The midterm elections are over, and the Democrats have won. Now their voters are going to demand that the elected officials keep their promises. We noted on Wednesday how one partisan wants money spent on trains, trains, trains, but he’s just a nobody like me. But Thursday morning found The Philadelphia Inquirer looking at reality, and the fact that the money isn’t there.
Pa.’s Democratic trifecta could mean more funding for schools and SEPTA — if Harrisburg can find the money
After many years, in fact my entire time since retiring to the Bluegrass State, I was represented in the House of Representatives by a steady, if unspectacular Republican. Now that Republican, Andy Barr has been elected to the United States Senate, replacing the retiring Mitch McConnell. But, alas!, I will now be represented in the House by a Democrat named Zack Dumbo, oops, sorry, Zach Dembo, which means, in effect, that I will not be represented at all. He supports prenatal infanticide, wants to double expenditures for Obysmalcare, wants a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, and involve the government in homebuilding projects, including “massive public-private partnerships to increase (housing) supply”. He wasn’t out there calling himself a “progressive,” but he’ll go along with any cockamamie scheme that the further left congresscritters propose. Continue reading
If this had been done by the Trump Administration, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and far-left columnist Will Bunch would be screaming for a Special Persecutor Prosecutor to throw everyone in jail, but the Opinion section of the newspaper has nothing at all about this:
Students who moved out of the country were put back on Philly schools’ rolls
The reenrollment came just before an important funding deadline, as the district was grappling with lower-than-projected enrollment citywide.
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
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:
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.
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.
My good friend and occasional blog pinch hitter William Teach noted that Luke Broadwater of The New York Times was apoplectic over the hardball that President Donald Trump played during the Government shutdown:
The government shutdown is already the longest in American history. But it’s also perhaps the most punishing, in part because President Trump has taken actions no previous administration ever took during a shutdown.
Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration cut food stamps for millions of low-income Americans. It tried to fire thousands of government workers and withhold back pay from others, while freezing or canceling money for projects in Democratic-led states. . . . .
But for now, the tactics appear to have worked, after a group of Democrats agreed to support a bill to end the shutdown and drop the concessions their party had demanded.
“Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” Senator Angus King, independent of Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, said on MSNBC Monday. “It actually gave him more power.”
We previously reported on how columnist Will Bunch and the liberal denizens of Bluesky were just spittle-flecking mad that the Democrats in the Senate finally caved agreed to end the filibuster, and allow the continuing resolution to fund the government come to a vote.
Well, it wasn’t just Mr Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer, but their Editorial Board as well:
Democrats caved on shutdown as Trump’s indifference to Americans suffering proved stronger | Editorial
The shutdown underscored clear policy differences between the two political parties: Trump and the Republicans do not care about everyday Americans.
by The Editorial Board | Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2025 | 5:01 AM EST
It is easy to say the Democrats blinked and got nothing in return for agreeing to end the historic government shutdown.
On its face, that is true. But Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was one of the eight senators who caved, is wrong to claim the shutdown was a failure.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say that Senator Fetterman “caved,” given that he was a vote to end the filibuster the entire time. However, to my friends at the Inky, any Democrat who does not hate President Trump with a plasma-hot passion is a filthy traitor and despicable human being.
The Democrats were right to make a stand to preserve the Affordable Care Act subsidies to stave off steep increases in health insurance premiums. By refusing to negotiate, President Donald Trump and the Republicans under his thumb showed they do not care about average Americans.
Would it not be just as true that the filibustering Democrats were showing that they do not care about average Americans? Yes, they eventually gave up, but only after forty days and forty nights.
Trump remained unengaged throughout the longest government shutdown ever. Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) abdicated any leadership as he sent the Republican House members home.
LOL! The editorial writer assumes that it was abdication, but it was a smart move. The Speaker largely kept the Representatives out of it, having already done their part by passing and sending the continuing resolution to the Senate. President Trump “remained unengaged,” which gave strength to Senate Republicans to hold firm, and, of course, the President had other jobs to do at the time.
For more than 40 days, Americans were largely left on their own as the government remained closed. The pain rippled across the country, as more than 600,000 federal workers were furloughed, 42 million low-income Americans lost food assistance, and chaos ensued at airports.
Also read: Robert Stacy McCain, “Senate Ends Filibuster; Democrats Immediately Form Circular Firing Squad“
There’s a lot more at the original, and almost every paragraph is worthy of challenge, but the reader is supposed to believe that President Trump is an [insert slang term for the anus here], because he doesn’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on welfare. For those of us not on welfare, Mr Trump and the Republicans want to spend less of our taxpayer dollars on the less productive and the welfare malingerers. People who have worked hard all of their lives really do not like being taxed to support people who will not work.
Those of us who voted for Mr Trump knew he is an [insert slang term for the anus here], and, more importantly, we wanted him to be an [insert slang term for the anus here], because being all kind and sweetness and light is a very large part of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.
The White House had threatened mass layoffs of federal government employees if Senate Democrats didn’t end their filibuster of the continuing resolution to fund the government, and many of us were wondering when, or if, it was going to happen. From The Wall Street Journal:
White House Starts Mass Layoffs of Government Workers
Many department receive notices, and an official says cuts will affect ‘thousands of federal workers’
By Natalie Andrews and Ken Thomas | Friday, October 10, 2025 | 2:24 PM EDT
WASHINGTON—The White House said Friday that it is conducting mass layoffs of federal employees in response to the government shutdown, an unprecedented step that follows through on weeks of threats meant to increase pressure on Democrats.
“The RIFs have begun,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought posted on X, using an abbreviation for reductions in force. An OMB official characterized the retrenchment as “substantial,” and a White House official said it would affect “thousands of federal workers.”
Vought briefed President Trump on the layoffs by phone Friday morning, according to a White House aide.
Department of Health and Human Services employees across several divisions received reduction-in-force notices on Friday, said Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for HHS. Some of the people who lost their jobs were deemed “at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” he said.
An Education Department spokeswoman said some agency employees would be among those receiving the layoff notices Friday, and a government official said there were layoffs at the Commerce Department.
Other Departments, including Commerce, Fatherland Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency, saw layoff notices.
Democrats were obviously aghast:
Reductions in force “are not a new power these bozos get in a shutdown,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, on social media. “We can’t be intimidated by these crooks.”
Having lived and worked in once-reliably Republican Virginia, I have been appalled that Virginia is now a “blue” state where presidential elections are concerned, and that’s entirely due to the huge number of federal government workers living in the Washington outskirts of the Old Dominion. Reducing the federal workforce eventually leads to better government, as it strengthens Republicans and weakens Democrats.
Republican leaders have been lukewarm on firing federal workers. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) and other senior GOP lawmakers had quietly advised the White House not to move forward with mass layoffs and sharp cuts to government assistance programs, citing people familiar with the matter.
But leaders have also expressed exasperation with the lack of progress as the shutdown heads into its second weekend.
Republican ‘leaders’ may have been lukewarm on firing federal workers, but do you know who aren’t lukewarm about it? Republican voters are not lukewarm about reducing the overpaid federal workforce, Republican voters want to see fewer people being supported by their tax dollars and more people working in real jobs in the private sector. We want tax payers, not tax consumers!
While there are all sorts of reports on movement in the Pennsylvania General Assembly on additional funding for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), at least as of this Friday morning writing, no funding agreement has been reached. Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has paid forward some of the city’s $135 million subsidy, to keep city bus service for schools, but that’s only a stopgap for the system’s projected $213 deficit.
But this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer is at least a little bit better than the notion that the taxpayers throughout the Commonwealth should pay for SEPTA:
Philly’s collar counties are only authorized to tax property. Could SEPTA’s budget crisis change that?
County officials have long sought broader taxing authority. Some say the debate over transit funding could force the issue.
by Katie Bernard | Friday, August 29, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
Officials in Philadelphia’s collar counties are hopeful that the monthslong impasse over funding for SEPTA may push lawmakers to consider a change to state tax law they have sought for years.
With many of their residents dependent on SEPTA for daily work commutes and other trips into Philadelphia, officials across the suburban counties — Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester — say they are committed to its success, and they contributed more than $30 million to it last year. But the state’s laws, which allow counties to tax only property, prevent them from doing more to support the agency without raising property taxes.
Officials have long asked state lawmakers to grant them the authority to tax wages, sales, or property transfers. Some wonder if the current debate over the beleaguered transit authority may finally push the issue.
“They’re holding up public transit funding for the entire commonwealth,” said Monica Taylor, a Democrat who chairs the Delaware County Council. “All of these things are piling up and coming together, and they haven’t passed a budget. … This is hopefully pushing for the opportunity for people to come back to the table and start talking.”
There’s much more at the original, but you get the drift: the counties want to be able to wring more and more money out of their people.
My position is simple: the people who use SEPTA should be the ones who pay for SEPTA, through a reasonable fare increase of 75¢.[1]Here’s the math! SEPTA’s average daily ridership was approximately 768,291 unlinked passenger trips in May 2025, representing a 7% increase from May 2024. The bus system accounts for the … Continue reading
But, if the government leaders want to keep treating SEPTA not as a public transit system but a welfare agency, frequently welfare for the well-to-do, at least if Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester counties start taxing their own residents for a system that is available to them, then the people of Carbon, Cameron, and McKean counties, which do not have access to SEPTA, will not.
Chester, Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware counties are, respectively, the four wealthiest counties in the Commonwealth.
If those heavily Democrat counties — Philadelphia, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware counties all voted heavily for then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, while President Trump carried Bucks County by the slimmest of margins, 291 votes out of 402,349 total votes cast — want to tax their people more heavily to pay for SEPTA, let them!
The fairest system is for SEPTA riders to pay for SEPTA, but what I have suggested is at least the second most fair system.
References
| ↑1 | Here’s the math! SEPTA’s average daily ridership was approximately 768,291 unlinked passenger trips in May 2025, representing a 7% increase from May 2024. The bus system accounts for the largest portion of daily ridership, with 354,820 unlinked trips, or 50% of the total. With 768,291 unlinked passenger trips every day, and a projected operating deficit of $213 million, how much would fares have to increase to cover the deficit? 768,291 x 365 = 280,426,215 trips per year. A $213,000,000 deficit ÷ 280,426,215 daily trips = 75.96¢ per trip which would need to be collected to completely eliminate the projected deficit. Call it a 75¢ per trip added to the fares, just to male collections simpler, and the budget can be brought under control. |
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