1) Once Mighty, Blue Cities Continue to Repel People
If you want to look into a crystal ball of the future and see what America would look like if the progressive/anti-free market capitalism took hold all over the country, then look no further than the heart-breaking decline of blue cities from coast to coast.
The Census Bureau just released its 2022 city population estimates on Friday. Our ace demographer Wendell Cox reports the lowlights:
The largest blue cities continued their plunge that began during the militant lockdowns.
In 2021 (July 2020 to June 2021) - the principal year of the COVID pandemic - households fled from the largest and densest cities to escape lockdowns and take advantage of remote and hybrid work arrangements.
But in the last year of post-Covid America, the exodus from big blue cities didn't reverse course - the outmigration continued.
The new Census data reveal that among the 10 largest cities, the cities in red states - Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and San Antonio added population. The largest blue cities continued to LOSE population - albeit at a slower pace. New York's population shrunk by 123,000, Chicago lost 33,000, Philadelphia lost 22,000, Los Angeles lost 16,000, and San Jose lost 10,000 - in just one year.
Another former jewel of urban America, San Francisco, has lost 7.5% of its population between 2020 and 2022.
Progressivism - high taxes, lousy schools, high crime with lenient punishments, powerful public employee unions, and corrupt political leadership - is a cancer cell that is causing the Detroit-ification of blue city America.
2) Meanwhile, Philadelphia Mayor's Race Shows a Sliver of Hope for Blue Cities
Some good news from the City of Brotherly Love. In the mayoral election last week voters rejected the far-left candidate supported by the unholy trinity of AOC, Bernie Sanders and militant teacher union boss Randi Weingarten.
City Council member Helen Gym was defeated by Cherelle Parker, also a former member of the Council. Parker won by making crime a major issue and vowing to hire hundreds of additional police officers with the power to stop and search pedestrians if they have a legitimate reason to do so. She also called for cuts in the city’s job-killing tax on payrolls.
Gym was undone in part by her flip flops on school reform. In years past she had sponsored a charter school, but now that HER kids have graduated, she‘s suddenly a vocal foe of school choice. Here is her flimsy explanation: "… The school that I started was in 2005, the city that I’m fighting for right now in 2023 and for 2033 and beyond is for everybody to have the kind of quality system every child deserves …”
The tired regurgitation of the teachers union rhetoric.
One of our CTUP supporters, Jeff Yass - the CEO of Susquehanna, a major employer in the Philly area - was one of the sponsors of ads that challenged Gym’s record. “The hypocrisy issue on school choice was definitely a major factor in her defeat,” he notes.
Congratulations to Philly voters for rejecting the catastrophic results of Chicago where soft-on-crime, pro-tax, and anti-school reform political activist Brandon Johnson won the mayoral election and now runs the city.
3) Headline of the Week
From The Washington Post:
Ah, the horror!
The article goes on to call the debt stand-off and the Republicans’ hardline an act of economic “self-sabotage” that will risk a recession and cost millions of jobs and higher interest rates.
We will say it for the umpteenth time: the risk of an economic meltdown comes from the tsunami of debt which may rise another $2 trillion this year and to $50 trillion by the end of the decade if Congress doesn’t act to stop the bleeding.
4) Speaking of Hypocrisy: The Rich and Famous Get to Keep Their Gas Stoves
As we’ve often said: food tastes better when prepared on a gas stove.
5) We Couldn’t Have Said It Better, Justice Gorsuch
Our quote of the day comes from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch speaking of the government’s seizure of power during the Covid panic:
Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.
They shuttered businesses and schools public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too...
Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.
They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.
While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation...
At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another. Make no mistake—decisive executive action is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But if emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others. And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.
