We’re here, we’re annoyed and we’re not gonna take it anymore
I’m forming a new political party.
No offense intended to the two major ones we already have, but they stink. OK, well, if I’m being honest, some offense was intended. Currently, we’re at “invading Venezuela to distract attention from the Epstein files” levels of incompetence, so a bit of change seems warranted.
I’m going to call my party The Nuisance Liberation Front, and you’re welcome to join.
We’re not going to tackle any hot-button social topics — you can go somewhere else if you want action on wedge issues. We’re dealing only with the stuff everyone agrees on, but no one ever takes action about.
Here are just a few of the planks in our platform:
A permanent end to corporate welfare. Recently, the CFO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, which lost an estimated $5 billion last year, said the federal government should “backstop” their $1.4 billion investments in infrastructure. It smacks of the “too big to fail” nonsense in the banking industry after they made a bunch of bad investments and then forced taxpayers to bail them out.
Fairness in grocery billing. At the grocery store, they will not be allowed to ring up items at the non-sale price and then tell you that “it takes the discount off at the end of the transaction, requiring you to have a postdoctoral degree to understand what you were actually charged. Too many times, I’ve been confused as to whether the sale price rang up or not, then had to decide whether to go back to the store to get my 50 cents or just give up and surrender more of my dignity to the obvious trick.
Truth in labeling. Speaking of groceries, they’re not allowed to put less of a product inside the package and charge you the same amount unless they slap a giant “NOW WITH LESS YOGURT” sticker on the front. No downsizing food.
No personal warehousing. And the stores can’t require you to purchase more than two of an item to get a sale price, unless they’re going to pay you rent to store their overstock in your pantry. I’m sick of having to choose between buying 40 boxes of cereal or paying $10 for a box of Cheerios. Also, the bags in all cereal boxes will be legally required to be equipped with a zippered closure that prevents the cereal inside from going stale.
Property tax stability. There will no longer be such a thing as an increase in the assessed value of a home. No more property-tax increases while you live in the same house. I mean, look, just because you say my house is worth that amount doesn’t mean I would be able to afford to pay that if I bought it now. You can’t tax someone for unrealized gains (or so I hear, from the billionaires who don’t want to pay taxes on the stock they own).
I have plenty of other ideas, but I think you get the drift. The two political parties have us fooled. So, vote for the Nuisance Liberation Front: We’re putting the “popular” back in “populism.”
Georgia Garvey is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of “Everything’s Going To Be OK (Until It’s Not).”
