Leftist Implosion: Philadelphia Soda Tax Leads To 30-50% Plunge In Sales, Mass Layoffs

This is my shocked face....

When Philadelphia became the first US city to pass a soda tax last summer, city officials were eagerly looking forward to the surplus-tax funded windfall to plug gaping budget deficits (and, since this is Philadelphia, the occasional embezzlement scheme). Then, one month ago, after the tax went into effect on January 1st we showed the tax applied in practice: a receipt for a 10 pack of flavored water carried a 51% beverage tax. And since PA has a sales tax of 6% and Philly already charges another 2%, the total sales tax was 8%. In other words, a purchase which until last year came to $6.47 had overnight become $9.75.

What happened next? Precisely what most expected would happen: full blown sticker shock, and a collapse in purchases.

According to Philly.com reports, two months into the city’s sweetened-beverage tax, supermarkets and distributors are reporting a 30% to 50% drop in beverage sales and - adding insult to injury - are now planning for layoffs.

One of the city's largest distributors told the Philadelphia website it would cut 20% of its workforce in March, and an owner of six ShopRite stores in Philadelphia says he expects to shed 300 workers this spring. “People are seeing sales decline larger than anything they’ve seen up to this point in the city,” said Alex Baloga, vice president of external relations at the Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association.

Di Leo: Emissions Testing and the Pollution of Big Government

Modern cars run clean consistently.  Emission testing is a waste of time.  Luckily, more and more states/cities are phasing them out.  Shocking, I know.

Emission testing unintentionally targets the poor since they are the least able to afford newer cars that would pass the testing.

From the Illinois Review:

We often talk about ‘regressive’ taxes, burdens that fall unfairly on the poor. This is one of the biggest of such burdens, because it’s precisely the working poor owners of old cars who are hit hardest by the well-intentioned goofiness of emissions testing. Consider:

It’s just a huge waste of time for newer cars, because of course they pass. The number of newer cars that fail are such a statistical minority that the pollution they produce is too little to be worth the bother.

For the old cars that we would expect to fail, the additional cost of bringing them up to code is so onerous on these mostly working-poor car owners, it just puts them further behind. That cost, specifically relative to the budgets of the working-poor in question, is utterly unjustifiable; for people who must count every transportation penny, it often has the effect of causing them to postpone much more important car-related purchases, such as auto insurance, brake repairs, alignments, and other issues that pose genuine safety concerns.

The cost of maintaining this service – all these buildings, public employees, etc. – contribute to the unsustainable government budgets of states like Illinois. This cost drives employers and entrepreneurs out of state, drying up the tax base, necessitating ever-larger collections from an ever-shrinking pool, and again contributing to the reduction of opportunities for the poor and lower middle class to climb upward.

And the timing itself has been insane all along, since the birth of these metropolitan emissions testing centers coincided with the (mandated) popularity of unleaded fuel and the catalytic converter. These advancements already had the country on a successful and fast-moving trend toward cleaner air; the emissions testing center archipelago was, frankly, obsolete almost at its inception! (How do you like that? I buried the lede.)

Shocking rain damage is wakeup call to fix ailing roads, infrastructure, experts say

CA, please hurry up and secede.  That way you can't make us pay for the repairs of your decrepit state!

“I’m not surprised by any of this that is happening right now because we have been delaying maintenance everywhere,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Southern California Association of Governments.

And former San Bernardino Mayor Patrick Morris quickly drew the same conclusion.

“I guess that’s testimony of the amount of maintenance needed in California,” Morris said by phone.

“When you get rainstorms like we’ve experienced over the last several weeks, suddenly reality sets in,” he said.

Dam crisis is wake-up call for aging California water system

I would consider this the first of many coming disasters that can be laid at the feet of the Leftists who run CA.

Environmentalists said the Oroville Dam crisis was a "wake-up call" for state leaders to fix existing water infrastructure instead of funding new projects, such as a tunnel to divert river water around the San Francisco Bay Delta to consumers in the south.

Billions of dollars are required to improve dam infrastructure in the state, said Adam Scow, California director for environmental group Food & Water Watch. He called for local, state and federal agencies to all pay up.

More than half of California's 1,585 dams would lead to deaths if they failed, putting them in the category of "high hazard potential," according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Expert: What You Need To Know About The Oroville Dam Crisis

Great youtube video/podcast with expert on the Oroville Dam.

"Everyone was told 'there's no problem.  There's no problem.  There's no problem...EVACUATE."

The Death of Venezuela. Prepare Yourself Accordingly.

Stefan Molyneux is an amazing man. Love his youtube channel.  Boots on the ground interview.

US Cases of refugees arrested or convicted on terror charges, and other heinous crimes

I think this post pretty much cements the issue as valid.  I'm putting the=is website on speed-dial:

But, I have to do it (to write this) because clearly the refugee industry has sent out talking points that I am seeing parroted many times each day which pretty much go like this: no refugee has committed an act of terror in the US. LOL! And, maybe that is because many were arrested and convicted BEFORE they could do anything! 

And, let me ask you, when evaluating the fact that you (as a taxpayer) paid for a refugee’s opportunity to come to America and in some cases below even paid to raise the refugee to adulthood, does it matter for your anger level that he/she planned to kill Americans or planned to kill some innocents somewhere else in the world? So when the refugee advocates make a distinction about the location of the wannabe jihadist’s target, it’s a difference without a distinction to me! 

Here are ten that come to mind: 

~The Somali (Mohamed Osman Mohamud) arrested on charges he planned to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon was a refugee. See here in 2010. He was arrested as he planned to detonate a bomb. 

~Mohanad-hammadi Kentucky refugee terrorist Mohanad Hammadi is serving a life sentence. ” Hammadi also admitted to lying on U.S. immigration paperwork about his involvement in Iraqi insurgent operations against American troops.”  

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2016/06/19/kentucky-one-of-two-convicted-iraqi-refugee-terrorists-wants-his-sentence-reduced/ 

~ Two Iraqi refugees were convicted on charges that they helped Al Qaeda in Iraq and may have killed American servicemen there. They lied on their refugee applications. Best coverage of 2011 case here by ABC News. The entire Iraqi flow to America had to be re-screened that year! 

~In 2012 Abdullatif Ali Aldosary (an Iraqi refugee) set off a bomb at a Social Security Office in Arizona. Sentenced here. 

~As successful asylum seekers, the Boston Bombers were refugees who had benefited from America’s generosity. One of many stories here about the 2012 deadly Boston Marathon attack by the Tsarnaev brothers (Chechens). 

~In 2013 Fazliddin Kurbanov was arrested in Idaho and later convicted on terrorism charges. Kurbanov is an Uzbek refugee. See here.

~In early 2016 an Iraqi refugee (Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan) living in Texas was accused of planning to bomb a local popular mall, see story at Newsweek.

~In September 2016, a Somali refugee went on a stabbing spree at a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Learn more here about Dahir Adan. Knife attacks are signature terror acts for devout Muslims.

~Also in September, the Chelsea bomber, Ahmad Rahimi, was arrested and we learned his family came to the US from Afghanistan and were given asylum. We need to be paying more attention to these asylum seekers since they enter the country completely unscreened and their numbers are on the rise. Story at CNN. Once granted asylum they are given all the same rights and privileges as the refugees we fly in.

~And, we can’t forget the most recent successful attack by Somali refugee slasher, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, at Ohio State, see here.

~For number ten, I’m lumping the dozens of wannabe Somali refugee jihadists (mostly from Minnesota) who have been identified and/or convicted of wanting to leave the country to fight for al-Shabaab or ISIS. See here. Several like those in that recent case, were convicted.