Tag Archives: Issues & Insights

Looking At The Platform Of The Democratic Socialists Of America

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about how well the items in the Democratic Socialists Of America platform resonate (or don’t resonate) with Americans.

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

First, I&I/TIPP asked about DSA’s proposal for the “abolition of jails and prisons.”

Only 26% agreed either strongly (10%) or somewhat (16%) with this plan, while 62% disagreed strongly (47%) or somewhat (15%).

…Next up: “Defunding the Defense Department.” On this, overall 33% agreed either strongly (15%) or somewhat (18%), while a majority of 54% disagreed strongly (17%) or somewhat (37%).

…For a third question, voters were asked to agree or disagree with “amnesty for all illegal immigrants.”

This time, 34% agreed strongly (14%) or somewhat (19%), while a slim majority of 52% disagreed strongly (19%) or somewhat (33%).

…On the fourth question, respondents were asked about “getting rid of the U.S. president and U.S. Supreme Court to be replaced by a chief executive and high court selected by Congress, not the people.”

An overall 27% agreed either strongly (13%) or somewhat (14%) with this proposal, while a more than 2-to-1 majority of 57% disagreed either strongly (42%) or somewhat (14%).

…Finally, the fifth proposal of the DSA’s plan: “Government ownership of the largest corporations and important industries.”

Again, about a third — 33% — agree with the idea either strongly (13%) or somewhat (20%), while 52% disagree strongly (34%) or somewhat (18%).

If Americans actually read the platform, it doesn’t sound like the Democratic Socialists of America will get a lot of votes. The question is whether or not Americans read the platforms or just react to the personalities of the candidates.

The article notes:

Other polls find the same level of acceptance for socialism, which is what “control or own” clearly implies.

In a June survey, for instance, Economist/YouGov found that 34% of Democrats said socialism was a “better” economic system than capitalism, while only 22% said capitalism was better. Among all Americans, 44% preferred capitalism versus 19% choosing socialism. And overall, a third of all Americans said they’d vote for a socialist candidate.

Why is this?

One big reason could be age. In the I&I/TIPP Poll, 44% of respondents were in the 18-to-44 year age range. So even the oldest among this group would have only the vaguest of memories of the collapse of communism and the subsequent debunking of socialist ideas as economically workable.

Meanwhile, in recent decades formal public education has become saturated with leftist indoctrination, well documented in numerous studies, reports and first-hand accounts.

No surprise, then, that in the I&I/TIPP Poll, 46% of those 44 years and younger supported the takeover of major U.S. industries, while just 22% of those 45 years and older did. It’s a generational thing.

Inevitably, today’s students become tomorrow’s voters. This, perhaps as much as anything, explains the current positive feelings that many younger voters seem to harbor for socialist candidates and the ideas they espouse.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Americans need to educate themselves on what socialism actually means and what the results of embracing it are.

The Real Numbers On Gas Prices

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The war in Iran has caused gas prices at the pump to go up, but adjusted for inflation, where are they?

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article to answer that question.

The article reports:

Democrats were quick to make hay of President Donald Trump’s remark that the high price of gasoline “is peanuts.”

But what if he’s right? What if today’s prices are lower than they were, say, when we had a peanut farmer as president? Or many times since then?

Democrats called Trump “out of touch” with everyday Americans.

“’Peanuts’ isn’t how my constituents would describe the spiking gas prices that make everyday life more expensive,” said New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. “POTUS isn’t paying for this war. Middle-class Americans are, and he couldn’t care less.”

Trump is, of course, being maligned … again. What he said was that the cost of gasoline “is peanuts” next to what would happen if Iran got a nuclear weapon.

He’s certainly right about that.

The article includes the following graph:

The article notes:

Yes, the national average is around $4.60 a gallon. And yes, that means filling up a tank will cost you more than $50.

But every story about high gas prices leaves out one piece of critically important context. Inflation.

When you factor in inflation, you see that today’s prices aren’t nearly as high as they have been over the past several decades. In fact, the national average price hit $5.79 a gallon — in today’s dollars — under Joe Biden in June 2022. (Funny, but we don’t seem to recall gasoline price horror stories being written back then.)

Go a little further back, and you see that gas prices were higher than they are today practically the entire two terms of Barack “We Can’t Drill Our Way To Lower Gas Prices” Obama. In fact, the average inflation-adjusted price of gasoline during Obama’s eight years in office was $4.39.

Most of us have realized that when the war in Iran ends, gas prices will come back down, and the Democrats will have to find something else to complain about.

Policies Have Consequences

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the end of Spirit Airlines. We need to give credit where credit is due. The credit for the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines goes to then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The article reports:

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the collapse of Spirit Airlines, it is that today’s Democratic Party should never be in charge of anything.

Does that seem like a stretch? Not when you consider the facts.

Four years ago, Spirit and JetBlue started talking about merging operations. Spirit was struggling to stay afloat, thanks in part to the massive run-up in inflation under President Joe Biden. The merger would have been a lifeline to Spirit and would have ensured low-cost competition survived.

But Democrats — led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren — decided that they knew better. Warren pressured then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Biden administration to stop it, “expressing serious concerns about the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.”

She bragged in early 2024 that she “has led the fight to ensure antitrust laws are enforced across the economy to prevent mergers that will reduce competition, jeopardize fair markets, and harm consumers.”

Her leadership paid off. Biden’s Transportation and Justice Departments teamed up to block the merger — claiming it would cost travelers $1 billion a year. Then a district judge in Boston sided with Biden.

All of them claimed the same thing. That they were doing this on behalf of air travelers.

Buttigieg said in 2023 that “it’s important to make sure that passengers have choices” and that they “have access to low fares.”

When the companies dropped the merger plans in the face of these assaults, Warren cheered, calling it “a Biden win for flyers.”

A win? Tell that to the 17,000 employees who just lost their jobs, the travelers who have paid for Spirit flights they’ll never take, and those families faced with a huge spike in travel costs.

The article notes:

Not surprisingly, these same Democrats are trying to pin the blame for Spirit’s collapse on President Donald Trump, saying, as Warren put it, “spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline.”

But that’s a lie. Anyone not blinded by leftist ideology could see at the time that killing the merger was the nail in Spirit’s coffin.

Here’s how the Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni put it back in March 2024:

Without the merger, Spirit is all but condemned to death, and investors know it, selling off the company’s stock, which hit a record low after the plug was pulled on consolidating with JetBlue. The ratings agency Fitch downgraded Spirit’s credit rating, citing default as a real possibility, meaning the airline may soon be unable to pay its bills.

With operational losses, over $1 billion in bonds coming due soon, and the evaporation of available equity from the stock plummeting, Spirit’s collapse seems like a fait accompli.

(Besides, even if we disagreed with his plan, Trump at least tried to find a way to keep Spirit afloat.)

This can, however, be a clarifying moment for voters before the midterms — if Republicans are smart enough to seize it.

Voters, take note!

Who Was Protesting?

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On Saturday, the political left held No Kings rallies around the country. Just for the record, these were not grassroots rallies. There were a few people there who actually had an idea of what they were protesting, but videos of the protesters doing man-on-the-street interviews trying to explain what they were protesting are all over the internet and are genuinely funny. These were for the most part paid protesters who got pre-printed signs and were paid by the hour.

On Monday, Issues & Insights reported:

We wonder if anyone has conducted a demographic survey of the people who showed up at the “No Kings” protests around the country, because we suspect the results would be an embarrassment.

We noticed as a rally marched down the main street in Pasadena, California, that the protesters were comprised almost entirely of white people who were predominantly middle-aged or older. (This is a city that is 40% black and Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau.)

So we looked at videos and pictures from protests in other cities around the country this past Saturday, and noticed the same thing.

Seas of white faces. And lots of gray hair. Few, if any, blacks or Hispanics. Certainly not a representative sample.

This is a movement made up of people who pride themselves on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and champion illegal immigrants and “people of color,” yet from what we could tell, the protestors were less diverse than attendees at the annual CPAC conference.

The article concludes:

We won’t bother to guess why the mainstream media ignored the evidence in front of their eyes. Nor will we try to speculate as to why the participants are so monochromatic. Although it is interesting to learn about how socialists and communist organizations were putting big money behind the protests.

We would bet anyone that had these rallies been for low taxes and less regulation, the media would have been screaming about the lack of diversity.

Still, what does it say about a so-called movement that appears to attract mainly middle-aged white people? Is this really a power to be reckoned with? Or just a bunch of disgruntled baby boomers and aging Gen Xers pathetically trying to find some purpose to their lives?

Whatever the reason, we wonder when #OscarsSoWhite founder April Reign will start her #ProtestsSoWhite social media campaign.

We have reached mass insanity.

Policies Have Consequences

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the opposing taxation trends between red states and blue states in America.

The article reports:

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the growing divide between blue and red states when it comes to income taxes. What it failed to mention is that this shows the genius of the nation’s founders.

“Republican-led states are racing each other to flatten, cut, and eliminate individual income taxes, with 23 states lowering their top income-tax rates since 2021,” Richard Rubin and  Jeanne Whalen write.

And, indeed, this year, nine states – all Republican – either cut their top marginal tax rate or lowered their flat tax rate. Ohio became the 14th state to adopt a flat tax.

“Democratic-controlled states are moving the opposite way,” notes the Journal, “pushing to increase taxes on top earners to combat inequality and plug budget holes expected from Republicans’ cuts to federal health and nutrition assistance programs.”

The article includes two graphs that illustrate the result of each of these policies:

The article notes:

The Journal notes that the number of states with top rates below 5% and above 10% have both been increasing.

“The middle ground is quickly disappearing.”

So how is this a good thing? After all, we’ve written many times in this space about the folly of playing the “tax the rich” game.

It’s good news because this is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work. States are free to experiment with their taxing, spending, and regulating policies – and suffer the consequences.

And that’s just what we’ve been seeing. Millions of middle-class Americans are voting with their feet – leaving high-tax “progressive” states for those that keep their government spending in check, regulations to a minimum, and their taxes low.

I guess my husband and I were not the only people to get out of Massachusetts as soon as we could!

An Interesting Place To Draw The Line

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On March 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about Bernie Sanders’ new tax idea–tax the billionaires–they shouldn’t even exist. Okay, billionaires have a lot of money, much of it made in the technology field, but Bernie Sanders has a lot of money too, all of it made while he was a public servant.

The article notes:

There are not quite 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. Roughly 200 of them are still in California, even after the departures of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and others who don’t wish to have their earned wealth seized by greedy hands and redistributed politically. It would take a while to drive them all to extinction, but it’s obvious that Sanders and the others who play the politics of envy would sadistically enjoy a painfully drawn-out eradication.

Naturally, they stake out a position based on morality, but if they get their way, they will do deep harm to the country. An advanced economy that has no billionaires is an economy that is in decline. Any economy that loses even a portion of its billionaires will suffer similarly.

Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).

And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.

Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.

Just for laughs, let’s talk about Bernie Sanders’ wealth.

According to Gazette Direct:

Between 2009 and 2018, Sanders and his wife, Jane, reported a combined income of $4.7 million, largely fueled by his writing. His other books, such as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and Where We Go from Here, added to his finances, with royalties ranging from $170,000 to $850,000 in peak years.

Real estate is another pillar of Sanders’ wealth. He and Jane own three properties. Their primary home is a four-bedroom house in Chittenden County, Vermont, purchased in 2009 for $405,000, now valued at around $440,000. They also own a townhouse in Washington, D.C., bought in 2007 for $488,999, which has appreciated to an estimated $685,000. Their vacation home, a lakeside cabin in Vermont, was acquired in 2016 for $575,000, a steal compared to its original listing price of $775,000. These properties, though mortgaged, contribute significantly to his assets.

Notice that Bernie Sanders is going after billionaires–not millionaires (because he is one). Somehow socialists always want other peoples’ money while keeping their own.

Moving From Accepting Benefits To Theft

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On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article wondering how easy it is to steal from the American government.

The article reports:

Some of us are old enough to remember Matthew Lesko, the lanky, fast-talking late-night TV pitchman who promised people free government money to those who bought his books.

There are, Lesko said in one of his countless ads decades ago, “15,000 programs you can use to get a better job, get an education, or start your own business. Those who know about the programs are the ones who get the money!”

The article notes:

But Minnesota is hardly the only place where scammers have gone way beyond what Matthew Lesko promised in his books.

As Charles Silver and David Hyman note in the City Journal,

Frauds against government health-care programs are both common and costly. Fraudsters routinely scam (Medicare and Medicaid) for billions of dollars. States themselves run schemes of their own. COVID-related frauds, for example, exceeded $280 billion, with another $123 billion wasted or misspent. Obamacare enrollment fraud is pervasive, likely costing taxpayers $27 billion in 2025 and $21 billion in 2024.

California is under federal criminal investigation for wasting $37 billion to fight homelessness. It lost $20 billion in COVID-19-related federal unemployment money — the most of any state. Nearly half of the state’s increase in Medicaid spending went to pay for health care for illegal aliens. And it’s under investigation to see where the $4 billion in federal money for California’s never-ending bullet train project ended up.

Fox News reports that the Education Department found that “during a 12-month period between 2024 and 2025, scammers stole at least $10 million in federal financial aid from community colleges in California.”

The article concludes:

Why is it so easy to steal from the federal government? Because, unlike a private business, nobody in government really cares if money is wasted. Who has lost their job after some major scam was uncovered?

Plus, as we pointed out in this space, fraud is good for big-government types because it creates new constituents and new sources of campaign cash.

The answer to this problem isn’t just to unleash armies of auditors and federal police. It’s to close the spigot entirely.

The federal government spends more than $3.6 trillion on what it calls “direct payments for individuals” and another $833 billion in grants to states that are supposed to end up in individual pockets.

That’s about two-thirds of the entire federal budget!

As long as there’s that much money flying around, fraudsters will flourish. And taxpayers will be bilked.

It’s time to act on the waste and fraud that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) found. People are never as careful with other people’s money as they are with their own money.

Voting With Your Feet

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On January 12, Issues & Insights posted an article about the reaction to a proposed California tax on billionaires. It should not be a surprise that billionaires do not want to pay this tax.

The article reports:

The Billionaire Tax Act isn’t even officially on the California ballot yet, but that hasn’t stopped businessmen, entrepreneurs, and investors from fleeing the state, taking $1 trillion in wealth – along with jobs and opportunity – with them.

Tech entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya has been keeping track of who’s decided to leave the state in advance of this “temporary” tax.

“We had $2T of billionaire wealth just a few weeks ago. Now, 50% of that wealth has left – taking their income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, real estate tax revenue, and all their staffs (and their salaries and income taxes) with them,” he posted on X this weekend.

“In other words, by starting this ill-conceived attempt at an asset tax, the California budget deficit will explode. And we still don’t know if the tax will even make the ballot.”

Among those who’ve given up on California are Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The New York Times reports that 10 days before Christmas, Brin “terminated or moved 15 California limited liability companies that oversee some of his business interests and investments out of the state” and “more than 45 California limited liability companies associated with Mr. Page filed documents last month to either become inactive or move out of the state.”

The Laffer Curve is an illustration of what is happening  in California:

Millionaires and billionaires have tax accountants, lawyers, and other people who help them legally avoid many of the taxes the rest of us pay. Voting with your feet is one of the easiest ways to avoid excessive taxes. Voting with your feet is one of the reasons Texas and Florida are the fastest growing states in the nation. Their tax policies make them very attractive to businessmen.

The article concludes:

This is a state, after all, that has managed in the past few years to kill its other golden goose, the film industry – the Wall Street Journal last fall said  “L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie.”

It’s a state that sits at the top of the list for highest tax rates, but the bottom of the list for just about everything else. (See “Do Californians Realize How Badly They’re Getting Ripped Off?”)

It’s a state that – despite idyllic weather and natural beauty – has driven more than 1.6 million residents away. (See “The Great Divorce Continues.”)

As we noted in this space a couple of weeks ago (See “California’s ‘Get Out Now’ Tax”), “Businesses and people are fleeing because lawmakers and blue voters are stuck in a Bolshevik rut.”

The question is, what will it take to get California’s lawmakers and voters unstuck?

Eliminating Fraud In Government

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On January 5th, Issues & Insights posted an article with a suggestion for ending government fraud.

The article notes:

Some are estimating that more than half of federal income tax revenues are devoured by fraud. This should not come as a shock. A massive government that funds everything from small businesses to health care to child care to housing is a rich target for thieves. Sharply reducing its size would limit the opportunities to steal from taxpayers.

Bandits have been defrauding of the U.S. government on such a colossal scale that even the legacy media has had to cover it, at least somewhat. The Minnesota Somalis looting the public fisc blew the lid so high that now smart folks are finding institutionalized fraud far, wide, high and low.

As noted in a March executive order, “the Government Accountability Office estimates that the federal government loses between $233 and $521 billion annually to fraud.” That higher number might be in reality a low-end estimate, because the money flows from Washington from a number of orifices outside the Treasury Department, and an accurate tracking is simply not possible.

We say this because in fiscal 2024, non-Treasury disbursing offices “were estimated to be responsible for 181 million payments totaling over $1.5 trillion,” says the White House, roughly 22% of the entirety of federal dollars disbursed. Combine this fact with the fraud that is being uncovered and it’s obvious we’ve reached crisis levels.

The article concludes:

The only logical solution is to limit the possibilities by thoroughly downsizing the beast, which has grown well beyond the point to which its size has nurtured and sustained the “professionalized the pathways of corruption” and “is doing many more things than can be done with tolerable honesty.”

We are realists and understand that shrinking Washington is about as easy as threading a needle with a rope.

But Donald Trump was elected to decrease the length, width, and depth of the federal government, and while his efforts after eight years will be modest at best, Americans do have the ballot box to elect presidential and congressional candidates who will continue what he started. Maybe the Minnesota scandal is a watershed moment that will anger voters enough for them to understand what they have to do.

Shrinking government was at the root of the founding of the Tea Party. Unfortunately, some of the people involved in that movement have either aged out and become complacent. It is time for everyone to get involved in putting pressure on the government to downsize and cut spending.

The Impact Of The Biden Administration On The Poor

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The Biden administration was economically rough for most Americans. Inflation skyrocketed, wages did not keep up, and jobs growth (after the real numbers came out) was slow. On October 3rd, Issues & Insights posted an article providing some concrete information about the impact of the Biden administration.

The article reports:

Even before he was president, Biden was fond of demanding that the rich pay their “fair share,” which makes a snappy sound bite but leaves open exactly what a “fair share” is and who gets to decide what rates are “fair.”

Fortunately, Biden never got his billionaire tax.

But he did succeed in making life more difficult for the poor. Both the overall and child poverty rates swelled while he was in office. The overall poverty rate grew by 40.2% from 2020 to 2024. The child poverty rate spiked by 38.1% over that same period.

“If you choose 2019 as your point of comparison, the increase in poverty under Biden is bad. If you choose 2020, it’s catastrophic,” says Jacobin magazine, which considers itself “a leading voice of the American left” that offers a “socialist perspective.”

As it happens, 2019 was the year Biden told “rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser” that poverty was “the one thing that can bring this country down.” Salon said he “listed several new programs to help the poor that he would fund if elected.”

“We have all the money we need to do it,” he said.

This is typical of Democrats. They have promised for the better part of a century that they will pull the poor out of poverty if they can just get their hands on more of other people’s money. Yet it never works that way. Biden and others can whine that poverty soared during his miserable presidency because they couldn’t raise taxes on the wealthy, but soaking the rich does nothing for the poor but hurt them.

Our history clearly shows that when tax rates are cut, economic growth follows, and everyone, yes, even the poor, benefits. Economist Art Laffer, who drew that famous curve that “showed the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues” and helped shape Ronald Reagan’s growth-boosting economic policies, has made a career of explaining why this is.

He has argued, quite accurately, that the economy underperforms when the highest marginal income tax rates are raised, and that the opposite occurs – the economy overperforms – when the highest marginal income tax rates are cut. He has further said that redistributing dollars to those with lower incomes from those who are more well off diminishes both parties’ incentives to work.

People are more inclined to work hard when they get to keep what they earn. It is demoralizing (to say the least) for a worker who works overtime to support his family to have to send 30 or 40 percent of his earnings to the state and federal government.

Google Really Hasn’t Changed

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On September 29, Issues & Insights posted an article about their recent experience with Google censorship.

The article reports:

In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the tech colossus said that under pressure from the administration, it silenced voices that were challenging Joe Biden’s COVID-19 policies.

“Senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” it said in a letter to Jordan.

And, as a supposed sign of good faith, Google said it would “provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”

That this admission comes amid the left’s screaming fits about President Donald Trump’s supposed efforts to silence dissent is interesting. But what’s more curious, and more troubling, is the fact that Google continues to violate what it claims to be its “unwavering” commitment to free speech.

The article includes the following:

The article concludes:

Opinion columns that point out peculiarities in the 2020 elections are routinely blacklisted. We’ve even had our “What We’re Reading” news roundups and articles reporting on our own I&I/TIPP Poll results demonetized by Google.

Is this what Google considers an “unwavering commitment” to free expression?

Our articles may be hard-hitting. People might disagree with them – as many of our readers do in the comments section. We make mistakes from time to time (which we acknowledge and correct).

But none of this comes anywhere close to being “dangerous” or “harmful.”

We also seriously doubt advertisers are clamoring for their ads not to appear on Issues & Insights. Which means that Google’s ad bans are nothing more than an attempt by this unrepentant left-wing behemoth to handicap content it doesn’t like by demonetizing it.

We aren’t cowed by this pressure. In fact, we are hoping to raise a relatively modest amount of money from our readers to permanently go ad-free. (See our Kill the Ads campaign here.)

But we are quite certain that many publishers simply won’t touch subjects that Google considers off limits for fear of a massive revenue hit.

Perhaps Rep. Jordan can follow up with Google and ask it what it is, exactly, that this company considers “free expression” and why it continues to demonetize content for purely political reasons.

Censorship isn’t dead. It’s up to the voters to look past the censorship and develop their own sources.

Another Obama/Biden Scandal

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There is an Obama scandal that has not been widely discussed. This is the scandal that is actually the most important one to every American.

On Friday, Issues & Insights reported:

Weren’t we assured that Barack Obama went “into and out of office with not a whiff of scandal”? Yes we were. Former Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen told us so, as did many others. But it wasn’t true. There are many, the most recent a claim that Obama, and then Joe Biden, pressured bank executives to deny services to conservatives. It’s a serious charge that, like the Russia hoax, makes Watergate look like a sandbox squabble.

Here’s what we’ve learned: According to Fox Business, major bank executives said “they were under pressure by the Obama and Biden administrations to deny services to individuals and businesses for political reasons.”

One executive said the “pressures were very, very real. When your regulator gives you a suggestion, it’s not a suggestion, it’s an order. The political stuff is very real, those pressures are real.”

This is known as “political debanking” and is “the involuntary termination of banking services to individuals and organizations based on their political or religious views,” says Todd J. Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, who further “argues that access to financial services is a prerequisite for exercising constitutional rights.”

…Operation Choke Point was a creation of the Obama Justice Department. Its mission was “to ‘choke out’ companies the administration considers a ‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable, despite the fact that they are legal businesses,” says a House Oversight Committee report. “The goal of the initiative is to deny these merchants access to the banking and payments networks that every business needs to survive.”

The whistleblowers told Fox that “ambiguity in federal laws was exploited by regulators under the Obama and Biden administrations in order to pursue political objectives. According to one executive, banks were pressured to deny services to certain industries as part of Operation Choke Point and Operation Choke Point 2.0,” which was “carried out by the prudential regulators to target and debank the digital asset ecosystem” during the Biden years.

I personally know someone who was in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. She attended the Trump speech, but did not go to the Capitol–she has stated that she saw Antifa people changing into Trump gear and decided to go back to her hotel. She used her Bank of America debit card to buy a hamburger. Bank of America shared any transactions made in Washington on that weekend with the government. As a result of that transaction, her business PayPal account was canceled. This is not acceptable behavior.

Let’s Go Back To Real Cars With Real Engines!

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On Friday, Issues & Insights posted an article about an item in the Big Beautiful Bill that was not highly publicized.

The article reports:

One of the most important provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill has gone completely unnoticed, but promises to make the auto industry great again.

For 50 years, the federal government has been forcing fuel economy standards on auto companies. If the average fuel economy of the cars sold in a year exceeded a federal standard, the companies had to cough up enormous penalties.

Passed in 1975 as a way to deal with an energy crisis (that was caused by government price controls), “corporate average fuel economy” (CAFE) standards – required the fleet of cars sold by an automaker to achieve an arbitrary miles-per-gallon goal. If they missed the goal, they paid hefty annual fines.

From the beginning, these standards were a disaster, forcing automakers to radically downsize their fleet, which research showed cost thousands of lives because, all things being equal, smaller, lighter cars are less safe than larger ones.

In fact, a 2002 National Academy of Sciences found that these fuel economy standards not only boosted the cost of cars, but may have caused as many as 2,600 more traffic fatalities just in 1993.

The article notes:

In this first term, Trump rolled the standard back a bit, only to have Joe Biden come in and impose standards specifically designed to force most cars sold to be electric. The standards would have cost automakers billions in fines for failing to meet the fuel-economy targets.

This time around, Trump is again planning to roll the CAFE standards back. But Congress did him one better. Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, if a car company sells cars that, on average, exceed whatever the fuel-economy limit is technically in force in a given year, they pay… nothing. The mandate is still in place, but the penalty is now $0.00. (Republicans pulled off the same trick with the dreaded Obamacare insurance mandate — zeroing out the penalty rather than trying to get the mandate repealed.)

Hopefully this will be the end of the electric Ford Mustang where they have to manufacture the engine growl electronically and the beginning of going back to the real Mustang design with the real growl!

How The Media Works

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On July 11th, Issues & Insights posted an article about food stamps. The article is about how the media has dealt with the use of food stamps in the past few years. We heard very little about food stamp usage during the time the President Biden was in office. Now it is again important (according to the mainstream media) to bring up the  subject.

The article reports:

A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”

The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”

But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?

Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.

Axios is hardly the only news site to claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill “slashes” food stamps – which now goes under the euphemism Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – and will cause millions to go hungry.

The article concludes:

Instead, Biden was praised for massively expanding spending on food stamps.

In his first year, SNAP spending shot up 43%. The New York Times reported at the time that Biden engineered “the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history,” which will “add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans.”

All the OBBB does is set food stamp spending back on its previous, pre-Biden course.

Bear in mind that all this information is easily available to any reporter covering this story.

Of course, there’s the deeper problem with all these horror stories – namely, the assumption that a decline in the number of people getting food stamps is a bad thing.

Shouldn’t the goal be that nobody is getting food stamps? That no one is dependent on government to help them afford groceries, because the economy is booming, people are earning decent wages, and inflation is under control?

We can expect more of the media’s “we’re all going to die” scenario as the Big Beautiful Bill goes into effect.

The Circles And Graphs Tell The Story

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted the results of polls taken to evaluate the presidency of Joe Biden. The numbers were not surprising.

Here are some of the circles and graphs:

The article notes:

To say Biden’s time in the Oval Office is viewed by most Americans as a disastrous presidency is no exaggeration. It would be hard to find another president who so comprehensively failed in key policy areas in the eyes of voters.

And these bad grades are for specific policy issues, as noted, not for other factors that have also seriously hurt Biden’s presidential reputation.

These include such things as the Big Media and Democratic Party’s efforts to downplay Biden’s obvious age-related mental decline, the socially damaging COVID lockdowns, the 20% jump in overall inflation, an 18% surge in homelessness over the last year, Biden’s alleged corruption in taking millions of dollars from foreign sources and pardoning his own son for crimes he committed, and an under-reported surge in in crimes by illegal immigrants crossing largely unprotected borders.

Biden has been a disaster for Democrats, but an unexpected bonus for Donald Trump and a newly revived Republican Party. In the recent election, the GOP made inroads in traditionally Democratic demographic groups, including Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans.

Dissatisfaction with Biden in specific and Democratic policies in general has led to a significant political realignment in the U.S., with Republicans broadening their base voters among key minority groups while also making strong inroads with working class voters who have typically supported Democratic candidates.

It is interesting to me that the majority of Democrats polled chose to park their common sense at the door.

A Familiar Story

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Recently, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) supervisor was fired for telling workers to avoid houses with Trump signs. Now, Marn’i Washington, the fired employee, is saying that she is a scapegoat and the problem is much higher up. Before we dismiss this as the complaint of a disgruntled ex-employee, there are some things we should consider.

On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted an article reminding us:

And the New York Post reported yesterday that:

A former FEMA official backed up Washington’s claims, telling The Post that the practice of skipping Trump-supporting houses is an open secret at the agency that has been going on for years.

The rest of the mainstream press seems utterly uninterested in this new revelation. We couldn’t find a story in either the Washington Post or the New York Times about it in the past 24 hours.

If this all sounds familiar, it should.

Those who’ve been around a while will remember the IRS scandal during President Barack Obama’s tenure, when the IRS was caught red-handed targeting conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election by holding up their applications for non-profit status.

At first, the IRS claimed it was the work of two rogue agents in its Cincinnati office. That turned out to be a lie, as evidence started to emerge that the instructions were coming from officials in Washington, D.C., all the way up to the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division, Lois Lerner.

…And when it turned out there was a coordinated effort – one specifically designed to thwart conservative attempts to get out the vote in 2012 – the press buried it and moved on as quickly as possible.

As a result, the Justice Department let Lois Lerner skate – she retired on a full pension. The head of the IRS at the time, John Koskinen, who lied and stonewalled a congressional investigation, served out his term. Obama dismissed it as a “phony scandal.”

And in the end, nothing was done to root out the politicization of this agency. In fact, as soon as Democrats had a chance under President Joe Biden, they showered the IRS with an additional $80 billion to hire more enforcement agents.

The article concludes:

…And like the IRS scandal under Obama, and the FBI scandals under Trump, the media will show zero interest in finding out just how high this weaponization of government goes or how many other agencies are infested with political vermin who are willing to use their powers to coddle liberals and attack conservatives.

Nope. Instead, they are writing stories about how terrified government staffers are at the prospect that Trump will finally carry out his plan to drain the swamp of political hacks masquerading as non-partisan government bureaucrats.

And that is the reason President Trump was elected.

The Ins And Outs After The Election

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On November 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article providing a list of “ins and outs” following President Trump’s election victory. The list is a beautiful illustration of biased media reporting and how quickly it can change.

Here is part of the list”

  • Out: Questioning election results is anti-Democratic!       
  • In: Trump stole the election!!
  • Out: Election fraud is not a real problem!          
  • In: Trump stole the election!!
  • Out: There’s no evidence of election fraud, saying otherwise is a lie!       
  • In: Trump stole the election!!
  • Out: Trump is an authoritarian!
  • In: Trump wants to cut the size of government!!
  • Out: Our elections are the most secure in the world!   
  • In: Trump stole the election!!
  • Out: Questioning the president’s mental health is unpatriotic!      
  • In: Trump misspoke!! Invoke the 25th Amendment!!
  • Out: Government censorship is no big deal!      
  • In: Trump will censor us!!
  • Out: “Weaponization of government” is a right-wing fantasy!      
  • In: Trump will take away Justice’s ability to target Republicans!!
  • Out: The economy is doing great!                      
  • In: Why hasn’t Trump fixed the economy yet??
  • Out: There’s no border crisis!                             
  • In: Why hasn’t Trump fixed the border crisis yet??
  • Out: Crime rates are falling!                              
  • In: Why hasn’t Trump done anything about rising crime rates yet??
  • Out: Jan. 6, 2021, was an attempted insurrection!  
  • In: Congress must refuse to certify the election results on Jan.6, 2025!!
  • Out: We must save democracy!                          
  • In: Down with democracy, it failed us!!
  • Out: Violence is never the answer!                    
  • In: Emotions are running high!!
  • Out: I’m leaving the country if Trump wins!     
  • In: I’m still planning to leave, dammit!!
  • Out: Project 2025!
  • In: Project 2025?
  • Out: Trump will take away our freedoms!         
  • In: Trump wants to repeal government mandates!!
  • Out: Trump is a fascist.
  • In: Trump can’t make the trains run on time.
  • Out: Trump is a racist, fascist, threat to democracy, and his supporters are semi-fascist garbage.
  • In: It’s up to Trump to unite the country.
  • Out: Kamala is amazing!                                    
  • In: Harris was a terrible candidate!!
  • Out: Kamala is smart to avoid taking positions on issues!
  • In: Harris should have talked more about the issues!!

Please follow the link for the rest of the list. It is awesome!

Using Taxpayer Money To Create The Illusion Of Fiscal Responsibility

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On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a change in Medicare law included in the Inflation Reduction Act and the consequences of that change.

The article reports:

We have no doubt that, in the years to come, the media will describe the Biden-Harris administration as “scandal-free.” But that’s only because for the past four years they’ve vigorously ignored any and all scandals.

Case in point is the $15 billion giveaway that Biden-Harris snuck through this summer without a single hearing, vote, or advance notice, in an attempt to buy seniors’ votes. Followed up by a campaign email to these same seniors on behalf of Kamala Harris, also paid for by taxpayers.

Is any of this legal? Who cares, if it helps Harris win in November? At least, that’s how the mainstream press is treating this scandal.

The article explains:

The criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” that Joe Biden signed on Aug. 16, 2022, after Harris cast the tie-breaking vote, including among its many horrid provisions, several that affected Medicare Part D – the drug benefit for seniors – is set to go into effect in 2025.

Biden and now Harris have been running around claiming that this was a tremendous deal for seniors, except those provisions added huge costs to these drug plans that were going to jack up monthly premiums for this benefit by an average of $110 – a 179% increase!

So, to avoid that, the administration conjured up a “demonstration project” whereby insurance companies would agree to hold monthly premium increases to $35 or less in exchange for a pile of cash.

The Congressional Budget Office figures this will cost $5 billion a year – in borrowed money – plus another $2 billion a year in added interest costs on the national debt.

Critics have pointed out that this wasn’t a “demonstration project,” normally understood as a small-scale effort to test a change in rules governing a program. Instead, it was a subsidy handed out to every insurance company offering Part D plans.

So basically, all Americans are paying for seniors’ Part D Medicare so that the public won’t know that the cost went up. Well, I just told them.

The Health and Human Services sent out a letter touting the Medicare changes.

This is a part of that letter:

“I want to make sure you’re aware of the historic changes to Medicare that are lowering health care costs,” it begins, that are “a result of the Inflation Reduction Act that I signed into law and that Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to secure.” It goes on to say that “these are just some of the ways my administration has worked to help you save money on your health care costs.”

(No mention is made of the $15 billion they’re planning to spend to make budget-shattering premium increases.)

The letter is flagrant electioneering, paid for by taxpayers, and in clear violation of the Hatch Act, which outlaws the use of federal staff or resources “for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”

Last week, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel saying that the email “was entirely political in both its purpose and language,” and “has been described as ‘a sales pitch for Kamala Harris.’”

Don’t look for this story in the mainstream media.

Another Consequence Of The “Inflation Reduction Act”

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The Inflation Reduction Act was bad news. It did pretty much everything except reduce inflation. Now it is becoming clear that the law is going to have a very negative impact on the cost of Medicare Part D for senior citizens.

Issues & Insights reports:

Go to Kamala Harris’ campaign website and among the very short list of alleged achievements is this: “She cast the deciding vote to lower drug prices and cap insulin prices for our seniors.”

The only problem is that drug costs for seniors have skyrocketed since Harris signed that bill.

Harris is pointing to the criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which got zero Republican votes, and which was supposed to lower the cost of prescription drugs by giving, as Harris puts it, “Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma.”

When George W. Bush established Medicare Part D, he let private insurers negotiate with drug companies over prices and then compete for seniors’ business. The result was a program that cost both seniors and taxpayers far less than government bureaucrats had expected, offered seniors a wide range of options, and had premiums that barely budged for more than a decade.

…Seniors next year will face premiums that are 57% higher, on average, than they were in 2021.

“Seniors in some states face even bigger hits to their wallets,” finds a state-by-state analysis done by the Heritage Foundation. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, Medicare drug plan premiums jumped by more than 90% in 10 states. Premiums more than doubled in three of those states (California, 122%; New York, 116%; and Nevada, 104%).”

And the number of plans offered has been cut in half. Which means less competition, which in turn will fuel further price hikes.

As the Congressional Budget Office noted in a recent report, premiums are shooting up “in part because the Part D redesign led to higher costs for those plans.”

…Here’s how the leftist news site Politico put it:

One of President Joe Biden’s signature domestic achievements is set to cause a significant spike in Medicare premiums for millions of Americans just ahead of the November election. Now, his administration is preparing to dole out billions of dollars to private insurance companies to blunt the impact of the increase.

The jump in premiums is a consequence of efforts to reduce what older Americans pay for prescription drugs, part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Insurance companies are on the hook for what patients used to pay and are raising drug plan premiums to make up the difference.

This isn’t a “signature domestic achievement.” It’s a scandal of epic proportions. And it gets worse.

Two months ago, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers issued a statement noting that not only is the “Inflation Reduction Act” costing seniors, it has led to a 35% increase in the cost of new drugs and the cancellation of three dozen research programs by pharmaceutical companies.

Vice-President Harris was the deciding vote on The Inflation Reduction Act–she broke the tie.

The Problem With Kamala Harris In Six Numbers

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article listing six numbers that are a problem for the Kamala Harris campaign.

These are the numbers:

1. $17,080 – According to the House Budget Committee, that $17,080 was, as of this summer, the annual Harris-Biden “inflation tax” on the average American household.

2. 662,566 – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has copped to having more than 600,000 illegals with criminal backgrounds on its national docket…

3. 323,000 – 32,000 unaccompanied children who, according to the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, did not appear for court dates between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – and 291,000 who never even received Notices to Appear during that period? For whom ICE admits it has “no assurance” that they “safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor?”

4. 0 – Kamala’s commitment to net zero – from which she has not backed off, and cannot without a revolt in her radical progressive base – amounts to the fracking ban she claims is not in the cards.

5. and 6. $6.75 trillion and 5,044 – The former represents federal outlays for fiscal 2024. The latter is the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. No sane individual would make this woman-child (and watch the last 20 seconds in particular), the chief executive in control of an enterprise of this size with this level of firepower.

On November 5th, the voters will decide whether or not these numbers are acceptable.

What Global Warming Is Really About

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On Friday, Issues & Insights posted an article about global warming. The article includes a number of statements by people who claim to be alarmed at global warming that might cause you to question their motives.

The article reports those statements:

  • Christiana Figueres, one-time executive secretary of United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the climate activists’ agenda is not to protect the environment but to break capitalism. The task ahead, she said in 2015, is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
  • The late Rajenda Pachauri was the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman until 2015. He openly conceded “the protection of planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems” was “more than a mission” to him. It was his “religion” and “dharma.”
  • Activist and influential author Naomi Klein once wondered if the fearmongering was “the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” The world must “change, or be changed,” she says, because an “economic system” — our free and open markets — has caused environmental “wreckage.”
  • Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said almost five years ago that Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming. She of course had a plan, not to deal with the changes, but to pass Democratic Party policies. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” former Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti said, according to the Washington Post Magazine. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked an aide to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee while the pair met at a Washington, D.C. coffee shop in May. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

The free market will always provide a cleaner environment than government regulation. It should also be noted that many of those complaining about the carbon footprint of our cars are flying around the world in private jets. If they truly believed climate change was an existential crisis, would they be doing that?

 

 

The Quest For Unity

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America right now is a divided country–there are not only major divisions between the major political parties, there are major divisions within each of the two political parties. It’s hard to find unity anywhere.

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article titled, “Want More Unity And Freedom? Try Returning To Constitutional Federalism.” What a great idea.

The article states:

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.

The article concludes:

Power in American life has been increasingly taken from individuals and local self-government, to be increasingly centralized in the federal government. Federalizing everything, including plainly private and local choices, has not benefited nor unified America, as clearly indicated by the increasing intensity of the battles to control what is to be imposed on everyone. We need to resurrect the federalism of the Constitution again, leaving people to make their own decisions outside of those very few areas where their choices must necessarily be in common. 

Felix Morley (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and college administrator) saw this clearly:

The value of federalism, in preventing the prostitution of freedom, becomes more clear … the founding fathers put restraints on government so that the governed might be free.

If America is to re-establish federalism, the liberties it protects and the far greater potential for unity it  preserves, Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalism is a great place to begin. As its cover summarized:

A government of free men is like a strong-standing arch. The solid stones of which it is built is called freedom. Neither the building blocks of individual liberty nor the arch of freedom will stand secure without the keystone of federalism. It is federalism that holds up the arch. It is federalism that makes possible the preservation of both liberty and freedom.

That is why lovers of liberty and freedom — self-ownership and solely voluntary arrangements, over as wide a canvas as possible — need to rediscover the force of federalism in resisting the ever-growing reach of centralized political determination, which is tyranny, even when it is tyranny of the majority.

If democracy is at variance with federalism, and if federalism is conducive to freedom, it would follow that, far from maintaining freedom, democracy is inimical to it.

If the American people want unity, they need to vote for liberty.

 

Regulations Matter

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On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the regulatory nightmare that is being created by the Biden administration.

The article reports:

Just after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in November 1980, economic adviser David Stockman wrote a memo warning the president-elect that he faced an “economic Dunkirk” thanks to the disastrous economy he was inheriting.

Among Stockman’s warnings was that the Carter administration had set a “ticking regulatory time bomb” that would blow up the economy.

“They have spent the past four years ‘tooling up’ for implementation through a mind-boggling outpouring of rulemakings, interpretative guidelines, and major litigation – all heavily biased toward maximization of regulatory scope and burden,” Stockman wrote.

Stockman – who would later serve as head of the Office of Management and Budget and ended up losing Reagan’s trust – had that part wrong. While Carter was a disaster as president, at least he showed an ability to learn on the job. And so late in his term, Carter embarked on a deregulatory campaign to fight inflation. Among other things, he freed the trucking and airline industries from onerous government mandates.

“Carter gave Reagan the phenomenal gift of deregulation. Combined with the (Reagan) tax cuts that largely took effect in 1983, the economy went on a growth tear,” wrote Brian Domitrovic, a scholar at the Laffer Center, in Forbes. “All the capital that Reagan freed up via his tax cuts found room to roam in the deregulated world which Carter had set up.”

Unfortunately the Biden administration has not studied the lessons of history. The article lists some of the regulations the Biden administration has put in place:

  • Force car owners into inconvenient, expensive, range-deficient EVs.
  • Impose emission standards on large trucks that, the industry says, will be “the most challenging, costly and potentially disruptive heavy-duty emissions rule in history.”
  • Sharply raise the cost of drilling for oil and gas on public lands and raise the cost of water.
  • Make it nearly impossible to get permits to expand or build new facilities in most areas of the country without violating impossibly strict clean-air standards.

The article concludes:

In his 1980 memo, Stockman said avoiding an economic Dunkirk required “an initial administration economic program that is so bold, sweeping, and sustained that it totally dominates the Washington agenda (and) holds promise of propelling the economy into vigorous expansion and the financial markets into a bullish psychology.”

Reagan delivered.

It will take even greater levels of boldness today. And while there is hope for such a comprehensive program under the return of Donald Trump, if Biden wins in November there will be no rescuing the economy this time.

Deregulation will be one of the keys to reviving the struggling economy. Despite the fact that the Biden administration keeps telling us that the economy is strong, people are working two jobs to keep up with inflation, there are layoffs in a number of industries, and high interest rates are making it very difficult for new home owners to afford a home.

Exactly Who Does Congress Represent?

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted the results of a Scott Rasmussen poll.

The article reports:

Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.

But more than a third of the elite 1% he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are “politically obsessed” – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69%.

Keep in mind that this elite 1% group is overwhelmingly liberal. According to Rasmussen, these are mainly well-educated urbanites who make more than $150,000 a year and think Joe Biden is doing a great job. Nearly three-quarters identify as Democrats.

They are also highly influential when it comes to policy, and they are completely out of touch with everyday Americans. A few examples from the survey:

    • Nearly 60% say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
    • More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of energy and food to combat the threat of “climate change.”
    • Nearly three-quarters (70%) of the elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
    • More than two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
    • Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are financially better off than before COVID, compared with 20% of the general public.

These elites are also the people who are constantly wailing and gnashing their teeth about how Donald Trump is a “grave threat to democracy.” You can’t turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go to any mainstream news site without being warned that “democracy is on the ballot this November,” or told that Trump is a wannabe dictator, his followers semi-fascists, blah, blah, blah.

Yet most of these same elites would be happy to see Biden and the Democratic Party rob and cheat to steal an election rather than let Trump win a second term in office.

It is time Americans elected people who actually represent them. Our current elected officials clearly represent only a small minority of the people. All of us need to get involved in primary elections to change this–until we change the candidates, we won’t change the results.

When The Numbers Just Don’t Add Up

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Issues & Insights posted an article Monday about President Biden’s claims in his State of the Union address about the taxes the wealthy pay versus the taxes he thinks the wealthy should pay. The bottom line is ‘simply hang on to your wallet no matter how much you make,’ but the article refutes some of his claims.

The article reports:

First, consider his claim that the tax rate paid by billionaires is 8.2%. That plays well with soak-the-rich leftists. But where did he get this number?

Not from the IRS. It calculates the actual tax rate that various income groups pay, including the ultra-rich. Its data show that the 400 people with the biggest incomes in America were paying an average tax rate of more than 23%. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation figures that the tax rate on the top 0.4% of families is 26%.

So where does Biden come up with an 8.2% tax rate? He changes the definition of taxable income to include all unrealized gains from investments.

If you have money in the stock market, any gains in the value of those stocks would count as income to Biden, even if you don’t sell the stock. Presumably so would any gains in the value of your home. Or the value of any other assets you possess.

By artificially inflating income, Biden can make their tax burden seem tiny. 

The idea of taxing unrealized gains — in other words, extending the income tax to things that aren’t income — could very well be unconstitutional in addition to being economically reckless.

Just for the record, Americans are already taxed on unrealized gains–every year we pay a real estate tax on what the city or county assesses is the value of our house. We haven’t sold our house. The only actual gain from our house is having a place to live, yet every year we pay taxes on it.

The article concludes:

What about his claim that taxing the wealth — not the income — of billionaires would raise $500 billion?

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Except Biden is hoping nobody notices the caveat — that it’s $500 billion over 10 years. In other words, $50 billion a year.

Even that might sound like a lot … until you put it in context.

That $50 billion wouldn’t even cover one month’s worth of interest payments on the national debt, which was $69.2 billion in January.

It wouldn’t even pay half of the increase in the deficit in the first five months of this year compared with last year. (The deficit from October through February was $830 billion, which is up $108 billion from the same months the year before.)

The idea that an extra $50 billion could finance a new childcare entitlement, paid leave, and home care isn’t just ludicrous, it’s insane.

We don’t expect Biden to know or understand what he’s reading on the teleprompter, but shame on anyone else for believing the lies he’s spewing.

Someone needs to explain the Laffer Curve to the Biden administration.