The Land of the Free

Free Stuff, that is.  Here’s the latest from Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA).  In addition to all the other free stuff she wants us to have, now she wants free child care.

[F]amilies living below the 200% poverty threshold (roughly $51,500 for a family of four) would get free access to child care and early education….

With this, Warren wants folks who, by her own definition, are not poverty-ridden to get free child care.  Notice, too, she’s lumped in with child care her “early education”—that’s her tacit admission that our public schools no longer provide actual education; they’re just child care facilities.

More importantly than that, though, is how she would pay for all of this.

Warren proposed using money from the ultra-millionaire tax that she announced at the end of January. Under the tax, anyone with more than $50 million in assets would pay a 2% tax. For those who have assets valued at $1 billion or higher, it would be a 3% tax.

That might—might—cover expenses for the first few years.  But Warren has no clue of what to do next (beyond, I assume, the usual Progressive-Democrat “solution” of raise taxes some more).  Warren has no clue where to get the money for all this free stuff (recall that she’s using her tax on the evil rich for other spending, too) when we don’t have any more rich because they’ve been taxed out of existence, no one aspires to be rich anymore (with the associated loss of economic activity and steady impoverishment of our population as a whole), the few remaining rich have moved their money overseas (and perhaps joined their money).

But hey—it’s Free Stuff today.  It’s votes today.

More important even than all of that is the moral damage she proposes to do to us Americans.  No longer are we to be responsible individuals, we’re just to be come wards of the State.  Her State.  Her State will supplant our individual morality with her own version; her State will strip us of our individual responsibilities, our individual duties.  Her State will do those.

Elizabeth Warren’s State is a socialist State.  John Adams wrote more than one hundred years ago that the nation of our Constitution required a virtuous, moral people to run it.  That’s not Elizabeth Warren’s State.

Another Illustration

I’m not one to defend Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden, but some things are far worse. When Biden spoke earlier of working with segregationists as a way to get things done, he wasn’t bragging about hobnobbing with racists, he was speaking of being able to work even with folks with whom he fundamentally disagreed in order to get things done.

In response, we see Senators and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates Kamala Harris (D, CA) and Cory Booker (D, NJ) cynically distorting his meaning in order to manufacture a race beef.  This is nothing but vote pandering, and it accomplishes nothing but demonstrate their own stinking racism.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is coming to.

In Which the Court Gets One Right

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Bladensburg Peace Cross is not an unconstitutional favoring by government of a particular religion, reversing the 4th Circuit. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

This is the privately done monument that was

built in 1925 and paid for by local families, businesses, and the American Legion to honor 49 World War I veterans from Prince George’s County [in Maryland]. But the 40-foot cross sits on a now-busy highway median owned since 1961 by a state commission that pays for its maintenance and upkeep.

The American Humanist Association, an anti-religion gadfly with many such attacks, particularly against what it considers Christian devices, had sued for the monument’s removal (these five decades and more after the commission assumed responsibility for the monument).  The appellate court had agreed with the AHA, ruling that the monument is an aggrandizement of Latin Crosses and nothing else.  That court also had displayed its contempt for the intelligence of ordinary Americans, ruling that the “display”

says to any reasonable observer that the commission either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both[.]

However, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court, had the right of it [emphasis added].

The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent.  For some, that monument is a symbolic resting place for ancestors who never returned home. For others, it is a place for the community to gather and honor all veterans and their sacrifices for our Nation. For others still, it is a historical landmark. For many of these people, destroying or defacing the Cross that has stood undisturbed for nearly a century would not be neutral and would not further the ideals of respect and tolerance embodied in the First Amendment.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

As an aside, Ginsburg in her dissent, which she emphasized by reading it from the bench, echoed the 4th Circuit’s contempt for us ordinary Americans:

As I see it, when a cross is displayed on public property, the government may be presumed to endorse its religious content.  The venue is surely associated with the State; the symbol and its meaning are just as surely associated exclusively with Christianity.

Further to the aside, here is F Scott Fitzgerald’s test of genius:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The Court’s ruling, including Ginsburg’s dissent, can be read here.

The VA Fails Again

Now we learn that the Veterans Administration owes our disabled veterans a ton of money for something other than their health: some 53,000 of them have been charged home loan fees that they didn’t have to pay, to the tune of $189 million in aggregate. Those 53,000 are over half of our veterans who were allowed the fee waiver.  VA auditors have discovered that, for 2012 through 2017

[V]eterans were charged the fees under the VA’s Home Loan Guaranty Program and now may be entitled to refunds ranging from $5,000 to $20,000….

That’s bad enough, but mistakes—even egregious ones like this—happen.  What makes this mistake unacceptable is this [emphasis added]:

The watchdog report also said the Veterans Benefits Administration knew since 2014 that tens of thousands of veterans may have been wrongfully charged the funding fee.
“OIG finds it troubling that senior (Veterans Benefits Administration) management was aware that thousands of veterans were potentially owed more than $150 million yet did not take adequate actions to ensure refunds were issued,” the IG report says.

Troubling.  NSS.

And this:

The VBA [Veterans Benefit Administration] noted that the financial impact to the veterans was minimal over the life of the loan, the inspector general report says.

Oh, well, that makes it all right.

No, it doesn’t.  The only thing that makes it all right is the disbandment of the VA altogether and use its budget and putative future budgets as vouchers our veterans

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

You’ve Made Enough Money

The New Jersey governor says so, and he wants to raise the income tax on the rich and the not-yet rich—those making more than $1 million per annual year*—by almost a full per centage point, to 10.75%.

Because, he argues.

So far, even the Progressive-Democrat-run legislature is demurring from that move, but the governor seems poised to veto a budget that doesn’t have the tax increase.

Give it up, the Progressive-Democrat governor says. I have better uses for your money than you do, the Progressive-Democrat governor says.

 

*Think $1 million is a lot?  It is, but not so much in Trenton.  On a cost of living basis, that would be worth $1.4 million in northern Texas.