Posted on 10/19/2026 8:08:52 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Limoges Town Hall. Built in 1873. Burned in the riots of October 18, 2026.
America’s blue states run France’s model. They buy dependency and tax the producers until they leave. France shows where it ends. Limoges Town Hall stood for 153 years before it burned in the riots. When politicians refuse fiscal discipline, the bond market imposes it.
The UK, France, Spain and America’s blue states and cities share a governing model. Progressive ideology drives it. Its leaders misunderstand markets, monetary policy and basic fiscal mechanics. They put bloated public-sector unions and dependent constituencies ahead of the taxpayers who fund them. The chain reaction follows. Crime stays high. Businesses close. Downtowns empty. Taxes rise. Deficits widen and public balance sheets swell to unsustainable levels. Dependence on higher levels of government deepens. A self-reinforcing downward spiral.
Businesses and middle-class families leave for lower-tax states with better prospects and higher living standards. The tax base shrinks. Those who stay pay the ever-growing cost of a bloated welfare state. Socialism replaces free-enterprise capitalism. Wealth taxes and confiscation follow, imposed by dictate.
The Fiscal Trap
When spending outgrows the tax base, progressive governments reach for higher taxes and accounting maneuvers to hide the gap. Both are at work in the blue states and the counties. Middle-class taxpayers and homeowners pay the rising cost of misguided, destructive governance, driven by a Marxist-rooted ideology that trades economic growth for subsidies.
Bethesda
Bethesda, Maryland, is a wealthy liberal enclave outside Washington. It shows how a county extracts wealth from shrinking assets.
Combined state and local income-tax rates run 8.75% to 9.75%. Montgomery County’s effective property-tax rate reaches 1.26% on some homes. Maryland’s statewide average is 0.90%. One homeowner’s property-tax bill rose 15.3% in a single year. The home’s market value fell more than 5%.
The county’s take keeps climbing. Property-tax revenue rose from $1.88 billion in FY2022 to $2.65 billion in FY2027, up 41%. The Council rejected a rate increase this year, and revenue still rose 10% on reassessments alone. Montgomery County lost a net 61,177 residents to domestic migration from 2020 to 2025. That is 45% of Maryland’s entire net loss.
Mortgage rates have left the sub-4% era. Fannie Mae forecasts a 7.5% average in 2027. Higher rates push home values down. The county keeps raising taxes on them.
Then the same homeowner lost the Homestead Tax Credit, which had capped the annual increase in taxable assessment at 10%. No notice. No explanation.
Add rising medical costs, and a retiree’s savings can vanish fast in a state that ranks near the bottom for retirees. World Population Review ranks Maryland ninth-worst for retirees.
Many progressive homeowners accept the burden. They back their political tribe. They pay for their own wealth destruction and the country’s in exchange for their “morally superior” beliefs.
Washington State
Washington shows how progressive lawmakers open a new revenue stream and then widen it.
Target the wealthy few → bypass the constitution → build a ratchet → broaden to the middle class.
The state constitution requires property taxes to be uniform, and Washington courts treat income as property. That bars a progressive income tax.
Lawmakers found the workaround in 2021: a 7% tax on capital gains above $250,000, labeled an excise. In 2023 the state Supreme Court upheld it as a tax on the sale of assets, sidestepping its own precedent. The label opened the door. In March 2026, Governor Bob Ferguson signed a 9.9% tax on income above $1 million, effective 2028.
The ratchet is built in. Thresholds adjust for inflation only every other year, so inflation pulls more taxpayers in over time. The Legislature’s final bill report amended pension statutes to state that pension income is not exempt.
Unions tell members their pensions will never reach the $1 million threshold. Lowering it takes one legislative vote. Representative Ryu and other lawmakers have pointed to earlier proposals as targets, including a 2010 ballot measure that taxed income above $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for couples.
Opponents placed Initiative 645 on the November 3 ballot to repeal the tax and ban future state and local income taxes. Democratic Attorney General Nick Brown wrote a warning into the official ballot description: repeal “would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education... and human services.” Public services, including those for illegal immigrants, become the shield and the justification for higher taxes.
Ideology Over Public Safety
The collapse of civic order traces to an elite worldview built on democratic socialism, postcolonial academic theory, radical progressivism and open borders. That worldview treats the nation-state’s enforcement tools as inhumane. The left takes the deepest offense when those tools are applied to people from the Third World.
Crime in Blue Cities
Homicide is the hardest crime to hide. The highest rates in America sit in cities Democrats have run for decades. In 2024: Birmingham, 58.9 per 100,000. Memphis, 40.6. Baltimore, 34.8. New Orleans, 33.5, after a sharp drop from 2023. Detroit, 31.2. Cleveland, 30.1. The national rate was 5.0. These cities ran six to twelve times the national figure.
The red-state defense fails. Legislatures don’t hire police chiefs or decide whom to charge. Democratic mayors, councils and prosecutors do. The post-2022 declines left the gap intact. The levels remain multiples of the national rate.
The real numbers run higher. In Washington, D.C., a Metropolitan Police commander was placed on leave and investigated for manipulating crime data. The police union reported senior officers ordering units to reclassify violent crimes as lesser offenses. For a decade after a system change, Columbus, Ohio, failed to report about 8% of its cases to the FBI. Other large cities stopped submitting data for years. The rates above survived those adjustments. They are still the highest in the country.
Where federal enforcement returned, crime fell. In the year after the August 11, 2025, federal surge in D.C., homicides fell 45%, according to the Justice Department. Carjackings fell 64%. Robberies fell 33%. The Major Cities Chiefs Association recorded the same homicide drop independently: 43.9% in the first half of 2026. A body is a body. Homicide resists reclassification. Prosecutions in D.C. Superior Court rose 67%.
Enforcement works. Blue cities choose not to use it.
New York
New York refused 16,070 ICE detainer requests from the start of the second Trump administration through October 2026, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The detainers covered 52,503 criminal charges or convictions, including 131 homicides, 132 kidnappings and 1,017 sexual offenses.
City law makes this the default. Since 2014, the Department of Correction has been barred from honoring ICE detainers without a judicial warrant. The exceptions are narrow and cover prior convictions for serious crimes. A felony charge alone does not qualify.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani carries the worldview into City Hall. Empathy goes to the abstract category of “migrant.” The victims of homicide, robbery and sexual assault in New York’s neighborhoods get none. Neither do the middle-class homeowners and taxpayers who bear the cost of his wrong-headed, naive socialist policies.
Releasing people accused or convicted of serious felonies is recast as “protecting communities.” The word now excludes the residents whose safety is compromised.
The city’s first duty is to protect citizens and legal residents. It chose otherwise.
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I do not want the USA to end like France. I don’t like the “Mostly Peaceful” arson.
They already have. The year 2020 was a showcase in anarcho-tyranny.
Left? After MoFos destroy civilization, rape whoever they want and murder all infidels, what’s left? Who’s left? A mostly “peaceful” world?
All this was led by demonic professional agitators and they had a ready following in spoiled, lazy, narcissistic baby boomers. But the Revolution ended and they realized they were going to have to get jobs, except they were still lazy and stupid.
So, they went into teaching and politics. And here we are.
Pathway is already open.
Right as rain - Mayors can pressure Police Chiefs on 'small crimes' like beating up innocent citizens.. or car theft. But it's NOT easy to 'hide dead bodies'...
There’s a typo in that title. Change “will” to “have”.
Legislatures don’t hire police chiefs or decide whom to charge. Democratic mayors, councils and prosecutors do.
Bingo!
The left has long known the most effective way to gain control of a nation is via the streets. Those from the streets can also be counted on to vote for and support removal of the "establishment".
The Red-Green (strategists-foot soldiers) block is composed of natural allies with an initial common goal - chaos.
Our little town, 99.9% white, decided it was in the best interest to hire a black police chief. He was totally incompetent and he brought his criminal family with him. Graffiti, car break ins, vandalism. All hidden because it was his rotten offspring and his rotten friends doing the crime. He lasted one winter and moved. All the issues vanished when his rotten family left. Until the country faces black “diversity” and Islamic criminality it will just get worse. The odds of that happening? Zero.
Florida’s latest budget dropped by one billion dollars.
Our department of justice has a dedicated task force to investigate municipalities that radically increased spending.
And on our ballot in two weeks will be a constitutional amendment to nearly do away with real estate taxes for most homeowners.
Love my state!
And on our ballot in two weeks will be a constitutional amendment to nearly do away with real estate taxes for most homeowners.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Great! Now if your “pols” can enact legislation to rid your State of all HOA-mandated membership, rules, and regulations, my bride and I would love to purchase a summer home down there.
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