Elections

What Happened to Serious Economic Policy Debates?

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Economic policy determines whether economies, and hence citizen real income grows nationally and how that income is distributed. The invisible hand of a market economy guides investment to its most profitable, hence most productive uses. Not so for the heavy hand of the state. The Soviet Union saved and invested five to six times as much as the US, but productivity lagged and the economy eventually collapsed. Taxpayers have some control over “public” investment performance at, e.g., the small private level (condo, coop) but voter influence declines as the distance and size of the governing body increases. Making national investment policy even more difficult is the fact that even highly productive public investment may not pay off until well into the future. While rational economic policy would devolve decision-making and funding to the lowest possible level, the federal government’s lack of a hard budget constraint allows it to fund without accountability. The Constitution’s enumerated powers has proven an insufficient constraint on this perverse political incentive.

 

During President Trump’s term, pre-pandemic, real wages rose steadily at about 2% reflecting the steady real economic growth, but fell under Biden by over 2% due to inflation. Black unemployment and poverty fell under Trump, and continued to fall under Biden. While Trump proposed deep budget cuts, the Congress passed essentially the Democrats’ budget under both Ryan and Pelosi. Trump passed what in the ’60s under Kennedy was called a Keynesian tax cut, now called a “voodoo economics” supply-side tax cut for the rich to spur business investment, that worked essentially as planned.

 

Trump takes undue credit for the good performance during his term, for which the main stream media (MSM) accuse him of lying. Biden does the same, for which the MSM cheers. Independent voters favor Trump over Biden by 45% to 34% on the management of the economy. Numerous Democratic commentators have speculated that voter mistrust of Biden reflects FOX fake news popping up on TV sets uninvited to brainwash unsuspecting viewers.

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“Israel’s strategic game of survival”

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Caroline Glick:

(March 15, 2024 / JNS)
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power on the Senate floor on Thursday was the latest sign that Hamas’s strategy is working. On the “Caroline Glick Show” this week, U.S. Military Academy professor Col. John Spencer, who chairs West Point’s Urban Warfare Studies Program, explained that the terrorist organization’s goal for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.
 
Hamas, he said, knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel. “They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.”
 
“Their only goal is to survive. … It’s all about time. They want to survive Israel’s attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war,” said Spencer…

Foreign and Domestic

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I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… (From the Oath of Enlistment)

It honestly kind of slipped my mind at first, that Monday morning was the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States. It’s been 22 years since that horrible day. I had other stuff – purely personal concerns on my mind.

For one, every single thing that I had to say about 9-11, I said, wrote and posted ages ago … and why re-run, one more time? There’s just nothing more to say, any more than there would be anything more to say about the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 – one more tedious rerun of a recollection of where I was, what I was doing. It’s been a lifetime, in a way – and for high-school and college graduates this year, it’s been all their lifetimes.

The other thing – a more recent tragic anniversary which looms closer in time is the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Abbey Gate suicide bombing there which killed more than a hundred civilians and thirteen American service personnel. Those deaths meant so little to President Biden that he kept looking at his watch during the ceremony at Andrews AFB when their coffins were unloaded. Those thirteen were the merely last American military lives frittered away in almost two decades of seemingly endless and pointless deployments to Afghanistan, culminated in a departure so botched that I’m still shocked that only a single commissioned officer resigned in protest. Sec Def Austin and General “Thoroughly Modern” Milley apparently feel no shame over bungling their responsibility to the Nation so horribly.

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