What are those Duke boys up to now?

1968 Dodge Charger

Our Southern Tier correspondent provides a photo of his new ride. 

"a semi-criminal enterprise run out of Manhattan"

Let's face it - the territory South of 5 and 20 has survived the last twenty years on public employment, the crumbs from Albany's bloated spending.  Now that our state and local governments are facing bankruptcy, that chicken has crossed the road.  Our decimated private sector can no longer support Albany's demands more and more tax money, so even public employment is shrinking.  In the past year we've suffered the latest symptom: long established restaurants are suddenly in trouble, or in many cases have already shut down.

Writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Fred Seigel makes a good attempt to explain why us hicks are so angry:

Nationally, most Tea Partiers look favorably on their state governments, but upstaters often consider Albany a semi-criminal enterprise run out of Manhattan. No wonder: the state’s executive-level leadership—its governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general—all hail from the New York City metro area, while upstate New York contains nine of the ten counties in America paying the highest property taxes as a percentage of home values...

 A patch of another upstate region, the Southern Tier, resembles Appalachia in its poverty. 

Read the whole thing, and use the email button below to share this post.

50 bucks a week

Scarier than a foot of snow on Halloween:  Your take-home pay is about to shrink by $50/week!  Since the nightly news won't mention it, we need to alert every voter we know.  Read this morning's AP story, then forward it to anyone who might miss that $2,000+ next year:

If the tax cuts were allowed to expire indefinitely, a typical family of four with a household income of $50,000 a year would face $2,900 more in taxes in 2011, according to Deloitte Tax LLP, a tax consulting firm. The same family making $100,000 a year would see its taxes rise by $4,500.

Tuesday is election day.  Click here to read the rest, and use the email button below to forward this post.

We're rich!

Mr. & Mrs. Thurston B. Howell III

Your government is raising taxes on the "rich".  That means you!  We're all about to become poorer.  It's hard to understand why nobody is talking about this.  If the price of gas goes up 4 cents, everybody freaks....

Come January 1, the average household earning between $20 and $80 thousand dollars annually will see their Federal tax bill increase by roughly $175 a month.  An average of a $2100 a year in reduced income for hundreds of millions of Americans, all because the Obama administration and a leftist Congress intend to allow the Bush-era "tax cuts for the rich" to expire on December 31st.

Joe Herring explains at American Thinker.

On the wrong track and headed for you

Finger Lakes families have had to find a way to survive during decades of job losses, rising taxes, and widespread economic decline.  Still, we are unlikely to hear anyone say "my economic woes would be resolved if only I could get to Batavia faster by train."

WSYR reports the federal government, mere days before the mid-term election, has taken another $18 million from taxpayers and given it to Big Rail:

The announcement is the latest round of funding for high-speed rail along the so-called Empire Corridor. The $18 (million) to be spent in Onondaga County is a majority of the $28 million to be spent across three projects in the Empire Corridor.

The funding came from a Federal Rail Administration grant that will formally be announced Thursday by the U.S. Department of Transportation. It was announced Monday in a joint press release from Representative Louise Slaughter, Representative Dan Maffei, Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

The political nature of this spending is analyzed by the Anti-Planner, under the heading "More Money Wasted":

Just in time to influence the November election, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has granted $2.5 billion for high-speed rail to several states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan. Underscoring the political nature of the grants, the announcements were not made by the Federal Railroad Administration, which doesn’t mention them on its web site.

Instead, LaHood phoned major politicians (all Democrats), who then announced the grants to the media. A formal announcement is expected on Thursday.

Bold added.

Gas prices rising before election

TV news reporters love to interrupt folks at the gas pump when prices are going up, but never when prices are going down. When fuel prices are dropping, we don't get to hear a driver gushing about how she'll take her kids out to eat with the money she's saving.  

Jammie Wearing Fool also obsesses about pumpside interviews, and notices a new trend:

Recall back a couple of years ago when gas prices rose precipitously. It was 24/7 news. You couldn't escape it. Live remotes from the gas pumps. Stories of how people were reduced to choosing between gas and food, gas and medicine, they had to eat dog food because gas was so high, it was Bush's fault, the greedy oil barons were conspiring to get us all, blah blah blah. An endless cacophony of gloom and doom.

I've recently noticed gas prices climbing quite a bit since I drive so much. Curiously, however, I never see any stories on the news about the rise in prices. Funny how that is when the Democrats are in charge.

Headline of the day

YNN of Rochester takes the low-key approach:

Victor Residents Disapprove of Proposed 300-Percent Tax Hike

"Disapprove?"  "They're really going to hear the wrath of God", quoth one taxpayer.