Category Archives: ethics

Social Safety Nets

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The nearly $2 trillion Wuhan Virus “relief” bill, the American Rescue Plan Act, wending its way through Congress on strictly party lines, is being masqueraded as a safety net for folks badly impacted by the Wuhan Virus situation.

Aside from the plain fact that no such bill is needed anymore—our economy is rapidly recovering, and would continue to do so were it not for the Biden administration’s burgeoning reregulation imperative, explosive spending plans, and its impending tax increases—there’s another aspect of this bill.

I’ve written elsewhere about the 91% of spending in this bill that has absolutely nothing to do with the virus. This is about the “safety net” spending. That spending includes items like these:

  • the largest direct stimulus payments ever provided in legislation at $1,400 per adult who filed tax returns with a Social Security number—which is nearly every working, or was working, person. It includes retirees, who lost no income due to the virus, and so they do not need virus stimulus/replacement money
  • expands the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit to the largest amount on record.
    • increases the Child Tax Credit amount to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for children under age six
    • increases the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit in 2021 from $543 to $1,502
  • continues the temporary weekly federal unemployment payments of $300 on top of state jobless benefits
  • recipients will get a tax waiver on $10,200 of unemployment payments. Heretofore, unemployment payments, as income replacement payments, were taxable as ordinary income
  • $86 billion bailout for union-managed multi-employer pension plans and single employer pension plans
  • $27.4 billion for rental and utility payment assistance
  • 15% benefit increase for food stamp recipients
  • reparations—direct payments, to the tune of 120% of outstanding indebtedness, for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers
  • “aid”—bailouts—for State and local governments—every bit as much handout to these political entities as are the above to individuals

All of these are handouts paid to folks who aren’t working and encourage, however weakly, those folks to continue not working and collecting the handouts. They’re not hands up paid to folks who are looking for work, are working temporarily reduced hours, and especially there are no criteria tying the payments to actively seeking work or increased work.

A legitimate social safety net would be a program that offers limited hands up to folks who’ve had a run of bad luck, or who have exercised bad judgment and learned their lesson, or who have misbehaved and mended their ways. Those hands up also would be tied to measurable efforts to find work or increased hours of work.

Giving handouts—especially broadly targeted or altogether untargeted handouts—making them repeatably renewable or outright permanent, and not keying them to working is no safety net. It’s

False Flag

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Progressive-Democrats continue to wax hysterical about an armed insurrection that they claim occurred on 6 January when Congressmen were traumatized by a bunch of rioters who penetrated the Capital Building and inflicted a fair amount of damage and did some looting.

However.

Jill Sanborn, FBI Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division in front of a Congressional joint oversight committee last Wednesday:

To my knowledge we have not recovered any [firearms] on that day from any of the arrests at the scene at this point. No one has been charged with a firearms violation.

And this exchange with Senator Ron Johnson (R, WI):

Johnson: How many shots were fired that we know of?
Sanborn: The only shots fired were the ones [fired by a Capitol Police officer] that resulted in the death of the one lady[.]

What “armed insurrection?” Tough to have one without arms.

No, this whole sad charade is wholly made up by the Progressive-Democrats and their communications arm, the press, to distract from the manifest failures of Progressive-Democrat policies, whether immigration, election (re)form, foreign policy, what-have-you.

Contempt

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President Joe Biden, through his Press Secretary Jen Psaki, said he’s just too busy to talk to the press (and, I add, to talk to us ordinary Americans). On the matter of holding a press conference,

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden is too busy with the COVID crisis, but it may happen by the end of March.

Recall that Biden also promised he’d talk to Congress (and through press broadcast of that to us) in early February—no wait, by mid- to late-February. Both of those promises have been reneged on.

Aside from that, Biden is claiming he’s too busy to find 40 minutes to talk to the press? Or, as his habit has been, he’s too busy to find 10 minutes to answer 5 carefully selected questions, for which he has the answers already scripted by his writers?

My credulity meter is pegged.

And this from Biden, also through his Press Secretary:

But this president came in during a historic crisis, two historic crises. A pandemic like the country had not seen in decades and decades, and an economic downturn that left 10 million people out of work.

A pandemic that already was coming under control because of a multiplicity of vaccines developed and for which distribution had begun under the prior administration. A pandemic whose “out-of-control” status already was an open question as actual hospitalization and mortality rate data started flowing in.

An economic downturn that already had been reversed months before Biden took office, and was in full swing when he was sworn in. A recovery sparked and facilitated by Republican-run States either not shutting down their economies in the blind panic to which Progressive-Democrat-run States had succumbed or starting to reopen their economies far sooner than those panic-riddled States.  (Panic-riddled—alternatively, those Progressive-Democrats were/are executing on their Party mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste as they moved to use the Wuhan Virus situation to accrete political power to Party and to them personally.)

Millions of Americans still out of work—mostly in those Progressive-Democrat-run States, whose authorities refuse to reopen their economies so Americans can go back to work.

Four expressions of contempt in one tweet and one short sentence. This is just Biden, typical of Progressive-Democrats, insulting our intelligence again.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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Here’s a partial list of what’s in the Progressive-Democrats’ Wuhan Virus “Relief” bill, just passed in the Senate and sent to the House for its concurrence.

A bill, incidentally, passed on strict party lines, after Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) showed his word to be worthless after he swore up and down that he’d not support any bill that didn’t have support from “his Republican friends,” and then voted for its passage.

  • $350 billion for state and local governments—never minding that many States, such as California, Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, had revenue increases over 2019
  • Over $128 billion for schools—never minding that 95% of that won’t be paid out until after 2021
  • $570 million—$280 per day(!), up to $21,000—for Federal employees to take up to 15 weeks off from work
  • $45 billion for Obamacare
  • $300 per week in enhanced unemployment, the first $10,200 would be tax-free to households with incomes under $150,000—even though unemployment benefits, as replacement income, heretofore was taxable as that income
  • $4 billion for agriculture, including $1 billion for, among other things, “socially disadvantaged” farmers getting their loans forgiven up to 120% of their loan. Never minding the intrinsically racist and sexist nature of that, since non-disadvantaged farmers don’t get a penny of loan forgiveness, at all, and that the 20% excess “forgiveness” is naked “reparation”
  • $50 million in “environmental justice” grants
  • $91 million in “outreach to student loan borrowers
  • $270 million for the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities
  • $200 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services
  • $10 million for the “preservation and maintenance of Native American languages”

The sad thing—or would be sad were it not for its dishonesty—is that some of these inclusions would be worthy of straightforward debate on their merits, did the Progressive-Democrats have the integrity to propose them separately and on those inclusions’ merits.

That partial list, by itself, works out to $1 trillion of money wholly irrelevant to (unneeded, with a recovering economy) Wuhan Virus “relief,” money that would be better spent on Biden’s—and Trump’s—vaunted infrastructure repair and buildout.

Or on making permanent the personal income tax rate reductions from the Trump tax reform.

Or in addition to the miserly $1,400 “stimulus” payments, make it $3,000 in our pocket direct payment checks.

We need to remember this in 2022.

One More Last Chance

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Britain, France, and Germany decided Thursday not to present a resolution censuring Iran that they had floated to other International Atomic Energy Agency member states earlier in the week. Iran had warned the move could lead it to further curtail international inspections of the country and dissuade it from engaging in direct talks with the US on its nuclear program.

This meek surrender is being masqueraded as a renewing effort.

The US and European powers are giving Iran a last chance to start cooperating with a United Nations atomic agency probe of Tehran’s nuclear activities, backing away from a formal censure of Iran in a bid to revive nuclear diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.
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The decision was backed by Washington, senior diplomats said, reflecting US concerns that renewed pressure on Iran could derail diplomacy.

We’ll mean it next time, guys.

Nah. No we won’t.