“Putin Will Adapt”

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In Holman Jenkins’ opinion piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal concerning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy war against Europe (as a secondary front in his war against Ukraine), he offered this regarding Europe’s stick-to-it-iveness vs Putin’s:

Mr Putin will quickly adapt once it’s proven to him Europe’s governing parties can’t knuckle under to Russian blackmail and retain their democratic viability.

If Europe doesn’t surrender in the face of Putin’s energy war, it will be the Russian people who feel the resulting economic, and other, pain.

Jenkins is incredibly naive to think Putin cares about that. He’ll persist until he is militarily driven out of Ukraine. And he’ll persist elsewhere for as long as he’s in power. The situation is all about Putin and his angst over the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century” and his obsession with redressing that.

Europe needs to defeat Putin in his energy war, not only to save themselves (and Ukraine) in the near term, but also to greatly mitigate the costs of Putin’s aggressively pushed obsession in the longer term.

Humane, Progressive-Democrat Style

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President Joe Biden (D) and his administration constantly brag about how humane his No Southern Border immigration policy is.

Here is the realization of that humaneness.

Since the start of the federal government’s 2022 fiscal year last October, authorities have found 609 bodies on the U.S. side of the southern border, according to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection data obtained by the Washington Examiner and confirmed by three federal law enforcement officials.
The 609 figure is already higher than the 566 record set in all of 2021….

That compares with the previous administration’s Secured Southern Border immigration policy results.

This year’s current total is more than double the 300 bodies recovered in 2019 and 247 in 2020….

The raw, bland numbers mask the individual tragedies that go into them. For instance,

[a] young girl’s body being pulled from the water near El Paso, Texas last Monday. The river’s undercurrent had swept the girl from her mother’s arms. Both were from Guatemala.

And

[a] boy was killed separately near Eagle Pass, Texas in a similar drowning incident.

And

On Friday, US authorities found a 4-month-old infant and an 18-month-old toddler in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, which borders Mexico. Smugglers left the young children in the desert “to die[.]”

And

A 2-month-old infant who was also found is currently fighting for his life in critical condition.

This is what happens when Progressive-Democrats succeed in pushing their own policy of illegal alien immigration, all in the name of humaneness, a policy that actively encourages masses of people to trek across Mexico, risking the nation’s arid heat and the nation’s drug and human trafficking cartel population, in order to become illegal aliens in the US.

This is what Progressive-Democrats see as humane.

More Disingenuosity

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President Joe Biden (D) has refused, since his cancelation of so much student loan debt, to identify who will pay for that cancelation, since the affected students won’t be paying for it themselves.

It gets worse—or better, for those in the Progressive-Democratic Party and their supporters who have such contempt for us average Americans. Either Biden and his minions couldn’t be bothered to run a cost analysis of the Biden Giveaway, or he did, and he’s refusing to let us unwashed see it.

The Leftist Brookings Institution does offer an excuse, though. Andre Perry, Senior Fellow at the Institution’s Brookings Metro:

This is hard to analyze because you need to look at the potential benefits or costs of people getting relief and how that may strengthen the economy. The federal financial aid program is one of the most difficult things to study and write about because these loans are not usually paid back all at once, but over decades—if they’re paid back at all.

It’s hard, so why should we have to bother? Never mind that now lots more of these loans won’t be paid back at all, which lightens that oh so difficult analysis. If one was done at all.

Never mind, either, that if Biden has no clue of the cost of his giveaway, of course he has no clue of who among us will be picking up the tab.

Wow.

Fascism

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President Joe Biden (D) infamously called half of Americans semi-fascists a few days ago.

Now California is creating a State government board that will dictate the wages that fast food companies in the State must pay.

California’s Legislature passed a bill Monday to create a government panel that would set wages for an estimated half-million fast food workers in the state….
The bill, known as the Fast Act, would establish a panel with members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders composed of workers, union representatives, employers and business advocates. They would set hourly wages of up to $22 for fast food workers starting next year and can increase them annually by the same rate as the consumer-price index, up to a maximum of 3.5%.

This is what true fascism is.

In a real dictionary, viz., American Heritage Dictionary or Merriam-Webster, socialism is a political-economic system in which Government directly owns the means of production—directly owns the businesses operating in an economy. Fascism is a subset of socialism wherein Government is pleased to allow businesses to be privately owned, but Government dictates to those businesses how they will operate: the products they will produce and in what quantity, and/or the prices they will charge for their products, and/or as in the present California case, what wages they will pay their employees—all to serve the State’s ends, not the business owners’ or investors’, who are us Americans. This government control, further, is paired with active, often violent, suppression of opposition to such controls.

In addition to that, Merriam-Webster also notes that in fascism, race often is “exalted” above the individual; American Heritage terms it belligerent racism. Much like the Progressive-Party adherents and supporters do today with their enthusiastic proselytizing of identity politics.

In the Newspeak dictionary of the Progressive-Democratic Party, though, “fascist” and “semi-fascist” are just shibboleths, personal smears, with which Party adherents and supporters insult all of us Americans rude enough to disagree with them. These tools of denigration are trotted out whenever Party adherents and supporters are unable to make coherent, reasoned arguments for their own policies and policy proposals or against anyone else’s policies or policy proposals.

Readers easily can discern which of these definitions are in play by Party adherents and supporters.

Plus Inflationary Effects

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Penn Wharton has updated its estimate of the cost to us average Americans of President Joe Biden’s (D) bailout of student loans, expanding its estimate to more than $1 trillion.

The largest potential cost-driver Penn Wharton identified is the Biden administration’s new income-driven repayment plan, which includes capping monthly student loan payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income and reforming the repayment guidelines to guarantee that no borrower who makes “about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage” will have to make monthly loan payments.

Others are touting the boon to our economy from all that freed-up spending those winners will be able to do, now that they don’t have to worry about paying debts.

In speaking from their Newspeak dictionary, though, the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their acolytes on the Left claim that that increased spending won’t add to the already burgeoning inflation our economy is afflicted with from supply disruptions and profligate spending (even for a Party administration) the Biden administration is throwing around.

Ignore what’s behind the curtain: the…intersection…of limited supply and increased spending that is inherently inflationary, especially in today’s economic environment, as anyone who’s had high school economics or who can understand a supply/demand graph knows.

Some on the Left piously intone that the bailed out students will use the opportunity to pay down the rest of their debts. Ignore what’s behind that other curtain, too, that the resulting increase in loanable funds held by financial institutions represents additional debt creation for the purchase of big-ticket items in the near- to intermediate-term supply-limited environment, which is inflationary in tomorrow’s and next week’s economic environment.