The LA County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to put Measure ER on the June 2026 ballot — a half-cent sales tax that would push rates past 10.25% countywide, the highest sales tax burden in the nation. The county projects $1 billion per year in new revenue, all flowing into the general fund with no legally binding restrictions, no independent audits, and no enforceable accountability.

Sound familiar? The city tried this play in 2022 with Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax. Supporters promised up to $1 billion annually for housing. It pulled in $280–$350 million — and a Harvard, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine study found that between 63 and 138 percent of that revenue was wiped out by lost future property tax receipts. The tax may have cost the city money.

Said Aidan Chao, Chairman of the LA County Taxpayers Association: "You cannot ask families already paying over ten cents on the dollar and facing a cost-of-living crisis to hand another billion dollars annually to a general fund with no strings attached." A March poll put opposition at 47%. The boardroom always wants more. Working folks are done writing blank checks.

Braddock, Pennsylvania — a steel town that once fed this nation's industrial spine — has shed nine in ten of its residents over the decades, according to a recent account from the town's former mayor. What deindustrialization and neglect built there is a monument to what happens when Washington serves the boardroom and forgets the mill.

The Founders understood that a republic rests on the dignity of its working people, not on the comfort of distant creditors. Lincoln called labor the superior of capital. When whole communities hollow out and stay hollow, the question is not whether the market spoke — it is who rigged the auction.

The long memory of the American experiment does not forget Braddock. Duty demands we ask which policies, which trade deals, which captured regulatory agencies wrote that town's obituary — and whether we have the honor to write something different.