Category: Economics

Maybe you don’t know who Al Sharpton actually is. Perhaps you never bothered to Google “Yankel Rosenbaum.” Maybe you’re too young to remember the Freddie’s Fashion Mart massacre. Your ignorance may be excusable because, after all, major news organizations have gone to great lengths to ignore or minimize Sharpton’s despicable history of inciting violence toward Jews. And we won’t even bring up Shapton’s anti-police rhetoric and his blatant dishonesty in the Tawana Brawley affair.

Sharpton has never been held accountable for any of this, because Democrats are so eager to pander to the “community” Sharpton claims to represent that they’ll send Joe Biden to give a speech on MLK Day at an event hosted by Sharpton’s National Action Network. It’s about the votes, you see, and if this means embracing a notorious Jew-hater, well, it ain’t the first time Democrats have made that bargain. Remember when FDR appointed JFK’s father Joe to be ambassador to Britain?

Kennedy rejected the belief of Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, he supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler without the approval of the U. S. Department of State, in order to “bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany” . . .
According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy’s embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as “kikes or sheenies”. Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that “[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.” When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assaults on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”

FDR wanted to pander to the Irish vote in Boston and elsewhere, so Joe Kennedy was all right — until he wasn’t, at which point, Roosevelt fired him. Similar calculations are probably involved in Biden’s de facto embrace of Sharpton, although it may be overstating matters to speak of “calculations,” as Joe is probably too senile even to realize where he is half the time. At any rate, it so happened that the TV in my home office was tuned to Fox News when they broadcast Biden’s speech live, and I found myself cussing as I listened to this kind of balderdash:

With all of you here, together we’ve made some important progress. Two years ago, our economy was on its back — flat on its back. People were hurting, particularly in minority communities. Black Americans and other people of color were disproportionately hit.
And Kamala and I, and our administration, acted decisively with the help of people in this room to not only rescue the economy from the pandemic downturn, but to lay the foundation for a stronger and more resilient and more equitable economy for decades to come.
If you hold just a second, one of the things that I wanted to — it’s a slight digression. But one of the big issues was with the pandemic. I wanted to make sure that we spent the time, effort, and had the mechanism to make sure that minority communities were not left behind, that they were not left in the lurch.
And the highest percentage of workers in minority communities were treated as — I mean, it was a single effort we had. And I’m very proud of the folks who ran that show that we got it done. We got it done.
You know, I’m of the view and have been my whole career — which is only a couple of years, I know; I don’t look that, but — (laughter) — but I’m tired of trickle-down economics. You and I have never liked it, have we?
And I think the economy — the way it should grow in America is from the bottom up and the middle out. That way, poor folks have a shot, middle-class people do well, and the wealthy still do very well. They still do very well, but they start to pay their fair share.
And two years in, it’s clearer than ever that I think our economic plan is working. We’ve created nearly 11 million jobs — the strongest job growth on record for any President at this point in history. . . .

On and on and on he went, but just in these few sentences he told more lies that I have time or energy to refute, most importantly, his straw-man characterization of pro-growth policies as “trickle-down economics.”

Folks, this bit of Democrat rhetoric is more than a century old — its etymological history dating back to William Jennings Bryan! So far as I know, such a belief was never an actual economic theory with any important influence, but Democrats resurrected it in the 1980s to mischaracterize Reagan’s pro-growth policy, and now the elderly idiot in the White House is reviving this ancient error as a way of claiming that opponents of his own policies are adherents of “trickle-down” (i.e., deliberately favoring the rich), whereas he intends to make sure those wicked rich people “pay their fair share.”

Certainly I hope that my readers are sufficiently well-versed in basic economics that they don’t need to me to explain what’s wrong with Biden’s rhetoric (or the policies he advocates), but if you need a refresher course, you can click here to buy Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics from Amazon, from which purchase I will receive a small commission, because I am and always have been a shameless capitalist. At what point does the normal American desire to make money become a bad thing, according to Democrats? Biden has certainly made a lot of money since he went into the politics racket, and Sharpton has managed to turn race-baiting and Jew-hating into a lucrative career. And, since Joe wants to talk about people who don’t “pay their fair share” of taxes, in 2014, it was reported that Sharpton owed $4.5 million in unpaid state and federal tax bills.

So, (a) Al Sharpton hates Jews, (b) Al Sharpton doesn’t pay his taxes, and (c) Joe Biden has no problem hanging out with Al Sharpton.

Nothing to see here, move along . . .

 

Of course, the headline could have been simplified — “Joe Biden Lies” — because every word out of his mouth is false, no matter the topic, but his lies Friday at Delaware State University were about the economy specifically. The official topic, “Remarks by President Biden on Student Loan Forgiveness,” as the White House web site phrases it, was just a pretext for Biden to engage in electioneering ahead of the midterms. But while we’re on the subject of “Student Loan Forgiveness,” let me remind you that in August, I explained (“Biden’s Illegal Boondoggle Giveaway”) that the President of the United States does not have the authority to order the cancellation of student loan debt, and that the Biden administration is falsely claiming such authority under the 2003 HEROES Act, a measure intended to provide assistance to military personnel deployed overseas during the War on Terror.

Biden himself admitted he doesn’t have this authority, and was against student loan “forgiveness” during the 2020 campaign (when it was part of Bernie Sanders’ socialist agenda), so why did he pivot suddenly in 2022 to claim this authority, which he does not actually have?

One word: Politics. Democrats who couldn’t muster enough votes in Congress to pass student loan “forgiveness” legislation were looking ahead to the midterm election campaign and, desirous of energizing “the youth vote,” seized upon the notion of having Biden cancel student debt by executive order, with the HEROES Act as pretext. Last month, six states sued the administration, arguing that the president acted unconstitutionally, and Friday an appeals court granted an injunction to halt the “forgiveness” program while the case is appealed to the Supreme Court (where, God willing, it will be permanently voided).

Anyway, that’s the background on Biden’s trip to Delaware State University which is, not coincidentally, in the category of HBCU (Historically Black College or University), allowing Biden to kill two political birds with one stone, (a) energizing the youth vote and (b) energizing the black vote, because why pander to just one Democratic Party constituency at a time, eh? Of course, the bill for this pandering — the $400 billion that Biden’s “forgiveness” is expected to cost — will be sent to the taxpayers, who are expected to be happy about going to work every day and paying taxes to fund a benefit for other people’s lazy kids who took out a bunch of student loans they don’t want to repay.

Here’s an obvious question: If your Mama and Daddy don’t want to help you repay your student loans, why should anyone else want to do it? Like, if one of my kids got into a desperate financial situation, I’m sure my wife and I would find some way to help them, and I expect most other parents would do the same, because we love our kids, right? So who are these college kids whose parents don’t love them? And why are the rest of us — going to work and paying our taxes — expected to pick up the tab for the irresponsible financial decisions of these unloved kids?

As obvious as these questions are, nobody in the national media ever asks Joe Biden or other Democrats to answer them. Student loan “forgiveness” simply doesn’t make sense, from a logical or moral perspective, but because it is a policy favored by one party, the fundamental deficiency of the policy is ignored by Democratic Operatives With Bylines.

So there is Biden at Delaware State, pandering to his party’s constituents, telling them to go to the government “Free Money” website where they can apply for his student loan forgiveness program (which he knows damned well the Supreme Court is going to strike down). And after he gets done promoting his unconstitutional giveaway, Biden then switches to an attack on Republicans and starts talking about deficits:

I will never apologize for helping working- and middle-class Americans as they recover from the pandemic, especially not to the same Republicans officials who voted for a $2 trillion tax cut that mainly benefited the wealthy Americans and the biggest corporations that wasn’t paid for and racked up our deficit.
I don’t want to hear it from MAGA Republicans — officials who had hundreds of thousands of dollars of debts, even millions of dollars in pandemic relief loans forgiven who now are attacking — attack me for helping working-class and middle-class Americans. . . .

(What, exactly, is he talking about here? Democrats voted for “pandemic relief” the same as Republicans did, and exactly how is it that opposition to an unconstitutional taxpayer-funded boondoggle is an attack on “working- and middle-class Americans”? But the real Big Lie here is the claim that the “$2 trillion tax cut” only benefited wealthy corporations, because I’m sure as heck not a wealthy big corporation, and I got a nice refund check, thank you very much, President Trump. I could write a few thousand words about the mythology behind Democratic rhetoric against “tax cuts for the rich,” but this is just parenthetical snark, so I’ll save that essay for some other occasion.)

But despite what Republican officials say, we can afford student relief. That’s because the first two years of my administration — that’s because of the historic deficit reduction, the very deficit reduction the Republicans voted against.
This morning, my administration announced that this year the deficit fell — the federal deficit fell by one trillion four hundred billion dollars just this year. The largest one-year drop in all of American history: one trillion four hundred billion.
And it follows last year’s historic drop on the deficit of $350 billion.
And we’re going to reduce the deficit by another $250 billion over the next decade. And the reason for that is because of what — Medicare is going to be able to negotiate drug prices and lower the costs.
We pay the highest drug prices of any nation in the world for the same drug. You can buy the same exact drug in a drugstore here in Dover or Wilmington, and if you go over to Paris, France, or anywhere in Europe, it can be as much as 40 percent to 60 percent less. Same exact drug.
So, folks, I don’t want to hear any weeping and gnashing of teeth from pharma — the big companies.
Folks, in just 20 months since I’ve been in office, we cut the deficit in half.

What word shall I use to describe this? Bullshit will do.

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has a few more words than that in a column at the New York Post explaining the shell game that Biden is playing with “deficit reduction.” When the pandemic hit in early 2020, Congress voted for hundreds of billions of dollars in “pandemic relief” which, of course, was not spent all at once, but instead involved funding for programs that continued into 2021. These programs expired in 2022 — the emergency had ended, and the funding ended with it — and Biden is falsely claiming credit for this as something he did to reduce the deficit. In fact, Biden and Democrats in Congress increased deficit spending for years to come, so that the truth is the exact opposite of what Biden said.

So now I’ve written 1,200 words explaining what most of you already knew — Biden is lying, as always — and most days I just let it slide by me, but this particular steaming pile of bollocks, delivered at Delaware State University, was aired live Friday on Fox News. At the time, I was busy with my day job and couldn’t take time to write anything about it, but I made a note to get back to it on Saturday morning, so that tonight I can discuss it with my friends John Hoge and Dianna Deeley on The Other Podcast, which airs live at 7 p.m. ET. Tune in, OK?

 

“In psychiatry, magical thinking is a disorder of thought content; here it denotes the false belief that one’s thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies or circumvents commonly understood laws of causality.”

Joe Biden evidently believes that recession can be avoided by pretending there is no recession, and that inflationary spending proposals can be enacted by dubbing them “The Inflation Reduction Act.”

Of course, it is somewhat sarcastic to speak of what Biden “believes,” let alone what he “thinks,” given that his mental condition has deteriorated to such a dysfunctional state that his cognitive processes cannot really be described as “belief” or “thought,” in the literal definition of those words.

In 2022, of course, many words have lost their meanings. Newsweek ran the headline “Joe Biden’s Eyes in Video Spark Wild Conspiracy Theories,” but is it really a conspiracy theory to say that the appearance of Our Alleged President in that 17-second video clip looked like some kind of CGI green-screen deepfake? Considering how we were assured by the same media outlets that it was a “conspiracy theory” to believe Biden’s dopehead son Hunter left a laptop full of incriminating evidence in a computer repair shop — which everyone now admits actually happened — hasn’t “conspiracy theory” become just a pejorative epithet meaning facts the media don’t want you to know about? But I digress . . .

The shameless effrontery of the people running the White House keeps surprising even hardened cynics like me. Just when you think their capacity for bald-faced lying has reached its absolute rock-bottom, they somehow manage to go even lower. Remember the “Build Back Better” act that died in the Senate last year? The mendacious bastards just repackaged it and called it “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”:

The latest compromise includes the previously agreed-upon health care provisions as well as a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, a proposal to close the carried interest tax loophole, and a provision for IRS enforcement. Additionally, it contains historic spending for climate, though it’s on a smaller scale than what the House envisioned last year.
All told, Democrats estimate the bill will bring in $739 billion in revenue and will invest $433 billion in spending. It also addresses Manchin’s goal of reducing the deficit and would do so by $300 billion or more. The bill’s investment in areas like clean energy, tax credits, and reducing health care costs is notable, though it’s much less ambitious than the provisions in the $1.75 trillion bill that the House passed last year.

That’s according to the liberal site Vox, which repeats the Democratic Party’s claims about projected revenue and deficit reduction as though this stuff will actually happen. News flash: It won’t.

When you employ magical thinking as the basis of economic policy, it’s possible to imagine almost anything, including $735 billion in tax revenue by imposing punitive taxes on corporations, as though the smart guys who run international business conglomerates are just going to leave that money sitting around and wait for Uncle Sam to come get his 15 percent share. But when the tax man shows up, those CEOs will point to the accounting numbers which prove that, in fact, they haven’t got two nickels to spare. The IRS guy will shrug and say, “Oh, well,” then walk away empty-handed. And then the CEOs will make gigantic donations to the Democratic Party, and the fact that all these hundreds of billions of dollars in projected tax revenue never made it to the Treasury Department will be forgotten, quite conveniently for all concerned.

You can’t tax your way out of a deficit.

Call that McCain’s Law of Fiscal Policy, if you wish, but every time Democrats get control of the White House, they keep trying the same thing. Democrats never met a wasteful billion-dollar boondoggle or welfare giveaway they wouldn’t support, and they throw away taxpayer money on all sorts of useless or harmful projects, and don’t you dare suggest that a single penny be taken away from the Department of Health and Human Services budget, you damned racist Republicans who want to shove Grandma off a cliff. Democrats want federal taxpayers to fund programs to hand out free needles to junkies sleeping on the sidewalk, send drag queens to entertain kindergartners in every school in America, and subsidize economically dubious “green energy” projects, while still claiming that they’re in favor of reducing the deficit.

Magical thinking: “Corporate minimum tax!” This will miraculously solve all the budget problems, Democrats expect us to believe and, considering that 38.2% of voters actually approve of the job Biden’s doing as president, there are tens of millions of Americans stupid enough to believe anything. Yet the fact remains: You can’t tax your way out of a deficit because, as the First Corollary to McCain’s Law of Fiscal Policy, the federal government will automatically grow to consume whatever additional revenue new taxes might actually produce.

The revenue dog is never fast enough to catch the spending rabbit, you might say, but even if you believe that this latest “compromise reconciliation” bill will somehow reduce the deficit — which no intelligent person honestly believes — please tell me, how the hell is it supposed to reduce inflation? Because that is the official name of this preposterous legislation: “The Inflation Reduction Act.” Apparently, we are expected to believe that ramming this thing through Congress to “invest $433 billion in spending” will reduce inflation, as if out-of-control federal spending weren’t the principal cause of our inflationary spiral. Instead, Democrats want us to believe, the real cause of inflation is — brace yourself for genius-level insight — corporations aren’t paying enough taxes!

There are no adjectives strong enough to describe my disgust with the gross cynicism behind the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” No honest person could possibly endorse this fraudulent legislation. Yet the magical thinking of Biden’s economic policy keeps producing insults like this:

President Joe Biden on Thursday reminded Americans suffering from inflation and high gas prices that he sent them a check for $8,000 in 2021.
“There’s reason to be down but I started thinking about it … the first year, we were able with the rescue plan, we were able to send them a check for eight grand,” he said. “I mean a check. Beyond that by the way, there was more than that.”
The president spoke about the trillions he spent in the Democrat-passed American Rescue Plan during a conversation he had with his economic advisers on the state of the economy. His mention of the “$8,000 check” was likely a reference to the temporary expansion of the child tax credit provided to some families in 2021 until it expired this year.
Biden complained that Americans forgot what he did for them in 2021, even as he admitted it was “totally understandable.”
He pointed out that even for Americans making $120,00 a year, $8,000 dollars should have meant a lot to them.
“That’s a lot of money, and so it helped save a lot of people in terms of getting thrown out of their home and rental housing and a whole range of things,” he said. . . .
“Does that make any sense to everybody or is it just me?” he asked his advisers.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen agreed, noting the trillions in government spending boosted the economy, despite the high inflation rates that followed.
“We need to bring down inflation, but we need to preserve the success that that plan achieved in the labor market,” she said.

This makes me so angry, it’s impossible for me to write any sentence that doesn’t include the phrase “fucking bullshit.” Think back, if you will, to what actually happened with the so-called “American Rescue Plan. The first COVID “stimulus” bill passed in March 2020, at a time when were were being told that a lockdown of “two weeks to slow the spread” was necessary, which was immediately followed by “30 days to flatten the curve.” So by May 1, all the lockdowns would be over, right? No, the pandemic panic brigade insisted on lockdowns ad aeternum — we must “follow the science!” — and so millions of people were forced out of work. Months went by and, with so much of the economy locked down, the need for more “stimulus” was obvious, but the Democrats who controlled Congress wouldn’t pass another stimulus bill before the election.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” project, COVID vaccines were developed in record time — but not in time for the election. So then the election happened and, while the first vaccinations were being administered, Congress belatedly passed another $900 billion “stimulus” package in December 2020, a month before Biden took office. The vaccine promised a swift return to normal (even though Florida had been back to normal for months, without causing any great crisis), and therefore, the need for additional “stimulus” wasn’t obvious. And it was at this crucial moment that Democrats rammed through “The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021,” a $1.9 trillion — yes, trillion, with a “t” — stimulus package, which took effect in March 2021, just three months after the previous $900 billion stimulus bill, so that the federal government injected $2.8 trillion in new spending into the economy in a span of 90 days.

“Gosh, I wonder why we have all this inflation now?” said nobody.

Oh, and of course I didn’t get any “eight grand,” and neither did you, because we were still working and paying our bills, same as always. The question of who did get “eight grand,” I’ll leave you to figure out for yourselves, but here Joe is telling Americans they shouldn’t complain about inflation because “we” — notice the first-person plural pronoun, by which he means Democrats — “we were able to send them a check for eight grand.” WHAT DO YOU THINK CAUSED THE INFLATION, JOE? DO YOU THINK MAYBE IT WAS $1.9 TRILLION IN ‘STIMULUS’ TO PAY PEOPLE TO STAY HOME INSTEAD OF WORKING?

Excuse my all-caps rant there. I’ve been trying to ignore this kind of stuff — concentrate on pleasant things, like the Patriots opening training camp — but today I made the mistake of reading actual news and saw they were calling this legislative monstrosity “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2021,” and suddenly found myself thinking, “You know, those guys who stormed the Capitol may have had the right idea all along.”

Everybody should have known the Biden administration would be a disaster, but even I never imagined how bad it would be.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!