Opinion: Tax revolt is an encouraging sign

You’d never expect a tax revolt to start in the blue California city of Oakland.

But a bunch of angry, over-taxed and under-protected local business people there have said, “Enough is enough.”

The owner of a restaurant has called on other Oakland small businesses to stop paying local taxes until their city starts doing what it should be doing – protecting them from a recent wave of robberies and thefts.

Big businesses like Tesla or Oracle can escape the madness and high taxes in California by moving to Texas, and they have.

But the poor guy who runs a pizza shop, gas station or a bar in Oakland or Los Angeles is trapped in a city while civilization and law and order have been breaking down around them.

Thanks to the bias and dishonesty of the TV networks and mainstream media, at least half the country has no idea just how bad things have gotten in West Coast cities like Oakland, Portland and Seattle.

Only Fox will regularly show their sidewalks lined for blocks with tents and strewn with used needles and human feces. Only Fox covers the financial strain tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are placing on their finances and police forces.

The ideologically perverse people in charge of our big cities in California and elsewhere have forgotten that the first job of any government is to protect us from being harmed by bad people who’d hurt us or take our stuff.

Democratic governments like the one in New York City are spending more time and money protecting and helping the people who are here illegally than they are on their own citizens.

They’re protecting squatters and homeless people living on sidewalks, not the homes and businesses of taxpayers.

In New York, while their city is going broke paying for their illegal “visitors’ ” food, hotel rooms and welfare benefits, government officials have kicked kids out of schools to make room for illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, New York’s politicians and government attorneys are so evil, it will not surprise me if someday they try to seize Trump Tower and turn it into the Migrant Tower.

The tax revolt of small businesses in Oakland is only a spark so far, but it could become a ray of hope for people living in our battered cities.

If a few million other businesses and taxpayers catch the Oaklanders’ Tea Party spirit, the people in charge might get the message and the upside-down world we’ve been living in for the last five years might be turned right-side up again.

Shoplifters might be arrested and imprisoned for more than four hours again. Sidewalks might be cleared of homeless encampments again.

Police might be adequately funded and deployed again. People might even be able to get the cops to arrest squatters who have taken over their homes again.

Daylight carjackings and home robberies might be reduced dramatically and women might feel safe to go to the mall again without worrying that their jewelry or smart phones will be swiped.

Oakland’s talk of a tax revolt is an insurrection that might never spread to other cities in California and elsewhere.

But it’s an encouraging sign that the harmful “woke progressive policies” liberal Democrats have put into place in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle may not last much longer.

Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at:

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