Tag: funding

Hamilton City Schools is Just the First: Years of collective bargaining agreements bankrupted public education

The announcement by Hamilton City Schools Superintendent Andrea Blevins in mid-January 2026 marked a significant moment in the ongoing fiscal challenges facing public education in Ohio. The district, serving the city of Hamilton in Butler County, unveiled a plan to eliminate approximately 153 positions—representing about 12% of its workforce—as part of a broader strategy to address a projected $10 million structural deficit for the 2026–2027 school year.<sup>1</sup> This included closing buildings such as Fairwood Elementary, consolidating the freshman campus into the high school, outsourcing preschool and nursing services, and implementing reductions across administrative, teaching, clerical, food service, custodial, and other roles.<sup>2</sup> While the initial figure of 153 positions was highlighted in media reports, district officials noted that through natural attrition and retirements, the actual number of forced separations could drop to around 101 or even fewer, with changes set to take effect starting in August 2026 to allow adequate notice.<sup>3</sup>

The shortfall stems from multiple converging factors: reduced state foundation funding under Ohio’s revised allocation formulas, recent changes in property tax laws that limit revenue growth, and declining student enrollment, reflecting broader demographic shifts in industrial communities like Hamilton.<sup>4</sup> These issues are not isolated; they illustrate a national and state-level reckoning with the sustainability of traditional public school funding models that have long relied on escalating property tax levies and generous state aid. In Hamilton’s case, the district’s current-year deficit was already around $5 million, with projections escalating without intervention, prompting proactive measures to avoid deeper program cuts or emergency borrowing.<sup>5</sup>

This development aligns with longstanding critiques of public education’s dependency on perpetual tax increases and union-driven collective bargaining agreements that prioritize salary scales, legacy costs, and benefits over merit-based compensation or operational efficiency. For decades, many Ohio school districts have assumed voters would approve levies to cover rising costs, including teacher salaries that often exceed private-sector equivalents for comparable education levels and workloads.<sup>6</sup> In Hamilton, as in neighboring districts, the era of unchecked levy approvals has ended amid economic pressures: inflation, housing affordability challenges, and taxpayer fatigue from repeated requests for additional funds. Property taxes, which fund a substantial portion of local school budgets in Ohio, have become particularly burdensome in areas with stagnant or declining industrial bases, where businesses relocate to avoid high taxation, leaving residential properties to shoulder more of the load.<sup>7</sup>

Nearby Lakota Local Schools in Butler County provide a parallel example. In 2025, voters rejected a $506 million bond issue and a permanent improvement levy tied to a district-wide facilities redesign, signaling resistance to additional tax burdens, even for infrastructure needs.<sup>8</sup> Lakota’s prior operating levies had sustained operations without new asks since 2013, but the failed 2025 measure highlighted growing skepticism toward large-scale spending proposals. This rejection occurred amid broader discussions of school choice and funding equity, where money follows students rather than zip codes, potentially forcing districts to compete on quality and cost.<sup>9</sup>

The broader Ohio context points to a deliberate policy shift toward tax relief. Political momentum, amplified by figures associated with the Trump administration and candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy in his 2026 gubernatorial bid, emphasizes reducing or eliminating state income taxes while pursuing significant rollbacks in property taxes—the “largest in Ohio’s history,” as Ramaswamy has proposed.<sup>10</sup> Ramaswamy’s platform includes making Ohio a zero-income-tax state to attract residents and businesses, coupled with aggressive property tax reductions to ease homeowner burdens and stimulate economic growth.<sup>11</sup> These ideas build on existing reforms that have lowered Ohio’s top personal income tax rate over the past decade and eliminated certain business taxes, though often at the expense of state aid to local services like schools.<sup>12</sup> Federal-level discussions under the Trump administration, including revenue from tariffs and potential clawbacks of federal taxes, further support a trajectory of lighter local tax loads over the coming decades.<sup>13</sup>

Critics of traditional public education funding argue that overreliance on property taxes has distorted community development. High levies deter business investment, contribute to population outflows, and exacerbate housing affordability issues, particularly for young families entering the market.<sup>14</sup> In declining industrial cities like Hamilton, where companies have long since departed, the tax base weakens further, creating a vicious cycle: fewer resources lead to service reductions, which accelerate out-migration. The push for enterprise zones and economic revitalization in such areas requires restraint on taxation to attract private capital, rather than burdening new opportunities with endless school funding demands.<sup>15</sup>

At the heart of these fiscal realities lies a deeper philosophical debate about the value and efficiency of public education. Collective bargaining has secured escalating wages, often tied to advanced degrees rather than performance, resulting in average teacher salaries well above those in many private-sector roles, despite generous vacation time, summers off, and job security.<sup>16</sup> Historical data shows Ohio teacher pay rising from averages around $63,000–$65,000 in the early 2010s to higher figures today, adjusted for inflation but still outpacing many comparable professions.<sup>17</sup> Proponents of reform contend that merit-based systems, competition from charters and private options, and student-centered funding (where per-pupil allocations follow the child) would incentivize excellence and cost control. Without zip-code-based monopolies, schools must attract families through superior results, not guaranteed enrollment.<sup>18</sup>

Additional pressures include the perceived ideological drift in curricula, where progressive influences have sometimes prioritized social agendas over core academic rigor, contributing to generations of students entering adulthood with skill gaps, delayed independence, and reliance on parental support.<sup>19</sup> This undermines the future tax base, as young adults struggle to form households, start families, and contribute economically. The traditional model—free transportation, extended daycare-like hours, and heavy administrative overhead—has been criticized as unsustainable, as parents increasingly drive their children to school or seek alternatives.<sup>20</sup>

The Hamilton announcement serves as an early indicator of inevitable restructuring across Ohio and beyond. Districts facing similar shortfalls will need to prioritize efficiency, reduce legacy costs, and adapt to competitive models. Charter schools, homeschooling, and voucher programs will gain traction as families demand better value. While painful in the short term—job losses, building consolidations, and service adjustments—the transition promises a more accountable, innovative education landscape aligned with economic realities and taxpayer priorities.<sup>21</sup>

This shift reflects a broader cultural move toward meritocracy, fiscal responsibility, and reduced government dependency. Public schools will survive, but in leaner, more responsive forms, focused on delivering robust education rather than serving as employment vehicles or ideological platforms. The warnings issued over the years about unsustainable models have materialized; adaptation, not denial, offers the path forward.<sup>22</sup> But as all these things are happening, don’t say I didn’t warn everyone.  They chose to ignore the inevitable.  The public school product costs too much.  Does too little.  And has turned out to be destructive to society, not beneficial.  So lots of changes are coming, because they have to. 

Bibliography

•  Local 12 (WKRC), “Tri-State school district to cut 153 positions, close school amid $9.6M budget shortfall,” January 22, 2026.

•  FOX19, “Hamilton City Schools announces $9.6M in budget cuts, job losses,” January 20, 2026.

•  WCPO, “Hamilton Schools announce cuts, including building closures,” January 2026.

•  Journal-News, “Hamilton Schools announce cuts, including building closures,” January 16, 2026.

•  WVXU, “Voters reject $506M Lakota Schools levy proposal,” November 4, 2025.

•  Forbes, “Vivek Ramaswamy Wants To Make Ohio The Ninth No-Income-Tax State,” March 13, 2025 (updated context 2026).

•  Cincinnati Enquirer, “Vivek Ramaswamy running for Ohio governor. Wants to end income, property taxes,” February 24, 2025.

•  Policy Matters Ohio, reports on state tax shifts and education funding, 2024–2026.

•  Tax Foundation, Ohio tax data and rankings, updated 2026.

Footnotes

1.  FOX19, “Hamilton City Schools announces $9.6M in budget cuts, job losses,” January 20, 2026.

2.  Local 12 (WKRC), “Tri-State school district to cut 153 positions,” January 22, 2026.

3.  Journal-News, “Hamilton Schools announce cuts,” January 16, 2026.

4.  Citizen Portal AI summary of Blevins’ presentation, January 16, 2026.

5.  WCPO coverage of Hamilton budget announcement, January 2026.

6.  Historical analyses from the Ohio Department of Education reports on teacher compensation trends.

7.  Tax Foundation data on Ohio property tax burdens relative to income.

8.  WVXU, “Voters reject $506M Lakota Schools levy proposal,” November 4, 2025.

9.  Lakota Local Schools’ official statements on 2025 ballot rejection.

10.  Vivek Ramaswamy campaign announcements, January 2026 (e.g., Facebook video on zero income tax and property tax rollback).

11.  Forbes article on Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial platform, with 2026 updates.

12.  Policy Matters Ohio, “The Great Ohio Tax Shift,” 2024–2025 analyses.

13.  Broader Trump administration economic policy discussions, 2025–2026.

14.  Economic studies on tax competition and business relocation in Midwest states.

15.  Hamilton enterprise zone revitalization efforts referenced in local economic development plans.

16.  Ohio teacher salary data from the National Education Association and state reports.

17.  Inflation-adjusted comparisons from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Ohio data.

18.  School choice advocacy from organizations like EdChoice and Ohio-specific voucher expansions.

19.  Critiques in education policy literature on curriculum content and outcomes.

20.  Parental transportation trends from the U.S. Department of Transportation and local surveys.

21.  Projections from the Ohio Legislative Service Commission on education funding reforms.

22.  Long-term forecasts in state five-year financial reports for districts like Hamilton and Lakota.

Rich Hoffman

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

The United Nations is Going Bankrupt: They never should have been created

I’m thrilled to hear it.  I used to go to meetings with my congressional representative, John Boehner, where he would do meet-and-greets, before he was Speaker of the House in 2010, and ask him to get the United States out of the United Nations.  Most of the time, he wasn’t there, but had assistants who would take notes for him, but they’d giggle about the crazy right-wing lunatic who they were embarrassed to have as a neighbor.  But I was serious.  I didn’t see anything good coming out of the United Nations.  Americans never wanted to be in the United Nations, even though President Woodrow Wilson wanted America to lead the League of Nations.  Americans finally caved after World War II because nobody wanted to see another Hitler in the world, so we ended up with the ridiculous United Nations, and things have gone downhill for America since then.  Americans want to be left alone and free from world problems.  But we have all these nosey politicians who like to drink tea with their pinky out, and sip wine of specific vintages, and they want to be respected by Europeans, so they have been trying to drag America into a marriage with the rest of the world for generations.  I would even argue that if not for sinister forces working in the background, we would never have had any World Wars, so it can be argued that the wars themselves were constructs meant to create a global government.  Not to prevent hostile characters that might plunge the world into war.  Hitler was a creation of a lot of bad people.  And the United Nations was never the solution. Instead, the solution to many of the world’s evils was more Bible reading and independence from the world’s villains. 

But finally, we have a President who gets it, and a political class that can at least understand what that President is up to and why.  People aren’t laughing when they say they want to be separated from the United Nations like it used to be.  Living in Liberty Township, Ohio, specifically Butler County, I think about the United Nations whenever I see a roundabout.  Most people don’t know it, but many of the sustainable living implements introduced socially have come from the United Nations Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 flowdown plans, and our colleges accepted these communist traps hook, line, and sinker for years.  When our township politicians hired people out of these colleges as community developers they brought Agenda 21 sustainable living priorities with them and we ended up with a bunch of sidewalks and roundabouts to adopt more European ideas of community building and environmental impact with the ultimate goal of keeping people in their homes more and driving cars less.  And the whole thing has made me sick every time I go through a roundabout, which are almost as common in Butler County, Ohio, these days as they are in socialist run Europe.  People argue about their worth; they say they are better at keeping cars moving, and they prevent accidents, which make insurance companies happy, who lobby politicians for ways to make society safer so that people will buy insurance but not have accidents to force payouts.  So for all the tyrannical micromanagers out there, Agenda 21 would make them a lot of money, but the goal was to limit freedoms so that stuffy bureaucrats could have an easy time at managing society with a growing centralized government and encourage through policy fewer people to leave their homes, but rather to take a sidewalk everywhere, and to ride bicycles instead of cars.  The roundabouts keep you moving, but also slow you down to go around those stupid circles.  I like long straightaways that we used to have in America, where you could go fast, and even quicker if you could beat the yellow light at an intersection.  Sure, there were more accidents, but life in general was better. 

And never forget that COVID was the ultimate creation of the United Nations to implement their Agenda 21 projects and to set the world on the same page with 2030 priorities.  And yes, COVID was a created virus meant to kill people to force acceptance of these ridiculous stay-at-home policies and conformity to centralized government rules.  If people didn’t die, nobody would listen to an overstuffed government, so through the World Health Organization, a division of the United Nations, a virus was created that would set the world on a Great Reset, much of which still hasn’t recovered.  COVID was planned and implemented using the Chinese system.  The virus was leaked out of a lab in China under very nefarious circumstances.  And immediately, the United Nations had the world on lockdown, micromanaging the economy globally, including America, and they thought that people would fall in line better than they did.  Instead, we had significant pushback and a world angry at the policies of the United Nations, and now we have a President willing to push back against them.  And to cut the money confiscated from Americans and redistribute it to the United Nations, to work against the nature of Americans themselves. Finally, we have politicians willing to stand up to that global tyranny and not play the game, which is great. 

What’s better is the recent report that the United Nations is running out of money because, without the United States, that motley band of socialists, communists, and Marxists has no money.  They can only loot cash from the only capitalist country in the world, America, to sustain themselves.  And now, because we elected Trump, they have essentially been cut off.  And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.  So I’m pretty happy about their trajectory toward financial ruin.  I have never liked the United Nations.  I have never liked politicians who support them and wanted to join them.  And I would say that without their desire to be created in the first place, we never would have had a World War.  Those wars were created as a reaction to the globalist push that followed the Jekyll Island meetings that started the Federal Reserve, and if you trace all the money and influence to their sources, you will find that it all goes to centralized monetary policy, especially the banks of Europe.  So, there was never anything good about any of this, and what upset them the most was that even after all this time, they never found a way to get Americans to comply with the United Nations willingly.  Sure, we built some roundabouts and sidewalks.  However, people have never embraced the United Nations’ globalist priorities.  Instead, we elected people like President Trump to say no to the United Nations.  And now they struggle to survive because they have nothing without American money.  Because they are rotten, stinking, Marxist countries with bad leadership and horrible economic policies.  And micromanagers without a clue.  But they can name a wine from France in a dinner conversation.  And they will drink it with their pinky out.  I would say that the United Nations types and their supporters are worthless people in life, and I am glad to see them finally rejected for the losers they have always been.  And the more miserable they are, the happier I am. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio Needs Money: One of the great sites in the world has fallen into disrepair

The thing about the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is that it’s our version of Stonehenge, and that it has fallen into a state of ridiculous disrepair, and it shouldn’t be.  When you look at the great historic sites around the world, like the Pyramids, Göbekli Tepe, and Stonehenge, they all have significant commitments to tourism dollars that inspire people to visit, instead of trying to frustrate them from doing so.  I have talked about it before. I like what they did to Stonehenge to make it a positive visitor experience, and at least that level of investment should be applied to the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio because, in many ways, it’s more mysterious.  It may not be as technical in its construction, but the mathematical logic that went into the Great Serpent Mound, just an hour or so east of Cincinnati, is equally impressive.  Given what we do know about it, I would say that Serpent Mound is one of the most mysterious sites in the world, and Ohio should be showing it off a lot more than they do.   I recently made it part of a grand paranormal tour that I took with my family, and we made a point to stop by and see it.  It was good to see again, I’ve seen it a lot over the years.  But each time it has fallen into disrepair more and more, instead of anybody giving it a fresh coat of paint and advancing it.  The Great Serpent Mound has recently received much attention because of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse show on Netflix, which deserves a lot of respect.  Graham also discusses the site in the opening chapters of his popular and well-researched book, Before America.  I read it and think that Graham is onto something about ancient cultures in North America, way before dates proposed by modern archaeology.  And sadly, they have dug in on their previous assumptions because they don’t want to admit that what they put forth regarding the history of Serpent Mound was lazy and needed significant updates. 

There is a lot of mystery going on these days with archeoastronomy that dates Serpent Mound to the Draco constellation between 3000 and 5000 BC, similar to what we see with the Great Boar at Fortified Hill just outside of Hamilton, Ohio.  Or Fort Hill, just to the north of Serpent Mound.  As well as the many other ancient sites built all over Ohio.  None have survived as well as Serpent Mound, but they are much more complicated than we have assumed of Native American cultures.  We are looking at the remains of a very ancient and sophisticated culture and it is more likely that the Adena and Hopewell Indians lived in these locations more as squatters than as architects, following a well-known Vico Cycle that is inconvenient to historic knowledge that has already broadcast to the world a lazy explanation that is now very much refuted. Ross Hamilton has done a lot of good work at Serpent Mound that offers much older dates and sophistication for the building and use of the mound complex, and the archaeology community has only dug in deeper, almost wishing the site would just go away so they could stop answering questions.  There is now a policy that drones can’t be flown over the site because the caretakers of Serpent Mound don’t want their complex to be shown all over the world, as it has been, so they are frustrating efforts to do research in the area rather than embracing a continued understanding.  I understand why, but it’s not a good reason.   

My interest in these kinds of things is the next level of political discussion for me, which is the root cause behind many of the troubles in our world.  I am personally tired of the lazy approach to everything that has permeated all our institutions, this little shell game where it is said, “there is no evidence to support wild accusations,” but at the same time being too lazy to look for the evidence because you are afraid of what you’ll find.  To call such an approach a massive conspiracy is an understatement.  I do not hate archaeologists by any stretch of the imagination.  It takes a lot of hard work to dig in the dirt, discover things long buried, and figure out what they mean.  Serpent Mound is well known to have had reports of giant skeletons of people seven to eight feet tall coming out of the mounds at that site, and like the other sites I have pointed out, the reaction to this news has been to dig less. They excavated at the site when I was a kid to understand it better.   But over the years, like the Miamisburg Mound they have stopped looking for evidence so that they could then say that any proposal of giants in those burial mounds is not proof because they don’t want to find it and what they have discovered is shoved into the corners of museums and private collections, not released to the public for all kinds of political reasons.  If these are wild theories, well then, let’s prove it.  Let’s dig and learn the truth.  However, keeping away from the questions is not a good strategy.

I remember in 2003 when a crop circle of great sophistication was made into a soybean field across the street from the Serpent Mound complex.  It was far too complicated to be a hoax by some deranged teenage kids, and it was very similar to the kind of designs that are common outside of Stonehenge in England, which has many of the same types of sites there as well.  We are looking at a global culture of Mound Builders who were not just surviving hunters and gatherers.  I think that the growing understanding points to the remnants of the Atlantean culture that had migrants fleeing the well-known island that was overcome by water somewhere off the coast of Britain and north of the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.  Former island dwellers dedicated to the God Poseidon, who ruled Atlantis, took with them their knowledge of astronomy and duplicated it all over the earth, as well as many of the ancient sites we talk about today.  A lot was going on from the time of Göbekli Tepe to the proposed construction dates of the Great Serpent Mound, or the Great Pyramids and archaeologists, being a young science, got it wrong from the start and its time to revise our previous assumptions with the many new facts that have been discovered over recent years.  And why Poseidon?  Well, he had an attraction to Medusa and her hair of snakes, which makes a lot more sense for the snake worship of the constellation Draco than the explanations we have received so far.  And while that may sound wild and unbelievable, it makes more sense than saying that a bunch of hunters and gatherers had all this advanced mathematics and built all these mounds, but they struggled to catch a rabbit for food.  We need a lot more research and understanding, and all that starts with the preservation of that historic site with fresh funding, and I would even propose a tourist model to pay for it, similar to what they do at Stonehenge under the care of English Heritage.  We should be making Serpent Mound a big part of our state identity, because people worldwide fly to Ohio to visit Serpent Mound.  We need to treat it with that level of care because it is incredibly unique and requires much more research and debate.

I’m prepared to stake my claim with what I think is significant evidence, that a culture, like Atlantis, and even cultures older than that but have been lost because there wasn’t a Plato to record it in a way that survived, populated the entire world and that they were very tall people obsessed with worship of planets and their power, which still exists to this day in cults of magic and occult astrology attached to many secret societies who wish to rule mankind from the shadows gaining control of our political, educational, and financial institutions so they could set policies that would maintain their concealment.  And from 9000 BC to around 3000 AD, they ruled the world until a rebellion of ideas came along and toppled their empire, for which Yahweh played his part.  I propose that Serpent Mound is the remains of this very ancient cult that was preserved and restored by many generations of inhabitants, of which the Adena and Hopewell Indians did just as Egyptian society did and that was to build their empires around the structures that were already there for many thousands of years.  Not much remains of this ancient culture because time tends to wipe them all out if something is over 3000 years old.  But Göbekli Tepi and other sites around the world dating back to 10,000 years ago show that there were already very advanced cultures on Earth with a high understanding of mathematics.  And Ohio has a big piece of that puzzle, which should be preserved.  As I explained to my kids on this trip, there should be nice, paved trails, a nice restaurant, and an admission price to raise money for the preservation at the Serpent Mound complex.  But this whole native American sacred site stuff needs to go.  Science needs more evidence and a bigger picture to consider in the schemes of the universe as captured in sites like the Great Serpent Mound.  And I dare everyone who snickers at this claim to prove me wrong.  Because I don’t think they can.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

The Brain Dead Losers at the IRS: And those idiots want to hire 87,000 more of them and give them guns to kick down doors to confiscate more wealth for a bloated, out-of-control government

Of course, there should always be a concern when we are talking about putting 87,000 dumb and inefficient people onto a government payroll and encouraging them to go door to door with guns to extract more money from the American population. It’s a plea by stupid people in the administrative state to feed the beast they have created. They can’t get tax increases passed in government, so they are looking to extract more money from the public to fund their gross inefficiencies with force. But they do so without dealing with their previous inefficiencies. Instead, they insist on creating a larger government with proportionally more lackluster effort without a care in the world to the incredible cost it would bring across our economic engine to society. From my experience, IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks on a good day. In my life, I keep things very simple, not for my sake, but because in my previous involvement with the IRS, I find them such a stupid class of people that have difficulty understanding basic things if I can’t show my incomes on simple W2s then its simply not worth doing. I get investment offers for crypto, real estate, and business opportunities of all kinds several times a day, all days of the week. But I turn them all down because the opportunity cost of doing them likely would never exceed the pain in the ass required to deal with the IRS and the set-up for the audits that require hours and hours of time spent with some of the dumbest people on earth. I’d rather give up making millions and millions of dollars so that I could gain the riches of not having to talk to a box of dumb rocks who took a government job so they could be paid well to mask their lazy life and still have authority over other people as a representative of big, out of control, inefficient, government.

The audacity of the proposal to hire 87,000 more IRS agents is that the government is already grossly inefficient. Adding this many more inefficient employees to the government payroll is only pouring gas on an already blazing dumpster fire. Government employees of all kinds are some of the worst in the world regarding lazy economic generators. I have always talked about how horrible it has been to pay public school teachers what we pay them only to get the horrendous work performance that we get out of them, not to mention the political activism. When they ask for tax hikes to pay for their bloated services to the community, it is always my default mode to require them to lay off some of that inefficiency because that should always be the goal.   Efficiency is the first thing anybody dealing with money should be thinking about. But government always throws money at inefficiency to achieve their stated objectives. In this case, they want more money to operate the administrative state, so they throw more money at the same inefficiencies that caused the problems to begin with. So not only have they compounded those inefficiencies and now connected more labor to those inefficiencies, making the situation considerably worse, but they failed to deal with the root cause of their inefficiencies in the first place seeking to mask it with ominous authority rule. That has always been the joke of public education. But you can see it most notably at your local BMV, where slow, horrible service has become the accepted norm. If you want to drive a car, you have to deal with these slow-minded losers who show up for work brain dead and end their days comatose.   All government employees become some representative of a brain-dead lifestyle by the nature of their tasks. So the greater expansion of government services, the more zombies that we put into society and pay them way too much to achieve way too little.

Because government never wants to admit what a burden it is to society, they never measure anything in opportunity cost. Instead, their goal is to leech off effort and fuel their disgusting lifestyles off the opportunity of others. With the expansion of 87,000 IRS agents, the government intends to fuel itself off the efforts of others. But as I said, there is a cost to inefficiency; it can’t be hidden on balance sheets. It emerges in undesirable ways frequently. When employees show up for work at 8 in the morning and are ordering their lunch by 9 am. It arrives at noon. Then after eating it, they are done for the day and ready to go home. So rather than work the rest of the day, they play on the internet sending messages of nothing to each other until 5 when they go pick up their kids at daycare, then meander home to die a little bit each day in front of the television too tired from their day’s activities to lift a hand to do much of anything else. Then when they finally get to their weekend, they waste it complaining about how tired they are from the previous week. That is the life of the typical government employee who has lost the ability to think because they aren’t paid to think; they are paid to waste time, money, and intellectual effort, which is precisely what the government gets in exchange for their overvalued employment. 

I remember how it was in 2010; I was on the IRS target list for Lois Lerner’s targeting of conservatives by direct order from the Obama terrorist organization that had occupied the White House. They confiscated some of my videos and other Tea Party material as evidence, and I will admit to having some fun watching them view the material. It was like watching dogs turn their heads to some invisible dog whistle, contemplating things beyond their comprehension to grasp because they didn’t have the mental capacity to do so. It was beyond their range of understanding. I’m probably being too nice when I say that IRS agents are dumb as a box of rocks. They are actually worse than that, and that’s because the mismanagement of those resources starts at the top and flows down to all the field agents. So when we add to those numbers, of course, proportionally, we will get much more inefficiency when employees are added because we did not make a leadership change. That is just dry wood on an open fire regarding the administrative state. Adding more employees to an already inefficient government agency is a useless and more costly gesture. What they cost alone is excessive but minor when added to the opportunity cost that the IRS imposes on the culture at large, the many trillions of dollars of money that could have been made if government was just out of the way. Regular hard-working people would be free to do their tasks unimpeded. And that is the cost of the additional IRS agents. The shakedown of regular people is just the beginning of the problem. The real burden comes from things that don’t happen, ultimately worsening the world. It’s bad enough to think that giving such lazy and stupid people so much government power might be a solution the administrative state values, but it’s in what doesn’t happen that holds the real costs of their incursion. And that is what the brain-dead losers of the administrative state never consider because they don’t have the minds to think it. What they want, all they want is to consume off the efforts of others. And by expanding the IRS, they are just looking the squeeze the orange a bit more for a spoonful of juice in all the inefficient ways that have become the norm of government activity.    

Rich Hoffman

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