Category Archives: Government Overreach

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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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Please, leave the government out of trying to ‘fix’ the ‘affordable housing’ problem

As people yell about the lack of “affordable housing” I see an interesting difference between my good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him in real life! — Architectolder, who posts a lot of pictures concerning houses interiors and exteriors, and Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, whom I have previously mentioned. Each have differing ideas about what makes a fine home, Architectolder favoring single family dwellings, while Alicia likes European-style courtyard housing. Alicia likes the idea of being able to walk downstairs and down and around the block to the local pharmacy, bodega, interesting shops and the like; who would not like to have a French boulangerie or pâtisserie just a few steps outside your door to grab a croissant for breakfast? Architectolder, on the other hand, is not afraid of people having to get into their cars to drive to a bakery. He believes that relatively small houses like the one in his tweet shown at the right ought to be affordably built: nice craftsmanship, a small but decently-sized yard appropriate to the house.

But then there was this, in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

The cost of housing in Pa. is too high. Here’s what Josh Shapiro will need to overcome to fix it.

Administration officials spent the past year taking feedback from advocates, experts, and local officials.

by Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PA | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | 5:00 AM EST

HARRISBURG — Rents are soaring, homelessness is rising, and homeownership is out of reach for many families in Pennsylvania. As the state grapples with a serious housing shortage and affordability dominates the national political conversation, Gov. Josh Shapiro is preparing to release a long-awaited plan to tackle the crisis.

The plan, first announced in late 2024, will draw on months of outreach to advocates, developers, and local officials. Supporters hope it will offer a clear path forward and build momentum around proposals that can win support in Pennsylvania’s politically divided legislature. But significant obstacles stand in the way.

“The housing crisis has risen to the level such that none of the four caucuses can ignore it,” said Deanna Dyer, director of policy at Regional Housing Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm.

The housing shortage is a nationwide problem, but Pennsylvania has been particularly slow to build new units. The shortfall leaves families squeezed by rising costs, pushes recent graduates to take jobs in other states, and makes it harder for companies to expand.

There’s more at the linked original.

It seems that everybody seems to believe that the government needs to somehow fix the problem, but I’ll point out the obvious: virtually all of the housing in our country was built by private enterprise, by builders contracted by someone, whether an individual or a developer, to build houses, and that’s how our country began and grew to where we are today. Why should the government have to get involved?

The Inquirer fully supports the illegal immigrant population. As we have previously reported, the newspaper itself has reported an illegal immigrant population of between 47,000 and 76,000 people. Just deporting the illegal immigrant population should free up a lot of housing in the City of Brotherly Love, but naturally the newspaper wants to protect the illegals rather than see the law actually enforced, primarily because it is President Donald Trump who is finally enforcing our immigration laws, and the people at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper hate the President with a white-hot passion.

Other states are passing laws to loosen local zoning restrictions and encourage new development — despite often fierce opposition from groups representing local governments.

Well, of course: local communities want to protect their typical American single-family home neighborhoods from having people build five-story apartment buildings which permanently shadow neighboring houses and change the character of neighborhoods. Zoning laws grew up to protect the American people, and to protect their investments in housing from being trashed by other development.

However, local governments can micromanage, and over manage things. When I lived in Hockessin, Delaware, our house, which was on a small farm, was surrounded by not one, not two, but three expensive house subdivisions. New Castle County, to combat overcrowding, reduced the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre parcel. Great! People could get larger yards, right? But it also meant that developers had to build more expensive individual homes to achieve the same profit, and so Hockessin Chase, Hockessin Green and Hockessin Something-or-other were full of McMansions, driving up the costs of housing in the whole county.

On the opposite side of that coin are newer houses off Leestown Road in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah, they’re the fancier new builds as well, but they’re so close together that you could hear your neighbor open his refrigerator, and if the houses were nice when they were built, most are now occupied by renters, not homeowners.

The best thing for government to do to address the ‘affordable housing’ problem is nothing at all. Every time the government tries to micromanage part of the economy it fails.

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You will own nothing and you will like it. The Communists want you to be poor, so you will be dependent upon the government for your survival.

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain wrote about new New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointing Cea Weaver to be Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It seems like the lovely Miss Weaver wants people like you and me to be poor and dependent upon the government, a government she said on May 30, 2017, should have no more white male members.

This Activist Has Long Been Polarizing. Mamdani Is Standing by Her.

Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate named to a high-profile role in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, is facing criticism for past comments calling homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”

By Dana Rubinstein, Sally Goldenberg and Mihir Zaveri | Wednesday, January 6, 2026 | Updated: Thursday, January 7, 2026 | 8:47 AM EST

For the second time in three weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing intense scrutiny for the years-old social media behavior of a high-level appointee — an episode that has once again forced him to answer for his vetting processes.

Mr. Mamdani named Cea Weaver, a housing activist, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants on Jan. 1, during his very first news conference on his very first day in office.

In past social media posts that have since been deleted, most of which predate 2020, she called homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and said that it was important to “impoverish” the white middle class. That rhetoric had played a role in raising her profile within New York housing circles, even as it seemed to hobble her 2021 bid to join the city’s powerful Planning Commission. Her calls to “elect more Communists” and “seize private property” had been well documented in The New York Post.

Heaven forfend! The New York Times actually cited the New York Post as a source? I am shocked, shocked! I say.

I suppose that Miss Weaver hates her own family, given that the New York Post reported:

The mother of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new woke renters’ rights honcho — who’s dubbed homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy” — is a professor at a prestigious college and owns a beautiful Nashville home worth $1.6 million.

Celia Applegate — whose daughter Cea Weaver is the director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants — teaches German studies at Vanderbilt University and owns a pricey classic Craftsman home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.

Applegate bought the property with her partner, David Blackbourn, in July 2012 for $814,000 and real estate websites now list the pad’s value at more than $1.6 million, records show.

This article continues below the fold, because I have embedded a video of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago spouting the line, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!” Continue reading →

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The solution to SEPTA’s woes is simple I did something ridiculously simple: I did the math!

I lived in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, for fifteen years, from 2002 into 2017, a long enough time to get pretty familiar with the place. So, when Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) decided to tweet that “Mass transit is a lifeline for the people across all 67 counties who rely on it every day to attend school, get to work, and power our economy,” I had to think about it: had I ever seen a bus, other than a school bus, in Carbon County?

The answer, of course, was no, I never had, never in fifteen years noticed a public transportation bus.

Jim Thorpe is a small, very ‘walkable’ town, and I spent many of my days off doing just that, walking through town. Here’s one of the photo albums I took, on October 12, 2013, and you can see just why I walked through the picturesque town.

Mass transit in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Photo by D R Pico. Free for use with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

The latest outrage in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia isn’t crime, isn’t murder, but the fact that the Republican-controlled state Senate has been unwilling to pass a huge, additional appropriation for the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, and my good friends at The Philadelphia Inquirer have waxed apoplectic about the whole thing.

Philly lawyer George Bochetto hired to sue SEPTA to stop service cuts

Bochetto said that a suit would challenge the service cuts on the grounds of a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Monday, August 25, 2025 | 8:39 AM EDT

Philadelphia lawyer George Bochetto demanded SEPTA halt service cuts and said he has been hired by a group of riders to sue the transit agency, in an email sent Sunday night.

“SEPTA’s planned service reductions are draconian in nature and will have a severe impact on racial and ethnic minorities and low-income citizens in Southeastern Pennsylvania without any legitimate basis,” Bochetto wrote in the notice, which was first reported by Big Trial on Substack.

Consumer advocate Lance Haver is among those involved in the action to block SEPTA’s service cuts, according to the Substack post. The action comes as Harrisburg has failed to approve new state funding for mass transit. The first round of service cuts began on Sunday.

“SEPTA’s legal counsel is reviewing the letter and intends to contact George Bochetto today,” said Andrew Busch, a spokesperson for the transit agency.

SEPTA had been living on post-COVID funds from the Federal government, but those ended. In 2024, Governor Shapiro redirected $153 million in federal highway funds to SEPTA, because, horror of horrors, the Governor didn’t want SEPTA’s customers to have to pay more to use their services:

Earlier this month, SEPTA moved to enact a 29% across-the-board fare increase followed by deep service cuts next summer, as the agency grapples with what officials call an “unprecedented” post-pandemic financial crisis. It faces a recurring deficit of $240 million annually.

While Shapiro’s efforts have paused the 21.5% fare increase expected for Jan. 1, riders will still face an increase of 7.5% beginning Dec. 1. Shapiro said the federal cash infusion would limit service cuts, but did not provide further detail.

So, it wasn’t just Pennsylvanians in the small towns and counties throughout the central part of the Commonwealth who were being taxed to provide cheaper bus and subway rides for Philadelphians, but taxpayers in Montana and Wyoming and Missouri who were having to dig deeper into their pockets as well.

Back to the first cited article:

Bochetto said in an interview Monday that a suit would challenge the service cuts on the grounds of a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities. SEPTA completed an equity analysis before adopting the cuts.

Oh, so now SEPTA isn’t a public transit service, but a welfare program? Got it! But that’s not an argument which will play well with Republicans.

“They’re committing a fraud on the public,” Bochetto said, noting SEPTA has $390 million in a reserve fund. “There is no reason why these cuts are necessary.”

Haver will be a plaintiff in the action, Bochetto confirmed. He declined to discuss other groups or individuals who may join.

The group plans to seek a judge’s injunction to stop the cuts, Bochetto said in the email, addressed to SEPTA General Counsel Gino Bendetti. That likely would require SEPTA to draw from its service stabilization fund instead of cutting bus routes and reducing trips across all modes of transit.

Pretty typical these days: the lawsuit seeks to have a judge usurp the executive decision on how SEPTA’s funds are to be spent. This is the kind of bovine feces which needs to be slapped down, hard. I don’t care what you believe SEPTA should be doing; that’s for the agency’s leadership to decide, not judges.

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.

So, let’s do the math! 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.

As we previously noted, the Inquirer reported that SEPTA was losing roughly $50 million a year from fare jumpers, much of it by people who could easily pay:

Transit Police Chief Charles Lawson said the agency has learned so far that the majority of fare evaders are everyday working residents — nurses, lawyers, even city employees with free passes, who, in a rush to catch the train, or out of habit after not paying in recent years, step over the turnstiles.

In a city like Philadelphia, nurses can make up to $100,000 a year. Attorneys? Normally they make pretty good money as well. City employees with free passes? When they use their passes, the city pays their fares. SEPTA has been trying to make turnstile jumping more difficult, but needs to install more barriers to do so. More, the system needs point out to those who skip fares they could easily pay just how much they are damaging the entire system.

The entire SEPTA crisis is caused by the cockamamie concept that the people who use SEPTA should not have to pay for the benefit they receive. Just raise the fares to what they need to be to operate the system!

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Apparently I am a “Domestic Violent Extremist”, or so Joe Biden and his minions would have classified me

Did you know that I’m a “Domestic Violent Extremist”? I didn’t know I was, but that’s apparently how the Biden Administration would have classified me, if they knew who a small fry like me was. Continue reading →

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Could Daniel Pearson be a conservative? Are there any moderate Democrats left?

Is a member of the Right Eing Extremists of the United States of America allowed to have a favorite liberal writer who I don’t use as a blog whipping boy? I have twice asked if The Philadelphia Inquirer’s primary editorial writer, Daniel Pearson, could actually be a conservative.

He knows that I have asked that question, and certainly denies it, definitely opposed to President Trump and most Republicans, but he is at least in some ways the kind of Democrat conservatives can appreciate. He’s certainly not a loony leftist like his colleagues Will Bunch and the rest of the newspaper’s cabal of columnists! While he seems to support some silliness like the city’s silly driving while black driving equality law, he does support the enforcement of law.

Fake, expired, and obscured car tags threaten public safety | Editorial

Continue reading →

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Not everything has to be a federal government project!

Under our 47th President, the sensible people in charge are looking at all of the spending in which the federal government engages. With the FY2024 federal budget deficit at $1.83 trillion — that’s trillion, a thousand billion, or a million million dollars — and FY2025 possibly going to be more, the Trump Administration is taking a battle axe to spending where it can, because a battle axe is what is needed. Tiny little cuts by going over everything with a fine-toothed comb will never work, because there’s always some purportedly good reason to spend for someone’s pet project. The battle axe method is the right thing to do, and then, after that is done, we can check to see if anything truly essential was cut and needs to be restored.

Trump administration freezes $12 million meant to help Philly plant thousands of trees

Continue reading →

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Beware the Ides of March!

Happy St Valentine’s Day!

I awoke this morning to a tweet from Libs of TikTok, noting that yet another federal judge has tried to block President Trump’s ‘pause’ in foreign aid spending.

Judge orders Trump administration to temporarily allow funds for foreign aid

by the Associated Press | Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 11:53 PM EST

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift a three-week funding freeze that has shut down U.S. aid and development programs worldwide.

Judge Amir Ali issued the order Thursday in U.S. district court in Washington in a lawsuit brought by two health organizations that receive U.S. funding for programs abroad.

Newsweek noted that Judge Ali was one of President Joe Biden’s last judicial appointees, confirmed by the then Democrat-controlled Senate after the election. Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right Joe Biden was a very sympathetic President . . . and that led to Donald Trump being elected again!

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to because it sometimes leads me to interesting things. I saw this skeet from The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard-left columnist Will Bunch, which he did not post on Twitter, leading me to an article in the UK’s The Guardian.

Canada intercepts people trying to cross border in ‘incredibly cold’ conditions

Nine Venezuelans including children found by police in Alberta with a second group apprehended in Manitoba

by Leyland Cecco | Friday, February 7, 2025 | 6:30 AM EST

More than a dozen people have been caught making the hazardous crossing into Canada, renewing focus on the closely watched – and seasonally perilous – border with the United States.

Police in Alberta this week intercepted two groups attempting to cross into Canada illegally, including one which included five children who were ill-prepared for the cold which can plunge as low as -30C (-22F) at this time of year. Continue reading →