Tag Archives: political parties

“Employment Levels”

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Candidates to replace term-limited Bill de Blasio (D) as mayor of New York City are coming out of the woodwork like the city’s rats. The opening sentence of a Wall Street Journal article covering their plans to “job recovery” is riddled with irony.

More than three dozen New York City mayoral candidates are vying for one of the toughest jobs in the country: leading the nation’s largest city back to pre-pandemic employment levels while trying to find the funding to do so.

The candidates—the city—do not need to “find the funding” to put folks back to work. In an actual free market environment, private employers provide the funding for their own employees. They get that funding from private citizens buying those employers’ goods and services. The city—any government—is a cost center for every business in it jurisdiction, from the taxes the city exacts (some of them actually legitimate charges) to the regulations (very few of them serving any legitimate purpose, being merely revenue centers for the bureaucracy charging them) it imposes.

Returning New York City to pre-Wuhan Virus situation levels is breathtakingly cost-free—and revenue-generating for the city: get out of the way, let the businesses reopen so folks can go back to work, let schools reopen so kids can go back to school—reducing both private and public medical costs—and letting even more folks go back to work.

It’s just that straightforward. It shouldn’t be as hard as even well-meaning, but overthinking, politicians make it.

Opposition

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Republicans in the Senate put Progressive-Democrats on the record on a number of amendments to Party’s budget reconciliation move—itself a deliberate act to sideline any dissent—which Republicans offered during a Thursday afternoon through Friday morning vote-a-rama. Party’s budget reconciliation then was voted up strictly along party lines.

Here’s some of what the Senate’s Progressive-Democrats oppose. Notice that every one of these would have enhanced Americans’ national security, economy, and individual liberty had they had the support of even a single Progressive-Democrat.

  • 50-50 on a failed amendment to support the border wall
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment supporting the free exercise of religion
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment to oppose packing the Supreme Court
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing stimulus checks for people in prison
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing the Biden administration’s move to restrict oil and gas leasing on federal lands
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing a federal carbon tax

“We Are Deeply Disturbed”

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That’s what President Joe Biden’s (D) State Department claims (through a carefully unnamed “official”) regarding the People’s Republic of China’s systematic rape, other sexual abuse, and torture of Uighur women in the PRC concentration reeducation camps.

And

These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences[.]

Indeed. The Biden administration, like the Obama administration that Biden is reconstructing, surely will shake its collective finger very firmly at the PRC. And if that fails, the Biden administration will engage in stern chit-chat and tongue clucking.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Party and Equity

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Jason Riley’s Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal focused on the idiocy of racial equity and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s zealous proselytization of that ideology. His closing paragraph, though, had this misapprehension:

Mr Biden surely understands this reality, but he’s also the head of a Democratic Party full of people who worship at the altar of identity politics and held their noses to elect a straight white male out of political expediency.

However, if Biden, who surely understands this reality, actually were the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, he’d put a stop to Party’s far-left shenanigans. On the contrary, he is not the head; he’s merely an expedient. The Far-Left is in charge, to the detriment of Party, if not to its power, and to the nation.

Needed Stimulus

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…or not. Mostly—nearly entirely—not.

real per capita disposable income in [Wuhan Virus situation-ridden] 2020 grew 5.5%

The Wall Street Journal noted that this is all before the December-passed $900 billion stimulus “took effect.” It’s also after that stimulus—which still hasn’t had much effect since much of that money hasn’t even been sent into the economy by Government.

What happened to the $2.6 trillion Government had already lobbed into the economy?

Preliminary data for 2020 show total savings for 2020 was $1.6 trillion higher than in 2019.  And that was before the $900 billion stimulus.

It’s also after those $900 billion….

Some folks are squawking that the money wasn’t really all that stimulative—it was saved rather than spent, which was the purpose of the stimulus. Some folks misunderstand. Savings do get spent—in the short term, if not immediately, on short-term needs and wants. Savings that aren’t quickly spent become deposits in financial institutions, where they join the pool of what economists call loanable funds—and get lent to borrowers, who then spend. Loanable funds might not be promptly spent, but they most assuredly do get spent.

Given this and the fact that the December stimulus remains uncommitted to the economy, why the urgency, and the need, for an additional $1.9 trillion in stimulus? According to the CBO,

The office said gross domestic product would return to pre-pandemic levels by mid-2021 and will continue growing until 2026 as a vaccine reduces the number of new infections and the need for social distancing.

And

Labor market conditions continue to improve. As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its pre-pandemic size in 2022[.]
The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its pre-pandemic level in 2024[.]

All that without the $1.9 trillion mess currently being rammed through Congress by Progressive-Democrats.

Why, then, do we need the additional $1.9 trillion national debt stimulus? We don’t. Progressive-Democrats do, or rather they want the money, so they can continue to virtue-signal. Those new trillions that Progressive-Democrats are insisting they’re going to jam down our throats, and rip from our children’s and grandchildren’s wallets (not that I mix metaphors or anything), in a strictly partisan fashion will be, in the longer run, nothing but destructive of all things economic.

There is urgency: to stop the train wreck that is this new $1.9 trillion package of froo-froo.