Budget and Tax News Podcast

Cities across the United States are experiencing rising crime rates, homelessness, and public disorder, alongside deteriorating infrastructure and a decline in the quality of public services like policing, sanitation, transportation management, and the resolution of abandoned properties. Major cities have been losing population for a decade or more, and now even the suburbs of those urban areas are losing people to more effectively managed cities in better governed states. Miami, Florida, has resisted the trend toward urban decline, enjoying rapid economic growth and record-low crime rates in the 2020s. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez joins Budget & Tax News to discuss the state of America’s cities and the solutions to the nation’s urban problems. 

On May 16, Heartland Editorial Director Chris Talgo appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room to discuss his recent op-ed in The Hill detailing how President Biden's economic policies are harming the vast majority of Americans.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg did what the left has wanted for years, served Trump with an indictment. Under what charges? Bragg’s case states that Trump’s payment to Stormy Daniels in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement violated campaign financing laws, a flimsy argument at best.

Chris Talgo, editorial director at The Heartland Institute, joins The Kristian Garic Show to discuss the indictment and what Americans can expect going forwards.

 The other day, Heartland Vice President Jim Lakely was a guest on The Mark Reardon Show on 97.1 FM Talk in St. Louis. I was invited on the show to talk about the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and how much woke politics had to do with it.

That bank and our federal regulators were a lot more interested in advancing left wing political goals, such as donating to Black Lives Matter, seeking investment equity, and fighting for "climate justice" -- whatever that is -- than it was hiring a risk assessment officer. Silicon Valley Bank had a Diversity Equity and Inclusion executive, but not a risk assessment officer for the last three quarters before it collapsed. So how much did woke politics have to do with it? Listen to this brief clip and find out.

I was invited on the program because of this piece on Heartland.org, which was a rough transcript of something I said on Heartland's weekly In the Tank Podcast.

https://heartland.org/opinion/silicon-valley-bank-was-a-woke-bank-and-wokeness-is-what-brought-it-down/ 

 At The Heartland Institute's 15th International Conference on Climate Change on February 25, 2023, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado gave a keynote address. She spoke about the concessions a group of 20 conservatives, including her, got from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy before they would put him in that post. She also talked about how she fights for sensible policy from her perch on the House Resources Committee and the other freedom-oriented policies she fights for in the House of Representatives.

For more information about The Heartland Institute, visit: https://www.heartland.org/ 

Larry Correia's book, "In Defense of the 2nd Amendment," provides a powerful and accessible explanation of the positive role firearms play in our lives. It explains why good guys with guns are a critical layer of defense and why the 2nd Amendment was adopted. The book argues that you are your own first line of defense in critical situations and that firearms make this defense possible.

Correia explains that those who want to ban guns do not necessarily hate guns themselves. Often, proponents of eliminating the 2nd amendment hate the freedom that guns make possible in the face of continuous attempts by elites to exercise near-unlimited power over the lives of average people. Guns, if available and used properly, are the best check against bad actors, whether they be criminals or tyrants.

Cities across the United States are in a persistent financial crisis because their governments are unable or unwilling to define who and what they are. In fact, many cities’ finances are so poor that they’re going bankrupt. The fundamental problem is that city governments attempt a scope of service provision that is impossible to deliver on. Policy Analyst Mark Moses, author of The Municipal Financial Crisis: A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting, joins the Budget & Tax News podcast to discuss this problem.

More from Mark Moses:

Website: https://munifinanceguy.com/

Twitter: @MuniFinanceGuy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-moses-municipal-finance/

Mark’s book: https://www.amazon.com/The-Municipal-Financial-Crisis_-A-Framework-for-Understanding-and-Fixing-Government-Budgeting/dp/303087835X/

H. Sterling Burnett joins the podcast The District with Teresa Mull to discuss the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act. Burnett highlights how this bill is simply a renamed version of the Build Back Better plan. Biden and Congressional Democrats are taking advantage of the pain that Americans are feeling due to inflation their own progressive policies created. They truly didn’t let this crisis go to waste.

Check out more episodes of The District here: https://spectatorworld.com/radio-category/district/

The government wants you to think its policies are reducing inflation. This isn’t the truth. Inflation is going away because government money infusion is over. Inflation is always a monetary problem of too much money chasing too few goods. The COVID lockdown saw the greatest infusion of money in the shortest time in the history of the world at a time when the economy that was shut down. That spending is over and the economy is turning out goods and services again, so the cause of the inflation has ended. Neither the inflation reduction act nor the Federal Reserve raising interest rates is responsible for the waning inflation, but they could bring it back.

Kevin McGary of the Fredrick Douglas Foundation of California and Every Black Life Matters says liberals and progressives are wrong. The 2nd amendment is absolute and essential for African Americans. More, public schools and socialism are terrible for the black community in America. Individual initiative and free choice are critical to success. African American's should embrace gun ownership for self-protection and protection against tyranny; school choice; and a ban of teaching Critical Race Theory, which embraces the "virtues" of socialism in our public schools. The culture of dependency pushed by liberals is the biggest road block to black Americans' succeeding.