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Trump was elected because the "deplorables" were fed up with being ignored and his personality gave Trump Haters the opportunity to rally against him, the mass media kept pounding him and radical Democrats kept impeaching him so he lost an election he should have won based on accomplishments alone.
Now DeSantis comes along and faces the same threats but he does not have a grating personality. In fact, he has a common sense, straightforward personality. He has been a rational thinking governor and his state is garnering people as if they were giving palm trees away. He should be a solid nominee if other Republicans exercise self-discipline and reject running because they don't measure up to him.
He is not afraid to stand up and speak out and that makes him appealing but also a target. I would love to see him run with our former Sec.of State as his VP.
Time will tell, stay tuned:
- Twenty retired French generals have written a letter warning that the country is headed toward civil war unless the spread of Islamism is stopped. Other high-level French officials including the Interior Minister and director of the Internal Security Agency have also warned of civil war.
- Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro appeared on the Seth Leibsohn Show with guest host Muslim reformer Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and said, “If you want to see the future of America, look at Europe. That’s the trend.” However, Mauro cautioned, there’s a risk in warnings about civil war becoming a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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- Psaki is Joan D'arc protecting America from Biden:
Jen Psaki admits Biden taking impromptu reporter questions is ‘not something we recommend’
Biden's press secretary also claimed that she often says to the president, 'Don't take questions.'
White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted in a CNN podcast published Thursday that President Joe Biden taking impromptu questions from reporters "is not something we recommend."
Psaki made the admission while being interviewed by CNN Senior Political Commentator David Axelrod on his podcast "The Axe Files," and claimed that she, at times, even tells Biden to not take questions from reporters.
The two began discussing the subject when Axelrod asked Psaki about a particular instance when Biden inadvertently ran into CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins at the White House, who proceeded to ask the president if a minimum wage increase to $15 would be included in the coronavirus relief package that was signed into law in March.
Axelrod stated that Biden gave the honest answer that he didn't think the increase would be included in the bill, but him telling that to the reporter must have given Psaki a lot of heartburn and made her ask herself why Biden would be allowed to roll around in the hallways doing impromptu interviews. He then asked Psaki how she managed that.
Psaki laughed off the incident, and explained that it happened after she had already left work and Biden was heading back to his residence. She then claimed that Biden takes questions "nearly every day that he's out in front of the press."
"That is not something we recommend. In fact, a lot of times we say ‘don’t take questions,'" she continued. "But he's going to do what he wants to do because he's the president of the United States."
Psaki then claimed the administration has kept from being distracted by avoiding having Biden do more consistent press conferences in which he would have to answer questions about certain topics. She gave examples of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., impeachment, and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. She added that they wanted to focus his time on addressing subjects that they claim the American people care more about, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the economy.
Biden held his first solo press conference on March 25, the 65th day of his term, following heavy criticism from the usually supportive media for not holding one. This marked the longest a president had gone without a news conference after taking office since former President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. Biden has also been known to consistently leave announcements, speeches and other events without answering questions from reporters, according to the New York Post.
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Normally I tend to agree with Henninger but Democrats have a different dream and therefore they are not killing the one to which Henninger refers. Democrats never wanted independency for Americans. They have always wanted big government and more dependency. They are not taking away a dream they ever believed but are simply creating a nightmare of their own. Meanwhile, Free Lunch Biden is simply their Trojan Horse.
If Biden truly believes his plan will be paid for he is the dreamer and if he believes it will create a nation hard at work then why is every business currently starving for workers who are sitting at home drawing a check while playing video games.
China has to be applauding Santa Claus Biden because he is making it easier for China to win the competitive match of who survives.
Democrats Are Killing the American Dream
Joe Biden’s American Families Plan replaces individual striving with middle class entitlements.
By Daniel Henninger
1President Biden’s American Families Act makes one political reality officially clear: The Democratic Party has given up on the American dream.
The Biden proposals—coming as they do with the Democratic progressives’ rise to power—present the American people with a once-in-a-lifetime decision about what kind of country they want to live in for the next half-century.
This isn’t about the culture wars or standard Keynesian stimulus spending. The Biden plan is about public policies that will redesign American society.
The American Families Plan and other recent Democratic legislation implicitly pose several important questions. Is the traditional American idea of upward mobility still important? If so, how should upward mobility happen—through Washington or individual effort? Indeed, should the habit of individual striving give way to a presumably more important goal of nationalized paternalism?
It is no surprise that a liberalism that embraced the “1619 Project’s” rewriting of the U.S.’s founding history would not stop there and try now, despite its almost invisible congressional majority, to displace the country’s originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad birth-to-death entitlement state.
This transition began in March, when Democrats enacted a federal unemployment-insurance bonus of $300. That bonus, pushing benefits past market wage rates, indisputably is causing many to shun previously held jobs, which surely will do long-term damage to the notion of working to get ahead.
Why bother? Instead, hold out for all this new state-subsidized compensation that reduces the incentive or need to work—the same skip-work choice public-school teachers across the country have made the past year.
Mr. Biden’s American Families Plan proposes four significant new federal entitlements: two years of free, universal prekindergarten; virtually free child care for all; a paid family and medical leave program; and two years of community college.
Nowhere will you find a Democrat calling these proposals what they are—entitlements like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Rejecting that criticism at his news conference Wednesday, Mr. Biden said all his spending will “create” jobs and growth.
His progressive colleagues don’t justify spending as optimism about the American system or its private economy. For years, the word favored by progressive analysts to describe the U.S. economy has been “stagnation.”
Though this argument is disputable, they say private-sector wage growth in the U.S. has been stagnant since the 1970s, isn’t likely to improve and that middle-class survival isn’t possible without replacement income in the form of federal social-welfare programs. Some conservatives agree but purport not to want Mr. Biden’s entitlements.
At his news conference, Mr. Biden made the manifestly false claim (also falsely citing the Heritage Foundation in support) that the Trump administration’s policies produced minimal economic benefit. In fact, before the onset of the pandemic last year, median household income in 2019 grew 6.8%, with higher increases among blacks, Hispanics, Asians and women. Unemployment for these classes hit historic lows. Possibly Mr. Biden was distracted with something else then and never heard about these gains.
Americans need to understand the realities of what Mr. Biden is offering them. Bernie Sanders wanted “Medicare for all,” but that applied only to healthcare. Mr. Biden’s reach goes beyond even Bernie, proposing what will become Medicaid for everything.
Medicaid is minimalist, bare-bones healthcare for the poor. Because of its scale and cost, it is necessarily lowest-common-denominator healthcare. When Joe Biden and the progressive Democratic Party demand “equity” everywhere, they are proposing a lowest-common-denominator society.
The reality of the new Biden entitlement is that costs will be contained, even nominally, only by defaulting over time to Medicaid-quality child care and universal pre-K.
But what if the progressive analysis is correct—that most Americans are ready to accept new middle-class entitlements as a substitute for centuries of individual striving?
Mr. Biden himself made this proposition clear in an interview Monday on the “Today” show when he said that “after 400 years,” black Americans remain “far behind the eight ball in terms of education, health, in terms of opportunity.”
If the American Families Plan passes, we’ll all be behind the same federal dependency eight-ball.
Generations of similar welfare compensation eroded the American dream for many black Americans by disincentivizing upward mobility. Hundreds of thousand still live in public-housing units built for them in the mid-1960s. The unions whose teachers refuse to return to inner-city schools will run child care.
The Biden Democrats not only don’t apologize for this malgovernance, they want to spread it to the nonpoor.
If Republicans let the Biden entitlements become law this year, they will indeed become tax collectors for the permanent welfare state, with payroll-tax increases or a national value-added tax becoming inevitable. The current Biden entitlement pay-fors—higher taxes on corporations and the 1%—are obviously preposterous as long-term support.
And permanently unanswered will be whether American parents ever actually concluded that traditional paths upward are out of reach for them, their children and grandchildren.
Come to think of it, that turns out to be the true big steal in the 2020 election: Joe Biden never asked voters if they wanted to replace the American dream. He’s doing it anyway.
- And:
America’s Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time
Biden has fully embraced the mad goal of giving 98% of the population lavish benefits at no cost.
By
Has anyone noticed that the president has proposed increasing federal spending by nearly $1 trillion a year, while promising that 98% of Americans will pay nothing for it? The very idea would have seemed mad to every previous generation of Americans. Today it is considered conventional.
President Biden’s plans have been rightly criticized for the incontinence of the spending and the perversity of the taxes. Much of the spending is designed to exploit the pandemic crisis by transforming emergency income support into permanent middle-class entitlements for toddler care, higher education, medical services and much else. Other spending is called “infrastructure” but includes a list of progressive wants having nothing to do with capital investment. The tax increases—supposedly confined to the 2% with household incomes of $400,000 or more, but heavily weighted against capital investment—would seriously damage the economy and raise radically less revenue than claimed.
But set aside these problems and take the Biden plans as advertised, as a tremendous expansion of government paid for by a select few taxpayers plus lots of new borrowing. This is the apotheosis of a political transformation that began insensibly in the 1970s and has triumphed with barely a quiver of recognition, much less debate. It may be called the borrowed-benefits syndrome.
From the founding through 1969, the federal government followed a balanced-budget policy, not perfectly but with impressive consistency. Regular operations were covered by current taxes and tariffs. Borrowing was reserved for wars, economic depressions and other emergencies, investments in territory and transportation projects. The debts were paid down through subsequent budget surpluses and economic growth.
From 1970 onward, the country shifted to a budget-deficit policy—spending more than current revenue as a matter of routine, at first a little and then going big, through years of peace and prosperity as well as of war and crisis. Deficits had averaged 3% of spending in 1950-69, a period that included two wars, a pandemic and two serious recessions.
Deficits then grew to 10% of spending in the 1970s and 18% in the 1980s. The U.S. borrowed for 22% of spending in 2019, a growth year that would have called for a budget surplus under the old regime. The deficit ballooned to nearly half of spending during the 2020 pandemic, setting the stage for another ratcheting up of regular annual deficits under the Biden plans.
Many explanations have been adduced for the shift, such as the triumph of Keynesian economics and its techniques for fine-tuning aggregate demand. But the growth of deficit spending has hardly been fine-tuning, and has been practiced energetically by non-Keynesians such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
The best explanation is populist rather than academic: the shift in federal expenditures toward mass consumption. In 1970, about 36% of federal spending, net of interest payments, was benefits to individuals—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (new programs at the time), unemployment compensation, means-tested welfare benefits. Benefits spending then grew mightily, roughly in tandem with deficit spending, and is now about 76% of spending, heading briskly toward 80%. Most of this spending has been placed on autopilot and is exempt from occasional spending-reduction initiatives and government closures.
The shriveling share of spending on traditional government—defense, courts and law enforcement, parks and infrastructure, basic research—has remained subject to congressional appropriations. The Biden plans, while lacking in many details, would continue this profound change, with well over half the spending devoted to individual benefits.
Politicians and citizens have gradually discovered a powerful new principle of political economy: The government provides large numbers of voters with immediate personal benefits that greatly exceed what it charges in taxes, billing the difference to future generations. This principle is the driving force of the Biden plans, which would be financed mainly by new borrowing, not taxes.
The principle is less salient in other advanced democracies because they raise healthy revenue from broad-based and often regressive levies on consumption, such as value-added taxes. The U.S., by contrast, has long depended on a highly progressive income tax that is complex and wasteful and produces relatively little revenue. The American tax system is increasingly an adjunct of borrowed-benefits policy—a means of distributing benefits rather than a means of paying for them. The conversion of the IRS to a social welfare agency would continue apace under the Biden plans with their profusion of targeted tax credits for families and green energy.
The borrowed-benefits policy deserves to be called a syndrome for two reasons. First, personal benefits, however much needed or described as “investments” by proponents, will not generate the future economic growth needed to pay down the debts incurred to finance them. Budgeting consumption spending according to imagined futures of trouble-free prosperity, rather than current revenues, is the real political legacy of Keynesianism. This technique is on display in the Biden administration’s rosy long-term economic projections for its spending plans.
Second, whatever the future may hold, the provision of borrowed benefits is deeply corrupting of democracy. It absolves citizens of recognizing their dependence on one another and politicians of accountability for managing the conflicts and constraints of today’s society. Instead, it encourages the fantasy that there are Croesuses in our midst whose “fair share” will pay for the benefits government wants to give us. This, too, is a central element of the Biden plans.
I have no solution for borrowed-benefits syndrome, which has dissolved the consensus that the welfare state is something citizens should be willing to pay for. I can, however, objurgate the politicians who have built their careers on propagating the syndrome far and wide, now with unprecedented aggressiveness in the Biden administration and Congress.
Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. This article draws on his essay “The Rise and Rise of Deficit Government,” published this week at Law & Liberty.
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