Author Archives: eehines

A Cost of Government

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The Congressional Budget Office is saying that the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s Medicare prescription drug scheme could cost taxpayers more than $20 billion over three years.

The budget analysis arm of Congress said the increased costs are due to the government subsidizing many seniors’ premiums by sending money to insurance firms, and it would cost at least $5 billion extra in 2025 alone and add to the deficit.

If the administration really wants to spend our tax remittals on subsidies for seniors’ prescription drugs, it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to send those subsidy dollars directly to the seniors and let each individual senior use the money for his own particular medicine needs.

That’s anathema, though, to Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. That would put the decision-making, the responsibility, in the hands of us average Americans as individuals, in the hands of individual geezers in the particular case. Party doesn’t think we’re capable of making our own decisions, though. Party insists that only its members who are in government are capable of such decision-making; the rest of us really need to just sit down and do as we’re told. And experience the joy of that.

Broken Promises

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The lede lays it out.

Government makes many promises, the Biden Administration more than most. Results are another story.

Here’s an all too typical example:

The 2021 infrastructure law included $42.5 billion for states to expand broadband to “unserved,” mostly rural, communities. Three years later, ground hasn’t been broken on a single project. The Administration recently said construction won’t start until next year at the earliest, meaning many projects won’t be up and running until the end of the decade.

With this follow-up:

Blame the Administration’s political regulations. States must submit plans to the Commerce Department about how they’ll use the funds and their bidding process for providers. Commerce has piled on mandates that are nowhere in the law and has rejected state plans that don’t advance progressive goals.

Whatever. That excuse misses the point. These program failures aren’t unique to the Biden-Harris administration. These incumbents are only the latest example. No, the failures have gone on for so long, across nearly all 235-ish years of Federal administrations, that it should be well-understood, by us average Americans and by the politicians who make them, that promises in the name of Government are just lies: they know when they make those promises that they won’t be carried out.

The answer lies not in making Government men live up to their government program promises; it lies in getting Government out of our economy almost altogether, and letting us citizens and our private enterprises do their trick in a free market unhamstrung by government promises, much less excessive regulatory laws and regulations.

Harris’ Position on Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was asked in a Sunday 60 Minutes interview whether the US has any “sway” over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war against Hamas continues. The show’s host asked about Netanyahu not listening to Harris’ and Biden’s administration demands.

Harris’ answer, in part:

Now the work we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a cease-fire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.

Except for a couple of things: the Biden-Harris administration (or the Harris-Biden administration, as Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden occasionally puts it) has put no pressure at all on the Arab terrorist entities Hamas and Hezbollah, and they’ve wholly ignored non-Arab Iran, except in one way noted below. The Biden-Harris administration has put tremendous pressure on Israel—Netanyahu—to agree a cease-fire.

Another thing is that a cease-fire would benefit only the terrorists by giving them time to reconstitute, refit, rearm, and attack again, while giving Israel no respite at all, and yielding only minimal—at best—kidnap release.

Aside from that, keep in mind that Kamala Harris is a very intelligent, very committed woman and would make a wonderful President, according to her Progressive-Democratic Party compatriots. That makes her seeming word salad response not empty-calorie rhetoric at all but a deliberate obfuscation of her disdain for Israel and her sub rosa support for terrorist Hamas and Hezbollah, and it puts her in league with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s overt protection of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Words

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is “subtly” changing what she says about her economic plans, should she be elected. Her advisers’ claim is

While President Biden’s agenda focused on jobs, Harris is focused on costs. Where Biden sees voters foremost as workers, she sees them more as consumers.
As a result, her policies are aimed at trying to help middle-class Americans afford the things they need and want, and helping them build wealth that can be passed along to their children, her advisers say.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to raise taxes on our income, in the name of making the billionaires “pay their fair share” without specifying what that share is, and which tax increases will reach down into our middle class through their effect on small businesses and large businesses’ employment plans.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to increase government spending on Party special interests, including subsidies for her “green new deal” businesses while hamstringing our oil- and gas-based energy production ability.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to institute price controls on a broad range of products from pharmaceuticals to food in our grocery stores, all in the name of her mythical price gouging.

She’s also said in so many words that her values haven’t changed. Her values are made plain through those plans. What she’s saying now, those “subtle changes,” are as her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders (I, VT) says, just empty words uttered to curry votes.

Nothing more.

One Effect of Biden’s Favoring Iran

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This demonstrates the effect Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s moral equivalence between terrorist- and terrorism-supporting Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other—which amounts to favoring Iran over Israel—has on the situation in the Middle East:

The decision to approve the September 27 strike [killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah] from US soil without alerting the White House beforehand—and later to make public a photo of himself issuing the order—underscored the growing divergence between Netanyahu’s government and the White House.

Netanyahu was speaking directly to Biden with that decision and that method of delivery, but Biden wouldn’t listen.

Biden has done nothing useful in support of Israel, only pushing for—demanding, along with his Secretary of Milquetoast Antony Blinken—Israel to agree a cease-fire even as the IDF is on the verge of defeating decisively both Hamas and Hezbollah, a cease-fire Biden and his syndicate members know full well favors only the terrorists. Biden has been, occasionally, deliberately counterproductive to Israel’s interests, its very survival, by withholding, however briefly, the ammunition resupply the nation needs.

And this:

In the short term, Israel’s unilateral decision-making about striking Iran risks embroiling the Biden administration in another unpopular regional conflict. In the longer term, it could be another flashpoint for critics who say the US gives Israel too much leeway, not using its leverage to rein in its ally.

Rein in!? This is the arrogance of those in the Biden administration, and outside it, who insist, in all seriousness that Israel is nothing but a US satrap, if not a US territory—they’re insisting that Israel isn’t an autonomous, sovereign nation in its own right.

And this:

US attempts to rein in Israel in Gaza yielded only limited results, analysts say.

Analysts are carefully ignoring the major result from the Biden administration’s constant interference in IDF operations in Gaza. By holding Israel back, Biden and his have only prolonged the fight in Gaza, at the expense of more terrorist-caused civilian deaths during the prolonged fighting, increased Israeli casualties, and the murders of more hostages before IDF units could locate and get to them.

It’s no wonder the Israeli government increasingly dismisses Biden administration attempts to pressure and to determine Israel’s self-defense actions.

But it’s not just Joe Biden who’s badly failing here.

As Vice President, it’s hard for Kamala Harris to separate herself from her boss’ position. However, as Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate, it’s imperative that Harris make her position clear on this question. As the highly talented politician and impressively intelligent woman that Party now makes her out to be, of course Harris knows how to walk that seeming divergence. Thus: it’s clear from Harris’ silence on the specifics, and from her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders’ statements regarding the sincerity of her current words, that despite her loud claims of standing four-square with Israel, she agrees with her boss’ favoring Iran and its coming nuclear weapons availability over the security of Israel.