Publisher’s Positions
Ballard Asks For Property Reappraisals Every Two Instead Of Four Years
Property Assessor Phil Ballard, who has been in office for six months while only winning his race by 12 votes, has gotten the county commission to approve reassessing real estate every two years instead of every four. As the daily newspaper indicated, it means your property taxes will be raised more often than before. The daily newspaper referred to the last property tax hike in the City of Knoxville as modest when it was 40%. Since when did anyone rationally refer to a 40% increase in anything as “modest”?
With the huge influx of newcomers fleeing “Blue” states and high taxes, they have descended on Tennessee like the locusts who devoured all of Egypt. The City of Knoxville in particular seems to think we have a responsibility to house anybody who shows up, hence the increasing traffic congestion and new apartment complexes are springing up on every scrap of pavement and scrub grass in sight. The more people who come here, the greater the strain on our local resources, schools, hospitals, health care, parking, roads and housing. The people fleeing from California, Illinois, Minnesota and the Northeast have come with their pockets full from selling their homes in what are inflated markets and paying cash here, and the demand for housing, as well as Bidenomics, has caused prices here to skyrocket.
That is the crux of why Phil Ballard wants to reassess property every two years, so as to assess your home at the much higher prices, meaning that you are going to pay more and probably much more in property taxes. I know folks who have had to write hefty checks for their mortgage escrows due to the property tax hike in the City of Knoxville; either that or they pay more per month on their mortgage. Even homes that sold four or five years ago are bringing substantially more than what they sold for then. So, too, will the property tax bill be higher.
The good news is it will bring in a large amount of revenue for Knox County and the City of Knoxville to spend on our overburdened infrastructure. The bad news is the City government can’t be trusted with spending taxpayer money as it is; the Gay Street Bridge is closed to automobiles because the City supposedly doesn’t have the money currently to fix it properly. Bridges and roads should be taken care of before bike trails and greenways and art.
Hundreds, if not thousands of apartment units are being built along the river in South Knoxville, where traffic is already clogged from the pace of rapid development inside the city. To get anywhere in Knoxville, South Knoxvillians have to come across the Henley Street Bridge, the James White Parkway, or down Alcoa Highway. Of course, most of the people doing the planning probably live in Fourth & Gill or West Knoxville and don’t have to cross the river, so they may not care.
When the daily newspaper, which has a long history of being for any and every tax increase since humans invented the wheel, including an income tax for Tennessee, is doing a jig to tell us how wonderful it will be to have our property taxes raised every two years, folks better start paying attention. But then again, bills always come due. The huge migration to Knoxville and Knox County has caused an unprecedented wave of development that has strained our resources. So – now the piper must be paid.
Drug Cartels Should Be Destroyed
Since 2022, 200 Americans have died daily from fentanyl overdoses. More than a quarter of a million Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses since 2018. Consider that 36,000 Americans lost their lives during the Korean War; 58,220 Americans lost their lives during the Vietnam War. The number of Americans lost to fentanyl is astonishing. Yet, during the Biden administration, our borders were deliberately thrown wide open just so the Democrats could give the finger to Donald Trump. For quite nearly four years, the legacy and corporate media lied to our faces, along with the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress, that there was no crisis at the border. The 250,000 Americans, many of them young people, dead from fentanyl overdoses doesn’t even take into account those dead from criminal violence like Laken Riley, whose name virtually no Democrat or Joe Biden himself could or would utter. Our congressman, Tim Burchett, is sponsoring the No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act. President Trump has designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Weekly bank shipments of American cash were being sent to the Central Bank of Afghanistan. As Tim rightly points out, those people and countries who hate us will still hate us just as much for free.
The time has come to deal with the cartels and their gangs the way we would with pirates or marauders. There isn’t a government on earth that doesn’t secure its own borders and that’s one big reason why. The virtue signaling and the lying of the corporate news media were very costly, both in terms of American blood and treasure.
Bye, Bye Joy
Speaking of lying in the media, Joy Reid has been cancelled over at MSNBC. Naturally, Rachel Maddow and those on the Left have to point fingers at MSNBC, which is evidently racist. Maddow and her cohorts fail to mention that Reid’s time slot is being filled by another Black woman, a Black man, and a Latina, not a White male. Yet only racism could be the cause for cancelling the shrill stupidity of Reid, who is no more a journalist than a caterpillar is a bull. Rachel Maddow, to whom MSNBC was paying millions to work one night a week, just called her own network “racist.”
MSNBC, believe it or not, is a business and as Comcast doesn’t intend to carry a lifeless body around forever and pretend it’s merely on life support, it can’t keep a show on the air that nobody watches. MSNBC has seen its viewership drop by 53% since Donald Trump’s election last November. The network has been paring back, including Reid’s salary. MSNBC barely managed to attract an audience of 734,000 viewers while CNN’s viewership was even less at 522,000. The most highly sought-after demographic is that between the ages of 25 – 54 and MSNBC has just had its lowest January with that demographic in its entire history. There were times when the viewership for MSNBC was just 45,000 viewers for the day, with 63,000 viewers during the supposed peak hours of the evening.
Reid was all too often condescending and intensely critical of White people, had difficulty explaining homophobic posts to social media, and often mouthed sometime truly bizarre opinions. Reid’s favorite topics were usually Black Lives Matter and immigration, and in her last show, she claimed fascism is here already. President Trump simply dismissed Reid as a “mentally obnoxious racist.”
