America’s Best and Worst Governors

October 16, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

In 2022, Chris Edwards released his Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors and calculated that Kim Reynolds of Iowa was the best in the nation.

That was an improvement over her 2nd-place finish in 2020.

How did she do this year (the Report Card is issued every two years)?

She held on to first place in the 2024 Report Card, thanks to policies that are making Iowa the “Florida of the North.” Here are the best and worst governors in the nation, with Reynolds on top by a comfortable margin.

Notice, however, who is in last place.

Tim Walz of Minnesota has been very unfriendly to taxpayers, earning an F thanks to a dismally low score of 19.

In his Report Card, Chris provides details on why Reynolds came in first place and Walz came in last place.

We’ll start with Table A.1, which shows that Reynolds presided over spending restraint. Walz, by contrast, increased his state’s spending burden more than seven times faster.

Next we have Table A.2. Once again, wee see a big gap between the two governors. Reynolds has dramatically reduced both personal and corporate income tax rates. Walz, however, increased Minnesota’s already-high top tax rate on households.

John Hendrickson of Iowans for Tax Reform must have suspected Reynolds would be first and Walz would be last. He compared the two governors last month in a column for Townhall. Here is some of his analysis.'

A Tale of Two States:
Conservative Gov. Reynolds vs. Socialism of Gov. Walz 

Under the leadership of Gov. Walz and a Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) legislature, Minnesota is being transformed into a California-style socialist state. This is the opposite of what is occurring in Iowa under the leadership of Gov. Kim Reynolds and its Republican-led legislature. …

Minnesota has some of the highest tax rates in the Midwest and, just as with other high-tax states, a mass exodus is taking place as families and businesses pack their bags for states friendlier to the pocketbook. …Overall, Gov. Walz and the DFL legislature increased taxes by $10 billion…

Gov. Walz and the DFL legislature are also increasing the size and scope of government by increasing spending. The governor and DFL legislature exhausted an $18 billion budget surplus. A $1.5 billion deficit is looming as a result of unsustainable spending. …Iowa seems like another world by comparison. Since 2018, Gov. Reynolds has made tax reform a priority. Iowa once had some of the highest income taxes in the nation. The income-tax rate in Iowa was close to 9 percent and the corporate tax rate was 12 percent, the highest in the nation.

Starting in 2025, however, Iowa will have a 3.8 percent flat tax and a corporate tax rate of 7.1 percent, which is scheduled to fall until it reaches a flat 5.5 percent. Gov. Reynolds also places a priority on conservative budgeting. The budget has been in surplus the past several years.

The surplus for Fiscal Year 2024 is projected to be $1.9 billion and the surplus for Fiscal Year 2025 is projected to be $2.4 billion. …In Iowa, Gov. Reynolds and the legislature removed barriers to education by establishing a strong school-choice program based on Education Savings Accounts.

Some very damning analysis, at least for those who like Walz.

I have a series of columns comparing Florida and New York and another set of columns comparing Texas and California. Maybe I’ll need to do something similar for Iowa and Minnesota.

P.S. I wrote in August about the failure of Minnesota’s class-warfare tax policy.

P.P.S. If you want to see how every state ranks for overall economic policy, I recommend Economic Freedom of North America and Freedom in the 50 States.

The Last 3 Dem Governors of New York Sexually Harassed Women

Daniel Greenfield  March 22, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

For 20 years, Democrat sexual predators have run the state of New York.

For 13 years, the terms of the last three Democrat governors, sexual harassers have held down the office. And for 20 years, Democrat attorney generals who were sexual predators ruled.

It’s quite an achievement for a national and state party that claims to protect women.

"There is a disrespect for women that this administration chronically exemplifies. After the #MeToo movement, they did absolutely nothing when it came to sexual harassment," Governor Cuomo ranted about President Trump during the Kavanaugh nomination.

That was the same year that Cuomo had halted an investigation into Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s mishandling of the Weinstein case back in 2015, six days after Cuomo got a $25,000 check from the law firm that had represented Weinstein in 2015, which had donated $10,000 to Vance.

Vance's office had also asked a judge to reduce Jeffrey Epstein's sex offender status so low that he wouldn't be listed as a sex offender. "Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?" the New Yorker recently asked. Better ask Harvey Weistein and Jeffrey Epstein about Vance’s track record.

Governor Cuomo has pivoted from condemning President Trump’s “disrespect for women” to accusing his female accusers of secretly working for Trump. The #IStandWithCuomo hashtag is being used to spread claims that Cuomo is being taken down to help President Trump.

If there’s anyone who knows how to really respect women, it’s Cuomo.

But it’s hard to complain about Cuomo sexually harassing and groping women. Let alone be surprised that Cuomo kept up the great tradition of his predecessors.

David Paterson, Cuomo's blind black predecessor, whom he ousted by digging up dirt, revealed at a press conference that he began to have an affair after his wife cheated on him. Paterson admitted to the affair, though denied having a child out of wedlock, to avoid being blackmailed.

"I think we have a marriage like many Americans, maybe even like many of you," Paterson told reporters. Considering he was addressing the media, he was probably right.

After denying that he had affairs with anyone on his staff, he eventually admitted to sleeping with a number of women, including his director of community affairs. He later reached a settlement to head off a sexual harassment lawsuit from his chief of staff whom he had allegedly hired while having an affair with her and then fired after breaking up with her.

Paterson also faced accusations of witness tampering when he called the girlfriend of a top aide after she filed a police report accusing his aide of choking her and throwing her against a mirror.

All of this was a refreshing change from his predecessor, Governor Eliot Spitzer who had picked Patterson as his Lieutenant Governor. Spitzer was forced to resign when he was caught patronizing prostitutes and allegedly used campaign funds to cover the hotel bills.

So the obvious next step was a job at CNN where his show never took off.

In what seems to be a troubling pattern with New York Democrats, one of Spitzer's prostitutes claimed that he liked choking her. The prostitute then claimed that she was pimped out by the Manhattan DA's office a few years before it was trying to keep Epstein off the sex offender list.

Spitzer had started out as the Attorney General of New York back in 1998, Cuomo took over from him in 2006, and Eric Schneiderman succeeded Cuomo in 2010.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to resign after multiple women accused him of choking and assaulting them. One of the accusers said that Schneiderman, a progressive Democrats, kept calling her his, “brown slave”. Another claimed he had declared, “I am the law”.

Sexual predators have held the office of the Attorney General of New York for 20 years from 1998 to Schneiderman’s resignation until 2018. The current officeholder is a woman.

It’s a hell of a record.

Governor Cuomo claimed that the Trump administration “chronically exemplifies” a “disrespect for women”, but it’s New York Democrats who can’t seem to stop preying on women.

All of the New York Democrat abusers were professional feminists.

“A year before Roe v. Wade, I graduated from high school, went to Washington DC, and got a job working in an abortion clinic. I learned an important lesson at a young age. If a woman does not have the right to control her own body, she is not truly equal. She is not truly free,” Schneiderman had tweeted, while he was choking women and telling them they were slaves.

On MSNBC, Eliot Spitzer claimed that he was a feminist with a record of "devout dedication to women’s rights, on the issues of choice", and urged voters to “look at the totality of my record,” and not just the parts that allegedly involved taking away a women’s choice to breathe.

"James says I’m a feminist and she’s right," Cuomo had once boasted at a Planned Parenthood event, referring to the Attorney General now investigating him for sexual harassment. "God told me I was a feminist."

Governor Cuomo had created the Women’s Equality Party as his own platform, and had read a speech attacking President Trump, in which he declared, “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. I am a Jew. I am Black. I am gay. I am a woman seeking to control her body. We are one New York​.”

Cuomo then went on to blame Jews for the pandemic while preventing women from being able to control their bodies with his meaty hands.

All part of the track record of the “national leader in the fight against sexual harassment.”

Democrat sexual predators were able to get away with their deranged behavior because they pretended to be feminists, and feminist leaders, celebrities, and the media were happy to help.

Planned Parenthood alone has provided cover for numerous Democrat sexual predators.

But New York is still something special. If Cuomo is toppled by his own #MeToo moment, that will mean that the last three Democrat governors were forced out of politics due to scandals.

It will also mean that three Democrat AGs were actually career sexual predators.

The media will carefully avoid connecting these dots because they peel back the mask and reveal the true face of their own political movement and the political faction at the top.

The Democrats don’t protect women. Like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, they prey on them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Cuomo, Democrats, New York, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

After watching Democrat governors flail, President Trump steps in to quell the riots

June 2, 2020 By Andrea Widburg

Before Monday, President Trump kept a low profile regarding the riots. He wasn’t invisible; he just wasn’t putting himself front and center. That changed dramatically on Monday. Trump scolded governors who allowed rioters to gain control in their states, announced that he would be mobilizing “all available federal resources” to end the riots in Democrat-run cities, and took a historic walk across the street from the White House (which inflamed the Trump haters).

Someone leaked to CBS News audio of a phone call that Trump had with the nation’s governors. In it, in typical Trumpian language, he essentially told them that if they don’t alpha up with the rioters and assert their top-dog status, things are going to get worse. This advice is only common sense, but some unnamed person naturally described Trump’s tone as “unhinged.”............

..............(If you really want unhinged, get a load of Biden’s Hollywood-production world in which police, when they see an imminent harm situation, are trained only to shoot people’s legs. To require cops to be sharpshooters in those milliseconds of decision-making, when the only sure shot is a body mass shot, is delusional)...........

Effective immediately, if localities refuse to act to protect against rioting, Trump will deploy the United States military, something allowable under the Insurrection Act. Trump is also dispatching soldiers and law enforcement officers to Washington, D.C., where the rioters concentrated their efforts on Sunday night............To Read More........... 

Blame governors for the coronavirus deaths in nursing homes: Goodwin

By Michael Goodwin May 16, 2020

EMTs move a resident of Cobble Hill Health

Center in Brooklyn. Gabriella Bass

An article in Nowhere Magazine
That made me shudder.

If they are honest, historians judging the American experience during the coronavirus pandemic will excoriate our barbaric failure to protect the elderly. We think of ourselves as civilized, but mindless policies and bureaucratic indifference turned many nursing homes and rehabilitation centers into killing fields.

At least 28,000 residents and workers in long-term care facilities already have died from the ­virus, according to a New York Times analysis done more than a week ago. That represented one out of every three COVID-19 deaths recorded in the United States at the time and was likely an undercount because of reporting lags and varying state methods.......... To Read More....