Monthly Archives: April 2021

We Got What They Asked For

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A letter writer in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters noted that

In the 2020 election, the US Chamber of Commerce backed 23 incumbent House Democrats, 15 of whom won. Six of the 15 won narrowly, by 3.3% or less. Without those six seats, Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t be speaker. The chamber helped hand her the gavel.
The consequences were predictable. House Democrats have passed the PRO Act, ““a labor-rights bill that would roll back many of the policies the chamber has supported for decades” (U.S. News, March 13). Without any Republican support, House Democrats passed HR1, the misnamed For the People Act, which the chamber “strongly opposes.”

The letter writer listed many of the upcoming Progressive-Democrat-run House plans, too.

He identified another organization he generously said was “duped.”

…Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden, whose leaders “feel used and betrayed” because the Covid relief package excluded the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer funding of abortions.

He concluded with

These two organizations duped themselves and sabotaged their own cause.

To which I say my heart bleeds.

It’s hard to believe that as erudite a collection of personnel as those running the US Chamber of Commerce and Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden didn’t know what they were getting when they supported those Progressive-Democrats. Of course, as responsible leaders of large organizations, they carefully vetted each of those candidates and their opponents. They knew what they were asking for.

They got it, good and hard.

And, sadly, so did the rest of us get those worthies’ choices good and hard.

Dishonest Businesses

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Here are two.

Major League Baseball responded to calls to boycott the state of Georgia over a controversial new voter-ID law by moving the All-Star game out of the Peach State.
But teams still requires fans to show photo ID to pick up their tickets from the Will Call booth.

Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R, SC) showed an example of MLB’s dishonesty (she was too polite to be as blunt as me):Of course, MLB management, so far, has shied away from answering multiple requests for an explanation of its photo ID policy for ticket retrieval.

Here’s another example [emphasis added].

Coca-Cola has released a statement condemning Georgia’s new voting legislation, but the company requires valid ID to be admitted to its annual meeting of shareholders.
“At the entrance to the meeting, we will verify your registration and request to see your admission ticket and a valid form of photo identification, such as a driver’s license or passport,” the company wrote in reference to its 2020 annual meeting of shareholders, held before the coronavirus pandemic.

That example illustrates even greater dishonesty—shareholder meetings are all about voting. Coca-Cola demands photo IDs for its voting, but the company demands no such identification be allowed for our nation’s voting.

In my view (where have I heard that phrasing before?) it’s impossible to do any further business with these enterprises until there is a broad and deep turnover of the persons sitting in management chairs. They’re too dishonest, and how can we trust the integrity of their products and services as long as the management teams running their productions are so dishonest?

Infrastructure Biden-Style

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That’s what his latest tax-and-spend multi-trillion dollar bill that he’s masquerading as an infrastructure bill is—a misleading mess of profligacy. Here’s some of what’s in it besides actual infrastructure monies.

  • $174 billion for electric vehicles
  • $400 billion on home-based care for the elderly and disabled
  • $25 billion on child care facilities
  • $50 billion on “research infrastructure” at the National Science Foundation
  • $213 billion for home sustainability and public housing
  • $35 billion+ for climate change R&D
  • $50 billion to create a new office at the Department of Commerce to “dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity and funding investments to support production of critical goods”
  • $30 billion to prepare for future pandemics
  • $45 billion so the Feds can buy “clean energy goods”
  • $14 billion “to bring together industry, academia, and government to advance technologies and capabilities critical to future competitiveness”

That’s more than $1 trillion out of Biden’s $2 trillion demand for his bill. Many of these things might actually be worthy projects—depending on pesky details—but they have no place in a real, legitimate infrastructure program.

And there’s this non sequitur that has no immediate cost, but it will reduce take-home pay of non-union members to no useful purpose and greatly limit our economy and drive up prices through greatly increased union costs:

[T]he PRO Act, which would essentially override right-to-work laws in states across the country, allowing unions to extract dues from workers who do not want to be members.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY):

It’s like a Trojan horse. Its called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse it’s going to be more borrowed money, and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy.

Indeed. Dollars—trillions of dollars—out of our economy immediately and trillions more for the foreseeable future.

Questions for Biden

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Mollie Hemingway has quite a few over at The Federalist. Read them all.

I have a couple more:

Joe—can I call ya Joe?—you’ve said the new Georgia voting law is Jim Crow on steroids because, in part, it closes voting polls at 5pm. Quote the paragraph in the law that does that.

Joe, you’ve said the new Georgia voting law is too restrictive and suppressive of voters. Compare Georgia’s voting law with Delaware’s on:

  • number of days for early voting
  • no excuse absentee ballots (compare with New York’s voting law, too)

Joe, identify the party that invented Jim Crow laws.

Gross Misunderstanding

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And a key distinction between what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party want and what Conservatives and, to an extent, the Republican Party want. President Joe Biden (D) fronts for this…position…and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made it explicit last Tuesday in front of the House Financial Services Committee:

We’ve had a global race to the bottom in corporate taxation and we hope to put an end to that.

The fact—I claim—is that the race to the bottom is a National Good, not a National Bad. Our Constitution specifies only three things our Federal Government is allowed to spend money on: to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. The general Welfare is further specified by the remaining clauses of that Article I, Section 8.

The only legitimate purpose for taxing is to raise revenue for those three narrowly specified items.

Above that low floor (or it would be low were we not living in a dangerous world with many enemies for whom the vasty oceans no longer represent serious barriers and were it not for out Government having been so profligate with spending for so many decades), the more money left in the hands of We the People in our private economy for our spending decisions, the better.

So, yes—a race to the bottom is good for our nation, the prattle of the Yellons and the Bidens and the Party notwithstanding.