Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.
There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.
He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.
But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.
To grasp how a man known as much for his messages of tolerance as for his artistic genius could be canceled for racism, you have to understand what’s actually happening here. The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.
There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chinese Communist Party, at the direction of Mao Zedong, called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. All of these stood in the way of Mao’s socialist ideology, so they had to be destroyed.
Children and students were encouraged by the communist government to inform on their parents and elders, to shame and condemn them in public. The guilty were forced to recant in “struggle sessions,” during which they were mocked and humiliated, sometimes tortured, sometimes murdered. Before it was over, millions were dead.
We’re obviously not there yet, but the woke revolutionaries who now run our elite institutions and exert outsized influence in the corridors of power are following this same pattern.
First, they come for the monuments, destroying the icons of the past and re-writing history to turn even our national heroes and Founding Fathers into enemies. The animating ethos of the mobs pulling down Confederate statues is the same as The New York Times editors who gave us the 1619 Project. And because there is no limiting principle to iconoclasm, they have moved on from Confederates.
Category: US politics
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No comments on Dr. Seuss today, you tomorrow
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“I was still a Marxist after taking Milton Friedman’s course [at the University of Chicago],” says free market economist and social critic Thomas Sowell. “One summer in the government was enough to let me say government is really not the answer.”
Known for provocative and best-selling books such as Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions, and last year’s Charter Schools and Their Enemies, the internationally renowned scholar is the subject of a new documentary and biography, both authored by Jason L. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Wall Street Journal columnist. Beyond the breadth and depth of his interests, what sets Sowell apart is that he “puts truth above popularity and doesn’t concern himself with being politically correct,” Riley tells Reason‘s Nick Gillespie. “It’s an adherence to empiricism, to facts and logic and putting that ahead of theory. [Sowell] is much more interested in how an idea has panned out…rather than simply what the intent is.”
Among Sowell’s chief insights are the realizations that there are no perfect solutions, only tradeoffs, and that information, knowledge, and wisdom are dispersed throughout society, often in unarticulated ways that experts and elitists ignore. As Sowell wrote in his memoir, growing up poor and segregated during the Depression, he had “daily contact with people who were neither well-educated nor particularly genteel, but who had practical wisdom far beyond what I had,” which gave him “a lasting respect for the common sense of ordinary people, a factor routinely ignored by the intellectuals among whom I would later make my career.”
At age 90, Sowell is still writing and publishing. His greatest scholarship may be behind him, but his body of work will continue to have a profound impact on our understanding of the world long after he’s gone.
Note the mention of Friedman, who tried to get on the faculty of UW–Madison, but ran into the anti-Semitism of the progressives of the economics faculty.
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… noted on the Corner the perplexing reaction (from all the usual suspects) to Senator Rand Paul’s entirely legitimate line of questioning aimed at Rachel Levine, Biden’s pick for assistant health secretary. The absurd headlines and “hot takes” keep on coming.
“Exchange between GOP senator, transgender nominee draws fire from Democrats,” reports the Washington Post. “Rand Paul’s ignorant questioning of Rachel Levine showed why we need her in government,” opines a writer for the same publication.
“1st transgender nominee deflects inflammatory questions from GOP senator,” reports ABC News. “Rand Paul Launches Into Transphobic Rant Against Trans Nominee,” opines The Daily Beast.
“Rachel Levine Responds to Rand Paul About Transgender Medicine,” reports the New York Times, neglecting to mention that Levine’s “response” was one of sheer evasion.
Talk about burying the lede. Contrary to what progressive pundits insist, the real story of interest here is not Levine’s transgender status, but rather the fact that Levine refused to answer a crucial and highly topical question related to child welfare.
Here’s the real story. What Senator Paul asked and what Levine refused to answer was this: “Do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one’s sex?” And this, “Do you support the government’s intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia?”
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Ryan Saavedra:
Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden during his Sunday CPAC speech over the issue of women’s sports.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are even pushing policies that would destroy women’s sports,” Trump said. “Lot of new records are being broken in women’s sports. Hate to say that, ladies, but got a lot of new records that [are] being shattered. You know, for years, the weightlifting, every ounce is like a big deal for many years. All of a sudden, somebody comes along and beats it by 100 pounds.”
“Now, young girls and women are incensed that they are now being forced to compete against those who are biological males,” Trump continued. “It’s not good for women. It’s not good for women’s sports, which worked so long and so hard to get to where they are. The records that stood for years, even decades, are now being smashed with ease, smashed. If this is not changed, women’s sports, as we know it, will die, they’ll end, it’ll end. What coach, if I’m a coach, you know, I want to be a great coach, what coach, as an example, wants to recruit a young woman to compete if her record can easily be broken by somebody who was born a man? Not too many of those coaches around, right? If they are around, they won’t be around long because they’re gonna have a big problem when the record is, ‘We’re 0-16, but we’re getting better.’ No, I think it’s crazy, I think it’s just crazy what’s happening. We must protect the integrity of women’s sports — so important.”
“Is that controversial?” Trump asked as the audience cheered.
I’m waiting to read a defense of men — and dress however they like, and get whatever surgery like, anyone who was born XY will be a man until he dies — competing in women’s sports.
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For years, a school of economists has complained that US wages have been virtually stagnant for decades.
“Jobs are coming back, but pay isn’t. The median wage is still below where it was before the Great Recession,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said in 2015. “Last month, average pay actually fell.”
In fact, it’s not hard to find data showing that wages have barely increased since the 1970s, a figure many have used to stoke classy envy.
The truth is, there have always been problems with the claim that real wages (adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant for years. As economist Don Boudreaux has pointed out … Reich and others overlook several important factors—including how inflation is calculated, compensation outside of wages such as healthcare, and the distinction between individuals and statistics.
The stagnant wage narrative was always mostly wrong. Federal Reserve data (which uses a chain-weighted price index) shows US hourly earnings have seen impressive growth in recent years.
Nevertheless, if one does choose to use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to measure family incomes over the last two decades, the picture is indeed a bit bleaker—at least it was.
Government statistics, which use the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation, show that from 2002 through 2015 median weekly earnings didn’t budge at all, but surged between 2018 and 2020.
I’m not the first person to notice this stunning wage growth. Writing in Bloomberg, economist Karl W. Smith describes the growth in income using a slightly different metric, real median household income.
“In 2016, real median household income was $62,898, just $257 above its level in 1999,” writes Smith. “Over the next three years it grew almost $6,000, to $68,703.”
Indeed, median household incomes increased from $64,300 to $68,700 in 2018 alone—an increase of $4,400. To put it another way, US incomes increased more in 2018 than the previous 20 years combined. (Household incomes were $61,100 in 1998 and $64,300 at the end of 2017.)
The question, of course, is why did US incomes suddenly explode after decades of tepid growth? The answer is not difficult to find.
The year 2017 saw massive deregulation and passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Estimates placed the deregulation savings at $2 trillion. But what was likely even a bigger factor was the cut businesses saw in corporate taxes.
Prior to 2017, the US had the highest corporate tax in the developed world (if not the whole world). With a top bracket of 35 percent, its corporate tax rate was higher than Communist China and socialist Venezuela.
This was a terrible policy on a number of levels. For starters, the revenue-maximizing rate of a corporate tax is 15-25 percent, which means anything above that isn’t even generating more revenue, it’s simply punitive and economically harmful. (Evidence bears this out. The United Kingdom, for example, reduced its corporate tax rate and saw revenues grow.)
Second, high corporate taxes actually hurt workers more than “Big Business.” Tax experts point out that roughly 70 percent of what businesses earn in profits gets paid to workers in the form of wages and other benefits. So it’s no surprise to see that studies show that workers bear between 50 and 100 percent of the brunt of corporate income taxes.
But the reverse is also true: cutting corporate taxes leaves companies more capital to grow and invest.
“Lower corporate taxes increase rewards for improving techniques, technology, and increasing capital investments, which increase worker productivity and earnings,” writes economist Gary Galles. “They expand rewards for risk-taking and entrepreneurship in service of consumers. They reduce the substantial distortions caused by the tax. And those changes benefit others, such as workers and consumers.”
So in 2017, when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law, companies saw their tax rate fall from 35 percent to 21 percent. Just that fast, businesses suddenly had more capital to spend to grow their business, improve productivity, and hire more workers—and few things attract workers more than higher wages.
Media scoffed at the possibility that corporate tax cuts would actually result in wage increases for US workers. But the data speaks for itself: Families saw incomes increase faster than at any time in generations.
Moreover, though median wages surged, showing the benefits were broad-based, every segment benefited from these wage gains.
“The lowest quintile increased their pay more than the upper quintile,” Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist recently pointed out in a conversation with FEE’s Brad Polumbo.
To be sure, reducing the corporate tax rate wasn’t the sole factor for the surge in wages, but it was likely by far the biggest.
The surge in family incomes no doubt helped soften the impact of the economic destruction the world suffered in 2020 during the recession precipitated by economic lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.
Whether the wage gains continue may depend to some extent on the permanency of the corporate tax cut. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears poised to become the next US president, has signaled he’d restore the corporate tax to its 35 percent rate or raise it to 28 percent.
“Biden would make our business tax higher than China’s,” Norquist quipped. (He’s not wrong. China’s corporate tax rate stands at 25 percent.)
This appears unlikely to happen, however. Even if Biden’s claim was more than campaign rhetoric, it appears unlikely that he’ll have enough votes in the Senate to roll back the tax cuts.
Even more promising for US workers, Biden appears inclined to roll back Trump’s tariffs, which are basically taxes on Americans and imposed costs on businesses.
“When you put a tariff on steel, you make American cars not competitive anymore. You make everything made with steel less competitive,” Norquist observed. “We did a lot of damage to the American economy that way.”
If a Biden administration rolls back Trump’s tariffs while leaving the corporate tax rate in place, the US economy could build on the gains made prior to the arrival of the lockdowns.
That would be a winning formula for US workers, businesses, and the US economy.
Or just wait until the economy is in the toilet in two years.
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A lot of politicians and businessmen don’t understand that the press only has so much power as we give them. If people don’t trust corporate media — if people don’t respect them — then they don’t have much power at all.
Reporters in particular don’t seem to understand this give and take. By and large, reporters think of themselves as very important, very noble people putting their lives at risk to save American democracy in between brunch dates. Close your eyes and you can almost see chubby little Washington Post journos dramatically whipping their bangs out of their eyes as they whisper: “Democrathy dythe in darkneth.”
Elon Musk gets it, though. When a Washington Post reporter emailed him for comment on a story on how investors are worried he is stretched too thin — a story the reporter almost certainly finished writing before bothering to reach out — Musk replied, “Give my regards to your puppet master.”
“Puppet master” refers to Jeff Bezos, the book-burning, dissent-crushing, Main St.-wasting, China-loving left-wing billionaire who owns The Washington Post. And “alpha” refers to Elon Musk, who just perfectly demonstrated how to respond to a hostile and dishonest corporate media no matter the story.
I admit I was once very skeptical of Musk. SolarCity was a disaster for the American taxpayer. Teslas are cool if you have subsidies and like screens a lot, but they won’t do you much good when the bombs drop. And then one day, while I was in the middle of an important conversation, I found myself somehow distracted by a television in the background showing a Falcon 9 booster returning to land on the Earth. That was the day I stopped rolling my eyes at that electrical man from Pretoria, even if his technology will destroy us all someday.
Now compare landing space ships to the world of news journalism I joined a bit over a decade ago, where laziness and based stupidity go hand in hand with self-importance.
It’s a profession where it’s noble to print private neighborhood texts and take photographs of children to get just one more scoop on the already known story of Sen. Ted Cruz going Mexico, yet a story about Gov. Andrew Cuomo killing thousands of your parents in your own state is ignored until President Joe Biden can be safely elected.
It’s a world where Brian Stelter feels comfortable talking about how he “crawled into bed and cried,” where journalists think covering Trump was “thrilling in the way that I imagine storming Omaha Beach must have been,” where Brian Williams smiles and waves to a crowd at a Ranger’s game while the jumbotron tells the completely fake story of that time he was super brave and his helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
It’s a place where The New York Times can print falsehood after falsehood about President Donald Trump, and where its reporters can proudly claim credit for starting deadly race riots, while the editor in chief claims Trump “puts [reporters’] lives at risk” by calling “them names.”
It’s a field that builds the “Newseum,” a massive monument to its own importance, while executives and board members pay themselves millions to run the place into the ground.
It’s an industry owned by men like Jeff Bezos.
It’s a thing that doesn’t deserve your respect.
And people like these make my job that much more difficult, since people assume I am just like them, when I am not.
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If any media folk are still interested in “fact-checking” presidents after the Trump era, they’ll have plenty of fodder from Tuesday night’s appearance by President Joe Biden on CNN. A favorite Biden habit is to appeal to the authority of economists, many of whom remain unnamed, to suggest that his policies are wildly popular among experts. And what would we do without anonymous experts?
Newsweek has a transcript of the event in which CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted our 46th president at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater. Here’s an excerpt:
COOPER: You’ve made passing a COVID relief bill the focus of your first 100 days. Those on the right say the proposal is too big. Some on the left say it’s not big enough. Are you committed to passing $1.9 trillion bill or is that final number still up for negotiation?
BIDEN: I’m committed to pass — look, here’s — some of you are probably economists or college professors or you’re teachers in school. This is the first time in my career — and as you can tell, I’m over 30 — the first time in my career that there is a consensus among economists left, right, and center that is over — and including the IMF and in Europe, that overwhelming consensus is, in order to grow the economy a year, two, three, and four down the line, we can’t spend too much.Thank goodness this statement is not accurate. There is not an “overwhelming consensus” among economists that no amount of federal spending is excessive. This column is often skeptical of conventional expert opinion. But even for those who aren’t, the Biden economic plan is notable for the way it has drawn criticism not just from economists in the center and on the right but from Mr. Biden’s own former colleagues on the left. Many of the critiques specifically warn that he is indeed spending too much taxpayer money on a recovering economy which does not need another massive intervention.
Last month this column noted the criticism of Bidenomics from veterans of the Obama economic team. More recently one of the Biden plan’s enthusiastic backers also acknowledged the resistance coming from liberal economists. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker:
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Conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday at the age of 70 after being diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer last year, his family announced.
Limbaugh’s wife, Kathryn, made the announcement on his radio show.
“For over 32 years, Rush has cherished you, his loyal audience, and always looked forward to every single show,” Kathryn Limbaugh said. “It is with profound sadness I must share with you directly that our beloved Rush, my wonderful husband, passed away this morning due to complications from lung cancer.”
The radio legend received Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis in January 2020. President Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom days later at the State of the Union address.
“This is not good news,” Trump said then of Limbaugh’s diagnosis. “But what is good news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet. Rush Limbaugh: Thank you for your decades of tireless devotion to our country.”
After launching The Rush Limbaugh Show in 1988, Limbaugh grew to become one of the most influential media figures in America, eventually hosting the most listened-to radio show in the U.S., airing on more than 600 stations.
Limbaugh spoke to some 27 million people who tuned into his show on a weekly basis from behind his Golden EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) Microphone. He dubbed his fans “Dittoheads,” as they would say “ditto” when they agreed with him.
In December, Limbaugh revealed on his show that he had already outlived his prognosis.
“I wasn’t expected to be alive today,” he said. “I wasn’t expected to make it to October, and then to November, and then to December. And yet, here I am, and today, got some problems, but I’m feeling pretty good today.”
Over his decades-long career, Limbaugh received a number of honors, including entry into the Radio Hall of Fame and the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
He was a five-time winner of the National Association of Broadcasters Marconi Award for “Excellence in Syndicated and Network Broadcasting” and a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author. In 2008, he was named one of Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People. One year later he was included in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Limbaugh was forced to go off the air beginning February 2 as his health worsened, though he continued his penchant for controversy in his final days of broadcasting.
Weeks after President Joe Biden won the election, Limbaugh questioned the validity of the results saying: “You didn’t win this thing fair and square, and we are not just going to be docile like we’ve been in the past and go away and wait ’til the next election.”
I rarely listened to Limbaugh because I was usually working while he was on. I rarely listen to talk radio, though I was an occasional contributor (radio and TV) for Charlie Sykes, as you know:
We recall how bracing the Rush Limbaugh Show was in its early days. For decades the airwaves had been governed by the Fairness Doctrine, a federal regulation requiring stations to balance “controversial” claims with “contrasting viewpoints.” The rule gave incumbent candidates and mainstream news outlets a near-monopoly on public discourse. Ronald Reagan scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. By the 1992 presidential campaign, the radio star’s first name was known across the U.S.
Limbaugh, whose show ran on weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. East Coast time, was invaluable to the conservative movement in the 1990s. He would spend an hour explaining supply-side tax policy or making the case for deregulation. Millions of Americans had never heard a coherent argument against the welfare state or Roe v. Wade until they tuned in to Limbaugh’s show. He played an enormous role in popularizing conservative ideas and policies.
His critics called him a racist and about everything else, which was always unfair. His real offense was to gain millions of weekly listeners by mocking the left’s pieties. He dissected environmental scare campaigns, and he ridiculed the news media for finding epidemics of homelessness only during Republican administrations. In 1994 Bill Clinton called the show from Air Force One to complain about the host’s criticisms—not for the last time blaming scrappy radio hosts for his own political woes.
In recent years, with the rise of more acerbic competitors and a general souring of public discourse, Limbaugh took on a more exasperated tone. He also moved to the Trumpian right on issues such as trade, immigration and foreign policy.
But unlike others on the talk-radio right, he kept his sense of humor and rarely let anger drown his fundamental optimism about the United States. His great strength was never to take himself too seriously. Limbaugh knew he was an entertainer, not an intellectual or politician, and he said so many times. He was popular because he was superb at his craft and represented traditional American values that the dominant culture too often demeans.
About Trump, Limbaugh correctly observed something most Democrats and some Republicans don’t or won’t grasp:
“Donald Trump represents an uprising of the people of this country against Washington, against the establishment, and it had been brewing for a long time. It had been building since [Ross] Perot in 1992.”
Limbaugh is not the father of conservative talk radio, but he lasted longer than anyone in conservative talk radio, even in markets you would never think of, including Madison. During his midday show in his first years on WTDY in Madison, there were “Rush Rooms” where people could listen. Limbaugh then moved to WIBA, preceding current afternoon host Vicki McKenna.
Limbaugh’s death was predictably celebrated by liberals in social media Wednesday, because some people believe the words “criticism” and “hate” are synonyms. That obviously didn’t bother Limbaugh, nor, apparently, did it bother his advertisers enough for very many of them to pull out of his show. As is often the case Limbaugh was prone to bombast (he called himself “talent on loan from God”), but controversy attracts listeners to a point.
Limbaugh gave himself credit for saving AM radio in the 1980s after music formats switched to FM radio, leaving people wondering what the point of AM radio now was. And then came Limbaugh and other radio talkers (including, later last century, sports talk). Those conversations about AM’s future are still taking place, because conversations are taking place about the future of radio. Some might blame Limbaugh for the increasing drought in live and local radio broadcasting, but Limbaugh didn’t make decisions for radio station owners or general managers or program directors.
Limbaugh’s success helps demonstrate how liberals hate markets. Sykes isn’t on Milwaukee radio anymore, but Mark Belling, who preceded Sykes on the air, still is. Sykes’ old station, WTMJ, still carries Jeff Wagner, who followed Sykes, as well as Steve Scaffidi, who ended up with Sykes’ time slot. McKenna has shows in both Milwaukee and Madison. If you get listeners, you get advertisers, and if you get and keep advertisers, your employment is assured.
The answer to Limbaugh and other conservative talkers was supposed to be the Air America network, which lasted less than six years. Liberal talk stations come and go, most recently WRRD in Milwaukee, because they can’t generate enough advertising. Sly is still on WBGR in Monroe and WIBA-FM in Madison, but as a DJ of, respectively, oldies and classic rock, not liberal talk. There is one liberal talk station in Madison at 92.7 FM. For now.
A lot of people in talk radio owe their careers to Limbaugh because Limbaugh showed that conservative talk is something people would listen to and advertisers would buy. Like Paul Harvey, Limbaugh’s advertisers sold high-end products and services, which was one reason he stayed on the air as long as he did.
James Wigderson:
In 1992, I still had dreams of being a political consultant. I had just left grad school a little earlier than planned (graduate school, where you gradually learn you don’t really want to be there).
As luck would have it, I found my first political race where I could do more than just lick envelopes. (I’ll let the older readers explain that to the younger readers.) It was managing a congressional race in a hopelessly Democratic district. There were primaries on both sides as it was an open seat. I got the solidly pro-life Republican in a five-way primary.
If you remember the 1992 election, it was a horrible year for Republicans. So much hope generated by the popularity of the 1st Gulf War vanished in a recession economy. Republicans were divided and Pat Buchanan challenged an incumbent GOP President George H. W. Bush in the primaries. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, a draft-dodging womanizer.
Managing that congressional campaign was not a happy experience for me. I learned then that my patience for dumb people is about zero. I mentally checked out. We won the primary but we lost the general election – badly. The only good thing I can say about the experience is that I didn’t become an alcoholic.
The day after the election, I was down. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. My girlfriend was about to dump me (she did on my birthday – true story). I had burned a bridge with my last college job. It was bad.
That afternoon, Rush came on the radio. Instead of forecasting doom for the country and allowing conservatives to feel sorry for themselves, Rush told us that the best revenge, the best thing we could do at that point, was just live our lives as best as we could in the way that we believed.
That advice from Rush has always stuck with me, and I’ve tried to pass that advice along after every election. I will always be grateful for those words from Rush.
I know he changed over the years, and there will be others that will write complete obituaries with the good and the bad of Rush Limbaugh and his effect on politics.
But today I’m going to remember how that golden microphone sending out advice to a mourning Republican audience somehow spoke directly to me. That’s the Rush Limbaugh I want to remember. Maybe some of you will read this and Rush’s advice from 1992 will stay with you, too.
Limbaugh turned himself into a franchise, selling cigars and ties. I own a couple of the ties, which were very colorful and bold. He doesn’t appear to sell ties anymore at RushLimbaugh.com (written in the present tense since like dead actors and musicians he is still making money), so apparently I have collector items.
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The 21st century has been bad news for proponents of limited government. Bush was a big spender, Obama was a big spender, Trump was a big spender, and now Biden also wants to buy votes with other people’s money.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that there is still a simple solution to America’s fiscal problems. According to the just-released Budget and Economic Outlook from the Congressional Budget Office, tax revenues will grow by an average of 4.2 percent over the next decade. So we can make progress, as illustrated by this chart, if there’s some sort of spending cap so that outlays grow at a slower pace.
The ideal fiscal goal should be reducing the size of government, ideally down to the level envisioned by America’s Founders.
But even if we have more modest aspirations (avoiding future tax increases, avoiding a future debt crisis), it’s worth noting how modest spending restraint generates powerful results in a short period of time. And the figures in the chart assume the spending restraint doesn’t even start until the 2023 fiscal year.
The main takeaway is that the budget could be balanced by 2031 if spending grows by 1.5 percent per year.
But progress is possible so long as the cap limits spending so that it grows by less than 4.2 percent annually. The greater the restraint, of course, the quicker the progress.
In other words, there’s no need to capitulate to tax increases (which, in any event, almost certainly would make a bad situation worse).
P.S. The solution to our fiscal problem is simple, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. Long-run spending restraint inevitably will require genuine reform to deal with the entitlement crisis. Given the insights of “public choice” theory, it will be a challenge to find politicians willing to save the nation.
P.P.S. Here are real-world examples of nations that made rapid progress with spending restraint.
P.P.P.S. Switzerland and Hong Kong (as well as Colorado) have constitutional spending caps, which would be the ideal approach.
There was no interest in fiscal restraint after 9/11. Nor was there during the Great Recession. Nor has there been during the pandemic. The only way to get closer to balancing the budget (I doubt it will be balanced in the lifetime of anyone reading this) is, as Mitchell points out, mandatory, as in constitutional, spending restraint.
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If you read the headline of a blockbuster, 6,000-word-plus story in Time magazine, you might think former President Donald Trump wasn’t so wrong about the election, after all.
Despite the tease, Molly Ball’s “Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” doesn’t allege widespread voter fraud in what some Trump supporters still insist was a “stolen” election. Nor is the essay an exposé of illegal activity that would justify the Trumpian challenges to the results that threatened to tear the country apart.
But what Time did uncover is disturbing enough, even if most of those involved are proud of what they did to help elect President Biden: underhanded methods made all the more galling by the preening self-righteousness of those who deployed them.
As the magazine reports, a secret alliance of left-wing activists, union leaders and corporate CEOs worked together to help craft unprecedented changes in the rules governing the way America votes. They did their best to encourage and facilitate mail-in voting on an unprecedented scale.
That wasn’t cheating or illegal, but it was enormously consequential.
With funding from federal sources as well as private moguls like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, this cabal of anti-Trump forces mobilized an enormous number of first-time voters who despised Trump
Using pandemic fears about voting in person — less dangerous, in fact, than a trip to the supermarket — and without a national debate or any meaningful oversight by legislators or the courts, the anti-Trump alliance managed to make it easy for people who don’t normally bother to vote.
That this also involved discarding rules intended to safeguard the integrity of elections was a side benefit.
That the cabal operated successfully in plain sight highlights the impotence of Republicans, who, though they saw the threat coming and in some cases sued to prevent the changes, ultimately failed to prevent the shift. But there’s more here than just a case of the Democrats out-organizing the GOP.
This also involved getting Americans used to the idea that in a country with the most advanced technology in the world, the vote count would last days, rather than being settled in one night.
What Time also documents is a campaign to pressure internet and social media companies as well as press outlets to censor “disinformation” about the election, especially with respect to fraud allegations. While some of the material that was targeted was false, the tech bros also blocked the dissemination of legitimate reporting and commentary that could have undermined Biden.
The best example was The Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling, which was tossed down the Orwellian “memory hole” by both Twitter and all non-conservative media outlets; to boot, 50 former intelligence officials baselessly claimed that the Hunter Files was Russian disinformation. Yet to this day, neither Hunter nor his father has disputed the authenticity of the emails uncovered by The Post or the provenance of the laptop they were recovered from.
Though Time claims the censorship was “defending democracy,” it was actually just the opposite. In a campaign that was represented as a counterattack against Trumpian lies, what the anti-Trump group pulled off was perhaps the biggest lie in modern American political history.
The collusion between Big Tech and biased legacy media prevented the public from learning more about a candidate who largely spent 2020 in hiding. In this way, the anti-Trump forces did help stage an election that was, in a sense, rigged against the incumbent.
There’s nothing wrong with getting more people to vote, as long as the votes are legal. But there is something profoundly wrong with a system in which Silicon Valley oligarchs, big business, union bosses and lefty agitators can effectively shut down free discourse and freedom of the press during a presidential election in order to ensure their candidate wins.
That means the challenge facing the country is not what to do about Trump’s sore-loser tantrum, which resulted in a disgraceful riot (swollen into an “insurrection” by Democrats and media keen to discredit all Republicans). The real problem is whether Americans are prepared to let the same forces that tilted the 2020 election in Biden’s favor get away with it again.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 