Pictures taken outside the Orlando Synagogue this past Wednesday:
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Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
Many of you are likely familiar with Mark Steyn. He is a very engaging writer who understands the perils that face our eroding culture. Short and even witty read!
https://imprimis.hillsdale.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ HOOVER Weekly Review Edited
Back to the drawing boards:
The CIA Spent 20 Years on the Front Lines of the War on Terror. It’s Time for That to Change
By Amy Zegart via Politico
Amy Zegart writes that while the fusion of espionage and military activities in the Central Intelligence Agency over the past two decades have capably helped the nation fight its wars, it has taken time and talent away from the agency’s purpose when it was founded in 1947: to anticipate major threats before they materialize, such as a Pearl Harbor–style attack. She maintains that the CIA needs to regain the balance between fighting terrorist enemies of today and providing the intelligence to detect, understand, and prevent escalating threats posed by such actors as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
And:
Scientists gone political to advance their ideas:
‘Science,’ They Said
By Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson argues that some leading figures in the scientific community have abandoned evidence and basic logic in their analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, and have instead advanced arguments based on their inherent biases. As an example, Hanson describes how scientists who engaged in gain of function research oversaw an investigation with Chinese authorities and all reached the predetermined conclusion that COVID-19 did not originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Finally:
| Inflation In The Shadow Of Debt |
| by John H. Cochrane via Project Syndicate Generally speaking, inflation can be stabilized with little recession if people believe the necessary policy tightening will be seen through, rather than abandoned at the first signs of pain. Unfortunately, US economic authorities have done little to inspire such confidence. |
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ KariLake is anything but wet!
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Another reason why Biden and his handlers are unprincipled:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sent to me by a very intelligent fiend and fellow memo reader:
Only in This Stupid World
......do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
Only in This Stupid World
......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.
Only in This Stupid World
.....do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet Coke..
Only in This Stupid World
.....do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters..
Only in This Stupid World ...........do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in Packages of eight..
Only in This Stupid World .....do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.
EVER WONDER ...
Why the sun lightens
Our hair, but darkens our skin?
Why don't you ever see the
Headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?
Why is 'abbreviated' such a long word?
Why is it that Doctors call what they do 'practice'?
Why is lemon juice made
With artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?
Why is the man who
Invests all your money called a broker?
Why is the time of
Day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?
Why isn't there
Mouse-flavored cat food?
Why didn't Noah
Swat those two mosquitoes?
Why do they sterilize the
Needle for lethal injections?
You know that Indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?!
Why don't sheep
Shrink when it rains?
Why are they called
Apartments when they are all stuck together?
If con is the opposite of Pro,
is Congress the opposite of progress?
If flying is so Safe, why do they call the airport the terminal
Spread the Stupidity!
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Puns are defined as the lowest form of humor and here are some that prove that to be correct.
Every once in a while the news is so depressing I resort to bad humor. Today's one of them:
PUNS FOR THE DAY
How does an attorney sleep?
First he lies on one side, then he lies on the other side
*****************
I have a few jokes about unemployed people,
but none of them work
******************
How do you make holy water?
You boil the hell out of it
*******************
Will glass coffins be a success?
Remains to be seen
*******************
What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo?
One is really heavy and the other is a little lighter
******************
Two windmills are standing in a wind farm.
One asks, “What’s your favorite kind of music?”
The other says, “I’m a big metal fan.”
******************
Hear about the new restaurant called Karma?
There’s no menu - you get what you deserve
*******************
I went to buy some camouflage trousers yesterday
but couldn't find any
*******************
What do you call a bee that can’t make up its mind?
A maybe
*******************
I tried to sue the airline for losing my luggage.
I lost my case
*******************
When everything is coming your way,
you're in the wrong lane
*******************
A cross-eyed teacher couldn’t control his pupils
*******************
She had a photographic memory but never developed it
*******************
Is it ignorance or apathy that's destroying the world today?
I don't know and don't really care
******************
I wasn’t originally going to get a brain transplant,
but then I changed my mind
*******************
Which country’s capital has the fastest-growing population?
Ireland. Every day it’s Dublin.
*******************
My ex-wife still misses me.
But her aim is starting to improve
*******************
The guy who invented the door knocker got a no-bell prize
*******************
I saw an ad for burial plots, and I thought:
“That’s the last thing I need!”
*******************
Need an ark? I Noah guy
*******************
I used to think I was indecisive; now I'm not so sure
*******************
Sleeping comes so naturally to me,
I could do it with my eyes closed
*******************
What did the grape say when it got stepped on?
Nothing - but it let out a little whine
******************
What do you call a super articulate dinosaur?
A Thesaurus
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Now back to the serious:
Elliott Abrams reviews Dara Horn's novel:
Elliott Abrams reviews Dara Horn's novel:
Horn of Plenty
By Elliott Abrams
How can a book filled with anger, a book about anti-Semitism and entitled People Love Dead Jews, be delectable at the same time? The novelist Dara Horn has done it, combining previously published pieces in a work that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Horn’s target is a world obsessed with dead Jews, whether found in Holocaust memorials, the rebuilding of old and abandoned synagogues and cemeteries, or in assigning students the reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. Jews, she writes, are “part of a ridiculously small minority that nonetheless played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations,” both here and in countries where they have faced persecution and even extermination. As Horn observes of some high-school girls she met in Nashville when she was 17: “Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were a people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.”
The center of this book is Horn’s absolute rejection of all that ostensibly heartfelt, morally significant, admirable concern about dead Jews. “I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews,” she writes, but it is not so. She concludes that “even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms,” it is “a profound affront to human dignity.” People Love Dead Jews explains why, and does so in colloquial, even conversational language with sparkling insights about Jewish life. At root, Horn says that this obsession with dead Jews distorts not only Christian but also, and perhaps more painfully, Jewish understanding of Jewish reality.
Her take on the rebuilding of abandoned synagogues and houses and rubbished cemeteries in places where Jews no longer live gives the sense of her argument: “There is a tourist industry concept, popular in places devoid of Jews, called ‘Jewish Heritage Sites.’ It is a much better name than ‘Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.’” And using the tourist industry’s “Heritage” lingo absolves us from asking “why these ‘sites’ exist to begin with.” What happened to the Jews? What was done to them? Instead of finding out, we are meant to congratulate the locals for their lovely architectural restorations.
All such activities, Horn says, are an effort to convert dead Jews into a nice lesson about redemption while forgetting the vicious persecution, just as so many Holocaust books are about the minute number of rescues and rescuers rather than the reality of the Holocaust. Thus was Anne Frank’s diary censored and her story made into one not of suffering and death but of a prelude to the famous line: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Horn reminds us that “Frank wrote about people being truly good at heart before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
As Horn writes, bestselling Holocaust novels are usually “uplifting,” and very many “involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk and sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all.” It happened, occasionally, but making it central to the story serves the function of obscuring real accounts of what happened to the Jews—and who exterminated them. The rescuer stories are “statistically insignificant happy endings” that appear in English. But not in Yiddish—where instead there was a reckoning with truth: “In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish…one finds the overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents, along with cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance.”
Unknown to most American readers of Elie Wiesel’s famous account of the Holocaust in his book Night is that “Wiesel first published the memoir in Yiddish. The Yiddish book told the same story as Night, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible.” The revised and sanitized version earned a Nobel and perhaps an even greater prize: selection for Oprah’s Book Club. Horn goes to an exhibit about the Holocaust at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where, “at the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another.” But she says this concept never appears once in the survivor literature she has read in Yiddish, “the language of 80 percent of victims.” As she notes acidly, “love rarely comes up; why would it?” She is furious at “being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor.”
But even in these sections of the book, Horn never loses her ability to amuse, if sometimes with very black humor. Of that museum show, for example, she writes, “The exhibition is relentless. After an hour and a half, I marveled that I was barely past Kristallnacht. What the hell is taking so long? I found myself thinking.…Can’t they invade Poland already?” And she never loses her ability to see in new and fascinating ways what so many others have worked over for decades. Her discussion of Anne Frank is a good example, for what Horn does is write Frank’s obituary—had she not been betrayed, and then murdered by the Nazis. It begins: “Anne Frank, noted Dutch novelist and essayist, died this past Wednesday at her home in Amsterdam. She was 92.” On it goes, discussing the un-murdered Frank’s novels and her journalism, her reporting on Soviet oppression, the Arab–Israeli wars, and the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann. This is the kind of insight only a novelist can bring, transforming the comforting lessons of the usual Anne Frank story into a searing expression of a life extinguished—6 million times.
_____________
HORN INSISTS that Jews today very often accept, knowingly or not, all the wrong lessons about hatred of Jews—from Anne Frank to Shakespeare. In a wonderfully comic chapter called “Commuting with Shylock,” she recounts what happens when her 10-year old son comes across The Merchant of Venice. As they listen to it in the car, she finds herself defending the play—of course. It’s Shakespeare. It is only as they hear it line by line, and her 10-year-old keeps saying “pause it,” and she has to explain every scene, that she finally sees it all through him. Hearing the “Hath not a Jew eyes” soliloquy, she suggests to her son that that’s the good part, where Shakespeare humanizes Shylock. He listens carefully, she hits pause, and he says: “That was pathetic. That’s it! That totally sucked!” A rueful Horn writes, “I have a doctorate in literature. I am aware that Shakespeare’s plays contain many layers and mean many things. But the degrading hideousness of this character is obvious even to a ten-year-old….Why, I wondered, should I feel obligated to excuse this blindingly obvious fact, like some abused wife explaining why her darling husband beat her up?”
This theme of seeing again what we have been forced to see as virtue is laced through People Love Dead Jews. Horn writes a long and fascinating chapter on Varian Fry, who saved scores of Jewish lives in 1940–41 as the representative in France of the “Emergency Rescue Committee” formed by American intellectuals and artists. Here again, Horn derives a very different lesson from the usual simple accolades—a lesson, again, on how Jews have come to think about their history. Fry’s mission was to rescue what he called “the culture of Europe.” And in a way he did: In addition to then-famous and now little-known writers such as Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel, he helped save Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall. Horn offers a fascinating look at the psychological interaction between rescued and rescuer (trying to explain the frequent ingratitude), but that is not her point. It is rather that Jews, like Christians, accept at once that this was a noble mission—that such artists, writers, and intellectuals were the “culture of Europe” and therefore worth saving while others died.
But what about the culture of Hasidism, she asks, “with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness—or Misnagdism…whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigorous study of musar, or ethics”? What about those whose lives were dedicated to righteousness, not art and culture? “For them, there were no Varian Frys.” She concludes, “I could not help wishing that instead of an emergency rescue committee saving Europe’s greatest artists, that there had been an emergency rescue committee saving Europe’s greatest prophets—that perhaps what should have been saved was not more of the culture of Europe, but more people like Varian Fry.”
What ties these chapters together is Horn’s insistence that Jews have drawn so many wrong lessons about themselves and the societies in which they live—or more sharply put, from the societies in which they live, occluding the real lessons that must be drawn about how Jews have lived and died. In the end, for Horn, there is one clear way to understand the past, and it is Judaism: the source of far truer lessons. The many pop-culture books on the Holocaust come to false happy endings; here, Horn’s own happy ending is quite different. She joins in Daf Yomi, studying a page of Talmud each day along with tens of thousands of other Jews around the world. Here, memory of the past never fades. Here, as each generation seeks to understand righteousness and holiness, “I turn the page and return, carried by fellow readers living and dead, all turning the pages with me.” At turns caustic and comic, at others filled with outrage, People Love Dead Jews will also have readers turning the pages with her.
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Reposting because this is one of the clearest and most lucid explanations of what I have been feeling and trying to articulate for years about liberals, progressives, hypocrite politicians, youthful radicals, dangerous ideologues and mostly Democrats.
If you read it initially I dare you to re-read and let it really sink in.
To truth and knowledge,
By Brandon Smith
Whatever it is not worth listening to cause nothing to learn that is worthwhile.
The most destructive people in the world are not generally the most ignorant, though we are often told otherwise. Rather, ignorant people are more likely to become victims. The truly dangerous people tend to be arrogant, but with enough intelligence to knowingly absorb and regurgitate a particular dogma in a way that appeals to unsuspecting bystanders that were never given the tools to defend themselves. In other words, it's the puritan "educators" that promote incendiary collectivism, usually by preying on those that lack the armor of reason. Ignorance is encouraged by these supposed teachers as a marinade; it tenderizes their victims and makes them ready to absorb more and more cultism.
Their arrogance is the key to all of this because these folks are really just middlemen for an agenda that is ultimately designed to harm them. They see themselves as brilliant minds that cannot be denied; they think they are the prophets of our age. They generally fall into two categories — the young acolytes and the aging adherents, and today all of them are leftists.
When I examine the dangers of leftists I inevitably get accusations that I am "perpetuating the false left/right paradigm," but these people don't understand what the left/right paradigm is. At the top of any government pyramid, you will find that the politicians may claim to represent different parties or ideologies but when it comes to their policies these leaders are all the same. Their vested interests are in maintaining power for themselves and the globalists that line their pockets.
This is not to say all politicians are frauds, just most of them, and the higher up you go in government the more frauds you will find.
The opposite is true in terms of the bottom of the pyramid among regular citizens. There is no "false paradigm" for the masses, the leftists are truly ideologically obsessed in their collectivism and communism, and conservatives and constitutionalists truly embrace personal freedom and civil liberties. The divide is not fake, it is very real. There are people who want to control others and there are people that want to be free, and the political left is staunchly on the side of control.
Leftists are the only people supporting draconian lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates, vaccine passports and forced vaccinations, mass censorship and the silencing of anyone that disagrees with their twisted worldview. They ignore all science to the contrary of their positions and seek to exploit every possible crisis to gain power through people's irrational fears. They are also the only group that is receiving unmitigated support from governments, corporations and globalist foundations. The very people they say are evil capitalists are the same people that make their movement possible.
This is why I have to laugh every time I am confronted with a hatchling communist trying to "educate me" on the "dangers of conservatives and individualists" ... they know nothing but have an opinion on everything.
The behavior and mentality of the acolytes are very familiar to me, and I have had many opportunities to observe burgeoning leftists in their native environments. The newer generations of leftists have never been told by those close to them that they really are not as smart as they think they are. They have never been given the reality check or the slap upside the head that they needed. They have been conditioned from a very early age to believe that everything they say and do is profound. And even though most of them have not accomplished anything of note or merit in their lives, they think that their ideology gives them the power to assume a mantle of wisdom and look down on others that do not share in their religion.
The notion of the young teaching the old is an extension of a philosophy from the early 1900s called "Futurism." It teaches the idea that all "old ideas" should be cast off and all new ideas are automatically superior. It teaches that all tradition and heritage is a prison that holds humanity back from progress. Futurism is the root ideology that helped to spawn both the rise of the National Socialists (Fascists) in Europe as well as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Of course, those of us who are a little older than 20 years of age know from experience that there are no new ideas, only old ideas like authoritarianism repackaged as new. Tear off the shiny wrapper and social justice and Critical Race Theory have the same rotten putrid guts as the communism and fascism of old.
Strangely, many young leftists pontificate and worship at the altar of social justice extremism while at the same time claiming to be "moderates" or "middle-of-the-road." They have learned that once they openly admit what they are it is much harder to demand the attention of others, so they will exhibit rabid fits of zealotry in the face of conservative viewpoints and then argue that Cultural Marxists don't exist.
The leftist ability to gaslight is really quite astonishing because in order to master tactical dishonesty at such a high level one has to be an accomplished sociopath.
To be clear, confronting their disinformation and cultism is not done in order to change their minds or to force them to admit they are wrong, that's not ever going to happen. They will double and triple down on their false narratives. The only reason to confront them is when you can publicly dismantle them so that the rest of the world can see how frail their dogma really is.
The majority of them don't have their own families and never want a family. They have never been responsible for other human beings; they can barely take care of themselves, and they like it that way. And though they tend to blame "boomers" for all the world's ailments, they also have a habit of living off their boomer parents well into their late 20s and early 30s, some stick around for even longer.
No one ever told them how boring they are or how badly they suck, so they never improve or strive for more. They then waltz into adult life with grand assumptions of their genius and righteousness.
In their teens and twenties, they think they are ready to refashion the very pillars of society and rewrite all the "wrongs" of humanity. It is no wonder that communists target the youth as a rule because many of them lack a grasp on the basics and their views are painfully simplistic. Today young leftists think everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, everything is about discrimination and unfairness, all of their weaknesses are actually strengths, everything our society values is wrong, and all of their failures are caused by others holding them back from their own imminent greatness. They cannot meet today's standards of accomplishment because today's standards are dated and obsolete. The world is wrong, and they are right.
As you can imagine, this mentality is enticing because it feeds young narcissism. No one at that age wants to admit they know nothing, and maybe that is one of the biggest problems in Western society.
You cannot talk to these kids because they will not talk to you about anything other than themselves and their non-accomplishments and their social justice religion. They will never ask you about your own views or experiences or knowledge earned over a lifetime that dwarfs theirs – They don't care. For how could you possibly know more than they do about anything of importance? Their cult has taught them that everything old is always wrong and has nothing to offer. Only the new and the young and the untested are relevant to the future.
Tearing things down is far more exciting to them than keeping what has already been built alive. Surely this is insanity, but think about it from their perspective for a moment. When you have no merits or inherent abilities, how do you feel like you have control over your environment and your destiny? Building things and creating things of value is hard but destroying things of value and burning structures down is easy.
Gullible leftist children are not our main concern, however. The older adherents are the true source of the indoctrination campaign beyond the think-tanks and establishment nonprofits that fund it. These people are the predators of the political left, and they know exactly what they are doing.
I have long been fascinated with the existence of psychopathic people, and in particular, I find the behaviors of narcissists at once horrifying and illuminating. If you ever wanted a chance to study an alien life-form, the closest you will probably ever get is to study a narcissistic sociopath or psychopath. One aspect of narcissists is that they tend to be magnetically drawn to a handful of career fields in which they can control people and gain a captive audience. You will often see medicine, finance and politics listed as common fields that attract narcissists, but lesser mentioned fields include academia and teaching.
I have come to realize recently that the teaching profession is a perfect petri dish for narcissists because it draws less negative attention while offering comparable fuel for their control addictions. Many people think that a person that wants to be a teacher must be a selfless saint because who wants to babysit other people's kids all day unless they are kindhearted, but the temptations are plenty for those with aberrant psyches.
Children are especially vulnerable to influence well into their teens. The younger they are the more trusting they tend to be of the adults around them, who they see as their protectors and providers in a world they have no power over. The further they tread into adolescence the more they start to question their place in the world and what values they should adopt in order to find meaning. Furthermore, they have an innate inclination to test boundaries and to rebel if their parents use helicopter methods or refuse to enforce rational limitations, and there's nothing more dangerous than a rebel without a cause.
Leftist adherents see these children as their playground and revel in the notion of manipulating their minds to bring them into the cultist fold. I can't think of a more captive audience for a narcissist than a public-school classroom or university lecture hall in which the teacher is able to establish a dominant hierarchy and demand fealty without ever actually having to earn the trust of the students. The children are expected to listen and accept their pontificating without question from day one, even though the teacher in front of them might be a smooth-brained lunatic.
Under indoctrination programs like CRT, teachers are the confessors, the saviors and the judges "awakening" their students to their own original racial sins. The kids that fall in line will be rewarded and the kids that don't will be browbeaten into silence or submission. The teachers become the center of their universe for the bulk of their day and when those children go home, they will still have to think about how to best navigate tomorrow so they do not attract the ire of the cult leaders and their growing flock. The pursuit of knowledge is supplanted by the stresses of conformity. Learning is the last thing on their minds.
This is not to say that all teachers are like this, but the profession clearly attracts the worst of the worst in many cases. To these people, children are an endless buffet. Their goal is not to teach but to coerce and manufacture useful minions for the collective.
Critical Race Theory and social justice are the new plantations and leftists are the plantation owners, or at the very least they are the overseers with their whips in hand. As Oliver Stone's character Chris Taylor from the movie Platoon states: "Hell is the impossibility of reason." The political left revels in its destruction of reason; they even think they have transcended it. The worst possible future would be to allow these people to continue their theatrics unopposed. You cannot mentor the next generation if your only goal is to engineer an army of proxies that think exactly as you do.
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Another reposting written by Larry Kudlow.
Ten thousand pages which no one will read and trillions of dollars that no one actually has and/or can afford to spend. This is why our nation is sinking fast and we will never be able to redeem it even if we change our mindset and throw out the rascals .
There comes a time when there is no return because we have gone too far in the wrong direction.
Getting and spending we lay waste our power.
We are days away from an unprecedented vote by the Congress on a $5 trillion plan to address a number of matters, infrastructure being the most significant, but by no means the only focus. The column below from Larry Kudlow puts this all into perspective and I encourage you to read it carefully as this will have a huge impact on your future and that of those around you.
The Sum of All Fears
Democrats Abandon Regular Order To Sneak Through a Socialist America
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, Special to the Sun
So what did they hide, and when did they hide it? Key Democratic committees — Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate — are marking up unheard of spending and taxing plans. Right now. Yet they are not telling the public what they’re really up to.
The answer to “what did they hide?” and “when did they hide it?” is that they’re hiding it now, and information is starting to leak out on specifics. There’s no question that the Democrats want this $3.5 trillion reconciliation, which is really going to be more than $5 trillion, to avoid public scrutiny and to roll rapidly through both houses just to get it done.
Some say that it’s going to be a 10,000 page bill and that literally no one is going to know what’s in it. I remember when, a month or so back, I asked Senator Shelley Moore Capito, who is a friend, whether she’d read the 2,000 page infrastructure bill. She smiled and said she got through half of it. She was one of my great hopes that actually might know what’s going on in the second half of the bill.
This one — 10,000 pages worth — no one will know. Trust me. Not before, during, or after. It will take many years to figure this out. That’s just the specifics. In terms of the negative consequences, we won’t know for many years after that.
This is why Joe Manchin’s idea to “pause” the process is a good one — if he sticks to it. The senator’s track record is not fabulous, but hope springs eternal in the Mountain State. Meantime, there’s such a thing in Congress as regular order. Got it? It’s one of the most important concepts in democracy.
Regular order. It means that even in highly partisan bills, normal process is an open markup to thoroughly examine and debate key proposals. Policy experts on both sides of the aisle testify in open session to discuss these massive new programs. This is a time-honored tradition.
After the public testimonies, members then go back and discuss. Then they vote inside the committee to bring it to the floor of the Senate. This is not happening. Instead, Democrats are hiding the policies, foregoing any discussions, and avoiding score cards from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Tax Committee.
That scoring will eventually come. The reconciliation instructions call — explicitly — for deficit reduction by not less than $1 trillion over the 10 year period ending in 2031. Trust me, there will be nowhere near a trillion spondulix in deficit reduction. Instead there will be significant deficit increases even with the largest tax hike in more than half a century.
Republican senators on the Finance Committee have just issued a press release calling for a full and open markup. Don’t hold your breath, friends. Now I don’t want this process issue, important as it is, to obscure the unprecedented cradle to grave spending increases. This will generate an unprecedentedly high social safety net.
Expanding Medicare and Medicaid. Expand the funding for child care. Universal Pre-K. Expanded refundable child tax credits paid monthly. Food stamps. School nutrition. Free community college, income supplements. Workforce training programs. This amounts to unprecedented dependency on government welfare and far left progressive planning schemes.
I just think of it as “go woke, go broke.” It’s redistribution on a grand scale. Take from Peter to pay Paul. We used to laugh at that. When workfare was introduced by President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich 25 years ago, we thought this kind of left-wing wishlist would never come to pass. Workfare worked. The economy flourished.
What’s happening now, though, is no workfare, and no work. In fact take the “r out of work and you have “wok” == sure go ahead and add an “e.” It’s still woke.
The great Art Laffer has pointed out that redistribution has damaged both sides — those whose success is penalized and those who depend on welfare lose all initiative to work. The economy suffers. And speaking of economic suffering, the list of tax hikes being hidden by the tax committees, though it has been starting to leak out today, is unbelievable.
Of course, we knew of the centerpiece policies of corporate taxes, international taxes, capital gains taxes, individual taxes, small business taxes, estate taxes, all that stuff has been out there for quite a while. It’s a tax assault on business and investment that will cripple the economy, generate higher inflation, and be paid for mainly by the blue-collar middle-class workforce.
Wait, though, there’s more. In a desperate revenue search, the Senate Finance Committee is looking at a stock buyback tax, a corporate alternative minimum tax, and a tax on so-called high salaries.
Not to mention a tax on CEO pay disparity, a tax on unrealized capital gains, a tax on carried interest, an end to the 20% small business deduction, a tax on estate planning, limits to active business losses, a tax on so-called mega retirement accounts, new bank reporting requirements for all depositary inflows and outflows, a plastics excise tax, a carbon tax, a fossil fuel tax, and what amounts to an international tariff on carbon emissions.
Now, the sum total of all this — call it the sum of all our fears — is to inflict major damage on the economy and the middle-class workforce, and investors. There will be consumer price hikes. Leading economic models have already scored this. Now the Democrats are adding to the tax damage.
That doesn’t include additional measures that will be hidden in a 10,000 page bill — features like illegal immigration amnesty, unionization via the so-called Pro Act, which stands for Protecting the Right To Organize Act. Lord knows what else (if even the Good Lord can find time to read a 10,000 page bill.) And we haven’t even gotten to the Green New Deal.
This is the Democratic wishlist to transform America by exponentially raising the welfare state and exponentially punishing the productive side of the economy. This is a dodging regular order to give big government socialism a humongous boost and bury free enterprise capitalism. If and when all these details get out to the public, the vast majority of Americans are going to hate this.
The vast majority of Americans favor free market capitalism and oppose big government socialism. That’s precisely why the Democrats are doing as much as these can to hide these policies and get the legislation passed before anyone gets through reading the first 500 pages, let alone the last 9,500.
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From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox News. Image: The Boston Tea Party revolt against King George’s taxes, hand colored lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1846. Via Library of Congress.
Best regards,
Robert L. Dilenschneider
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