Divemedic

Socialists Clueless About Economics

I keep seeing things like this, and it really bugs me:

Since 2013, I have been warning those pushing for an increase in minimum wage that it will simply cause higher prices. I, along with others, have been shouted down and told how stupid and wrong I am.

Seattle and California have a $20 per hour minimum wage. The answer is “real communism hasn’t been tried.” People in the Seattle area now have to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill. Instead of listening, the left is now demanding $33 an hour as a new minimum wage.

If $20 is good, and $33 is better, why stop there? Why not make the minimum wage $250 an hour? Then we can all be rich!

Next month, Florida’s minimum wage will increase to $14 per hour, a 61% increase from the $8.56 minimum wage in the state back in 2020. Not coincidentally, the median home price in Florida went from $306,000 in 2020 to $436,600 in 2025, which represents a 43% increase in house prices.

Rents saw similar increases. Rentals were costing a median of $1187 in 2020, and now are running about $1752 in 2025, a 67% increase.

Increase the minimum wage, and prices will increase to match. Economics, it’s a thing. The socialist blames a free market, but it’s market manipulation that is causing a huge chunk of this.

It isn’t just housing. As long time readers are aware, my Denny’s Grand Slam scale is a great example of this. That breakfast has 2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes. A good cross section of food products. I have been using the price of this breakfast in the same Denny’s location since 1997 as an indication of costs.

  • Here we are in 2025, and the cost of that breakfast is now $14.19.
  • In 1997, that breakfast cost $1.99
  • In 2009, it cost $4.99
  • In 2021, it cost $9.29
  • Just a year later in 2022, it was $11.59
  • In 2023, the rate slowed a bit. The breakfast was $11.99 in April
  • By November of 2023, the price was up again, to $12.99

So the breakfast in 2021 was $9.29, and it is now $14.19, a 65% increase. It’s almost like prices across the board are increasing to match wages. It’s a simple rule- more money (demand) chasing the same goods (supply) equals higher prices. Now there is a bit of a mismatch, because population (which is also part of demand) has increased a bit, but it still illustrates the point.

Before any of my readers respond with “well, technically…” please understand that my relatively short posts are not an exhaustive treatise on the issue. Books have been written about this, and I am not writing a book here. I had one reader respond to a recent post that mentioned income taxes with a comment that stretched into more than 600 words, explaining that I had calculated the taxes incorrectly. This post went into details about exemptions, credits, and other factors that made my numbers incorrect. My posts aren’t meant to withstand an IRS audit. I use public sources and usually post links to them, but they are still meant to be quick examples to illustrate the point. Responding with an over 600 word comment to explain one insignificant sentence in a 450 word post is just silly.

By Divemedic, ago

Florida Taxes Rising 10x Faster than Population

Property taxes in Florida are skyrocketing.

The population of the state of Florida has increased the most of any US state, but the increase in population was still only 8.2% since 2020. Where is all of the money going?

Taxpayers are being fleeced. Ripped off to pay for DEI, illegal immigrants, and for government employees to groom your children to turn them into twinks and trannies. Enough is enough.

By Divemedic, ago

Politics of Caving

For decades, the way things have worked in Washington politics is for the Democrats to demand something, then offer a quid pro quo in order to make a “compromise.” Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s how we incrementally get more and more gun control, taxes, you name it. You give me a billion in funds for my district, and I will give you something that you want. The law then becomes a behemoth of special interests, graft, and corruption.

In the latest version of this, Chuck Schumer is holding Trump’s cabinet nominees hostage in exchange for Trump caving in and giving the Democrats $1 billion in cash for their favorite charities, which thanks do DOGE we now know will be funneled to provide funding for leftist NGOs, leftist movements, and ultimately into the pockets of Democrats themselves.

Schumer reportedly asked the White House to unfreeze about $1 billion of foreign aid and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in exchange for allowing the confirmation process for additional Trump nominees to move faster.

Schumer had this to say about Trump’s nominees:

Trump “attempted to steamroll the Senate to put in place his historically unqualified nominees, but Senate Democrats wouldn’t let him.”

Then Schumer also said:

Democrats have been “working all week to try and find a reasonable path to allow bipartisan Senate consideration, provided the White House and Senate Republicans met our demands.”

If Trump’s nominees are unqualified, then how will giving the left $1 billion make them more qualified than they are now? This is a shakedown, no more, no less.

Trump isn’t part of that Washington inside circle, so he refuses to play that game. He told Chuckie to get lost. So now they are in a Mexican standoff. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

Trump tried taking the advice of “bipartisan” appointees and tried playing by the business as usual rules, and look what it got him. Years of impeachments, accusations, leaks, several assassination attempts, and most of his loyal insiders indicted and financially destroyed. So now he isn’t playing their game.

By Divemedic, ago

The Village

The left has taken the old saying “It takes a village to raise a child” to heart. Melissa Calhoun was a teacher who took to calling a child by their chosen name– that is, calling a child by a name that doesn’t correspond to their gender. (The child was unidentified due to privacy concerns) It’s been the law in Florida since 2023 that teachers cannot use any name for a child that isn’t the child’s legal name, unless they have written permission from the child’s parent. (Critics call it the “Don’t Say Gay” law) The child’s parent complained about Calhoun, and the she was fired as a result.

People who live in the area supported that teacher, who claims that she didn’t know about the law. Fifty people came out to support her. Fifty? I can draw more people than that for any number of causes. Despite the state law, the state board of education decided to reinstate her license. Parents don’t matter. The gay and leftist agenda is all that matters. They are grooming your children.

By Divemedic, ago

It Must Be Deliberate

This article has hit my feed several times recently, and the author is either deliberately being deceptive, or she is just a moron. The headline reads: “I Asked ChatGPT What Would Happen If Elon Musk Paid Taxes at the Same Rate as the Middle Class” The claim is made in the article that Musk only pays a tax rate of about 3 percent, because his net worth increased so much.

The article claims that Musk can dodge taxes by using the value of his assets as collateral to take out a loan, which isn’t taxed. They are demanding that we tax people on the unrealized gains of their assets, because rich people something something.

The author is comparing apples to Volkswagens. The middle class, for the most part, pays taxes on income. It’s right there in the name: Income Tax. In the article, you are talking about taxing the rich on their wealth. It’s two entirely different concepts. If the two were equal, the middle class would be paying taxes on the value of their house, not on what they make.

As an example, let’s say that an average guy and his wife are making the US median income of $80k. They have two kids, take the standard deduction, and are thus paying $9400 in income tax, plus Social Security, Medicare and other payroll taxes totaling $11,752. That makes this family’s effective tax rate 14.69%. However, his house is worth $40,000 more than it was last year. That $40k is an unrealized gain, and this lowers his effective tax rate to 9.7%.

Now look at Elon’s taxes. They are screaming that his wealth increased by $86 billion in 2021, but he “only” paid $8.6 billion in taxes. They don’t say what he actually made, just what he is worth. It just isn’t a proper comparison.

My opinion here is that the powers that be desperately want the ability to tax wealth. Currently, this isn’t permitted because the 16th Amendment only permits the taxing of income, not wealth. Once they get the power to tax what you own, and not just what you make, there is no limit to what all of us can be taxed on.

  • Your retirement account? 2% annual tax
  • Your house? 4% annual tax
  • You have a collectable car? taxed at 5% of its gain

The beauty of this, is that even if your unrealized gains are adjusted for inflation, the official rate of inflation is lower than the actual rate. So if they let you deduct 2% of your unrealized gains as being inflation, but the actual rate of inflation is 5%, you will pay taxes on that extra 3%.

This will make all of us poor in no time.

By Divemedic, ago

Economic Illiteracy

Read this to begin the post:

A maximum wage? So what happens when your doctor, lawyer, or accountant hits that amount in September, and decides to take the rest of the year off? You will pass a law saying that they have to work all year? OK, so those high wage people, being smart, do some math and switch to a three day, 24 hour workweek. Good luck getting a doctor on Thursday. That means doctor appointments will be even more difficult to get.

The funniest part of all this, is that it won’t affect the truly wealthy. They don’t earn wages. They make their money from investments. Cap those, and people stop investing, which will grind the entire economy to a halt.

Democrats really are economically illiterate.

By Divemedic, ago

Anchor Babies

Let’s just, for the sake of discussion, assume that birthright citizenship is actually the law. That doesn’t mean that any woman who gets creampied and pregnant before she sneaks over the border to have her child gets to stay. She isn’t the citizen, her child is. So when I see a video like the one discussed below, I have zero sympathy. She is getting deported. Her child can stay. If she wants to take the child with her, she can.

Her and her accomplice are caught stealing more than six thousand dollars in merchandise from all over the state of Florida. The police tell them that they are to be deported. One of them replies with, “You can’t deport me. I have a son who is American.”

Wrong. Your son is American. You are not. Get the fuck out.

By Divemedic, ago

Property Taxes Again

Governor DeSantis is pushing to have a ballot initiative on Florida’s 2026 ballot. The initiative would be to eliminate property taxes.

Those who oppose this claim that counties, school boards, and other government entities rely on this to provide essential services. That’s a load of crap. On average, counties only rely upon property taxes for 18% of their expenditures. Of course, if you ask the counties, they play a bit of a shell game with the facts:

“If you want to get it from sales tax, well, it’s really going to disproportionately hurt lower income,” Kroll said.

Each year Kroll’s offices collect more than $700 million from property taxes, he said.

“The majority of it goes to the school board that that’s about $248 million,” Kroll said.

The remaining revenue goes to the Seminole County Board of Commissioners and Kroll said they use most of that money to fund the budgets for the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office and Fire Rescue.

  • It isn’t going to disproportionately affect lower income. See, lower income will buy less stuff, so they will pay less in taxes. If a person spends ten times as much, they will pay 10 times more in taxes. That’s how proportionality works. What they really mean is that the poor are now paying nothing, while those who aren’t poor are paying for bullshit that isn’t necessary. There are so many carve outs and exemptions, that nearly half of the people in my small town pay NOTHING in property taxes. More on that in a minute.
  • Don’t look now, but $248 million isn’t most of $700 million
  • The Seminole county school board has an annual budget of just over $1 billion. Only 1 in 3 households in Florida has a school aged child, yet we are each paying thousands to send those kids to school, even though education is a giant failure. It’s a huge drain of resources.

Seminole County’s proposed 2025 budget is $1.2 billion, which includes a potential property tax increase for 2025. That amount also doesn’t include the money that goes to the school board, because that is a different budget. In fact, they are increasing the milage rates for property taxes by 10% over 2024 levels, as well as increasing the county gas tax from 6 cents to 11 cents per gallon, and increasing taxes on electric, cable, and telephone.

With property values climbing, there is no need to raise taxes, but they do like them some tax and spend. Government officials always like to blame the services that are popular for tax increases, even though there is plenty of room to cut other, unneeded services. People don’t want to see the fire department cut, so they fund things like free needles for drug addicted transgender unwed mothers, then cry poor when there is no money left for the fire department.

Let’s take a look at the Seminole County Sheriff’s budget: There is plenty of waste here. The SWAT team has 20 members, and spends $4.5 million a year on it. That is a lot of money. Perhaps there is some room for cuts there. The sheriff’s office is paid $4.4 million per year to provide school resource officers to Seminole county schools, but actually providing those officers costs the Sheriff’s office $9.9 million per year. The cheaper way to go is to have the schools participate in the Guardian program, allowing teachers who volunteer to go through the training to be armed at school. Most counties in Florida who are part of the Guardian program accept the grant money, but then pay cops to fill the roles while not allowing teachers to participate. It’s a HUGE waste of money to have cops there when so many teachers would do it for free. Then they are spending all of that cash, only to find out that school resource officers aren’t required to do a damned thing if, God forbid, there actually IS a shooting at their school.

I pay over $6,000 a year in property taxes. 28 percent of that goes to the county, another 33 percent to the town, 31 percent to the school board, and the remainder to police, fire, EMS, hospital, and the water authority.

Overall, the loss of property tax revenue would mean that government agencies would need to get rid of some luxury items and perhaps learn to stop wasting money. If I could vote more than once to get rid of property taxes, I would.

By Divemedic, ago

Report From the ED

Working in the Emergency Department, it’s odd that each day tends to have a theme- that is, the patients who come in tend to follow a pattern of similar complaints. Some days, it is STI’s, other days, it’s heart problems. The theme of the last few days in the hospital has been mental health and substance abuse.

The last day that I worked, there was a man that was found naked, lying in the street. He couldn’t even tell us his name. His drug and alcohol screens were all negative. There was the woman we Baker Acted, because she was working with the FBI on a child trafficking case, and some one had given her a delayed reaction drug six years ago, and now they had activated it remotely to silence her. Then there was the guy who came in with a blood alcohol level of 486.

There was a guy that came in with a knife. He looked like butterbean: Bald, 340 pounds, 6 foot 4 inches tall. He looked at you like he was trying decide how he was going to kill you. His first words to the triage nurse were, “Which one of you nurses think you can take this from me?” Two security guards and a rather large doctor tackled him. He got Ketamine and Versed to no effect. So then we held him down and gave him another 200 mg of Ketamine, followed by a dose of Rocuronium. After the intubation, he still required the maximum dose for 3 different sedatives to keep him down. Since sedatives lower the patient’s blood pressure, he also required Levophed.

Flu season is over- I haven’t seen a patient test positive for Flu in weeks. COVID seems to be having a bit of a surge. In the past two weeks, I have seen perhaps half a dozen patients who were positive for COVID. Symptoms are vague, but mild. Patients complain of stomach pain, sore throat, congestion, body aches, and other assorted mild complaints. Only one of them was running a fever. We tell them to drink fluids, take Tylenol or Motrin, and get lots of rest.

We are running far busier this summer than usual, averaging 300 patients or so per day. This is our slow season, when we typically see 200 or so per day. During the busier Flu and snow bird season, we usually have about 450 to 500 per day. Overall, we usually serve 140,000-170,000 patients per year. This year will likely surpass that.

By Divemedic, ago