Tag: Taxes

If you Vote for the Fairfield School Levy, You’re Stupid: What really causes communities to fail

I’ve said it for years, and it’s just as relevant today as it ever was, perhaps more so.  If you vote for a school levy, you’re stupid.  That’s what Darryl Parks and I always said on WLW radio when I was a frequent guest.  Many of our old interviews are still on my YouTube site, where we talked about why in a thousand different ways.  When he was the program director for Clear Channel Radio, we spent many hours discussing what had come true in public education today, well before anybody else realized it, and nobody can’t say that they weren’t told.  It was just an inconvenient truth that nobody wanted to admit to.  When they thought of public school, they thought about school jackets, class rings, homecoming dances, and the social aspects of being around other kids.  But public school designed by socialists, Marxists, and outright communists under John Dewey was never intended to teach anybody anything useful.  It was always about social controls that would last the duration of people’s lives with liberalized sentiment and submission to authority, which served the notion of big centralized governments.  And the entire system has collapsed on itself.  Finally, people have admitted that sending their kids to public schools was something they’d instead not do if they could get away with it. Suppose they could afford a private school or some other alternative.  And that is the state now where there are massive waiting lists for alternative schools to the government school option at the center of everyone’s community.  It’s taken many years, and COVID was the final straw, but people have finally admitted that the public school option is one they’d love to get away from for the benefit of their children.  Based on what we know now, if you are choosing to send your kid to public school, it’s more for your convenience than that you love them.  Nobody would choose to send a kid to a public school and, in the same sentence, mean it when you said to them, “I love you.”  Those things do not go together.

And so it goes; knowing all that, my wife and I were shopping at Bridgewater Falls in Fairfield, and we noticed all the yard signs advocating for a new tax levy for Fairfield Schools.  Fairfield is a school district neighboring Lakota, where I live, and they have been flirting with a new levy in Lakota for several years.  Public schools were designed to burden a community, so everyone has to go through a kind of divorce with their government schools where property values are perceived to be directly connected.  For years, it has been thought that people move into or out of a community based on the quality of the schools.  That’s what real estate people will tell you anyway, but that has, too, been a lazy way to manage school districts.  Government schools that are controlled by radical leftist teacher unions with consistently high wage rates in mind have no means to generate more money to pay their staff but ever-increasing burdens on their property taxes.  So the game continued; home values would increase, making more taxable revenue available for the government schools to confiscate.  That money is then used to program the next generation of children into the ways of Democrat politics, anti-God sentiments, transgender bathrooms, and racial politics, making for much of their youth, future Democrat voters.  Public schools are essentially teaching anti-family and a replacement of domestic concerns with obedience to centralized government. 

So the longer a community survives this process, the more burden and expensive those government schools become before there is a collapse, and the following community with the next shiny thing becomes the new destination, leaving the old community behind and used up.  That has been the story of several communities around Butler County, especially Fairfield, where I have much experience.  My wife and I were married and went to church there for many years when it was a destination community for many people all over the country.  I have watched this government school game for a long time, and behind it all is the communist intention to attack private ownership.  We are seeing this trend in Liberty Township, within the Lakota district now, where apartments and lower-cost living seek to attract lower-income people who don’t own so much private property.  It’s not a massive conspiracy; I know all the trustees involved.  They are nice enough guys.  But it’s in the handbook of community development, written by the same dumb people from the United Nations who designed these horrible public schools.  What could go wrong with a community entirely of apartments and people who vote but don’t own property?  Then, people who own property are squeezed out of their homes with high taxes, and before you know it, the tax rates are too high and unmanageable, and people move away once their children grow up and start lives of their own somewhere else.  In the background of all these apartments and condos is the hope that the children will stay in the community when they grow up if only affordable options exist.  But what you end up with is Democrat voters until they grow up and take on more responsibility by starting a family of their own.  So they vote for school levies, but their landlords end up having to pay the taxes, and the schools achieve one of Karl Marx’s goals: the destruction of all private property.  We have seen this cycle everywhere, and Fairfield has suffered from it.  Most of their best companies picked up and left because the taxes were too high, the same story that could be told in every community around Butler County, Ohio, for the last four or five decades.  The Lakota schools are watching if any of these levies pass so they can try independently for their own.  We have managed to keep the taxes low in Lakota because plenty of people have a hostile reaction to the prospect of higher property taxes.  However, the system was built to fail in every way, providing a tempting lure to busy parents, free babysitting while they work, and dual income lives to pay for all this mess. 

However, changes are coming with another Trump administration; serious reforms to public education will happen by eliminating the Department of Education, which should have occurred during the Reagan administration.  But the communists fought to prevent it with the standard fear tactics, which Reagan listened to.  And so we have had this uncompetitive socialist model ever since, and Trump is poised to change it.  And to that point, the most apparent change will be that any federal dollars will follow the child, not the zip code.  That will mean that Fairfield, Lakota, Mason, and several other government schools along the outer loop of I-275 will have to fight to have children in their schools to access the funds that come with them.  And their cost structure will be challenged severely, which would be great.  Many teachers at Lakota schools make over six figures, which is a big part of their quarter of a billion-dollar yearly budget. If you have attended a school event anywhere lately, you will see many of these teachers can afford to miss a sandwich or two.  They are not specimens of excellent health, let’s just put it nicely.  The entire system is poised to fail, whether levies are approved or not.  And knowing all that, if you vote for a school levy, as I have said for several decades, you are stupid.  It’s silly to vote for any public school for more money that they are just going to waste on radical Democrat teachers.  And until we change that, it’s stupid to give them even a penny more. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why Property Values in Butler County Could Go Up By 42%: And What Nancy Nix and many others are doing to Protect taxpayers

It was a very beautiful day looking out the windows of the Office of Nancy Nix as the Great Miami River gently rolled by as it has for many thousands of years. I looked down from the third-floor vantage point into the park that used to be the movie theater in Hamilton, where I first saw Sleeping Beauty and reflected on good memories from childhood. The weather outside was perfect for a day in May of 2023, so it was an excellent reflection of the long history of Butler County, Ohio, where the city of Hamilton had seen so much history, lots of good days and rough times to say the least and of course, the river flows by regardless of what human beings cause themselves by way of trouble. And the topic that Nancy and I were set to talk about, captured well in the video above, was historic trouble. The short story was that Butler County and nearby Clermont County were being penalized for being affluent areas that had recently enjoyed dramatic economic growth. It made an easy target for the new Ohio Tax Commissioner, Patricia Harris, in trying to correct the many sins of the past, where the government had kicked the can down the road over a long period of time. She had decided that there was nowhere left to kick it. So this wasn’t something that just happened well before Nancy Nix took over in Butler County in the very important auditor position, this crisis was brewing, and now it was splashed all over headlines from a recent I-Team report that indicated property values in Butler County were going to go up by a recommended 42%. That meant that property values for a $250,000 house were suddenly going to be at $355,000, an increase of $105,000. And people were not happy about it.

At Thanksgiving Dinner, such news might sound great; people might even open a bottle of wine at the success of their investments in real estate. Suddenly things on paper looked much better, and their homes were worth a lot more. But in Butler County, regarding 8 of the ten school districts, there would be tax increases proportional to that value increase which was going to impact homeowners negatively. For instance, the school district of Ross, right across the river from Nancy’s office, as we spoke about this matter and looked in that direction, they just had a vote to defeat a tax increase for that school. The levy had failed for the third time. But now, because of this news from the Ohio Department of Taxation, Ross is holding off on trying for another levy because they will gain a lot of new revenue from the new tax rates of these inflated property values. That’s the kind of thing that has people so upset, and for good reason. In a lot of ways, the recommendation from the state is taking away a fundamental right of property owners to manage their local governments by essentially taking extra tax money without a vote, with just a decision by the state to calculate these varying percentages based on sales data recorded during a very turbulent time that does not represent the norm.   According to the state, which then imposes the percentage rate onto auditors like Nancy Nix, they take a three-year sales reflection of what they think is market value during their state-mandated triennial update. But for this one, that analysis period was one of the worst in the history of the world. Looking at sales from 2019, where America had one of the best economies in human history, then the following year with Covid lockdowns, then the volatility of runaway interest rates resulting from the Biden presidency and the economic tampering of several government controls, the data collected is far from the norm, and has resulted in these crazy recommendations which Nancy Nix and other auditors are questioning, aggressively. 

And as bad as all that news was, it was still a good day from the vantage point of Nancy’s office as we talked about the many proactive measures that she and area legislators were doing to help solve the problem. Regarding that, a new Fox 19 article had hit, and I was talking to Senator George Lang about it, where he is proposing a way to change how Ohio’s property values are reassessed, which is obviously needed. Politics aside, Patricia Harris, the Ohio Tax Commissioner, had just been appointed in January of 2023 and obviously could use more time on the job before destroying everyone’s tax bills based on some bad data compiled during her first few months on the job. And George’s proposal as a legislative solution would definitely help her and the people connected to her decision. But the Ohio Department of Taxation itself, according to the spokesman Gary Gudmondson was already headed down the wrong road by digging in with obviously flawed data by saying, “We don’t change our recommendations in response to a county complaint.” What he means is that the Ohio Department of Taxation doesn’t listen to people like Nancy Nix, professionals who have been doing this kind of work for most of their adult lives. Instead, her job was to listen to what they recommended and live with it because they held all the cards. 

Yet, there is optimism on the legislative front; in addition to the good work that George Lang is leading, there have been further meetings involving Sara Carruthers, Rodney Creech, Jennifer Gross, and Thomas Hall. Treasurer Mike McNamara, Clerk of Courts Mary Swain, and Recorder Danny Crank are working aggressively to propose short-term and long-term solutions. Some of them are legislative, such as what George is working on. Some would involve amendments to the State Constitution, which are obviously long overdue. Others are things that Nancy Nix and the names mentioned can do as proactive measures. It’s not all bad news. But ultimately, these rate hikes are the result of years of government mismanagement from the state level imposed on regional government, where the most accountability to the voting public is supposed to be the key to all decision-making. But in this case, stuck against the cost of volatile bad decisions, especially during the Covid period, the impact of those decisions is not flowing into people’s property value assessments which are being penalized because they live in areas that were disproportionately well off in relation to other parts of the state that didn’t do so well. And now, we must sort it all out in a way that makes Ohio an attractive place to continue investing in. Otherwise, people might leave for destinations without these kinds of problems. The burden falls on the Ohio Tax Commissioner to develop better strategies for recovering costs from kicking the can down the road for so long and analyzing the market temperament correctly with a better sampling than what the last three years have shown, as they were the worst three years in the history of life on planet earth. And that isn’t the fault of innocent people who have lived in their homes for a long time and plan to stay in their homes. This is the task that I think Nancy Nix is doing a great job of representing Butler County under very turbulent times. But like the history of Hamilton itself and the Great Miami River that flows past her office, we are living history that will be remembered for a long time to come, and that history is made better by some of the great people who are tackling this problem aggressively in defense of the innocent who might otherwise be victims of bad government, such as we are seeing now with the Ohio Department of Taxation in its first few months of a new commissioner. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What President Trump’s Tax Returns Say About Him: He took millions and millions in losses to serve as President and to save America from looting liberals

For several years now, Democrats have promised to get a hold of President Trump’s tax returns and reveal them to the public, as if that would change how people feel about him. Well, on the last business day of 2022, they finally did, and it was like a firework dud that never went off. You know, you get one of those fancy fireworks for the Fourth of July and hype up as a great climax to a backyard firework display. Then once you light the fuse, it just never goes off. That is what happened with the tax return issue, with Democrats releasing them with great fanfare thinking that something would happen that never did. As it turned out, Trump paid the taxes he owed, and primarily through his political years, he lost many millions of dollars of losses, which allowed him to take deductions, which he deserved. With all the hype, there was no smoking gun, nothing that showed wrongdoing. The only thing that was revealed with the insanity of liberal views on tax policy, income, and the merit of wealth, was how bad the progressive policy is for American sentiment. The assumption is that everyone in society has a “fair share” that they owe to a government that is obviously out of touch and wastes too much money. Their assumption, reflected in all “progressive tax policy” since 1913, has been that the more you have, the more you owe as if the government made it so that you could have that money. That’s the attitude. They are like mobsters who want their cut for not destroying your life. 

The truth about the Trump taxes, which says a lot about him, is that he spent many years of his life building up a reasonable amount of wealth the traditional way. He’s not like these mindless tech billionaires who made a lot of money riding the wave of a new technology. Trump, the way he was in the 80s and 90s, would have had to make hundreds of billions of dollars to compete. But in those days, becoming a billionaire was a lot harder than today, so he was in unique territory. Trump was considered one of the wealthiest men in the world during those years when he had The Apprentice television show on NBC. I’ve said it for a long time when Trump met Melania, and it took a couple of things for him; he needed to get older and less interested in parading women around to show how powerful he was because that used to be a thing in the 90s. And Trump has changed while married to Melania, the supermodel wife who has obviously been very smart. I’ve met her, and I think a lot of her. She’s a sharp personality and clearly has the attention of Trump, who goes out of his way to ensure she’s happy. I don’t think Donald Trump would have ever run and won the presidency without Melania Trump. He might have talked about it as he did back in the Reform Party days, which I remember well. I was involved in the Reform Party during the Ross Perot days, so I remember precisely what was going on and why. The values for Trump changed; he was no longer concerned about making the most money in the world, but about using the money he had made to leave something behind that people would remember forever, something better than any building, any hot supermodel wife, or even a really great family. He wanted to save the country from the obvious intrusions against it that he became aware of. It looks like 9/11 was a big deal for him that changed him as a person, along with that television show, and slowly in the decade that followed, as his relationship with Melania grew, his focus changed a lot. 

That bit of backstory is significant because Trump became President without thinking of making money for the first time in his life. The combination of being married to Melania Trump, becoming the head of the Republican Party, and actually living in the White House for the first time made him a better person. I always liked Trump as a business guy, but I never liked his failed relationships with women. That was what kept me from supporting him during the Reform Party period. But like everything they do, liberals have been targeting wealthy people for years with their Karl Marx hatred of all management positions. By the time Trump ran for President, they had assumed among themselves that they had destroyed such notions among the wealthy that they had an obligation toward altruism and not the opulent showing off of that wealth. The value was in how much you could make, then give away to the needy. By the time this assumption had taken hold during the Bush administration and the first administration of Obama, the open socialist, the stage was set for Trump. Many of us from the Reform Party migrated into the Tea Party movement to protect America from the erosion of wealth that was obviously occurring as a perception of anti-America sentiment, which was always a full-scale assault on wealth creation and the nature of America in the first place. Then the Tea Party became the MAGA movement, led by Trump, bringing us to our current period.

By looking at Trump’s tax returns, it’s evident that the plan for his companies was to take a long view and to become President, give back his salary, take his losses and claim those losses in filing with the IRS to stop as much bleeding as possible. But to be in the hot seat as President with all the investigations and harassment that came with it, Trump was prepared to lose a lot of money. But it wasn’t the kind of loss that the political left had set the stage for. It was more of an Atlas Shrugged activity where Trump denied his wealthy input into the world of politics through donations and instead took up the job himself to show how easily it could all be done. Which considering the opposition, which was literally everyone in the establishment from the top down, Trump was enormously successful. His value was in actual production instead of some mindless commitment to a “fair share,” as defined by the same looting government that wanted to steal the money from all his hard work and then distribute it among themselves for the growth of more big government. I always thought it took a lot of guts for Trump to change his lifestyle, and it really took a lot for Melania to go through it with him. She could have chosen many things to do in her life as one of the most beautiful women in the world. But she has stuck with Trump, she has committed herself as a mom to her son, and she is deeply committed to the American experience, far more than many people realize. And she has Donald Trump’s heart enough to convince him to take these massive losses revealed in the tax returns to save his country from the terrors of liberalism. And that was a story that the political left didn’t want to see. But ultimately, that was shown to the world by revealing those returns, which is why nobody is discussing the story, because it didn’t do what Democrats want. Instead, it further validated Trump’s position and articulated quite well why he’s the perfect person for the job of President even more.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Public Toilet that Lakota Schools Is: We tried a conservative board, but they are just as bad, except for Darbi Boddy

Recently someone from Lakota schools attempting to defend the horrible behavior of the adult staff and administrators there sent me a list of Republicans and conservatives who have been caught in sex trafficking and the widespread abuse of children as if to justify the massive failures going on in the public school system. My thoughts on it are that it’s much easier to make a list of conservatives who commit such terrible acts against children because if liberals were included, we wouldn’t have enough time in the history of the world to complete such a list because there are so many. But regarding Republicans, I had just been thinking about how disappointed I have been in trying to play things right and what we ended up with on the Lakota school board. But there were good stories, too; one thing you can count on in life is that Darbi Boddy will never be accused of accepting evil and contributing to young people’s delinquency. But for all the work that was put into getting a new conservative school board in the Lakota school system, the board is just as bad as when the liberals ran it with the majority, back when Brad Lovell and Joan Powell were the ring leaders. Suppose a political body, such as the prosecutor’s office, the sheriff’s department, and all the other characters involved, cannot protect children as the most serious element needed in a public school. In that case, there is absolutely no hope for them. At least I can say that I tried to work it out with a social solution working within the rules, even if I doubted from the beginning that a conservative school board at Lakota schools would work at all. I wouldn’t say I will stop trying, but the results have been garbage. It didn’t matter if we had a conservative majority on the school board or a bunch of sex-crazed liberals; the results were the same. The system itself is broken and is left resolute to allow progressive politics to seep into all communities and work at destroying conservative values wherever they reside. There is no hope for public education to work. 

As that same person pointed out, the recent student teacher at Lakota who has found a lot of trouble for trying to have a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old kid in one of the junior schools had attended Liberty University, a traditionally Christian school. My reply was that she was picked as a target of investigation, likely because she attended that school, so the corrupt administrators could point to someone and say, “see, they want to have sex with kids too.” I’m against anybody who wants to do such a thing, and if conservatives turn their backs on children and fail to do the right thing for their well-being, then I hate them just as much as liberals who do it. It doesn’t change my anger toward them because they call themselves conservatives. What do I say all the time, “I love Republicans until they show me that they aren’t.” And it might be recalled that I recently pointed out that the Republican Party leadership of Butler County needs an oil change so that newcomers who want to do good can. Instead of letting some Boss Hogg characters run things with the level of corruption that was typical on the television show, The Dukes of Hazzard. If I don’t get invited to the Christmas Party this year because of it, I think I’ll live. It will just be one less thing for me to worry about. If people don’t have the guts to do the right, basic things in their life, I’m not impressed with them, and I generally won’t waste my time with them. If people turn bad, no matter what political party they are in, I scrap them, move on, and never look back. So with that said, Darbi Boddy and others who have risen to support her in the face of terrible radical teacher union protests and out-of-control superintendents who pick fights and then cry when people accept those challenges like a little baby have been worth knowing and supporting. But the efforts at the Lakota school board have been horrible; I’d say it’s much worse than when the liberals ran things in the past.

.So when I say that public education is no better than using a public toilet, there is some context to go by. I tried to be part of a solution to bring proper management to the Lakota school system. I prefer not to think about public education; I have a long history of showing all the problems with it. They are institutions of liberalism that seek to embed themselves into a community and to sell destructive progressive ideas to the residents who are forced to pay for the product with the value of their properties. It’s a horrible deal; I’d prefer not to deal with them at all. I only do because they are in my community and do not represent the conservative values of my community. Another person wrote me recently and stated they were considering moving because they only moved to Lakota because of the schools. I say to those people, leave. Move away and take all your stupid liberal ideas with you. If you want to live in a great community, then do so. But don’t move to a liberal school and bring a bunch of liberal east coast ideas with you and expect everything to work out well. I lived in the area when most of the neighborhoods that are built today contained cows and vast open fields. And the cows were much better neighbors. The pigs you could smell when you drove down the road smelled far better than the smell of today and what comes out of Lakota schools. If those losers who moved here to leech off the Lakota public school system for the free babysitting service want to move to a more liberal area, then I would be fine with that. It would not hurt my feelings at all to bulldoze all those homes back into dust and to put the cows back. They were much higher quality lifeforms than the supporters of Superintendent Matt Miller and his administrators of doom. The kids of the community would be a lot better off.

But it’s not just Lakota; it’s all public schools, government in all its various manifestations. The bigger government is, the more corrupt it presents itself. And if conservatives are fighting to preserve a big government approach, then they cease to be conservatives in my way of looking at things and are just as worthless. I remind people also, all the time, that we are not a democracy. We have a democratic way of establishing who manages our government, but we are not a flee bitten democracy where popular sentiment rules the day. As is the case in Lakota, if most people think that child abuse is OK or open sexual lifestyles are permissible because the sheriff, the prosecutors, the media, and a bunch of crybaby residents believe it’s OK, that doesn’t make it OK. Leadership is where one person stands up against a tide of bad decisions alone and under great ridicule and does the right thing anyway. That is what we expect in our republic form of government. That’s what Darbi Boddy has been doing. But as to the rest of the characters have been typical, and what is typical leads to the conclusion that all government schools are no better than public toilets and the content that gets flushed down them. I wouldn’t send a kid to a public school if the school paid me to do it instead of the other way around. It’s a worthless product run by terrible, horrible people who are dumb as rocks. And it’s irresponsible to consider them teaching anybody, anything. Ever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rinos for Lakota: Time to call the public education scam for what it is

For the record, given the level of taxation we have now, locally, statewide, and nationally, you can’t be a conservative and be for higher taxes. Yet, at Lakota schools, behind all the reckless gossip of the superintendent’s life that has spilled over into his professional capacity, the real story under the surface of the debate is that Lakota has wasted all its money that has been generously given by the community and that levy whores are already pushing for tax increases to be placed on a ballot, because they know it will take several attempts to pass, to wear down the voters, and the big government spenders behind the Lakota school system want their money. And they are remarkably willing to overlook any problem so they can get it, which is grossly apparent not just by the labor union elements but the disguised face of the Democrat party, a Facebook group called Rinos For Lakota (Conservatives). They are obviously not conservative, they are pro-big government schools, and they want the hired superintendent, no matter his personal flaws, to sell a levy to the public and push up the income extorted from the community even higher than it is now. The school board recklessly gave out raises to the teacher’s union recently, and now they have to pay for it and are running out of money. So essentially, the next levy fight has already started, even if it’s not formally on the ballot, and Lakota has been keeping Matt Miller around, hoping that he has some miracle rabbit tucked away to pull out so that the public would vote for it. The anger toward whistleblowers reporting real news on Matt Miller is the giveaway to the real motivations and the example of why vast evil is permitted in public schools. Because groups like the Rino’s For Lakota Schools want the free babysitting, the hope that the school will be better parents for their kids than they are and that the school’s reputation will keep pushing up their real estate values artificially, perpetually, they don’t really care about the kids of the school, or what happens to them. They are like all liberals, they want what they want, and they’ll run over anybody to get it. 

There are plenty of lawyers involved. They’d all like some easy money out of a school that allows administrators to create unsafe environments for children. Be careful what you wish for.

Most of the assumptions that government school advocates utter, like the Rino’s for Lakota, are essentially old union talking points, like all public schools are the centerpiece of a community. If they go down, so will the community. Well, that’s false, and it’s time to call their bluff on that assumption. People move to a community for lots of reasons.   Schools might be one of them, but those tend to be low information, young neurotic parent types who eventually grow up anyway, often during election cycles. The unions have seized on this ignorance to exploit it for their own use, which is why we have our beliefs about public schools. But in truth, a good community full of good people is why a school district is successful. It’s not because of what a school does that makes a community good. The school system is simply riding on the backs of success that comes with the parents. Parents who move to a district because of the perception of a good school are already putting the extra effort into their children that is conducive to good behavior, so naturally, one thing causes the effects of the next thing. But it’s never the schools themselves that make something good. The belief that a school superintendent can make a good school is simply ridiculous. So is the notion that the teachers of Lakota are better than the teachers of Mason, or Monroe, or anyplace else. Lakota might be able to recruit good teachers for their first decade of service that might be better than other districts because of the nice roads, the great shopping, the wonderful restaurants, and other great things. But they are all unionized employees, and by the time they reach their shelf life after a decade or so of service, they start to become complicit slugs that aren’t worth the money we spend on them. 

But when that belief system is jeopardized, you can see by some of these Facebook musings from the Rino’s of Lakota that they have bought the ruse hook, line, and sinker. They swallowed the union bait and have built their lives around the scam. And they hope for the protection of legalizations to maintain their vast illusion. When people come along who challenge their premise, they get angry because they fear that everything they have built their lives around is false. And they want to attack anybody who shakes their confidence in that system they want to believe so intensely because they are too lazy to let the facts guide their decisions. It’s interesting to consider that just in April of 2022, the school board, led by many of these Rinos for Lakota, wanted to get rid of Darbi Boddy because if she stayed on the board, Matt Miller might leave for another district. Now, because they have seen Matt Miller’s police report, most everyone would gladly keep Darbi and say bye-bye to Matt.   Yet, the Rinos for Lakota aren’t mad at Matt; they are upset that anybody exposed Matt for who he really was. We went from complete illusion in April to an overdose of reality by September. And if the world were run by people like the Kool-Aid drinkers of Rino’s for Lakota, we would never know what kind of activity these public-school administrators were up to because the school itself, with the help of the board, would simply cover it up. 

My suggestion would be to call the public education bluff and terminate the superintendent on grounds based on his behavior. There are plenty of opportunities in his contract to release him based on his personal behavior that has impacted his public role as a hired administrator. But the main concern for Lakota, the teacher’s union, and groups like these Rino’s for Lakota is for the passage of another levy. They know they need the money, and they are hoping they can sit on this story and push it under the rug, then parade Matt around to high school football games like he’s Elvis and appeal to the young moms who are voters and might vote for a tax increase because they find him appealing. They aren’t selling facts but purely imaginary hopes and dreams with no bases in reality. They hope to control the narrative with rules and procedures that protect them from whistleblower judgment, and when that fails to protect their intentions, they get upset and scream to the gods of legalism for more power to shut down the voices that would tell them the truth. Because they don’t want to hear it. But regardless of their wishes, many people spend money on Lakota schools, and they are in the vast minority. Vanessa Wells only lost in her election because she made an ethical decision not to carry the Republican nomination. If she had kept it, she would have easily beaten anybody on the current school board. And that is a lesson for the next time around. But, if she had been elected to the board, she would not have had the freedom to act as a conduit of valuable information as she is now. And we likely wouldn’t know what we do. And Lakota is far better off knowing the condition of its employees than in not. Because if it really wants to get better, as a district, it will correct the bad things so people can believe in it beyond just mindless lip service from people too lazy to consider the truth.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ricky Shiffer Attacked the FBI: Don’t get caught playing their game, the way to beat them is to take away their money

The frustration that Ricky Shiffer experienced when he attacked the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati is understandable, just as the January 6th rioters were understandable in their anger over election fraud. But I say to them and anybody else thinking about the injustice they see coming out of the FBI and law enforcement in general, the law is against them. Don’t let them bait you into making a bad move because all they have on their side is the attempt to victimize themselves and gain public sentiment by victimizing their position. Even though he was upset about the FBI raid of Trump’s home, Ricky Shiffer should have been cool and allowed the process to play out, even though the great fear is that these law enforcement types are manipulating the law to cover their own crimes, just remember that they do not have the legal position of merit at their backs. They have no other option but to try to win public sentiment through the traditional “sacrifice of public service” display. But people see what is going on, and the way to deal with these things at this point is through the election process. Fight to ensure we have free and fair elections, then use elections to remove these corrupt people from their positions. That is the case whether we are talking about local issues like public schools where obvious crime and misconduct have occurred. Yet, the authorities in charge are grossly abusing their power, or it’s the FBI office in your community. For me, the Ricky Shiffer story is a local one, it happened in my neck of the woods, and I understand there are lots of people out there like him. They are angry, and they want justice. But, the bad guys know how to twist things to their advantage, and Ricky should have never let himself be drawn into their trap. Because once he was, they could then control the narrative, which is all they really care about anyway, controlling public perception and using their manipulation over the media to continue their abuse of power fueled by taxpayer dollars.

I see all these bad things that the FBI has been caught doing as advantages. I would say the same to the local school board problems or the corruption of a local sheriff, where the law is certainly one way for political enemies but quite another for their friends and associates. Without the measure of a law and order society to compare to, there wouldn’t be any way to really say that things are out of control. And that’s when people like Ricky spring into action when they think there is no hope for justice and that they must take it upon themselves to defeat bad guys and restore order to the world. Part of the plan of how evil works in the world is to drive people toward the sense of desperation that causes them to remove themselves from the best strategic decision and then present themselves in a vulnerable way. From there, then they are playing the FBI game and falling right into their hands. When Ricky Shiffer attacked the Cincinnati field office, he might have made a few people think he was doing a good thing on Truth Social, Trump’s very good social media site. Still, he weakened his argument by allowing the pressure they created to inspire him to move off his already good position and go to them instead of making the FBI accountable at the ballot box with new management. Part of their goal in supporting a Democrat political party in America is to push people into a sense of desperation so that they act against the law because they have been led to believe that it is no longer respected. That is part of the strategy, and during the years of Trump in politics, this impression has only gained more bold action. But that says more about them than it does their opposition, the Constitutional conservatives who have gravitated toward the MAGA movement of populism.   The administrative state, which the FBI is struggling to protect with its bloated bureaucracy and big government ideas, is showing all its cards and building a case for their elimination in the future day by day. Let them make it because they are their own worst enemy.

Ultimately, Ricky Shiffer’s greatest power wasn’t a gun or threat of violence against the FBI. The January 6th protestors didn’t need to raid the Capitol building to prove their point. They were made to feel desperate by the regime in control. We’ve watched the Swamp in Washington attempt to use public sentiment against the protestors, even though the world had watched all through 2020 that liberal rioters were unleashed in all our cities and did far worse. Things go wrong when you get caught playing the game that the bad guys want you to play. The greatest weapon Ricky had, and we all have, is the power of the purse, the funding mechanism to feed the beast. That is where the administrative state is weakest, whether it’s the local school system or the corrupt national FBI. Don’t charge them with your guns and aggression, hoping to bring things to a conclusive resolution with a show of force. The FBI presents themselves with a show of force because it’s the only thing they can do. They do not have the law to their back, and much of what they did to Trump has put them in a bad public relations position. It has cost them far more harm than the fear of the public turning against them and attacking them where they work, like the Cincinnati field office. 

The way to attack is to reduce the size of government, vote for the kind of people who understand that smaller government is the way to go and choke them out of their funding. I know it doesn’t come out very sexy; it’s not like the movies we’ve seen where it’s a three-act play, the presentation of the situation, then the trouble is shown, then there is the climax at the end of the movie where everything is resolved. These legal problems are a running gig day by day and year by year. And if you look at things in the long run, we have learned a lot more about our FBI and their true nature based on how they have acted toward Trump, which has been very valuable. Before Trump, only conspiracy theories were talked about on talk radio at 2 AM in the morning. Now there are thousands of podcasters talking about these crimes from the FBI in the middle of the day all across the country. So, things are getting better the worse they look because now we can see what the FBI and law enforcement is really about. And that information can then help us know why we must defund them and replace them with something much more manageable and better for our society than the thugs of lawless bureaucrats they have become. It’s not a cliché to say that knowledge is a more powerful weapon than anything else, but it’s true.

Knowing what we are dealing with is far more important than whether they followed the law or not because we can then establish intent. And once you’ve done that, you can see the situation for what it really is, not how they want you to see it. And from there, you can decide what to do about it. But when you discover that these are bad people who have been up to no good, don’t let that knowledge rot you to your core with audacious revelation. Be cool, use the law to your advantage and manage them through the power of the purse. Taking away their money is the best way to harm them. That is a weapon that all the guns in the world couldn’t do better. And it’s time we use it for the purpose of good in the world.   It takes money to run all this evil. Take it away from them; then they will have nothing to fuel their activity.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Self Government Starts by Being a Good Person: Politicians are not leaders as Tucker Carlson says, they are representatives

You Need to Be a Good Person to Have a Good Government

It’s not enough to just talk about it or make names for it.  The real problem is a fundamental one of philosophy and not recognizing the basics of human nature.  What is self-government?  Then, how do you fund it, this something that nobody really understands?  For me, it’s about the difference between a republic and a democracy.  It’s about breaking the Vico Cycle.  In a republic, our politicians are our representatives, extensions of ourselves that buy us time to do other productive things in the world. At the same time, they manage the affairs of our country, states, and counties.  We do need government, but what does that mean for people.  Some, especially those who aren’t so bright and are timid about spiders and other bugs, don’t want the responsibility of self-government. They’d rather have a “leader” running things so they can complain about the results, one way or another.  For self-government to work, all individuals must be empowered to understand how to maintain a republic as opposed to democracy and to spend their lives productively, not worshipping others in the process because they fear personal responsibility.  So the key to everything past and future, including the present, is to define responsible living and how that translates into responsible government.  You can’t expect politicians to behave if the people who put them in decision-making positions truly represent the people who voted for them.  If you want a good government, you first need to be a good person. 

These are the thoughts I had while watching a local school board meeting.  I don’t mean to pick on Brad Lovell, whom I have covered in other articles about the politics of changing our school board from a liberal body of government to a more conservative one. He’s a local guy; every school district has its own version of him.  There are many people like Brad Lovell in government at all levels most of the time.  They are little power-hungry attention seekers and are easily corruptible.  Electing people like that and turning them loose, thinking they are leaders, is one of the most dangerous things society could do to itself.  To be mad at Brad for being what he is isn’t really fair.  We elected him at some point in time because we were suckered as a society into what he said he would do, which was bring big government to our community by wasting endless amounts of money in the process.  When I heard Brad talk this past week, it was just as dumb as what we hear from our own congress over budget considerations revolving around Build Back Better.  This article is not the one to talk about the communist intentions of Build Back Better.  It’s about how weak people spend money and are lazy and too unmotivated to manage money given to them as taxpayers properly. They essentially don’t understand their roles as politicians, and the people who voted for them don’t either.  Even Tucker Carlson gets it wrong all the time.   We do not elect our “leaders,” we elect our “representatives.” No politician is a god to be worshipped.  None of them can be elected and turned loose to do all the hard work while we sit around watching reality television. 

Based on my experience in life, especially in a corporate setting, I would say that half the money we spend on taxes at the federal, state, and local level could be cut in half right now.   If we use the same methods used to approve basic overtime in a corporation, we could reduce the tax burden by at least half by asking our political class basic questions.  Now, where I live, and this is not by accident.  People call me the Tax Killer for a reason.  I would say that I’m a pretty nice guy.   My family loves me.  I think people respect me tremendously.  But when I walk into a room, I would not say that people like it.  Everywhere I go, I am called the “tax killer,” which is a nickname that people who don’t like what I do have persisted to call me because I do question our taxes, especially at the local level.  I think everyone should do what I do; it is the primary responsibility of self-government to elect representatives and ask those reps to be responsible in the same way I would.   When I get mad at Brad Lovell, the local school board tax and spend liberal, it’s not that I don’t like the guy as a person. I’m sure his wife loves him and his kids, and that’s fine.  People care about him out in the world, but we are talking about management here, and being liked is not a value; it’s a lazy retreat and a shift of responsibility for those afraid of it.  I would say that I am known as the tax killer locally because I ask questions the same way I would in a business.  I don’t get invited to many Christmas parties because the goal is to get drunk and act like idiots, and I am also known as a buzz kill.  Sometimes you have to pick being liked to being right, and to my mind, being right is all that matters.  If many managers brought me the overtime needs for over 100 employees who needed to work 10 hour days and 8 hours on a Saturday, I would challenge them.  I would ask them why they weren’t getting the production they needed in an 8-hour day.  Are you short headcount?  I would then ask why Saturday was necessary because it’s a lot more expensive to operate on a weekend than during the week.  Now everyone who knows me understands that productivity always trumps comfort.  I expect people to do whatever they must do in life to be productive, even crawling through broken glass naked.  I ask people to do what I would do in life, and it’s my job to set the parameters to define success.  Most of the time, those managers retreat from their overtime requests and figure out how to get the work done without overtime.  Why? Because the overtime requests were lazy and driven by chaos, not logic. 

I could write books and books and books on this topic of self-management and the values of a republic, and over time, I just may do that.  But for now, understand that the areas I live in, the school district, the townships, and my county all are operating at a surplus, meaning they take in more money than they spend because the money they spend is challenged.  Just think of what a nice world it would be if people everywhere challenged their politicians in such a similar way.  The goal is not to elect a leader then go to sleep playing video games.  It’s also not to be liked. “Oh, here comes that person who will ask us all kinds of uncomfortable questions.” But once we manage to understand our role in a republic and not a democracy, we can begin to improve lots of things for the better.  I don’t think it’s difficult at all, but people go wrong in the world when they’d rather be liked than to be respected.  And in that basic function, so many evils in the world are conducted.  What needs to happen often doesn’t because people, including voters, would rather be loved than to be right.  It doesn’t matter if we have term limits or an R next to a name or a D.  If we elected idiots to office, then stop asking them to represent us, allowing them just to lead us, no wonder costs run out of control, and a government develops a bottomless pit attitude about taxation and its worth to society.  The way to fix it isn’t to complain; it’s to demand answers for the spending, then to watch them flail when they can’t explain it, and in that way, the conditions of our republic improve dramatically, and for a fraction of the cost. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Biden’s Theft of a Trump Issue: Removing troops from Afghanistan is all about cover-up

As I have been pointing out, Democrats are simply looters who steal other people’s ideas to cover for their massive corruption.  They certainly have done this with the racism issue, which is exclusively their problem.  They created it.  And they are and have been for decades involved in the cover-up.  Now that they have a disastrous first quarter of a Biden first term, they are looking to steal another Trump idea, the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Of course, for Trump’s original targets of getting America out of Afghanistan, he knew that the support for the long 20-year war chasing after a fake Taliban threat was to support a military-industrial complex and economy of defense spending. Suggesting that the moment US Troops would leave, that Afghanistan would fall into chaos is just another lie.  It was a lie created on behalf of perpetually keeping wars going so that investors could know where to spend their money to make millions then donate that money to the politicians who made it all happen to begin with.  There was never a goal of the Afghanistan War.  It was simply to send troops somewhere to do something while the drug trade flourishes around the world from the inhospitable country intent to poison the world with its narcotics products. It was never about terrorism.  The terrorism created the urgency to do something in that region that could justify spending massive amounts of money on feeling good about something. 

Yet, it’s a great example that the government cannot be trusted by the voters who put them in office.  All you need to do is compare how politicians reacted to Trump wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan and then their very passive and even supportive reaction to Joe Biden wishing to do the same.  Of course, Republicans are against the idea.  They were when Trump wanted to do it, and they don’t like it that Biden wants to, although they are much less vocal about it ironically.  But it’s Democrats who have been most notably schizophrenic about it.  That shouldn’t be a surprise.  However, it does provide a noticeable difference.  In 2020, as Trump was speaking about withdrawing from Afghanistan, the world was coming to an end.  Now fast forward into the first quarter of 2021, suddenly America has been there for over 20 years, and now its time to bring them home.  Democrats like the idea, and so does the media.  Strange how that happens. 

It would be nice if Democrats were sincere about their cares for the troops, but as we all know, that isn’t the reason.  Instead, Democrats under the Biden administration have put themselves in a lot of trouble.  The Hunter Biden story didn’t have long legs, and Democrats need a diversion from their intentions of court-packing.  High taxes on infrastructure, their full embrace of the communist Green New Deal.  The war that is brewing with Ukraine and Russia, think about that one. The Biden’s have business payoffs from Ukraine, and Democrats have used Russia as the excuse for how Trump managed to break through the political firewall of global cabals who try to run all politics through financial support.  And now Russia knows the Biden administration is compromised and weak.  They dance from the fingers of China, whom Russia has now aligned themselves with, so no matter how much money from Ukraine the Bidens have received, the new administration can’t afford to put its foot down.  Russia knows it.  Yet Democrats continue to talk about how Russia compromised Trump for help in getting elected in 2016.  What they don’t tell you is that it was the Democrats who owe Russia for allowing themselves to be a punching bag of their incompetency while all this has been brewing.  And now for Russia, it’s payday.  They want Ukraine back. 

There is more corruption, too; people are not buying Covid anymore, so the Democrats lose that mask of panic which has allowed them to gain so much power.  Few people trust the CDC anymore, which carried the Biden administration back to a mock election.  And the corporate commanders at Twitter and Facebook are losing their grip on information flow.  Conservative outlets are coming on now; we are not all one country.  Liberals have their entertainment.  Conservatives have their own.  We all don’t share movies, sports, and television shows anymore.  Liberals have successfully, unintentionally, of course, driven a wedge in our entertainment culture, and people are on their separate sides now.  And those conservative sides aren’t buying the election fraud that took away their President in Trump.  People are very resentful of the role media played in stealing the election through many methods.  The Biden people know they are falsely elected and that there is tremendous pressure that much of the American population knows it.  So why not steal a Trump action with Afghanistan in hopes to heal the ill-will?  That is undoubtedly a factor in this withdrawal.

The Biden people are suffering through what it feels like to build a lie on top of a lie on top of a lie until the whole cake starts sliding off itself into collapse.  The Biden administration is a corporate concoction that thought it could rule by consensus and finance.  But what is now missing from the world is authentic leadership, the kind of leadership Trump brought to the presidency.  The world had been waiting for an opportunity toward corruption once again.  So, of course, they hated Trump and his voters.  They lied, cheated, and manipulated themselves back into power, and now they have it.  But, they have to live up to the promises, and they are collapsing under the pressure of needed performance, and they can’t do it.  All they can do is copy off what was working and hope people stop looking at them. 

That’s what everyone needs to know about the Afghanistan withdrawal plans.  It’s as phony as the Biden administration is.  If anybody cared to withdraw from Afghanistan, they would have done it during the eight years that Obama was in office.  But of course, Republicans got their industrial complex concerns addressed with the continued war, and Democrats were able to protect the drug trade in that country from poisoning the world under the protection of the US military.  Everyone was happy until that mean old Trump came along and wanted to take the troops out of the politics, and the world threatened to meltdown in reaction.  However, now that the shoe is on the other foot, Democrats need a diversion.  They hope that it will last longer than the pornography of the President’s son plastered all over the internet with his weiner hanging out and displaying his decaying teeth destroyed by drug abuse.   That is, after all, what kind of product comes out of President Biden.  His son is a perfect caricature of his corrupt life, and now we are supposed not to see those things as all their plans came apart so soon in the new administration.  These are, after all, not the days of old where empty promises would be enough.  These days, especially after Trump, people expect results.  Instead, all they have so far is a disaster of an administration, and pulling the troops out of Afghanistan won’t cover that up. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


Share, subscribe, and see you later,https://rumble.com/embed/vciikp/?pub=3rih5#?secret=FUwbbCpIjT


Sign up for Second Call Defense at the link below. Use my name to get added benefits.
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

If Trump Paid Zero in Taxes I would Respect him Even More

It’s interesting how new people come in and out of your life over the years and what they think of you as. A few decades ago if someone said bullwhips, my name was synonymous. Then it was my nickname of “Taxkiller” that carried with it a celebrity status that was inescapable, because of my work in reducing taxes in Ohio in the pre-Trump days of the presidency. And these days its more of a suit and tie relationship that I have that is a strange combination of guns, golf, and grandpaisms. Each decade had its own priorities and people come and go from your life, yet I have always been essentially the same person. But the world and the priorities of living in it do change and people do tend to define their memory of you based on some limiting definitions. In my “Taxkiller” days it was considered taboo to even talk about tax cuts, or in not paying them and I certainly did my part to change that culture for the better. Yet in all honesty, the moral conditions of taxation have always remained the same and the issue has returned to the surface now that congress has no other means of getting at President Trump but through the billionaire’s tax returns.

Paying taxes is like playing golf, which is why that game has sort of evolved into the game of the business person, the goal is to get the lowest score possible. Not the highest. To win at business and in life, you don’t want to over pay for things because to do so you are endorsing the value of it. Paying taxes means essentially that you are endorsing the way government spends money since they are the managing parties involved in the exchange. But we all know that’s not how it is, politicians are not good stewards of money and the only thing they really know to do is to ask for money like some chocolate bar obsessed child in a candy store always asking for more because they spend it like its going out of style. This is a well-known attribute in politics, that politicians do not spend money well, so it is inconceivable for a smart businessperson to throw money at those types of people knowing that the money will just be flushed down the toilet anyway.

What congress is trying to do to President Trump is hold the ridiculous position that there is some kind of moral rule that paying taxes is a duty to country and our system of government. So whatever is in Trump’s tax returns as a billionaire, which probably reflects the way the game is played in business, is to pay as little as possible, just like the game of golf requires the lowest score, the assumption of congress is that because Trump is rich, and because he sits in the executive branch that he is tied to some notion that government be fed tax money in measures of whatever they demand. And especially if you are rich, that a high percentage of that income be tossed to altruistic purposes that are managed by exactly the same kind of stupid people. Either way, the government view on taxes is to feed the machine infinitely and to like it.

My view on these things is that when you pay taxes you are endorsing the behavior of the management handling the money. If you continue giving government money they will grow proportionally. So if you are a small government guy, like I have always been—even from the time that I was a fetus—then paying more in taxes is an abomination. You should always seek to pay as little as possible, no matter how much money you make. I have been very active in the business world for all those decades mentioned above. Before the decade of my bullwhips I was known as something of a very reckless entrepreneur and I had a reputation for doing things that nobody else would even try. I was very young, something like 25 years old at the time—when I was in the Mayor’s office in Cincinnati working out solutions to complicated problems and I learned that the majesty of politics was simply left over garbage from our cultural inheritance from Europe, that it was too expensive and rather useless. The mayor at that time was the very liberal Roxanne Qualls so it didn’t take long for me to realize that all the tax money we would spend on people like her was just wasted anyway, so why should we work so hard only to throw it away on their governments. Not smart, so I learned very early to look at taxes as a waste of money and any intelligent person would always seek to pay as little to that vile system of government as possible.

I would be disappointed if Donald Trump paid too much on his taxes. It doesn’t matter to me that other presidents were elected but first submitted their tax returns. The only standard that measures is to what degree people blindly throw money to government, and very few prior presidents were like Trump, who came straight out of the business world. Measuring the value of a president based on his tax returns is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. But in the case of congress it’s the only thing they have left to shoot after all their past efforts have failed against the President. However, and this is how it should be in all aspects of government, more businesspeople should be managing the money sent with taxes because the old system has failed. I didn’t just wake up one day and was known as the “Taxkiller.” My opinions about taxes formed over a very long period of time with great experience on the matter. And my books and other work that have taken me through other reputations were about themes formed while learning about how much waste government actually produces with our hard-earned money. I mean I like roads; I like the idea of an education—certainly not the way it’s done now—and I like police, military and even NASA. But not much else. Government wastes a lot of money and the more you know about the process the sicker you become about it. Any reasonable businessperson would find it reprehensible to consider how the IRS works as a strong arm of government to confiscate private property just to fulfil the spending zeal of the government. It’s a reprehensible process. So in business it is considered smart to pay as little as possible, because in over paying, you are essentially announcing to the world that you don’t know how to manage money. And in business management, that is the name of the game, not to overpay, but to keep costs down.

Who knows what other names I’ll be remembered for in the decades to come, but one thing will always be consistent for me, taxes are bad and inflate a government that I consider to be dangerous due to its size. I am proud to have a president who doesn’t think we should all pay the maximum amount of taxes as possible and that his means of generating revenue is in production. The world is a lot better with Trump in the White House. I don’t care if he paid zero in taxes over his past decades. It would tell me that he is as smart as I think he is. Only an idiot would think otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The River Link Scam: Louisville’s theft of the innocent through a toll bridge to depraved economic activity in Clarksville

What a scam I ran into in Louisville Kentucky! It was a few weeks before Christmas and my family was going south to celebrate early. This year my kids were going with their grandparents and cousins to a dinner theater over in Clarksville which was across the river from Louisville and just upstream from the Falls of the Ohio. My wife and I were going to watch their kids while my kids went to the show. So we dropped off everyone, kept the kids, then went back across the river to keep the little ones busy so their parents could enjoy the show. As we approached the 1-65 bridge over into Clarksville we saw signs indicating that it was a toll bridge, but I never saw a booth for collection, so we figured being out-of-town that the toll had expired some time in the past and that the local government hadn’t taken down the signs. That’s the way it’s worked in other places in the country, so we just went about our way doing our business and figured the issue was over. 6 weeks later, on the night of the government shut-down ironically, we received this letter in the mail from some loser outfit called River Link saying that we owed $16 for our use of that bridge that day which I thought was astounding. They sent an invoice with a picture of our car on it and our license plate demanding payment and my first thought was—where were the pricing indications so I could have made a decision? If I had known the price, I would have found another way across the river. But it was clear that this River Link organization with the politicians behind them meant to use that bridge as a revenue trap—and that their information postings were deliberately vague, because they wanted nice families like mine to do just as we did—and pay for the mismanagement of Louisville’s resources with a bunch of lazy losers who let intrusive street cameras do the work of toll collecting to satisfy their inflated budgets and scandalous activity politically over the years.

http://www.wdrb.com/story/30483478/louisville-area-toll-bridge-system-to-be-called-riverlink

My wife wanted to just pay the fee, and I imagine that there are many thousands, if not millions of people just like her who are willing to say “it’s only $16 dollars, let’s just pay it.” But I told her that we should shit in the envelope and send that to those bastards because what they did was deliberately deceitful and a practice which tells a story about our greater needs as a nation as we debate how to fund all our infrastructure projects. This River Link organization and the toll on that bridge is only a few years old as of this year of 2018—so it’s a very new thing this idea of a toll booth free collection racket. I suppose from their point of view its better than backing up traffic on a bridge, so the local government can pay for it. Such contemplations have been going on in Cincinnati where there is a tremendous need for a new bridge serving I-75 going from Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky—and a toll has been one proposal for funding it. But the problem of stopping traffic to collect the toll is not attractive because of the volume of traffic that goes through that region. It was essentially the same situation in Louisville, the main artery north out of the city is the I-64/I-65 bridge. The bridge looked nice, but I was surprised how few people were using it—now I understand why.

While we were waiting for our kids to finish their show we had a lot of time to kill. We were getting hungry but didn’t want to miss the pick-up time so my wife and I drove around Clarksville to grab a bite to eat, and I was pretty shocked at how run down and swanky everything was. I could see downtown Louisville literally just a mile or so away yet there was nothing in Clarksville worth doing. We found a Hardees restaurant—which was the only place off the highway to eat for several miles and it was in such bad shape that we passed. For me that’s a big deal because I never remember passing on a good hamburger. The condition of the building and the look of the people inside sent enough alarm bells that we drove away hungry and happy to avoid the experience—and no the workers were not black. They looked like toothless Appalachians that had the sanitation of a dirty diaper. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why several exits of a nice highway that is the main artery out of the city of Louisville didn’t have more to offer consumers. I mean wasn’t there a lunch crowd and dinner rush that would leave the city for a break? After I received the invoice from River Link I understood what the locals already knew. The toll to go across the bridge and come back into the city was too great—it would exceed the cost of lunch—so nobody was using the bridge or buying food in Clarksville—which is why there were so many undeveloped storefronts everywhere we drove.

When I picked up my kids we all had a laugh at what a dump the dinner theater was. It was pretty nice inside but on the outside, it looked like the whole building was about to fall over. Across the street was a campground that had a bunch of hippie losers sitting around a fire in the dead of winter so I had to ask if this was Louisville’s idea of “social life.” My wife’s parents live in a million-dollar home on the east side in Oldham County where a lot of horse breeders live. My past impression of Louisville was cast by that part of town, I don’t typically get to see the results of all the liberalism that has destroyed the inner loop of the I-264 band around the downtown area. But it was obvious going across the river and looking south back into the city and the results of the surrounding communities like Clarksville what had happened to them—liberalism had destroyed their opportunities and robbed them of a future. The hippies outside of the dinner theater where just one result—those people were reserved to give up on life and sit by the fire making smores on a Saturday afternoon ahead of Christmas—and that was all that was going on in Clarksville. My wife and I drove down to the river and along it and noticed several developments that had been attempted, but were left unfinished, likely because the toll bridge had destroyed their opportunities for profit. We drove down to the Falls, and there was still nothing, just a bunch of empty opportunities—an economy in decline.

To us, my wife and I, $16 is a typical tip for a dinner—but I remember very well when it was like a million dollars to us. On principle, I consider that toll to be a major rip off in Louisville. As I told my wife not to pay the fee I was certain that the issue could be fought in court and that my state did not have an agreement with Kentucky to collect such horrendous abuses of authority. Indiana and Kentucky have such agreements with each other, but Ohio does not as of yet. Fighting that in court however would cost more money than the stupid fee and that’s what these liberal toll collectors are counting on, nice people like us to just pay the fine and go about our business while they mismanage the undisclosed tax under the guise of “paying for a bridge.” What did they do with all their federal and state dollars which should have built that bridge without a toll? They wasted it is what they did. Louisville is a liberal city ran by liberal losers and those types of people are always starving for money—because they lack discipline and a basic understanding of value. To a liberal empathy is a value. To a conservative—its an emotion. Emotions don’t pay bills, value does. This toll across Louisville’s main bridge over into Indiana is a theft of value to fund those who don’t have it. It’s that simple. Clarksville is the proof and as long that toll bridge is in place—they’ll get more and more of the depraved conditions for which I have described.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.