Opinion: Personal Theft and Political Crimes in 2024

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

How much have you had stolen from you?

That’s a big question. My apologies. Too big a question for a short online column.

So let’s narrow it down.

How much have you had stolen from you in just the past four years?

Political candidates like to talk about all the free stuff that they’ve given you, and then promise even more free stuff in the future (paid for with your own tax dollars, of course. Nothing is ever really free).

But candidates don’t like to talk about what they’ve taken from you, do they?

So let’s look at that, shall we?

Retail theft has skyrocketed over the past four years. Shoplifting used to be a rare and minor offense, in which criminals would sneak out of a store with a single purse hidden in their coats, or a wristwatch or bracelet surreptitiously dropped in a pocket. In recent years, however, “flash mob” stealing has taken over; it’s a truly organized crime now, in which a dozen or more thieves attack at once and grab all they can carry, overwhelming the store’s staff. This explosion of retail crime has driven the closure of countless stores, and driven huge price increases at others, since the store has to make up for those losses by higher prices on the merchandise they can actually sell.

What has driven this change? Specific policies – the reduction or elimination of jail time for property crimes, along with the decision not to even prosecute many property crimes – have caused an explosion of known criminals going free, rather than being in jail where they belong. And it’s Democrat policies – the specific, proudly stated policies of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – that have specifically driven this change.

If you’re a storekeeper, or a store employee, or even just another shopper having to pay higher prices because of all this, this is theft, personal as well as corporate. It’s theft of profits, if you own the shop or own stock in the retailer.

But it’s theft of a bonus, a raise, or even a job, if you’re a retail employee. And it’s theft from your own wallet, if you’re the shopper who is now paying twenty or thirty percent more for everything you buy because of all this theft.

Depending on which of those hats you wear, this may mean hundreds of dollars stolen from you each year, or maybe thousands, or maybe even more.

And what about transportation? You’re paying almost twice as much for fuel today as you did four years ago. Whether you’re driving to work or to school, or driving your kids to and from college, or driving the family on vacation, you’re paying twice as much for gasoline.

This is extremely difficult to estimate because everyone drives a different amount, and everyone’s car gets different gas mileage. But the national average increase has been about two dollars per gallon since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took over the White House in 2021, and the average car is driven about 10,000 miles per year. At an average gas mileage of 20 mpg, that’s about 500 gallons per year per vehicle, for an increased cost of about $1000 – per year, per vehicle – in your household’s gasoline spending alone.

This increase in the cost of gasoline has also been driven specifically by the policies of the team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They started out – Day One – cancelling pipelines and slow-walking oil exploration permits, banning massive areas of federal land from drilling, and banning or restricting the wonderfully-efficient process of fracking. This has taken hundreds of thousands of acres of resources off the table. That’s why the price of gasoline has doubled.

That additional thousand dollars plus per year that you’re spending on the pump is directly due to these Democrats’ specific policies. If anyone but Democrats had been in office instead – Republicans, libertarians, independents, whatever – you’d have a thousand dollars more per year in your bank account, just from this one issue alone. The Democrats are robbing you.

The same goes for the diesel fuel that truckers and locomotives use, to transport goods all over the country. Diesel prices have doubled too, roughly along the same lines as gasoline.

As diesel has jumped, so too, therefore, has the price of freight, which means that everything you buy, from the grocery store to the mall, from brick and mortar retailers to online shopping, costs more because it cost that much more not only to get it to you, but to get the parts or raw materials to the factory that made it.

Exactly how much depends on how much you shop, and where, and what you buy. But you can be sure of this much: that transportation inflation – caused directly by the Biden-Harris regime’s fuel policies – has driven much of the cost of the things on which you spend your money, from food to school supplies, from new tires for your car to new chairs for your living room.

How much has your restaurant bill gone up in the past few years? Restaurant prices have increased across the country anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent over the past four years, with an incredibly regressive effect: the fast food establishments upon which the working poor and middle class depend have often doubled in price, while higher end restaurants have been less severely hit. Why?

Because much of the cost increase is from the transportation already mentioned. And because of the Biden regime’s war on cattle and the dairy industry, since milk and beef figure so prominently in the cost of restaurant operations. And much of the increase is from outrageous, mandated hikes in the minimum wage over the past four years, which Democrat politicians have pushed through in state after state, city after city. In many areas, the minimum wage has doubled in just four years, which has caused fast food places in particular to shut down or to have to double their prices.

Has this helped their employees, though, at least? Of course not. The ones who’ve kept their jobs have inflation-hiked expenses as a result, so the wage increase is more than consumed by higher personal costs. And hundreds of thousands of jobs have been eliminated, as thousands of restaurants and fast food outlets have had to shut their doors. Rather than the win-win policy it was painted as, this minimum wage jump been lose-lose, as those who kept their jobs saw no real inflation-adjusted increase, and so many lost their jobs outright as a result.

And how much has this group of Democrat policies cost you? If you go to restaurants frequently, it has cost you thousands of dollars per year. If you go to restaurants rarely, it’s cost you hundreds per year. One thing is for certain: it hasn’t actually benefited anyone.

Need we discuss taxes? Here it differs widely from state to state; red states have not seen huge tax increases, but blue states have, as decades of profligate government spending have necessitated huge increases in property taxes, sales taxes, and newly created or newly increased commodity taxes in places like Illinois, New York, California and New Jersey.

And we haven’t seen this one yet, but it’s coming: Congress forced the Trump era tax cuts to be temporary, and many are expiring this year. The Biden-Harris crowd could have extended them, but their policy is for federal tax rates to climb again. Next year will be worse for you. Depending on your bracket, it could be a lot worse.

Has your car ever been stolen or broken into? Perhaps not, but you probably know someone whose has. Carjackings are up, especially in our major cities. When a car is stolen, that’s $10,000, or $20,000, or $30,000 or even more. You’ll get some coverage back from your insurance, of course, but your premiums will go up for awhile too; there’s no winning here. It’s still a loss, when it happens.

And whether your car is the one stolen or not, it hurts you anyway, because everybody’s premiums go up when there are a lot of carjackings and break-ins. How much has your insurance gone up this year? Three hundred? Five hundred? More? That too can be laid at the feet of the Democrats on the ballot this fall; it’s their open-border policies, their non-prosecution policies, their empty-the-prisons policies, that have caused this crime wave that has directly impacted your auto insurance rates, and likely your homeowner’s policy as well.

We could go on. We haven’t touched on the jobs that have been stolen by government over-regulation, by government collusion with foreign countries, by the irrational fear of carbon dioxide that has led to the destruction of whole industries from appliances to automobiles. These Democrat policies have stolen the livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands of people dependent on thousands of companies in hundreds of towns all over the country.

In the end, when you do the math, the Biden-Harris regime – along with the state-level regimes of so many states under Walz and Hochul, Pritzker and Newsom, Whitmer and Inslee, and so many more – have stolen countless thousands of dollars from you, personally, through their destructive policies.

We can never get that money back. They’ve caused it to evaporate.

They’ve robbed you of your nest egg, shaken you down for your grocery money, in many cases even stolen your very job from you, stolen your town’s future, stolen your children’s careers.

We can’t undo what they’ve done, but we can stop the bleeding now.

All we have to do is vote them out of office, forever, and never let that corrupt, destructive, criminal party ever do any of this to anyone again.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo