The Biden administration has approved a sale of $360 million worth of drones, missiles and other military equipment to the Republic of China.
So far, so good.
There remains a Critical Item, though: when is the actual delivery. American governments—not just the Biden administration, this time—have a venerable history of slow-walking actual delivery to the RoC.
Arkansas’ Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed into law the State’s latest round of individual and corporate tax cuts. “Finance officials” say that
the cuts will cost about $483 million the first year and $322 million a year after that.
Sanders also has signed into law a different tax cut, this one in the form of a tax credit increase. This one
increases the homestead tax credit from $425 to $500, retroactive to January 1.
“Finance officials” piped up again:
That cut will cost $46 million.
Cost whom, exactly? The money isn’t the State government’s after all. The money belongs to the citizens of Arkansas, they just remit it in the form of tax levies. It doesn’t cost the government a single copper penny to not get what doesn’t belong to it.
Beyond those “financial officials'” distortion, there’s another item missing from their pseudo-analysis.
Those officials are ignoring the impacts of the increased economic activity in the State’s private economy from all that money now being left in the private hands of the State’s citizens and private businesses. There are two primary impacts. One is the increased prosperity of those citizens both from their being able to hold onto more of their money and from that increased economic activity. The other is the increased tax receipts the government will receive, on net despite the reduced tax rates, from the increased aggregated revenues flowing from all that increased economic activity.
…in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s world.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have this one right.
CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit.
…
Notably, CBO’s revenue projections are little changed. Revenue is expected to total 17.2% of GDP this year—roughly the 50-year average before the pandemic….
So, whence the deficit explosion? Plainly, it’s in all that spending that the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Party syndicate in the House and Senate insist on doing.
CBO significantly revised up projections for federal spending. Outlays are now expected to hit 24.2% of GDP this year and average 24% over the next decade. Wow.
Mind you, that’s against a steadily, if slowly, growing GDP. That projection means that Party spending will be growing, too. All while revenue remains steady—which is to say, flat/not growing.
This is the politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s utter inability to say “cut spending,” which plays into their inability actually to cut spending. After all, the money, in their minds, isn’t real; it’s only monopoly money, and if they need want more dollars, they have only to go to their Modern Monetary Policy money tree and pick more dollar bills from the branches.
The reality, though, is that the money Progressive-Democrats demand to spend is our money. Those politicians have no skin in the game beyond their political power. The skin us average Americans have in this game is real: our ability to get along in the real (and real economic) world in which we live, having as we do, only those real dollars that Party policies steadily devalue.
We need to remember that this November.
This one comes from the Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates. She told WBBM‘s Political Editor, Craig Dellimore, in their Sunday interview,
Conservatives don’t even want Black children to be able to read. Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing Black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter. So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, Black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.
Not so much. Pushing for alternatives to public schools—voucher schools, charter schools, pods, homeschooling—is what Conservatives do explicitly to make it possible for black children, other minority children, all children trapped in failing public schools to learn to read and to learn to do arithmetic.
Conservatives championed Black codes during Reconstruction? Apparently, Davis Gates is a product of her public school American history: she’s utterly ignorant. It was the Democratic Party that was creating Black codes during Reconstruction—and that created the Ku Klux Klan to prey on freed Blacks and their White supporters—and it was Party that pushed for gun control laws aimed at keeping those same Blacks and White supporters unarmed and helpless against the KKK.
Now Party is adamantly opposed to those alternative schools, and Davis Gates is right there with them, doing her best to keep black children, other minority children, all children from learning much of anything by keeping them trapped in those public schools.
Davis Gates is just one more example of the intrinsic dishonesty of teachers unions and of the failure of public schools, including in Chicago.
Amid the press coverage of a variety of recent video clips showing Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline—standing motionless in the middle of a number of dignitaries swaying and bobbing to some music, wandering off in the middle of a parachute team demonstration, being taken by the wrist and led off the stage—there comes Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s full throated and angry denunciation of the video clips as cheap fakes and deep fakes.
Among the press’ snark corps commentary ridiculing Jean-Pierre’s claim there were a few suggestions that were more serious.
The least among the more serious is Guy Benson’s unsubstantiated denial:
But it’s literal misinformation to pretend the videos themselves are fake. They are not.
Based on what evidence, Benson?
Some more serious questions include these:
Senator Mike Lee (R, UT):
Wait, exactly which videos we’ve all seen—of Biden freezing or looking lost—are deepfakes?
Stephen L Miller:
A reporter needs to genuinely ask her what she thinks a deep fake is[.]
This line of questioning badly lacking, however, which is all too typical of today’s cute sound bite-driven media. A reporter—a myriad of reporters—also need to ask (to get back to Benson’s failure from the right) for the specific data that shows the videos to be deep fakes, or cheap fakes, or in any way altered other than—perhaps—being clipped out of longer videos showing more of Biden’s behavior both before and after the clips in question.
Maybe the lack of calls for hard evidence—and Benson’s evidence-free claim—is of a piece with what passes for today’s journalism: sound bites don’t have room for facts.