Tag Archives: political economy

The Size of the Drift

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ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos is the latest member of the media to portray Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) as a moderate choice for Joe Biden’s running mate.

Stephanopoulos went on to add

Kamala Harris comes from the middle of the road, moderate wing of the Democratic party….

Harris’ positions include

  • supporting vastly raising tax rates, beginning with—but not ending there, rescinding the 2017 tax rate cuts
  • eliminating private insurance altogether and replacing it with Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) Medicare for All
  • limiting, in contravention of the 2nd Amendment, Americans’ access to weapons of which she personally disapproves
  • legalizing marijuana, never minding the damage marijuana chemicals do to developing brains
  • pushing for the Green New Deal
  • supporting far more open borders than currently exist—no more wall
  • canceling outright up to $20,000 in student loans for selected groups of students
  • heavily limiting the ability of oil and gas companies to produce the energy our economy needs
  • raising the minimum wage to $15/hr
  • “studying” reparations
  • eliminating the Electoral College
  • removing most of the existing limits on abortion.

She’s likened police departments to the KKK.

She’s also the most liberal and least inclined to bipartisanship of all the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate according to GovTrack.

It’s a strong measure of how far left the Progressive-Democratic Party has gone that a person with those positions is considered a member of the moderate, middle of the road wing of the party.

Radicals Haven’t Taken Over the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Or so William Galston thinks. His subheadline reads, in part, But the radicals haven’t taken it over.

His is an amusing article. Or would be, but for the bigotry he so obliviously pushes.

Radicals haven’t taken over Progressive-Democratic Party?

It’s nominated an empty vessel for its Presidential candidate; for its VP candidate, Party has nominated a woman who is black—Party’s two primary selection criteria—who turns out to be the most Liberal Senator in Congress.

Party is so solidly run by America’s Far Left that the NLMSM claims Party’s VP candidate is “moderate, middle of the road.”

Party is so strongly in the hands of America’s Left Radicals that it whole-heartedly embraces the Green New Deal, Government control of whole sectors of our economy, and vastly expanded tax regimes.

Party’s platform calls for rescinding the Hyde Amendment, a law that goes some way toward protecting unborn babies.

[The Progressive-Democratic Party] has become less white and more educated.

More credentialed, certainly. It’s actually much less educated, given the widespread failure of public K-12 schools to produce even basic testing success for our children, and colleges/universities that have gone over to teaching single-viewpoint positions rather than critical thinking.

[Progressive-]Democrats are more focused than ever on equality for women, racial and ethnic minorities, disabled Americans, and the full range of gender identities.

This isn’t even close to accurate. In fact, quite the opposite. Party’s focus on identity politics—the 1950s-era of segregation brought forward to the 21st century—demonstrates the contempt Progressive-Democrats have for women, racial and ethnic minorities, disabled Americans. The careful separation of these groups from the rest of America so as to afford them special treatment is Party’s view that these folks are inherently inferior and unable to compete without separate, special treatment. Party’s breakout of the two sexes into artificial gender “identities” is an extreme step in that segregation.

Ethnic minorities is especially insulting: the ethnicity of the United States is American. There is no minority here; there are some 330 million ethnic Americans in our nation, including the several millions of first generation immigrants who are bent on becoming American, pushing to join our American culture.

“Corporate America Worries WeChat Ban Could Be Bad for Business”

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As President Donald Trump contemplates barring the People’s Republic of China-originated and -based communications app WeChat from operating in the US, some businesses worry.

US companies whose fortunes are linked to China are pushing back against the Trump administration’s plans to restrict business transactions involving the WeChat app from Tencent Holdings Ltd, saying it could undermine their competitiveness in the world’s second-biggest economy.

Couple things about that.

Those companies shouldn’t make themselves so dependent on the People’s Republic of China for their business health.

The other thing is that those companies aren’t actually competitive in the PRC. They’re “competing” against domestic companies that get the benefit of PRC government subsidies and preferential legal treatment. Those companies also operate inside the PRC only at the suffrage of the PRC government—a suffrage that requires access to their intellectual property, backdoors in their core business software, and since 2017, PRC-based subsidiaries’ cooperation with the PRC intelligence community.

Maybe Not So Much

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Some economic news from the end of last week:

The latest jobless claims figures from the Labor Department, which cover the week ending August 1, show that more than 1.18 million workers sought aid last week….
Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected 1.41 million new claims.

And

Continuing claims, the number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid fell by 844,000 to 16.1 million.

The data coincide with the expiration of the $600/week Wuhan Virus-related payments added to ordinary unemployment payments, so that’s not a driver of this sharp labor improvement; although the impending end of the addendum could have had some impact. The overall improvement in our economy is the driver.

This weakens the case Progressive-Democrats are making to continue paying folks to not work, and it emphasizes their blatant obstruction to getting any sort of relief into our economy.

The biggest relief, of course, would be for the Federal government as a whole to get out of the way of our recovery, to let businesses reopen unfettered. Progressive-Democrats, though, and too many Republicans are continuing to insist on interfering.

Pen and Phone

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The editors at The Wall Street Journal expressed worry about President Donald Trump’s use of his “pen and phone” over the weekend to render the Congressional Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism regarding Wuhan Virus relief for Americans irrelevant. They think he’s aping too closely ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) pen and phone.

It’s true that Trump is using his pen and phone. The differences between his actions and Obama’s, though, are two: Trump is undoing Obama’s pen and phone actions, not creating new things—with this exception, which is the other critical difference: Obama’s actions were largely illegal, struck down on legal challenge; Trump’s have proven legal, in the main, upheld on legal challenge.

The editors are worried about this use in particular:

Mr Trump’s FEMA order is a bad legal precedent that a President Kamala Harris could cite if a GOP Congress blocked her agenda on, say, climate change.

This is mistaken. For one thing, not doing a useful thing because a bad person (of either party) might misuse it later is simply foolish. If the thing is useful, it’s usefully done. Full stop.

For another thing, Obama already set the general precedent—Congress not performing to his satisfaction was his rationale for his own pen and phone use.

Finally, the question of precedent enabling a President Harris to use FEMA funds on her global warming agenda—to take a particular example—is plain wrong. Harris needs no precedent to use FEMA funds for her agenda; she’d do that anyway. And set her own precedent, without a care.

RTWT, though. Aside from this last item, it’s a generally soundly reasoned piece.