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Taxes
Money Grab
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis, Boca Raton Mayor Andy Thomson and Broward County Property Appraiser Marty Kiar hosted an event in South Florida where they made speeches opposing cuts in Florida’s property taxes, because of course they did.
Trantalis told the crowd of more than 40 business leaders, attorneys and real estate agents property taxes fund 45% of the city’s day-to-day operations, with more than half of Fort Lauderdale’s budget — 62% — pays for police and fire service. The claim is how every dime in taxes is essential, property taxes only come from owner occupied property, and any cuts to those taxes will result in less service from police and fire.
The misdirection is 45% of the city’s day to day operations is in itself a bit of a lie. He is pulling a stunt that excludes sections of the budget in order to hide the real monetary picture here. By saying “day to day operations” he is talking about only one section of the city’s overall budget. The day to day operations he is speaking about is the city’s general fund. The mayor’s fuller statement says that approximately “48 cents of every General Fund dollar” comes from property taxes, but the General Fund is only 43.5% of the city’s $1.194 billion adopted operating budget. So “property taxes fund nearly half of the city’s day-to-day operations” is a way of hiding a narrower fact: property taxes fund less than half of the General Fund, and only about 22% of the city’s entire annual spending.
That distinction matters because many genuine day-to-day city operations sit outside the general fund:
- Water and wastewater
- Sanitation
- Stormwater
- Parking
- Airport operations
- Building services
- Internal-service operations
Those activities are primarily supported by utility rates, service charges, assessments and other dedicated revenue, not property taxes.
The city has a total annual budget of $1.194 billion. Of that 1.2 billion, homestead property taxes are only $79.8 million, or about 6.6% of the city’s budget. The remaining roughly $185 million in ad valorem revenue comes from non-homesteaded residential, commercial, rental, industrial, and other taxable property.
So to boil things down- the loss of all ad valorem revenue from homestead property would cause the city to lose less than 7% of their total budget.
What impact would that have? Let’s take a look at the city’s total budget for the past 5 years.
| Fiscal year | Total adopted expenditures | Year-over-year increase | Year-over-year % |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2022 | $897,744,024 | — | — |
| FY 2023 | $985,053,597 | $87,309,573 | 9.7% |
| FY 2024 | $1,071,928,055 | $86,874,458 | 8.8% |
| FY 2025 | $1,193,279,369 | $121,351,314 | 11.3% |
| FY 2026 | $1,194,366,687 | $1,087,318 | 0.1% |
In the past five years, the city’s budget has grown by a total of 33%. Even eliminating all of the $80 million in ad valorem revenue from homesteaded property would leave Fort Lauderdale with roughly $1.115 billion, which is still 4% above its FY 2024 budget.
Amendment 3 wouldn’t even go that far. The median value of residential property in Fort Lauderdale is about $486,000. The amendment would increase the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 over a two year period. This would have the effect of reducing the taxable value of the median homestead property in Fort Lauderdale by 46%. In other words, Fort Lauderdale would see a 3.6% reduction in their overall annual budget as a result of Amendment 3.
Sources
Mayor’s public statement to social media on spending and taxes
Anti American left
Intel
It’s important to understand the mindset we are dealing with. This guy travelled to Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin to set fire to a Republican Congressman’s office. he comes right out and admits to doing so, states he did it because he disagrees with the Congressman’s recent votes. He goes on to say he has tried peacefully protesting, but that didn’t work, so peace is no longer possible. I have started the video below at the beginning of his police interrogation, just after his Miranda rights have been read to him:
I can already hear a bunch of you- you are making fun of him because he looks like a marshmallow soy eating lard ass. (I will get in my one shot- his Antifa code name is Sponge Bro Lard Ass.) Here is why I think you are wrong: he did something other than sit on the Internet and complain. This alone makes him, and people like him, a threat. The stupid ones like him will either be stripped away while they are in prison, or they will be released until they learn how to carry out attacks without getting caught, and the attacks will get more and more deadly and effective.
For those reasons, I think we make fun of people like him to our own peril.
Race baiting
Ferals
First, we see this:
He complains how being treated like animals in a zoo is disheartening to blacks. Then we see this:
Another store closes in 3…2…1… Then the blacks will come out and complain this doesn’t happen in white neighborhoods.
Cops
Crazy
A man broke up with his girlfriend. That morning, she claims to have been getting her hair done and had a “hunch” he would be at another woman’s house. She showed up there and began attacking him. He left in his car, she followed him and kept ramming his car with her own. Hey, the old saying is “don’t put your dick in crazy.” It’s even worse when the crazy woman who is ramming your car happens to be a police officer.
So what was name of this hunch that allowed the woman to find him? I think there is a good chance it wasn’t really a hunch, but was instead Flock.
In a side note, the police department she worked for was recently mentioned in this blog when one of its patrol supervisors was doing 124 miles per hour with lights and sirens on because he was late for work.
Gaming the Courts
Games
The window for gun rights to be won in court is closing. Democrats are trying to game the court because they are convinced the court is political. Of course it is, and everyone has known it for the past 100 years. That’s why there is such a fight every time a vacancy appears on the court. That’s why they are trying to do anything they can to make the court a permanent rubber stamp for their own agenda.
The Democrats had friends in justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and Lewis F. Powell Jr., all Republican-appointed justices whose votes often swung to the left. Now the justices largely vote with the party of the President who nominated them. Thanks to some maneuvering by the Republicans and a bit of stupidity and vanity on the part of Democrats, the Republican party has a bit of an advantage on the court, something they hadn’t been able to say for decades.
- Antonin Scalia died under mysterious circumstances in 2016. Mitch McConnell managed to delay a vote on his replacement until after the 2016 election. Democrats, convinced that Hillary was a lock for the White House, went along with it. That put Neil Gorsuch on the bench and infuriated the left.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, trying to hold on to staying in office forever, managed to die during the last year of Trump’s first term. Republicans, not being as dumb as they usually are, were smart enough to replace her with Amy Barret, who hasn’t really been a stalwart Republican vote.
Leftist professors argue “This is the first time where you have a court where the ideology really maps onto partisan affiliation,” which is patently and verifiably false. The courts were left leaning for decades before Trump managed to shift the court more to the right. Anyone who says differently is either foolish or lying. The court would regularly tie itself in knots to rubber stamp things like Obamacare and the NFA.
Make no mistake, the left is doing everything it can to seize control of the nation and take it down the path to communism.
Crime
Evil
About 20 years ago, I responded as a paramedic to a 911 call. A man had called the emergency number because his wife had called to tell him she was going to kill herself and the kids. We responded and the entry team went into the house. Inside, it was discovered to be too late. The woman and all four kids were dead.
In January of 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for takeout and medicine, and while he was gone, she strangled her three young children (Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months)) using exercise bands. She then called her husband to tell him he should come home right away, and as he arrived at the house, she jumped from a second-story window in an attempted suicide that left her paralyzed.
In Jacksonville, Florida police arrested a couple who had refused to let the woman’s children leave the cab of the truck for years. Investigators say the four children had been living in the cab of a semitruck driven by the woman’s boyfriend (who is a truck driver for a company operating between Atlanta, Georgia, and Miami, Florida) since December 2019. The children had been locked in the cab of the truck for so long, they could no longer walk. The man had been sexually abusing the children. The children told investigators that the mother was informed of the abuse but did not believe them and continued to leave them alone with him.
I wanted to post on this because it brought back a flood of memories for me. I don’t mention this often, because I don’t want sympathy. In fact, I’ve only mentioned this on my blog one other time. When I was a child, my mother used to burn my fingers with matches when my brother or I touched something that we weren’t supposed to. When we said something objectional, she would put hot peppers in our mouths. She used to tell me things like “I have to love you because I am your mother, but I don’t have to like you.” Later as an adult, I was homeless for a time. That’s when I called my parents for help, because even though we hadn’t been speaking for a couple of years, I had nowhere else to turn. They hung up on me. There were plenty of reasons for me to resent her. All of those reasons are probably why I have had so many failed relationships. It made me into a person that isn’t good at being vulnerable or sharing my feelings. It’s also probably why I am such an overachiever and why I try to be the righter of wrongs, even if it means tilting at windmills.
The relationship between a mother who abuses her children and the children she is abusing is a complex one from the viewpoint of the child. Children are born with an impression of their mother. She is supposed to be the one person they can count on and depend on. They are the one person that’s supposed to be the child’s safety, their protector. When that person becomes the one causing the child’s pain, it destroys their world, while even at the same time the child is drawn to that same person for love and safety.
So to the people who say the mothers above are sick or should have some sort of mercy given to them because of post partum depression, I have to tell you that there is true evil in this world. I was once one of the victims of that sort of abuse. I’ve also had to be there to see where that abuse often ends. It’s always a tragedy. When I see stories like this, I imagine the child standing there crying to its mother for protection as they watch her strangle their siblings to death, knowing and fearing that they are next, and wondering what they did wrong to deserve this. It’s overwhelming.
My son had a best friend growing up, let’s call him Brad. I knew the kid. The group of friends that my son was a part of and who grew up together eventually married and had kids. Brad was always there for them, good old friend Uncle Ben was being a good friend and watching the kids for them. It turns out he was molesting them and filming it. When he was eventually caught, my son agreed to testify against him. Instead of facing a Federal trial for distributing child porn and the 30 years he could have gotten if convicted, Brad pled guilty. His lawyer argued to the judge that he be given leniency, since he had confessed. The judge agreed and knocked six months off of sentence he could have given him. The kid is doing 29.5 years in Federal prison.
In a moment of complete honesty to my readers: Truly evil acts like this are what completely destroyed any positive religion in my very core. I just can’t understand how any god that can allow things like this to be done to children cannot be loving or good. I just can’t understand any being having the power to stop such evil, yet allowing it to happen. Please don’t think of this as an attack on your or your beliefs, this is just a statement of why I feel the way I do. I have seen far too much evil, suffering, and pain to understand how there can possibly be a good and loving deity running things.
For those of you who *ARE* religious, please explain to me how these two things can simultaneously be true-
- An omnipotent, loving God
- Evil existing that harms children too young to have committed no sin worthy of such pain
I struggle with this each and every time I see something like this with my own eyes. It hurts me to my core each and every time I see it or hear about it. Maybe that’s a me problem, I don’t know. All I do know is seeing things like this made me a bitter, withdrawn human for awhile. When people would tell me “I know how you must feel,” my answer used to be, “Have you ever held a dead baby? No? Ever seen a mother stab her child to death? No? Then you can’t possibly know how I feel.” Such things are an assault on a person’s very core. It changes you forever.
The best answer I have ever been able to come up with is this: Some people are just evil or broken. You can’t reason with them, you can’t fix them, you can’t predict which of them will be like this. You have to wait for them to commit one of these heinous acts in order to identify them. Once you know who they are, there is only one true way to make sure they never do it again.
Even though I don’t trust the government with that power, I still think it’s the only way to prevent a person from committing evil again.
Communism
Free Stuff
So soap, toothpaste, and other “biological needs” should have no penalty or law preventing them from being stolen? Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, my 14 year old niece who believed tampons should be free.
So when anyone who wishes any of those things can just walk into a store and take whatever they want, how will businesses react? Of course, they will simply stop carrying those products. Is there anything the left doesn’t want businesses to produce for free?
Crime
OK,I Misspoke
I know I said no post today, but this begs for a comment. Watch this and take what lesson you can from it.
Racial tensions are as high as I can recall. This is an attack by a man upon two unsuspecting women, and purely based on race.
It’s also why I carry. Note this happened in Charlotte, NC, where they can legally carry guns. Why didn’t someone punch that asshole’s ticket? This is the 23rd time he’s been arrested in the past 14 years.
Hunt was in 2020 convicted of shooting into a building or a vehicle with a person inside, Charlotte-Observer news partner WSOC first reported. He has been arrested on charges of assault against women and government officials, trespassing and violating probation and domestic violence orders eight times in the last three years, jail records show.
How many times before he actually gets caged or shot? Are the residents of Charlotte waiting for him to kill someone?
Avoid feral negros. Cross the street. Go a different way. Be prepared to kill them, because they will certainly kill you.
Me
Not Feeling It
Just not feeling like blogging today. My tank is empty. I’m going to spend the day in the pool, maybe go get a haircut. The nearest barber that uses a straight razor and cuts hair for men and not queer haircuts is about 40 minutes away.
See you all tomorrow.