Tag Archives: political parties

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.

Bureaucratic Interference

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The lede laid out the problem, but the news writer missed it.

The agencies under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy are getting squeezed between old-guard staff who object to Trump administration priorities on one side, and prominent conservatives and business interests on the other.

Old-guard staff are well worth listening to and taking their input, especially their objections, seriously. But, this:

The dynamic is creating a minefield between Make America Healthy Again and deregulation for current leaders and new appointees.

No, it does not create any sort of minefield. The situation really is quite straightforward and simple, requiring only some managerial will.

Staff inputs, especially those objections, legitimately, apply only during the investigation, ideation, and discussion/debate phases. Once the decision has been made, though, here by Kennedy or his designated subordinate—CDC Director or Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director, for instance—it then becomes the duty of old-guard staff, every single one of them, to carry out that decision with zeal and enthusiasm. Their objections or disagreements no longer matter and should no longer exist.

If an old-guard staffer does not believe s/he can carry out that decision in good conscience, then his duty is to resign, not to refuse to execute or to passively resist.

If an old-guard staffer—or a newer hire—does resist the decision or obstruct it passively, then the relevant manager must fire the staffer. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has an opportunity here. In a kerfuffle over whether NIH would create a list of DEI-related words to be banned from grant recommendations, he issued a directive barring any such lists.

[B]ut some program officers “took it upon themselves” to create ad hoc, unofficial lists.

Those program officers should be identified and fired for cause.

I Have a Question

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In partial response to President Donald Trump’s (R) refusal to pay Progressive-Democrats $1 billion in released foreign aid and NIH funding—variously a bribe or an extortion payment, depending on who’s talking—in order to get Party Senators to agree to speed up the nomination confirmation process that Party has been busily stonewalling, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) had this:

Sooner or later, Donald Trump—Mr “Art of the Deal,” or so he claims—is going to have to learn that he has to work with Democrats if he wants to get deals, good deals, that help the American people[.]

My question, and the answer illustrates the intrinsically partisan and obstructionist nature of Party, is this: when will “Democrats” work with Trump? When will “Democrats” work with Republicans generally? Party’s determined refusal to do so is harming us American people about whom Schumer and his Party so piously pretend to care.

There’s Straightforward Fix

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Progressive-Democrats are once again showing their monarchical and my-way-or-no-one-gets-anything attitude toward us average Americans. This time it’s the Texas branch of the Progressive-Democratic Party intending to have its State legislature politicians abscond from Texas in order to deny the State legislature the necessary quorum to conduct business. The proximate business is the legislature’s State redistricting proposal resetting the districts from which our State’s Federal Representatives would be elected.

The short term solution to this, I suggest, would be to hold the redistricting proposal as the first item on the agenda for every Special Session the governor calls and for every regular legislative session until the proposal gets a vote in each of the House and the Senate.

My wife has a longer-term solution: a Texas Constitutional Amendment that would allow the governor to declare every Representative or Senate seat whose Representative or Senator is absent for one week or more (she suggested two weeks) from an active legislative session as part of a group of Representatives or Senators who are absent, thereby denying the House or Senate (or both) a quorum—whether that’s the intent or not—vacant. The governor then must schedule a Special Election to elect a new Representative or Senator to the vacant seat, the election to be held within 30 days of the vacancy declaration.

To this, I add a couple of items. The heretofore incumbent would be ineligible to stand for immediate reelection; although he would be eligible at the next regular election following the Special Election or following the next regular election if the Special Election were to coincide with a regular election.

And this: the governor must appoint a Representative(s) or Senator(s) to fill every such vacancy in the interim between the vacancy declaration and the Special Election or regular election if the Special Election coincides with a regular election. This would allow the legislature to get on with its business without having to wait on that next election.