Tag Archives: political economy

What Progressive-Democrats Think of our Veterans

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Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Governor Maura Healey is moving to turn an erstwhile Boston veterans care facility into a shelter for illegal aliens. She’s intent on converting

the historic Chelsea Soldiers’ Home—which was vacant and scheduled for demolition—into a site for 100 migrant families and pregnant women[.]

Meanwhile, there remain several hundred of our veterans—who are in our nation legally—in Boston who are homeless and need shelter of their own. When the facility was open to veterans, they had to pay $10-$30 per month, depending on whether they needed nursing care or just a place to be. The facility was closed last December, though in lieu of a different, larger facility. Closed, not kept open as an additional facility for our veterans.

It’s true enough that otherwise unsupported pregnant women also need a place to be, and it’s true enough that the women aren’t necessarily illegal aliens. The fact remains though, that for all that earlier support, our veterans had to pay for their stays there. Now that it’s scheduled to become a shelter for illegal aliens, those illegals won’t even have to pay that token fee. America’s—Massachusetts’—taxpayers will foot the bill for them.

This is what Progressive-Democrats think about the generations of Americans, and of those soon-to-be-American by dint of their service, who have fought for our nation, for our freedom, and have been maimed, or killed in those struggles over the centuries. Illegal aliens—who broke our laws and continue to break them by staying here of their own, malice aforethought—will get better treatment under this move than our veterans, men and women in much direr straits as a result of their defense of our nation.

It is shameful that an American political party would treat those who made that party, and all the others, possible in this way.

Pay Their Fair Share

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Progressive-President Joe Biden is busily trying to raise taxes in his never ending effort to get the Evil Rich to Pay Their Fair Share™.

Here are some numbers and a couple of graphs, via The Wall Street Journal‘s editors:

…for 2021 show that the top 1% of Americans reported 26.3% of the country’s adjusted gross income, while paying 45.8% of total income taxes.

This graph shows the trend of taxes paid and who pays them over the course of this century:

Yet Biden, Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (IL), and the rest of Biden’s Party syndicate, individually and as a group, flat refuse to say what they believe that fair share should be. Plainly, that’s because they’ve already defined among themselves, that fair share to be All of It.

This is illustrated by the tax increases that Biden is actively pushing this year. Per a Tax Foundation analysis,

The tax increases would substantially increase marginal tax rates on investment, saving, and work, reducing economic output by 2.2% in the long run, wages by 1.6%, and employment by 788,000 full-time equivalent jobs. On a gross basis, we estimate Biden’s FY 2025 budget would increase taxes by about $4.4 trillion over that period [of 2024 to 2034]. After taking various credits into account, the increase would be about $3.4 trillion[.]
[Biden’s] tax changes…include “additional taxes on high earners, higher taxes on US businesses—including increasing taxes that Biden enacted with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) —and more tax credits for a variety of taxpayers and activities[.]

As the WSJ editors asked,

Is this not a “fair share” to Mr Biden? Then what would be?

Plainly what would be to Biden and his Party syndicate All of It.

This is the central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s platform this season. And they won’t stop with the Evil Rich as they define down what constitutes “rich” behind their DEI smokescreen.

Reassurances

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping is busily…reassuring…foreign business leaders, especially American chief executives, that

the country is working to improve its business environment.

Xi mustn’t be taken seriously in any of this.

The PRC’s national security law requires all PRC-domiciled businesses and their affiliates satisfy the nation’s intelligence community requests for information on any subject it deems useful for national security and to actively seek out that information—to conduct espionage if necessary—to obtain that information. That information gathering is far easier when the (foreign) target is present in the PRC.

Further PRC laws require foreign enterprises to partner with local enterprises (though the requirement for equal or majority control by the domestic enterprise has been lifted) and to facilitate technology and intellectual property transfer to the local enterprise as a condition prerequisite to doing any business within the PRC. If those transfers aren’t moving quickly enough to suit the government, the government’s hackers attempt to steal the data.

Yet further PRC laws require Communist Party of China apparatchiks present in those domestic partners to have access to the foreign partner, also.

Overarching all of that: the PRC is a nation that rules by law; it is not a nation that operates under rule of law tenets. As such, the laws by which the PRC operates are malleable and subject to the ephemeral whims of Xi and his Communist Party of China syndicate. That, though, is not unique to Xi, or to the PRC since 1949. Rule by law has been the position of the rulers of mainland China since the nation began coalescing out of the Warring States Period nearly two-and-a-quarter millennia ago.

If those American business heads, already showing excessive credulity by being present at the PRC’s China Development Forum and subsequent personal audience granted by Xi, allow themselves to be taken in by Xi’s blandishments at the audience, they’ll be showing themselves too credulous to be fit to manage their respective businesses.

Government Influence over the Means of Production

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The Biden administration wants to control—put a leash on—the development of artificial intelligence software, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach to the development of the Internet. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal Monday article.

The matter is far deeper and far broader than that. Biden’s move regarding AI is of a piece with his moves regarding ICE vs battery cars, solar and wind energy vs oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, and on and on.

In truth, Biden isn’t the first in this; too many prior administrations of both parties, have wanted to…influence…what our private enterprises, especially those that make things, should or can produce—or not produce. The efforts to control range can be indirect—Obamacare’s nationalization of our health provision and health coverage industries, in addition to Biden’s moves—and they reach as far back as Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful effort to nationalize our railroad system, Woodrow Wilson’s and Harry Truman’s outright seizures of a variety of factories and factory systems, ultimately overturned by the courts, and they include prior administrations’ indirect moves of subsidies for some industries—”green” energy, for instance—and no subsidies or significantly smaller subsidies for competing industries.

The matter reaches as deeply and broadly as our tax code, which by design gives overt preference to some industries and de-prefers some other industries.

The Biden administration has only greatly accelerated this trend of government intrusion into the affairs of private enterprise.

This expanding government insistence that private enterprise can make whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants so long as it has government approval (even if only tacit) to do so is textbook Fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government control of what gets produced and the amounts produced.

Rewarding Illegal Aliens for their Illegality

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Recall that the New York legislature is pushing legislation that would allow [prison] inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.

New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams just said, “Hold my beer.”

Officials in New York City have begun giving out prepaid debit cards to migrant families residing in the Big Apple.
The first batch of debit cards, which are reportedly meant to be used by the illegal immigrants to purchase food and baby supplies, were handed out Monday to a handful of migrant families in the city, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office confirmed to Fox News Digital.
The effort is part of a reported $53 million pilot program to hand out prepaid credit cards to migrant families….

The program…will provide migrant families of four with two children under 5 with up to $350 each week until the end of their stay

(Keep in mind that “migrant families” and “illegal immigrants” are Fox News Digital‘s euphemisms for “illegal aliens,” which is what these persons are.)

Underlying all of that is this demonstration of Adams’ cynicism and his contempt for ordinary Americans:

Under the pilot program, which is expected to last for six weeks, migrants could receive more money from the city than the state gives to low-income and elderly New Yorkers under SNAP benefits.
According to the state’s website, single households are eligible for up to $291 a month in SNAP benefits aimed at providing “low-income working people, senior citizens, the disabled and others” money to buy food products.

All of that favorable treatment for illegals will be paid for…with the tax remittances of the city’s working residents, including the working poor, and by the increased debt the city will incur from the tax remittances’ shortfall—which are themselves future taxes to be imposed on the city’s residents.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party whose politicians are on the ballot this November.