Florida is the state that gave the world hanging chads, the Burmese python invasion, and the guy who got arrested for throwing an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-through window. There is even a small section of Key West called the Conch Republic that officially seceded from the United States (although no one has yet noticed, since its alcohol consumption rates remain stable). But in one of many pandemic miracles, Florida drew the best governor in human history, Ron DeSantis, who, sadly, is terming out in December. But he isn’t just sitting around; in his lame-duck year, Governor DeSantis heroically pushed through what critics called a “reckless and insane” property tax initiative, which is now on the November ballot (albeit severely pruned in the passage process).

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Florida Cities Are Already Cutting Spending Ahead of Pivotal Property-Tax Vote.” This news was essentially buried by other breaking Florida news of the reckless and insane, specifically, Florida man Eddie Inch and his hoverboard-towed golden retriever Loosy riding a jet ski. (Loosy wore a regulation flotation device.) This was not part of a circus performance. It was just Tuesday in South Florida.

Anyway, Florida’s local governments have become morbidly obese on property tax revenue for the past several years. As home values across the Sunshine State went vertical—driven by the entirely predictable consequence of millions of Americans fleeing high-tax blue states to move somewhere that doesn’t force its residents to triple-mask and show vaccine passports to buy gas-station powdered donuts—local tax collections went vertical right along with them. Florida TaxWatch said many counties saw tax revenue increases that doubled or tripled and blew past both inflation and population growth combined.

Here’s the shocking (not shocking) part. Responding to this sudden windfall in unexpected and unspent tax revenue, hundreds of local governments were suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lower tax rates without giving anything up. They could be heroes! They could balance the budgets, pay off debts, retire bonds, and lower property tax rates—all without firing a single DEI administrator’s head assistant!

So of course, they did the exact opposite.

Not one of Florida’s local governments lowered residents’ property tax rates. None paid down their debts. No bonds were retired. Out of hundreds of contestants, none managed to balance their budget. Local governments had discovered that “emergency” is a magic word that —shazam!— makes budget discipline disappear faster than a plate of jelly donuts at a school board meeting. There would be no going back.

Nope. Instead, they went on spending sprees, like a corps of Army Rangers back from Fallujah, flush with combat bonuses on an R&R deployment to Las Vegas. Cities expanded DEI departments. Counties added more and more and more goofy wokeness, expanded “programs,” handouts, and expensive nonsense. School boards spent every nickel of additional property tax revenue and staffed up.

I hate to break this bad news, but if you can’t achieve budgetary sanity in Florida —the reddest of red states in 2026— even when it costs nothing and would be a complete political win, then I must regretfully conclude that governmental financial prudence is impossible.

They simply cannot be trusted. I might have predicted this result in my socialist blue outpost of Alachua County. But sadly, even dark-red Republican counties misbehaved. Their spending appetites are insatiable. I can only conclude that we must put them on a forced diet, like sending them to one of those Russian fat camps where they give you one small cup of chicken broth once a day and won’t let you leave for 40 days no matter what you say.

This was also Governor DeSantis’s conclusion. So he proposed ending all property taxes of any kind, replacing annual property taxes with a once-per-purchase sales tax instead. Hysteria ensued. The legislative sausage factory reduced that admirable goal to the current ballot initiative.

Still, Governor DeSantis successfully rammed through a diminished version of the proposed constitutional amendment, called “Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes,” which will appear on the November ballot. Assuming 60% of Florida voters approve it, the homestead exemption —a modest discount on property taxes for residents’ primary residences— will slowly increase from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027, and then to $250,000 in 2028.

The expanded discount would hardly keep up with the property tax inflation. But still.

For millions of Florida homeowners who’ve watched their property tax bills balloon faster than Ilhan Omar’s expense account, this seems like generally good news, and apparently the politicians think it will be popular. After all, according to the Journal’s story, they are already buckling down their budgets, while also wailing to anyone who’ll listen about how they can’t possibly go back to their pre-covid lifestyle, which, from the shrillness of their complaints, must have been truly severe austerity.

It’s like listening to a pack of drug addicts begging not to be sent back to rehab. Sorry. It’s for your own good.

They have to go cold turkey. It’s the only way. One hopes that, when he leaves the Governor’s office, Ron DeSantis will find a solid spot in the Trump Administration or possibly even on the Supreme Court. But I digress.

The mind-numbingly common pattern is tax increases. Major tax cuts are vanishingly rare. This one requires a constitutional amendment and a 60% super-majority. Hopefully, other states will soon follow Florida’s historic example.

Which leads nicely into our next story. DeSantis barely won his first election in 2018. It was within 0.2%. He almost lost to Democrat darling Andrew Gillum, who has also been in the news this week. And you thought Graham Platner was bad.

🔥 Andrew Gillum — former Tallahassee mayor, former Democrat gubernatorial candidate, former ‘rising star’ of the Democrat Party, is currently vacationing at the Baldwin County, Alabama jail. Andrew was arrested last week after a police officer pulled him over for erratic driving and noticed, sitting on the center console in plain view, a glass meth pipe. The Daily Beast reported, “Former Democratic Rising Star Arrested on Drug Charges.”

The story’s sub-headline explained, “The arrest marks the latest setback for Andrew Gillum, 46, who could now face up to five years in prison.”

I want to stop here to note that “glass pipe sitting on the center console in plain view” is not a subtle detail. This is not a case of a zealous officer conducting an invasive search of the back of the glove compartment. The pipe was on the console. In the open. Visible from outside the vehicle. It was, in the parlance of law enforcement, what professionals technically refer to as “glaringly obvious.”

Officers then searched Andrew’s car and found three grams of methamphetamine, eight pre-rolled marijuana joints, four cut straws, three pipes, and a bong.

Four cut straws. Three pipes. And a bong. For traveling purposes.

In other words, this is not just a drug user. This is a drug enthusiast. This is a man who has given serious thought to his drug storage and retrieval system. This is someone who, when packing for a road trip, uses a checklist.

In 2018, Andrew Gillum came within 30,000 votes of becoming the Governor of Florida— a razor-thin margin of less than two-tenths of one percent. (A steady stream of late-received mail-in ballots nearly put him over the top till a judge stopped it.) He was the Democratic Party’s golden boy — young, charismatic, progressive, and apparently traveling with enough controlled substances to supply an above-average music festival.

The national media adored him. Barack Obama campaigned for him. Oprah campaigned for him. The New York Times wrote approximately eleven billion glowing words about his inspiring journey, his unparalleled vision for Florida’s socialist future, and his politically inconvenient meth, cocaine, and male hooker habits. Whoops! Sorry! The Times didn’t mention that last part. They knew it; they just didn’t say it.

As noted, this week’s arrest was not Gillum’s first ride on law enforcement’s mechanical bull.

🔥 In March 2020, Miami Beach police responded to a hotel suite at the Mondrian South Beach after reports of a drug overdose. They found Gillum in the room with two other men (one a male escort), and three small bags of suspected crystal methamphetamine.

No charges were filed, allegedly because the drugs couldn’t be tied directly to Gillum, which is the kind of legal outcome that requires a very specific and creative interpretation of the phrase “in the room.” It weren’t MY drugs!

Gillum subsequently ‘came out’ as bisexual. He said his wife, Jai Gillum, had long known and they’d “embraced a new dynamic” in their marriage. (Voters might have benefited from this information, but whatever.) He claimed he’d developed a drinking problem after his 2018 loss, conveniently said he had blacked out on the beach before waking up in that hotel room with all those guys and drugs, and promptly entered rehab.

I don’t think it worked.

The Democratic Party, which had just spent two years calling Gillum the future of progressive politics, nodded sympathetically and moved on, because that is what you do when your rising star wakes up in a hotel room after a bender with a male escort and three bags of crystal meth— you express ‘support for his journey’ and quietly take him off the fundraising email list.

It might be time for more rehab. But despite the corproate media framing, it’s not just drugs and alcohol. In 2022, federal prosecutors indicted Gillum on conspiracy, wire fraud, and false statement charges, accusing him of diverting campaign contributions and NGO grant money for personal use while lying to donors, and of lying to the FBI during its investigation into corruption in the Tallahassee city government.

But a progressive Tallahassee jury acquitted Andrew of lying charges and hung on the rest. So prosecutors just dropped the remaining counts, because the American justice system is a rich tapestry.

But the Florida Commission on Ethics —not afflicted with blue Tallahassee juries— found probable cause that Gillum had ‘improperly accepted gifts’ while mayor of Tallahassee —including trips to Costa Rica and New York, with tickets to Hamilton— from people who turned out to be undercover FBI agents.

Andrew paid a $5,000 fine to settle those serious allegations. Five thousand dollars. For a man who nearly became governor of the third-largest state in the country. That is less than the cost of a barely reliable used car, or, apparently, one well-stocked road trip.

And now, Alabama. Three grams of meth. Eight joints. Four cut straws. Three pipes. A bong. Erratic driving on U.S. Highway 98 at 10:45 p.m. on the Fourth of July. (Gillum posted a $6,500 bond and has declined to comment.)

🔥 What are we to think of Democrats’ nominees and their voting preferences? One of the commenters from the story about Gillum’s most recent arrest said they would still “vote for a drugged-up Andrew Gillum a million times over before I’d ever vote for Ron DeSantis”:

They did wonder about their donation to Gillum’s campaign, though. Ironic.

I hate manifesting this horrific possibility in print, but if the 2018 mail-in ballot counting had continued for one more day: Gillum would have been elected Florida’s governor. The nation would still be under pandemic martial law. And, worst of all, Gillum would have been a serious presidential candidate.

Now we are breathlessly waiting for the next shoe to drop on Governor Newsom’s oleaginous hairdo. We are munching bags and bags of microwave popcorn in rapt amazement at rapey Graham Platner’s Greek tragedy. (Currently: He’s not leaving without his prize bag.) WSJ, yesterday:

Mangling its metaphors again, the Journal explained, “Democrats are scrambling to stave off disaster as the fallout from new allegations against Graham Platner threatens to intensify simmering rifts within the party.” Fallout is radiation from the sky, not a stovetop simmer. And, just how coherent is intensified simmering anyway? Oh, never mind.

One can only conclude that Democrats, frustrated by wicked Republicans stopping them from defunding the police, have transitioned to the other plank of their noble criminal justice-reform platform: elect criminals.

But I remain open to alternative explanations. Let me know what you think in the comments.