Category: national politics & policies

Categories
inflation and inflationism national politics & policies

Quips & Stunts

Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, economy, inflation, democracy, government

The Epoch Times has produced a handy policy comparison between the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States, former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Maybe issues don’t matter so much now, though: more talked-about is Trump’s stunt scooping fries at McDonald’s, which got Democrats so upset (to their detriment), or Kamala Harris’s bizarre quip at a rally where two young men shouted “Jesus Is Lord!” and “Christ Is King!” as they were being thrown out. The Veep’s response that they were at the wrong rally was construed by many to suggest that her supporters aren’t Christians.

Nevertheless, The Epoch Times is right to emphasize policy. It’s a big subject, so let’s just compare the candidates on “The Economy.”

Donald Trump “Pledges to reduce inflation by increasing American energy production, cutting wasteful government spending, and preventing illegal immigration,” and “Seeks to lower commodity prices by ending global wars.” Are these “good for the economy”? Probably; mostly. But distant from the heart of inflation. 

Worse, Trump allegedly “‘Strongly’ feels presidents ‘should have at least a say’ in the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions.” The Fed is indeed key, but the only way to reduce inflation immediately is through the kind of policies presidents tend to hate — for example, the deflation that Fed Chairman Paul Volcker performed on Jimmy Carter’s economy that helped get Reagan elected.

Kamala Harris sticks to progressive standards, proposing “a federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries to tackle inflation,” which would backfire into a major economic debacle, complete with shortages and calls for rationing and worse. It fits in nicely with another typical progressive plank, calling for “raising the minimum wage,” which would lead to less employment partly through increased robotization of businesses now employing the workers affected, the low-skilled (the ones Trump calls “great”).

Looking over their substantive policies, it’s easy to see why “culture war” issues prevail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Something Pathological

Kamala Harris, Fox, interview, Bret Baier

Fox News’s interview with Kamala Harris itself made news. The betting markets had Ms. Harris tanking; we await post-interview polls. Bret Baier did more than a competent job, pressing the Democratic candidate like Sam Donaldson used to press President Ronald Reagan. 

Harris came to the interview “fashionably” (strategically?) late, which added some frisson to the affair. But what stuck out to me was a repeated evasion, which to Kamala no doubt felt natural, but to this onlooker, anyway, seemed bizarre.

Trump.

When challenged about Biden Administration failures of policy, leadership, or efficacy, candidate Harris — in addition to insisting that she will lead in a totally new direction, mostly unspecified — kept on blaming, somehow, Donald Trump.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance noted this, saying “something pathological is going on.”

That pathology is TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome.

“You’ve been in office for three-and-a-half years,” Baier challenged in the interview’s most memorable exchange, eliciting from the Democrat an immediate response: “And Donald Trump has been running for office since . . .” A stunned, incredulous Baier watched Harris rant on against Trump, declaring that “he is unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader who spends full time demeaning and engaging in personal grievances, and it being about him instead of the American people.”

This is her appeal to the middle, to non-partisan voters: not for her or her policies, but against Trump.

Democrats need their devil. Without him could they win a national election?

And we should inquire whether the reverse is also true.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Watch the entire interview is here.

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Hurricane Algebra

hurricane, climate change, global warming, weather, panic, big government, regulations

Helene is x times worse than Katrina, but receives y less coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

When we finally plug in the numbers, we will likely discover that the coverage difference is best explained by two factors: there are fewer reporters yet more “journalists” than ever before, and (you guessed it) politics.

You see, Katrina coverage helped besmirch George W. Bush and the Republicans.

Covering Helene in the same way, or to similar extent, could hurt the incumbents (FEMA has been especially lame), and the presidential race is too close for the Democrats’ lackeys in the media to do that.

So let’s blame Helene on Trump.

Or, the low coverage on Trump. Trump’s the why of the y!

It’s just as sensible as blaming Helene on man-made climate change. Nearly every newsperson intones the plausible-sounding theory that the warmer the climate the more damaging the storms. It’s a great hypothesis. But pre-Helene studies have shown scant evidence for it.

Further, the oft-repeated line that “never before” has a hurricane reached so far inland is also untrue. Asheville, North Carolina, was destroyed by a similarly horrific hurricane in July 1916.

These are rare events. Or, perhaps, cyclical, on repeat by century. 

The pity with all this theory and conjecture and political nonsense is: less coverage means less knowledge outside the hurricane zone of how horrible Helene is, and thus less sympathy elicited from the general population of generous Americans. Thus, less aid.

Making major media complicit — with the U.S. Government (FEMA, etc.) — in not helping relieve the suffering. 

So maybe we should thank the climate change agenda. Without that devil to fight, we might get no coverage of Helene at all. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Destroying What Has Been

Kamala Harris, tweets, riots, bail

Let’s assume that chief executives responsible for major appointments know something about whom they’re appointing.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president, was fine with the appointment of an associate professor “of urban and multicultural education,” Brian Lozenski, to help write the state’s “ethnic studies” standards. Those were supposed to have been released for public comment in August but being kept under wraps.

Lozenski’s left-wing ideas are notorious in Minnesota. For instance, he has advocated overthrowing the United States — not to be replaced by an Elysium of reason and freedom, we can be sure.

Let’s also assume that someone running for president of the United States is familiar with his or her own views and agenda.

One thing we should know about his running mate, the current Vice President Kamala Harris, is that in 2020 she asked people to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In jail for unpeacefully destroying the property of others. 

A couple of years later, she denied making the appeal . . . but her tweet doing so remained up on the platform and, regardless, had been screenshot.

Commentators sometimes suggest that the future policies of Kamala Harris are mysterious, since she has said or half-said so many different things.

What mystery?

All of her left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-First Amendment, anti-Second Amendment statements and actions express her true impulses. All her blarney about how she’s now a big fan of fracking or a gun owner who’d drop any intruder, etc., are attempts to fool voters who’d be appalled by her actual agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Hillary Disinformation Hunt

Hillary Clinton, disinformation, censorship, mind control, thought control

Have you heard? It’s open season on disinformation.

Disinformation spewed by Hillary Clinton, that is.

Mrs. Clinton has escaped jail time for all her previous crimes, whether committed singly or in partnership with her husband. But now we are going to have a brand-new crime to charge her with. And boy, is she a serial offender!!!!!!

The irony is, we would not even be able to charge anybody with this new category of crime — if indeed we’ll be able to; there’s still some controversy about it — but for the contempt of Hillary Clinton and politicians like her for the First Amendment rights that a large minority of Americans hold so dear.

Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC: “I think it’s important to indict the Russians . . . who were engaged in direct election interference. . . . But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrent.”

Yes, Hillary Clinton “got away with” everything else. But can she get away with all her lies and, let’s face it, downright disinformation, certainly heavily disseminated by her around election times? 

Heck, even if the new category of criminal offense won’t be applicable retroactively, thus giving her a free pass for the last umpteen years, are we in any danger of running out of actionable Hillary disinformation going forward? Does a leopard change its spots?

Maybe she’s counting on selective enforcement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies subsidy tax policy

Kamala Hood

Kamala Harris, crony corporations, green, taxes, spending, welfare

American politics is largely devoted to the grand task of taking from some and giving to others, a sort of Robin Hood mania that has nothing to do with giving back to taxpayers what was taken from taxpayers (as in the legend) — or doing much of anything for the poor — but, instead, to ostentatiously give to some and quietly take from as many people as possible.

Nevertheless, that giving is not always ostentatious. Sometimes it is surreptitious. 

Or at least not ballyhooed.

Kamala Harris has taken up an old Democratic Party stalking point: soak the rich! Though she tries not to mention just how much money she and her fellow Biden Administration insiders have been giving to a few big corporations.

“Despite Harris’ rhetoric of fighting for the middle class,” writes Jack Salmon at Reason, “her policies have disproportionately benefited the wealthy and large corporations while leaving middle- and lower-income Americans behind. Far from soaking the rich, Harris’ legacy has been one of feeding them.”

Corporate subsidies have “exploded,” explains Mr. Salmon, going from a ten-year budget allocation of $1.2 trillion in 2021 to now surpassing $2 trillion.

Nearly doubled!

“The beneficiaries of this largesse are extremely concentrated,” Salmon notes, most of it going to “just 15 large corporations, seven of which are foreign.” Of course, a lot of this is under cover of “saving the planet” and fighting “climate change”: “Wind turbine manufacturers like General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens/Gamesa — who collectively produce 79 percent of all turbines — are among the biggest winners.”

Robbing from the few and giving to the many makes neither for good mathematics or a winning political strategy. Robbing from the many and giving to the few is what usually works. But if your appeal is to “the left,” you have to pretend to grab most from the super-rich few.

Your pals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

The Value of Principles

The late Bernie Baltic used to ask politicians, who invariably wanted him to write them a check, “What are your principles?”

They would then recite their key issues or the issues they thought were key to getting Bernie to write that check. He would stop them, saying, “Not your issues — issue positions can change — your principles.”

Values are like sorta like principles. In politician speak.

“My values haven’t changed,” Vice-President Kamala Harris assured us, after being quizzed about her flip-flopping on issues including fracking (hello Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes), defunding the police and building a border wall.

CNN host Erin Burnett recently took the Democratic nominee to task, citing an investigation that counted more than 50 instances of Harris “slamming Trump’s border wall,” even while her “campaign ads actually showcase that wall.”

Hard to believe but true: Kamala’s TV spot touts Trump’s wall — his “big distraction,” as she dubbed it — as a symbol of her tough border stance. 

You can’t make this stuff up.

In her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, Kamala Harris identified “a bigger reason to oppose a border wall,” decrying such a structure as “a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built.”

Therefore . . . it would seem obvious that her values have indeed changed. Or perhaps the problem is that she doesn’t have any values that cannot be trumped (go ahead, pun intended) by the all-powerful need to secure her personal political advance.

That’s her paramount principle. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with …

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy

Kill the Stock Market!

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Marxism, socialism, equity, stock, capital gains tax

Taxing capital gains is a form of income taxation that Democrats love. 

And it’s not just a matter of increasing revenue. Remember that President Obama thought that increasing the capital gains rate was a good idea even if it decreased government revenue. Democrats are playing to a soak-the-rich sentiment among their base, even when the most important supporters are billionaires.

Take Mark Cuban. He’s a billionaire. And he supports Kamala Harris for president. 

Weeks ago, the Democrat standard-bearer came out with a wild proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And Cuban, for all his faults, is not an idiot; he knows just how incredibly corrosive that tax on capital would be.

“It would kill the stock market,” he points out. 

In a chat with Fox Business, Cuban explained how he told Democratic insiders that taxing unrealized capital gains (as when stocks you hold gain value, but you haven’t sold them so you have no income from them), would become “the ultimate employment plan for private equity, because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed, right?” 

By this he means that a stock owner might have to borrow money to cover taxes, only to have the stocks go down later and enjoy neither rebate from the government nor any income from the investment to cover the debt.

Cuban insists that Democratic insiders are pragmatic and will not push this tax.

Yet, with both members (comrades?) of the presidential ticket spouting Marxist talking points, how do we know that they are stable (corrupt?) enough to save public capitalism from their malign agenda?

How can we be sure they’re just lying?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Since unrealized capital gains aren’t income, I don’t know how taxing them could be constitutional. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Say No to Reich-Harris Reich

Kamala Harris, Robert Reich, censorship, X, Twitter, mind control, free speech

Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.

Just one example: government-instigated stomping on social-media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.

But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.

They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.

Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention . . . to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”

Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.

Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”

Something has to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies regulation subsidy too much government

Stay Puft America

FDA, regulations, food, rules, diet, fads

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more. 

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast . . .from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy. 

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts