Posts Tagged ‘El Paso’

Texas vs. California Update for September 8, 2015

Tuesday, September 8th, 2015

Time for another Texas vs. California roundup:

  • Why Texas is awesome:

    First, there is no state income tax in Texas. Some people know this and some don’t—few really grasp what it means practically. It means that if you make decent money and decide to move here and rent something affordable, it’s essentially free to live in Texas. If you make $150,000 a year, your state income taxes in California are roughly $12,000 per year (in NYC it’s closer to $15,000). Or, you can put a thousand bucks a month toward your rent here. If you decide to buy, property taxes are high—but what you get for the money more than makes up for it. My editor at the Observer recently tried to cajole me into coming back to New York. Our house now—which has its own lake and is 29 minutes from the airport which never has lines—costs less than the rent we were paying for our lofted studio apartment in Midtown. Are you kidding?

    Also note the mention of walk-in gun safes…

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • 600,000 Californians have moved to Texas since 2009.
  • Another take on that data: “5 Million People Left California Over the Past Decade. Many Went to Texas.”
  • Austin and Houston are the top two relocation destinations in the country.
  • $15 billion for a fish tunnel?
  • “The average full-career California teacher receives a pension benefit equal to 105% of their final earnings. CalSTRS CEO says the plan isn’t generous enough.”
  • In 2012, Los Angeles passed some modest pension reforms for newly hired employees. Surprise! A new union contract undoes those reforms. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • California, like Texas, has a homestead exemption built into their bankruptcy laws. Unlike Texas, California’s exemption doesn’t actually protect debtors.
  • The FBI raided Palm Springs’ city hall as part of a corruption probe.
  • Mining company suspends operations at California mine because rare earths aren’t.
  • Chief of tiny California fire district to have his $241,000 pension cut. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Enviornmental idiocy and California’s drought.
  • Texas’ 2016 Fiscal Year started September 1st. “Several taxes that were eliminated on September 1 include the Inheritance Tax, Oil Regulation Tax, Sulphur Regulation Tax, Fireworks Tax, Controlled Substance Tax Certificates, and the Airline/Passenger Train Beverage Tax.”
  • Meanwhile, California’s legislature is trying to raise gas and tobacco taxes.
  • Elderly poverty in California.
  • Evidently California’s Democratic politicians stay up late at night devising ways they can make the state go broke even faster. The answer: Host the Olympics again.
  • Korean-owned businesses in LA consider relocating to El Paso. “Kim makes the case that El Paso, once home to plants for denim companies including Levi’s and Wrangler, has abundant skilled laborers, fewer regulations, much cheaper rent and direct flights from Los Angeles.”
  • A cartoon via IowaHawk’s twitter feed. That is all.
  • Scenes From The Illegal Alien Flood

    Monday, July 14th, 2014

    You’ve got to hand it to the Obama Administration: They’ve taken an issue (a flood of illegal aliens) that was most heavily impacting the border states, and found a way to piss off pretty much the entire nation.

    As Senator Jeff Sessions noted: “The crisis on our border is the direct and predictable result of President Obama’s sustained effort to undermine America’s immigration laws. As the president’s previous director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John Sandweg recently acknowledged: “if you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” Enforcement has collapsed.” Sessions further notes that Obama’s $3.7 billion request does not ask for enhanced deportation authority.

    The leftist ideologues who form the core of the administration evidently never gave up their love of forced busing, since they seem to want to forcibly bus illegal aliens into every state (or perhaps fly them to Alaska and Hawaii).

    They’re certainly pissing off people in Arizona, as well as elsewhere. “Federal officials have been dumping illegal immigrants in places like Arizona, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois without telling state and local officials beforehand and then demanding the states use their limited resources to care for the illegal immigrants.”

    Even Obama’s fellow Democrats in Texas are saying he should visit the border. Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke “added that he has been surprised by the anger he has heard toward the immigrants from many of his El Paso constituents, who “feel like we can’t take care of everyone, and these children and their families are gaming the system.’”

    And if Hispanic constituents in heavily Democratic El Paso are pissed off, how do you think people in other parts of the country feel about illegal aliens being force bused into their neighborhoods?

    And Obama has done absolutely nothing to complete the construction of the already authorized 700 miles of border fence. Despite the fact that where border fences have been completed, illegal alien crossings are down 95%.

    But doing that might keep out the illegal alien felons Obama so seems to love. Like the Mexican national who had already been deported four times being charged with molesting a 9-year old. Evidently molesting our children is one of those jobs Americans won’t do…

    And Americans know who is to blame for the problem: “Nearly half of U.S. voters believe the Obama administration has prompted the flood of illegal immigrant children at the border, and most want them sent back home right away.”

    If this is a scheme to panic Republicans into passing illegal alien amnesty, it seems to have backfired spectacularly.

    No wonder Democrats are nervous. 2014 is shaping up an awful lot like 2010, if not worse…

    LinkSwarm for July 11, 2014

    Friday, July 11th, 2014

    More news from inside the handbasket, including the dust-up in Gaza and the illegal alien surge at the border:

  • Israel hits Gaza for a third day in retaliation for yet another round of rocket attacks. Is there really anything left to say about this that hasn’t been said before? Hamas is the elected government of Gaza, they fire rockets indiscriminately against Israeli civilians and fire them from their own civilian areas to maximize civilian damage at both ends, making them legitimate military targets under international law.
  • And speaking of rockets, Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system racks up a 90% success rate. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, who adds “Suck It 1980s Lefties”.)
  • And Hamas might be receiving taxpayer money.
  • Also speaking of rockets, in Iraq ISIS seizes control of one of Saddam’s chemical weapons sites, filled with rockets full of nerve gas agents. You know, the ones liberals swore didn’t exist in 2004…
  • Food inflation costs overwhlem wage growth.
  • Get ready for the next round of ObamaCare rate shock.
  • Scabies outbreak at the border. Well, that’s just lovely. Thanks, Obama!
  • Even Democrats think Obama should visit the border.
  • Are veterans being turned away from appointments because treating illegal aliens takes precedence? Caveat: Twitter is not a source.
  • But the Obama Administration seems to be going to great lengths to prevent lawmakers from inspecting illegal alien holding facilities.
  • “We can medically treat non-citizens in a few days, maybe even hours, but not our own veterans.”
  • Planes full of illegal aliens landing in El Paso.
  • They’re even trying to house illegal aliens in Virginia.
  • The scale of the problem:

  • Important reminder: Not all Hispanic immigrants are in favor of unlimited illegal aliens coming to the country.
  • Greg Abbott criticizes Obama. “Whether it’s on the broken VA system, or our porous border, he is all talk and no action. He’s all hat and no cattle.”
  • Airlines reduce flights to Venezuela due to cash trapped in the country by currency controls. How’s that socialism working out for ya?
  • Hillary Clinton and Adultery. Then again, maybe Hillary is one of Ashley Madison’s fake profiles.
  • Hillary’s book drops off the Amazon 100 list. Evidently there are tens of millions of Democrats who found that not buying Hard Choices was, in fact, an easy choice…
  • Public employees union AFSCME severs ties with the United negro College Fund because they took money from the Koch brothers. So it’s more important to display their hate than to help black people go to college…
  • 50 colleges now charge more than $60,000 a year to attend, and Harvard, Yale and MIT are not among them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Evidently former Merrill Lynch chairman Stan O’Neal wants this to disappear.
  • El Paso vs. Juarez

    Monday, February 15th, 2010

    I’m not big on linking to The New York Times, and this is the sort of story that Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties covers more than I, but this article reveals some pretty shocking details about the drug war going on in Juarez. Like the fact that Juarez had 250 homicides. Last month.

    By contrast, in 2008 (the most recent year I was able to find annual figures for), El Paso proper had 17 murders (plus another two for “other reporting areas,” which I take to mean unincorporated parts of the county). While it’s possible that the drug war across the border has increased that some, it’s fairly shocking to find out that more people are killed in Jaurez in a week than are killed in El Paso in a year. (Indeed going through each of the individual zip codes here, it appears that there have been no homicides so far in El Paso this year.)

    Why the vast difference? A few thoughts:

    • Say what you will about U.S. government officials, but they’re at least a couple of orders of magnitude less corrupt than their Mexican counterparts. If drug cartels started killing government officials on a regular basis, Uncle Tex and Uncle Sam would come down hard. The rule of law matters.
    • Honest police officers seem to be a luxury good; rich nations can afford them, poor nations can’t. There are, of course, exceptions, but I can’t help believing that the average American cop is much more likely to be honest and responsive
    • Guns don’t cause crime. Texas has some of the loosest gun laws in the U.S. Buy contrast, Mexico’s gun controls are fairly strict.
    • Would legalizing drugs in America help? Probably. But I doubt it would solve all the problems, which are large, systematic, and endemic.

    (Note that Reason (for which I’ve penned the occasional piece) covered this same paradox early last year, though I wasn’t aware of their article when I started working on this blog post. I do not agree with their conjecture that illegal immigration actually reduces crime, but pointing out problems with their reasoning would take a longer (and only tangentially related) blog post than I’m interested in penning to reply to a year-old piece.)

    Further reading: Articles from The El Paso Times on the situation in Juarez.