It is an economic truism that if you subsidize something you get more of it. Well, by defunding the police, by legalizing theft, by reducing community and public health standards to medieval levels, by encouraging hatred towards law enforcement, and by decrying traditional American values in regards to law and order, Democrats and the Left have politically subsidized crime across America.

And it won’t end anytime soon, as Democrats have a political stranglehold in America’s crime ridden largest cities. Former GOP congressman Jason Chaffetz offers details.

Chaffetz: “The crime spike is real. Democrats don’t want to talk about it. But we’re seeing consistent data out of blue cities where Black Lives Matter protesters are getting the criminal justice reforms they demanded. They don’t work.

The progressive agenda includes aggressive bail reform policies, the election/appointment of lenient prosecutors, the reclassification of felonies to misdemeanor crimes, and the establishment of sanctuary cities where criminals can safely hide out and reoffend with little fear of accountability. Whatever the intent, all of these policies are showing the same outcome: more crime. Murder rates are up 25% across the board according to FBI data. That’s some 4,000 more murders in 2020 than 2019. That national number masks the more substantial spikes in cities where progressive ‘criminal justice reforms’ are practiced.

New York City saw shootings up by 97% in 2020, with homicides up 45%. Chicago, which had already been experiencing a violent crime spike prior to the riots, saw a 55% increase in shootings. It was the same story in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Portland, Minneapolis, Detroit and many other progressive meccas. Likewise, the rise of organized retail crime has become so acute in California that major retailers like Walgreens and Target are closing stores. Similar coordinated shoplifting attacks have afflicted Washington, D.C., and New York, among others.

This comes in the wake of progressive reforms that decriminalized shoplifting in California, allowing thieves to take up to $950 in goods before they can be charged with a felony. The defunded police have no reason to respond to a shoplifting call. They can’t arrest the perpetrators anyway.

In other major cities, prosecutors forego filing charges for what they consider minor crimes as part of their agenda to end mass incarceration. Or they use cashless bail programs, only to see people commit violent crimes upon release. These so-called justice reforms don’t work for good reason: when the rewards of committing a crime are not outweighed by the consequences, there is little incentive to behave lawfully. The result is always more crime.

Leftist publications have rushed to assure us that these crime statistics are not related to progressive policies. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed to record gun sales as the culprit behind surging crime rates. But these crime spikes aren’t driven by law-abiding gun owners. They’re driven by criminals. There are criminal justice reforms that are needed. I sponsored some of them as a member of Congress, together with colleagues from across the aisle. But whether by design or as an unintended consequence, the left’s agenda to “end mass incarceration” has functioned as a pro-crime agenda that has been good for the guilty and catastrophic for the innocent…

We know how to reduce crime. New York paved the way in the 1990s with a Precision Policing model holding that stopping small things before they become big things was the key to reducing violence. It worked. And it can work again. But the progressive prescription for addressing crime is a recipe for chaos. We don’t need cashless bail. We don’t need lenient prosecutors who essentially believe in decriminalizing crime. Most of all, we don’t need to make paying for purchases optional in this country.”