Every so often a story comes along that’s built entirely on a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding is so widely shared that the story just sails along unchallenged. Gas prices are one of those stories. It comes back every time crude oil drops and the pump doesn’t drop as fast: somebody, somewhere, must be ripping you off. It’s an emotionally satisfying story. It is also almost entirely wrong — not wrong as a matter of opinion, wrong as a matter of how the machine actually works.

Even the President of the United States gets in on the game.

This past week the charge came straight from the President, who suggested Big Oil was gouging drivers and floated sending the Justice Department after them. So I spent some time on-air walking through the actual mechanics, and my listeners — who are sharp, and who ask better questions than most people I’ve ever cross-examined — kept pulling the thread further. What about American oil that never crosses an ocean? Do other commodities work like this? Lumber?

Those questions turned out to build, one on top of the next, into the whole picture of how prices are really set in a modern economy. So here it is, start to finish. Once you see it, you’ll never fall for the gouging story again — and better yet, you’ll be able to explain it to the person at dinner who’s still falling for it.

Part One: The Pump Is a Conveyor Belt, Not a Light Switch

Start with the thing everybody gets wrong first: who owns the gas station. The sign out front says Shell or Exxon or Conoco, and people assume that means an oil giant is setting the price. It almost never does. That’s a brand license and a fuel-supply contract. The overwhelming majority of the roughly 145,000 fueling stations in this country are owned by independent operators — a family, a small local chain, a convenience-store company. The person setting the price on that big lit-up sign is a local businessman, not a boardroom in Houston.

And that local operator prices his gasoline off exactly one number above all others: what the last tanker truck of fuel cost him. He bought that load a few days ago at a certain wholesale price. He has to sell it, replace it, and clear a few cents a gallon in the middle to keep his lights on. He cannot sell today’s gas for less than what tomorrow’s replacement load is going to cost him, or he’s out of business by Labor Day. So the price on the sign is anchored to inventory he already paid for — not to the crude oil ticker scrolling across your television this morning.

That’s the whole reason for the famous “lag.” When crude drops, that cut doesn’t teleport to your neighborhood. It has to travel down a long, physical chain, and every link takes time. The barrel itself is slow — an oil tanker crosses oceans at roughly the speed of a bicycle, so cheaper crude leaving the Persian Gulf today doesn’t reach a U.S. port for weeks. The refinery is a price-taker, not a price-maker: it pays market rate for whatever cargo shows up at its dock, and the crude it’s running right now was bought and paid for a couple of weeks ago, when the price was higher. And your corner station is still pricing off the last truck it took delivery of.

Add it up and you don’t get a switch you can flip. You get a real decline that arrives in stages. Which, by the way, is exactly what’s happening — pump prices have fallen substantially over the past month even as the expensive, already-purchased crude works its way through the system. If the oil companies were secretly conspiring to hold prices high and rob you blind, they’d be doing a spectacularly bad job of it, seeing as your fill-up has gotten meaningfully cheaper.

One more thing worth knowing, because it’s the part that never lands: Washington has leveled the “price gouging” charge at the oil industry for fifty years. Every spike, out come the podiums and the subpoena threats. And in all those decades, all those federal investigations, the number of times a probe actually found a major oil company guilty of gouging is zero. Not “rarely.” Zero — because the thing they keep hunting for isn’t there. The pump price is the output of a slow, physical, competitive supply chain, not a conspiracy.

Part Two: But What About Our Own Oil?

Here’s where my listeners got sharp on me, and it’s a genuinely good objection. Fine, tankers are slow — but a huge share of the oil we refine comes right out of Texas and North Dakota. It never touches a ship, never crosses an ocean, never goes anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz. So why should that oil be priced off some international event? Why does a barrel out of the Permian Basin cost whatever the ships from the Gulf are charging?

The answer is the single most important idea in this whole essay, so let me put it plainly: oil is a globally traded, fungible commodity, and its price is set on a world market — not by where any particular barrel happens to come out of the ground.

Picture yourself as a producer in West Texas. Say it costs you forty dollars to get a barrel out of the ground, and the world price is seventy. Are you going to sell it to the refinery down the road for forty-five out of neighborly goodwill? Of course not. You’ll sell it for seventy — because if that Texas refinery won’t pay the going rate, you’ll put your barrel on a ship and sell it to a refinery in Rotterdam or Singapore that will. Your oil can go anywhere. And precisely because it can go anywhere, it commands the world price no matter where it actually ends up.

That’s what fungible means in practice. A barrel of comparable crude is a barrel of comparable crude whether it’s sitting in Midland or Riyadh — the molecules don’t know their zip code. And nobody on earth sells a globally tradeable asset for less than the global market will pay. That’s not gouging. That’s just refusing to leave money on the table, which is a thing no business does voluntarily.

There’s a nuance worth having in your back pocket. American crude isn’t priced off Brent, the international benchmark, exactly — it’s priced off WTI, West Texas Intermediate, our domestic benchmark, which usually trades a few dollars below Brent. So our oil is often a touch cheaper than the imported stuff. But WTI and Brent move together. They’re two corks bobbing on the same ocean. When the world price rises or falls, both benchmarks rise and fall in near-lockstep, because they’re pricing the same global supply-and-demand picture. Being priced off WTI doesn’t insulate our oil from world events — it just means it rides the same wave at a slightly different height.

So when the Strait of Hormuz seizes up and Brent spikes, WTI spikes right alongside it, even though not one barrel of West Texas crude goes anywhere near Hormuz. That feels wrong to people. It isn’t. It’s simply what a single global market for a fungible good does. And — this is the part to hold onto — it cuts both ways. As the world price comes down, WTI comes down with it, and our domestic oil gets cheaper right alongside the imported oil, for the exact same reason. You don’t get to keep the domestic discount when prices are high and then complain about the linkage when prices fall. It’s one market, and it works in both directions.

Part Three: Oil Isn’t Special — It Just Has the Biggest Sign

The last question my listeners asked was the one that ties the whole thing together: does anything else work like this? Lumber?

Yes. Oil isn’t a weird exception. It’s just the commodity you happen to stare at twice a week on a giant sign by the road. Nearly everything that gets dug up, grown, or refined at scale prices the same way.

Take lumber, since somebody asked. A two-by-four is a two-by-four. A sawmill in Oregon isn’t selling to the local yard at some cozy neighbor price while the rest of the country pays more — it sells at whatever the market is paying, because that same wood can be loaded on a railcar and sent to Denver or Atlanta or Toronto. You watched this happen in real time during COVID: lumber futures went vertical, quadrupled, and the two-by-fours at your hardware store shot up right alongside them, even though the wood didn’t suddenly cost more to grow. Demand spiked, mills couldn’t keep up, and the futures price dragged the physical boards up with it. Then the frenzy broke and it all came back down. Nobody was gouging. Same machine, different plank.

Lumber even has its own version of the pump lag. The futures crash, but the boards already sitting in your local yard were bought at the peak, so retail prices come down after the futures do — days or weeks later. Same conveyor belt, different product.

Once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere. The energy complex — crude, gasoline, heating oil, natural gas. The metals — gold, silver, copper, aluminum; traders literally call copper “Dr. Copper” because it’s so globally priced and so tied to industrial demand that it forecasts the world economy. And the agricultural commodities — wheat, corn, soybeans, coffee, sugar, cattle. This is where it gets vivid: a drought in Brazil spikes your coffee, and a war in Ukraine — one of the world’s great wheat baskets — raises the price of bread in Kansas, even though Kansas grows plenty of its own wheat. Why? Because Kansas wheat can be sold onto the world market, so it commands the world price, and the world just lost a huge chunk of supply. Same exact logic as West Texas crude spiking over an event in Hormuz. The grain never left Kansas. The price moved anyway.

There’s even an exception that proves the rule, and it’s worth knowing because it’s the tell. Natural gas is harder and far more expensive to ship across oceans — you have to super-chill it into LNG — so it’s priced more regionally than oil. American natural gas is genuinely, dramatically cheaper than European or Asian gas, precisely because it can’t freely flow to the highest bidder the way a barrel of oil can. That’s the whole principle in one data point: the easier something is to transport, the more perfectly it obeys one world price. The harder it is to move, the more local its price stays.

The One Rule Underneath All of It

Strip away the specifics and every bit of this reduces to a single idea. If a thing is standardized enough that one unit is interchangeable with another, and portable enough to be shipped to the highest bidder, then it stops having a local price and starts having a world price. Geography stops mattering. The barrel, the board, the bushel, the ingot — none of them get sold to your neighbor for less than a stranger across the ocean will pay.

That’s not a conspiracy against the American consumer. It’s the same neutral mechanism that raises your coffee over a Brazilian drought, your bread over a war in Ukraine, your framing lumber over a building boom, and your gasoline over trouble in a strait most Americans couldn’t find on a map. It also, quietly and less dramatically, lowers all of those things when the world’s supply-and-demand picture eases — which is exactly what’s happening at the pump right now.

So the next time someone tells you the oil companies are gouging you because gas didn’t drop fast enough, you’ll know the real answer. The barrel is slow. The refinery already bought expensive oil. Your corner station is pricing off its last delivery. And the price of all of it is set not by anyone’s greed but by a global market doing precisely what it has always done. It’s not a scandal. It’s a calendar and a map.

Your family, friends, coworkers, may believe there is a Big Oil conspiracy. There isn’t. Share this with them.

Take one less trip. And I had a small, uncharitable thought, which was that I already know what my day looks like, it includes an errand I didn’t even have last night, and I am not turning the car around. I’d also bet the mortgage that nobody else reading that sign at seventy miles an hour rerouted their day either. Everyone on that highway is, definitionally, already on the highway. That train has left the station.

I could’ve left it there — filed it under harmless nanny-state noise and gone about my day. But I got curious, because that little sign makes two claims. One: that it changes what you do. Two: that what you do changes the ozone. It turns out there’s real, peer-reviewed science on both. And on both counts, the sign doesn’t just come up short. It comes up backwards.

Count one: the sign may be making the road more dangerous

Set the ozone aside for a second and think about the whole category of these electronic message boards — the ones engineered to grab your attention and nudge your behavior.

In 2022, two economists — Jonathan Hall at the University of Toronto and Joshua Madsen at the University of Minnesota — published a study in Science, one of the two most prestigious peer-reviewed journals on the planet. Not a think tank, not an advocacy shop. Science. They looked at Texas, which had accidentally run a near-perfect experiment: the state posted its running annual traffic-death count on message boards, but only one week out of every month. Same signs, same roads, same drivers. On, off, on, off.

So Hall and Madsen pulled every crash in Texas over eight years — 844,939 of them — and compared the weeks the death-toll message was up against the weeks it was down, matched by hour and day of week, controlling for weather and holidays. (The study is here; a plain-English write-up from Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies is here.)

The finding: in the stretch of road right after the signs, crashes went up when the message was showing. On the roughly six miles following the boards, crashes rose 4.5 percent during display weeks. To put that in terms you can feel, the researchers said the effect was about the same as raising the speed limit three to five miles an hour. That is the safety cost of a safety message.

And the details are what tell you it’s real. The bigger the number on the sign, the worse the effect — the most extra crashes came in January, when the board displayed the full prior-year total, the scariest figure. It got worse exactly where drivers were already loaded up: heavy traffic, complex interchanges, stretches with multiple signs. And it showed up as multi-vehicle crashes, not single-vehicle ones — the fingerprint of a distracted driver drifting half a lane into the car beside him rather than sailing off into a ditch.

The authors had a phrase I love: the messages can be too salient. So attention-grabbing that they crowd out the one thing you actually need to be doing, which is driving the car. Your attention is a budget, not an infinite resource, and every word on that board is a withdrawal.

Now, in fairness — and you’re smart enough to catch me if I skip this — that study was about death-toll signs, the deliberately alarming kind. An ozone advisory is not a body count, and I’m not going to tell you “Take One Less Trip” is killing anyone. That’s not the claim.

The claim is narrower and it holds: any sign that isn’t telling you something you need in order to drive — a curve, a wreck ahead, ice on the bridge — is a tax on your attention that buys you nothing back. A seatbelt reminder at least points to an action you can take in that car, right now. A lecture about your travel habits, read at highway speed by someone whose day is already locked in, is pure cost with nothing on the other side of the ledger. And as we’re about to see, there really is nothing on the other side.

Count two: your one trip cannot move the ozone

Here’s the thing most people don’t know about ozone, and it changes the whole picture. Ground-level ozone doesn’t come out of your tailpipe. You don’t emit it. It gets cooked — formed when two ingredients, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, bake together in hot sunlight. That’s why it’s a summer problem, and why the sign was up on a hot day.

So the real question isn’t how much people are driving. It’s where the ingredients come from. And on the Front Range, the answer will surprise you, because mostly it isn’t your car.

Start with the background. On an average summer day here, about 58 of our parts-per-billion of ozone is already baked in before anyone starts a car — it either blew in from elsewhere or it’s left over from ozone cooked the day before. The federal limit is 70. Sit with that: roughly 58 of our allowable 70 is spoken for at dawn. That background is wildfires, emissions from trees and plants, lightning, pollution drifting in from other countries, even ozone sinking down out of the stratosphere. (CIRES, the CU-Boulder environmental research institute, walks through the accounting here; the EPA’s Front Range background breakdown is here.) You cannot idle your engine less and fix the stratosphere. It is not on the menu.

Then the local stuff. Up in the northern part of the range — Boulder toward Fort Collins — the dominant local driver isn’t cars at all; it’s oil and gas operations out in the Wattenberg field. One study of high-ozone days near Boulder found that transport from the oil-and-gas areas accounted for about 65 percent of the elevated ozone, while the entire Denver urban corridor — all of us, all our cars — accounted for about nine. (That research is summarized here.)

And here’s the most car-unfriendly number I could find — the one that gives the sign every possible benefit of the doubt. The big FRAPPÉ field study, the one our own state legislature cites, found that on bad ozone days, motor vehicles and oil-and-gas each contribute somewhere around 30 to 40 percent of the local ozone, with the rest coming from power plants, industry, and the airport. (NCAR’s summary is here.) But read “motor vehicles” carefully. That’s the entire regional fleet — every commuter, every semi, every delivery van and bus, all of it, all day, added together. That whole mountain of metal is a third of the local piece, which is itself a slice of a total that’s mostly background.

So where does your one skipped trip land in that? It doesn’t. It’s a rounding error inside a rounding error inside a number that’s mostly not even from around here. No ozone monitor in Colorado will ever twitch because I skipped a run to the hardware store. And — here’s the tell — the people who wrote the sign know it.

How do I know they know? Because the state’s own campaign, Simple Steps. Better Air. — the program that sign is quietly steering you toward — doesn’t ask you to stop driving. It asks you to skip two car trips a week. Two. And it doesn’t promise that’ll fix anything; it calls it “doing your part.” That’s the vocabulary of a gesture, not a result. If skipping trips actually moved the needle, they’d ask for a lot more than two a week and they’d tell you exactly what you’d get for it. They ask for almost nothing because almost nothing is what it does.

For the record, this wasn’t even a severe day. The Ozone Action Day Alert in effect this morning had a high ozone reading of 77 on the Air Quality Index — squarely “Moderate,” below the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” line. The urgency of the signage and the reality of the air were not on speaking terms.

So am I supposed to feel guilty? No. The guilt is the product.

Put the two halves together and look at what that sign actually is. It belongs to a category that the best evidence we have says can make the road less safe — and it’s asking you to take an action that the best evidence we have says will not measurably change the thing it names. A safety sign that undercuts safety, drafted into a fight where your personal contribution is a rounding error. And you paid for the sign, and you paid for the study that could have warned them, and you’ll pay for the next sign too.

I’m not even mad about the ozone. I’ll confess I sort of like the smell of it — that sharp, clean, after-the-storm smell. (I like the smell of jet fuel, too, so don’t seat my nose on the jury.) My point is bigger than one sign on one hot morning.

This is what a certain kind of government does instead of governing. It can’t lower the background ozone. It isn’t going to have the hard fight over the oil-and-gas fields, because that fight is hard and has constituents on both sides. So it does the one thing that’s easy and free and demands nothing of anyone in charge: it puts up a sign, shifts the responsibility onto you, and lets you feel a little bad for driving to work. It’s a mood ring bolted to a gantry. It lights up, tells you how you’re supposed to feel, and does precisely nothing to the air.

Don’t feel guilty. Feeling guilty was the whole point. Take the trip.

There’s a number going around this week, and it sounds like a moral indictment. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology maintains something called the Living Wage Calculator, and my local morning shows have been running with its findings: here is what it costs to actually live, here is the wage a family would need to cover it, and — the unspoken close — isn’t it a scandal that nobody is requiring employers to pay it?

Let’s take that seriously, because the people making the argument are not stupid and the underlying data is not junk. But I also want to walk you through why the conclusion everyone is gliding toward — just mandate the living wage — doesn’t solve the problem it claims to solve. It builds a machine that can never be satisfied.

First, their claim

Let me give the other side its best case, because I think you persuade people by beating their strongest argument, not their weakest.

The MIT tool is legitimate. It was built in 2003 by Dr. Amy Glasmeier, an economic geographer at MIT, originally as an alternative to the federal poverty line, which everyone agreed was a blunt and dated instrument. What it does is genuinely useful: it adds up the real cost of a basic life in a given place — housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and taxes — and converts that into the hourly wage one full-time worker would need to cover it without leaning on public assistance.

And the gap it reveals is real. In large stretches of this country, the legal minimum wage does not come close to what it costs to keep a roof overhead. That is not a talking point. That is arithmetic, and conservatives do themselves no favors by pretending the cost-of-living squeeze is imaginary. It isn’t. People feel it because it’s true.

So if you stop the story there, the policy writes itself. The floor is too low. Raise the floor to match the cost. Done.

Except the story doesn’t stop there. That’s where it gets interesting.

One correction before we go further

A quick housekeeping note, because the morning-show version flattened it. You may have heard the study described as one figure that covers most states, with a slightly higher figure for a handful of others. That is not what the MIT data is. It is the opposite of that.

The calculator produces a separate figure for more than three thousand counties — because rent in rural Mississippi and rent in Honolulu have almost nothing to do with each other. A companion analysis this year pegged what a family of four needs at roughly twenty-five dollars an hour in Mississippi and nearly seventy in Hawaii. When you hear “the state living wage,” someone has usually averaged a whole state’s counties into a single number for convenience. Useful shorthand. But it is not a national wage waiting to be enacted, and that distinction matters for everything that follows.

Where does the number come from?

Here is the question the cheerful version of this story never asks. That living-wage figure — where does it come from? It is not revealed truth. It is constructed. It is built, line by line, out of local prices: rent, groceries, the cost of childcare, the premium on health insurance. The number is, at bottom, a measurement of what things cost where you live.

Hold onto that, because it’s the whole ballgame: the living wage is a measurement of prices. Now watch what happens when you take a measurement and turn it into a mandate.

The loop

Suppose you do it. You order every employer in the state to pay the calculated living wage. Labor is now more expensive. And businesses, as a rule, do not absorb higher costs out of civic affection — they pass them along. The diner’s breakfast costs more. The daycare raises its rates, and notice the daycare gets hit coming and going, because its single largest expense is the very labor you just made pricier. Meanwhile you’ve put more dollars into more pockets in the same town, chasing the same fixed supply of apartments, so rents drift upward too.

And now look at what you’ve done. Rent and childcare are two of the largest line items in the living-wage calculation to begin with. You have just driven up the precise costs the number is built from.

So next year MIT runs the numbers again. And the cost of living has gone up — partly because of what you did. The living wage recalculates, higher. Which means the wage you mandated is now, once again, below the living wage. So the pressure builds to mandate again. And around it goes. You have indexed the cure to the disease and then wondered why the patient never recovers.

The objection — and the honest answer

Now, I’ve learned to argue against myself before the other side does it for me. So let me put the strongest objection on the table, because if I don’t, a competent economist will.

They’ll say: you’re overstating the loop. Labor is only a fraction of what any good or service costs — often a quarter or less. Raise wages ten percent and prices do not jump ten percent, because wages aren’t the whole price. The circle doesn’t close. You don’t end up exactly back where you started.

And that objection is correct. It does not fully close. I’ll concede that cleanly, because overclaiming is how you lose the smart half of the room.

But here is the answer: it doesn’t have to close to trap you. It only has to move. This was never a perfect circle. It’s a ratchet. Each turn, you lift wages, prices follow part of the way, the target slides upward, and you’ve gained far less real ground than the headline suggests — all while congratulating yourself that the problem is handled. Partial pass-through doesn’t rescue the policy. It just makes the failure slower and harder to see.

The part nobody mentions: housing

And then there’s the cruelest piece, the one the morning segments skipped entirely. Housing is the single biggest driver of that whole number. Rent moves the living wage more than anything else on the list.

You cannot wage-mandate an apartment into existence. When you push more dollars into a town without adding one new unit of housing, you have not made housing affordable. You’ve simply called an auction. Same number of apartments, more money bidding for them, prices up. The family you set out to rescue is still outbid — they just have more zeros printed on their losing ticket. We told ourselves we were raising their standard of living, and instead we handed the gain straight to their landlord.

Treat the patient, not the thermometer

So what’s the honest verdict?

The MIT number is a thermometer, and a fairly good one. It is telling us something true and uncomfortable: in much of the country, what things cost has outrun what people earn. Don’t shoot the messenger; the reading is accurate.

But you do not cure a fever by holding a match under the thermometer. If the disease is the price of housing and the price of childcare, then the treatment is more housing and more childcare — supply — not a wage chase that bids up the very things we are already short of. Zoning reform, permitting reform, getting government’s boot off new construction, easing the regulatory load that makes childcare scarce and expensive: these are slower, less satisfying, and far harder to fit on a chyron than “mandate a living wage.” They also happen to be the things that actually move the number in the right direction.

Measure the fever. By all means. But let’s treat the patient — not the thermometer.

_{I received this email from one of my readers who happens to be a friend, so I knew if I didn’t honestly analyze it he would hound me until I did. Thanks. Now I had to spend part of last night and this morning re-analyzing what I wrote. :). But I do think it deserves an answer. Posting it here without attribution but with his words intact, because his pushback makes this piece sharper:}

<sub>Quote from your sub-stack on this topic: “here is what it costs to actually live, here is the wage a family would need to cover it, and — the unspoken close — isn’t it a scandal that nobody is requiring employers to pay it?”

The logic flaw in the question “isn’t it a scandal that nobody is requiring employers to pay it?” is that the so called “living wage figure” is that it is the total HOUSEHOLD INCOME for a family of four.

So what if the prospective employee is a a single man or woman? Should ten employer be required to offer that single individual the same salary as the head of a 4 person household? And if not, since the prospective employer is not allowed to inquire about your marital status during an employment interview, how would they know what starting salary they would legally be required to offer you?

And if you did hire a single young man at a $22 per hour rate of pay and 6 months later he marries his pregnant girlfriend and she gives birth to twins, would the employer be obligated to immediately increase his rate of pay to $38 per hour while others in the store doing the exact same job are still making the original $22 per hour rate of pay?

And since that living wage figure is a HOUSEHOLD INCOME figure, how does it account for that fact that more than half of all middle class households have multiple adult wage earners in the home?</sub>

Here’s my answer.

First, the credit, because he earned it. He is right that the MIT figure is built from a household budget — the calculator totals a family’s basic needs, divides by the number of working adults, then divides by 2,080 hours. So the published number is contingent on an assumed family structure, and you genuinely can’t bolt a household-contingent figure onto an individual job posting. An employer can’t ask marital or family status, couldn’t lawfully price an offer to it if they could, and would hit the twins problem the moment anyone’s life changed. As a point about whose number it is, it’s airtight.

But here’s why I’m not going to let that become the whole conversation — and this is the part I want everyone reading to remember:

It doesn’t matter who’s right about the income figure. The mechanism is identical either way.

Whether the “right” number is the single adult’s wage or the family-of-four’s wage, whether you mandate the high figure or the low one — the loop runs the same. Raise the wage floor by law, and you’ve raised the employer’s labor cost. The employer raises prices to cover it. Those higher prices raise the cost of living for everyone in town — including the cost of the very things the “living wage” is calculated from: rent, groceries, childcare. So next year the living wage recalculates higher, and the floor you just set is underwater again. Mandate, prices rise, costs rise, mandate again. Round and round.

That’s my argument, and notice what it survives. It survives being wrong about the income figure. It survives my friend being smarter than me about household composition (he is after all an engineer, and I’m only a recovering lawyer — I know my limitations). Pick any number you like off that MIT chart and feed it into the mechanism: you get the same loop. This is simply the minimum-wage argument every economist already understands, wearing a new “living wage” costume. We just dressed up an old idea in nicer clothes and acted surprised to see it.

So the household-income point, fascinating as it is, is a debate about which number goes into the machine. My article is about the machine. And the machine doesn’t care.

Now — since I’d never deny an engineer his correction — two technical notes, because he’ll check:

One: there’s no single “the” living wage. MIT publishes twelve family types, from one childless adult to two adults with three kids. The television report I heard quotes the four-person version, which is why it sounds like “the” number. It’s twelve numbers, which only makes “just mandate it” more incoherent — mandate which?

Two — and this one I’ll hand him with both hands, because it tightens his own best point: the figure isn’t total household income. It’s already a per-worker number. MIT assumes the second adult earns the same wage and divides the budget by the number of earners. That’s exactly why the single-breadwinner numbers look so huge — one income carrying the whole load doesn’t get divided down. (Which means the twins example slightly overstates the jump. The logic is bulletproof; the arithmetic got away from him by a hair. Call it even — the engineer caught the better counterpoint, the lawyer caught the better math. I’ll take that trade and frame the receipt, especially when it comes to the math!)

And his closing question is the real prize, so let me answer it head-on: he notes the figure assumes a second earner, then asks how it squares with the fact that so many households have multiple earners. It squares badly, and that’s the point. Roughly half of all married couples are dual-earner — about two-thirds of those with kids (BLS, 2025, before he asks). So a mandate tied to the one-earner figure would overpay that dual-earner majority, while one tied to the two-earner figure would crush the sole breadwinner. There is no single number correct for both households doing the identical job. The same math that makes this a useful thermometer makes it impossible as a thermostat — it reads the temperature fine, but try to set the room with it and it breaks.

Keep the emails like this coming. They’re better than most of what I write. But I would never tell him that.

A company that already controls about sixty percent of its entire market just spent more than a decade — and a meaningful chunk of a two-billion-dollar-a-year research budget — reinventing a product that already worked perfectly well. And then it had the nerve to charge you nearly double for the new version.

Your gut says that’s insane. Or worse, that it’s a con. I’m going to argue it’s neither. It may be the single smartest thing happening in American business right now. And once you see how the machine actually works, you will not walk down the detergent aisle the same way again.

The company is Procter & Gamble. The product is Tide. The new thing is a laundry tile — a flexible three-inch white square that feels like a little pad of fabric, called Tide evo. And here’s the detail that ought to make every Coloradan sit up: they test-marketed this thing right here, starting in 2024. You and I were the lab rats. We just didn’t know it.

First Let’s Defend P&G

I want to steelman P&G before I lay a glove on them, because their case is genuinely strong — stronger, frankly, than the cynics in the comment section give them credit for.

P&G teaches every new hire a single mantra on day one: if anybody is going to disrupt a business we’re in, it had better be us. This isn’t some recent MBA-deck slogan. The grandson of one of the founders ran the company a hundred years ago and said the same thing about soap — that if somebody was going to replace the soap business, it had better be Procter & Gamble, because the competition was working hard to do it and P&G needed to get there first.

And they have lived it. In 1946, as they were about to launch the original Tide, somebody warned the CEO that the new product might cannibalize sales of the company’s own two existing detergent brands. His answer was two words: Go ahead. They knowingly ate their own lunch. Over the next ten years, their earnings tripled.

Underneath all of it sits a theory I find genuinely fascinating. P&G’s chief innovation executive — a man who’s been there nearly forty years — describes every consumer product as riding an S-curve: introduction, growth, maturity, decline. He says most products peak around fourteen years and then begin to die. Which means even a product selling beautifully is already on the clock. A dominant brand isn’t a fortress. It’s a melting ice cube.

Listen to how this man thinks. He says if P&G were in the chocolate business, they wouldn’t just hand you a low-sugar candy bar. They’d invent a “cocoa chewable gummy you never thought was possible.” Read that twice. He is not trying to satisfy a demand that exists. He is trying to manufacture a desire you do not yet have.

How? Here’s the part that’ll stay with you. At P&G’s research campus in Mason, Ohio, there are rooms with two-way mirrors, and researchers in lab coats sit behind the glass and watch people in bathing suits take showers — counting how many pumps they take from the shampoo bottle, watching how they react to the suds. They have studied human beings doing laundry so closely that they have catalogued more than fifty separate steps a person goes through to wash a single load.

Fifty steps. To do laundry. Somewhere there is a scientist with a doctorate and a parking space who owns step number thirty-one.

So that’s the defense, and it’s formidable. These are not fools chasing a gimmick. This is the most sophisticated persuasion operation on the face of the earth, and it is pointed directly at your hamper.

Share

But Let’s Ask Questions

Because there’s a question P&G’s own people can’t quite answer. A consultant quoted in P&G’s own coverage — someone who openly admires the engineering — admits she can’t figure out what problem the tile actually solves. It isn’t obvious, she says, which unmet need it uniquely fixes. Especially at roughly double the price of pods.

Double. Let’s do the arithmetic, because I’d rather have a real number than a feeling. A box of 42 tiles runs $19.99 — about 47 cents a load. A tub of 42 pods runs $12.99 — call it 31 cents. You are paying a fifty-percent premium for the privilege of washing your clothes with a square instead of a blob.

And what did the earliest customers ask for? Go read the reviews. They are begging for perforations — so they can tear the tile and use less. Sit with what that means. For seventy years, liquid detergent gave you the one thing the pod and the tile quietly take away: control. You decide the dose. Big load, more soap. Light rinse, less. The great forward march of innovation handed you a fixed portion and called it progress.

And the green pitch — the lighter cardboard box, the smaller footprint, save the planet? A sharp-eyed customer noted the tiles are still made of the same polyvinyl alcohol as the pods, the stuff most water-treatment plants can’t actually break down. Into the waterways it goes, tile or pod.

So by now you’re sure you’ve caught them. It’s a racket. Marketing in a lab coat.

Share Heckuvajob

And here’s where I surprise you

It isn’t.

The research firm tracking the Colorado rollout found something it called “highly incremental.” In plain English: people didn’t switch from pods to tiles. They added tiles. They kept the liquid for the everyday wash and bought the tile for the curtains and the couch cushions. The market didn’t shift from one product to another. It grew. P&G didn’t carve a bigger slice out of the pie. They baked a bigger pie.

Nobody got tricked. P&G manufactured a desire that did not exist on Monday, and by Friday enough of us had decided it was real that there was suddenly a brand-new market worth millions. That is not fraud. That is the engine of a free economy doing precisely what it was built to do — and doing it better than anyone else alive.

This is the part the “what a scam” crowd and the “tax the greedy corporations” crowd both miss, and they miss it for the same reason: they assume that if a company profits from a desire, the desire must be fake and the customer must be a victim. But nobody held a gun to a single Colorado shopper. The people who bought tiles looked at 47 cents a load, looked at the convenience, and decided — freely, individually — that the trade was worth it to them. The ones who didn’t, didn’t. The market is just the running tally of millions of those private verdicts. No central planner could have told you in advance whether the laundry tile would live or die. Only we could. And we did it one cart at a time.

What Does It Mean?

The wheel did not need reinventing. It rolled fine. It rolled fine for seventy years. And we went out and bought the new one anyway — at 47 cents a load — because the best-funded, most patient, most scientifically rigorous persuasion operation on planet Earth spent ten years and a slice of two billion dollars a year quietly deciding that you and I needed something we never once asked for.

And the kicker — the genius of it — is that you’ll only ever discover your detergent needed improving because they told you so.

So before you file this under “soap” and move on, go look at the rest of your house. The toothpaste with the new microbeads. The razor that somehow grew a fifth blade. The phone that is mysteriously new every September. The car trim package you didn’t know was a tier until the salesman named it. Same machine. Same fourteen-year clock. Same relentless, brilliant, faintly unsettling engine, humming away behind every ordinary object you own.

It was never really about the laundry.

Heckuvajob is reader-supported. If this made you look sideways at your own pantry, forward it to the person in your life who reads detergent labels.

If you read Part I, you’ll remember where it ended: Europe got there because the public and the political class finally fused. America’s problem is that ours never did. To see why, start with a man who told a lie so cleanly, so repeatedly, and so officially that it eventually became an article of impeachment.

For most of President Biden’s term, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sat in front of Congress and the cameras and told the American people that the southern border was “secure.” Not improving. Not challenging. Secure. He testified that the Department of Homeland Security had “operational control” of the border — a phrase that has a specific legal definition under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, a definition that requires the prevention of all unlawful entries. As an attorney, I want you to sit with that. “Operational control” is not a vibe. It’s a statutory term with a meaning, and the meaning is the opposite of what was happening.

What was actually happening: somewhere north of eight million illegal crossings over the course of the administration. Mass parole programs that functioned, in practice, as a side door around the legal immigration system. A “Remain in Mexico” policy dismantled. A border-wall contract terminated. And a Secretary going before the people’s representatives to assure them it was all under control.

The House of Representatives impeached him for it in February 2024 — the first Cabinet secretary impeached in nearly 150 years. The second article of impeachment was, in essence, you lied to us. The Senate, controlled by his own party, dismissed the charges without a trial in April 2024. You can argue, as Mayorkas’s defenders did, that a policy disagreement isn’t a high crime. Fine. But here’s what no Senate vote could dismiss: the American people had been watching the same border the whole time, and they did not believe him. They could see it. And in November 2024, they delivered their own verdict — one that no procedural motion could table.

Subscribe now

The Verdict They Actually Rendered

This is where I need you to follow along carefully, because the conventional conservative telling of this story is true but incomplete, and the incomplete version is exactly what’s going to get us beaten in the next round.

The conventional telling: Americans watched the open border, watched Mayorkas lie about it, and elected Donald Trump to shut it down. All true. In June 2024, a CBS News/YouGov poll found 62% of Americans favored deporting all undocumented immigrants. That is a landslide-level number on a question that, a decade earlier, would have been treated as fringe. The border verdict was real, it was decisive, and it was bipartisan at the margins in a way that terrified the Democratic Party.

But watch what happened next — because this is the whole ballgame.

The border verdict and the enforcement verdict are two different things, and the American public split them apart almost immediately. Look at the polling once ICE actually went to work:

• General support for deporting people here illegally held steady — Marquette found 56% still favoring it in early 2026; other polls put the floor at 56-61%. The principle survived.

• But approval of ICE’s actual conduct collapsed. A February 2026 Marquette Law School poll found 60% of Americans disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job. A Reuters/Ipsos poll the same month found roughly 60% saying ICE has “gone too far.”

• And here’s the number that should stop every conservative cold: a YouGov poll found 46% of Americans support abolishing ICE outright, against 41% opposed. More Americans wanted to abolish the enforcement agency than wanted to keep it. Among independents — the people who decide elections — 47% backed abolition.

So the same electorate that voted 62% for deportation in 2024 was, eighteen months later, narrowly in favor of abolishing the agency that does the deporting. That is not hypocrisy. That is a public that wanted the result of enforcement without the sight of it. As one immigration analyst put it bluntly: most Americans favor immigration enforcement — they just don’t want to see or hear much about it.

That sentence is the most important thing in this essay, so let me say it in my own words and put my name on it: Americans wanted the border closed. They did not sign up to watch federal agents drag their neighbors out of restaurant kitchens on the evening news. The verdict was for the policy. The flinch was at the picture.

Share

What Turned the Flinch Into a Rout

A flinch is natural. A flinch can be managed. What turned this flinch into a genuine collapse in support for ICE — the thing that has functionally capped how far America can go — was a specific sequence of events and a specific machine for amplifying them.

The events: in January 2026, federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in the Minneapolis area within roughly a month of each other. Not illegal aliens. American citizens. Whatever the facts of each case turn out to be — and they’re disputed; a Marquette poll found Americans split 37-62 on whether the Good shooting was justified — the political effect was instant and enormous. Every poll showing the ICE collapse was taken in the shadow of those shootings. The enforcement abstraction had become a body, and a name, and a citizen’s name at that.

That is the raw material. Now here is the machine that shapes it.

The Framing, and How It Holds the Line

Here’s where the dominant media does its most consequential work — not by lying, exactly, but by choosing the frame.

Recall the European vote from Part I. When the Parliament passed its deportation regime, the international and American press reflexively reached for one comparison, over and over: “ICE-style.” “US-style.” The European left branded their own continent’s law as the Americanization of cruelty. Stop and appreciate the strangeness of that. The same media ecosystem that treats American immigration enforcement as a national disgrace has now exported “ICE” as the global shorthand for repression. ICE has been transformed from a federal agency into an adjective — and the adjective means the bad thing.

That framing does specific, identifiable work, and it runs on a predictable cycle:

First, it isolates the image from the principle. Coverage of enforcement overwhelmingly centers the raid, the cuffs, the crying family, the citizen caught in the dragnet — the 11% of Americans who, polls show, support family separation, never the 56% who support deportation as a concept. The principle is popular; the picture is not; so the coverage is wall-to-wall picture. The result is a public that supports the policy in the abstract and recoils from it in every concrete instance it’s shown.

Second, it elevates the hardest cases to stand for the whole. The U.S.-citizen shootings, the wrongful detention, the sympathetic dreamer — these become the representative image of enforcement, while the deported criminal alien with a violent record, who polls at 73% support for removal, vanishes from the frame. You are shown the exceptions until the exceptions feel like the rule.

Third — and this is the European connection — it pre-loads the word “deportation” with “far-right.”Notice that in the EU coverage, the law is “far-right-backed” even though it passed with the votes of the mainstream center-right and a chunk of liberals, and even though majorities of European voters support it. When a policy commands majority support but is labeled “far-right” by the press, the label isn’t describing the policy’s position on the spectrum. It’s describing the press’s position on the policy. And it’s doing something sneaky: it’s telling the persuadable middle that to want this thing is to be that kind of person.

That is the mechanism. That is how the framing holds the line. It doesn’t have to convince a majority that deportation is wrong — it never could; the majority supports it. It only has to make the enforcement of deportation feel shameful, extreme, and un-American enough that no political coalition can sustain the public, visible, large-scale interior enforcement that Europe just authorized. It caps the ceiling. It keeps the flinch fresh.

Share Heckuvajob

Why This Keeps Us a Few Exits Back

Here is the through-line to where we started, and where tomorrow’s larger argument picks up.

Europe just went “full deportation” — offshore return hubs, 24-month detention, the works — and it did so as an emerging cross-partisan consensus. The center-right adopted the enforcement position outright. The liberals split. The socialists couldn’t hold their own members. The result, ugly chants and all, was a law that now sits in the realm of the normal and the durable.

America cannot currently do that, and the reason isn’t that Americans disagree on the border. They don’t — they rendered a crushing verdict on the border, and that verdict still holds in the polling today. The reason is that America’s enforcement verdict was split off from its border verdict and then worked over, relentlessly, by a media frame that makes the act of enforcement feel like the thing decent people oppose. In Europe, “send them back” became a parliamentary majority. In America, “abolish ICE” became a 46% plurality — in a country that voted 62% to deport.

That gap — between what Americans decided about the border and what they’ll stomach watching us do about it — is the exact distance between Brussels and Washington on this issue. Europe closed that gap because the cultural shock was severe enough, and the political realignment honest enough, to fuse principle and enforcement back together. America hasn’t, because our enforcement was severed from our principle and then framed into something we’re supposed to be ashamed of.

We are not a different country than Europe on immigration. We are the same country, a few exits back on the same highway, still arguing in the car about whether we’re even allowed to want what we already voted for.

Part I laid out what Europe just did and why the cordon sanitaire finally fell. This is the American mirror: we reached the same verdict on the border, but ours was severed from its enforcement and worked over until acting on it felt shameful. Europe fused principle and enforcement. We pulled them apart. Whether we ever put them back together — and what it would cost if we did — is the question the next few years will answer for us, the same way this past week answered it for them.

Leave a comment

Share Heckuvajob

There is a particular sound a political consensus makes when it breaks. Just yesterday, on Wednesday, June 17, in the chamber of the European Parliament in Brussels, that sound was a chant: “Send them back. Send them back.” Far-right MEPs were on their feet. Progressives shouted “Shame on you” across the aisle. And in between those two camps sat the people who actually decided the thing — the respectable center-right, who had just done something they spent two decades swearing they would never do.

They voted with the far right. On purpose. To pass a law the public has been demanding for years.

What happened in Brussels this week is the political class finally catching up to a public that left it behind a long time ago. And it tells us something uncomfortable and clarifying about where the United States is — and isn’t — on the same question. Europe, for once, gives Americans some hope for ourselves.

The Verdict First, Then the Evidence

Here’s my argument: The European backlash against mass third-world migration ran ahead of the political class, not behind it. The voters reached the tipping point first. The politicians are now scrambling to ratify a verdict the electorate already delivered. And the mechanism by which they’re doing it — mainstream conservatives abandoning their cordon around the populist right — is the single most important political development in Europe right now.

What the Law Actually Does

Strip away the dueling chants and the press-release adjectives, and you have a concrete piece of legislation. It’s called the Return Regulation by the people who wrote it and the Deportation Regulation by the people who hate it. Same law. Watch which name a source uses and you’ll know where they stand before they finish their first sentence.

It replaces a toothless 2008 directive, and here is the number that explains the entire thing: across the European Union, the return rate for rejected asylum seekers stands at no more than 28%. Some sources put the figure of executedorders closer to 20%. Read that again. When a European country goes through its full legal process, adjudicates an asylum claim, rejects it, and issues a formal order for that person to leave — roughly four out of five times, nothing happens.The order is issued. The person stays. The law is a piece of paper.

That is not a border-security problem. That is a credibility problem. A legal system that issues orders it cannot enforce is not a legal system; it’s a suggestion box. I can tell you there is nothing that corrodes public faith in the rule of law faster than laws that apply to some people and evaporate for others.

Subscribe now

The new regulation attacks that gap directly:

• “Return hubs” in third countries — the flagship measure. The EU can now transfer irregular migrants to detention and processing centers outside the bloc’s territory while their removal is arranged. Italy already pioneered the model with two centers in Albania.

• Detention periods of up to 24 months.

• Removal of the automatic suspensive effect of appeals — meaning an appeal no longer automatically freezes a deportation. This is the procedural heart of the 80% failure rate.

• Permanent exclusion orders for individuals deemed a security threat.

• Expanded entry bans and stiffer penalties for non-cooperation.

• Home searches to locate individuals subject to removal.

You can support these measures or oppose them. What you cannot honestly do is pretend they’re untethered from a real, measurable, four-out-of-five-times failure of the existing system.

Share

The Vote: Watch the Defection

Two separate votes were taken, and the distinction matters.

On March 26, 2026, Parliament adopted its negotiating mandate — its opening position — by 389 to 206, with 32 abstentions. Then came negotiations with the Council (the member-state governments). And on June 17, 2026, Parliament gave final approval to the agreed text by 418 to 218, with 30 abstentions.

But the raw numbers aren’t the story. The coalition is the story.

This passed on what’s called an “alternative majority” — and you need to know the players. The center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in Parliament and the home of figures like Ursula von der Leyen, abandoned its traditional governing partners. Instead of governing with the Socialists (S&D) and the liberals (Renew Europe) as it has for years, the EPP reached right — to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the hard-right Patriots for Europe (PfE), and the further-right Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), which includes parties the EPP has publicly treated as untouchable, including Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, and France’s National Rally.

For European politics, this is the equivalent of a continental taboo being broken on live television. There is a term of art for the wall mainstream parties built around the populist right: the cordon sanitaire — literally a “quarantine line.” The unwritten rule of post-war European politics was that respectable parties do not formally cooperate with the nationalist right.

That wall just came down on migration. A Greens negotiator called the vote “the death knell of what remained of the cordon sanitaire.” She’s right. An ECR leader, Sweden’s Charlie Weimers, put it more triumphantly: “The era of deportations has begun.”

Here’s the detail that should make every establishment defender squirm: leaked WhatsApp group chats, reported by the German press agency dpa, revealed that EPP representatives were coordinating directly with far-right lawmakers — including the AfD — to draft and pass this legislation. After the committee vote, participants reportedly traded messages of gratitude for the “excellent cooperation,” complete with applause emojis. The cordon wasn’t breached by accident in the heat of a floor vote. It was dismantled deliberately, in private, by people who still publicly deny doing it.

Share Heckuvajob

The Opposition Argument – It Will Sound Familiar

I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending the opposition has no case. They have one, and it deserves a fair hearing before I take it apart.

The critics — the Socialists, the Greens, the radical left, refugee organizations like ECRE, the UN’s human rights apparatus — make essentially four arguments:

One: It’s cruel and legally dangerous. The S&D’s vice-president warned the law “risks normalising legally questionable practices that would have been unthinkable in the EU only a few years ago.” Offshore detention, 24-month confinement, the possibility of detaining minors, deportation to centers outside any EU court’s jurisdiction — critics call this the architecture of “a Guantánamo outside the EU.”

Two: It’s the Americanization of European migration policy. The left has explicitly and repeatedly branded this “ICE-style” and “US-style” deportation. That comparison is a deliberate rhetorical weapon, and we’ll come back to it.

Three: It legitimizes the far right. By adopting the populists’ policies, the argument goes, the EPP doesn’t defeat the AfD and National Rally — it validates them, normalizes them, and ultimately hands them the keys. As one liberal MEP put it, the EPP “has chosen to shift permanently to the right, chasing and legitimising the positions of the far right.”

Four: It won’t even work. This is the cleverest objection, and the one conservatives should take most seriously. Critics argue return hubs are a legal house of cards that will collapse in years of litigation — “a lot of propaganda, few concrete results, and the foreseeable risk of a new wave of legal disputes that will ultimately block its implementation.”

Those are the arguments. They won’t hold.

The Dismantling

On cruelty: The “unthinkable” framing only works if you ignore what’s already happening to native populations and to migrants themselves under the current system. A regime that issues 80% phantom deportation orders isn’t humane — it’s a system that lures people across the Mediterranean on the promise that a rejection means nothing, that drowns thousands in the attempt, and that warehouses the survivors in legal limbo for years. There is nothing compassionate about a law that doesn’t mean what it says. Enforcement is the humane position, because predictability is what actually deters the deadly journey.

On the “Guantánamo” and “ICE” framing: This is rhetoric, not analysis. Processing rejected asylum claims in third-country centers is not indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists. The conflation is designed to import American political baggage into a European debate where it doesn’t fit. Which brings me to the most important point.

On “legitimizing” the far right — this is the argument that eats itself. The establishment’s theory is that adopting popular policies “legitimizes” the populists. But think about what that claim actually concedes: it admits the populists’ policies are popular. If deporting people who have no legal right to stay is a “far-right” position, and it commands majority support across Europe, then the word “far-right” has stopped describing an extreme and started describing the electorate. You cannot simultaneously argue that a policy is dangerously extremist and that the mainstream had to adopt it to keep up with voters. Pick one.

The cordon sanitaire didn’t protect Europe from extremism. It protected a policy consensus from accountability. For twenty years it let the establishment treat majority public opinion on immigration as illegitimate by definition — as something that respectable people simply don’t act on. The wall wasn’t around the far right. It was around the voters.

On “it won’t work”: Maybe. The litigation risk is real and conservatives shouldn’t wave it away. But “the courts might block it” is an argument about implementation, not principle — and it’s a tacit admission that the democratic branch has already decided. If the elected Parliament and the elected governments of the member states both want enforcement, and only the unelected judiciary stands in the way, that’s not a refutation of the policy. That’s a preview of the next fight.

The People Got There First

This is the spine of my whole argument, so let me put the numbers on the table.

The political class did not lead this. It followed. The public moved first, and the data is unambiguous:

• In the United Kingdom, the share of Britons saying immigration over the past decade has been “too high” climbed to roughly 70% by January 2026 — up from 55% in 2020. That’s a 15-point swing in six years, in the direction of restriction.

• In Ireland — a country with no recent tradition of immigration politics — concern about immigration jumped 8 percentage points in a single six-month Eurobarometer cycle, from spring to autumn 2025.

• Across the bloc, majorities now back harsher migration policies, and the member-state governments — not just the Parliament — had already endorsed the Return Regulation’s principles before the final vote. Five countries, led by Germany, had drawn up a preliminary roadmap for return hubs before Parliament finished voting.

• Germany’s own conservative interior minister became one of the loudest champions of the offshore-hub concept — in a country whose entire post-war identity was built on not doing this kind of thing.

When the famously pro-migration consensus countries — Ireland, Germany, Sweden — are the ones turning, you are not watching a fringe. You are watching a center of gravity relocate. The politicians who broke the cordon sanitaire this week didn’t create that shift. They surrendered to it.

Why Europe Is Ahead of Us — and Where America Actually Is

Here’s the part that should interest American readers most.

In one specific sense, Europe is now ahead of the United States. They have suffered a more acute cultural shock — denser populations, faster demographic change, sharper integration failures, a string of events that turned abstract policy into kitchen-table fear — and their politics has now produced an actual deportation enforcement regime with continental scope. The philosophy that championed unfettered migration is reaping, on its own native populations, exactly what it sowed. And the European center-right has done something the American center-right has mostly refused to do: openly govern with the populist right rather than against it.

But I want to resist the easy applause line, because the American situation is genuinely different.

The United States elected Donald Trump in significant part on immigration — after four years of a demonstrably open border and a Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, repeatedly insisting the border was “secure” while the numbers said otherwise. That was a real verdict, and a decisive one. But it was a verdict rendered through one election, on one man, inside a two-party system that absorbs and neutralizes populist energy rather than forcing the kind of open, multi-party realignment we just watched in Brussels.

America hasn’t reached Europe’s tipping point on deportation specifically. We are still litigating — politically and legally — whether large-scale interior enforcement is even acceptable. Europe just answered that question with a 418-vote majority and an offshore-hub statute. We have an administration that wants to enforce and a public that’s deeply divided on how far that should go. Europe has arrived at something closer to a cross-partisan settlement: even the liberals split, even the socialists couldn’t hold the line, and the governing center adopted the enforcement position outright.

That’s the real distinction. In America, immigration enforcement is still a partisan fight — yours or mine, red or blue. In Europe, it’s becoming a consensus — which is precisely why the left is panicking. A policy you can lose an election over is survivable. A policy that becomes the new normal, endorsed by the respectable center, is an extinction event for the worldview that opposed it.

The Verdict

So here is where I come down.

What happened in Brussels on June 17 was not the far right hijacking Europe. It was European democracy doing something democracies are supposed to do but had been structurally prevented from doing for twenty years: translating a sustained, measurable, majority public preference into actual law. The cordon sanitaire was sold as a defense against extremism. It functioned as a quarantine around the voters. When it finally fell, it didn’t fall to a coup. It fell to an election result — to many of them, accumulated over a decade, until even the most cautious establishment party in Europe concluded that defying the public was the greater risk.

The chant of “send them back” is ugly, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the ugliness of the loudest voices in the room shouldn’t distract from the substance of what the room actually decided: that a legal order which is ignored four times out of five is not a legal order, and that a continent has the right to decide who enters and who remains.

Europe got there first because Europe was hit harder, sooner. America is on the same road, a few exits back, still arguing in the car about whether we should even be driving. We would be wise to watch what’s happening at the destination — both what works, and what the litigation does to it — because the question Europe just answered is coming for us, too. It always was.

The verdict is in. The only thing left to argue about is the sentence.

A note before you go: Europe didn’t reach this point because Europeans are braver than Americans, or further gone, or more callous. They reached it because the cultural shock got severe enough that the public verdict and the political class finally fused.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for those of us on this side of the Atlantic. Americans rendered their own verdict on the open border — loudly, decisively, at the ballot box. For once, Europe is out ahead of us on enforcement. So why hasn’t the United States gone where Europe just went? Did we not reach the same tipping point — or did we reach it, and something stepped in to hold us back?

That’s the question I’ll take up in Part II: the Mayorkas lie, the verdict American voters actually rendered, and the machine that’s been working overtime to make sure we never act on it.

Leave a comment

There is a word for what a person does when they knowingly destroy the thing that keeps them alive. We don’t usually apply it to governments. After watching California burn down a second refinery in six months, I think it’s time we did.

Let me be precise about what I mean, because this is not hyperbole and I’m not interested in cheap outrage. I mean that the state of California is methodically dismantling the infrastructure that fuels its own economy, its own airports, and the military bases that defend the West Coast of the United States — and it is doing so on purpose, with full knowledge of the consequences, in service of a green-energy fantasy pushed by the gospel of the Church of the Climate Activists that even their own congregants are now quietly trying to walk back. That is not policy. That is self-destruction with a press office.

Here is how I know.

Share

The facts, undisputed

A few weeks ago, Valero shut down its Benicia refinery, pictured above. One hundred forty-five thousand barrels a day of refining capacity, gone. And it didn’t go quietly into that good night the way the company first promised. Valero cancelled its crude oil contracts and pulled the plug roughly four months ahead of schedule. That is not a company easing toward a graceful exit. That is a company sprinting for the door.

This is the second major refinery California has lost in about six months. Phillips 66 closed its Los Angeles refinery last October. Put the two together, and California has deleted around 17 percent of its in-state refining capacity in under a year.

The U.S. Department of Energy frames the longer arc even more starkly: the number of operating refineries in California has collapsed from 23 in 2000 to roughly a dozen today, heading toward eleven. In the most populous state in the union — the fourth-largest economy on the planet — the machines that turn crude into gasoline and jet fuel are being switched off one by one.

California has deleted roughly 17 percent of its refining capacity in under a year — on purpose.

“It’s just the market,” they’ll tell you

Now, the state has a story ready for you, and I want to give that story its best possible day in court before I take it apart. Because that’s how you actually persuade someone — you don’t strawman the other side, you steelman it, and then you dismantle it.

Here is their strongest case. California gasoline demand is genuinely declining, because the state is phasing out the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. These are aging refineries serving a shrinking customer base. The oil companies are just reading the room and making a rational business decision. As one environmental advocate put it, this is all about their profit margin, their bottom line.

Fine. That’s the argument. Now watch how quickly it falls apart.

Because look at what actually drove these companies out. Valero absorbed an $82 million fine from California’s air regulators, then took a $1.1 billion write-down on the value of its California refineries. In the company’s own words, California’s regulatory and enforcement environment is the most stringent and difficult in North America. Not in the country — in North America.

And Phillips 66? It announced its closure two days after Governor Newsom signed a bill handing the state even more power to regulate refineries. Two days.

That is not a coincidence. That is a confession in the confessional of their church.

You don’t get to be surprised

So let me lay out the theory of the case, as plainly as I can make it.

You cannot spend a decade deliberately strangling an industry — legislating away its customers, imposing the most expensive compliance regime in North America, levying record-breaking fines, mandating government-dictated fuel stockpiles — and then stand at a podium and act shocked when that industry packs up and leaves.

That is not a market failure. That is the policy working exactly as designed. You built the cage. You don’t get to act astonished when the animal walks out the door you left open. The “greedy oil company” story only holds together if you squeeze your eyes shut to the fact that California pulled every lever it had to make refining unprofitable — and then expressed shock when refining became unprofitable.

And here’s how you know they knew all along: they’re quietly trying to undo it. Even Democrats in Sacramento are now floating proposals to fast-track drilling permits and pause the very refinery profit cap they once bragged about passing — anything to keep the fuel flowing. When the people who built the machine start frantically throwing it into reverse, that, ladies and gentlemen, is consciousness of guilt.

The part that should frighten you

Everything up to this point has been about gas prices and politics. Set all of it aside, because there is a larger argument here, and it does not care which party you belong to. It is about whether this country can defend itself.

California is an energy island, and I mean that almost literally. There are no meaningful pipelines carrying refined fuel over the Sierra Nevada. So when California loses refining capacity, it cannot simply truck the shortfall in from Texas. The federal Energy Information Administration says so plainly: the West Coast cannot easily access fuel supply from the rest of the country.

So where do the replacement barrels come from? Overseas. From Asia. From refineries in India and South Korea — among the only foreign refineries that can even produce California’s unique gasoline blend. We are now importing the fuel that keeps California moving across the Pacific Ocean.

Now connect the last wire, because this is the one that matters most. Travis Air Force Base. Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. Lemoore. Miramar. By the Department of Energy’s own accounting, more than 30 U.S. military installationssit inside this fuel ecosystem. These bases have historically run on jet fuel from California refineries an hour’s drive away. Take those refineries offline, and the fuel for American military aviation on the West Coast now has to arrive by tanker — from India, from South Korea.

Think hard about what we just did. We took a domestic strength — fuel made here, on our own soil, beside our own bases — and converted it into a foreign dependency. And not just any dependency: one that runs through the most contested shipping lanes on Earth.

We took fuel made beside our own military bases and made it depend on tankers crossing the most contested waters on the planet.

A blockade. A shipping-insurance crisis. A confrontation over Taiwan. Any one of those now degrades the fuel supply to American forces on the West Coast without an adversary firing a single shot at U.S. soil. That is the textbook definition of a self-inflicted strategic vulnerability.

And the fragility runs deeper still. The handful of remaining refineries are old. We are talking about a 56-year-old furnace stack that separated and crashed to the ground because it had never been inspected — it couldn’t physically be reached to inspect it. A thin spot on a furnace tube at another plant. A contractor opening the wrong valve at a third. With redundancy this thin, it no longer takes a policy decision to bring the West Coast to its knees. It takes metal fatigue. One fire. One old pipe. And the whole system — civilian and military alike — wobbles.

The honest caveat

I’m going to give you one honest caveat, because I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending the other side has nothing.

There are serious analysts, including economists at Stanford, who argue the hit to the price at your pump may be smaller than the doomsayers claim. Their reasoning is that California was already buying its marginal barrel of fuel from imports anyway, so losing a domestic refinery shifts more volume offshore without necessarily spiking the sticker price at the station.

I’ll grant them that. But notice what the argument quietly concedes: that we were already dependent on imports — and now we are about to be a great deal more dependent. The pump price was never the real story. The real story is resilience: whether the fuel keeps flowing when something on the far side of the world goes wrong. And on that question, every closure makes us weaker. There is not an analyst alive who can argue with a straight face that losing domestic refining capacity makes you more secure.

The conclusion

So why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Here is the uncomfortable answer: we aren’t doing it to ourselves by accident. A government in Sacramento decided, deliberately, that these refineries should die. It wrote the plan. Refinery closure isn’t a bug in that plan — it’s the goal. The only thing the planners neglected was a plan for what comes after: for the fuel, for the bases, for the slice of the entire West Coast’s refining capacity they just set on fire.

The evidence is in. They knew the refineries would leave — they engineered it. They knew the fuel would have to come from overseas — their own federal data said so. They knew the military runs on this fuel — the bases are right there on the map. They did it anyway. And now they are quietly trying to reverse the very policies they campaigned on, hoping you won’t notice.

Here is the cruelest irony of all. While Sacramento lights the match, Washington is running for the extinguisher. The federal government has moved to restart California oil production through the Santa Ynez unit specifically to blunt the supply risk the state created. Read that again. We have reached the point where the federal government is actively working to undo the damage a state government is inflicting on its own people.

That is not energy policy. That is energy surrender — dressed up as virtue, marketed to you as progress. California went from energy dominance to energy dependence, did it on purpose, and called it leadership.

If a foreign enemy had shut down a fifth of our West Coast refining capacity and forced our military to import jet fuel from across the Pacific, we would call it an act of war. California did it to itself and called it a climate plan.

Take this article to the next person who tells you this was just the market at work — look them in the eye, walk them through the evidence, and let them try to explain away the smoking gun.

Leave a comment

Four dollars back for every dollar spent. Twenty-five million dollars in community impact from a $6 million program. Independent research.

Sounds great. Let’s find the research.

Subscribe now

The “Independent” Research Is the Transit Lobby’s Own Study

The “$4 for every $1” figure has two primary sources in the transit policy world, and Douglas County almost certainly drew from one or both.

The first and most widely cited is a study commissioned by the American Public Transportation Association — APTA. Specifically, the study was directed by the Transit Development Corporation, the education and research arm of APTA itself, and administered by the National Academies through the Transportation Research Board as part of a program designed to fund quick-response studies on behalf of APTA and its committees.

APTA is the transit industry’s own trade and lobbying organization. They paid for a study concluding that transit investment is economically beneficial. Calling that “independent research” requires a creative definition of the word “independent.” It’s the equivalent of the American Petroleum Institute commissioning a study on the economic benefits of oil and gas, then a county government citing it as independent energy research.

What did the APTA study actually measure? It analyzed $232 billion in transit investments — major urban infrastructure: light rail, subways, commuter rail, bus rapid transit in dense metro corridors — and projected a 4-to-1 return in economic activity over a 20-year horizon. The economic multiplier was built on network effects, congestion reduction across entire metro areas, transit-oriented real estate development, and expanded labor market access through high-frequency service. None of those dynamics exist in a free rideshare app operating in Highlands Ranch.

The second possible source is a 2026 University of Illinois Chicago study that examined on-demand transit specifically and reached a similar conclusion. This one is a closer analog — but only superficially. The UIC research examined transit systems in rural areas and communities with populations under 50,000, quantifying benefits in places where riders have no private transportation alternative and access to healthcare and employment would otherwise be impossible.

Douglas County has a population approaching 400,000. It has Uber. It has Lyft. It has the highest median household income of any county in Colorado — approximately $139,000, placing it among the top 15 wealthiest counties in the entire nation. The UIC study was designed around communities with no market alternatives. Applying it to Douglas County — where the private market was already solving the problem before the government decided to undercut it — is not a methodology. It’s a marketing move.

Share

The Researcher Himself Said This Doesn’t Mean What Douglas County Says It Means

Here is the detail that turns the county’s FAQ from misleading into something considerably worse.

The lead researcher on the UIC study — Dr. P.S. Sriraj, Director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago — explained directly and on the record what the $4 figure does and does not mean:

“In reality, the $4 return does not translate into revenue flowing back to the state. Instead, that $4 reflects the overall impact on society because of that dollar investment.”

The person who produced the number said it does not translate into revenue flowing back to anyone. It is a theoretical accounting of diffuse social benefits — improved mobility, better health outcomes, reduced strain on social services, workforce participation. These are real benefits worth counting in a comprehensive social analysis. But they are not money. They do not fund the program. They cannot offset the program’s cost. The researcher said so, unambiguously, in the same interview where he described his findings.

Douglas County’s FAQ takes that number — specifically designed to capture non-financial social value — and uses it to imply financial self-sufficiency: “$25 million in community impact” presented as justification for a $6 million spending commitment. The sleight of hand is elegant but not accidental. “Community impact” sounds like a return. The reader is supposed to conclude the program generates value exceeding its cost. What the underlying research actually says is that some diffuse, non-monetized social benefits may be roughly four times the program’s cost — and none of that flows back as revenue to offset a single dollar of the $6.3 million annual tab.

One more detail worth noting: APTA has already revised the number upward. Their latest 2026 study now claims $5 in economic returns for every $1 invested in public transit — up from $4 in previous iterations. When the multiplier gets adjusted whenever a new advocacy document is needed, you are not looking at science. You are looking at advocacy in a lab coat, and Douglas County just cited it as gospel.

Share Michael D Brown

Why This Is Not Just a Douglas County Story

If you live in Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Westminster, Thornton, or anywhere else in the eight-county RTD service area, you have been reading this as someone else’s problem. It isn’t.

RTD collects a 1% sales and use tax across the Denver metro area — that single revenue stream funds roughly three-quarters of RTD’s operations. Every time you buy something taxable in the metro, a penny on the dollar goes to RTD. RTD then distributes some of that money through partnership grants to local programs. One of those local programs is Link On Demand.

Here is the context that reframes this entire picture.

RTD is currently facing a $250 million annual budget shortfall against a $1.5 billion budget. Operating costs are rising faster than tax revenue. Federal relief funds that sustained the agency through the pandemic years are gone. RTD is cutting jobs — what management is calling an “operations realignment.” RTD’s fare revenue has collapsed from $154 million annually to approximately $57 million — a $100 million drop — as ridership has fallen by 40%. Transit advocates tracking the agency’s trajectory say that between 2024 and 2026, RTD will have run three consecutive years of deficits totaling nearly a billion dollars.

RTD is, by any reasonable measure, a transit agency in distress.

And simultaneously, RTD is writing partnership checks to Douglas County — the wealthiest county in Colorado, the 7th wealthiest in the nation, with a median household income of $139,000 and a poverty rate of 3% — to subsidize free on-demand rides for any resident who wants one. Not for seniors who have no other means of transportation. Not for the disabled, for whom ADA-mandated paratransit services already exist. For anyone. Including, as a driver explained to CBS News, employees commuting to Charles Schwab and DISH Network.

If you live in Denver and you wonder why bus routes feel squeezed, why the agency is cutting management positions, why RTD’s CEO is warning of “difficult decisions” — part of the answer is that RTD’s partnership program is sending your sales tax money to fund free Uber rides in the metro area’s richest suburbs. That is not a Douglas County story. That is your story.

What “Independent Research” Actually Requires

There is a broader principle worth naming, because this pattern appears constantly in local government spending debates and almost never gets called out.

The argument structure works like this: a government agency wants to spend money on a program. It finds a study — usually commissioned by an industry group, a trade association, or a vendor with a financial interest in the outcome — that shows a positive return on that category of spending. It describes the study as “independent research.” It applies the study’s multiplier to its specific program. It announces a projected “community impact” that exceeds the program’s cost. It declares the program fiscally sound.

Not one link in that chain requires the study to have been conducted on anything resembling the program being justified. Not one link requires the multiplier to apply to the specific community. Not one link requires the “impact” figure to represent actual revenue rather than theoretical social value.

Douglas County’s FAQ is a textbook example. The study was commissioned by the lobby. It modeled urban rail infrastructure. Its lead author explicitly disclaimed the revenue implication. The county applied it to suburban microtransit in the nation’s 7th-wealthiest county. And nobody asked a single follow-up question.

Until now.

The Verdict

Douglas County’s “independent research” is a study commissioned by the transit industry’s lobbying arm, modeling urban rail infrastructure, whose lead researcher explicitly said the $4 return “does not translate into revenue flowing back.” It has been applied — without methodological justification — to a free suburban rideshare program in the wealthiest county in Colorado, while the agency co-funding that program is laying off workers to close a $250 million deficit.

The FAQ was posted in response to scrutiny. It cited research that doesn’t say what the FAQ says it says. And it omitted the one sentence from that research that would have answered the original question honestly.

That’s not an oversight. That is how government spending defends itself when it can’t defend itself on the merits.

Commissioner Laydon’s program has a 4.9-star rating and 83,000 rides. It also has a $6.3 million annual cost, a co-funder that is hemorrhaging money, a private-sector competitor it is systematically undercutting with public funds, and a self-funding claim built on research that its own author says doesn’t mean what the county is saying it means.

Douglas County — enjoy the ride. The rest of the metro area is paying for it too.

Leave a comment

The Calendar

There have been 161 days since January 1. Strip out the 46 weekend days and the four federal holidays that landed on weekdays, and you’re left with 111 ordinary working weekdays available to the United States Congress. Days that most of us actually worked our butts off, doing whatever it is we do for work.

The House of Representatives has been in session and actually working only 57 of them.

The Senate did better: roughly 76 days, including one genuine weekend of overtime in March when they worked a Saturday and Sunday (!) on the appropriations grind. Credit where it’s due.

Now, the official scoreboard looks rosier than that. Congress will tell you it’s been “in session” 75 days (House) and 82 (Senate) through the end of May. But that number is padded with pro forma sessions — the theater where a single member walks onto an empty floor, bangs a gavel, passes nothing, and bangs it again to adjourn. On January 16 this year, the Senate’s entire “session” lasted under a minute. The House has held two dozen of these ghost sessions during district work periods. I don’t count a 38-second gavel-strike as a day of work, and neither would you if your contractor billed you for it.

So: the People’s House has shown up for about a third of the calendar. It has been out — recess, district work period, holiday, weekend — for 104 of 161 days. Sixty-five percent of the year, the lower chamber of the federal legislature did not exist as a functioning body. For this, the job pays $174,000 plus amazing benefits. All paid by you.

Subscribe now

The Work Product

Days in a chair are an input. Let’s talk output — bills that cleared both chambers and reached the President’s desk, because that is the one thing only Congress can do.

The answer, straight from the Congressional Record’s official Résumé of Congressional Activity: 29 bills became law. Zero vetoes. Every single thing they sent up, the President signed — which is what happens under unified government.

But look at what those 29 were. Nine of them — the heavyweight bills by every measure — were last year’s overdue spending bills. Fiscal Year 2026 began October 1, 2025. Congress did not finish funding it until April 30, 2026 — seven months into the fiscal year — when the Homeland Security bill was finally signed. The big consolidated package that funded most of the government? Signed February 3, after a self-inflicted weekend funding lapse on January 31, on a deadline Congress had written for itself two months earlier.

Strip out the must-pass spending bills and one genuinely consequential law — the FISA Section 702 surveillance reauthorization — and the discretionary work product of five-plus months is roughly two dozen minor and commemorative-grade statutes: a Capitol Police retirement adjustment, a couple of private relief bills, a resolution disapproving a Bureau of Land Management land order, and a stack of items in the post-office-naming weight class.

That’s the harvest. Twenty-nine bills, nine of them just paying last year’s bills, finished over half a year late.

Share

The Golf

Now to the question a listener texted me, and the reason my PD walked in: “Mike, how many days has Trump spent on his golf courses?”

Fair question, and I’ll give the critics every inch of it. Depending on which tracker you trust and whether you count “confirmed round” or “was at the course,” the answer runs between roughly 92 and 130 days. The most-cited tracker puts it at 113 confirmed golf days across his first 505 days back in office — about one round every four and a half days. Call it one day in four. I’m not going to shave a single stroke off that number. It is what it is.

Here’s the apples-to-apples: the President has spent something like 22 to 26 percent of his second term at a golf course. The House has spent 65 percent of this year not in session at all.

And here is the distinction nobody bothers to make, the one that separates a cheap shot from an honest comparison:

When the President travels, the presidency travels with him. The nuclear football, the secure communications, the staff, the briefings, the phone calls to heads of state — all of it goes to Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago. You may not like it, but the executive branch keeps functioning from a golf cart. It always has, under every president. I know. I’ve been with one doing just that.

When Congress leaves town, the legislative branch ceases to exist. The House cannot pass an appropriations bill from a district work period. The Senate cannot confirm a judge from an Easter recess. Article I doesn’t travel. It requires 218 bodies in a room, physically present, voting. When they’re gone, nothing happens — not because they’re golfing, but because the Constitution doesn’t let the legislature phone it in.

Leave a comment

Your Verdict?

Put the two exhibits side by side and you can decide.

The President golfs one day in four — and the government still runs while he does it.

Congress skips work two days in three — and produces 29 laws in five months, nine of which were last year’s homework turned in seven months late, with a weekend shutdown thrown in for flavor.

If golf days are the standard by which we measure a man not doing his job, then fine — apply the standard evenly. By that yardstick, a 79-year-old in cleats just lapped the entire United States House of Representatives.

The President takes his job to the golf course. Congress leaves theirs on the floor of the House.

— Michael Brown

Sources: Session-day counts derived from the published 2026 House and Senate legislative calendars and the Congressional Record Daily Digest’s Résumé of Congressional Activity (Jan. 3–May 31, 2026); pro forma sessions identified from floor announcements. Public-law totals from the official Résumé and confirmed against Congress.gov and White House signing statements. Golf figures from independent public trackers (Trump Golf Track and others) reflecting confirmed rounds and property visits through early June 2026; totals vary by methodology and cutoff date.

Author’s Note: The numbers are subject to change and were verified as of 9:00 a.m. this morning when I went on-air. Congress could have surprised me and actually done some work today, but I won't hold my breath.

Share Michael D Brown

I want to be precise about what this case is and is not, because when others overstate it, you hand the SLPC its escape route. So let me try the way one might present it to a jury: evidence first, the other side’s best argument, and then the dismantling. If the facts are as strong as I think they are, they don’t anyone’s thumb on the scale.

Subscribe now

I. The Charge

On June 2, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is the second swing — the original eleven-count indictment came down in April — and it alleges that from roughly 2010 through August 2023, the SPLC funneled approximately $4.1 million in tax-exempt donor money to a series of fictitious bank accounts. Those accounts, prosecutors say, paid “field sources” — the SPLC’s internal term for paid operatives embedded inside the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the National Alliance, the National Socialist Movement, and other groups the organization was publicly swearing to dismantle.

Here is the first place you must be careful, and where the breathless version of this story goes wrong in the media. The crime charged is not “the SPLC ran informants inside hate groups.” Running paid informants inside the Klan is an old, lawful, even honorable intelligence tactic. The FBI has done it for decades. If that were the whole story, there would be no case.

The crime charged is fraud and concealment — that the SPLC took money from donors on the promise it would use their donations to dismantle these groups, then secretly spent a portion of it propping up those same groups, hid that fact from the people writing the checks, and built fictitious entities and shell bank accounts to disguise where the money went. The indictment carries eleven counts: six of wire fraud, four of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

In other words: this is not a case about spying on the Klan. It is a case about lying to your grandmother in Colorado about what their twenty-five dollars a month was buying.

Share

II. The Exhibits That Don’t Spin

A good fraud case lives or dies on specifics, and this indictment is unusually specific. Three allegations, if proven, are the spine of the case.

Exhibit A — The man they paid to stay in the Klan. Prosecutors allege that two members of the Ku Klux Klan wanted out — they had, in the language of the file, gotten “cold feet.” The SPLC, an organization whose entire fundraising identity rests on helping people escape hate groups, allegedly did the opposite: it paid them $1,200 a month to remain in the Klan. And then, the indictment says, SPLC employees instructed these men to lie about where the money came from — to claim it was payment for a job helping college students research and write essays. Neither man, prosecutors allege, ever researched or wrote a single essay for any student.

Consider the architecture of that. A watchdog group raising money to fight the Klan, allegedly paying Klansmen to stay Klansmen, and coaching them to cover the paper trail with a fictional tutoring gig. That is not surveillance. That is a payroll.

Exhibit B — The shell companies. The money did not move openly. Prosecutors allege one source, identified as “F-9,” received more than $1.2 million over two decades, routed through a fake entity called “Tech Writers Group.” Another, “F-30,” allegedly led the National Socialist Party of America while collecting SPLC cash through a shell company called — and you cannot make this up — “Rare Books.” When a defense lawyer tells you this was all aboveboard intelligence work, the obvious question is what you’re thinking right now: if it was lawful and proper, why did it need a fake company named “Rare Books”? Legitimate informant programs do not require fictitious entities to disguise the recipients of the money. Fraud does.

Exhibit C — The boyfriend’s mortgage. This is the count I expect the government to build the trial around, because it is the one that strips the politics out entirely. Prosecutors allege that an SPLC employee was in a romantic relationship with field source F-9, and that roughly $140,000 in donor funds landed in a joint bank account they shared — money that allegedly paid the mortgage on a house they owned together. If that holds up, it is not ideology and it is not intelligence-gathering. It is an employee allegedly steering donor money into her own household through her partner. Everyone can understand that one. You don’t need a political theory to see the theft.

And then there is the hypocrisy that gives the whole thing its grim symmetry. The indictment alleges the SPLC maintained an “Extremist Files” webpage publicly denouncing a KKK-affiliated individual it was secretly paying — and used that very webpage to solicit even more donations. Denounce the man on the website. Pay the man off the books. Fundraise off the denunciation. If proven, that is the business model in a single sentence.

Share Michael D Brown

III. The Money: Fear Was the Product

Now widen the lens, because the indictment is one chapter in a much older ledger.

In 2010, the SPLC reported revenue of $38,712,628 to the IRS. By 2023, that figure had ballooned to $129,069,290 — an increase of roughly 233%. That is not the trajectory of a charity winning its war on hate and working itself out of a job. That is the trajectory of an enterprise for which hate is not the enemy but the inventory.

The balance sheet tells the rest. By the end of 2024, the organization controlled more than $800 million in assets. And here is the detail that should stop any donor cold: the SPLC’s foreign equity holdings have exceeded its domestic holdings every year since 2016, with money parked in accounts in the Cayman Islands and tens of millions in disclosed “investments” across Central America and the Caribbean. A “poverty law center” sitting on a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar war chest, routing investments through Caribbean tax havens, is a phrase that should never have survived contact with a single skeptical reporter.

I want to be specific about the inference here, because this is exactly where an honest advocate separates himself from a hack. The revenue tripling while the alleged scheme ran is an established fact. The claim that they ran the scheme in order to triple revenue is a motive argument — the indictment asserts it, but a courtroom has not yet proven it. Both belong in the story. Only the first is beyond dispute. State it that way and you cannot be knocked off it.

But the motive theory is not fantasy, and the SPLC’s own history supplies the pattern. The model was always the same: manufacture the sense of an exploding threat, mail the fundraising letters, bank the fear. A former SPLC staffer publicly described the operation as a scheme to exaggerate hate in order to “bilk” donors. One of the organization’s own former writers, writing in The New Yorker, called it a “scam.” These are not Fox News talking points. These are the people who worked there.

Subscribe now

IV. The Bait Was Always You

This is the part that matters most to anyone who has ever been smeared, and it is the part the indictment, by itself, does not prove — so I source separately and keep it separate.

For decades the SPLC’s “hate map” has been its crown jewel and its cudgel. Begun in 1990, it purports to identify groups that “attack or malign an entire class of people.” In practice it has routinely lumped mainstream conservative and Christian organizations in alongside the actual Klan. The real-world consequences were not theoretical: in 2012, a gunman walked into the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council and opened fire, after the group had been branded an “anti-gay” hate group on the SPLC’s site.

And in 2018, the map’s pretense of objectivity collapsed in the only forum that cannot be spun — a legal settlement. The SPLC had listed Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim and a genuine anti-extremism reformer, and his Quilliam Foundation in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” Nawaz threatened to sue for defamation. The SPLC folded completely: it paid $3.375 million, issued a written and video apology, and admitted Nawaz and Quilliam were “most certainly not anti-Muslim extremists.” Read that again. The nation’s self-appointed referee of who is and isn’t a bigot paid more than three million dollars to a man it had falsely branded a bigot. Nawaz’s own warning afterward was the right one: if it could happen to him, in so clear a case, it had surely happened to others.

The “hate” label, in other words, was never a finding. It was bait. And the people most likely to be caught on the hook were ordinary conservatives, Christians, and dissenters whose only offense was holding a view the SPLC’s fundraising department found useful to demonize.

Share Michael D Brown

V. The Fox Grading the Henhouse

Before we get to the press, consider the watchdogs who were supposed to catch all of this — and didn’t, because of how the entire system is wired.

Pull up the SPLC’s profile on Charity Navigator, the most trusted charity-rating service in the country, the one millions of donors consult before writing a check. As of its most recent fiscal-year-2024 evaluation, the SPLC holds a four-star rating and a 98% score. And tucked inside the “Accountability & Finance” panel is a line that, in light of the indictment, reads like dark comedy: under the metric “No Material Diversion of Assets,” the SPLC scores a perfect 100%. The page even defines the term for you — a material diversion of assets is “the unauthorized redirection of funds.” The SPLC scored 100% because it reported “Yes”: no such diversion occurred.

Read that against the charge. A federal grand jury alleges the SPLC secretly redirected $4.1 million in donor funds through fictitious accounts. Charity Navigator’s record says, in effect, “no unauthorized redirection of funds here” — and gives full marks for it.

How can both things be true on paper? Because the rating is not an audit. Look at the fine print: every one of those accountability metrics is sourced to “Public data from IRS Form 990” — the SPLC’s own annual tax filing, its own self-report. The 100% “no diversion” score is not a finding that investigators combed the books and found them clean. It is a checkbox the SPLC checked about itself. The watchdog asked the organization whether it had misappropriated donor money, the organization said no, and the watchdog wrote down the answer and stamped it with a gold star.

Be precise here, because precision is what makes it land: I am not saying the rating proves anything was stolen. I am saying the rating proves nothing either way — and that is the entire point. The score certifies that the SPLC filled out its forms and made the right attestations, not that the attestations were true. If the diversion alleged in the indictment is proven, then the SPLC’s flawless “no diversion of assets” score was built on a false self-report that no rating agency was ever structured to catch. Fictitious bank accounts named “Rare Books” do not show up on the line of an IRS Form 990 marked “material diversion of assets.” That is the whole reason you build the fictitious account.

There are honest caveats, and I’ll state them so no one can throw them back at you. The SPLC’s Charity Navigator rating reflects only one of four “beacons” — just the Accountability & Finance category is scored; Impact, Leadership, and Culture are blank. And the profile is, by the site’s own label, “managed by the nonprofit.” Both facts make the picture worse, not better: the one dimension that is graded is the financial-integrity dimension, and it’s graded substantially on paperwork the subject controls and submits about itself.

This is the larger rot, and it’s bigger than the SPLC. The American system for policing charitable organizations runs, at its foundation, on self-attestation. A nonprofit files a 990 swearing its house is in order; rating services and donors treat that sworn paperwork as if it were an independent verdict; the gold stars and four-star badges then launder the self-report into the appearance of third-party validation. Donors see “98%, four stars, 100% on financial integrity” and reasonably conclude someone checked. Nobody checked. Nobody, in this system, is structured to check. The fox is handed the clipboard and asked to certify the henhouse, and the certificate gets framed on the wall. The SPLC is not the disease. It is the most spectacular available symptom of a watchdog architecture that mistakes a defendant’s own testimony for proof.

VI. The Press Cabal That Never Asked

Here is the second institutional failure, and it is a genuine one. For years, mainstream newsrooms, Big Tech platforms, and corporate compliance departments cited the SPLC’s “hate group” designations as if they were the findings of a neutral court rather than the marketing copy of a fundraising operation with a partisan agenda and a half-billion-dollar endowment. Google and Amazon used it. Reporters quoted the “hate map” without a breath of skepticism about who compiled it, how, or why.

The Nawaz settlement should have been the end of that. When Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said the settlement left “the media and big business with no excuse” to keep treating the SPLC as objective, he was simply stating the obvious. And yet the citations continued. The lesson here is not that journalists are stupid. It is that a label confirming what a newsroom already believes will sail through unchecked, while the same claim about a favored institution would face a wall of verification. That is not journalism. It is laundering — taking an advocacy group’s opinion and stamping it with the credibility of a wire service.

VII. The Defense — Stated Fairly, Then Answered

A debater steelmans the other side before dismantling it, because anyone who hears you duck the best counterargument stops trusting you. So here is the SPLC’s defense, made as strongly as its very capable lawyer Abbe Lowell makes it.

The defense says: The SPLC did not lie to donors and did not mislead its banks. Its informant program was a legitimate intelligence operation that “prevented violence and saved lives,” and the secrecy existed to protect the physical safety of sources embedded among violent extremists. The charges, Lowell says, are “provably wrong,” resting on “inaccurate facts and inapplicable law.” The organization insists it shared what its sources learned with law enforcement, including the FBI. And there is a procedural grievance: the DOJ appears to have handed the indictment to the press before the court unsealed it — improper, and a sign, the defense argues, of a politically motivated prosecution under a Trump administration with an obvious axe to grind against the SPLC.

That is a serious defense, and parts of it have real force. Take each in turn.

On safety and secrecy: Yes — protecting a source inside the Aryan Nations is a legitimate reason to keep a name quiet. But it is not a reason to lie to donors about what their money funds, and it is certainly not a reason to build fictitious corporate entities and coach informants to invent fake essay-writing jobs. You can protect a source’s identity without telling your contributors the opposite of the truth about your mission. The secrecy defense explains the discretion. It does not explain the deception.

On “preventing violence”: Perhaps some of it did. But the indictment’s specific allegations cut hard the other way — paying men to stay in the Klan when they wanted out, and a paid source who allegedly sat in the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, attended at the SPLC’s direction, and helped coordinate transportation for others, all while collecting more than $270,000. At what point does infiltration become participation? The defense wants the jury to call that intelligence-gathering. The facts invite the jury to ask whether the SPLC’s money helped put bodies on the street in Charlottesville. That is a question the defense cannot afford to have asked out loud.

On “politically motivated”: This is the defense’s best card, and I will not pretend otherwise. Note, too, that one neutral former federal prosecutor reviewing the superseding indictment found it still has a structural hole — it does not name individuals with specific fraudulent intent or tie the fraud to any specific deceived donor, and he doubts a patch fixes that. Those are real proof problems, and intent is the whole ballgame in a fraud case. But “the prosecutor may have a hard time proving intent” is not the same as “it didn’t happen.” Fictitious bank accounts do not name themselves “Rare Books” by accident. A romantic partner’s mortgage does not get paid out of donor funds by clerical error. The motive of the prosecutor and the guilt of the defendant are different questions, and a smart audience knows it. The political-motivation argument is a reason to scrutinize the prosecution. It is not an alibi for the conduct of the defendant.

Share Michael D Brown

VIII. The Verdict You’re Allowed to Reach

Let me end where an honest brief has to end: with the limits.

This is an indictment, not a conviction. The SPLC has pleaded not guilty. Every factual allegation above is exactly that — an allegation — until a jury says otherwise, and the government still has to clear the intent hurdle that even neutral observers say is its weakest point. If you go on the air or into an argument and skip the word “alleged,” you are not being a zealous advocate; you are being the guy who hands the other side a reason to dismiss everything you said.

But here is what you are entitled to say, today, without fear of contradiction. An organization that built a fortune branding its fellow citizens as bigots has been formally accused, by a grand jury, of secretly funding the very bigots it monetized — and the supporting exhibits are its own bank records, its own internal coaching, and its own tax returns. Its revenue tripled across the years the scheme allegedly ran. It already paid $3.375 million to one man it falsely smeared. It sits on $800 million while routing investments through the Caymans. And the press that elevated its every pronouncement into holy writ has yet to seriously reckon with any of it.

The SPLC told America that hate was everywhere, that it was rising, that only the SPLC could fight it — and please send money! The indictment alleges that some of that money went to make sure the hate kept rising. If even a fraction of it is proven, then for thirty years the most trusted name in fighting hate in America may have been one of its most profitable manufacturers. The division in this country? Groups like the SPLC intentionally made it worse. Manufactured it. Paid for it.

That is not a conclusion. It is a question the SPLC now has to answer in a courtroom, under oath, with its own documents on the table. For an organization that spent decades demanding accountability from everyone else, that may turn out to be the harshest sentence of all.

Leave a comment

Let me start by talking you out of the easy answer, because the lazy version of this argument is also the wrong one.

I am not telling you the crash was buried in order to protect the ticketing revenue. I’m not telling you Halliburton was running a stop the night he killed two people, or that the two scandals share a paper trail, a memo, a phone call, a plan. There is no evidence for any of that. And if I stood up and claimed it, the first competent defense lawyer to read this — and I happen to know a good one in Oklahoma — would use that one overreach to discredit everything else I’ve shown you, including the parts that are bulletproof. A prosecutor who charges more than he can prove loses the whole case. So I won’t.

The connection is real. But it’s a connection of character, not of conspiracy. And here’s the uncomfortable part: that’s worse. You can fire a conspirator. You can indict a plan. You cannot so easily fix a culture — and a culture is exactly what these two stories, side by side, reveal.

Look at what they actually share.

Share

Same institution, same closed loop

The District One Drug Task Force is the throughline. The five agents writing pay-to-disappear tickets are the same unit as the agent driving the Tahoe. The district attorney who “controls” that task force and banked the $2.1 million is the same district attorney who personally handled the public messaging on a fatal crash involving one of his own officers — producing the video, narrating the speeds, explaining away the airbags.

And watch how the dynasty runs. DA George “Buddy” Leach III inherited the ticketing program from the prior DA, James “Mike” Boring — the man Leach had practiced law with for seventeen years, at a firm called Boring and Leach.When the prosecutor who would theoretically charge wrongdoing is fused — institutionally and personally — to the agency that commits it, you don’t have a check. You have a hall of mirrors. Remember from Part 1: when the FBI looked into Votta’s complaint, it ended up phoning the very DA at the center of the thing. There was no outside. Every road led back to the same office.

Subscribe now

Same instinct: keep it out of court

This is the deepest tell, and it’s the one a trial lawyer can’t walk past.

The entire genius of the ticketing scheme was that nothing was ever filed. The agent in charge said so out loud, and built his whole legal defense on it: until it hits the court, it’s the DA’s discretion. No docket. No judge. No record.

Now look at the crash. Scene cleared in thirty-eight minutes. Both cars towed before the fatality investigator arrived. No photographs. No interview of the lone survivor. A report stamped “incomplete.” Records surrendered only under the pressure of a lawsuit.

Two completely different events — and the same reflex underneath both: avoid the one forum where an independent party gets to ask hard questions and create a permanent record. The courthouse. The single thing No Man’s Land, historically, never had. Both the money operation and the crash investigation were engineered, consciously or not, to never produce the document that would let an outsider reconstruct what happened. That’s not two coincidences. That’s one habit, expressed twice.

Same attitude: “we can probably get by with this”

The one-day shutdown of the ticketing program tells you these were people who knew, on some level, that daylight was fatal to what they were doing. That’s not the confidence of the righteous — it’s the confidence of people who’d simply never been made to answer for anything.

And the sloppiness of the crash investigation is precisely what that same confidence looks like when nobody’s filming. You don’t photograph a scene you’ve never been forced to account for. You don’t test the officer when no one has ever required it. You don’t interview the grandmother when her family has never once made the system pay a price for ignoring them. The shoddiness isn’t only incompetence. It’s competence aimed at a different target — closure, not truth. They could get by with the tickets for six years and $2.1 million. Why on earth would they expect to be questioned about a car wreck?

Subscribe now

Same victims

And here’s the part that should trouble a free-market conservative most of all, because it is the predictable output of the broken machine, not a random cruelty.

When you strip the external check off an institution, the risk it generates doesn’t vanish. It gets transferred — and it rolls downhill, every time, to whoever has the least power to push back. The ticketing scheme picked off out-of-state truckers who’d rather pay $360 than litigate in a county they’d never see again. The crash investigation steamrolled a Guatemalan immigrant family — a dead patriarch who couldn’t testify, a surviving grandmother nobody bothered to interview, a community that assumed, correctly, that the system wasn’t built to hear them.

Same design flaw. Same selection of the same kind of victim. That isn’t coincidence. That’s physics. Unaccountable power doesn’t pick its targets at random; it finds the people who can’t fight back and bills them for the privilege.

Share Michael D Brown

Why this should bother you even if you back the badge

I want to close where I suspect a good chunk of you instinctively start: on the side of law enforcement. Good. So am I. Which is exactly why this matters.

The legitimacy of a prosecutor’s office and a police force is not a renewable resource you can spend down forever. It rests on a single proposition: that the law applies the same to the people enforcing it as to the people subject to it. The moment a community watches a task force turn traffic stops into a private revenue stream with no court involved — and then watches that same office handle the death of a child at the hands of one of its own with no photographs, no test, no interview, and a story that changes every time the documents contradict it — the proposition collapses. Not just for the guilty. For everyone. The law-abiding rancher. The churchgoing trucker with a clean 21-year record. The immigrant who came here precisely because he believed the system was different from the one he left behind.

This is the conservative case against unchecked government power, and it has nothing to do with being soft on crime — it’s the opposite. It’s the oldest insight we have, and Madison wrote it down for us: if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and because they are not, you build the checks before you need them. Take away the courthouse, the second set of eyes, the credible fear of being told no — and human nature does the rest, every time, regardless of how decent the people were when they started. This is not a story about uniquely wicked men in the panhandle. It’s a story about what any institution becomes when you remove the friction.

No Man’s Land got its courthouse on the map in 1890. The tragedy of District One — and the friend of mine who knows these stories put his finger on exactly this — is that in every way that actually counts, it’s still No Man’s Land. The building is there. The judge is there. But the check that building was supposed to house never fully moved in. And until it does, the bill for that vacancy will keep coming due — paid, as it always is, by the people least able to afford it.

An 8-year-old girl named Petronila paid part of that bill on an embankment of scrub grass, forty feet from her grandfather’s car, while the people whose job was to look for her went home.

We can at least refuse to let it stay quiet. That’s the one thing No Man’s Land was never able to survive.

This concludes the three-part series. Part 1: The Toll Booth on U.S. 54 · Part 2: The Girl in the Grass

Subscribe now

Among the deluge of tips that followed the ticketing exposé, the picture that emerged was of a region people were genuinely afraid of — ruled, in the reporters’ words, by “a culture of impunity” and “family dynasties.” A mother who said she was arrested on a bogus check charge nine months pregnant, as leverage to find a man police wanted, and gave birth shackled to a hospital bed. A snitch-recruitment system that turned a man’s own friends into informants against him. Civil-rights suits against the Guymon Police Department, including one alleging an officer intentionally spat in a handcuffed man’s face.

And a tip from a man who said he’d recently been a Guymon patrol officer himself. He described dissent inside the department over the ticketing scheme — and something else his colleagues were quietly wondering:

“Members of the Guymon Police Department, including myself, are suspicious of where seized cash is going.”

His colleagues had noticed, he said, that drug task force members pulling down a $50,000 salary somehow afforded cars for their kids and homes well beyond their means. (To be precise about what that is: it’s an allegation from a source whose employment Oklahoma Watch independently verified. It’s smoke, documented as smoke — I’m not calling it fire.)

But one tip stood out from all the rest. It described a fatal crash on the edge of Guymon that had killed an 8-year-old girl, and it carried a single line the reporters — and now I — cannot shake:

“This was covered up quick, quick, and I didn’t understand why.”

Share

The night of August 5, 2023

Eight-year-old Petronila Mejia-Ramos didn’t want to go to the babysitter that evening. She wanted to stay with her grandfather, Juan Mejia-Garcia. Juan and his wife, Daniela Manea — Petronila’s grandmother — worked opposite shifts at one of the two meat-processing plants that keep Guymon’s economy alive. They were part of the city’s community of roughly 1,600 Guatemalan immigrants, in the only majority-Hispanic city in Oklahoma.

That evening Juan and Petronila drove out to visit relatives and to pick up Daniela at the end of her shift. The car was a Toyota Corolla on loan from the family’s pastor. Heading home at dusk, Juan took the shortcut he knew well — Mile 33 Road to U.S. 412 — to skip the downtown stoplights. The headlights were on. He was driving the speed limit. Daniela, exhausted, dozed off as a few raindrops hit the windshield. Petronila was in the back seat.

Two things then went catastrophically wrong at the same instant.

First, for reasons no one has ever explained, Juan rolled past the stop sign where he always turned for home, and the Corolla entered the intersection at 50 to 60 in a posted 55.

Second, a Chevy Tahoe was barreling west on 412 toward that same intersection. Behind the wheel: Eldon “Len” Halliburton — a member of the District One Drug Task Force, driving a DA-owned vehicle. Five seconds before impact, the Tahoe’s own “black box” recorded it doing 85 in a 70. The dash camera showed the Corolla dead ahead, in clear view. The Tahoe drifted slightly toward the shoulder, never skidded, never swerved, and barely slowed before it slammed into the side of the smaller car.

The Corolla spun, flipped onto its side, and ended up in a ditch. Juan and Daniela, gravely injured, stayed with the car. Petronila was thrown through the rear window and came to rest about 40 feet away, on an embankment of scrub grass. Juan died ninety minutes later. Halliburton was treated for a possible broken arm and released the same night.

Share Michael D Brown

Thirty-eight minutes, zero photographs

Reconstruct the next several hours from the dispatch logs and the thing reads less like a fatal-accident investigation than a study in not looking.

A trooper, Austin Lozano, reached the scene at 8:57 p.m. The first logged action after that was twenty minutes of dispatch silence — followed by a call for a wrecker to haul the Corolla away. That call came 38 minutes after the crash was logged. Both vehicles were towed off within the hour. By the time Trooper Trent Cagle of Troop Z — the unit that actually investigates fatalities — was even logged as en route, both cars were already gone.

The collision report bears a watermark stamped across every page: “Investigation Incomplete.” And per that report, no photographs were taken of the scene. None. In a double-fatality highway crash, where photographing the scene is the most basic protocol there is.

Now hold the most unbearable fact against that timeline. The troopers who canvassed the scene — who cleared it, who released both vehicles — never found Petronila. The 8-year-old lay in the grass forty feet from the car, and the search missed her.

Her body wasn’t discovered until 2:23 a.m. — roughly six hours after the crash — and only because her family, frantically calling around after midnight when her grandparents never came home, realized she wasn’t at the babysitter’s and forced authorities back to the scene. Her father, Pedro, had assumed she was safe; in the chaos of being told his father was dead and his mother was being airlifted to Kansas, no one had mentioned a little girl. The medical examiner’s report listed the probable cause of death as cervical spine dislocation. No time of death was ever recorded. Nothing in any record reviewed by reporters establishes whether Petronila died on impact — or whether she might have lived had anyone found her in the first hour instead of the seventh.

The Guymon fire chief, bound by medical-privacy law on the details, confirmed the essential, damning fact: a routine search of the immediate area around the Corolla had failed to find a third victim lying forty feet away. “It was reported as a subject found — possibly injured,” he said of the call that finally came in hours later. “That’s when they found the child.”

Share

The contradictions stack up

If the cause was as obvious as officials kept insisting — the immigrant ran the stop sign, case closed — then why did everything about the investigation behave like something that needed to be hurried out of sight?

• The official collision report lists Halliburton’s contributing factor as “No Improper Action By Driver.” This about a man whose own vehicle’s black box clocked him at 85 in a 70, drifting onto the shoulder, barely braking.

• Juan’s body was tested for drugs and alcohol after he died. None were found. Halliburton, per DPS records, was never tested at all.

• The Department of Public Safety first told reporters there was no dash-cam or body-cam footage from any responding trooper or from the Tahoe. Then DA Leach — the man who controls the task force — produced the Tahoe’s dash-cam video himself, saying DPS had handed it to him to pass along. The 18-second clip has no sound and cuts out an instant before impact; Leach said the collision killed the recording.

• Leach’s account of the Tahoe’s speed migrated from 70 mph, to “maybe 77,” while the black box his own office had fought to keep sealed said 85. Asked about the gap, Leach attributed his numbers to a verbal conversation with Trooper Cagle.

• Leach said the Corolla’s airbags didn’t deploy. Photographs the family took of the towed car show deployed airbags. Asked about that, Leach said Cagle believed they hadn’t deployed because the airbag module contained no data.

• Daniela — the only surviving occupant of the Corolla — says she was never interviewed by police. Neither, the family says, were they ever formally told the other driver was law enforcement. They learned it from reporters knocking on their door two years later.

It took a lawsuit — filed in August 2025, settled in April 2026 — just to extract the black-box data that proved the speed. A crash expert reviewed it and confirmed it: 85 mph, fifteen over, five seconds before impact.

One more thing. Halliburton had filed his own lawsuit against the shattered family in July 2025, seeking damages over $75,000 for his injuries. He quietly withdrew it; his lawyer wouldn’t say why. And his personal driving history, it turned out, included a stack of citations — two for speeding, two for no seat belt, two for no proof of insurance. He retired in 2025. He now reportedly works for a nearby police department — and teaches driver’s education at Guymon High School.

So here’s where it stands. A trucker exposes a money operation that never touched a courtroom. Tips pour in. One leads to a dead child and an investigation that cleared the scene in thirty-eight minutes, took no photographs, never tested the officer, never interviewed the survivor, and left an 8-year-old in the grass until almost dawn.

Two scandals. Same task force. Same district attorney. And the obvious, lurid question hanging over both: were they connected? Did they bury the crash to protect the money?

Tomorrow I’m going to tell you the answer is no — and then I’m going to tell you why the real answer is worse than the conspiracy you’re imagining.

Tomorrow, Part 3: “No Man’s Land Still Has No Man.” Why these two stories share something more corrosive than collusion — and what it should mean to you even if you back the badge.

Missed how this started? Part 1 is here. Subscribe to get tomorrow’s finale in your inbox — and if Petronila’s story moved you, share it. The thing that thrives in No Man’s Land is the silence.

There’s a phrase the locals use for the Oklahoma panhandle, and it predates statehood. No Man’s Land. For forty years in the 19th century, the strip was a legal orphan — claimed by no state, no territory, governed by nobody. People settled it anyway, and they sorted out justice the way you’d expect when there’s no court to appeal to: among themselves, by whoever had the leverage.

The strip got attached to Oklahoma Territory in 1890. The courthouse arrived. The maps got redrawn.

Over the next three days I’m going to make an uncomfortable case: that in District One — the four panhandle counties of Beaver, Cimarron, Harper, and Texas, home to about 31,000 people — the courthouse arrived in name but never fully in fact. It comes in two stories, broken sixteen months apart by the nonprofit newsroom Oklahoma Watch. One is about money. The next is about a dead child. They are not connected by a conspiracy — and I’ll spend the third day explaining why the truth is actually worse than a conspiracy.

But it starts with a trucker who would not pay.

Share

The wrong driver to shake down

On June 11, 2024, a Florida-based long-haul driver named Tammy Votta set out from Albuquerque hauling a heavy, pre-sealed load — 45,000 wobbly pounds — bound for Hiawatha, Iowa, mostly up U.S. Highway 54, which cuts diagonally across the Panhandle, straight my hometown of Guymon, Oklahoma. She stopped for the night in Stratford, Texas, had two cookies for dinner, and got back on the road the next morning. Twenty-one years behind the wheel. A spotless record. She had never committed a crime in her life.

As she rolled through Goodwell — population 920 — she was running under the posted speed limit, because she was heavy and the highway curves through town. Even out on the open road she couldn’t push her rig past 68 in a 70. Then the red lights came up behind her. A roadside inspection, she figured. A pain, but part of the job.

It was not a roadside inspection.

Officer Karan Gray, badge No. 79, came on hot — like Votta was a suspected serial killer, the way she described it. None of it made sense; her own truck logs showed she wasn’t speeding. When Votta started asking questions, the officer told her, oddly, not to worry — it was all going to be okay. Then Gray walked back from her cruiser and handed Votta a slip of paper with the District 1 Drug Task Force printed at the top. It claimed she’d been clocked on radar doing 58 in a 45.

But the “ticket” was a strange, primitive thing. No statute listed. No fine. No order to appear. Nothing to sign. What it said was: call this number. There’d be some costs, Gray explained, and then it would be like the whole thing never happened.

Votta called the number and got an email instructing her to send $360 — directly to the district attorney. For perspective: the actual local fine for going 11–15 over is $160. So the “deal” cost more than twice the real ticket. And the attached document carried a threat — pay up, or face a warrant for a criminal misdemeanor.

Here’s where Votta proved to be exactly the wrong trucker to shake down. She refused.

“This is America, last time I checked,” she said. “I will have no part in that. At all. Ever. Integrity comes at a price.”

She started digging, and what she found smelled like extortion to her — maybe even a violation of the federal Hobbs Act of 1951, which bars the obstruction of interstate commerce. So she went looking for someone in authority to care. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol referred her to the state Bureau of Investigation. The OSBI referred her to the attorney general. The attorney general referred her to the FBI. And the FBI — in a move that captures the whole closed-loop absurdity of District One — called the local district attorney. Which made no sense, because the local district attorney was the one running the alleged racket. (The FBI later said it had referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s office for review. As of this writing, no public charges have followed.)

When Votta wouldn’t pay, the gears turned the other way: a warrant was actually issued for her arrest. It was eventually caught and dismissed — but think about that for a second. A trucker with a clean 21-year record gets pulled over while driving under the speed limit, refuses to pay a fee that’s double the legal fine, and the system’s response is to try to have her arrested.

Subscribe now

The trick that made it all “legal”

Here’s the part that should make every prosecutor in America wince.

The entire genius of the scheme was that nothing ever went to court. It wasn’t a citation. There was no docket, no judge, no record, no fine in the legal sense. Just a phone call and a payment to the DA’s office. And if nothing is filed in court, there’s nothing to find. No paper trail. The whole apparatus of public accountability — the thing that lets a citizen, a reporter, or a higher court look back and ask what happened here — simply never engages.

Run the numbers and the scale comes into focus. According to statistics the DA’s own office handed over, from 2019 to 2024 the five-agent District 1 Drug Task Force conducted 6,934 traffic stops, the overwhelming majority in Texas County, Oklahoma. Of those, roughly 6,000 became deferred prosecutions at an average of $360 each. That’s more than $2.1 million funneled into the district attorney’s coffers in six years — most of it during the tenure of DA George “Buddy” Leach III. A source who later spoke to reporters said task force members described writing as many as ten of these a day.

Even seasoned attorneys had to squint at it. James Wirth, a Tulsa lawyer who handles speeding and moving-violation cases by the bushel, said the thing that jumped out wasn’t that a deferred-prosecution deal existed — those are legal, albeit rare. It was that a drug task force was bothering with speeding tickets at all. Drug task forces, Wirth explained, pull people over as a pretext to manufacture probable cause for a search and a seizure — they’re fishing for cash and contraband, the big-dollar stuff. For context, District 1’s task force had, over 18 years, seized drugs with a street value of $117 million.

“They don’t care about speeding,” Wirth said. “Speeding is just a means to pull people over… They’re not looking for $350 tickets. They don’t even waste their time writing that stuff.”

So why would this unit grind out $360 slips times ten per day? Only one answer makes sense: because at scale, the small-time stuff was the business.

Leave a comment

The man in charge of the task force

And who ran this outfit? The agent in charge was a man named Kevin McIntire. Before he took over the District 1 Drug Task Force in 2016, McIntire had his own history with seized money: back in 2007, as a Carter County, Oklahoma, drug task force investigator, he was indicted on an embezzlement charge following a drug bust. He pleaded down to willful neglect of duty by a public official, was ordered to return $2,600, and surrendered his police certification — before eventually being recertified and handed the panhandle unit. That was the equivalent of being sent, literally, to “No Man’s Land” or being sent out to oblivion for his misdeeds. The man overseeing the cash-for-dismissals program had, in a prior life, been charged with pocketing task-force money. You cannot make this stuff up.

McIntire’s defense of the program, to his credit, was at least candid. He framed Votta’s case as a “miscommunication” and conceded she was never clearly told she could choose a real court date instead of the pay-to-vanish deal. His legal theory was the load-bearing wall of the whole operation:

“The anti-masking statutes are all referencing citations that have been entered into the court. And so, in Oklahoma, until it hits the court, the district attorney holds the discretion just like he would in any other criminal matter.”

Translated: a well-masked violation doesn’t violate the anti-masking laws, because we made sure it never became a court record in the first place. It’s a perfect little ouroboros. The cover-up is the legal defense for the cover-up.

The federal law they ran straight through

Here’s why that theory should not survive contact with the actual regulation.

Federal regulation 49 CFR 384.226, rooted in the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999, could not be more direct. A state “must not mask, defer imposition of judgment, or allow an individual to enter into a diversion program” that keeps a commercial driver’s traffic conviction off the record. The reason is pure public safety: the only tool a future judge or prosecutor has to spot a dangerous trucker is that driver’s accumulated history. Mask one violation — or six thousand — and the next official down the line is flying blind.

The National Traffic Law Center, which literally publishes the “Masking Quick Reference Guide,” put it about as plainly as a written statement can:

“Offering deferred prosecution for CDL holders violates federal anti-masking regulations… While some jurisdictions may be unaware of these requirements, others may prioritize revenue generation through fines and plea deals, leading to non-compliance.”

Revenue generation. That’s the Center’s phrase for the polite version of what was happening, and it lands on District One like a verdict. And the federal door McIntire tried to walk through — it never hit the court, so it’s not masking — the FMCSA bolted shut back in 2013, when it formally said that dismissing a citation “following payment of a fine or mandatory contribution to a State program as a condition of dismissal” is masking. Pay a fee, get the violation erased — that is the prohibited act, court record or no court record. States that do it risk losing their CDL certification and federal highway funds.

How a “public safety” program dies in one day

The task force had a deeper defense, and a weak prosecution is one that pretends the other side has nothing. So here it is, fairly stated.

The program — informally the “commercial driver program” or “public safety emphasis program” — predated both McIntire and Leach. It went back to the prior DA, James “Mike” Boring. The stated idea was to use deferred prosecutions to prevent serious big-rig accidents, and McIntire claimed it had cut accidents in Texas County without dinging truckers’ records. Assume good faith at the founding. Grant the premise entirely.

Here’s the cross-examination question that ends the defense: If this was a legitimate safety program, why did it die in a single day the moment a reporter started asking about it?

Oklahoma Watch’s J.C. Hallman contacted the task force and the DA on January 12, 2025. On January 13 — the next day— the program was quietly discontinued after what McIntire described as “internal conversations.” Programs you believe are lawful and effective, you defend. You explain them. You point to the data. You don’t strangle them overnight and decline to comment. Leach, for his part, refused to comment for the story at all.

The one-day shutdown isn’t the behavior of people who thought they were right. It’s the behavior of people who’d been getting away with something — and just heard footsteps in the hall.

Tammy Votta thought she’d exposed a one-off — a single bad stop on a lonely highway. What she’d actually done was knock loose the first stone. When Oklahoma Watch published her story in February 2025, the panhandle seemed to exhale all at once, and the newsroom was flooded with tips from people who’d been afraid to speak for years.

Most of the tips were about money, or harassment, or petty abuses of power.

One was about a little girl.

Tomorrow, Part 2: “The Girl in the Grass.” What a drug task force officer did at 85 miles an hour on a panhandle highway — and the thirty-eight minutes, the missing photographs, and the six-hour search that the locals said was “covered up quick, quick.”

If this is worth your time, subscribe so Part 2 lands in your inbox tomorrow morning — and forward it to the one person you know who still believes “it can’t happen here.” And if you’re reading this in my home state, ask yourself, what is going on in the Oklahoma Panhandle?

Share

That’s the kind of statistic that lands and then slides off, because the scale is too abstract to feel. Forty percent. Highest in the country. Sure. Next story.

But pull on that thread, and the whole sweater unravels. What you find underneath is not a real estate story. It is an economic story, a political story, a social story, and ultimately a story about what happens when one political party holds total, uncontested power over a great American city and state for long enough that there is no one left to blame but themselves — and the consequences are now too large and too documented to deny.

This is that story.

THE NUMBER IS REAL — AND IT’S WORSE THAN REPORTED

Start with the evidence, because that’s where every honest argument has to start.

The CBRE Q1 2026 report puts downtown Denver’s total office vacancy at 38.9% — a new all-time high. The Wall Street Journal’s “nearly 40%” was, if anything, rounding conservatively. In upper downtown — the traditional Central Business District, the geographic and symbolic heart of the city — vacancy exceeds 40%, reaching as high as 46.4% in some blocks. Some individual buildings are 100% empty.

To understand what those numbers mean in physical terms: downtown Denver has roughly 31.4 million square feet of office space. Approximately 12 million square feet of it sits vacant right now. That is enough empty space to house 50,000 to 60,000 office workers who are no longer commuting downtown daily. Eight Empower Field stadiums, stacked with silence.

During the entire Great Recession — the worst financial crisis in a generation — downtown Denver’s vacancy peaked at only 17.4%.

The trajectory is even more alarming than the snapshot. Total downtown office vacancy was 16.5% at the end of 2019 — a few months before COVID arrived. It crossed 20% in early 2021, 25% a year later, 30% in the third quarter of 2023. It has now nearly reached 39% and is still setting records. For context: during the entire Great Recession — the worst financial crisis in a generation — downtown Denver’s vacancy peaked at only 17.4%. The pandemic and its aftermath have done more damage to this city’s commercial core than the financial collapse of 2008.

The comparison to other recovering cities is damning. Manhattan’s office market is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “roaring back.” San Francisco — battered, ridiculed, written off — is being rescued by the booming artificial intelligence industry. Denver has neither of those forces. No sector requiring physical co-location. No hot new industry generating fresh demand. Just 12 million square feet of emptiness, and a set of causes that are fully traceable to specific decisions made by specific people.

Subscribe now

THE CAUSES: A CASCADE, NOT A COINCIDENCE

The First Wave: Remote Work Destroyed the Demand Floor

The obvious cause is the one everyone reaches for first, and it’s real — but it doesn’t explain why Denver is the worst among 50 major American cities. It explains why Denver has a problem. The other causes explain why Denver’s problem is bigger than everyone else’s.

Remote and hybrid work restructured the economics of office space nationwide. Denver’s white-collar professional services and technology workforce — precisely the population most capable of sustained remote work — adapted to it, and then stayed. Many employers adopted permanent hybrid policies, reducing their space requirements by 30 to 50 percent when leases expired. A company that once needed 50,000 square feet for a five-day-a-week workforce discovered it needed 25,000 to 35,000 square feet for a three-day-a-week workforce.

As of 2025, downtown Denver’s return-to-office rate was 64%. That sounds like progress until you register what it means: on any given weekday, more than one in three people who once filled those towers isn’t there. The foot traffic, the lunch crowds, the retail spending, the parking revenue, the incidental commerce that a functioning downtown generates — all of it scaled back by a third or more, permanently.

The Second Wave: Oil and Gas Didn’t Just Leave — It Was Shown the Door

Here is where Denver’s story diverges from every other city’s story. Here is where a national problem becomes a Colorado-specific disaster.

In 2015, oil and gas companies represented 35% of downtown Denver’s occupied office space. Today that figure is 7%. Twenty-eight percentage points of the city’s dominant tenant category, gone. That is not a market fluctuation. That is the near-total extinction of what was once downtown’s anchor industry — and it did not happen entirely by accident.

“It’s more about companies feeling like the state really wants them here.” — CBRE Senior Vice President, Colorado Sun

In 2019, a newly elected Democratic governor named Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 181 into law. Passed in under 60 days by a Democratic supermajority legislature, SB 181 fundamentally rewrote Colorado’s oil and gas regulatory framework. The bill explicitly prioritized environmental restriction over development certainty, made the permitting process significantly more rigorous, gave local land-use authorities new power to approve or deny drilling permits, and restructured the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. At the moment of SB 181’s passage, oil and gas companies leased approximately 4.5 million square feet of downtown Denver office space.

The CBRE executive who watches these markets daily summarized it with remarkable candor in a Colorado Sun interview: “It’s more about companies feeling like the state really wants them here.” That is not a real estate observation. That is a verdict on a political climate.

The Third Wave: The Tech Cavalry Retreated

Denver had a genuine economic diversification success story in the late 2010s. Bay Area technology companies, priced out of San Francisco and attracted by Denver’s quality of life and mountain access, established significant Denver offices. The narrative was compelling: the boom-bust oil economy was being replaced by a stable knowledge economy anchored by technology.

The pandemic demolished that narrative. When remote work became viable everywhere simultaneously, the logic of paying Denver commercial real estate rates for a workforce that could work from their homes in Highlands Ranch evaporated.

Then came the departure that crystallized the technology story. In February 2026, Palantir Technologies — a data analytics and AI company with a market capitalization of approximately $328 billion, headquartered in Denver — announced it would move its corporate headquarters to Miami. The departure came amid widespread speculation about Colorado’s sweeping AI regulations, Senate Bill 24-205, which made Colorado the first state to impose pre-emptive, comprehensive AI compliance requirements on companies operating within its borders. A Democratic legislature passed it. A Democratic governor signed it.

The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has maintained a formal corporate departure tracker since 2019 — the year Democrats achieved their current trifecta control. The tracker documented 98 companies that relocated or moved business operations to other states between 2019 and 2025, resulting in the loss of more than 13,600 jobs. Twenty-seven of those departures occurred in 2025 alone — accelerating, not slowing. Colorado experienced a net loss of 34 public company headquarters since 2022.

The Fourth Accelerant: Overbuilding Into a Collapsing Market

The final structural cause is almost comically bad timing. More than one million square feet of new Class A office space was added to the downtown Denver market after 2022 — after the vacancy crisis was already fully visible. New supply entered a market experiencing the steepest demand destruction in its modern history.

The predictable result: tenants who remained in the market migrated to the shiny new buildings, abandoning their older Class B and C towers. Those abandoned buildings now carry a vacancy rate approaching 50%, with some individual structures entirely empty. The real estate professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver who has watched this market for decades put it plainly: the lower-quality buildings in lesser locations will “die on the vine.” Some of these structures will never be office buildings again.

Share

THE CONSEQUENCES: THE DOOM LOOP ACTIVATES

A Billion Dollars Gone, and Counting

The most immediate and quantifiable consequence of 39% office vacancy is the obliteration of commercial real estate values — and the billions of dollars that investors, lenders, and pension funds have already lost.

The “Cash Register Building” — the Wells Fargo Center, Denver’s iconic 52-story downtown tower — was recently reappraised at $115 million. Its 2019 valuation: approximately $450 million. That is a 76% decline in value in roughly five years. Denver ranks sixth in the nation for CMBS office delinquencies, with a 27.2% delinquency rate nearly triple the national average.

City Center sold in 2025 for $57.4 million. The purchase price in January 2020 was $400 million. That $342.6 million seemingly evaporated.

City Center — two buildings at 17th and California streets — sold in late 2025 for $57.4 million. The purchase price in January 2020 was $400 million. Brookfield Properties put $170 million in equity in — that went to zero. Wells Fargo provided a $230 million loan and recouped a fraction of it. Los Angeles-based Gemini Rosemont and its lender JPMorgan Chase lost $170 million at Denver Energy Center, which sold for $5.25 million. LBA Realty and its lender lost $152 million on Denver Place, trading at a 75% discount.

The documented losses from completed transactions now exceed one billion dollars. Multiple additional towers sit in receivership. Those losses, when realized, will add substantially to the total.

Leave a comment

The City Budget: Spending Up, Revenue Collapsing

Denver faced a $250 million budget hole requiring major cuts, furloughs, and freezes. A Common Sense Institute analysis found that downtown Denver would have generated $646 million more in taxable sales in just the first half of 2024 if it were recovering at the rate of comparable Colorado counties. That gap represents the lunch crowds, the parking fees, the retail sales tax generated by 50,000 daily commuters who no longer show up.

The property tax situation contains a time-delayed detonation. Current valuations are based on market conditions from 2022 to mid-2024. Most of the catastrophic building sales — showing 75 to 80% discounts — occurred after that period. The next reassessment cycle will capture those losses in full, and the implications will cascade through city, county, and school district budgets. In Minneapolis — a comparable market — residential property owners now pay 55.6% of property taxes, up from 47.4% in 2020, as commercial properties shed assessed value. Denver is heading toward the same rebalancing.

Crime, Homelessness, and the Displacement Trap

The connection between office vacancy and street-level disorder is not speculative. It is mechanical, and it runs in both directions simultaneously.

The mechanism is what the urbanist Jane Jacobs identified 60 years ago as “eyes on the street” — the natural safety produced by active sidewalks, working populations, and functional commerce. When buildings empty and workers stop commuting, the eyes disappear. Empty lobbies, vacant storefronts, and deserted sidewalks create physical environments where open-air drug use and encampments flourish. That drives away more workers, which empties more buildings, which removes more eyes from the street.

The data confirms this loop with geographic precision. Downtown Denver’s crime rate rose 44% since 2019, even as total homelessness grew 86% over the same period. More revealing: Denver Police Department’s District 6 — covering downtown and north Capitol Hill — was the only police district in the entire city to see an uptick in violent crime from 2024 to 2025. Everywhere else in Denver, crime was declining. In the vacant downtown core, it was still rising.

Mayor Johnston’s “Solution” That Isn’t

Johnston has claimed what he calls the largest reduction in street homelessness in the history of any major American city — most recently asserting a 64% decline in unsheltered individuals since 2023.

But the methodology is fatally compromised. The 2026 Point-in-Time count was conducted on January 26th — in sub-freezing temperatures — on a night when emergency cold-weather shelters were activated. People who would normally have been sleeping outside were inside because it was 20 degrees. The mayor is counting a weather event as a policy victory.

More fundamentally, the reduction in street homelessness did not produce a reduction in total homelessness. The Colorado State of Homelessness Report — tracking data across an entire year — found total homelessness in the metro area actually increased. The Common Sense Institute found the number of homeless individuals in the City of Denver rose 86% since 2019 and 12% just since 2024. The city moved people from sidewalks to shelter beds — not from homelessness to housing.

The city also changed its public tracking dashboard in April 2025, eliminating metrics for how many people died, went to jail, or returned to the streets. Denver’s own independently-elected city auditor found approximately $20 million in underreported program expenses out of a total spend approaching $180 million. The program’s name and structure changed “roughly 15 times” according to a city Housing Stability official.

When you need fifteen names for one program, you don’t have a program. You have a press release with a budget.

The encampment clearance strategy — the operational core of Johnston’s approach — is, by the testimony of his own city council members, a displacement operation. Council Member Kevin Flynn reported in 2024 that Johnston’s initiative had moved downtown homelessness into his south Denver district. Council Member Jamie Torres reported that homelessness was migrating along the light rail lines into her west Denver district. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Urban Health confirmed the pattern: clearing encampments redistributes disorder rather than eliminating it.

Subscribe now

The Retail Collapse: 16th Street as Exhibit A

The retail vacancy rate on 16th Street — Denver’s most iconic pedestrian corridor, which just completed a massively expensive multi-year renovation — is 25%. Metro Denver’s overall retail vacancy rate is 4%. The city’s flagship street is one quarter empty.

Building owners who paid peak prices for properties now worth a fraction of that cannot afford to lower rents to market-clearing levels without admitting their assets have collapsed. Many are in receivership. So empty storefronts stay empty.

Cherry Creek, meanwhile, has a retail vacancy rate of 0.5%. The same city, the same economy. One geography is thriving and one is 25% vacant. The difference is not the renovation. It is the workers.

THE POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE: ONE PARTY, TOTAL CONTROL, FULL OWNERSHIP

The Record of Control

Colorado is not a state with contested political power. Colorado has a Democratic trifecta and a Democratic triplex: the Democratic Party controls the governor’s office, the secretary of state, the attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature. Democrats have held continuous control of the state House since 2013. The trifecta has been unbroken since 2019. In 2022, Democrats expanded their House majority to 46-19 — approaching two-to-one. By 2024, they held a 23-12 majority in the Senate.

At the city level, Denver has had Democratic mayors continuously since at least 2003. The Denver City Council ranges from mainstream liberal to democratic socialist. The ideological distance between its most conservative and most progressive members is measured in degrees of left.

The Direct Legislative Lines

SB 181, signed by Governor Polis in April 2019, rewrote Colorado’s oil and gas regulatory framework in ways that sent an unmistakable signal of hostility to an industry that occupied 4.5 million square feet of downtown Denver office space. The subsequent collapse of oil and gas’s downtown presence — from 35% of occupied space to 7% — unfolded over the following years.

SB 24-205, the AI Act, signed by Governor Polis in 2024, made Colorado the first state to impose comprehensive pre-emptive AI compliance requirements. Within two years, Palantir — a $328 billion AI-dependent company headquartered in Denver — announced its departure for Miami.

The Chamber of Commerce’s corporate departure tracker began in 2019, the year of the Democratic trifecta’s formation, and has documented an accelerating pattern of departures. Colorado ranked 48th out of 50 states for new business starts in 2024. It lost a net of 3,934 business establishments that year alone.

The Counterarguments, Honestly Addressed

The strongest counterargument is real and must be acknowledged: remote work is a national phenomenon that hit every major downtown regardless of political control. This is true. It is also insufficient as an explanation for Denver’s singular position at the top of the vacancy rankings.

Every major city is dealing with the remote work floor. Denver is the worst. The differential is explained by the Colorado-specific factors: the regulatory exile of oil and gas, the departure of technology companies accelerated by hostile AI legislation, the sustained accumulation of regulatory and cost burdens that drove 98 companies and 13,600 jobs to other states. Those are policy outcomes, produced by identifiable legislation, signed by identifiable officials, passed by a legislature with an identifiable partisan composition.

The second counterargument — that some of this predates Democratic control — is also partially true. The 1980s oil bust created Colorado’s first major downtown vacancy crisis. COVID was not a policy choice. But the response to COVID, the response to the homelessness surge, the regulatory decisions that accelerated corporate departure — those happened on a Democratic trifecta’s watch, across seven years of uninterrupted, unchecked power.

My Verdict

When one party holds the governorship, both legislative chambers by overwhelming margins, every statewide office, the city hall, and the city council — for seven to thirteen years without meaningful opposition — they own the outcomes. There is no aisle to point across. There is no minority party to blame. The legislation bears their names. The signatures are theirs.

Colorado ranked 48th out of 50 states for new business starts in 2024. The people who wrote this story are still in office.

Under that uncontested control: Colorado lost 98 companies and 13,600 jobs between 2019 and 2025. Oil and gas shrank from 35% of downtown Denver’s occupied office space to 7%. Downtown office vacancy climbed from 16.5% to 38.9% — highest in the country. Homelessness grew 86% since 2019. The city is running a $250 million budget deficit. Over a billion dollars in commercial real estate value has been incinerated.

None of this happened to Colorado. It was produced in Colorado, by the people Coloradans elected, exercising the power Coloradans gave them.

THE DOOM LOOP: HOW IT ALL CONNECTS

Pull back and look at what has been built here, because the individual threads weave into something larger than any one of them.

Remote work struck the first blow, reducing demand across the entire national office market. That was the floor — the damage every city absorbed. Denver then absorbed additional blows specific to its own policy choices: oil and gas driven out by SB 181, technology companies chilled by AI regulation and the broader anti-business climate, 98 companies and 13,600 jobs departed for states with more predictable governance.

The resulting vacancy — 12 million empty square feet — deactivated the human ecosystem of downtown. No workers means no lunch crowd. No lunch crowd means closed restaurants. Closed restaurants and empty storefronts mean no eyes on the street. No eyes on the street means the physical environment becomes hospitable to the disorder that further deters workers from returning.

The homelessness surge — up 86% since 2019, driven by housing costs the city never meaningfully addressed — filled the deactivated spaces. The city’s response, nearly $180 million of encampment clearances and shelter beds, moved the visible population from swept blocks to surrounding neighborhoods, expanding the zone of perceived danger rather than contracting it.

Companies evaluating their real estate decisions look at the full geography. They look at District 6 crime statistics showing the only rising violent crime rate in the city. They look at 16th Street with its 25% retail vacancy. And they make the rational decision to go somewhere else — Cherry Creek, the Tech Center, the suburbs, Texas, Florida, Miami.

Which empties more space. Which deactivates more streetscape. Which deepens the disorder. Which drives out more companies.

That is the doom loop. That is what a single line in the Wall Street Journal opened up.

The building that sold for $5.25 million after trading for multiples of that number, the workers who don’t commute downtown anymore, the restaurants that closed on 16th Street, the homeless man swept from one block to a neighboring one, the oil company that moved its Denver office to Houston, the AI company that moved its headquarters to Miami, the city auditor who found $20 million in unaccounted spending, the 48th-place ranking for new business starts, the $250 million budget hole — these are not separate problems with separate causes.

They are one story.

And the people who wrote it are still in office.

Share

Leave a comment

It’s a coherent argument. I’ve made it myself. The Fair Tax, the flat tax, consumption-based reform — the details differ but the principle is the same: honest, transparent, universal taxation on what you consume rather than what you produce.

Here’s what Colorado’s legislature just did to that argument: they broke it. Not by defeating it in debate. By implementing a grotesque parody of it.

What a Fair Consumption Tax Actually Looks Like

Before we get to the parody, let’s be precise about the original.

A genuine consumption tax — whether a national sales tax, a VAT, or a flat-rate expenditure tax — has three defining characteristics. It is transparent: you see exactly what you’re paying and why. It is universal: everyone who participates in the economy pays it, at the same rate, on the same basis. And it is democratic: the rate is set through a visible political process that voters can reward or punish at the ballot box.

Those three characteristics are not incidental features. They are the entire moral case for consumption taxation. The argument isn’t simply that consumption taxes are economically efficient — though they are. It’s that they’re honest. The government tells you the price of citizenship, you pay it, and everyone can see the transaction.

That’s the theory. Now meet the practice.

Subscribe now

The Parody Version

As I documented Tuesday, Colorado’s fee enterprise system has become the dominant engine of state revenue growth. Fee collections per resident have grown from $225 in 2000 to $4,322 in 2024 — nearly twenty times over, while General Fund tax revenue per resident grew from $1,209 to $2,614. The fees now dwarf the taxes.

And what are those fees, structurally? They are consumption-based charges. You register your car — fee. You use a toll road — fee. You rent a vehicle — fee. Your utility company passes through an enterprise surcharge — fee. You are being taxed, functionally, on transactions. On consumption.

So in theory, fiscal conservatives should be fine with this, right? Consumption-based revenue, just like we asked for.

Except that it violates every single one of the three defining characteristics of an honest consumption tax.

It is not transparent. The charges are disaggregated across dozens of enterprise funds, buried in utility statements, folded into registration renewals, embedded in rental agreements. There is no single line that says: Colorado consumed $4,322 of your income this year in fees. The Common Sense Institute had to do forensic accounting across the entire state budget to produce that number. You shouldn’t need a think tank to know your tax burden.

It is not universal. Different fees hit different people depending on what they drive, where they live, what utilities they use, and what services they access. The burden falls asymmetrically — and notably, it falls regressively. A $15 vehicle registration fee increase represents a far higher percentage of a working-class family’s income than it does for a household earning six figures. A genuine consumption tax, properly structured, can be made progressive through rebates or exemptions. Colorado’s fee structure has no such architecture. It just hits whoever happens to be in the path of each individual enterprise.

And it is emphatically not democratic. As I laid out Tuesday, Colorado voters said no to more taxation four separate times. The fee increases came anyway, through a mechanism specifically designed to circumvent that democratic verdict. A genuine consumption tax gets enacted by a legislature accountable to voters, debated openly, and subject to repeal. Colorado’s fee regime was engineered precisely to avoid that process.

So what Colorado has given fiscal conservatives is consumption-based taxation stripped of every virtue that makes consumption taxation worth defending. The economic distortion of taxing transactions? Present. The transparency, universality, and democratic accountability that justify it? Absent. It is the worst of both worlds: you still pay income tax, and you now pay what amounts to a hidden, regressive, unvoted consumption tax on top of it.

The Cruelest Irony

Here is where it gets genuinely infuriating, at least for those of us who have spent years arguing that consumption taxes are more honest than income taxes.

Since 2018, Colorado voters approved three income tax cuts — a combined reduction of 0.38 percentage points. We celebrated. The rate came down. Labor was being penalized slightly less.

Meanwhile, the Common Sense Institute’s data shows that fee-based revenue to non-higher-education enterprises increased over the same period by the equivalent of a 1.5 percentage-point income tax increase. We won the visible fight and lost the invisible one by a ratio of roughly four to one.

The legislature, in effect, let us have our income tax cuts — knowing full well that they were simultaneously imposing a larger consumption-based extraction through fees that we’d never see coming, never aggregate, and never connect to the income tax debate we thought we were winning.

That is not fiscal policy. That is a three-card monte game played with your paycheck.

Share Michael D Brown

The Solution Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s politically nuclear to implement.

Every Colorado household should receive an annual statement — one document, one number — showing the total fees paid to state enterprise funds during the prior year. Not buried in individual bills. Not distributed across twelve different transactions. One invoice. Colorado State Fee Collections: Your Household, FY2024: $4,322.

That single act of transparency would do more for fiscal accountability than any constitutional amendment, any supermajority requirement, any Prop 117. Because the anesthesia only works in the dark. Turn the lights on and the patient wakes up.

Republicans, if they’re paying attention — and that’s admittedly an open question — have a ready-made campaign platform sitting in the Common Sense Institute’s data. Not a tax increase argument. Not an abstract TABOR debate. A receipt. Here’s what they took. Here’s what they called it. Here’s what they said it was for. Now vote accordingly.

Whether they’re smart enough to use it is, as I noted Tuesday, an open question.

But the argument is there. The data is there. The case is airtight.

The only thing missing is the political will to hand every Colorado voter the bill they’ve already been paying — and haven’t been allowed to see.

The Common Sense Institute’s “Snapshot of Fees in Colorado: 2025 Update” is available at commonsenseinstituteus.org. Read Tuesday’s piece, “The Anesthesia Tax,” for the full breakdown of the fee enterprise data.

Leave a comment

Share Michael D Brown

They don’t call them taxes, of course. They call them fees.

And that distinction — that single word — is the most consequential sleight of hand in Colorado politics.

The Numbers Are Not Subtle

The Common Sense Institute, a Colorado-based free-enterprise research organization, released its 2025 update to its Snapshot of Fees in Colorado. The report has some methodological rough edges I’ll get to — intellectual honesty requires acknowledging them — but the core data is not in serious dispute, and it should make you angry. And drive you to the polls in November.

In 1994, the first year Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) took effect, fee-based enterprises generated $742 million in revenue. By 2024, that figure had grown to $25.8 billion. No, that is not a typo. That is a 3,400% increase, against a backdrop of population growth plus inflation — the metric TABOR uses as its own growth cap — of 196% over the same period.

But here’s the per-person comparison that cuts through all the large-number noise: in the year 2000, Colorado’s fee enterprises collected $225 per resident while the General Fund collected $1,209 per resident. By 2024, fee enterprises were collecting $4,322 per resident — and the General Fund? $2,614. Fee revenue per person didn’t just grow faster than tax revenue. It lapped it, twice, and kept running circles around the poor unsuspecting taxpayers.

Put another way: the mechanism the politburo uses to fund government without your permission is now larger than the mechanism it uses with your permission.

Subscribe now

What TABOR Actually Did — And Didn’t Do

Colorado voters passed the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in 1992. The idea was straightforward: any new tax requires voter approval, and annual tax revenue growth is capped at inflation plus population growth. Anything above that cap gets refunded. It was — and remains — the most aggressive taxpayer protection measure in the entire United States.

But TABOR didn’t anticipate, and certainly did not, cap fees.

That distinction, buried in the constitutional language, became the escape hatch through which the Colorado legislature has been driving a convoy of revenue vehicles for thirty years. Fees collected by “enterprise funds” — government-owned entities nominally providing services — are TABOR-exempt. Create an enterprise, attach a fee, collect revenue, done. No vote required. No refund owed.

By 2020, the politburo had created 24 such enterprises. When voters noticed and passed Proposition 117 — requiring voter approval for any new enterprise projected to collect more than $100 million in its first five years — the politburo didn’t stop. It adapted like the alien creature it is. Legislators created ten new enterprises below the threshold. It expanded existing enterprises that Prop 117 didn’t touch. It imposed fees through bill language that technically fell outside the enterprise structure altogether.

The CSI report is at its weakest when it tries to pin all of this on Prop 117’s aftermath. Some of the “new” fee revenue it identifies is non-TABOR-exempt, meaning it’s already subject to the very constraints the politburo is supposedly circumventing. The legislators’ maneuvering is real, but it’s more complicated than a simple before-and-after story.

What isn’t complicated is this: the voters said no to more taxation, four separate times — TABOR itself, Proposition 117, and three income tax cuts approved since 2018 totaling a net reduction of 0.38 percentage points. And while those votes were being cast and celebrated, those same legislators were simultaneously imposing fee increases equivalent to a 1.5 percentage-point income tax hike. Voters thought they won. The scoreboard tells a different story.

Share

The Anesthesia Is the Strategy

Let me be direct about something the CSI report documents but doesn’t quite say out loud: this is not by accident.

Legislators are not oblivious to the difference between a fee and a tax. They are not stumbling into enterprise fund structures out of administrative habit. They know — with the precision of people whose careers depend on surviving elections and lying and prevaricating where necessary — that a proposed income tax increase triggers town halls, editorial boards, and of course, talk radio. They know that the same revenue, extracted in $15 increments through vehicle registration fees, $4 surcharges on utility bills, and rental car assessments, does not. The dose is the strategy. Keep each individual extraction below the threshold of conscious political pain, and you can collect what the voters would never approve in the aggregate.

This is the anesthesia you’re being forced to take. It works not because people are stupid — Colorado voters are not stupid, and the people who listen to my program especially are not — but the human brain is not wired to aggregate invisible costs. We notice our property tax bill because it arrives as a single number on a single piece of paper. We do not notice $0.27 here and $4.50 there, especially when those amounts are buried in bills we pay automatically, statements we scroll past, and registration renewals we just want to get done.

If you received a single annual statement — Colorado State Fee Invoice: $4,322 — the political conversation would look very different. That would be a political earthquake and if Republicans were smart enough, they might take that invoice and win statewide.

A Word on the CSI Report’s Limitations

I said I’d be honest about the study’s rough edges, and I will be, because your intelligence deserves it.

The 3,400% growth figure is real but incomplete without noting that a large portion of fee enterprise revenue is university tuition, reclassified in 2005. Strip out higher education entirely and the per-person fee number drops substantially — from $4,322 to $1,382 per Coloradan. That is still a staggering increase from $101 per person in 2000, but it is a different number than the headline implies. The anesthesia theory is the same, the quantity of the anesthesia is just slightly less. But we’re still asleep regardless.

The report’s income tax equivalency claim — that converting all fee enterprises to income tax funding would require a 12.57% income tax rate — is rhetorically powerful and analytically imperfect. Some fees genuinely correspond to services rendered: you use an express lane; you pay a toll. Converting those to income tax funding and then calling the resulting rate an “equivalent tax burden” conflates a market transaction with compulsory taxation. The more defensible figure, non-higher-education enterprises, would require a 5.98% rate — still 41% higher than the current 4.25%, and still a damning comparison.

I flag these not to undermine the argument — the core argument survives scrutiny — but because a thesis that can withstand its own weakest points is a thesis worth making.

This Isn’t Just Colorado’s Problem

Here’s why this matters beyond the Front Range, the TABOR debate, and the particulars of Colorado fiscal policy: the anesthesia strategy doesn’t require TABOR to work. It requires only that legislators face meaningful democratic resistance to tax increases — and that they have access to a fee mechanism that circumvents that resistance. Republicans talk resistance all the time. Democrats in most states practice it – covertly.

That description fits most of the country. Any state with ballot initiative requirements, supermajority rules for tax increases, or simply a politically attentive electorate creates the same incentive structure. The label changes — “assessments,” “surcharges,” “enterprise revenues,” “special district levies” — but the mechanism is identical. Disaggregate the extraction. Keep the doses sub-threshold. Collect in the aggregate what the voters would reject in a single ask.

Colorado has thirty years of data and a constitutional framework that makes the before-and-after unusually legible. Everywhere else, the anesthesia is working without anyone having thought to check the patient’s wallet.

Leave a comment

Thursday: The Fair Tax Trap — how Colorado’s fee regime managed to give fiscal conservatives the worst of both worlds, and why the most dishonest form of consumption taxation isn’t the one the left invented.

This video is so rich with truth that I did not want to wait until Thursday to post it. You might consider this a “bonus” article, particularly if you live in Colorado. But then, I’m not charging for this Substack (yet!) so share this one far and wide. Because what the Senator says is what Democrats truly believe when it comes to taxpayers everywhere. YOU are just their ATM.

Let’s start with what Senator Michael Bennet actually said, because the words are worth savoring. In a single rambling, clause-colliding sentence — punctuated by three separate false starts on the word “because” — he managed to articulate the entire Democratic theory of government in Colorado: the roads are bad, the bridges need work, the transit system needs investment, and it’s all TABOR’s (Colorado’s Constitutional “Taxpayer Bill of Rights) fault.

Not Medicaid’s fault. Not “Cover All Coloradans”’ fault. Not the legislature’s fault for raiding the transportation budget to plug holes created by programs they chose to create. TABOR’s fault. Yours. The taxpayer’s fault.

Follow along, but take your pain meds first.

Subscribe now

THE INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS REAL — AND THE LEGISLATURE MADE IT WORSE

Bennet isn’t wrong that Colorado’s roads are in bad shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave Colorado a C-minus overall in their 2025 report — Colorado’s lowest grades came in schools, roads, and levees, each at a D+. Roads actually dropped from a C-minus to a D+ since the 2020 report. Only 34% of Colorado’s roads are in good condition, nine points below the national average. And the price tag for ignoring this is real: unsafe and failing roadways cost Colorado motorists an estimated $11.4 billion each year in wasted fuel, vehicle repairs, insurance, and time. In Denver alone, repairs, fuel, and lost time run drivers more than $3,000 a year.

So yes, Senator, roads matter. Here’s where it gets interesting: CDOT faces a $350 million annual shortfall just to maintain existing conditions. Of that, at least $200 million is needed solely for pavement maintenance.

$350 million. Keep that number in mind.

Now — and this is the pivot — what did the Democrat-controlled legislature do when faced with a budget crunch? In March 2025, the state’s Joint Budget Committee slashed more than $140 million initially allocated to CDOT for infrastructure improvements, including more than $65 million of state highway funds. While most state departments saw budget reductions due to the deficit, CDOT’s funding suffered the most.

So the legislature that’s now blaming TABOR for the infrastructure crisis is the same legislature that cut the transportation budget the most deeply, the most deliberately, and the most recently. They didn’t go to the voters and say “help us fix roads.” They quietly took the road money and put it somewhere else.

Where did it go? Sit down.

Share

THE MEDICAID MONSTER THEY BUILT

Over the last decade, Medicaid spending in Colorado has risen at a rate of 8.8% a year — about double what the state government is allowed to spend under TABOR. You read that right. A program the legislature chose to expand has been growing at twice the rate of everything else in government — twice the allowable rate — for a decade. And they’re blaming the constitutional cap?

The state’s Medicaid program — which covers about one in four Coloradans! — is poised for its largest single-year jump in at least two decades, with officials proposing a $2.3 billion increase, even as lawmakers faced a $1.5 billion budget shortfall. Even with $537 million in proposed reductions, spending is still expected to rise by more than 12%.

Even their cuts result in a 12% increase. That’s not a budget. That’s a hostage situation.

THE COVER ALL COLORADANS FIASCO

And then there’s the piece de resistance. In 2022, Democrats passed “Cover All Coloradans” — a program providing Medicaid coverage to children and pregnant women regardless of immigration status. The fiscal analysts at the Colorado politburo said it would cost $14.7 million. Because of higher-than-forecast enrollment, the state is expecting the Cover All Coloradans program will cost $104.5 million in the current fiscal year — a 611% overrun on projections. And it’s not getting better: the cost was projected at $14.7 million. It’s now expected to be about $127.4 million for the next fiscal year.

The program now covers about 28,000 people — when supporters estimated it would cover 3,700. They were off by a factor of seven and a half. In any private enterprise, that’s not a policy disagreement. That’s a firing offense.

And who could have possibly imagined that if you offered something to someone “for free” that more people than you anticipated would show up for the free goodies? I’m shocked! (Insert sarcasm here for you newbies.)

So to summarize the Democratic budget math: Create a program. Lowball the cost by 700%. Watch it explode. Then tell Senator Bennet that it’s TABOR — the constitutional protection against exactly this kind of government overreach — that’s the problem with Colorado’s roads.

THE HARD CHOICES THEY REFUSE TO MAKE

The Common Sense Institute found that between 2019 and 2025, the Colorado legislature enacted 182 new health care laws, creating new bureaucracies, expanding covered services, and adding regulations on public and private providers — totaling at least $858 million per year in new state spending.

$858 million. Per year. In new spending. They chose every single one of those programs. And CDOT needs $350 million to fix the roads.

Do that math yourself. Even trimming that $858 million by half — which is not radical, it’s math — you’ve more than covered the transportation shortfall without touching a single cent of your TABOR refund.

Nearly two-thirds of Coloradans say they travel to the mountains less often than they would like due to traffic and road conditions. And 60% believe taxes are high enough to cover schools, healthcare, and road improvements. Translation: Coloradans know what’s happening. They’re not confused. They just don’t have a senator who’ll listen to them.

A WORD ON “TRANSIT”

I want to flag something in Bennet’s statement because he’s doing what politicians do — slipping something in on the back of something legitimate. He lumped “transit” in with roads and bridges. That’s not an accident.

This is a state of 104,000 square miles. You can drive 300 miles across Colorado and pass through three towns with a combined population smaller than a Denver apartment building. The notion that light rail and bus rapid transit are equivalent infrastructure needs to paving I-70 or fixing a structurally deficient bridge in rural Logan County is absurd on its face. A portion of the state’s transportation-related revenue is currently allocated away from roads to fund mass transit and environmental mitigation, primarily in areas like Denver and Boulder. We already subsidize the bus and the light rail. The Front Range transit system exists. It serves a corridor. The other 95,000 square miles of Colorado runs on roads. Period.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Senator Bennet’s argument is elegant in its simplicity and dishonest in its premise. It goes like this: We spent money we didn’t have on programs we didn’t vet with projections we knew were unreliable, and now there’s no money left for the roads, so obviously the constitutional limit on how fast government can grow is the real villain.

TABOR isn’t preventing Colorado from fixing its roads. Democrats are. Because making hard choices — between Medicaid expansion for people in the country without legal authorization and pavement on Highway 34 near Sterling — is not something they’re politically willing to do.

So instead, they tell you it’s your fault. Your refund. Your constitutional protection. Your TABOR.

Senator Bennet wants to remove the guardrails so Colorado’s politicians can drive faster toward the cliff. The irony is, the roads to that cliff are in terrible shape — and they’re the ones who cut the budget to fix them.

Leave a comment

Second, somewhere in the world of the Internet I ran across a snippet that claimed the federal government workforce was the smallest since the days of President Lyndon Johnson! How could that be? Have we really reduced the federal workforce by that much? Turns out, yes, we have.

Finally, putting those two little facts together, I couldn’t help but wonder, how is that we don’t recognize that an ever-expanding Colorado state government has made us poorer with fewer jobs, a declining economy; and yet,

Subscribe now

Share

the feds have reduced the number of federal jobs, but the deficit still remains high. What do those two facts mean for overall economic growth? My thesis is simple: more government generally means less growth. See for yourself.

The thesis is simple, and deeply counter to the way Democrats in Colorado and Washington talk about government: the bigger the public sector grows relative to the private economy, the more it weighs down growth in the private sector. Democrat Governor Jared Polis’s Colorado gives us a live example—ever‑rising spending and a growing government workforce alongside a state economy that has slipped into the doldrums. At the federal level, the pattern is similar: an ever‑expanding fiscal state correlates with a weaker growth trajectory. The bet here is that if Washington paired a smaller federal government workforce with real restraint on federal spending, the result would be faster private‑sector growth than we see today.

Colorado’s political class (and Democrats everywhere) is very good at talking about cuts. They are not good at actually cutting anything that matters. During Jared Polis’s tenure, Colorado’s state budget has grown almost every year, setting new nominal records even in supposedly “lean” times. In 2025, the headlines out of Denver said lawmakers had to slash more than a billion dollars from the governor’s proposed budget to close a projected shortfall. Yet the bill Polis signed that spring still totaled around 44 billion dollars in spending—larger than the budget just a few years earlier and part of a broader upward trend. By May 2026, Governor Polis was signing a roughly $46.8–47 billion budget, another multi‑billion dollar increase in just one year and far above the spending level at the beginning of his tenure. Analysts who track Colorado’s finances note that, over the past two decades, government spending per resident has climbed by roughly 31%, outpacing both inflation and population growth. In other words, when Colorado Democrats say, “we cut the budget,” they almost always mean they cut their wish list, not the actual size of state government.

The job market tells us the same story. 2025 was a bad year in Colorado’s private economy. A breakdown of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows Colorado’s private sector lost about 10,100 jobs over the year, a decline of roughly 0.4%, with thirteen of twenty major sectors shedding workers. Government, however, added about 2,400 jobs, growing its payroll by about 0.5% even as private employers were shrinking. Over another recent twelve‑month stretch, government jobs increased by about 12,000 while private jobs rose by roughly 10,200—meaning the public workforce grew faster than the private workforce. Colorado’s Common Sense Institute has pointed out that in some months nearly all net job growth in Colorado comes from government hiring. For example, in December 2025 the state added about 1,200 jobs, of which 900 were in government and only 300 in the private sector. In a year when businesses tightened their belts, the one reliable growth industry in Polis‑era Colorado was government itself.

Contrast that with what has happened in Washington during Trump’s return to the White House. Fiscally, Trump’s record is clearly not that of a small‑government purist. Independent budget watchdogs estimate that his previous term in office added around $8.4 trillion to ten‑year debt projections, largely through tax cuts, new spending, and emergency COVID measures. The federal government is still running massive deficits—around $1.8 trillion last fiscal year—even in a growing economy. On the numbers, Republicans in Washington have been perfectly willing to write big checks and leave the bill for later.

But if we shift from dollars to people, the Trump‑era federal government has actually become smaller. Recent data put federal government employment—civilian workers including postal employees—at roughly 2.66–2.68 million, the lowest level since about 1966. Since late 2024, the federal workforce has shrunk by roughly 350,000 jobs, a drop of around 12%. Federal workers now make up only about 1.7% of total U.S. employment, down from over 4% in the 1960s. This reduction has come from a mix of hiring freezes, aggressive attrition, early retirements and buyouts, and targeted program cuts overseen by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), combined with repeated shutdown threats and budget fights that discouraged new entrants into federal service. While Congress continued to authorize large spending, the permanent bureaucracy—what people often call “the federal workforce” (and many of us refer to as the administrative state)—is smaller than it has been in six decades.

Now we have a useful contrast. In Denver, a Democratic governor and legislature have treated the state workforce as a protected class: when money gets tight, they may trim programs and slow the growth of some agencies, but the overall budget keeps rising and public employment is insulated from the pain private employers feel. In Washington, a Republican president has presided over the mirror image: a federal government that continues to spend and borrow heavily, but with a civilian workforce that has been pushed back to Johnson‑era levels. Colorado Democrats have grown the share of Coloradans who work for the state; Trump’s Washington has reduced the share of Americans who work for the federal government—even if it has not yet reduced what that government spends.

The question is whether any of this matters for growth, beyond our ideological preferences about the proper role of the state. Here the empirical literature lines up more with my thesis than with the standard progressive story. A large body of work finds that as government grows beyond a certain point, each additional dollar of public spending yields less benefit and increasingly crowds out private activity. Reviews of dozens of studies conclude that the relationship between government size and growth is hump‑shaped: moving from a very small state toward a moderate one can support growth, but pushing beyond that “optimal” size tends to slow it. Several papers that try to pin down the optimal size of government for advanced economies often cluster around public spending in roughly the 25–35% of GDP range; beyond that, higher spending is usually associated with slower long‑term growth.

The Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD) has put it bluntly. In an analysis of member countries, OECD economists find that larger governments are associated with lower long‑term growth and that bigger states also slow countries’ ability to catch up to the productivity frontier. They also find that not all public spending is equal: investment in infrastructure and education tends to support potential growth, while pensions and subsidies have a significantly negative effect. A Cato‑summarized version of this work emphasizes the same point: within a given tax burden, shifting money away from transfers and subsidies and toward productive investment can help, but once government overall gets too large, even “better‑mix” spending cannot fully offset the drag.

Other studies quantify the effect. A widely cited review from a free‑market perspective concludes that a one‑percentage‑point increase in government size as a share of GDP is associated, on average, with a reduction in the long‑run growth rate on the order of a tenth of a percentage point or more—small in any one year, but enormous when compounded over decades. A recent cross‑country analysis finds that in high‑spending nations, increases in government expenditure are negatively related to growth, suggesting diminishing returns and misallocation of resources as the public sector expands. Surveys of the public‑debt literature reach a similar conclusion: when large, persistent deficits push debt levels ever higher, long‑run growth tends to suffer through lower investment and productivity, especially once debt rises above already‑high baselines.

Taken together, this evidence does not say “any dollar of government spending is bad.” It says something more nuanced—and more damaging to the Colorado/Washington status quo. Moderate levels of government spending on core public goods can support growth; but as spending rises and the state does more redistribution and consumption on autopilot, the costs—higher taxes, more borrowing, more regulation, more political allocation of resources—begin to outweigh the benefits. That is exactly the trajectory Colorado is on: state spending per capita rising faster than inflation, more of the workforce employed by, or dependent on, government, and yet a private economy that is slowing, losing jobs in key years while the public sector continues to hire.

Economically, that is also why the Trump story in Washington is incomplete. Shrinking the federal workforce to its lowest share of total employment since the 1960s is consistent with higher growth: it reduces the direct footprint of government in the labor market and may even improve efficiency in some agencies. But if Congress continues to run $1.8 trillion deficits and to ratchet up total federal spending, the growth drag from a too‑large fiscal state remains. The literature is clear: tax cuts financed by more borrowing are not pro‑growth in the long run; tax relief paired with real reductions in low‑value or distortionary spending is.

That leads back to the thesis. Colorado is a case study in Democratic governance under balanced‑budget rules: because the state cannot borrow freely, Democrats have chosen to balance the books by steadily increasing nominal spending, protecting and expanding government jobs, and leaning on taxpayers and a strong national economy to cover the difference. Washington under Trump is a case study in Republican governance with no such constraint: federal headcount has been cut back to Great Society‑era levels, but the checks being written are larger than ever, and the deficits that fund them are a clear headwind for future growth. If the research is right, the formula for stronger long‑run growth is not complicated: keep genuinely productive public investment, dramatically scale back consumption‑type spending and transfers, and then cut taxes to reflect a smaller, cheaper state. What Colorado shows is what happens when you move in the opposite direction. What Washington shows is what happens when you do only half the job.

Leave a comment

American public life is caught in a contradiction. Modern science rejects the old biological taxonomy of race, and major medical and scientific institutions now describe race as a social construct rather than a biologically valid classification. Yet law, policy, and everyday political discourse continue to rely on racial categories as though they identify stable, meaningful, and administrable groups. The result is a regime that denies race as science while preserving race as bureaucracy.

This thesis argues that the United States should move toward a principled form of colorblind humanism: a legal and social order in which each person is treated first as a human being and as an individual citizen, rather than as a member of a state-defined racial class. The central claim is not that history is irrelevant or that discrimination never existed. It is that a society cannot abolish racial thinking while preserving the governmental machinery that continuously recreates racial categories in law, administration, education, and politics.

The practical catalyst for revisiting this question is the Supreme Court’s April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, invalidating Louisiana’s congressional map after concluding that the state had engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. In a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines, the Court upheld a federal district court’s judgment that the 2024 map — which created a second majority-Black congressional district — violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. That decision did not resolve the philosophical debate. It exposed it. The Court’s reasoning reflects a constitutional impulse toward race neutrality even as the broader legal order remains saturated with racial classification.

More significantly, the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito drew a sharp dissent from Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, who concluded that the ruling had rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Whether that proves correct will play out in courts and legislatures in the months ahead. But the direction of constitutional travel is now unmistakable: the Court is systematically withdrawing the legal architecture that made race-conscious law seem not merely permissible but required.

Race as a Construct

The first premise is scientific. The longstanding claim that humanity can be divided into biologically coherent races is not supported by modern genetics. Scientific and medical authorities now emphasize that race is a sociopolitical construct: a way societies sort people, not a valid genomic taxonomy.

That conclusion matters because the older framework of “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” and “Mongoloid” was once treated as objective science. In fact, it was a historical classification system developed in Europe and refined through 18th- and 19th-century anthropology, later used to rationalize hierarchy, colonialism, exclusion, and slavery. Modern genetics undermined that framework by showing that human variation is clinal, overlapping, and far more complex than discrete racial boxes suggest.

To say race is a social construct does not mean it has had no consequences. It means the categories were created by human institutions and enforced by law, culture, and custom rather than discovered in nature. A construct can be socially powerful without being scientifically real. The key question is whether a category invented for domination should continue to govern modern law and public policy.

The Invention of Whiteness

The American vocabulary of race did not arise neutrally. Historians trace the legal and social consolidation of “whiteness” to the colonial era, when distinctions between Europeans and Africans were hardened in law as slavery expanded and elites sought to divide populations that might otherwise have resisted together. The category of “white” was not simply a description. It was a political tool.

That history helps explain the persistence of classification absurdities in modern administration. For decades, federal standards classified many Middle Eastern and North African populations as “White,” a practice that produced obvious mismatches between lived identity and bureaucratic labeling. The Census Bureau’s categories have also shifted over time in ways that reveal their political and administrative character rather than any stable scientific basis.

This instability is not accidental. It is evidence that racial classification has always been contingent, negotiated, and bureaucratically managed. A category that changes with administrative need is not functioning as a scientific truth. It is functioning as a state artifact.

The Census and State-Made Identity

The Census illustrates the problem with unusual clarity. Before Census 2000, respondents were not allowed to select more than one race, even if their family background plainly crossed categories. Census 2000 changed that rule and allowed people to mark more than one racial box, producing a far more visibly multiracial count.

By 2020, the multiracial population measured by the Census had risen to 10.2 percent, although the Census Bureau also noted that methodological changes contributed significantly to that increase. That is important because it shows not only changing identity but also the degree to which racial data are shaped by official form design and processing decisions.

More revealing still is the practice of imputation. When respondents skip race questions or other demographic items, the Census Bureau uses imputation methods to assign characteristics using available information, including geography and statistical matching procedures. In related research and government practice, surname analysis and geocoding have been used to estimate racial identity probabilistically. In other words, even refusal does not necessarily free a person from racial classification; the state may classify the person anyway.

A government that says race is a social construct while assigning race to people who decline to identify by race reveals the core contradiction of the modern system. The state is no longer merely recording identity. It is manufacturing it for administrative use.

The Voting Rights Act and the Redistricting Dilemma

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to protect the franchise against racial discrimination. Over time, however, the law became intertwined with doctrines that encouraged or required the creation of majority-minority districts in certain circumstances to remedy vote dilution. This development reflected a remedial logic: if racial bloc voting prevented minority voters from electing preferred candidates, mapmakers could be required to draw districts in which those voters had a fair opportunity to elect representation.

That logic has always contained a constitutional tension. The Equal Protection Clause protects persons, not races, and the Supreme Court has long held that state action sorting people by race triggers strict scrutiny. Cases such as Shaw v. Reno recognized that districts predominantly shaped by race may themselves be constitutionally suspect, even when the government claims to be helping historically disadvantaged voters. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) extended that logic to higher education, ending race-conscious admissions and drawing on the same constitutional principle: the state may not sort individuals by racial category even in the name of remediation.

The Court’s April 2026 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais sharpened that tension dramatically. In striking down the state’s map, the majority concluded that race had played too dominant a role in district design and that the Constitution almost never permits racial discrimination by the state. The doctrinal arc from Shaw to SFFA to Callais is now a straight line: the Court is consistently, methodically, and with accelerating force withdrawing judicial tolerance for race-conscious government action.

Commentators across ideological lines described the Callais ruling as a major blow to Section 2 Voting Rights Act enforcement because it constrains the use of race-conscious districting while leaving intact the social realities of racially polarized voting. This is the heart of the modern dilemma. If race is unreal as biology but powerful as social practice, should law continue to use race to counteract race? Or does that remedy entrench the very categories it seeks to transcend?

The Problem with “Minority”

The language of “minority” appears moderate and administrative, but it depends on the same classificatory apparatus as the language of race. In legal usage, minority status generally refers to groups historically subjected to discrimination, often defined by race, ethnicity, sex, or national origin. Yet this does not solve the problem. It simply relocates it.

A “racial minority” can exist only if the state first decides what counts as a race and who belongs in which group. The modern list of protected groups in policy and administration is not the product of scientific discovery. Scholars have documented that it emerged through politics, bureaucracy, lobbying, analogy, and historical contingency. Some groups that suffered discrimination became official minorities; others did not.

This means “minority” is not a neutral description of reality. It is a state-mediated label attached to selected populations for selected legal purposes. Once that is recognized, the term loses its aura of objectivity. It becomes another way the government preserves the old taxonomy under a more contemporary name.

Colorblindness and Its Critics

The case for colorblindness is straightforward. If race is not a valid natural classification, then the state should stop allocating burdens, benefits, representation, and identity through racial categories. Equal protection should mean equal rules applied to individual human beings. On this view, every official use of race, even for ostensibly remedial purposes, teaches citizens that race remains a real and governing feature of social life.

The principal objection is that formally neutral law may freeze in place inequalities created by earlier discrimination. Critics argue that colorblindness announced too early is not neutrality but surrender: it renounces the vocabulary and tools needed to address the lingering effects of historical injustice. They note that disparities in wealth, education, neighborhood networks, and political access can endure after discriminatory statutes are repealed.

That objection identifies a real problem, but it does not itself justify the indefinite continuation of racial classification. A remedy may be understandable and still be corrosive. If the cure requires the state to keep teaching successive generations to think of themselves and one another in racial terms, then the cure may preserve the disease at the level of public consciousness.

Why Replacing Race with Class Does Not Solve the Problem

Before accepting race-conscious law as a permanent fixture, consider the most tempting alternative: replacing race with class, geography, or economic disadvantage as the basis for remedial policy. That approach has practical appeal because it targets hardship more directly and avoids many of the constitutional problems associated with race-based policy. It can also be defended as a way to address need without relying on discredited biological or quasi-biological categories.

But class-based sorting raises a further objection. Replacing race with class may preserve the same administrative logic under a different banner. Government must still define categories, test eligibility, distribute advantages, and manage outcomes according to group status. The category shifts, but the machinery of classification remains.

That is why a more radical thesis emerges from this discussion. The objective should not be to replace one favored category with another, but to narrow the role of government classification itself. A society serious about equal human dignity should be wary of every scheme that makes the state the permanent registrar of group identity and group disadvantage.

Equality of Humanity

The deepest claim in this philosophy is that equality should be grounded in shared humanity rather than in managed group status. Equality in this sense does not mean equal outcomes. It means equal standing before the law, equal liberty, equal accountability, and equal moral worth. It means that a person’s ancestry, skin color, surname, tribe, ethnicity, or hyphenated identity should not determine how the state sees that person.

This perspective does not deny history. It rejects making history the master category of present citizenship. The fact that ancestors suffered discrimination, poverty, exclusion, or conquest is morally and historically important. But a legal order oriented toward human dignity must eventually refuse to treat citizens as proxies for ancestral narratives. Otherwise, citizenship becomes hereditary moral accounting rather than equal membership in a common republic.

Personal advancement from modest beginnings, minority ancestry, or social disadvantage does not disprove the existence of obstacles in the abstract. It proves something more important for political philosophy: human beings possess agency that no group category can capture completely. A just system should protect that agency, not bury it beneath ever more refined demographic sorting.

A Forward Standard

If the United States is to move toward a genuinely post-racial order, the transition requires a clear forward-looking standard. First, law should prohibit discrimination against persons in present time, vigorously and without favoritism. Second, public institutions should reduce reliance on racial and quasi-racial classification except where narrowly required by clearly stated law. Third, policy should focus on improving universal conditions of opportunity — such as school quality, public safety, due process, and economic openness — rather than managing demographic balances.

Such a standard would not promise equal results, because free societies cannot do that without sacrificing liberty. It would promise something more durable: equal citizenship under neutral rules, with the state no longer in the business of ratifying race as the central fact about a human being.

This forward standard also answers the charge that colorblindness is merely rhetorical. Colorblindness is empty if it means ignoring actual discrimination in the present. But it is morally serious if it means refusing to let inherited categories govern modern law while enforcing the same civil protections for every person, regardless of background.

Conclusion

The American race debate has reached a conceptual breaking point. Science rejects race as a biological reality. History shows that racial categories were built for power, not truth. Bureaucracy preserves those categories through forms, metrics, and legal doctrines even while admitting their instability. Constitutional law increasingly recoils from explicit racial sorting — as the trajectory from Shaw v. Reno to Students for Fair Admissions to Louisiana v. Callais makes plain — but has not yet abandoned the broader framework that made such sorting seem normal in the first place.

A coherent alternative is available. The nation can affirm that all people are equal not because their group outcomes are equal, and not because their ancestral stories are identical, but because each is a human being entitled to the same legal respect and judged as an individual. The path to a colorblind republic cannot be paved with permanent color-conscious administration. It begins when the state stops teaching citizens that race is their most important public identity and starts treating them, without qualification, as persons.

Leave a comment

Share Michael D Brown

Share

It pays for itself.

That claim deserves the same scrutiny you’d apply to a car salesman telling you the payments are so low you’ll barely notice them. So let’s notice them.

What the Commissioner Didn’t Post

Laydon’s Facebook post is a masterpiece of selectively omitted math. Here’s what it doesn’t tell you.

The original Link On Demand program launched a decade ago in the City of Lone Tree. Its annual cost: $1.44 million per year, split among RTD, the City of Lone Tree, the Denver South Transportation Management Association, and Douglas County taxpayers.

Then it started growing. The county approved a $2.9 million contract with Via Transportation Inc. to expand the service into Highlands Ranch in 2025. In February 2026, the Board of County Commissioners approved a $4.4 million contract to continue existing services and fund the expansion into Stonegate and Parker — with Parker kicking in $250,000 of that tab. The county’s share comes from Road and Bridge Sales and Use Tax funds: money that voters (including me) approved for what I thought was transportation infrastructure, now being used to pay for free rideshare rides.

The total cost to fund Link On Demand across Douglas County in 2026 alone: $6.3 million. And the county’s own long-range 25-year transportation plan earmarks an additional $30 million to expand Link On Demand countywide.

So the next time someone tells you this is a scrappy little pilot program helping grandma get to her doctor, understand that it is a $6.3 million annual enterprise with a stated goal of covering every corner of Douglas County — and a $30 million expansion budget waiting in the wings.

The operator, for reference, is Via Transportation Inc., a private technology company that holds a 24% share of the global on-demand transit market. More on Via in a moment.

“Pays for Itself”: A Mathematical Autopsy

This is the claim that warrants the most serious examination, because if it were true, it would be one of the great breakthroughs in municipal finance. Spoiler: it is not true.

The theory is straightforward: Link riders get free rides to stores. They shop. They generate sales tax. That sales tax flows back to fund the program. Simple, elegant, and almost entirely disconnected from how math works.

Let’s run the numbers.

The combined sales tax rate in the RTD service areas of Douglas County — Lone Tree, Parker, Highlands Ranch — runs approximately 7.25 to 7.75 percent, blending the Colorado state rate (2.9%), the RTD levy (1%), the county’s own share (roughly 1%), and various local and special district taxes. For simplicity, call the blended rate 7.5%.

If you’re going to claim the program pays for itself through sales tax revenue, and if you’re generous enough to assume that every penny of every applicable tax stream flows directly back to fund this program — a fantasy, since most of those dollars go to the state, RTD, and other jurisdictions — here’s the math you have to do:

$6,300,000 ÷ 7.5% = $84 million in new, incremental retail spending per year — just to break even.

Spread across the 83,000 rides Commissioner Laydon cited in his post, that’s over $1,000 in net-new retail spending per ride that would have to be generated by the act of taking a free Link trip.

But let’s focus on reality. Douglas County’s own tax share is roughly 1 cent on the dollar. If only county-controlled revenue is flowing back to fund this:

$6,300,000 ÷ 1% = $630 million in incremental retail spending to cover even the county’s portion.

This is not a program that pays for itself. This is a program that would need to transform Douglas County into the Las Vegas Strip just to approach break-even.

The Word the Commissioner Never Said: “Incremental”

Here’s where the argument doesn’t just fail mathematically — it fails conceptually, and that’s the deeper problem. And this applies almost anytime a politician tells you a program pays for itself.

The question isn’t how much Link riders spend at the end of their free ride. The question is how much more they spend than they would have spent anyway. Economists call this incremental spending — and it’s the only category of spending that can plausibly “pay for” a transportation subsidy.

Douglas County residents were already shopping at King Soopers before Link On Demand existed. They were already eating out. They were already going to Park Meadows Mall. They were doing it in their own cars, or in an Uber they paid for, or by calling a friend. The sales tax from those transactions was already being collected. A free government rideshare does not create new sales tax dollars from existing spending patterns — it simply changes who’s driving the car to the register.

The only genuinely incremental spending comes from a narrow category: people who were unable to make certain trips before Link existed and are now making them. For some mobility-limited residents, that’s a real benefit. But it’s a far cry from the broad economic multiplier Laydon implies.

Here’s what “incremental” looks like if you’re being honest. Link saves a rider roughly $12 to $18 per trip that they would otherwise have paid for an Uber. Call it $15. If every dollar of that savings gets respent on taxable goods — an aggressive assumption — that generates:

$15 × 7.5% = $1.13 in additional sales tax per ride.

Multiply across 83,000 rides: roughly $93,000 in total incremental sales tax revenue.

Against a $6.3 million program cost.

That’s not paying for itself. That’s covering about 1.5 cents on every dollar spent. Commissioner Laydon’s claim is not creative accounting. It’s creative fiction.

The RTD “Grant”: You Already Paid for That

When you read that RTD is contributing over a million dollars to this program, you might picture RTD benevolently writing a check from its own resources. That’s not what’s happening.

RTD collects a 1% sales tax on purchases in the northern portions of Douglas County — including Lone Tree, Parker, the Acres Green area, and most of Highlands Ranch. Every time a Douglas County resident in those areas buys something taxable, they pay 1% to RTD. RTD pools that revenue regionally, spends the bulk of it on light rail and bus routes that many Douglas County residents rarely use, and then — through its Partnership Program — returns a fraction of those same residents’ own tax dollars back to Douglas County to fund Link On Demand.

The RTD “grant” is, in substantial part, a partial rebate of money Douglas County residents already paid. The county’s share, meanwhile, comes from the Road and Bridge Sales and Use Tax fund — a pot of money that voters approved for roads and bridges, which now also apparently includes free rides to Park Meadows Mall.

There is no external benefactor here. There is no windfall. There are Douglas County taxpayers paying for their own free rides through at least three different tax streams simultaneously, while elected officials describe it as a grant-funded program that practically pays for itself.

“Essential Government Service”? Tell That to Charles Schwab

In public finance and government appropriations law, the concept of “essential government services” has a recognized, if elastic, meaning: public safety, courts, roads, public health, and basic safety-net services for those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves. That last qualifier matters: genuinely cannot. Not inconveniently won’t. Not preferably shouldn’t have to.

Link On Demand’s own advocates sell it primarily as a lifeline for seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income residents who lack access to private transportation. That’s a compelling case for a targeted service. But here’s what they don’t lead with: anyone can use it.

CBS News Colorado reported on how the service actually functions. One driver described a typical Lone Tree shift this way: passengers include “local employees who go to work at Charles Schwab and DISH Network. They’ll go to Costco or Sam’s Club.” Charles Schwab — one of the largest financial services corporations in the country, headquartered in a campus in Lone Tree — has employees commuting to work on Douglas County’s taxpayer-funded rideshare.

Parker Councilmember Laura Hefta, selling the expansion to her community, predicted it would be “widely successful for our seniors, for our young people, for our folks working at home, and for incidentals like car breakdowns.”

“For incidentals like car breakdowns.”

That’s the pitch. A $6.3 million annual program — growing toward county-wide deployment — justified in part because sometimes your car won’t start. That’s not a gap in essential government services. That’s what roadside assistance is for. It’s what calling a neighbor is for. It’s what — and I cannot stress this enough — Uber is for.

And before anyone raises the legitimate concern about vulnerable populations: ADA-mandated paratransit services already exist. RTD’s Access-A-Ride provides curb-to-curb service for the disabled throughout the service area. Parker Flexride offers curb-to-curb bus service in parts of Parker. The mobility-impaired are not without options. What Link On Demand is providing, for those populations, is an upgrade in speed and convenience — a legitimate quality-of-life improvement, to be sure, but not the same thing as filling a legal gap that no other program addresses.

Government vs. Uber: Picking Winners with Your Money

This is the argument that should make every limited-government conservative in Douglas County genuinely angry — because it cuts to the philosophical core of what local government is supposed to do.

Uber operates in Douglas County. Lyft operates in Douglas County. Both are private companies. They employ drivers, pay taxes, carry insurance, and operate in a competitive market. They charge riders real prices that reflect real costs: driver pay, fuel, insurance, platform overhead, government-mandated fees, and the profit margins that justify continued investment and service. The market is working.

Now Douglas County, using Road and Bridge tax funds, RTD rebates, DRCOG grants, and federal FTA dollars, is offering the identical service at a price of zero. Not a subsidized price. Not a discounted fare. Zero. That is not competition. That is obliteration — carried out with the taxpayers’ own money.

The irony should not be lost on anyone: the county isn’t even running this service itself. It contracted the operation out to Via Transportation Inc., the private, venture-backed technology company that holds nearly a quarter of the global on-demand transit market. So what’s actually happening here is this: the county is taking your tax dollars and handing them to one private company — Via — to operate a subsidized service that destroys the economic viability of two other private companies — Uber and Lyft — who are doing nothing wrong, breaking no laws, and competing fairly.

That is not neutral governance. That is the government functioning as a venture capitalist, picking Via as the winner, and making taxpayers fund the bet. Via, to its enormous credit, has figured out a brilliant business model: get governments to pay you to undercut your competitors. Thirty-six percent of the global on-demand transit market doesn’t stay at 24% by accident. You stay there by getting taxpayers to foot the bill for free rides that your private-sector rivals have to charge for.

The standard defense of government transportation spending is neutrality. Government builds roads; everyone uses them — Uber, FedEx, commuters, everyone. Building roads does not mean the government is competing with FedEx. But Link On Demand is not neutral infrastructure. It is a direct substitute product, competing head-to-head with Uber and Lyft for the exact same trip, for the exact same customer, at an artificially imposed price of zero.

If a private company used its dominant market position to price its service at zero in order to eliminate competition, regulators would call that predatory pricing. When a government does it with other people’s money, it gets a 4.9-star rating on Facebook.

My Closing Argument

Douglas County is the wealthiest county in Colorado. According to U.S. Census data, its median household income is approximately $139,000 — well above the state median of $87,598. It ranks among the top fifteen wealthiest counties in the entire nation. Its poverty rate is 3%, compared to a statewide rate of nearly 10%.

This is not a struggling rural county with no transportation alternatives. This is one of the most affluent communities in America — and its county government is spending $6.3 million in 2026 alone to provide free Uber rides to anyone who wants one, including Charles Schwab employees, people whose cars have broken down, and anyone else who’d rather not pay for their own transportation.

Commissioner Laydon says it pays for itself. The math says it covers about one and a half cents on every dollar it costs.

He says it’s funded by RTD. In reality, it’s largely funded by Douglas County residents’ own RTD tax dollars returned to the county as a partial rebate.

He says it’s modeled on Lone Tree’s successful pilot. What he doesn’t say is that the county just committed to $30 million more in expansion over the next 25 years — funded by the same Road and Bridge taxes your neighbors voted for when they thought they were fixing roads.

And he says it serves “everyone from seniors getting to doctor’s appointments to residents with developmental disabilities.” That part is true. It also serves everyone who just doesn’t feel like calling an Uber, everyone who’d rather not pay for their own commute, and every employee at every major employer in Lone Tree and Highlands Ranch who’d like a free ride to work.

That’s not a transportation policy. That’s a subsidy in search of a justification.

Enjoy the ride, Douglas County. You’re paying for it either way. You’re being taken for a ride.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now