(ThyBlackMan.com) Before I begin, I want to explain why I write as I do. The reason is multifaceted. First, I write how I speak and think – WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get. Just ask my students. Second, I have a ton of unique experiences that I should share in print before I pass. Lastly, I read a lot, and it stays with me. So I integrate all of the above in print, I pen. Add to this, I am a scientist, so I write my essays with the same detail as I do any of my scientific papers. With this out of the way, back to the topic.
The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” means taking resources (usually money) from one source to cover a debt or expense somewhere else, without actually improving the overall situation. In other words, you’re just shifting a problem around rather than solving it.
From what I have been able to find and have read, the expression dates back to at least the 14th or 15th century, and it’s rooted in English religious and financial history. Some connect it to the two great churches of London: St. Peter’s at Westminster (Westminster Abbey) and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. King Edward VI (1547–1553) or earlier monarchs diverted funds from St. Peter’s to pay for repairs at St. Paul’s, literally robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Here in America, this saying can describe all that surrounds the management of major urban cities, the government shutdown, and the debate regarding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). It is actually about taking from those who have to give to those who don’t, or otherwise, “I am taking from them to give to you.” This is democrat policy in a nutshell. No better example outside of New York and California is Chicago, which, through the policies of Brandon Johnson, has become the one that keeps on giving for political punditry.
I ran for mayor once in my city (Pop. 3200), lost by 14 votes. After the ballots had been counted I was up 106 votes. But before they were to confirm my victory, the city manager came out the back and said they forgot to count the absentee ballots. Over 100, not in envelopes (as required by law), and without signatures. Long story short, I lost my lead, lost the race, and did not receive a single absentee vote. I ran because the mayor had been in office since 1985. He was making a lot of money, for a job with a $1200 salary. I ran to combat mismanagement.
My platform was to find a way to computerize utility payments and get all of the warehouse developers in our community to pay for half of the utility bills of all city residents annually. Had mandatory open carry for all adults, but I don’t like mandates, plus that was half the city already. I also wanted to create a way for all residents to buy stock in the city so we could profit from future corporate ventures, but couldn’t figure how to do that shit. But after my challenge, things in my city started to change miraculously. Wish I could say the same for Chicago.
Chicago’s mismanagement of its fiscal responsibility to its citizens touches everybody. Mayor Brandon Johnson has announced an over $16 billion budget plan for 2026. It will depend on increased taxes on corporations to close a $1.2 billion shortfall, according to Johnson, which will offset the city from tax cuts by the Trump administration.
The mayor’s budget proposal centers around a corporate head tax. That is a tax on the biggest companies in the city based on how many employees they have. It’s something the city got rid of more than a decade ago, but now the Johnson wants to bring it back.
Chicago already taxes everything, including the small things, like Uber rides. Several city taxes are added for Uber riders. These include:
- Chicago Ground Transportation Surcharge: For all rideshare trips in the City of Chicago, the Chicago Ground Transportation surcharge is $1.13 on UberX or UberXL trips or $0.53 on Pool rides.
- Chicago Accessibility Surcharge: The City assesses a $0.10 per-trip surcharge on any non-wheelchair accessible vehicle trip. The funds are deposited into the City’s Vehicle Accessibility Fund.
- Chicago Congestion Surcharge: For trips starting or ending in the Central Business District between 6 am and 10 pm on all days of the week, a congestion surcharge is applied for $1.50 per UberX and UberXL or $0.60 per Pool ride.
- Chicago Special Venues Surcharge: A surcharge for trips to or from specific high-traffic locations like the airports, Navy Pier, and McCormick Place.
This is just a low-end example of progressive economic policy. Tax and spend, that’s all they know how to do. This is the stupidity saturated in progressive logic, as observed in Brandon Johnson’s proposed budget and plan for more taxes. The mayor has suggested in writing that companies with at least 100 employees pay $21 per employee each month in taxes. He calls it a community safety search charge. How dumb does a person have to be to tax companies so that they have less money to hire people? In fact, his new so-called head tax is literally a direct attack on employment. Essentially, Johnson is taxing companies for hiring people, on behalf of greasy, unemployed communist weirdo freaks.
This is why you should never trust a 50-plus-year-old with a Mohawk. They will misgovern the city, then chase out the tax base. Chicago Mayor Let’s Go, Brandon Johnson, is one joke of a mayor. Johnson went from “we’re not raising taxes” to “raising taxes is a good thing.” Johnson couldn’t run a garage sale. Businesses with 100-200 employees will all downsize to 99 employees, and open offices just outside the city. It will decrease tax revenues in the city more than the amount raised by the tax.
He thinks that cutting federal taxes messed up Chicago’s City budget? Makes perfect sense. If your city or state is reliant on federal funding to stay afloat, your state is failing or has failed. That’s a management problem for the Mayor, Governor, and representative. Johnson’s default setting is “It’s Trump’s fault” with zero accountability for his failed and failing policies. I am so sick of this idiot and other Dems talking about Trump’s tax cuts for the ultra-rich. I got more money back in my paycheck from Trump’s tax cut than I did in my annual raise, and sure ain’t ultra-rich.
Johnson spent tax dollars on illegals, and now he’s going to tax the people for his economic missteps. Chicago’s spending has been out of control for quite some time. Stop blaming Trump. Trump is not the one devoting Chicago’s resources to housing immigrants or Healthcare for non-citizens. Trump is not the one who inflated the salaries of city workers and employees in Chicago. Trump is not the one who is wasting funds with unnecessary construction projects that never even start, or necessary construction that went over the allotted budget in the first 3 days of being approved. The President has zero control over a city’s budget. Never has, and hopefully never will. That is solely in the hands of the Chicago city government, engaging in financial mismanagement, either via ignorance, stupidity, or corruption. You cannot blame a single man who has only been a politician for 10 years for 80 years of poor governance.
Normal people, unlike many progressive politicians like Johnson, see cutting taxes as a GOOD thing. This highlights the conflict. The spending by these political jurisdictions isn’t because of a lack of tax revenue but because of overspending. Normal folks understand they can only spend what they have. This contrasts with liberals, who believe the only solution to any fiscal problem, when discussing a budget, is to raise taxes. This is clear in Mayor Johnson’s policy, which is to raise taxes because Trump has provided tax cuts. So, his approach is to raise taxes instead of cutting spending.
We regular folks understand that the point of cutting taxes is so that people can decide what they want to do with their money. Letting people keep their money and deciding what to do with it is probably the best use of the money rather than giving it to the government. This is another reason why they are broke.
These liberal democrat clown shows that get voted into office and do a terrible job, show us that majority rule and populism can have severe consequences due to a poorly educated population. They argue that the rich having more than you is why you don’t have as much, or why you’re suffering, or why your life is not as good as you believe it should be, because somebody else has more than you. So we got to take from them and give it to you.
Joy Reid had the nerve to say that “When [her] mother came from Guyana, she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us.” Reid was making over $3 million annually. The average salary in Guyana is around $5,000. Both of her parents came from impoverished Africa and graduated from the University of Iowa. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a professor and a nutritionist. They achieved the American dream. Just imagine how much more successful she could have been in Guyana without all the racism. Joy Reid is living proof you can get rich off the American Dream just by whining about how bad the American Dream is. Only in the USA can ungrateful millionaires build their whole brand on hating the country that made them.
The same is true for Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Nancy Pelosi. Bernie Sanders talks badly about the rich. He’s rich! Nancy Pelosi is rich, very rich! All Sanders does is complain about rich people, while he counts the millions of dollars in his bank account. He has never held an actual job outside of elected office, yet has still managed to accrue multiple multi-million dollar homes. Bernie, AOC, and Pelosi like to complain about the problem but will never admit that they are the problem. The “Tax breaks for the rich” they like to complain about are tax cuts for them. They all took office dirt poor and are now worth tens of millions.
They continually yell “tax breaks” for the rich but give zero proof. This is why they enact the policies they do, because for them to stay in office, they have to buy votes, and there is no better way to do this than by promising numbskulls and birdbrains, free shit.
By birdbrains, I mean people who aren’t very intelligent, without any understanding of capitalism, and do not want to work hard. All they have been taught and know is that the government should just give things to them just because.
This is why they focus on illegal immigrants; they benefit from government assistance as well. The problem is that Democrats don’t understand that having a welfare state, in concert with illegal immigration, is not sustainable. But this logic is secondary to their aim, which is to create a new voting bloc. They know that it helps them get votes. Naturally, when illegal immigrants are living off the government, they’re going to be incentivized to at least try to vote for individuals who are going to maintain that. If a man from Guyana can enter the country, falsely claim to be a U.S. citizen, become the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district, and get registered to vote in Maryland as a Democrat. How many others are doing the same? In California, most voters do not need to show an ID to vote, and it has an estimated illegal immigrant population of over 2 million.
This is the same logic progressives employed to get Obamacare passed. This is the clearest form of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is as if they have never considered that maybe the reason we’re the richest country in the world is because we DON’T provide free healthcare. I would venture to posit that we wouldn’t have a housing, healthcare, or wage crisis if we deported the 30 million people who came here illegally. But no, they need to give more free stuff, and if they do not get their way, they take their ball home and close down the government.
You know you’re dealing with a typical moron when you watch a democrat filibuster being called a Republican shutdown. This shutdown is all about Democrats fighting for subsidies for Obamacare, which was supposed to make healthcare affordable. Sneaking in 1.5 trillion in spending isn’t a “clean continuation” while having further debate. Democrats deliberately timed the funding to expire at the end of 2025. They want DEI returning, illegals getting benefits, alphabet wish lists, and resuming money laundering to bogus foreign projects; basically, they are trying to reverse everything Trump has done that people voted for.
These subsidies were added during COVID. They were unnecessary, but they added them anyway. If Obamacare did what it promised it would do, if it would make health care more affordable, why do we need the subsidies in the first place? Why do you need the subsidies if health care was made affordable by Obamacare?
The Republicans aren’t talking because they have already stated that paying for illegal alien healthcare and upkeep as well as sending money to other countries for ridiculous reasons are non-starters. While Democrats are using health care as a scare tactic while demonizing RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement.
Democrats are admitting, as they beg for more subsidies, that Obamacare didn’t work, that it failed to make healthcare more affordable. Since it is increasing in cost, all they are saying is that they will shut down the government, for more government money, to subsidize the health care system even more.
More government is never the answer. The government has never and will never make money. Progressives think government healthcare is a good solution, but the reality is that everything the government touches turns to crap. What I don’t understand is, Trump has only been in office for nine months; healthcare was on their watch. They had 4 years to fix health care under Biden. Instead they spent trillions on dumb shit.
All they have to do is vote to open the government. The republicans have 54 votes. To open the government requires 60 votes, and every Republican voted for it. So that tells me the Democrats don’t care about opening the government. This isn’t difficult.
Everything really wrong with America since the year 2000, has been executed, encouraged and condoned by progressives and Liberals. We are only in this mess because of Obamacare. Why are premiums going up every single year? Why did healthcare get more expensive if Obamacare was supposed to make healthcare affordable? This, and because the party in power refuses to fund healthcare and benefits for the uninvited. Here is a thought, perhaps we shouldn’t use money meant for citizens on non citizens.
All of this is out of whack. What progressives are doing on Capitol Hill, in New York, Chicago, and California is what mismanagement would look like if it could see itself in a mirror. Tax and spend, that’s all they know how to do. This is the stupidity saturated in progressive logic.
We are in the front row, watching the Destratification of America. The same for states with the highest individual overall tax burden (Hawaii, New York, Vermont: California, Maine, Connecticut, Minnesota, Illinois, and New Jersey. So many of these Democrat cities/states have such incompetent leadership, it’s remarkable. Obviously, running a city isn’t easy, but this is like someone with absolute zero financial literacy being the CFO of a company. What’s even more remarkable is that the people are voting for this over and over and over again.
In Chicago, Johnson pumps taxpayer money into public education so he and all his buddies can steal it. The more money they spend on education, the worse it gets, and for the richest country in human history, their education system is severely lacking. Teachers couldn’t run a one float parade, and it appears, have no concept of how money is made and spent.
Rob Peter to pay Paul politics, right? It’s very easy to say, “Hey, you know, all your problems in life are because somebody has more than you.” I reckon progressives want as many people to vote as possible because it’s very easy to sell, when your policy is to raise taxes and give away free shit. Looking back on it, glad I didn’t become mayor.
Staff Writer; Torrance T. Stephens
Can also purchase any of his books over at; Amazon – TTS Books.
