The Wall Street Journal asked a question last Friday regarding President Joe Biden (D) and the weekend G-7 meeting.
What would you like to see come out of the G-7 summit?
I would have liked Biden to repeat former President Donald Trump’s (R) offer of a completely tariff-free trade regime among the seven.
But he didn’t make the offer. Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democrats are all about higher taxes, not lower.
There’s this graph, via Power Line, that illustrates the impact of subsidies—here the production tax credit (PTC) for wind power in particular—and their expiration, on wind energy production facility investment and installation.
Those green bars (because Power Line has a sense of irony) represent the new wind-energy systems installed the year after the PTC was allowed to expire.
Wind power, among “green” energy production systems, just isn’t ready for market.
That’s the central question we should be asking ourselves—and we should be electing our government representatives on the basis of the answer.
For example: the Progressive-Democrats in the Maine State legislature are looking to add a 3% income tax “surcharge” on any Maine citizen who makes $200,000 or more per year. The rationalization for this is provided by Progressive-Democrat State Senator Ben Chipman:
If someone is making $1 million a year, they can afford to pay a higher tax rate than somebody who is making $20,000 a year[.]
If they can afford it, they’re somehow obligated to pay it. That imagined obligation can only flow from the Progressive-Democrats’ view that the money we earn isn’t our money, it’s Government’s money, and Government—the men and women in Government—will let us keep what they deem sufficient to our needs.
After all, as a prominent Progressive-Democrat almost said, a short while ago,
If you’ve got [an income], you didn’t [earn] that. Somebody else made that happen.
As that man also said,
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back.
What the Progressive-Democrat chose to misconstrue, though—what Progressive-Democrats as a group choose to misconstrue—is that “give back” means “Government take back.”
Because Government, according to Progressive-Democrats, isn’t really taking back; Government is keeping and giving back a portion of what it doesn’t believe is ours to begin with.
Someone who is wealthier than me is somehow obligated to pay more than me for the same good, service, benefit I’m getting? I pay $X for a car or a meal out but my neighbor, who has a higher income than me, should have to pay $X++ for that same car or meal out? Just because he can afford to pay $X++?
How does that work, exactly? Where is the morality in that? Where is the equality in that? Where is the Progressive-Democrats’ precious equity in that?
From Luke 12:48 (King James Version):
For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
Absolutely. Hence the desire of those who want to give something back.
But that’s the thing. The obligation is levied by God on us as individuals, not by Government on us as a collection of citizens, and it’s an obligation for each of us to give according to our chosen methods and beneficiaries (and by extension, to choose wisely), not an authorization for Government to take according to Government men’s choices (and by extension, to be subject to their arbitrariness).
Recall the spendiferous $1.9 trillion bill enacted in March that President Joe Biden (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats have been pleased to call their “American Rescue Plan.” This enactment included funding explicitly for the States. Recall further that this…plan…seeks to bar recipient States from reducing their own tax rates as a condition of receiving the money.
…can’t use their share of the funds to “directly or indirectly offset a reduction” in “net tax revenue.”
Ohio demurred from that Federal intrusion into State prerogatives, as those prerogatives are made explicit in our Constitution’s 10th Amendment.
It’s possible that the Biden administration will lose on Constitutional grounds, as the Editors noted at the end of their piece, which centered on a Federal trial judge’s ruling allowing Ohio’s suit to go forward:
[I]n a preliminary opinion last week, federal Judge Douglas Cole found the state has a “substantial likelihood of success on that [Spending Clause] argument.”
But this is just an early skirmish in the Progressive-Democrats’ war on our federal republican system of governance. After all, this is the position of Biden and his brethren:
It is my first wish to see the United States assume and merit the character of one great nation, whose territory is divided into different States merely for more convenient government and the more easy and prompt administration of justice, just as our several States are divided into counties and townships for the like purpose.
And
…one of the first wishes of my heart, viz., to see the people of America become one nation in every respect; for, as to the separate [state] legislatures, I would have them considered, with relation to the Confederacy, in the same light in which counties stand to the State of which they are parts, viz., merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government….
No, wait—that was John Jay, both times, regarding the power he wanted in our then nascent central government prior to the Constitutional Convention.
Biden is just bent on reviving that. Americans successfully defeated Jay in those early days. We Americans need to defeat the Progressive-Democrats’ assault today.
President Joe Biden (D) and his Co-President Kamala Harris (D)—it is, at Biden’s behest, the Biden/Harris administration—held an infrastructure meeting last Wednesday with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) in which he pushed for acceptance of his $2.3 trillion version of an infrastructure bill along with his commensurately large tax increase plan with which he claims he’ll pay for his infrastructure plan.
Shortly after the meeting, Biden gave an interview to MSNBC, in which he said,
I want to know what we agree on and let’s see if we can get an agreement to kick start this, and then fight over what’s left, and see if I can get it done without Republicans if need be[.]
Since he’s going to pass his stuff along strictly party lines, anyway, what was the point of the meeting?
Plainly, Biden Bipartisanship—Progressive-Democratic Party Bipartisanship—means Republicans go along quietly or be kicked to the curb.
It’s Party’s version of republican democracy: Progressive-Democracy.