Vance becomes the next President, and he continues President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies for two full terms, 96 months, that has an additional 4,800,000 illegals arrested and hopefully deported, a nice number, but still just a fraction of the number of illegals already here.

The real solution is for real Americans to shun companies that employ illegal immigrants: cost them profits, at which point they’ll get rid of the illegals or go out of business, and the illegals will self deport. Yes, we need actual enforcement of our laws against hiring illegals, enforcement which sends the violators to prison. A few employers spending quality time Leavenworth will get the others to comply quickly. Continue reading →

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But it’s not my fault!

I confess: I sometimes spend too much time on Facebook, and one of the things that keeps appearing there are posts from people, purporting to be alpha males, telling us that women cannot be trusted, that women will leave you for the handsomer or wealthier guy who happens to come along. Man are strong and blameless, and women are just there for men as long as no one better comes along. Lose your job — unjustly, of course — and women will leave, even though there are hundreds of thousands of wives who have stuck by husbands who’ve faced such reverses. These things are written by ‘men’ who never take responsibility for their own failures, but have to find someone else to blame.

If your wife leaves you, maybe it is because you just weren’t a good enough husband.

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Call it The Self-Pity Blame Loop. If you are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of your own behavior, you must seek scapegoats to blame. This leads to a pattern, viewing yourself as the victim of unfair treatment, and indulging in self-pity, while becoming resentful of more fortunate people. . . .

If you know people like this, you know the key to their entire personality involves a single sentence: “It’s not my fault!“

Continue reading →

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Can socialists learn anything?

I raised, in our after-Mass Bible study group — contrary to some Protestant claims, Catholics actually do read the Bible! — a theological question: can God, who is omniscient, learn? My question was inspired by this: God, being all powerful, cannot be hurt, but by taking human form, Jesus suffered the agony of the crucifixion, so did God learn anything new in this?

Which leads me to a more mortal question: can socialists actually learn anything? Continue reading →

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Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen, Federal employees are leaving, which is an unambiguously good thing

One thing is certain: that Donald Trump guy sure is an evil genius! He wanted to reduce the size of the federal government, and he’s gotten a lot of government employees to leave voluntarily!

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Trump’s administration planned mass layoffs. Instead, thousands of Philly-area federal workers left on their own.

Thousands in the Philadelphia region left federal jobs last year, but only 2% of them were laid off.

by Joe Yerardi and Ariana Perez-Castells | Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

Early last year, federal workers braced for layoffs after President Donald Trump took office. But as his administration’s threat loomed, many in the Philadelphia region opted to leave on their own instead, recent data suggest.

In 2025, roughly 4,700 federal employees in the Philadelphia metro area — an 11-county region spanning Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland — left their jobs. That is more than in the two previous years combined.

But only 2% of them were laid off, according to an Inquirer analysis of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm.

The vast majority of workers who left their positions chose to do so. They opted to retire, quit, or take a government incentive — the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program — that allowed federal employees to resign and continue to be paid for months.

There’s a lot more at the original, detailing how the departures were made, and that’s good reporting.

Some left because they saw their agency’s mission change, said Richard Gennetti, a national AFGE representative in Pennsylvania.

He heard from Environmental Protection Agency employees, for instance, who told him, “‘I’m not doing this. I came to protect the environment, not water down all the rules. I came to provide services. I didn’t come to destroy them,’” Gennetti recalled.

Hey, if they can’t stand to implement the policies of the government, they should leave rather than linger on, trying to subvert the policies of our elected leadership.

Regardless of their motives, and regardless of the manner in which they left, they all helped the President’s goal of reducing the federal workforce, and that’s a good thing.

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What The Philadelphia Inquirer told us . . . and what they didn’t.

We have pointed out, several times, that it is illegal to work in the United States unless you are a citizen or have the appropriate legal documents. In the last linked article, referencing a Philadelphia Inquirer sob story about an illegal immigrant identified only by her surname Guzman we pointed out:

Miss Guzman doesn’t have a husband or boyfriend living with her, so there’s (probably) no real, legal financial support there. That leaves four possibilities:

  1. Miss Guzman presented forged documents saying she was eligible to work in the United States, which is a felony;
  2. Miss Guzman’s employer hired her knowing that she did not have the proper documents, which would be a felony by both Miss Guzman and the employer;
  3. Miss Guzman is living off welfare, for which she is ineligible, and would have had to have presented forged documents to the social workers, a felony; or
  4. Miss Guzman has been working for cash, which means she is evading income and Social Security taxes, which is a felony.

Saturday’s Inquirer noted that a lot of the illegals in the City of Brotherly Love are probably engaging in a least some of the time in option number four:

Philly’s gig economy runs on immigrant workers. Now that labor pool is shrinking amid tougher ICE enforcement.

A new analysis by the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia says the city’s gig economy faces a reckoning.

by Jeff Gammage | Saturday, March 28, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

Are you waiting longer for the rideshare driver to show up? Or for that burger and fries to be delivered to your door? Does it all cost more?

Here’s part of the reason: stricter immigration enforcement. And not just the arrest and deportation of workers who lack official permission to be in the country, but the fear that those arrests have engendered among others, dissuading them from taking similar gig jobs. That as legal pathways into the country for other immigrant workers have been curtailed.

A new analysis by the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia says the city’s gig economy faces a reckoning. It runs on immigrant workers, but the Trump administration’s effort to carry out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history is shrinking the labor pool.

“The demand [for gig services] is not going away,” said Jeff Hornstein, executive director of the Economy League. “The fact that we have so many foreign-born workers in this country, and so many of them are under threat, it’s inevitably going to drive costs up or services down.”

There’s more at the original.

So, what is the “gig economy”?

(T)he gig economy is a labor market made up of freelance or part-time workers who work a “gig” to supplement their income or simply work as they wish.

It’s easy to join this labor market because jobs or tasks are usually accepted through an online app or platform.

In the US, the gig economy has provided millions of people with the ability to work independently and is projected to increase in years to come.

Translation: these are people working without regular employment, people paid either in cash (less probably) or by a check, but without deductions withheld for taxes. If paid by check, an employer is supposed to issue them a Form 1099, if the “individual contractor” has been paid more than $600 over the year, showing the amount paid to the individual, but if an individual has six “gigs”, there is no particular reason he could choose to report only three or four. If the individual has not provided a legitimate Social Security or Tax ID number, the government might not be able to track him. Gig jobs like the delivery job Mr Gammage used as an example frequently get tips in cash rather than as part of their bill.

It’s easy to see why an “independent contractor” would under-report. The Social Security/Medicare tax rate in 7.65% for both the employer and employee, but a gig worker who was just paid what he earned is responsible for both, a 15.3% tax on all income received. How many people can pony up 15.3% of their total earnings once a year, in the spring? For every $10.00 they can under-report results in $1.53 in taxes they don’t have to send the Infernal Revenue Service.

For every $1000.00 they can underreport, that’s $153.00 they avoid sending the government. For someone delivering for Door Dash or some other service, $153.00 is probably real money, and that’s an encouragement to cheat.

ICE does not release local figures, but nationally, arrests of immigrants are surging. Those arrests, detentions, and deportations, and the fear among immigrant workers that they could be next, is subtracting people from the labor force. That and the reduction of humanitarian-entry programs and new limits on work sponsorship mean there are simply fewer workers available, as the national, foreign-born labor force has declined by an estimated 750,000 people since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.

Hmmm. I would have hoped that number would have been higher. As we have previously reported, the Inquirer has reported an illegal immigrant population of between 47,000 and 76,000 people just in Philly.

Mr Gammage’s story was intended to convey to readers that immigration enforcement is pushing up inflation; he might not have intended to point out that the gig workers, which even he pointed out that “Gig platforms are among the last accessible labor markets for undocumented workers, because the E-Verify system generally does not apply there,” might be evading taxes. All it takes is reading his story closely, to see what he told readers, and what he didn’t.

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Electric heat is fine, as far as it goes, but I always want a backup

That rascally rodent, Punxsutawney Phil projected six more weeks of winter, something which should have expired on Monday, but Tuesday sure was cold as well. We know that the groundhog’s projections are scientific, because the Weather Channel sends very scientifically-minded Meteorologist Jen Carfagno to cover it.

Alas! Not only did we not get an early spring, but winter in the eastern half of the United States was colder than usual for much of the season, and The Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Erin McCarthy researched how much it was costing Philly-area residents to heat their homes.

Philly-area residents share how much they paid to keep warm this winter

As the region experienced one of its coldest winters, see how much it cost to heat a Chester County farmhouse, a Fairmount condo with electric, an Ardmore twin, and more with different fuel sources.

by Erin McCarthy | Wednesday, 18 March 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

If you’re getting burned by high heating bills this winter, you’re in good, and equally stressed, company.

U.S. households are expected to pay more than $1,000 on average to heat their homes this winter, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association’s projections, which were updated last month. That’s about $100 more than households paid last year, according to the association, which advocates for federal funding for low-income ratepayers.

Consumers are paying more whether they heat their homes with electricity, natural gas, or heating oil. Residential propane costs are on par with last year.

And customers usually pay more in freezing temperatures, when more energy is required to keep their homes comfortable.

Miss McCarthy gave us several examples, and, as expected, it cost more to stay warm, even though a couple of the respondents said that they kept their thermostats at 65º Fahrenheit.

I confess: our thermostat was set at 72º F!

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

As I have mentioned previously, our fixer-upper house was all-electric when we moved in, in July of 2017, and that meant our heat was entirely dependent upon our heat pump-based HVAC system. We had some very cold weather in January of 2018, and the heat pump couldn’t quite keep up. During our remodel in 2018, we added propane, because my wife wanted a gas range, and added not only that range, but a propane water heater and fireplace.

During the bitterly cold days, we supplemented the HVAC system with the fireplace. On Sunday, January 25, the electricity went out, though fortunately for only three hours. The propane fireplace works without electricity, so we stayed nice and warm, on a day which was right around freezing.

Other customers were not so lucky, and hundreds were without electricity for a few days, as the weather dumped two inches of snow, followed by 1½ inches of rain, and temperatures plummeting into the teens the following day. Last December 29th, we lost power for 6½ hours.

Our good fortune continued as we did not lose electricity as a major cold front, with some serious winds, came through on Monday of this week, but a lot of Jackson Energy Cooperative’s customers did. That simply drives home the need for an alternative heat source, something the global warming climate change warriors do not want you to have; they want total electric homes, to save Mother Gaia.

I ordered another propane delivery on Tuesday, as the tank got down to 30% of capacity; our previous delivery was on December 15, 2025, so I can’t complain. When the delivery came, it cost me $336.00, not too terrible for propane usage through winter. Once I turn off the propane to the fireplace, a full tank of propane will last us until next winter!

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Welfare for the well-to-do

On Boxing Day of 2023, I noted an article in The Wall Street Journal concerning investors souring on electric vehicle charging companies. In plug in electric vehicles are the wave of the future, why would investors not be moving into, rather than out of, such companies? Note that the original article was from December of 2023, when Joe Biden was securely in the Oval Office, and Donald Trump appeared to be headed for the big house far more probably than the White House.

The Journal included a photo that I am reproducing under Fair Use rules, because it illustrates something I’ve said before. I have seen, at the Wawa at the junction of Interstate 78 and Pennsylvania Route 61, six very new looking Tesla charging stations, none of which were in use, while what looked like twelve gasoline pump alleys were full, with other cars lined up to refuel when the vehicles ahead of them in line pulled out. The Journal photo shows twelve Tesla chargers, with only one in use.

The particular station I’ve mentioned is along busy I-78, and is roughly halfway between Allentown and the state capital of Harrisburg, but the specific area isn’t in a city of any size, making it easy in, easy out.

Plus, it’s at a Wawa, which means great coffee! 🙂 And you’ll need that great coffee if your car’s battery is down too much, and you have to spend an hour recharging.

So now we come to Chester County. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that electric vehicles are expensive, but that Chester County has the highest median income in the Commonwealth, so it is unsurprising that there are a lot of people there who have purchased such automobiles. But it also seems that the wealthy people there want welfare for the well-to-do:

Chester County has more than 9,000 EVs. Now it wants to build more public electric vehicle charging stations

Through a federal grant program, the county wants to address day-to-day charging needs.

by Brooke Schultz | Saturday, March 7, 2026 | 5:01 AM EST

Chester County, home to one of the largest numbers of electric vehicles in the state, hopes to grow its footprint of public charging stations.

Through the federally funded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, administered through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the county is looking to build up its community-based public EV charging stations for people who have or want an electric vehicle but do not have a charging station installed at home.

Funding from the program flows directly to municipalities or other applicants for EV chargers. PennDot expects to fund more than 100 projects through the grant.

It builds on an initial federally funded project under the same program, which sought to place charging stations every 50 miles along the major travel corridors to address long drives across the state. Through that program, Chester County projects received $3.2 million.

So, more of our tax dollars going to, as we previously reported, private companies to build for-profit public car charging stations. Those were not even government loans, but outright grants.

Chester County’s proposal would increase the number of public chargers speckled around the county, from workplaces to businesses, giving drivers a place to charge their cars as part of their day-to-day routines.

Chester County, which has both densely packed development and rolling agricultural pockets, saw its rates of EV ownership double between 2022 and 2024, with more than 9,000 EVs registered in the county in the state’s most recent data. The county is behind only Montgomery in overall EV registrations in the southeastern part of the state.

Really? More than 9,000 plug-in electric vehicles? The latest Census Bureau figures, July 1, 20245, show Chester County with a population of 560,745 souls, so 9,000 would be 1.61% of the county’s total population.

The math indicates another problem. Most EV owners recharge their cars overnight in their garages, something most Chester County EV owners would already have. With more than 9,000 EVs registered in the county, and most charged overnight at home, how many actual customers would a public EV charging station actually see in a day there?

“Things are pretty spread out, and with the infrastructure that we have in place right now, other modes of transportation that are carbon-free or less carbon intensive than single-occupancy vehicles are not as viable here as they are in other places that are more dense,” said Rachael Griffith, sustainability director for the Chester County Planning Commission. “If we’re looking at a lower carbon future for our transportation network, EVs are really a great option for that here in our land-use setting. Building out the network of EV chargers is really the way that we incentivize that.”

So, one well-paid government employee wants to direct taxpayer dollars to directly benefit the more well-to-do people of her county. Got it!

I have no objection to people buying plug-in electric vehicles, and no objection to private businesses investing in and building public car chargers for profit, but I have to ask: why should the government, at any level, be subsidizing the building of private businesses? Tesla (TSLA) built thousands of public chargers for their vehicles as part of their sales pitch, and helped make Elon Musk the wealthiest man in the world; as of this publication, Mr Musk has an estimated net worth of $834.8 billion, 3.38 times the net worth of Google founder Larry Page, the second wealthiest man. If it helped make Mr Musk that wealthy, it ought to do the same for other investors.

The policy of sending federal tax dollars to states, to give to private companies to build for-profit EV charging stations was an idea under President Biden, and, as usual, his ideas and policies — or those promulgated by his young staffers — were bad ones. If there is a demand for public EV charging stations, private investors will fill it. If there is insufficient demand for such, then there’s no reason to waste our tax dollars on it.

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No one is above the law, and that includes our immigration laws We need to go after the people who knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

Thanks to my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach, I found this wonderful story:

Immigration arrests left NC restaurants short-staffed and job sites idle, owners say

By: Ahmed Jallow | Friday, February 20, 2026 | 5:30 PM EST

For two weeks last November, kitchens at David “Woody” Lockwood’s restaurants ran short of dishwashers, prep cooks and servers as workers stayed home, afraid to leave their houses during a federal immigration crackdown that resulted in more than 400 arrests across North Carolina.

“We had a lot of people, mostly in the kitchen, that didn’t feel safe coming to work,” said Lockwood, a co-owner of Trophy Brewing and The Bend. That meant managers working extra shifts, longer waits for customers and paying employees who were not on the job to help them get by.

“We decided, at least for those two weeks, to pay those people for the hours they missed, which is not a sustainable thing,” Lockwood said.

So, Mr Lockwood now knows exactly who among his employees is here and was working illegally. Perhaps he didn’t look at their I-9 documents closely, or perhaps he ignored legal requirements on hiring illegals, but now he knows who was working there illegally, and has absolutely no f(ornicating) excuses: he needs to discharge them all immediately, and inform Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, exactly who they were. If he does not disclose this information to ICE, he needs to be arrested for knowingly harboring illegals, along with the penalties for not insuring that those he hired were legally eligible to work in the United States.

It is possible that a few of his Hispanic-looking employees were in the country and working legally, and should now have their documents in hand to prove that if ICE comes calling, but the odds are that most were not legal.

It’s simple: if the illegals cannot find work in the United States, they’ll go home on their own.

Business owners and educators said the effects of the crackdown extended well beyond those taken into custody, disrupting construction and hospitality – two of the state’s largest industries – and keeping some students home from school.

Mikki Paradis, chief executive of PDI Drywall, said construction sites fell silent for more than a week during the November operations.

“There was not a single person working on those jobs,” said Paradis, who has relied on Hispanic workers throughout her 21-year career. She said these labor shortages would slow housing construction and drive up costs.

Translation: Miss Paradis has been knowingly hiring illegals, and ICE needs to visit her offices and start pulling the company’s I-9 files. If it can be proved that she knowingly hired illegals, she’s in a heap of trouble. Under the Handbook for Employers M-274, Section 11.8, it is specified that:

Unlawful Employment Criminal Penalties
Engaging in a Pattern or Practice of Knowingly Hiring or Continuing to Employ Unauthorized Aliens

If you or your business are convicted of having engaged in a pattern or practice of knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens (or continuing to employ aliens knowing they are or have become unauthorized to work in the United States) after Nov. 6, 1986, you may face fines and/or six months imprisonment.

Six months behind bars ought to teach Miss Paradis and Mr Lockwood the error of their ways, and scare the poop out of the other employers of illegals, scare them enough that they get rid of the illegals right away. If the illegals then self-deport, it just makes everything easier for ICE and law enforcement.

Will it cost Mr Lockwood and Miss Paradis their businesses? Perhaps it will, but if they were knowingly employing illegals, they deserve it. That, too, will get other employers to straighten up and fly right.

No one is above the law our Democratic friends told us when they were trying to get Donald Trump thrown in jail. Well, if no one is above the law, then no one is above our immigration laws as well.