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Crazifornia in The Daily Caller: Keep Your Eyes on California
Dec 7th
The Daily Caller, my new favorite national political news portal, ran a piece by me as its lead opinion piece in this morning’s edition. Here’s the link (where you can sign up for a Laer Pearce RSS feed!), and here’s the piece as it appeared:
Keep Your Eyes on California
Don’t think California is done messing with America
By Laer Pearce
After the 2010 midterms, you could almost hear conservative pundits dismissing California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevancy. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though California doggedly stayed left while nearly every other state veered right, it still remains the supercharged engine for America’s progressive movement. If anything, the midterms just stomped down its accelerator.
California’s accelerated national influence is evident in what many dismiss as a loss for liberals, the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization initiative. Most conservative commentators saw the vote against legal pot as proof that even California isn’t that crazy, but look again. More Californians voted to legalize marijuana than voted for Republican Meg Whitman for governor, even though Prop 19’s supporters spent a mere $4 million on their campaign, compared to Whitman’s $163 million.
Like earlier society-bending propositions on the California ballot — gay marriage and global warming are recent examples — the measure blazed the trail for similar efforts in other states. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana. Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.” Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.” Colorado is a likely target.
Similarly, California’s rejection of Prop 23, ensuring the state would continue its plunge into cap and trade even as Congress is backing away from similar legislation, has reinvigorated global warming activists. As the Daily Green blog put it, “The federal government needs to take a close look at the result.”
Prop 19 was on the ballot in California, not Kansas or Alabama or even Massachusetts, because supporters of liberal social change know they’ll get more publicity and possibly even a winning vote in unrepentantly liberal California. The state nurtured progressivism a century ago and has given the movement staying power through its modeling of liberal legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its universities — so much so that it’s not likely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for the very blue Golden State.
While the established political parties and their consultants will ignore California and pore over campaigns in other states for clues on how to capitalize on — or crush — the Tea Party’s influence, the Left will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it the next time around. What they will find is not so much a magic formula but a vast progressive infrastructure they will then work to replicate elsewhere.
I call this infrastructure the PEER Axis, for the progressives, environmentalists, educators and reporters who collectively run California and influence the underpinnings of America. The PEER Axis remains powerful because politicians and political movements may come and go, but government bureaucrats and regulators, environmentalists and social justice activists, and their supporters in education and the media are pretty much forever. The structure of California ensures that appropriately indoctrinated college graduates will continue to fill the personnel pipelines that run from Berkeley, UCLA and other liberal universities straight into the progressive movement.
Many end up in government offices in Sacramento, where they write policies that are parroted in other states around the nation, as evidenced by the fact that the federal government is following California’s lead in setting the next round of vehicle fuel economy standards. Others will go to work at California’s giant environmentalist organizations, social justice NGOs and activist law firms, or the powerful public employee unions. Some will stay on the campuses, turning out future generations of progressives and writing studies to reinforce and justify progressive government policies, and those who graduate into the media will publicize these efforts and belittle any contrarian thinking. Many will find jobs in California’s foremost culture-bending venture, Hollywood, where they will pummel all the world with green messages (The China Syndrome, Avatar), anti-corporate tirades (Metropolis, Wall Street), anti-war propaganda (Apocalypse Now, In the Valley of Elah) and movies challenging conventional values (Milk, Juno).
Wherever they end up, they will be greeted by like-minded alumnae ready to show them the ropes so they, too, can form and implement policy, bring lawsuits, and mold the next generation. Don’t be lulled into dismissing California’s influence just because of one election, because the California progressives will not be content to limit their focus to west of the Sierras. As Gavin Newsome, the San Francisco mayor and newly elected Lieutenant Governor of California, put it when he declared San Francisco open for gay marriages, “It’s gonna happen, whether you like it or not!”
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Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is currently working on a book that shows how everything wrong with America comes from California.
CalWatchdog Runs “California’s Brain Drain”
Dec 6th
Thanks to the good folks at CalWatchdog for picking up my column, “California’s Crippling Brain Drain.” The piece explains how, besides saddling the state with a half-trillion dollars of unfunded pension obligations, public employees are retiring years before private sector workers do because the formulas used to compute their pensions encourage them to ditch their jobs just when they’re well seasoned. It concludes:
You’d think the very least our public sector cohorts could do would be to give their all for another 10 years or so, since it’s going to require all the brain power we’ve got to get California through the next decade. They did their part in getting us into this mess, so why are we paying them so generously to not take part in getting us out of it?
If you haven’t bookmarked CalWatchdog yet, you should. It’s a continuing source of good stuff on Crazifornia.
California’s Crippling Brain-Drain
Dec 5th
Three articles caught my eye this morning in the Orange County Register, and what a tale they tell!
The first article said that Donald Lamm, 57, has announced his retirement as City Manager of Westminster, an Orange County city of 88,000, where he was taking down a $207,000 a year salary. Lamm complained about the hours required to manage the city – which is hardly a Newark NJ or Los Angeles – and said he was going to start his own business. As the owner of a small business myself, I’m not sure he’ll be happy about the hours required for his new endeavor.
The second article said David Freeland has announced his retirement as Deputy Police Chief of Irvine, which is routinely rated as one of the safest large cities (pop. 208,000) in America. We can therefore guess that his 32 years with Irvine PD have probably not been rife with high-risk situations that are used to justify earlier retirement ages for public safety workers – although he did suffer severe injuries from an on-duty car accident and headed the SWAT squad for awhile. Freeland, 59, appears to have been paid close to $200,000 a year. Now he plans to teach martial arts, write a book and of course spend time with his family.
Freedland and Lamm are something of anomalies in California’s public sector, since the deputy chief worked four years longer than he to in order to get his maximum pension, and the city manager stayed an extra two years.
Or to put into the terms of the entrepreneurial private sector, Freedland left at least 11 good, productive years on the table, and Lamm left at least 13 – assuming entrepreneurs retire at 70, which is generous given what’s typical nowadays, which I’ll get to in a moment. The cities had invested much in their expertise, not just paying their salaries year after year, but also spending generously to train them. They were at the top of their games, in a position to pay Irvine and Westminster back handsomely on their investments, but instead they took their chips and left their cities.
And they had plenty of chips to take with them, given the generous public employee pensions, which currently have mounted a half-trillion-dollar unfunded liability for the state. Both men will receive annual income from their pensions roughly equal to their last-year salary, for life. No wonder most public employees retire the moment they’re fully vested.
And that brings us to the third article, about how debt is forcing Baby Boomers to reconsider retirement. (Here’s the link to the original article, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.) The article shows how many private sector retirees are looking at bankruptcy as their only retirement option, and says:
“We may be entering several generations of a depression era for future U.S. retirees,” said Thomas J. Mackell, former chairman of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank.
“The problem is 50 percent of baby boomers are ill-prepared financially to retire,” he said. “They just don’t have enough money, and many of them are in debt.”
Things weren’t great even before the financial slump of the last two years. Then the economic downturn hit older people hard, based on research funded by the state’s economic development department, making an already challenging situation that much more difficult.
For a variety of reasons — from medical bills to limited retirement income to relatives in need — a growing number of older people have been turning to the bankruptcy courts for relief in recent years. …
“With the job environment the way it is and the problems people age 50 and over are having finding employment, the continuation of their problems could increase dramatically if the economy doesn’t turn around,” [bankruptcy attorney Theodore Connolly] said.
Overall, a lot of factors out of retirees’ control are working against them.
The major asset many had expected to rely on in their retirement — their home — is decreasing in value. They may have counted on the equity carrying them through lean times or being able to sell it at a nice profit during retirement.
Whatever they’ve invested in the stock market may not be growing at the rate they expected, and whatever retirement income stream they were counting on from bank CDs and government bonds has been reduced to a mere trickle.
No such worries will plague Freedland and Lamm, or any of the other thousands of California public employees who will leave working behind this year to enjoy many, many golden years at the people’s expense. Since they enjoy fixed benefits, not fixed contributions, they know they’ll be covered no matter what the economy does.
So we have public employees retiring in their 50s to follow their dreams, while those in the private sector – who paid the salaries of Freedland, Lamm and the others – are looking down the barrel of something that feels very much like a Great Depression, with no fixed, permanent public benefit awaiting them.
You’d think the very least our public sector cohorts could do would be to give their all for another decade or so, since, given how things are in California, it’s going to require all the expertise we’ve got to get through the next decade. They did their part in getting us into this mess, but we’re paying them to not take part in getting us out of it.
My Column on CalWatchdog
Nov 29th
The CalWatchdog blog (“Your Eyes on California Government”) ran a column by me as its lead feature today – it’s reproduced below. Please bookmark and consider contributing to CalWatchdog – it’s a great monitor of California government malfeasance run by Steve Greenhut, the long-time editorial crusader at the OC Register.
NEW: Deceptive Agency To Punish Deception
NOV. 29, 2010
By LAER PEARCE
On Wednesday a California state agency with a well-earned reputation for deception will hold a public workshop that may well set a new standard for governmental hypocrisy in California – and that’s really saying something.
The hearing is the spawn of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which has proposed a regulation prohibiting false statements. Under the new regulation, no one submitting information to CARB could knowingly and willingly “falsify, conceal or cover up by any trick, scheme, or devise a material fact.” The draft regulation ends ominously with: “This section shall not be the basis for any private right of action.”
A private right of action? As in some poor over-regulated sap going to court to charge CARB itself with making false statements to further its mission of saving the planet by smothering the private sector under regulations? Were such an action to be brought, the aggrieved sap would have many precedents to bolster his case – which is why CARB is guilty of proffering what is probably the most hypocritical regulation ever proposed in California.
The foremost exhibit against CARB is Dr. Hien Tran, a CARB scientist who wrote a key study the agency used to force recession-wracked operators of diesel off-road construction equipment to buy new, less polluting graders and trucks, at a cost of up to $12 billion. CARB identified Tran as a UC Davis-educated Ph.D. in statistics, a claim that gave his report some credence. But that was a false statement – Tran’s Ph.D. is from Thornhill University, which the Pacific Research Institute, the parent organization of Calwatchdog, points out is located “in a New York City office of the United States Postal Service.”
So Tran deceived us – but was CARB using tricks, schemes and devices to cover up for him? It appears CARB was duped just like the rest of us … initially. But ultimately, the agency hid Tran’s deception so it could stick it to off-road construction equipment operators – whether the facts backed up the regulations or not. CARB only came clean after one of its board members, John Telles, excoriated its staff in a three-page letter that explained the cover up in detail:
“On December 8, 2008, the Chief of the Research Division asked [Tran] if he had a Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Davis …. [Tran] on the evening of December 10, 2008, confessed to the Chief of the Research Division that he did not have such a credential. The following morning, the day [CARB] had convened to deliberate on the Truck Rule, this chief informed the Executive Officer, the Chief Deputy Executive Officer, the Deputy Executive Officer, the Chief of the Heavy Duty Diesel In-Use Strategies, the Chief of the Mobil [sic] Source Control Division, the Chief of the Health and Exposure Assessment Branch and at least one Board Member of [Tran’s] confession …. This information was not, however, relayed to the full Board. …
“Last week, on November 11, 2009, I learned that the Chair of CARB [Mary Nichols] was also aware of this information prior to the Vote …. Thus, neither the Staff nor the Board Chair informed the full board of this discovery prior the Vote. The Public, of course, was also not informed.”
CARB had allowed the fraud to be perpetrated in order to get the vote it wanted – an act far worse than any likely “false statement” anyone would ever try to pull on the agency. Embarrassing as that was, it wasn’t as embarrassing as Tran’s work itself, which Dr. S. Stanley Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences called “too flawed to be done by a capable statistician.”
The Tran study itself is a violation of the “false statements” regulation, which prohibits making or using “any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry.” Another CARB study in support of the off-road construction vehicle regulations violates the regulation as well because it overestimated the pollution caused by these vehicles by 340 percent. That little flub finally caused CARB to shamefacedly suspend the tainted regulation for the time being.
Asked if this kind of action by its staff – incompetence at best, criminal at worst – might call into question other allegedly scientific work of the air board, CARB chair and Tran co-conspirator Nichols told the Chronicle, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no and no.” That may be easy for her to say, but evidence points to the real answer: CARB can’t be trusted to follow its own proposed regulation because it routinely justifies its actions through staff-authored studies that are false, false, false, false, false, false, false and false.
Despite all this, the state’s air police have the unbridled arrogance to attempt to stop others from doing what they do with criminal regularity, even if it means having to strip the public of its right to free speech in the process.
Utter Obliteration
Nov 24th
Twenty-two days after the midterm elections, Steve Cooley has just conceded to San Francisco left-wing DA Kamala Harris in the attorney general race, making the devastation of the California GOP complete. With the Secretary of State no longer reporting any “close races” on her website, we now know that Dems hold every state-wide position, and every Dem incumbent running for Congress or the Legislature was re-elected.
And, of course, Prop 25 made the GOP irrelevant in the budget process, since the Dems will be able to pass whatever monstrosity they wish upon California with a simple majority.
The GOP train has officially wrecked. Is anyone ready to stage the come-back that’s supposed to happen at this point?
A relevant bit on Harris from Wikipedia:
[C]ritics argue that San Francisco sends fewer people to jail per arrest than other counties throughout the state. The San Francisco DA’s incarceration rates are among the lowest in the entire state of California—fully 10 times lower than in San Diego County, for example. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “roughly 4 of every 100 arrests result in prison terms in San Francisco, compared with 12.8 out of 100 in Alameda County, 14.4 of 100 in Sacramento County, 21 of 100 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 26.6 of 100 in Fresno County, 38.7 of 100 in Los Angeles County and 41 of 100 in San Diego County.”
On the plus side, her inability or unwillingness to incarcerate dangerous felons may be just what California’s ruined prison system needs.
Niki and the Nurses
Nov 23rd
The sordid tale of rancid electioneering is out and no one should be surprised: The California Nurses Association, one of the most powerful and selfish unions in the state, brought down Meg Whitman by master-minding housekeeper Niki Diaz’s actions against her former boss. Carla Marinucchi of the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story today:
One of the most tantalizing mysteries in California’s 2010 gubernatorial election involved the connection between one of the state’s poorest women and one of its wealthiest.
How did an undocumented, Mexican-born housekeeper, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, end up in the national spotlight, boldly confronting her former boss, billionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman?
The short answer: with the help of a union.
The longer answer is that at the height of the gubernatorial race, as campaign ads blared on Spanish-language television, the aggrieved housekeeper was determined to tell Californians her story of being abruptly fired by Whitman after nearly a decade on the job.
In early September, Diaz turned to a friend who knew a member of the powerful, Oakland-based California Nurses Association, The Chronicle has learned.
The union called in two lawyers for Diaz: Marc Van Der Hout, a longtime immigration attorney in San Francisco and celebrity feminist attorney Gloria Allred, a fierce workplace rights litigator who arranged for Diaz to tell her story in a live-webcast news conference.
Besides lining up the lawyers and paying for Diaz vs. Whitman campaign hit-ads on Spanish-language media, the union also sent 1,500 nurses to a rally where Diaz was speaking. Didn’t they have bedpans to empty – or was the sh*t all on the airwaves and newspapers that day?
It’s typical CNA action. This is the union, after all, that’s made it hideously expensive and frustrating to actually graduate a new nurse in California. Why? Because the health of the union members’ bank accounts is more important to CNA than the health of Californians, and too many young, eager nurses could bring down the pay and benefits and muss up the cushy work rules of more senior nurses.
Did California Become Irrelevant Nov. 2?
Nov 21st
As commentators broke down the midterm election results on election night and the next day, you could almost hear them dismiss California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevance. It’s easy to see their point. The rest of the nation looked at the mess we’re in and did something about it; Californians looked at an even worse mess and voted to make it worse.
You know the talking points: We re-elected every single incompetent, egotistical, out-of-touch politician that contributed to the mess – as of this point in the ballot counting, not a single member of the California congressional and legislative delegations was sent packing. What a stunning endorsement of idiocy! But it didn’t end there. Californians passed Prop 25, giving the Democrats complete control of the state budget, as an award for their effectiveness at destroying the state’s economy. And they ensured that the California would stay mired in recession when they voted for draconian economic mandates by voting down Prop 23.
So, as voters in nearly every other state set new courses, it’s easy to count out California as a powerful national influence. But it’s wrong.
Ever since Republican Hiram Johnson became governor of California in 1910 and told voters he spoke for the insurgents, defining insurgency as “opposition to the looting of the people by the unholy alliance between big business and politics,” California has been the nurturer of America’s Progressive movement. The state’s modeling of Progressive legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its schools and universities has given the movement staying power – so much staying power, in fact, that it’s unlikely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for California’s Progressives, right up to Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and, once again, Jerry Brown.
Sure, politicians, think tanks and campaign managers will be studying election results everywhere else to see how to capitalize on, or crush, the Tea Party’s influence, but just as surely, Progressives, environmentalists, social justice advocates and union bosses will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it in their state next time around.
Besides, California’s influence on government goes much deeper than mere elections. We kid ourselves if we think our elected politicians control the show. They come and go, but the bureaucrats, regulators and legislative staff are forever, and they’re where the rubber of government really hits the road. Because California trains so many Progressives and pushes them into government, the state will continue to influence America, even if voters are trying to steer a different course.
This was evident when federal eco-bureaucrats followed Californian’s lead when they started setting the new federal vehicle fuel economy standards, just as it was evident in the eleven states that recently announced they would blindly follow California down the trail to eco-economic lunacy by adopting our Low-Carbon Fuel Standard. Like California, they will force industry to switch to low-carbon fuels that just aren’t there or just can’t perform – if there were a ready alternative for carbon-rich gasoline, Californians wouldn’t be burning 45 million gallons of it a day.
Don’t count out California. It may be sinking into economic ruin, but plenty of states and municipalities continue to jump aboard, eager to follow our lead, no matter where it leads them.
A Smokin’ Take-Away from the Midterms
Nov 21st
I heard plenty of commentators pass off the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization measure on the November 2010 ballot, with a condescending, “Even California isn’t that crazy.” You would think these professional pundits would know by now that it is never a good call to underestimate the craziness of California.
Which leads up to my favorite election fact from the 2010 election: More Californians voted to legalize pot than voted for Meg Whitman for governor. So we really are that crazy!
With the final votes yet to be tallied, Meg got 4,027,661 Californians to vote for her while nearly half a million more, 4,502,657, voted to legalize pot. You could almost double the population of North Dakota with the difference between the two tallies. The Whitman campaign spent $163 million on her failed effort ($141 million of her own money and a mere $22 million in Meg-free campaign contributions), so each vote she collected cost her $40.47. The much-derided Prop 19 supporters, in contrast, spent $4 million on their campaign, or $1.13 per vote.
More significant, though, is what running a social-reform proposition in California means to the rest of the nation, even if the proposition loses. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana. Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.”
Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.”
Colorado is a likely target, underscoring California’s continuing ability to influence American society, even if the state’s voters continue to vote as strangely as they did in 2010.
In the “Fail Race,” California is Tops
Sep 29th
I didn’t know that in the world of financial prognosticating, successfully predicting a bank’s dividend cut in 2008 would remain a salient kudo in 2010, but that’s the way it is, at least at Fortune, Bloomberg and Business Week, which used that as the sole qualifier for one Meredith Whitney’s credibility. Be that as it may, I think the gal’s spot-on with her latest future-gazing:
Meredith Whitney, the analyst who correctly predicted Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008, will release a report rating California’s financial condition as the worst among the 15 largest U.S. states, Fortune said.
The report rates the states by four criteria: economy, fiscal health, housing and taxes, Fortune said, citing Whitney. Texas and Virginia are the only two states to receive overall positive ratings, the magazine reported yesterday. An official at Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC in New York confirmed the document’s existence and said it wasn’t immediately available.
Crippling debts and deficits are about to make individual states the next casualty of the credit crisis, Whitney said, according to an article on the CNBC website.
“The similarities between the states and the banks are extreme to the extent that states have been spending dramatically and are leveraged dramatically,” Whitney said. “Municipal debt has doubled since 2000. Spending has grown way faster than revenues.”
It comes as no surprise that California would top Whitney’s list of fiscal bottom-dwellers. I’ve got about 200 pages of notes for Crazifornia, including at least 50 pages on budget- and spending-related issues that support Whitney’s findings. I also think her analogy to banks is on the mark. There have been 127 bank failures nationally so far this year (nine of them in California), and that doesn’t include the spectacular failures that triggered the recession.
California is the coming spectacular failure that could well trigger the much-anticipated double dip recession.
Crazifornia will cover this thoroughly, especially in its chapter on how California taught the rest of America the art of government over-spending. The state has continuously increased its spending on welfare, the environment, pensions, education and thousands of questionable pet projects while systematically destroying its business and industrial base, which it needs for revenues. Last year, business and industrial tax receipts in California dropped 40 percent from the previous year! Interestingly, Texas is taking the opposite route and remains in good financial standing, according to Whitney.
Image: New York Times
Barking Towards Oblivion
Aug 4th
Yesterday, the California Democrats unveiled their budget proposal, an utterly uninspiring amalgamation of new burdens on businesses and taxpayers, with no proposals to cut spending – not one.
Businesses would be scammed out of $2 billion by letting some rare California business tax breaks expire. Personal income tax and car fees (what got Grey Davis drummed out of office, for cryin’ out loud!) would both go up. There would be no cuts to welfare entitlements, no sanity injected into the state’s prison system, and certainly no purging of useless, duplicative state commissions, boards, agencies and departments – in short, there was no respect for the people of California.
Against all that, I give you my vet, Dr. Mike Eberhardt. I’m going to a Rancho Santa Margarita Planning Commission hearing on his behalf tonight, to speak in favor of innovation and against the expensive repression of business that goes on so routinely in Crazifornia.
Dr. Eberhart’s clinic is in an industrial park, not a neighborhood. An innovative vet, he built a fenced-in dog run behind the building, encircling it with an expensive wrought iron fence, in keeping with the design of other fencing in the park. He uses it to let dogs walk off anesthesia, and to better diagnose dogs. He found that dogs on a metal table in a vet’s treatment room will mask their symptoms, but if he and the owner go out to the dog run, in a few minutes, the dog will drop the mask and a better diagnosis can be made.
Ah, but the city of Rancho Santa Margarita has a policy requiring a Conditional Use Permit for dog runs like his. And they’re recommending that the Planning Commission deny his application. Overseeing dog runs may be a good idea if you’re attempting to regulate doggy daycare facilities, where such runs can create a lot of barking and a lot of poop. But his dogs are there for one-on-one observation, are never left alone, and are cleaned up after, so it’s … well … an entirely different animal.
What’s logical to you and me is missed in the regulation-addicted mindset of California government. How crazy is it? Well, Dr. E’s spent over $20,000 to date on attorney’s fees, and will ring up a bunch more as his attorney prepares for and sits through tonight’s hearing.
Welcome to business in California – where every good idea gets the bureaucratic bum’s rush, and every good business gets taxed into oblivion.
