On Thursday March 11 Biden made his first presidential prime time TV address to mark the one year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic in America. The address also coincided with his signing into law the same day of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill known as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), Biden's first legislative victory in office.
Almost half of this gigantic stimulus spending will go directly to the well publicized $1,400 per person direct deposits or checks ($8,400 for a family of two adults & four small children), $1,300 per child expanded child tax credits ($5,200 for this same family), bigger food-stamp payments, & $300 per week federal enhanced unemployment benefits in addition to regular state unemployment benefits. And $350 billion payments will be made to states - the majority of which will go to Democrat states that have been financially irresponsible for decades meaning that states like Tennessee, Florida, Texas, & Georgia will bail out New York, New Jersey, Illinois, & California. For instance, New York will receive more money from the bill than Florida despite New York having a smaller population than Florida - one of the consequences of the November election.
The ARPA will also provide 14 weeks of paid sick, family, & medical leave through September, while reimbursing local governments for the cost of this leave, provide an additional $25 billion for rental relief & $5 billion to cover home energy & water costs for low income people, extend the federal eviction moratorium through September & allow people with federally guaranteed mortgages to apply for forbearance until September, provide $40 billion to ensure childcare providers can remain open & expand the childcare tax credit, provide an additional $15 billion to the Paycheck Protection Program in flexible, equitably distributed grants to small businesses to help them reopen & rebuild, & provide $20 billion to support public transit agencies to ensure that workers keep their jobs & routes are not cut from service.
All of this federal deficit spending - just when the economy is growing on its own. Mitch McConnell said: "Our country is already set for a roaring recovery. We are already on track to bounce back from this crisis. That's not because of this bill. It's because of our work last year."
The graphic below shows the initial claims for unemployment benefits fell below the pre-pandemic record last week without this government stimulus - this will convert to GDP growth. The ARPA stimulus bill contains measures that are less targeted than the two previous stimulus bills the past year & to make matters worse comes when the economy is already recovering. In short, it is just a blanket giveaway to buy votes. And of course the entire plan is unconstitutional.
The initial eight state tour started with Biden's visit to Pennsylvania on Tuesday March 16, while Harris & her husband visited California, Nevada & Colorado & Jill Biden visited New Jersey & New Hampshire. The second gentlemen moved the message to New Mexico. Biden & Harris wrapped up the week in Georgia.
Biden expects, & incidentally so do I, that the massive giveaway will be largely more popular with Republican voters around the country than it is with Republican elected officials. The nation is already coming out of the economic pandemic doldrums strongly on its own capitalistic free enterprise merits but Biden is there to falsely tell people that it is his stimulus package that did the trick. As the economy strengthens Biden will both take credit for it & count on watching his popularity grow thereby helping congressional Democrats win in the 2022 midterm elections. A perfect setup for an unsuspecting poorly educated citizenry.
Many people who have received the relief funds clearly recognized that they would one day run out of money but did not think that the government could face the same fate never realizing that the government gets its money from people & no matter how rich these people are they too will also sooner or later run out of money.
Now the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan is just the start of the Democrats plans. There is a $3 trillion infrastructure plan being developed that includes climate change initiatives, extending the newly created child tax credit, providing for universal pre kindergarten & tuition free community college, raising the minimum wage to @ least $15 per hour, & providing for universal child care & rental assistance.
These plans are pretty much set up because during the campaign Biden had proposed more than $3 trillion in tax increases over the next decade & there is evidence from polls, such as from Gallup, showing that people think businesses & wealthy people do not pay enough in taxes. These polls do not indicate where these people think their employers get the money to hire them or if they would be willing to take a pay cut or be discharged if their employer took the money saved from their salaries to pay more in taxes.
To put Biden's spending binge into perspective: in less than Biden's first hundred days in office he will have proposed $4.9 trillion in deficit spending. The national debt from the start of the Republic to 2000 was $5.6 trillion. Is anyone thinking about the significance of the national debt? Or what the government's maximum claim on earned income should be?
But as long as people are receiving the Biden stimulus money they do not have any remorse about voting for Biden, even considering the following seemingly significant items during the campaign that have blindsided Biden voters:
1. On the eve of the annual March for Life event (this year virtual) Biden signed a presidential memorandum that reversed restrictions on abortion access both foreign & domestic. The new Biden policy rescinds the so-called Mexico City Policy (also known as the global gag rule) thereby allowing American tax dollars to be used for abortion businesses & promoters overseas. Biden claims to be a practicing Catholic who until recently followed the Hyde Amendment, a legislative provision that barred the use of federal funds to pay for abortions with rare exceptions. Many religious people were surprised by Biden's religious contradictions but really are fine with Biden's pro-abortion position as long as the stimulus money keeps flowing.
2. Biden placed a 100 day halt on deporting illegal aliens including felons with final orders of removal in a direct violation of his oath to enforce the immigration laws of the U.S. Shortly after his 12 noon inauguration on January 20 Biden sent a memo to Congress outlining a proposed comprehensive immigration bill (a form of amnesty) that includes an eight year path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the U.S. who don't have legal status - thereby putting many of these people on a faster path to citizenship than those standing in line legally today. Comprehensive immigration reform is of course the source of new Democrat voters that will keep the statists in power until everyone realizes what they have been throwing away.
In the meantime, while we wait for many on the eight year citizenship path to come of voting age, Biden's policies have incentivized & attracted tens of thousands of people from Central America to come to our southwest border to pursue admission to the U.S. to take advantage of any or as many as possible of the 126 welfare programs identified by the Cato Institute. Although the general procedure is to let the migrants in & bus or fly them to northern states like New Jersey & New York there has been a significant number of positive cases of Covid-19 discovered among the illegal border crossers. So after a year of the government restricting American citizens from going to church, weddings, funerals, or visiting family members the Biden administration has allowed possibly Covid diseased people who are the poorest, least educated, lowest skilled people in the world into America in what Biden perceives as a permanent Democrat voting block - all of which will sooner or later be financed by taking away your life's savings through paying for one welfare program after another.
See photo below of Hondurans clashing with Guatemalan soldiers as a migrant caravan tries to cross into Vado Hondo, Guatemala on January 17, three days before Biden's inauguration, on their way to the U.S. in what is the biggest surge of illegal migrants in twenty years, including a record number of unaccompanied minors. Biden does not consider the type of scenes depicted in the below photo to be a crisis although the Federal Emergency Management Agency was sent to our southwest border. Biden's election in & of itself incentivized these people to come to America, many of whom did not even know Biden's name, & most of whom were men in search of work such as picking lettuce & washing dishes. Now ask yourself: do we really need more dishwashers?
3. And of course there were the usual Democrat abuses & insults to the intelligence to the American people such as A) the $1,400 checks going to pedophiles & felons such as Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his jail cell; B) $5 billion going to "Farmers of Color" to compensate for the alleged discrimination of the USDA & "to support activities @ the USDA that will supposedly root out systemic racism, provide technical & legal assistance to agriculture communities of color, & fund under resourced programs that will shape the future for farmers & communities of color" - source: The Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act introduced by Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), & Debbie Stabenow (D-MI); C) millions of dollars going to lawless sanctuary cities; D) the welcoming back to America of people legally deported by Trump; & E) in the biggest abuse & insult of all - portraying the American Rescue Plan stimulus bill as a plan to combat the Covid-19 pandemic when so little of the proceeds go toward Covid relief as you can tell by reading the above.
From his first news conference last Thursday, painfully slow, protective, & well scripted, Biden feels he is on a winning path with American voters even saying @ one point he did not know whether there would even be a Republican Party in 2024 - & neither do I.
The GOP must do more than have their elected representatives or paid pundits come on TV to talk about radical socialism or what has escalated recently to talking about fascism citing Biden's large number of executive orders. This won't & hasn't cut it. We are long past this. Long before Trump said in the 2020 State Of The Union address that "America will never be a socialist country" we were well more than halfway there already. This is what the citizenry has become accustomed to & voted for more of in 2020 with no remorse.
It is very disheartening to see conservative commentators miss the point entirely as to what happened last November when they list the offenses Biden has committed on America & act like Biden's election was a mistake - laughing as if Trump is a shoo in in 2024 when in reality he has no chance @ all of being reelected after the way he conducted himself after losing a close election in which he offended virtually every voting group imaginable. This attitude will play well to die hard Trump supporters but will not help @ all in returning America to excellence.
The majority of American voters want, & have signaled that they want by electing Biden, the government programs described hereinbefore & have no remorse whatsoever regarding the 2020 presidential election. People who have not been affected by one iota by Covid 19 are lapping up the $1,400 stimulus checks, & the previous two, as if they deserved them.
In our lifetimes we have seen the descendancy of the Death Of Democracy stages (that every democracy in history has gone through before becoming a dictatorship): from learning in elementary school & junior high about the Founders' great courage & successful fight for liberty, to the resultant liberty to abundance stage of our heritage, & then more recently to our direct witnessing of the abundance to complacency stage & the complacency to apathy stage, & now the apathy to dependence stage as described in this post above.
It could not be clearer. The most powerful influence of any election is the destructive message that your vote can be bought by promising government programs that seemingly offer security & plenty of leisure time & freedom.
This destructive process of the majority always voting for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury will continue until it collapses of its own financial deadweight or enough citizens, who know better, spend themselves in the worthy cause of helping our country fight off the socialist onslaught that is on course to fully take over America.
The genesis of our problem is the socialist education system presented by government schools & human nature that is always looking for something free.
Professor Friedman wrote in the Cato Policy Report, March/April 1999 - "Any institution will tend to express its own values & its own ideas. Our public education system is a socialsit institution. A socialist institution will teach socialist values, not principles of private enterprise."
Reversing the socialist bent in American education will take a dedicated effort from virtually all of us. Otherwise the socialist slide will continue as sure & as natural as the entropy of the universe increases.
If you have children, grandchildren, nieces, hephews, or friends & neighbors who have bought into the socialist destruction of America through the "I deserve" or the "I am entitled" mentality ask to see their textbooks - I do with every person I meet who tells me they are a student.
Do not send children to schools that do not teach American values.
A charter subscriber to this blog told me she has tutored her neighbors' children in American values while she supervises them, @ their parents request, after school.
This blog is written @ the suggestion of former South Carolina Senator Jim Demint & this month the posts will reach over 10,000 readers. If you can't write your own blog for whatever reason pass these messages on if you see value in them. Or comment - all comments are posted whether they agree or not with my points of view unless they use profanity. Commenting is a good way to add to the discussion so that everyone learns starting with me.
But don't rely on me - I always leave one thing out of every post hoping someone will find it.
Before the first presidential debate last fall I suggested fourteen questions that should be answered by every citizen before being presented to our incumbent politicians or new candidates for office. Once you are sure of the answers you are armed to make a positive contribution so that the electoral result of 2020 is a one off proposition.
Understanding the answers to these questions is the way to return America to the excellence of the liberty to abundance stage of our history that has the potential to benefit everyone in the world. If we don't teach these principles to others the electoral margins of 2020 will not change.
I don't know of another way to turn this Biden/Harris electoral nightmare around. But if you do, please do not hold back. If you don't, I hope this post gave you some ideas of what to do to help.
Reference Post: Is Your Representative The Ultimate Telecommuter?
The second graphic in the post is the House vote of the Senate Amendment regarding the ARPA.
ReplyDeleteDoug: this is an exceptional, spot-on analysis.
ReplyDeleteEconomic ignorance is astounding. Alternatively, this ‘ignorance’ may be deliberate so Left can destroy economy, blame capitalism, thereby escalating drive for new World Socialist Order. I truly hope latter remains just a conspiracy theory.
Nevertheless, $Trillions more will be printed, requiring shrinking pool of investors to finance new debt at high rates, and / or Fed purchasing much of the debt. Fed may be forced to purchase much of the debt. That will further accelerate already significant money supply increases.
Qu: Why we should expect Fed to purchase much more?
Answer: The debt supply is exponentially expanding while investor abilities to finance will very soon decrease or have already decreased due to higher taxes on way, more business killing regulations, and less wealth opportunities.
This will expand supply of $ without expansion of supply of goods and demand. Higher inflation, regulations, and taxes will result in less output produced and less income. This will lead to increasing job losses with high odds of a deep Recession and a $ collapse. The latter may result in 10’s of millions losing majority of their Government transfer payments..
What to do?
Those of us who believe in free markets and individual freedoms, must now more than ever, and in a civil way, express our opposition with clear, passionate details about our pro-growth (for all) proposals, with strong evidence. Then with God’s grace we may be able to save our country.
God Bless America !
Great article, it was a real gem.
ReplyDeleteApril 1 Update (NOT April Fool's): Whether Biden voters desired it or not, US is in rapid progression to Totalitarian Socialism. Increasing Taxes on corporations and entrepreneurs while printing Trillions for ‘social infrastructure’ equates to Government Central Planning. Private sector role in capital formation (and thus wealth & GDP expansion) is plummeting. US companies will be taxed more even on their foreign operations. Expect many US corporations to seek foreign buyers to avoid the tax onslaught. Result: more jobs overseas.
ReplyDeleteWhat to do?
Trump should get his new Media platform up ASAP, open to all. We need free expression of ideas. With that can we regain our country. Time is of critical essence.
Doug, this is so upsetting! I fear a crash! Of course, it will be Trump’s fault! It seems so reckless the way $ is being spent and more disheartening for me is the way poorer, needier citizens are being neglected in favor of the immigrants who are receiving abundant benefits. I keep praying to Our Lady and her Son to protect our country and to give faith to believe they will!
ReplyDeleteHi Doug
ReplyDeleteMy comment below pertains to a growing US mindset you reference in this post:
It is very disappointing to learn today that MLB decided to move the all-star game away from Atlanta. This is due to incomprehensible outcry and lies that Georgia passed racist voting laws. Is this blatant condescending view that some minorities are incapable to secure Voter ID? Does the Left feel that these minorities are to remain on Government plantations? If no voter ID become full reality, does MLB realize that the US will never have a fair election? Did they think this through? Does MLB ultimately desire the Government to tell them they must include diversity on their team rosters and free stadium seats for select population segments? How about salary controls and excess Taxes for social infrastructure and reparations to relatives of Black players that were denied to play MLB until the 1950’s. Slippery slope?
We MUST stand up to this, argue our points, in attempt to return to normalcy.
Hi Doug - Thought provoking as always. As you mentioned, democracies always turn into some form of totalitarian system as those in or want power figure out buying votes (making the people, fat, dumb and happy) is the the way to achieve their goals.
ReplyDeleteThe average person who claims to despise big government also welcomes the $1,400 per person "gift" from the government. So while they are against big government on an individual level, it benefits them, at least in the present.
It is a rare person indeed who sees and will condemn it. After all, it is a freebie. One that they will pay dearly for later, but the drug addict never thinks about tomorrow.
This is partly due to a weak educational system and bad communication skills from those that know better. They simply never developed the ability to counteract the other side, their ability to turn the message of freedom and free enterprise stinks. They never learned to use the media to their advantage, to turn their message into a populist one.
Your quote on Mitch McConnel simply says it all. A .220 hitter 25 games out of 1st Place (and clueless that he is 25 games out) makes the usual idiotic and inane comment that "the economy was "on track to bounce back" crediting "our work" (i.e. Congress). Like the rest of the fools in DC he thinks it is "their work" that was doing the trick.
This genius and his colleagues have the US $30 trillion in the red, beholden to China and other countries, losing businesses and manufacturing, much of which can be laid at the policies of the government, including the biggest disgrace in the history of the US, the tax code. And he talks about "the work" they have done.
Mitch and company have spent the last 60 plus years making a mess of things, all in their quest to retain power (Republican and Democrats alike), turning us primarily from a free market nation into an economic fascist one. That is "the work" they have done.
One point you make that I think needs to be clarified: "Biden expects, & incidentally so do I, that the massive giveaway will be largely more popular with Republican voters around the country than it is with Republican elected officials. The nation is already coming out of the economic pandemic doldrums strongly on its own capitalistic free enterprise merits but Biden is there to falsely tell people that it is his stimulus package that did the trick. As the economy strengthens Biden will both take credit for it & count on watching his popularity grow thereby helping congressional Democrats win in the 2022 midterm elections. A perfect setup for an unsuspecting poorly educated citizenry"
The "capitalistic free enterprise merits" is but a fading memory, replaced by crony capitalism that is evolving into economic fascism thanks to McConnell and all the others.
Best wishes for you and Carol to have a Happy Easter.
I am unable to reply to all your complaints about the Biden administration and wouldn’t do so, even if I had the time. While you are in the weeds railing against the stimulus package and horrors the infrastructure proposal, I find the Republican answer to suppress votes to be a poor response to losing the election. Where is an alternative Republican vision to help our country? Below is Heather Cox Richardson who has a very different take on what’s happening.
ReplyDeleteApril 1, 2021 (Thursday)
The efforts of Republican state legislators in 43 states to suppress voting have made the rubber of Republicans politics meet the road of reality.
Republicans are pushing the idea that it is imperative to pass laws to protect the sanctity of the vote because their supporters are concerned that the 2020 election was stolen. But, as observers have pointed out, if they want to reassure their voters that the election was clean, the way to do it would be to tell them the truth: the election wasn’t stolen.
This reality has been established by Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States Department of Homeland Security whom Trump fired after he said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history”; by former president Trump’s attorney general William Barr, who said that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election; and by judges who dismissed more than 50 lawsuits alleging voter fraud.
Last week, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claimed in a court filing that “no reasonable person” would believe that her lies about election fraud “were truly statements of fact.”
And yet, rather than admitting that Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election fairly, Republicans are claiming that they must relieve supporters’ concerns about the stolen election—a myth they, themselves, have created—by passing legislation that will suppress Democratic votes.
There seem to be a couple of things at stake here.
One is that, having riled up Trump supporters by telling them that the election was stolen, Republican leaders can’t very well now back down and admit that they were lying. So they are playing this charade out in the hopes that they can keep Trump supporters energized enough to keep showing up at the polls and to keep voting Republican.
The other, of course, is that Democratic wins, especially in Georgia, indicate that the Republicans must either change their political positions or get rid of Democratic voters. Since the one seems impossible to them, they are going for the other.
But the political imperative to get rid of Democratic voters is running headlong into modern America. Not only is 2021 more openly multicultural than the 1890s, when the previous avalanche of voter suppression kept poor people of all races and ethnicities from the polls, but also the people who approve of racial equality have way more economic power than they did a century or more ago.
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ReplyDeleteYesterday, more than 70 Black executives wrote a letter urging companies to fight the voter suppression measures under consideration in 43 states. “There is no middle ground here,” said Ken Chenault, the former head of American Express. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”
After complaints that companies had been quiet about the Georgia voter suppression bill, the chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian, issued a statement calling the new law “unacceptable” and noting that “[t]he entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.” Bastian condemned the “sweeping voting reform act that could make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote.” He pledged “to protect and facilitate your precious right to vote.”
Shortly afterward, the leader of Coca-Cola, James Quincey, followed suit with an interview on CNBC that called the law “unacceptable.”
After Bastian spoke, Georgia Republicans said they were caught off guard by his opposition. In the Georgia House, Republicans voted to get rid of a tax break on jet fuel that benefits Delta. David Ralston, the leader of the Republican Party in the House said: “They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” then added: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”
That is, Republican lawmakers made it clear they are not legislating in the interest of the public good, but are instead using the law to retaliate against Delta after its chief executive officer criticized their voter suppression law. (The Georgia Senate did not take up the bill before the legislature adjourned.)
Similarly, Ralston told reporters he was now a Pepsi drinker, seemingly retaliating against Coca-Cola for its own opposition to the law.
A similar scene played out in Texas, where legislators are considering an even more restrictive bill that tries to end drive-through voting and 24-hour polling places, as well as giving partisan poll watchers more leeway to harass voters, including by recording them on video. Today, American Airlines announced it was “strongly opposed to this bill and others like it.” The company affirmed its support for democracy and called for making it easier, not harder, to vote. “Voting is the hallmark of our democracy, and is the foundation of our great country. We value the democratic process and believe every eligible American should be allowed to exercise their right to vote, no matter which political party or candidate they support.”
Tonight, the chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, Rodney Anderson, retweeted a statement cheering on the Georgia House for trying to strip Delta of the multimillion dollar tax break for criticizing the state’s voting bill. Then he suggested retaliating against companies that oppose Texas’s proposed voting restrictions by increasing their tax burdens. Within an hour, he had deleted the tweet.
In the late nineteenth century, southern lawmakers’ calculation that business would support voter suppression efforts would have been accurate. Indeed, southern lawmakers could suppress Black voting in part because business leaders across the country were happy to see poor voters cut out of political power, especially after the alliance movement suggested that farmers and workers might make common cause across race lines to change laws that privileged industry over ordinary Americans. When fourteen southern lawmakers defended their region’s suppression of Black voting in an 1890 book, they dedicated the work to “the businessmen of the North.”
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ReplyDeleteThe reaction of today’s business leaders to new voter suppression measures suggests that the old equation in which businessmen want to get rid of Black and poor voters is no longer so clear. While businesses undoubtedly like preferential treatment, they now answer to a broader constituency than they did a century or more ago, and that constituency does not necessarily support voter suppression. Today, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, which is developing a hub in Atlanta, took a stand against the new Georgia election law. He wrote: “We hope that companies will come together and make clear that a healthy business requires a healthy community. And a healthy community requires that everyone have the right to vote conveniently, safely, and securely.”
In 1890, southern white leaders promised the North that voter suppression would make the South bloom. They were wrong: by concentrating wealth and power among a few white leaders, it kept the South mired in poverty for at least two generations. Rejecting voter suppression this time around could write an entirely different story.
BK - thanks for your detailed and very civil post. We need a return to a time when opposing points of view were almost always respectful & civil.
DeleteI have a different perspective than you.
Short and very succinct, I can not respond better than ex NFL great, now a Congressman from Utah Burgess Owens who stated yesterday:
“Let me be clear: the real racism is thinking only white people are capable of getting an ID. As a proud Black conservative, I won’t let them bully us with their phony accusations of racism.”
My conclusion:
*** we must stand up to the Dems who imply Blacks and other select minorities are victims. They are victims only if they listen to extremely condescending dialogue that imply they are incapable of attaining a voter ID. Did not they attain Covid Vaccine ID’s with similar effort required of voter ID?
And what about the failed public school system? Without school choice or vouchers, average Black scores in reading and math are substantially below Whites and Asians. So - Are Dems keen on keeping certain minorities as victims on 21st Century Government plantations?
Blacks are no better or worse than any other group in securing voter ID. And if we do not have Voter ID, confidence in elections plummet. Unfixed, lack of voter ID can lead to hell breaking loose in the US.
On this Easter Sunday -- God - please bless America and guide her back to civility, unity, and Love.