It is incredibly funny and incredibly tragic, all at the same time — a meme making the rounds on Facebook featuring a photo of a broadly smiling Allegheny County Chief Executive Sara Innamorato.
Reads the caption: “Congratulations Washington County Realtor of the Year! Sarah[sic] Innamorato.”
The implication is that an Innamorato-backed measure (promulgated by Allegheny County’s health department) to mandate that every private employer (nonprofit or for profit) offer every private employee 18 weeks (four-and-a-half months!) of parental leave after mere days on the job will result in mass business and population flight to neighboring counties such as Washington.
Backers of the audacious measure – members all of The Free Lunch Society – scoff at the notion. They point to, among other past imposts and/or regulations, former ACE Dan Onorato’s “drink tax” that concerns of flight are overblown.
But Allegheny County’s population and jobs data, even after the Covid pandemic, certainly don’t paint any kind of meaningful gains or, in some metrics, any gains at all. And that’s been going on for years.
Recidivist attempts to tax the county to prosperity and government scheme after government scheme to command the county and its economy to the same have created only one thing: The Great Ditch of Funk.
And the more the jobs and economic picture wallow in that ditch, the more interventions government-types cook up to hide the lies of every past, failed, cockamamie intervention.
It is the insidious creeping crud of government that believes it knows all but, in reality, knows nothing at all and, in the process, slays free markets and the innovative spirit so necessary for free markets to survive, to prosper and to deliver.
That iteration after iteration of county government has no fundamental understanding of the error of its ways is deeply disturbing. And it is the product of the worst kind of ignorance — willful ignorance.
It once was written that “Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we’re the ones who securely tied the knot.”
Sadly, the blindfolds and the knots keep multiplying, unabated, for Allegheny County’s “leaders.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
