Tag: budget

Doug Horton in His Own Words: The Joy of Taking a Shower in Liberal Tears

I’m not the kind of person who spikes the football.  However, just before the Lakota levy attempt in 2025, school board member Doug Horton posted a video (shown here) where he emphasized the last levy won by Lakota back in 2013.  That was a swipe at me personally, so I have to address it, specifically.  He also indicated another Democrat talking point that has been circulating for many years, and that is that I, and about a dozen other anti-levy people, are a vociferous minority who do not represent the rest of the community.  So his message is not to listen to us and vote for his monstrous tax proposal because we love children.  However, these days, many more than a dozen people are opposed to the Lakota tax spending addictions.  And there are a lot more than I who take a position and help out during these political campaigns.  In this case, I had very little to do with the official campaign.  I do the things I always do, but with many more people working on the campaign, and they are brilliant and organized individuals.  And I’m proud of the great work they did.  And that effort is only going to grow in the future, especially with a successful defeat of the Lakota levy, the first one since 2013, which barely, and I mean barely, squeaked by.  Back then, it was Sheriff Jones who stepped over the line to support the public school teachers because he was still mad at the Tea Party effort to make public sector unions illegal in Ohio, which was the side I was on.  It was due to Sheriff Jones’ support that the 2013 levy passed by just a tiny bit, and another hasn’t passed since then. 

And why should a levy pass? It’s not like the community isn’t giving Lakota enough money.  They have a budget of over a quarter of a billion dollars per year, and for their collective bargaining contracts, that’s not enough for their insatiable desires.  It took about a decade, but Sheriff Jones and I are mostly on the same page, and that’s how the ball bounces in politics.  And for this levy attempt, and any others that Lakota proposes in a declining enrollment district with education changing dramatically in the years to come, that’s how it’s going to be.  This leaves people like Doug Horton on the extreme outside, and because he made the statements he did, we must address his point of view as a costly school board member and as a proper representative of the poor management currently on the board.  For many years, we had something of a conservative on the board who worked with everyone to keep more taxes off the ballot.  We even managed to get a majority on the board to control costs, which Horton referred to.  And I found some of his comments incredibly out of touch, especially regarding Darby Boddy, the conservative school board member whom Lakota, as an organization, lobbied hard to remove, literally the moment she was sworn in.  If Doug Horton is worried about Lakota headlines not being negative in the national media, then don’t support superintendents who have sex fests on Craigslist and tell the police that he fantasized about engaging with children who were going to the school at the time.  Horton proposes ignoring the problems so they can receive good press, pass tax increases, and gloss over trouble for the greater good of the school brand, which is a kind of fake sentiment that is at the heart of many problems when raising children.  A topic we could spend many books writing about, given its incorrect point of view. 

Doug Horton and many others in the background have worked hard to destabilize the school board so that they could get rid of the conservatives and essentially get to this big facilities plan, which has been in the planning phase since Trump’s last term, a very long time.  And they believed that if only they had enough liberals on the school board, the community would pass the levy.  And my thoughts have been for a long time to let them have the school board, let them try to run a levy, and let that levy crash and burn when they find out just how many people in the community are against them, many more than just a dozen or so.  In the case of this levy, the defeat was even more than I thought; it lost 60% to 39%.  I thought our side might get into the high 50s.  I was impressed to see it hit 60 in a down-year election, where engagement was naturally low.  It was actually a good simulation of what we expect Lakota to do next, and that is try to slide another levy under the door in May when people want to forget about school and turnout is low, or in August when nobody is thinking about politics.  Turnout was not very vigorous for this election, and still, Lakota lost massively, so that’s a good start for the tax defenders.  And it proves something even more profound that I knew we had to get to once we essentially kicked the control of the school board over to the liberals.  They needed to see what I’ve been telling them all along, which they obviously pay attention to, because Doug Horton essentially announced it to the world as a matter of fact.  People are not with them; they are against them in massive ways.  And they never believed it because they don’t speak to people outside their social circles, which are proportionally very small. 

The biggest problem with our conservative majority is that we let them play the game of division; they got our people all fighting each other with the belief that, in the vacuum, they would regain power and win the hearts of the public.  And Doug Horton does represent the rest of the board, especially Julie Shaffer and Kelly Casper, in his point of view, and that is the public would spend money on their dumb ideas if only I weren’t around, or a dozen or so noisy people, which they have justified to themselves as a small minority.  What reality says, however, is that those voices represent a majority of the Butler County population, and as I said would happen, when given a chance to talk, they would voice their opinion at the ballot box.  And they did, they crushed the Lakota levy.  I don’t think about it too much, but when I see videos like his, it’s a grotesque reminder of just how stupid some of these people are, and it really makes me sick that they are my neighbors.  I’ve lived in the area longer than most of these pro-levy types have been alive, and I will be around long after all of them are gone.  To me, they are the unwelcome noise of a thriving community, where people come from other places and bring their misguided ideas with them, which are socially very destructive.  But when things get tough, I like to let people show what they have, and he certainly did.  And rather than warn them not to pass a levy, I’m fine to let them try, which they did.  And what I said would happen, happened.  And it was because a lot more than a dozen people got information to the voters that helped them make the right decision.  And the amount of support we have had in that effort has grown over the years; it hasn’t declined.  The real solution lies in young people like Ben Nguyen, who was just elected to the school board, and I think will bring many good ideas with him, along with healthy and intelligent debate.  And we’ll need about three or four more like him to push off all these ridiculous liberals.  But first, they had to be exposed for what they were.  And they have, so now it’s time for a lot more work, focusing on school board building rather than defending our property values against those who are clearly out of touch and not very smart.

Rich Hoffman

We’re rebuilding the school board. Good management is the best way to defeat tax increases.

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The Debt Ceiling Debacle: Government needs to be cut by 75% or more

The values expressed by the June 1st made-up deadline for the debt ceiling talks were that it was a bi-partisan agreement, which prevents a first-ever default, protects Biden’s key priorities and accomplishments, and rejects extreme cuts to programs for veterans, seniors, and what families count on. It protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and keeps President Biden’s student loan relief program for 40 million hardworking borrowers. That is what the White House is saying about it, and it’s the kind of deal you will always get from a corrupt government with a serious spending problem. And the feeling is that Keven McCarthy got suckered even though members of Congress I like from my area; Jim Jordan and Warren Davidson were happy to push back a bit from the Republican perspective; ultimately, these budget fights are going to get messy and would have been better done now than later. Essentially, Republicans bit on the phony deadline for debt payments that Janet Yellen set from the Biden administration, and House Republicans didn’t want to be blamed for a default. We are dealing with radical employees here; it’s precisely the same argument we have been making for years in public schools where the government simply adds too much payroll, then expects taxpayers to pick up their massive expansion of government through job creation, then overpaying those employees. I tend to agree with Davidson and Jordan that McCarthy played a nice game, but in the end, there weren’t wins to justify the effort, and the Biden Democrats get to celebrate a win at taxpayer expense. 

We aren’t all on the same page with this one. The government needs to be radically shrunk, and it will put a lot of people out of work. The entire issue of these budget talks really comes down to whether we are a better nation with all the government workers we have who do so little for the nation in general. Most government workers make 30-40% above market value for jobs that aren’t needed in most cases. And we could likely afford to cut 75% of those and still get an operational government, much like Elon Musk did at Twitter. Real people who run real companies understand that budget impacts on the payroll are the biggest problem of inflated budgets. If employees get increased productivity with their staffing, and that productivity is valuable to the world, then a company could be said to be successful. But we’re not talking about that with this budget problem with our government. Government is a make-work enterprise where they fill positions we don’t need and pay people too much money to perform the job. I would say that the utilization rate of those employees is under 5%, where it should be somewhere between 70% to 90%. That’s the effective time employees are actually doing their jobs while being paid. What we are dealing with when it comes to government workers are lazy radicals who are hidden from job performance by government labor unions who continue to want to throw bodies at positions they create to expand government and take credit for it as politicians. And politicians are never going to give those jobs away without a major fight. And this debt ceiling talk of 2023 would have required people negotiating who actually want to fight. 

And the kryptonite for Republicans is always military spending, but even with that topic, do we really want to waste money on a woke military? In my view of this problem, everything is on the table. What does our military really do for us these days? It seems to only serve for wars that help globalism. It’s not preventing war with China. China has their guy in our White House. They are fighting wars through finance now; nobody is planning to fight a ground war now or in the future. So, Republicans need to be willing to go there. And they must be willing to take away the credit cards from big-spending Democrats and let them have their head-spinning moments. At some point, we are going to have to call the bluff of the big government types and stop wasting money on these massive government programs in every category. Lots of people need to lose their jobs, and a resizing of the real needs of our federal and state government needs to occur because, at the core of it, that is what we are talking about with these talks. Nobody wants to end well-paying jobs for a government that know-nothing politicians created for a job that society generally doesn’t want or need. We are going into debt to do jobs so that foreign interests can make money off the interest rate, and the only entities benefiting are the communist labor unions attached to the government workers. It’s a treadmill that goes nowhere, and we waste all our time and money on essentially nothing. Our nation has not improved because of all the money wasted on these jobs, and the economic value is a negative rather than a positive. We are paying a lot of money to get in the way of productivity, not to enhance it. 

And that’s where the really hard decisions come into play. We all have family members who work in government and did what they needed to to get a job with the government at that overpaid rate, with all the days off and work-from-home policies we have seen over the past several years. Government workers don’t think they owe any productivity to society. They believe that society owes them a job and that they’ll show up for it whenever they get around to it; that is the true cost to the productivity of our culture. We are paying a lot of money for a government that doesn’t do what we need it to. And unless Kevin McCarthy was willing to argue on those merits, the Democrats would own him in the negotiations. McCarthy made a good show of it, working himself over the Memorial Day Holiday, but Democrats knew from the beginning that all the mainstream Republicans could not fight the budget battle where it is really the costliest. Nobody wants to admit that their friends, family, and fellow union members are actually performing worthless tasks for a worthless government. Eventually, we will have to have this discussion because it is what makes deficit spending such a catastrophe. One that few, perhaps only the 20 or so freedom caucus members, are willing even to discuss. Government, in general, with all their labor unions attached at every level, is a bloated machine of communist corruption of no value, and to be a healthy country, those government jobs need to be private sector jobs at a much lower wage rate. And that would essentially destroy the inflated economy of the Beltway culture that entirely exists on debt, not the actual value of the jobs that fuel that economy. Then until we are willing to have that discussion, which is inevitable, we will continue to see debt ceiling discussions like this one with precisely these results. Kevin McCarthy never had a chance because he was making the wrong argument. The government positions that make up the bloated budget we are dealing with need to go away. People will have to be out of work. And the government will have to be significantly minimized, by 75% or more, because anything productive never happens. And we are a long way from that happening with these government politicians. A long way away from reality.

Rich Hoffman

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