RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/joe-bidens-imaginary-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

His policies seem designed for coastal enclaves that do not represent most of the country

After two painful recessions and ever greater national discord, there is considerable support for a new beginning, even if it takes massive federal spending. The question we must ask now is what kind of spending makes sense given the character of the country, its geography, and its economic challenges. America remains a vast and diverse place, and decisions that make sense for one locale do not necessarily make any sense in others. A dispersed country needs dispersed decision-making, not edicts issued from on high by the D.C. nomenklatura.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden’s ballyhooed “infrastructure” plan, coupled with unprecedented stimulus spending, is cast by the obliging media as being about the middle class but seems oddly detached from how the overwhelming majority of the middle class lives, which is in lower-density, automobile-dependent neighborhoods. This dynamic was intensifying even before the pandemic. But Biden’s plan seems mostly about serving the relatively small sliver of transit-riding apartment dwellers living in denser neighborhoods. Overall, dense residential areas accommodate no more than 10 percent of the nation’s population.

Rather than emulate Roosevelt’s New Deal, as Biden’s handlers insist, the plan renounces much of what drove it. The New Deal, whatever one thinks of it, was about improving the material quality of life for most Americans, such as by spreading the benefits of homeownership to an ever-broader part of the population. In contrast, the Biden plan focuses on permanent redistribution through ever more entitlements and dependency — something Roosevelt opposed. It is likely to reduce our competitiveness by boosting energy and regulatory costs as well as taxes.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s myopic sense of geography than its transportation priorities. Take urban transit. Biden has proposed a policy that, by some estimates, would allocate $165 billion for public transit (including urban rail — subways, light rail, and commuter rail) against only $115 billion to fix and modernize roads and bridges. Transit, which accounts for about 1 percent of overall urban and rural ground transportation, would receive nearly 60 percent of the money.

https://www.city-journal.org/corporate-world-politicization-not-sustainable

As the definition of “social responsibility” continues to expand, the corporate world is undergoing an identity crisis. Executives regularly come under fire from subordinates or vocal activists who demand that their companies wade into politics. More often than not, these accusations come from well-organized but small-in-number political activists, rather than regular customers or the highest-performing employees. While virtue-signaling strategies might create some short-term benefits—attracting activist-minded workers, appeasing social media mobs—these decisions come at a cost. As the media have politicized more content, polarization has increased nationally. Meantime, companies that deviate from their central purpose run the risk of simultaneously overstepping and failing to deliver on their core responsibility: meeting marketplace demand. Politicization threatens not only society but also the long-term future of organizations involved in it.

New research that I coauthored investigates how the politicization of scientific issues, for example, affects user engagement in journalism. Drawing on over a decade of articles in the Guardian, we find that increasing the political content of articles about climate change leads to a decline in the number of readers, comments, and recommendations in those articles. While political articles receive greater engagement than non-political ones, politicizing otherwise neutral topics appears to backfire, in the form of sizably lower user engagement—about one-fifth of the increase that a political article normally would produce. We also find that the most politicized articles are those pertaining to topics that have previously been politicized—like throwing fuel on a fire.

Our paper is one among a number of findings suggesting that virtue signaling is ineffective. For example, some research shows that companies boosting their corporate giving to charities that advance the CEO’s interests end up reducing the firm’s value through reductions in the shareholder valuation of firm cash holdings. Other research shows that low-performing CEOs can defer getting replaced by donating to charities affiliated with a large fraction of the firm’s board members. How many executives have issued virtue-signaling statements to distract from their own poor management?

https://freebeacon.com/columns/bidens-long-hot-summer/

Sometime in the last week, Democrats looked at the calendar and realized that President Biden is in trouble.

My theory is that the moment of truth arrived on May 27. That was when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to scramble to save one of his priorities, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, from falling apart. Then, on May 28, the proposed commission into the January 6 riot at the Capitol failed to clear the filibuster.

The panic started. You began seeing articles about the “summer slump” that afflicts presidencies. You started hearing that Biden can’t let negotiations with Republicans drag on. Before leaving for Memorial Day recess, Schumer told reporters that when the Senate returns he plans to hold votes not only on the constitutionally dubious “For the People Act,” but also on the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Equality Act, and two gun-control bills.

And that’s just what the House has passed already. The president’s $4 trillion American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan haven’t come to a vote in either chamber of Congress. They haven’t been put into legislation. The fate of these projects depends in large part on Biden’s ability to strike a deal on infrastructure with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. The likelihood of a bargain? Not great.

For Democrats, the Biden presidency is an hourglass and the sand is running out. They have two years to enact the “transformational” agenda that, presto change-o, will turn Biden into the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And since they have incredibly narrow margins in the Congress—four votes in the House, a tied Senate—they have to remain unified. “That is a problem with the Democratic Party,” the activist Rev. William J. Barber II told the Washington Post. “What you see with Republicans—they stick together no matter what.” He must not see many Republicans.

It is still a problem with the Democratic Party, though, because Democrats agree on one thing alone: They oppose Donald Trump. They’re happy he’s not president. They don’t want him to be president again. Beyond Trump, however, Democrats are all over the place. They have Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on one side of the caucus and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other.

The coalition that elected Biden is even broader, stretching from Cindy McCain to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An alliance formed on the basis of opposition to one personality is never going to be ideologically uniform. Nor is it going to be stable. The Democrats face a similar problem as the coalition government that was agreed to in Israel this week: What do you do after the boogeyman is gone?