Filed under: Election 2020, Politics | Tags: Cato, Governor Rankings, Jay Inslee
“The Cato Institute has published their annual report on the nation’s governors. They say “Governors play a key role in state fiscal policy. They propose budgets, recommend tax changes, and sign or veto tax and spending bills. When the economy is growing, governors can use rising revenues to expand programs or they can return extra revenues to the public through tax cuts. When the economy is stagnant and budget deficits appear, governors can respond by raising taxes or trimming spending. “
“The report rates governors on their fiscal policies from a limited government perspective. Governors receiving an A are those who have cut taxes and spending the most, whereas governors receiving an F have raised taxes and spending the most. “
There were only four governors who received an A. New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu (R) received the highest score at 75. He Was followed by Iowa’s Kim Reynolds (R) with a score of 71, then Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts (R) 70. then Wyoming’s Mark Gordon (R) 66, followed by Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson (R) with a score of 64.
If you don’t find your governor on this list, you may like to see the whole list from Cato, and find the score for your own state. You probably have a good idea about how your own governor will rate, or you just may want to confirm your own opinion.
There are only 4 A’s, 9 B’s, 13 C’s, 14 D’s, and 7 F’s. Our own Washington State Governor Jay Inslee (D) ranked dead last with a score of 18, and a resounding F. All the governors who received A’s were Republicans, all the governors who received F’s were Democrats. The Cato Institute is firmly Libertarian.
You can find the whole article here, and it’s really quite interesting and possibly useful, if you are getting sick of your state. There have been numerous articles on people leaving their state for a new and different one, and a little search should turn one up. Cato has used the same grading method since 2008. Republican and Democrat governors have had average scores around the middle of the range. When the economy is rowing and state coffers filling up, Democrats tend to increase spending, while Republicans tend to increase spending and cut taxes. Democrat governors often pursue tax increases to balance their budgets., while Republicans put more focus on spending restraint. There are some big budget gaps out there and we’ll see what happens.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Politics, Progressivism, Regulation, Science/Technology, The United States | Tags: Gavin Newsom, Global Warming, Jay Inslee
Washington State is still smoky, some local fires, mostly I believe, smoke drifted north from California. Visibility is not normal, ( Rain forecast for Friday) but we’re told in Eastern Washington, across the mountains, visibility is about the length of a football field, at least considerably worse than here.
Our incompetent Democrat governor, Jay Inslee, follows in the steps of California’s incompetent governor Gavin Newsom, to proclaim the wildfires are because of global warming, and we just have to give up our cars, or at least switch to electric cars, and be kinder to Mother Earth so she doesn’t punish us for our fossil fuels. Which is all nonsense.
Sorry. Carbon Dioxide is not the control switch for the climate of the earth. The Sun is.
We had Ice Ages and Heat Waves long before we had gasoline powered cars, or even discovered fossil fuels. Native Americans did controlled burning, thinned out brush, and even cut down trees to keep their lands safe from fire. California is on fire because the governor has not funded the necessary cleanup, as is Washington State.
Lots more expensive when you have to pay lots of firefighters coming for high pay to fight the fires in our forests in our forests, but you can’t be blamed if it is the result of a global pandemic. Our respective governors, having never bothered to study up even slightly, accept as gospel the party line. Trump bad, Paris Climate Accord essential to save the Earth. Trouble is the scientists started making “models”to help them decide what to do, but they were too arrogant to grasp that they didn’t know enough to make viable models, because there is so much we don’t yet understand about the Sun and the Earth and the galaxy and the interactions between them.
The debate is over around climate change. Just come to the state of California, observe it with your own eyes a grinning Newsom told reporters while touring the fire-ravaged North Complex near Oroville. It’s not an intellectual debate, it’s not even debatable. The debate is over around climate change. Just come to the state of California, observe it with your own eyes,a grinning Newsom told reporters while touring the fire-ravaged North Complex near Oroville. It’s not an intellectual debate, it’s not even debatable.
Breitbart reported this morning:
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said Thursday that the August Complex Fire has burned 471,185 acres in the Elk Creek and Stonyford area, surpassing the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire, which burned 459,123 acres.
Six of the largest fires in California’s history have taken place in 2020. Cal Fire said 29 major wildfires are active and more than 3.1 million acres have burned in the state since the beginning of the season.
The National Interagency Fire Center said 102 large fires have burned a combined 4.4 million acres in 12 states in the western United States, resulting in some two dozen deaths in California, Oregon, and Washington.
In California, five people were killed in the LNU Lightning Complex, 10 were killed in the North Complex, and one each was killed in the CZU August Lightning Complex, August Lightning Complex, Tatham Fire, and Hills Fires.
So there you go, 19 people killed so far, but just blame it all on global warming. I grew up on 400 acres bordered by National Forest at about 4,000′. Many of our closest friends were Forest Service people, and others were loggers or ran lumber mills.
Bernie Sanders is using the current wildfires to push for a Green New Deal, of course blaming Trump who he says “rejects science and calls climate change a hoax.” Christiana Figueres, who was the General Secretary of the IPCC said at a news conference that the idea of Climate Change was the best weapon they had for destroying Capitalism.
You can natter on all you want about Global Warming, but if you had thinned the forests, rid them of dry brush, we would not have the forest fires of three states poisoning our air and blanketing us with smoke.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Freedom, Global Warming, Immigration, Junk Science, Law, Media Bias, National Security, Politics, Science/Technology, The Constitution | Tags: A. O-C., Gov, Jay Inslee, The Green New Deal
What a peculiar time this is.. Democrats and Republicans seem to be speaking different languages, each about completely different world. Jussie Smollett has dominated the news for days – that seem to be weeks, over an incident that never happened. The figure that controls much of our attention is a freshman congressperson who has not the slightest idea of what it is that Congress does nor why. Someone on the radio just pointed out brilliantly that “It’s not what she says, it’s the confidence of her cluelessness.”
That confidence has led to Conservative fascination with what she says specifically because it is so clueless. The Green New Deal, a big idea, was issued before anyone had read it, approved it, or even had chance absorb the contents. “The New Deal” was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s answer to The Great Depression brought on by the 1929 Stock Market Crash. FDR had not the slightest idea of what to do about the misery, so he assembled his “brain trust” which made what he was doing seem approved by superior wisdom.
In fact he had embarked on course of endless tinkering – which, it has been determined, actually prolonged the Depression by seven long years. The Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, with breadlines and soup kitchens to feed the unemployed. There was not, at the time, the safety net we have today. But over the last half-century we have had one planetary scare after another. In the 1960’s it was an unstoppable human population explosion that would inexorably lead to global starvation. (Norman Borlaug saved us from that one). During the early 1970s the temperatures which had been gradually rising since the Little Ice Age some 400 years before, seemed to be falling again, and many eminent scientists warned that we were facing the horrors of a new ice age.
Ice ages are followed by global warming, Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio, Harrison Ford, and the extinction of the polar bears, and probably the caribou as well. What did happen was that the government got interested, and suddenly there was grant money available. and lot of professors who could write a grant proposal thought that with new equipment and more powerful computers, they could solve the problem. They started with the basic program that Wall Street had been using for figuring out where the stock market was going, and entered what they knew about the temperature, and what they knew about the atmosphere, and some significant information and some speculation, and a few wild guesses, and they got their grants and money for ever fancier computers. The globe seemed to be warming inexorably, and they even got to hire some assistants and appear on the local news. Heady stuff.
The federal government had thermometer stations all over the country, often at airports, and it gradually turned out – next to air conditioner exhausts, or trash burners, reflective concrete walls, and it became clear that there was a lot of artificial warming built into the readings. We had 97 % of scientists agreeing, which was bunk, and anyone who did not agree with the meaningless 97% or questioned Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph, was called “a denier” and stuffed in the unacceptable category. So if you trust Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio, then global warming becomes a real thing to be feared.
Thing is, our records of real temperatures range from thin to non-existent. City temperatures have a heat bias from too many concrete heat-retaining walls and streets and traffic, Tree rings have proved to be unreliable, and we just don’t have any reliable history. Paintings of people skating on the Thames tell us something, but not enough.
People who depend on what they’re told without questioning it must find the whole thing scary – forest fires all over the west (no), hurricanes (no), tornadoes (no), In the past 40 years, since we have had satellites measuring the temperatures of the Global Lower Atmosphere the Climate Models have shown warming that is 67% greater than the average of 9 Observational Datasets. According to the Satellite measurements the Earth has warmed in the past 40 years about 25/100ths of one degree Centigrade.
Our own Governor Jay Inslee, on CBS’s”Face the Nation” said that ” if President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to get the funds to build border wall on the U.S. Border with Mexico stands then Democrats will use those “new rules” to address climate change. He says there is not a national security emergency, Donald Trump has a political emergency.” ” He added that the president should be responding to rel emergencies like forest fires. … and climate change is burning down our forests. ”
Governor Inslee wants badly to run for the presidency, but can’t get much attention when there are so many others who hit the Democrat brownie points, like being a woman or being black or both. The Cato Institute ranked him as the worst governor in the United States for his fiscal management of his state, but Democrats aren’t all that interested in fiscal management. Checking off the identity points is more important.
American Elephants 