About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

A Referendum On Joe Biden

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it along to our children in our bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, & handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children & our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  - President Reagan, March 30, 1961
 
***
 
On the eve of the Democrat National Convention:
 
Hillsdale College writes that "far too many of our nation's schools produce young adults who are ill-prepared to hold jobs, much less inherit the responsibilities of free government.  It's no coincidence then that today our young people don't understand our nation's heritage of liberty, or what is necessary for self-government."
 
Hillsdale reports 1) that 46% of young Americans said they do not agree that America is the greatest country in the world, & 47% said America's future should be driven by socialism over capitalism & 2) that Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) backed candidates in 2017 won 21 of 32 local & state elections in Minnesota, Tennessee, Montana, & Virginia & that DSA claims they have 10,000 new dues paying members since March, 2020.
 
The main problem with Millennials (83 million in U.S. in 2015) & members of Generation Z (nearly 74 million in U.S.) is that they believe, or don't even think, that once America is fundamentally transformed they will still have all of the freedoms they enjoy now plus all of the government handouts that promote plenty of high quality leisure time.  They never ask, or think to ask, who is producing the wealth that makes their vision possible so they don't understand it is not sustainable.  In short, only in a country as free & prosperous as America is it possible for people to take all they have for granted.
 
Equally as wrong as the Millennials & Gen Zees understanding of what life would be like after the fundamental transformation of America are the Trump supporters who don't believe any of the polls showing Trump losing the presidential election.  Any Trump supporter who thinks the polls are fake news can go to the betting windows & put up their money to earn a nice profit because Trump is +165 & Biden is odds on to win the presidency & has been for several weeks with the people who talk with their money.
 
Trump supporters touting re-election certainty don't realize how fragile Trump's 2016 electoral college victory was.  Trump was in immediate danger on election night 2016 of not being able to repeat in 2020 because the three states that put him over the top in the electoral college were won by a combined total of less than 80,000 votes.  WI, MI, & PA had not been won by a Republican in decades & Democrats are working double time to see that does not happen again – even if they lose every other state.
 
Couple the aforementioned reelection fragility with the pandemic mass hysteria, the racial unrest, no MAGA rallies, & the hostile anti-American media attacking Trump 24/7 & it is amazing that his odds for winning the presidency are not even higher.
 
But let's get past this superficial stuff & get to the issues that will really matter to us all for years after the election.
 
Trump's record is one of accomplishment in that he built an economy with his policies that produced record low or near record low unemployment for every group – whites, blacks, women, Asians, & Hispanics – & every one of these groups experienced increased incomes before the Wuhan coronavirus hit & the state & local governments shut down the economy.   We have no reason to believe Trump cannot restore prosperity once the pandemic passes & no reason to believe that Biden can based on his 47 years of bureaucratic politically correct experience in government.  Name one tangible Biden accomplishment in those 47 years?
 
Trump was true to his word in selecting Supreme Court nominees based on the list of originalist jurists provided by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society.  It is much more important to see Biden's list of Supreme Court nominees than it is to see Trump's income tax returns – we will live with the former for a generation or more while the interest in Trump's income tax returns will fade quickly being of no real consequence for anyone trying to make their own way in the world.
 
The closest we are likely to come to seeing a list indicating the caliber of people Biden is considering regards the Vice Presidency.  The media has been full of people under consideration & Biden has said the VP will be a woman of color – not the best person for the job but limiting the selection to a woman of color.  This is identity politics & political correctness right out of the box that resulted in Kamala Harris being the selection.
 
Biden knows that he has to consolidate the Bernie Sanders socialist voters in order to win, otherwise the Democrat vote will be split & Trump will be reelected - something no Democrat can tolerate the thought of.  Accordingly, Biden & Bernie smoked the peace pipe & formed a Unity Task Force that produced a 110 page document of recommendations that compromised the previous Biden-Bernie policy differences, meaning that Biden moved even further left. 
 
The starting point for the negotiations of the Task Force was AOC's comment – "In any other country, Joe Biden & I would not be in the same party."  AOC was the task force co-chair representing Bernie for the climate change portion of the report.
 
Biden's proposals to date are nothing but more government.
 
Under Trump nearly every American pays less income tax.  Biden would reverse that - including nearly doubling the top capital gains rate, eliminating the stepped up basis of inheritances for capital gains in the death tax laws so that heirs pay capital gains taxes on increases based on the original purchase price of an inherited asset @ almost double the current capital gains rate for taxpayers with incomes of $1 million or more, & raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% so people would be paying higher taxes both individually & through the corporate tax rate with every transaction they make.
 
Remember that corporations do not pay taxes – only people do whether consumers, shareholders, or employees.  The corporate income tax is embedded in the prices that people pay as certainly as the cost of steel, plastic, rubber, electronics, or services are.  Who thinks we don't pay for any of these components when we buy a car? – they are just more obvious than a hidden, embedded corporate income tax which has to be accounted for or the company will go out of business.
 
A high corporate income tax also costs America jobs – e.g., the Daimler-Chrysler merger in the 1990s was not headquartered in Detroit but rather in Stuttgart simply because the management of the company saw that corporate taxes would have been 50% higher in Detroit than in Stuttgart.
 
All tolled Biden is proposing a record $3.8 trillion over ten years in new taxes compared to Hillary's proposed $1.1 trillion in new taxes in 2016. 
 
And of course Biden plans, & is virtually obligated, to do away with Trump's $10,000 cap on federal deductions for state & local income taxes whereby politicians from high tax states (Democrat controlled states like NY, NJ, & CA) hide the real cost of their state governments meaning that people in low income areas in Alabama & Mississippi picked up part of the high tax states' costs prior to the enactment of the cap.  Since enactment of the tax cut law in 2017, under Trump, high income tax payers in NY, NJ, & CA have paid their share of state & local taxes in full & many do not like it. 
 
Before Trump lowered the corporate income tax rate politicians would say we need to lower the corporate income tax to make our products more competitive.  The above explanations are exactly the competitiveness they were talking about & Biden would reverse this making America less competitive with the rest of the world.
 
Biden also is proposing a 15% minimum corporate income tax for companies that pay less than 15% of their net income in taxes meaning that anything companies did in using the tax breaks Congress created would be clawed back if it lowered their tax bills below 15% of their net income.  This effectively works against industries that Biden supposedly is for like renewable energy, low-income housing, & manufacturing.  So what is he for?
 
In addition, Biden has plans for the Federal Reserve central bank to take the place of Congress in favoring minority communities much like Democrats have used the courts to legislate from the bench in areas they didn't think Congress was focused on.  Another end run around the Constitution.
 
Biden's "Buy American" plan is what he called "the largest investments since World War II of public investments – i.e., government spending paid for by you instead of what you would want to spend your own money on.  Biden's plan calls for spending $400 billion in government purchases of goods & services related to procurement & infrastructure & $300 billion on R&D mostly for clean energy initiatives.
 
In mid-July Biden made a $2 trillion over four year proposal to combat climate change which when added to the more than $7 trillion over ten years in new federal spending he previously proposed just shows that after a while all of the spending turns into a blur of numbers that has no meaning other than it will be paid for by tax increases on corporations & the wealthy – meaning all middle class readers of this blog – & stimulus spending meaning expanding the money supply so that everyone pays via inflation.
 
Biden moves ever left following the direction of AOC & her squad – as Pelosi already has done over the months.
 
In this regard the aforementioned $2 trillion (don't know whether even Biden can spend that much money in just four years) is a climate change down payment.  AOC's Green New Deal is in reality the largest expansion of government since LBJ's Great Society – a previous post detailed the costs @ $93 trillion over ten years.  It not only proposes getting the U.S. off of fossil fuels within nine years, & counting, but also provides universal healthcare, government job & housing guarantees, & a host of impractical ideas like replacing air travel with trains & upgrading & retrofitting every building in America to make them more energy efficient.  In short, it is more about AOC's economic agenda for America & less about eliminating carbon emissions that Biden is stumbling into.
 
In one of his more subtle gaffes Biden told attendees @ a campaign rally in NH in May, 2019 that quickly addressing climate change is even more urgent now than the first time he told us of its urgency over thirty years ago.
 
Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress reports that Biden has been denied communion by the Catholic church (Rev Robert E Morey of Saint Anthony Catholic church in Florence S. C. denied Biden communion much like Kerry had been denied communion in St. Louis, & Andrew Cuomo is denied communion where he lives in the Archdiocese of NY) because of his mixed record on abortion including his abandoning his decades long support of the Hyde Amendment that restricts federal funding for abortion.  Contrast this with Trump being 100% pro-life.
 
In addition – regarding religious matters – Biden pandered to a group of 3,000 Muslim voters on July 20 saying he wished schools in America taught their students more about Islam.  Not a word about having the Bible taught or mentioning the separation of church & state.  The event was the "Million Muslim Votes" summit hosted by Emgage Action, the country's largest Muslim American PAC.
 
In late July Biden released a policy document entitled "The Biden Agenda for Women" in which the document focused on "transgender women" as well as "Black women, Latina women, Native women, Asian American & Pacific Islander women, women with disabilities, & lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer women."  The document really is a pandering sop (i.e., a thing given or done as a concession of no great value to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met) to women as if they were waiting for someone like Biden to free them.  The document is patronizing, demeaning, & condescending to women who are better than Biden thinks they are.
 
Biden plays the middle of the road with regard to the Democrat position of defund the police in that he merely does not acknowledge the ever exceeding record murder rates in Chicago & Baltimore or the violence in Seattle or Portland where buildings are being burned & the protesting arsonists are hoping government agents are inside the buildings when they burn.  Biden's lukewarm position will not cut it with AOC who said  "defunding police means defunding police."  But Biden is caught between his past law & order pretenses & calling out the current violence in Portland where innocent people who own buildings & run businesses see their facilities looted & burned.  Biden has done nothing to help quell the rioting & looting & it is only a matter of time before all Democrats literally move AOC's defund the police way – the way the Democrat party has moved to the far socialist/communist left on virtually all issues.    
 
Biden is the first major party leader to endorse the concept of a proposed House bill looking into reparations for Blacks - compensation for slavery & longtime discrimination.
 
In summary, Biden & his fellow Democrats who will control or play a major part in his administration, should he win, have openly proclaimed they seek & plan a fundamental transformation of America – a transformation that will end the free enterprise capitalistic system that produced the prosperity & opportunity that made America flourish, a transformation that will replace the limited government enshrined in our glorious Constitution with a bloated faceless government where the simplest request is handled by highly paid bureaucrats who have no interest in helping, & a transformation where personal responsibility that is so essential to both individual & societal development is replaced with government dependent socialism where no one has any incentive to progress.
 
Is this what anyone wants?
 

6 comments:

  1. Will be close, will be a hair raising election, if it does not turn in this election it will in the next.

    Democrats have time on their side with more brain washing than before.

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    1. I believe this is the most insightful comment you have ever made. Just the fact that it will be close – win or lose - is outrageous.

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  2. Hi Doug - Agree with your analysis of Trump's narrow victory and how precarious his re-election is. Even more than the millennials this nation has been drifting towards big government simply by the virtue of politicians buying votes enmasse, a trend that really picked up steam under FDR and has continued ever since, particularly among the Democrats.

    It is not rocket science. For a politician to buy his way into office, the easiest route is to promise people something for nothing, Of course they won't say it that way, but that is simply what they are doing. To earn votes by prudent governance takes serious work and effort, so the lazy and corrupt 's attitude is; why earn it when you can buy it?

    This should be a surprise to no one but of course most people, on both sides have not a clue about the big picture.

    What still amazes me about the GOP is their cluelessness in campaigning and packaging the message of freedom and responsibility as well as the history of the Dems history of oppression and bigotry. The average American has not a clue, the tipping point is here.

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  3. Absolutely not! But the media already controls what people believe and our country will sink into a Venezuela stink hole of lost hope and no horizon for peace and prosperity. Maybe we have to endure this. I hope not. I believe it will be an insurmountable sinkhole. Goodbye democracy. Millennials et al: beware what you wish for. It will be your ultimate undoing Fortunately I won't be around for this cataclysm. Thank you for your voice!

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  4. This is so upsetting! We need to pray hard!

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  5. Doug – great job in identifying state of Millennials & Gen Zees, plus clearly summarizing scary facts of what the Dems goals are. However, I think a key flaw in our younger voters is that they err in their expectation that “once America is fundamentally transformed they will still have all of the freedoms they enjoy now plus all of the government handouts that promote plenty of high quality leisure time. They never ask, or think to ask, who is producing the wealth that makes their vision possible so they don't understand it is not sustainable” (with Socialism). In the next 2 months then, let’s champion & support Charlie Kirk of Turning Point -- tpusa.com. His organization visits many universities and provides empirical data regarding the outcomes of both capitalism & socialism.

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