Tag Archives: political parties

Trump is Right, and He’s Wrong

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President Donald Trump (R) delivered his State of the Union Speech Tuesday evening. In it, among a variety of topics (as is the nature of SOTU speeches), he touted the large improvement in our economy, from inflation down sharply, the stock market up strongly, manufacturing coming home, energy costs coming down, and so on. On all of this, Trump was absolutely correct: our economy is much better, much stronger, much more stable than it was under his predecessor Joe Biden (D). He also touted a number of projects and statutory proposals that would cement existing improvements and lead to further improvements.

Those, though, are national, population-as-a-whole, items. Our national population is made up of individuals, small clusters of individuals, and regional collections of individuals.

What Trump didn’t do was acknowledge the further work necessary to make those individual, cluster, and collections of Americans’ lives better in particular. He should have, he still needs to do, and what Republicans in Congress and running for Congress in Progressive-Democrat incumbent districts and States need to do, is talk to those folks specifically and directly about their economic situations and how Republican policies and proposals will help them in particular, how they’re already helping them (without talking down to them).

Failing that, both houses of Congress are in peril of falling to the Progressive-Democrats and the economic and security destruction they will inflict with their big, intrusive government; increasing taxation; and exploding spending policies.

One other thing: Trump got the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen to demonstrate, with their own behavior, how useless, if not dangerous, they are to our Republic. Trump challenged all of the Congressmen in the room (and it was most of them, as the threats of fully a third of Party’s House Representatives to boycott Trump’s SOTU speech proved empty words; they showed up instead) who agreed with the simple statement that the primary goal of the government is to protect American citizens and not illegal aliens to stand. To a man and woman, all of the Republicans stood. Nearly all of the Progressive-Democrats (there were a couple of exceptions) remained seated. They showed, thereby, that they don’t agree that protecting us American citizens is paramount.

Come to that, this was a Party that refused even to stand for the proposition that child transition hormonal or surgical treatments is wrong. This was a Party that refused even to stand for a little girl who survived a traffic collision caused by an illegal alien with an illegally granted Commercial Driver License driving a truck. This was a Party that refused even to stand for the mother of a young Ukrainian immigrant brutally murdered in a subway car.

This should be remembered in this primary season and in the fall elections.

Pending Republican Failure

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And it’s from the same old story of Republican failure. The backdrop is this:

Job growth trounced expectations. The unemployment rate fell. Wages grew.

And inflation is down, those rising wages are catching up with inflated prices, our border is secure, eleven of twelve budget allocations passed, with only a Progressive-Democrat Party-blocked DHS bill remaining as Party pushes for another (partial, this time) of their government shutdowns.

President Donald Trump (R) is rightly touting all of these successes and more (even though he’d benefit from bragging less and focusing on those successes for our national weal more). Congressional Republicans and candidates for Congress, though, are failing miserably in their own communication responsibilities.

Some of the more nationally known Congressmen are on the national and cable talk show hustings, but it isn’t enough just for those few to give interview to network and cable news outlets.

There’s more to this than that, too. It’s an utter lack of understanding, swaddled as they are in their cloisters, of each of the Congressmen’s and candidates’ need especially to talk to—and with—their constituents in their districts, not just the few to the nation at large. In the case of Senators, whose constituents are State-wide, and it includes the need to talk to voters in Progressive-Democrat enclaves as well as to their own.

It’s also the need to be specific—no glittering generalities, no obfuscating or question-dodging speechifying. Republicans need to discuss the specifics of their policies and policy goals, and they need to explain to their constituents in concrete terms how their policies will help them in particular. No generalizing about national-level benefits. How their policies and goals would help their constituents with their grocery bills, fueling up their cars, reducing their utility bills in real terms. And then tie those real terms to the nominal costs that are what comes out of their constituents’ pocketbooks.

That, though, takes courage. Being specific would bring on a host of Leftist and Party criticism, as we’re already seeing with the objections to the newly House-passed SAVE Act, which would go a long way toward ensuring only American citizens could vote in American national elections. It would be easy enough to demonstrate the foolishness of those policy specifics criticisms, just as it would be easy enough to demonstrate not only the foolishness, but the outright racist nature, of Party’s objections to SAVE—if Republicans only had the necessary courage and the willingness to do the work.

The needed work: Republican Congressmen and candidates need to stop wasting time on national television and get out into their districts and into Progressive-Democratic Party candidates’ base areas and hold town halls and meet in diners and recreation centers directly with their constituents. They need to write op-eds in their districts’ local news outlets, give interviews on local television and radio stations.

Each of these Congressmen have Congressional staffs, and they have offices scattered around their districts; these staffers can assist them with getting the interviews, drafting their op-eds, etc. Candidates have fewer staff outlets, but they have some, and these could help. It isn’t enough to just throw up a policy statement or a news release on their respective Web sites and call it a day. Those are necessary, but stopping there is just lazy when it isn’t cowardice.

In the end, too, those moves will make it much easier for their staffers and volunteers as they mount their get-out-the-vote efforts, which is especially critical regarding low propensity voters and unenthusiastic Republican voters.

[W]inning candidates motivate base supporters to turn out in off-year elections. That’s no easy task for a GOP coalition that relies on infrequent voters and unreliable partisans.

If Republicans fail at these specifics, they’ll deserve to lose their elections. And our nation will lose badly.

Middle Man?

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Andy Kessler touted San Jose Mayor and California candidate for Governor, Matt Mahan, as presenting a sufficiently centered (Progressive-)Democrat who opposes Party’s supposedly (they promise!) one-time billionaire tax on those Evil One-Percenters’ wealth, whether liquid or not.

But, Mr Mahan goes on [says Kessler], “I don’t believe that high-net-worth individuals should be able to borrow against appreciated assets endlessly as a way to avoid paying capital gains.” The mayor of the country’s 12th-largest city thinks that rather than impose wealth taxes, California should press Congress to eliminate the step-up in basis at death, so that estates or heirs would pay a tax on the appreciation of a decedent’s assets. (California has no estate tax.) That wouldn’t put “our economy, our engine of innovation and prosperity, at risk.”

Three guesses where that would take our economy. Here’s a hint:

No one wealthy would own capital assets, whether personal or enterprise—they’d lease them. That would thoroughly alter the structure of our private economy, real, financial, business ownership, and it would do so in ways that we won’t know until it starts happening. That’s dangerous.

And that doesn’t get to the ability of parents to leave to their children what those parents spent a lifetime building—at least not in any substantial way. That’s even more dangerous.

This is an example of careless compromise: Mahan’s position doesn’t move things to the extreme left, but it does move things toward the left, rather than making an even split, much less moving things a little bit to the right. That’s a loss, not just for Conservatives, but for all of California’s citizens, wherever they are on the political spectrum.

Still a Bankrupt Message

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Rahm Emanuel, late of the Obama White House and the Chicago Mayor’s Mansion, wrote of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s golden opportunity in the Tuesday Wall Street Journal‘s editorial pages.

Many of his points are valid, and Republicans and Conservatives ignore them at their and our nation’s peril. But then he closed his piece with this:

The next 10 months will be about branding Republicans in Congress as Mr Trump’s enablers. Beyond that, we need to focus on speaking to the interests and sensibilities of those who considered or took the Faustian bargain Mr Trump offered them last year and are uncomfortable today with all the chaos they got in return for little economic benefit.

Here is the Republicans’ and Conservatives’ golden opportunity, if they will find some backbone and make use of it. Enablers. Faustian bargain. Branding. This is Party’s sole and constantly delivered message: everything anti-Trump, and those not for Party are just ignorant or foolish or both. Party is against a man and against millions of average Americans.

Party has not a word, not a syllable, about the policies its members would work for and how those policies would strengthen our nation and its security and increase the prosperity of us citizens. [S]peaking to the interests and sensibilities of those who are so ignorant or foolish as to be suckered by the man on which Party focuses its enmity? And say what, exactly? Even as Emanual warns his Party against its common error of smug “I told you so,” here he is recommending Party do exactly that. Addressing the interests and sensibilities of those he says are disgruntled or uncomfortable says nothing about what Party would intend to do to satisfy those disgruntlements.

Republicans’ and Conservatives’ golden opportunity consists of this, and it’s simple and straightforward. Don’t get sucked into a contest of personal opprobrium. Point out Party’s focus on the empty ad hominem of personal opprobrium, briefly; point out the lack of policies and policy goals on which Party campaigns, briefly. Then spend the large bulk of their messaging on their own policies and policy goals; how those enhance our nation and especially the lives of us citizens, individually and as groups; and be specific, fleshing out the glittering generalities with the specifics of carrying them out and the specific, measurable benefits to Americans that would ensue, including anticipated time frames for their coming to fruition and any pain points that might come from the transitions to those goals.

Being specific, of course, invites criticism and attack; staying with glittering generalities ducks them. This is where the backbones of Republicans and Conservatives come in, backbones that too many claiming to be Republican or Conservative have for too long lacked. Specifics are necessary to make the claims concrete and so to attract voters. This is where these wonders must, finally, step up.

Electricity Price Controls

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New Jersey’s newly elected Progressive-Democratic Governor, Mikie Sherrill wants them.

Ms Sherrill used her maiden speech to lay out her plans to ease electric rates. “In short, you are sick of the status quo,” she said, “Well, guess what, guys, so am I.” Guess what: Her proposals are more of the same progressive policies that have fueled higher prices: Subsidies, mandates, and price controls.

Especially those price controls.

Her worst idea is a pause on utility “rate increases or cost recoveries to the extent permitted by law.” This is a price control that will reduce grid investment, including in new supply. ….
If utilities can’t pass on their costs, they will skimp on maintenance. It’s that simple.

Of course, those rate increases or cost recoveries permissions are specified by State laws, and Sherrill and her legislature can alter those laws at will. Her “extent permitted” is disingenuous.

Maintenance skimping is well-known to renters in rent-controlled apartments.

If the provider—landlord or utility (or any other)—can’t recoup his costs as those increase, whether they’re supply costs, regulatory compliance costs, or taxes, he has less money to spend on procuring the items he needs to produce electricity or rental housing or… and especially critically, he has less to spend on simply maintaining what he has. Rental homes/apartments and power generators deteriorate, those residences become badly substandard to the point of uninhabitable, and power generation becomes unreliable. That last is bad in a hot summer, and it’s deadly in a cold winter.

With unreliable power generation, we get rolling blackouts where broad areas in succession see the lights go out; oil, natural gas, and coal generators, all of which depend at bottom on electricity, stop; and electric heating (or cooling) systems stop. On-off cycling from those rolling blackouts, even if in longer intervals than shorter, adds to the wear and tear on the generators, and on the heating and cooling systems, requiring increased maintenance for which those price controls, and rent controls, severely limit the money available to pay.

But never mind. Progressive-Democrats want those price controls because that’s their exercise of political power.