With the unemployment rate below 4 percent for 16 consecutive months, one would expect economic growth to be soaring. Yet even as we experience the best job market since the late 1960s, this is the first time in modern history that we have not experienced a year of 3 percent GDP growth. What gives?
Earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the economy had grown just 2.1 percent during the second quarter of this year (ending June 30). It also revised Q4 of 2018 down to just 1.1 percent, which now means that growth during the 12 months ending Q4 of 2018 was only 2.5 percent, not 3 percent as previously thought. This means that the U.S. economy has now gone 14 years without a year-over-year growth of 3 percent. It’s been 19 years since we’ve hit 4 percent, which was during 1997-2000.
While the numbers don’t portend a coming recession, it is highly unusual for us to go for 16 consecutive months with unemployment below 4 percent and 43 months below 5 percent, yet never attain 3 or 4 percent annual GDP growth. In fact, that has never happened before. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate ranged from 5.3 percent to 3.9 percent – not even as good as today’s 3.7 percent – yet GDP growth was over 4 percent. Ditto for the late 1960s, when we saw years of 6 percent growth. During the mid 1980s, we saw this growth even with higher unemployment rates.
The debt is not just a problem for future generations in terms of a fiscal cost that will be borne by taxpayers. The exclusive focus on the future is what has fostered the Louis XV mentality of “after me, the deluge.” Let’s face it, we are a nation that doesn’t care about the future of our children. What is missing from the discussion is that the debt is permanently weighing down economic growth now.
Let’s peek into the numbers behind today’s topline GDP report. GDP comprises personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, government spending, and net exports. Seventy percent of the equation is consumption, and the robust 4.3 percent growth in consumption this quarter is a big part of what is keeping us even at 2.1 percent growth. This is not artificial and is good news. Consumption is a sign of a healthy job market, with more people earning money, as well as the tax cuts putting more cash in people’s pockets to spend. No matter whether our economy is fully free market or quasi-socialist, whenever there is more money in people’s pockets, these numbers will go up. We are now in a boom period, and the numbers are good.
But what else is propping up the number? Government spending! Gross government spending, which accounts for about 17.5 percent of the GDP pie, spiked 5 percent. Non-defense spending rose by 15.9 percent!
Thus, without the spending binge, which will be accelerated by the budget betrayal promoted by the president and backed by more Democrats than Republicans in the House, the topline number would have been lower.
But here’s the problem. While government spending juices up the economy in the short run, the debt that we must incur to continue that spending is permanently weighing down the economy in the long run.
Which leads us to the third component – gross private domestic investment. That is the engine of a supply side economy. Those numbers contracted by 5.5 percent this past quarter, the worst showing since 2015. Investment in non-residential structures plummeted by 10.8 percent, highly unusual with such a good job market.
Then, of course, there is the final component: exports. Net exports were down 5.2 percent because of the tariffs.
Here’s the reality: Our economy is nothing like it was in the 1980s or 1990s. We have a huge misallocation of resources, with all sorts of capital going into government-mandated schemes that increase dependency programs or debt, rather than the most efficient investments.
Then the debt itself is hurting us. So much money is now spent on paying off interest. As interest rates are pushed higher, more private money is used to purchase higher-interest Treasury securities rather than invest in capital goods, such as factories and plants. The more government is desperate to service this debt, the more it will drive up interest rates, which in turn will divert and misallocate more investors into Treasury bonds. This further makes interest on the debt even more expensive, constantly reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle of debt and higher rates.
At some point over the past decade, we crossed the Rubicon of irrevocable lethargic growth because of debt. Interest on the debt is the fastest-growing expenditure of government. That is a problem now. So, we can create jobs and wages even in a centrally planned economy, but the debt and market distortions are creating so much inefficiency and waste that they are permanently capping our growth. I don’t believe we will ever achieve protracted 3 percent growth until the debt crisis is solved.
The president has been convinced that we can grow our way out of the debt. The problem is the debt itself is weighing us down from growing!
With two months left until the budget deadline, the president could have spent the entire summer recess building the case for a better debt deal. Instead, he chose to support a bill nearly unanimously supported by House Democrats that will add almost $2 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years.
If Trump wants to be the president of growth, he can’t have it both ways and be the president of debt.
Category: US politics
-
The problem is that the deficit and debt issue is merely something with which the minority party in Washington hits the majority party. Democrats demagogue that people will drop dead if even $1 of government spending in any area is reduced. Calls to raise taxes on the “rich” to eliminate the deficit are spurious because the “rich” do not have enough money to even reduce the debt by any significant amount. The only way to reduce the deficit by taxation is to hit the middle class hard.
No comments on The consequences of Trumponomics -
The Economist compares the dueling governmental models:
In Texas an unexpected enemy gets a lot of attention. In a television ad for lieutenant-governor that aired last year, Dan Patrick, the winning Republican candidate, looked sternly at the camera and warned of a grave danger. “Truth is, Democrats want to turn Texas into California,” he said. “Well, I’m not about to let that happen. What about you?” United in concern is Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor. He predicts that excessive regulation could turn “the Texas dream into a California nightmare”. “Don’t California my Texas” has become a rallying cry for Republicans in the Lone Star State. You can even buy the bumper-sticker.
Some competitive jousting between the two is inevitable. California, with 40m inhabitants, and Texas, with 29m, are the states with the largest populations, with more than one-fifth of Americans claiming them as home. They also have the biggest economies. If they were countries, they would be the fifth- and tenth-largest in the world (see chart), with around $3trn and $1.8trn in gdp, respectively.
Texas is the country’s largest exporter, and California claims the number-two spot. In the past 20 years nearly a third of American jobs were generated in just these two states. Combined, they account for around a quarter of American gdp. They educate nearly a quarter of American children, so their investments in, and approach to, public education directly affects national competitiveness. Both states are booming, too. Between 2010 and 2018 two of the three fastest-growing metro areas in America were in Texas: greater Dallas and Houston each gained more than 1m people. The state has a robust oil and gas industry and has succeeded in diversifying its economy. California enjoys the many fruits of the technology boom, a rising stockmarket and some of America’s best universities.
A nation divided
But the two states matter just as much because of the opposing visions and models of government for which they stand. Indeed their rivalry is often an expression of these differences. California is the standard-bearer for progressive experimentation nationally, spearheading policies to deal with climate change, gay rights, the decriminalisation of drugs, paid family leave, inclusive immigration and more. Since Donald Trump assumed office, California has become a state of resistance, suing the federal government around 50 times. It is the country’s largest blue state, where the share of registered Republicans is at a historic low and Democrats control all three branches of government. Its model can be summed up as high taxes, high services and high regulation. California sees a strong role for government and leans heavily on its affluent residents to fund a social-safety net.
Texas, by contrast, has been socially conservative for decades. Although Democrats made gains in the state legislature in 2018, no Democrat has been elected to statewide office for more than 25 years. Its model is low taxes, low services and low regulation. “Govern wisely and as little as possible,” is how Sam Houston, who served as the first president of the Republic of Texas in 1836, described the state’s light-touch philosophy. Serious about avoiding government overreach, the legislature meets only every other year. In 2017 Texas ranked 49th out of 50 in spending per person, shelling out around $3,925 per citizen, 52% less than the national average and 68% less than California.
Demographically, both states are already living America’s future. Their non-white populations started to outnumber their white ones long ago; California became a “majority-minority” state in 2000, Texas in 2005. Today they are both around 40% Hispanic, more than double the national share. With fast-growing, young and ethnically diverse populations, what California and Texas look like today is what the country will look like in 2050. According to Stephen Klineberg, a professor at Rice University in Houston, “states like California and Texas are where the American future is going to be worked out.”
Both states have vulnerabilities. “The key question for California is how much a state can take on, and with Texas it is about how little a government can continue to take on,” says Ken Miller of Claremont McKenna College. Their differences can be seen in dramatic and subtle ways. To fund its operations, California levies one of the highest income taxes in America. By contrast, Texas’s constitution forbids a state income tax. Unions are a mighty force in Californian politics and workplaces, but Texas is what is known as a “right-to-work” state, meaning that employees do not need to belong to a union, so such infrastructure is weak.
Big-state big state
California probably has the strongest environmental regulations in the country, whereas Texas nurtures its oil and gas industry and regards nature as something to be subdued. It puts minimal restrictions on keeping exotic animals as pets, which is why there are believed to be more tigers in captivity in Texas than in the wild in India.
Their leaders embody the two states’ divergent philosophies. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who took office in January, is a former mayor of San Francisco, best known for legalising gay marriage in 2004 and sparking a national social movement. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is a staunch social conservative who formerly served as the state’s attorney-general and is proud to have sued Barack Obama’s administration 31 times over policies including health care and environmental regulations.
Earlier this year Mr Newsom ordered a moratorium on the death penalty, around the same time that politicians in the Texas legislature were debating whether to start providing air-conditioning in prisons during the sweltering summer—an expensive creature comfort, in the eyes of some. Since 1976 Texas has executed more prisoners than any other American state and around five times more than second-placed Virginia.
Their independent natures can be partly explained by history. Tellingly, Texans celebrate 1836 as their founding year, when the state became independent from Mexico after an armed insurrection, not 1845, when Texas officially became an American state. At the time slaveholding Texas received an ambivalent welcome into the nation, which was worried about the balance between states that permitted slavery and those that did not. California, which had also been a part of Mexico before it joined America in 1850, never allowed slavery, which meant it was more warmly welcomed. This experience shaped its political attitudes. Its distance from Washington, dc, fuelled its ability to experiment.
Both states used to be supportive of the other political party. Republicans won California in nearly every presidential election between 1952 and 1988, and Ronald Reagan served as governor there before he became president. The state’s politics swerved in response to its growing population of immigrants, who were troubled by Republicans’ intolerant rhetoric and policies. Texas used to be strongly Democratic and produced Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Mr Johnson’s legacy includes launching many of the programmes that Texan politicians today scorn, including the war on poverty and federally funded health care for the poor and elderly. His commitment to social services and civil rights helped hand his state and the south to Republicans.
Americans and immigrants have for decades travelled to both states to build their future unencumbered by tradition. The “Texas Triangle”, formed by the four large cities of Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, accounts for three-quarters of the state’s population, has been responsible for three-quarters of its population growth since 2010, and produces 82% of its gdp.
Small-state big state
The threat of Texas becoming California, as the Lone Star State’s leadership fears, is exaggerated. However, it raises the question of which pole America will turn towards—the progressive left represented by California or the right represented by Texas. “The fact that America can contain two such assertive, contrary forces as Texas and California is a testament to our political dynamism, but more and more I feel that America is being compelled to make a choice between the models these states embody,” writes Lawrence Wright in his book “God Save Texas”. “Under the Trump administration, Texas is clearly the winning archetype.”
That may not hold for ever. Texas is already changing. “Outsiders think Austin is a blue bubble and the rest of Texas is tumbleweeds,” says Ann Beeson of the Centre for Public Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think-tank. “People have a huge misunderstanding of how giant, progressive and diverse our cities are.”
Nor should California, which frequently creates political winds that then sweep across the country, be discounted. It experienced an anti-tax backlash in the 1970s and an anti-immigrant push in the 1990s, both of which spread nationally. It legalised abortion six years before Roe v Wade, the historic Supreme Court decision, in a bill signed by Reagan, then governor. “So much of what we aspire to as a country resides in California,” says Austin Beutner, a former businessman who is superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District. “Laws go east to west. Values go west to east.”
Much of America’s future rides on California’s and Texas’s success. This special report will look in detail at how the states are approaching business, taxation, public education, social welfare, the environment, and policies toward immigrants. It will ask which state’s model is likely to prove more fruitful in the long term. “There are 50 labs in the United States, and you can watch the California and Texas experiment,” says Ross Perot junior, a successful Texan businessman. “That’s the American way.”
Wisconsin’s Democrats favor California, if not some fictional socialist country.
-
Liberals are saying so many idiotic things that that might demand an entire blog on just that subject.
If you thought it was stupid for a liberal to claim that conservatives like dogs because dogs are like slaves to them, enjoy what Eric Worrall reports:
h/t Dr. Willie Soon – According to British MP Michael Gove, cheap food damages the environment and encourages poor people to overeat.
True cost of cheap food is health and climate crises, says commission
Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Tue 16 Jul 2019 06.00 BSTRadical change needed to make UK food and farming system sustainable within 10 years
The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiralling public health crisis and environmental destruction, according to a high-level commission. It said the UK’s food and farming system must be radically transformed and become sustainable within 10 years.
The commission’s report, which was welcomed by the environment secretary, Michael Gove, concluded that farmers must be enabled to shift from intensive farming to more organic and wildlife friendly production, raising livestock on grass and growing more nuts and pulses. It also said a National Nature Service should be created to give opportunities for young people to work in the countryside and, for example, tackle the climate crisis by planting trees or restoring peatlands.
“Our own health and the health of the land are inextricably intertwined [but] in the last 70 years, this relationship has been broken,” said the report, which was produced by leaders from farming, supermarket and food supply businesses, as well as health and environment groups, and involved conversations with thousands of rural inhabitants.
…
“Farmers are extraordinarily adaptable,” said Sue Pritchard, director of the RSA commission and an organic farmer in Wales. “We have to live with change every single day of our lives.
…
Gove said: “This report raises issues that are hugely important. We know that it is in the interests of farmers and landowners to move to a more sustainable model.” He added that the government’s agriculture bill would reward farmers with public money for public goods and a new “farm to fork” food review would look to ensure everyone had access to healthy British food.
The report was backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Green MP Caroline Lucas said: “This monumental report is a powerful and profound account of the ecological transformation of our food and farming system that we urgently need – and where we can start.”
…
I’m less than reassured by Gove’s promise that everyone will have enough to eat after he abolishes affordable food.
Green energy Britain has an atrocious record of helping people suffering fuel poverty. Occasionally even young people in Britain die because they missed a meal once too oftento ensure their children are warm and have enough to eat.
Meanwhile, Matt Margolis presents unsurprising news given the kerfuffle over what Donald Trump said about the Gang of Four:On Wednesday, Rasmussen released a very disturbing poll that found “one-in-three Democrats think it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color.”
While 80% of Democrats believe the president is a racist, 85% of Republicans think the racism charges by his opponents are politically motivated. Voters not affiliated with either major party are evenly divided on the question.
Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. That’s a view shared by just 16% of both GOP and unaffiliated voters.
Among all voters, 22% think it’s racist if a white politician criticizes the political views of a politician of color. Sixty-eight percent (68%) disagree, while 10% are undecided.
But only 11% believe the term “racism” refers only to discrimination by white people against minorities. Eighty-four percent (84%) say racism refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another. These findings have changed little in surveys for the last six years.
Let’s put this another way: A third of Democrats believe that minority politicians should be immune from criticism by white politicians. Their policies can’t be challenged without there being an inherent racist motive. This is what a third of Democrats actually believe. If you’re a white politician and oppose raising taxes, you can debate higher taxes with another white politician, but if you have the same debate with a minority politician, you’re racist.
Is it starting to make sense yet? This is why Democrats nominated Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and why you can bet anything there will be a minority on the Democratic ticket in 2020. Minority and women are human shields to the Democratic Party.
Jon Del Arroz, a conservative science-fiction author who is Hispanic, summed up this attitude perfectly:
There is absolutely nothing American about the idea that certain people are above having their policies and opinions questions. Democrats are desperately hoping they can silence the opposition by automatically dubbing anyone who dares to speak out against someone who happens to be a minority as racist. Conservatives put up with it for eight years under Obama, and sadly it worked to a degree. Obama’s repeated violations of the U.S. Constitution would have had any other president impeached. Obama’s status as a minority protected him from criticism from the media as well, and enabled Democrats to promote the narrative that Obama was a scandal-free president with little to no pushback. Enough is enough already.
I bet the percentage is higher than 32 percent, except that some Democrats have the sense to not publicly admit their own biases.
-
Democratic candidates for president, in their impressive expansiveness, are promising free college. Some limit their proposals to community colleges, others to state-run schools, and a few, going for broke, want also to forgive student debt for private-college tuition. Since no realm of American life has undergone greater inflation in recent decades than higher education, this is no piddling promise. The cost to taxpayers could be in the trillions, though the prospect would please a nephew of mine who this autumn is sending a son to Dartmouth at the annual price of $76,000.
If government is going to pay for college, at least it ought to try to bring down the cost. I taught at a university for 30 years and have a few suggestions. Start at the top: I would reduce the salaries of university presidents by, say, 90%. (At the institution where I taught, the president made more than $2 million when last I checked.) I would also evict them from their rent-free mansions and remove their cadres of servants. The contemporary university president, after all, has little or nothing to do with education, but is chiefly occupied with fundraising and public relations. If universities were restaurants, the president would be a maître d’. To encourage their fundraising skills, perhaps they could be paid a small commission on the money they bring into their schools—cash, so to speak, and carry—excepting that on money used to erect more otiose buildings filled with treadmills, computers and condom machines.
The next big cut in the cost of higher education would be in superfluous administrative jobs, for the contemporary university is nothing if not vastly overstaffed. All those assistant provosts for diversity, those associate deans presiding over sensitivity programs, those directors for student experience—out, out with them. I would also suggest dispensing with courses that specialize exclusively in victimology, the history of victim groups told from the point of view of the victims. Young men and women do not need reinforcement in their already mistaken belief that they are victims because of their skin color, ethnicity or sexuality.
Another place serious money could be saved is college athletics. I’ve read that the highest-paid public employee in most states is the state-university football coach. The school at which I taught is not a state school, but its reasonably successful football coach earned $3.3 million in 2017, ranking him only 32nd among all college football coaches.
Nick Saban, the football coach at the University of Alabama, earns $8.3 million a year. Mike Krzyzewski, the basketball coach at Duke, earns $7 million. The argument for these astonishing figures is that football at Alabama and basketball at Duke more than pay for themselves. The Alabama football “program,” as they like to refer to this most brutal of sports, with its postseason games and television fees, brings in nearly $100 million a year. Duke’s perpetually winning basketball teams doubtless result in more student applications and alumni donations.
Under pure capitalism, Messrs. Saban and Krzyzewski might be said to earn their pay. But if higher education is to be free, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would have it, we are no longer talking about capitalism. Coaches’ salaries could be greatly reduced and the money earned by college sports—which means chiefly football and basketball—would need to be turned over to the federal government to help pay the cost of education itself.
Which brings us to the faculty. Faculty jobs in American universities have risen well in excess of any visible improvement in the quality of university teachers: $200,000-a-year-or-more professorships are now not uncommon. When I began teaching in my mid-30s, an older friend, long resident at the same university, said to me, “Welcome to the racket.” What he meant is that I would be getting a full-time salary for what was essentially a six-month job, and without ever having to put in an eight-hour day. At the tonier universities, professors in the humanities and social sciences might teach as few as three or four courses a year, the remainder of their time supposedly devoted to research. Like the man said, a sweet racket.
Under free higher education, perhaps it would make sense to pay university teachers by the hour, with raises in the wage awarded by seniority. Surely they could not complain. After all, the two most common comments (some would say the two biggest lies) about university teaching are, “I learn so much from my students” and “It’s so inspiring, I’d do it for nothing.” A strict hourly wage for teachers, as free university education may require, would nicely test the validity of that second proposition.
Free higher education—what a splendid ring it has, sufficient tintinnabulation to cause one to forget the old axiom that you get what you pay for.
-
With excessive heat warnings and heat advisories in southern Wisconsin today and Saturday, surely Penelope Green of the New York Times knows better than us:
Modernity was born 116 years, 11 months, two weeks and two days ago, at a printing plant in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, when a junior engineer named Willis Carrier devised a contraption that blew air over water-filled pipes to dry out the humidity that was gumming up the pages of a humor magazine called Judge.
And in that moment (well, within a few decades), entire industries and geographies were transformed, and new technologies made possible, including, terribly, the internet: Without cooling, there would be no server farms.
Nearly 90 percent of American households now have some form of air-conditioning, more than any other country in the world except Japan, though that will change as global warming alters more temperate zones, and swelling populations and rising incomes in hot zones mean the folks there will clamor for AC, too.
On an overheated planet, air-conditioning becomes more and more desirable, solving in the short term the problem it helped create.
-
Scientific research has shown that a great and fascinating — perhaps even mysterious — bond exists between dogs and human beings. They even understand human language.
The love story between dogs and humans goes back tens of thousands of years, the results of which can still be seen everywhere, every single day. Families going out with their dogs, which are carefully groomed, looking extremely healthy and happy. The pet is a real member of the family. His needs are as important to his owners as their own. Because of this close relationship, dogs have developed the ability to perfectly understand us.
Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is a look of surprise on a person’s face, dogs tend to turn their head to the right. The heart rates of dogs also go up when they see someone who is having a bad day, say Marcello Siniscalchi, Serenella d’Ingeo and Angelo Quaranta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy. The study in Springer’s journal Learning & Behavior is the latest to reveal just how connected dogs are with people. The research also provides evidence that dogs use different parts of their brains to process human emotions.
Considering these abilities, it’s not so strange that we love dogs so much.
Liberal Twitter-user Danielle (@ladypalerider) has a different explanation for people’s love for dogs, however. Wait. I should’ve written: for white people’s love for our canine comrades. According to her, “white people love dogs so much because deep down they miss owning slaves. They love the owner and master dynamic, desperate for something to control.”
-
The news cycle recently has been nonstop talk about Trump’s “racist” tweets and the fallout that ensued. A lot of arguing has been going on about what exactly makes them racist, with many of the usual subjects complaining that the Right is defending a “white supremacist” and even many on the Right denouncing the tweet storm as unacceptable.
One NPR opinion writer raised a few hackles when he suggested that those journalists reporting on Trump should refrain from using descriptors like “racist”.
Keith Woods is Vice President of Newsroom Training and Diversity at NPR. After the outlet made a corporate decision to use the term “racist” when describing Trump’s tweets, Woods felt the mandate violated journalistic practice and penned an op ed explaining why he thinks journalists should refrain from using the term.
I understand the moral outrage behind wanting to slap this particular label on this particular president and his many incendiary utterances, but I disagree. Journalism may not have come honorably to the conclusion that dispassionate distance is a virtue. But that’s the fragile line that separates the profession from the rancid, institution-debasing cesspool that is today’s politics.
It is precisely because journalism is given to warm-spit phrases like “racially insensitive” and “racially charged” that we should not be in the business of moral labeling in the first place. Who decides where the line is that the president crossed? The headline writer working today who thinks it’s “insensitive” or the one tomorrow who thinks it’s “racist?” Were we to use my moral standards, the line for calling people and words racist in this country would have been crossed decades ago. But that’s not what journalists do. We report and interview and attribute.
Woods goes on to say that while he’s not a journalist by trade, he respects the legacy of the profession and feels that objectivity requires reporters to drop editorializing labels, no matter how tempting.
I am not a journalism purist. I came into the profession 40 years ago to tear down the spurious notion of objectivity used to protect a legacy of sexism, xenophobia and white supremacy. The better ideals of truth telling, accountability, fairness, etc. are what give journalism its power, while the notion of “objectivity” has been used to obscure and excuse the insidious biases we do battle with today.
Woods makes the argument that journalistic integrity is greatly damaged by “obscuring” objectivity. Of course, people on the right have been saying that forever but it is especially notable to see such a point of view from a liberal outlet. The fact that one would feel compelled to describe NPR as a liberal outlet in the first place (and many do) perhaps only proves Woods’ point.
In the end, Woods implores reporters to report, and let the reader do the editorializing…for better or for worse.
It’s already nearly impossible to separate actual journalism from the argumentative noise on the cable networks that dominate so much of public perception. There are already too many journalists dancing day and night on the line that once separated fact and judgment. When that line is finally obliterated and we sink into the cesspool beckoning us to its depths, this historically flawed, imperfect tool for revealing and routing racism will look and sound indistinguishable from the noise and become just as irrelevant.
[The President’s] words mirror those of avowed racists and xenophobes that date back to the birth of this country. Was that moral judgment, my last sentence? I would argue no. I’d call it context, and it doesn’t require my opinion, just a basic understanding of history. That’s an alternative to labels: Report. Quote people. Cite sources. Add context. Leave the moral labeling to the people affected; to the opinion writers, the editorial writers, the preachers and philosophers; and to the public we serve.
We just have to do journalism.
I heartily agree with Woods. Given the death spiral the mainstream media has thrown itself into over the last decade (and the resulting 2016 electoral response) it would seem like a good business decision to leave the opining to the opiners and just report the facts.
I would also add that if we are having so much trouble agreeing on what constitutes “racist” in this case (and we are) maybe that in itself is proof that it wasn’t really racist. Either that or we’ve overused the term so much no one even knows what it really describes anymore.
Either argument works here, and that is basically the argument Woods is making – lay off the drama, report the facts, and let the consumer do the labeling.
-
Thomas Friedman, no one’s idea of a conservative:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.
I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 millionAmericans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.
I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.
I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.
And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.
So, I wasn’t surprised to hear so many people expressing fear that the racist, divisive, climate-change-denying, woman-abusing jerk who is our president was going to get re-elected, and was even seeing his poll numbers rise.
Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!
Unless, of course, there are no decent, sane Democrats.
-
A recent profile of Rep. Illan Omar by the Washington Post made waves because of its revelation that the congresswoman lied to a group of high school students about witnessing racism and injustice in a Minneapolis courtroom. In an anecdote lifted almost verbatim from the plot of “Les Miserables,” Omar claimed she saw a “sweet, old… African American lady,” who had spent the weekend in jail for stealing a $2 loaf of bread to feed her “starving 5-year-old granddaughter,” handed an $80 fine. Omar, unable to control her emotions, blurted out, “Bullsh—t!” in the courtroom.
But Omar’s lies aren’t nearly as revealing as when she tells the truth. In that same speech to the high schoolers, she said “I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all. So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”
The promise that’s not kept. Consider the disconnect between that statement, the seething resentment behind it, and the reality of Omar’s own life story. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an American success story more demonstrative of America keeping its promise. Omar’s family fled civil war in Somalia when she was a child and spent four poverty-stricken years in a Kenyan refugee camp before the United States, in its generosity, granted them admission to America as refugees.
Here, safe from the violence and chaos of their home country, they flourished. Omar received a college education, started a family, won election to the Minnesota State House at age 34, and two years later, became a member of Congress.
The Left Has an Inverted View of America
What, one wonders, does Omar have to say for the country that has given her so much? Mostly, that it has failed to be the Hollywood utopia she was promised as a child, that “the classless America that my father talked about didn’t exist.” Of course it didn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a classless society, anywhere. That’s something everyone learns, or should learn, as they become an adult and encounter the real world.
Instead, Omar takes it as evidence that America is based on a massive lie—a promise not kept, as if America actually promised a classless society free from inequality, poverty, and the manifold trials of human existence. According to this way of thinking, past mistakes and injustices, whether in foreign policy or civil rights, simply reveal the hypocrisy of America’s founding ideals. The United States was fatally flawed from the beginning, conceived in sin, and deserves only damnation.
Such thinking is now commonplace and mainstream. Witness the recent Fourth of July scrum of sports stars and media outlets quoting—and utterly misunderstanding—Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick all cited the 1852 speech as a condemnation of America for its hypocrisy, confirming their present-day animus toward their country. WBUR Boston ran a commentary piece from a young black woman about why she doesn’t celebrate the Fourth, citing Douglass’s speech and declaring the holiday “a festivity with no substance, a celebration with no soul.”
They are of course wrong. Douglass concludes his condemnation of American slavery with an appeal to America’s founding. The Constitution, he writes (in all caps), “is a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” and the principles of the Declaration of Independence are to him a source of hope. He wrote and believed this in the face of American injustice and oppression incomparably worse than anything we have today. So did Martin Luther King Jr., for whom the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
For Social Justice Warriors, America’s Promise Is a Lie
This is not how elites in academia, media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party see America today. That’s why corporations like Nike repudiate American symbols like the Betsy Ross flag at the slightest provocation. That’s why Democrats, including several major presidential candidates, now support reparations for slavery (Sen. Elizabeth Warren even claims America owes reparations for denying tax breaks to gay couples before the legalization of same-sex marriage). That’s why NBC News thought fit to publish a story about how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s great-great-grandfather owned slaves, and how that fact was somehow relevant to McConnell’s opposition to reparations.
For these people, America today isn’t much better than it was in Douglass’s day. There’s a telling anecdote in the Post’s Omar profile about a young political activist and fundraiser from Omar’s district named Filsan Ibrahim. Like Omar, Ibrahim and her family fled war-torn Somalia and were taken in by the United States. Like Omar, she and her sisters all went to college. And Like Omar, she has a jaundiced view of the country that adopted her:
‘All of America is focused on people’s backgrounds,’ Filsan said. ‘It’s all anyone cares about. You can’t come here and just be an American unless you are white. Otherwise you are a Somali American, an African American, an Asian American.’
‘It’s bulls—,’ her sister agreed.
‘Hilarious,’ her other sister added.
A few days later Filsan, her mother and her sisters attended a fundraiser and rally for nine Somalis who had been convicted in 2016 of trying to travel to Syria to fight on behalf of the Islamic State.
The irony is that the hyper-focus on people’s backgrounds is a feature of the left, not the right. Democrats and progressives are the ones who push for hyphenation and separation according to ethnic and sexual identities, while conservatives generally try to see people as individuals.
Ultimately, it’s both sad and frightening that Omar and these young women, for whom America has been a lifeline, can’t see that social justice culture and identity politics, which have seeped into the mainstream, have betrayed them and turned what should have been to them a great blessing—a home in America—into a curse.
-
On Sunday, Donald Trump gave the Democrats a gift — comments that indicate he thinks native-born congresswomen he detests should “go back” to the countries of their ancestors. On Monday, the four congresswomen handed Trump a gift in return, managing to respond to the president’s insults in some of the most politically self-destructive ways possible.
First, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota again called for impeaching President Trump during the press conference with the members of the “Squad” yesterday afternoon. The latest NBC News poll finds that just 21 percent of registered voters want the House to begin impeachment proceedings. With the Democratic presidential primary heating up, most Americans feel like they can see the 2020 presidential election off in the distance. To many Americans, including many of those critical of Trump, a certain-to-fail effort to remove the president from office right before the voters have their say on whether to give him a second term sounds like a ridiculous waste of time.
Separately, Al Green, Democrat from Texas, announced he would introduce articles of impeachment of Trump for his tweets. “The President of the United States is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, as well as an invidious prevaricator,” Green said. “To say that Donald John Trump is unfit for the Office of the President of the United States is an understatement.” It’s easy to forget that this is the third time Green has done this, and the number of House Democrats willing to support impeachment is in the low 80s, well below the 217 needed.
Get it over with, House Democrats. Have the vote on impeachment. We all know this is going nowhere. Stop telling us what you’re going to do someday and as Betsy Ross flag-denouncing Colin Kaepernick would say, just do it.
Second, Omar also contended Trump “has been credibly accused of committing multiple crimes, including colluding with a foreign government to interfere with our election.” Did she miss the entire Mueller report? Or does she think that Trump did collude and that over 22 months, Robert Mueller and his whole team of investigators and prosecutors just missed the evidence?
Omar revealed that some Trump foes will never let it go, that they will never believe any exoneration, and that there is no need for evidence — at a press conference where the squad was denouncing Trump for making terrible accusations without evidence.
Third, some on the right are arguing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to denounce an attempted firebombing of the Tacoma immigration detention center. It’s probably more accurate to say she ignored the question. The attacker carried a rifle, attempted to light a propane tank, and set a car on fire; police shot and killed him.
The motive appeared to be anti-ICE, anti-immigration-enforcement terrorism:
Deb Bartley, a friend of Van Spronsen’s for about 20 years, described him as an anarchist and anti-fascist, and she believes his attack on the detention center was intended to provoke a fatal conflict.
“He was ready to end it,” Bartley said. “I think this was a suicide. But then he was able to kind of do it in a way that spoke to his political beliefs . . . I know he went down there knowing he was going to die.”
Still, any of the Squad’s members would be wise to denounce this attack, and as of this writing, they haven’t done so. I suspect they will only do so if they are specifically asked about it.
This comes after protesters at an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, took down the American flag and put up a Mexican one, then spray painted graffiti on a Blue Lives Matter flag before flying it upside down on the flag pole. The entire sequence is tailor-made for a Trump reelection commercial.
Whether or not the four congresswomen hate this country, there are antifa and anti-ICE protesters who indisputably do hate this country. Rich may have inspired the 2020 Trump reelection slogan: “Men Literally Died for That Flag, You Idiots.”
Elizabeth Harrington passes on what those who are criticizing Trump are defending (with repeated tweets for some reason):
Since the media refuses to provide any context, a thread of statements made by the socialist “squad” in the House: Ilhan Omar laughing about al Qaeda, wondering why we don’t speak of America in the same tones
More on Omar from Facebook Friend Michael Smith:
Let’s review:
A person and their family are rescued from a refugee camp just over the border of their home country that is in the middle of a religious war. Their home country is a communist country, a country with a non-functional economy where everyone but the powerful is starving.
The rescue comes by the people of a peaceful, prosperous, free and religiously tolerant, majority Christian country that is half a world away, the government of which has programs to support these refugees and help the integrate and assimilate.
This person takes advantage of all the new country has to offer and becomes successful in politics, so much so they join the national governing body.
And yet, this person claims the country is racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic and seeks to change its method of governance and its economy – a desire, strangely enough, to change America into the very conditions that led to the war in their own country.
This is Ilhan Omar.
The New York Times relates a story about Omar. To wit:
“She has spoken about being bullied for wearing a hijab during her time in Virginia, recalling classmates sticking gum on it, pushing her down stairs, and jumping her when changing for gym class. Omar remembers her father’s reaction to these incidents: “They are doing something to you because they feel threatened in some way by your existence.”
I don’t believe her.
She has told far too many lies abut her past.
This is par for the course how she claims victim status to deflect from her radicalism. I honestly believe this woman has been groomed to be a sleeper agent who has been activated to wreak political terrorism on this country – and she is a walking, talking narrative that represents every victim class the progressive left has been cultivating for decades.
More than anything, she represents the progressive faction within the Demorat Party and it is their problem with which to deal. I can oppose her without cost because I’m going to be called a racist, xenophobic Islamophobe no matter what. They can’t.
More on Tahib from Caitlin Yilek:
Rep. Rashida Tlaib stood firm in her conviction that President Trump will be impeached while speaking to an audience of liberals Saturday.
“We’re going to impeach the MF’er, don’t worry!” she said to huge applause at Netroots Nation, echoing a line from January that drew criticism for its profanity.
“I will not back down impeaching this lawless president. He will not be above the law and get away with it on my watch,” the Michigan Democrat said. “Stay strong. Stay strong on this. If we don’t call him out, if we don’t push for this … who is going to be the next crooked CEO that runs for president? You know they’re coming.”
Tlaib made waves in January when just hours after being sworn in she told a liberal gathering, “We’re gonna go in and impeach the motherf—er.”
As for “that motherf—er,” Bookworm writes:
The reaction from the Progressive and Democrat cohort, encompassing politicians, presidential candidates, and the media, was predictable: RACIST!!! It did not matter that Trump said nothing about race. There was a dog whistle there and, naturally enough, race-obsessed Leftists heard it.
(Before I go on, a brief moment of ironic laughter here. When Occasional Cortex accused Nancy Pelosi of racism, Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo), a member of both the Black and Progressive Congressional caucuses opined, “What a weak argument. Because you can’t get your way and because you’re getting pushback you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable. Unbelievable to me.” Likewise, Maureen Dowd also piped up with “A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.” Coming from people who’ve spent the last 11 years insisting that racism is the only reason anyone can disagree with their agenda, that’s pretty rich. And now back to my post….)
Equally predictably, when he was againcalled a racist, Trump was not cowed. Instead, he doubled-down:
So sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion. Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, including Nancy Pelosi, “RACIST.” Their disgusting language…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019
….and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged. If the Democrat Party wants to continue to condone such disgraceful behavior, then we look even more forward to seeing you at the ballot box in 2020!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019
Two conservative writers whom I admire tremendously think Trump made a terrible mistake with today’s tweets. Ed Driscoll agrees with a RedState pundit who thinks Trump essentially own-goaled himself. Likewise, John Hinderaker, one of the first conservative pundits I followed when I crossed the political Rubicon from Democrat to conservative, argues that Trump committed “a blunder of epic proportions.” I have to differ.
What I think Trump did was to drag the Overton window back to some semblance of reality. For those unfamiliar with that expression, the Overton window is a way of describing ideas that are allowable in public discourse. For example, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the run of I Love Lucy, the word “pregnant” was not spoken in polite society. The show used a bazillion euphemisms, but never once uttered the word pregnant. In 1950s television, smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, getting pregnant was part of the Overton window, while actually using the word “pregnant” was not.
For the past 60 years, Leftists have been pushing the Overton window steadily . . . (duh) left. From the manic colors of the LGBTQRSTUV+ rainbow, to contending that people can magically use hormones and surgery to “change” their gender, to “shouting your abortion,” Leftists are introducing entirely new (and frequently insane) ideas into the realm of acceptable public conversation.
At the same time — and this is what Trump fully understands — Leftists are closing the Overton window on ideas that were once considered perfectly normal. Think of ideas that were normal just a decade ago: using pronouns consistent with biological sex, worrying about Muslim-inspired terrorism, admiring the Founding Fathers, believing that a traditional male-female marriage is optimal for raising children, mentioning the Judeo-Christian God in public, questioning anthropogenic climate change, or being anything but mindlessly positive about a member of a “Progressive protected victim class.” Nowadays, thanks to relentless media, entertainment, political, and educational pressure, voicing those ideas creates the risk that the speaker will be shouted down, humiliated, fired, or even physically attacked.
It was not so long ago that we expected people who came to America as immigrants to (a) recognize that they were invited guests, rather than entitled squatters; and (b) not to bad mouth their new country. I know what I’m talking about, for I grew up in a world of immigrants. Not only did my parents come from another country, so did all of their friends, as well as the parents of my own friends. All of these immigrants, without exception, came here legally with some, such as my father, a Polish citizen, waiting years before they were allowed in thanks to national quotas. All of these immigrants, without exception, either had to bring money with them or have someone sponsor them so that they did not become a charge on the public.
And all of these immigrants, without exception, worked hard. Some made it financially; some, like my father, never did. But all of them recognized that their being in America was a rare privilege. Even though many missed their home country (the food, familiar customs, etc.) or, in the case of the Europeans, looked longingly at the cradle-to-grave care Europeans could afford in the 1970s thanks to America paying their defense costs, they still understood that they were lucky to have been invited into an extraordinary country. They recognized that, even though it might have been hard to leave their familiar world behind, they had made it possible for their children to have a much better life than anything they could have done in the old country. There were noexceptions to these values in my world of immigrants.
The viewpoint I’ve just described was Overton window on the subject of immigration for centuries: America is an incredible land of opportunity and, thankfully, a generous country. We Americans want to continue as we have done by inviting into our country hard workers and creative people who will be appropriately grateful for the opportunity given to themselves and their children. We recognize that new immigrants will inevitably suffer from homesickness and that they may view some of the things they left behind as more virtuous or better run than America, but we expect that, having freely volunteered to come here, they will treat their new home with love and respect. Moreover, that wasn’t just the American point of view; the immigrants came in with the same attitude.
Within the last decade or so, the Leftists changed this immigration Overton window. Pretty much ever since Obama hit the White House, Leftists have insulted America and then doubled-down on insulting America, and than increased their insults to America. Even as people from around the world have illegally stormed America’s borders, the Left has told us — and instructed these new immigrants to believe — that America is a stinking pile of poop country, filled with evil plutocrats and redneck racists. To the Left and the new immigrants they indoctrinate, America is a country to be loathed, not to be admired. Moreover, immigrants are told to believe that whether we graciously invited them in or they voluntarily broke in to our country like common criminals.
You know that and I know that this is what the Leftists have done. Moreover, the millions of Americans who aren’t as political as we are know that this is what Leftists have done. They intuitively recognize that the new Overton window is as unrelated to reality as the current gender madness, but because of the Leftist Overton window shift, they are cowed into silence. The silent, sane majority in of Americans know that they can lose their jobs, get doxed, be socially humiliated, or be subject to brutal attacks if they suggest that people who were living in dirt poor, war torn, corrupt countries were blessed to come here. It would be even worse were these silenced Americans to state the obvious conclusion: If these new immigrants cannot show gratitude for the country that took them in, but insist that it’s the most evil country in the world and that their dirt poor, war torn, corrupt homeland is better, they should stop taking up space in America and return to their natal lands.
In other words, Trump stated the obvious. And by his willingness to state the obvious, he has returned the obvious to the realm of public discourse. He has shifted the Overton window back to a more normal, common sense debate. It wasn’t a mistake of epic proportions. It was a brilliant insistence on having public debate occur in reality world, not in the Leftist’s dystopian fantasy world.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 