Tag Archives: political parties

Lack of Message, Lack of Followers

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is illustrating its failure to say what it is for, only its skill at saying what (who, really) it is against, and that is showing up in its lack of overt support among us Americans.

For instance:

Crowds on Demand CEO Adam Swart told Fox & Friends on Friday that his company has received 400% more paid protester requests this year than during the same period last year.

Crowds on Demand brags openly that it’s

your home for impactful advocacy campaigns, demonstrations, PR stunts, crowds for hire, and corporate events. Services available nationwide.

Apparently, Party is having so much trouble selling its non-message—and has been for some time—that it can’t even put together a protest of its own consisting of supporters or even of spontaneous Leftist joiners. It must hire artificially enthusiastic pretend supporters to flesh out even its protests in support of what it’s against.

Raise Those Taxes

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Progressive-Democrat-run States are looking at ways to cover putative budgetary shortfalls.

  • Minnesota State Representative Aisha Gomez, a Democrat…sponsored legislation that would implement a higher tax rate for joint filers in Minnesota making over $1 million a year if federal Medicaid cuts take effect
  • Connecticut legislators have proposed a bill that would raise income-tax rates on couples making at least $500,000 and individuals making at least $250,000
  • Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, in May signed into law a budget that includes an increase in the capital-gains tax, among other things
  • Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, in May signed into law his tax proposal, which includes higher income-tax rates for state residents making more than $500,000 a year
  • Rhode Island in June imposed a new tax on certain vacation homes valued at $1 million or more

And this:

Many states face projected budget deficits after increasing spending and cutting taxes in the flush postpandemic years….

Notice that. Profligate spending leads to revenue shortfalls, so—raise those taxes, especially on the rich, who Owe Us. That’s akin to a business losing money, so it raises the prices it charges for its products.

Nowhere in there is any Progressive-Democrat-run State reallocating its spending to stay within existing revenues, much less cutting spending to do so.

I repeat a long-standing challenge of mine: can any Progressive-Democratic Party politician even say the words, “Cut spending?”

I’m Down with That

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George Will wants a clear and present example of the wonders of socialism, so he’s pushing for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s most prominent socialist (yes, even more so than Bernie Sanders (D, VT) to become mayor of New York City.

I want him to win. I think every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again.

That works out to about once a generation, which I think overstates the need. Every three generations—every 60-ish years—I think would be about right; the grandfathers would still be around to help the grandchildren with the empirical outcomes of their own dabbling in socialism.

I agree with Will’s basic premise, though: let New Yorkers get the socialism they want. Let the outcome of that serve as an object lesson of the destructive and life-shortening nature of that ideology. New York City is large enough and nearby enough that the results will not be able to be ignored.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase HL Mencken, give New Yorkers what they want, good and hard.

Universal Basic Income

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The Leftist dream of socialism won’t die, and neither will the Leftist dream of free money, which they masquerade as universal basic income, the steady handout of taxpayer money to everyone because—well, just because. The Left doesn’t care that handing out free money—one of the more extreme aspects of socialism—doesn’t work.

The Left simply doesn’t care about making lives better for Americans, only making their own lives better. Free money, this universal basic income, is just modern day bread and circuses offered in payment for votes so the Left can keep their Progressive-Democrat politicians in power, favoring them. They hope.

The editorial at the second link lays out a number of the ways that UBS fails us all.

Here’s another path to that failure. A UBS increases overall demand for goods and services beyond what producers can supply. This is textbook inflation. Eventually, production succeeds in getting supply increased to match that increased demand, and inflation abates. However, the higher price levels resulting from that bout of inflation remain in place, which means the handed-out money doesn’t have the buying power that it was represented as having: recipients can’t buy significantly more goods and services than they could before the handouts started due to that eroded dollar.

It gets worse. One of the areas of failure that the editorial pointed out was that recipients of free money took advantage of that largesse to work less. Since there is less work being done—this is a universal basic income handout, recall; all of us get it—it would take producers commensurately longer for production to catch up to demand. This would let that inflation run longer, elevating overall price levels even higher. That, in turn, would reduce the buying power of the handed-out money even further, leaving us recipients even less well off than before the handouts began, likely worse off in absolute terms.

Leftists and their politicians, of course, know this full well. They’re hoping us average Americans are too grindingly stupid to figure out that these folks are merely buying, and playing, us for their own power gains.

Abandonment of Duty, Attempt at Tyranny

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has asked the Texas Supreme Court to remove State Congressman Gene Wu from office and declare his seat vacant. Wu is the Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair and one of 57 Progressive-Democrats who ran out of Texas for the explicit purpose of denying the Texas legislature a quorum and thereby prevent it from operating at all.

Abbott’s argument centers on this [citations omitted]:

Every elected officer of this State, including Wu, swears an oath to “faithfully execute the duties of the office” to which they are elected. The principal duty of a legislator is to attend and participate in legislative sessions as required by Article III, Section 5 of the Texas Constitution. The quorum provisions further underscore that attendance is not optional; it is an affirmative constitutional obligation. The Texas Constitution authorizes the House to “compel attendance of absent members.” That power would be meaningless if members could freely make themselves absent for political advantage without consequence. Such actions also render meaningless the Governor’s authority to call a Special Session, for which the Legislature “shall meet.”
Representative Wu has openly renounced these constitutional mandates by fleeing the State of Texas to break quorum, obstruct legislative proceedings, and paralyze the Texas House of Representatives.

Wu answered via television interview (he doesn’t have to respond to the filing until late this afternoon).

Let me be unequivocal about my actions and my duty. When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant.
Denying the governor a quorum was not an abandonment of my office; it was a fulfillment of my oath. Unable to defend his corrupt agenda on its merits, Greg Abbott now desperately seeks to silence my dissent by removing a duly-elected official from office.

Aside from the fact that Wu’s irrelevant ad hominem inclusion illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy of his position, his oath of office requires him to obey his constitutional duty to appear in the State Congress when it is in session. There is no leeway for absenting himself solely because he disagrees with the outcome of a policy debate and ensuing vote—most especially is there no leeway for absenting himself as part of an effort to prevent that vote from occurring.

That he’s part of Party’s movement to block a single piece of legislation, a redistricting bill, from being acted on is merely the narrow, proximate implication of his action.

The question here, though, is much larger than a single disputed piece of legislation; it embraces the nature and basis of democratic governments. In a democracy, especially in a republican and representative democracy such as ours, there are those who win in a policy contest and those who lose. The foundation of (representative, republican, even popular democracy) requires that the defeat be accepted by those in the minority and that those who lost are free to try again in a succeeding, even later renewed, policy debate but are not free to shut off all legislative capacity unless and until they, this minority, get their losing position fully accepted.

Texas’ Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are deliberately shutting down the Texas government, denying it its ability—its obligation—to legislate, are not filibustering a single piece of legislation in an effort to block its passage. Their behavior is categorically different from that. These persons are not just violating their oaths of office. They are attempting to impose, from their minority position, their demands on an entire government at the cost of no functioning government absent the majority acquiescing to them. This is the stuff of tyranny, and thus their preventing a quorum is antithetical to democratic principles. All of them should be removed from office.

Abbott’s filing can be read here.