Good morning and welcome to Broad + Liberty's Weekly Reads. Hope your Thanksgiving was happy and peaceful.

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1. Delaware County facing $76 million budget deficit — 28 percent tax increase proposed

By Todd Shepherd
 

The first draft of Delaware County’s 2025 budget shows the county operating with a $76 million deficit, according to a Broad + Liberty analysis of county budget documents.

In order to pay for $52 million of that gap, taxpayers are facing a 28 percent real estate tax increase. To fill the remainder, the draft budget spends $10 million in non-renewable funding from the federal government, and also dips into the county’s “fund balance” — essentially the reserve fund — for another $14 million.

The five-member county council, which flipped from a Republican to Democratic majority in 2020, will have the final say on any adjustments or changes to what Executive Director Barbara O’Malley has proposed. Yet the executive director’s draft budget is usually a reasonable predictor of the basic outline of the county’s anticipated spending and revenues.

The proposed 28 percent tax increase would come on the heels of a five percent increase already levied on county residents in 2024.

Why It Matters.  The Democrats, who came to power in 2020 and many of whom still remain on the all-Democratic county council today, campaigned on promises to launch ambitious projects like the creation of a county-run health department and the deprivatization of the county prison.
Republicans warned some of those projects would be more costly than Democrats imagined — predictions that seem to be coming true.

Quotable. “I am pleased that council Democrats have finally come clean and admitted what most of us have known for years. Out of control spending by the Biden-Harris Administration in DC and this council have resulted in crushing inflation and massive tax increases at a time when most Delco families can least afford it,” Delaware County GOP Chairman Frank Agovino said.

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2. The plight of men

By Thom Nickels
 

While having a drink with a friend in a neighborhood bar a few years ago, a distraught-looking woman approached us and started chatting.

We engaged in typical barroom banter until she introduced herself as the mother of a guy I had met in the same bar almost two years before. The guy in question, Mitch, introduced himself to me then because he recognized me from a photograph that accompanied my column in a local newspaper. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes but I remembered the encounter because Mitch seemed to be a troubled guy. 
While talking about her son, Mitch’s mother told me her son described his meeting me then with the words, “I talked with the guy from the newspaper.” 

She also described Mitch’s suicide note to her. At this she became very emotional and shed tears. 
By the end of the night I had promised Mitch’s mom that I would check out a Suicide Prevention event she was organizing in another part of the neighborhood. After that I thought about the suicides that had affected my life in some way.

Why It Matters.  Studies show men are less likely than women to say that they would tell anyone they were considering suicide. Here we have the reworking of that old stereotype: men hold things inside and are less likely to reveal their feelings. Isolation makes young men feel inadequate and angry. This can sometimes lead to thoughts of self-directed violence. 

An essential side note to the topic is the current role of men and boys in American society. Since the rise of certain strands of militant feminism (with or without shaved heads), this role has been devalued, even though a certain devaluation of men and boys has always been present in our culture. 

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3. Lightning Round

• Guy Ciarrocchi: Why Americans are called to give thanks

• Andy Bloom: Digging into the post-election data – and the pollster who got it right

• Christine Flowers: Born in the U.S.A.

• Richard F. Kosich: The American people have chosen

4. What we're reading

As the election post-mortems continue to roll in, we particularly enjoyed this one by Christine Rosen at National Review. The Harris campaign expected women to carry her across the finish line. In the end, though, she fared worse with women than Joe Biden did four years earlier. “In addition to her general lack of skill as a retail politician,” Rosen writes, “Harris’s campaign neglected to consider how its messaging would sound to women outside the world in which Harris lives, with its wealthy, well-educated, decidedly left-leaning Democratic voters.”