RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/11/15/how-to-stop-inflation-a-winning-republican-program-n1532966

Last August I wrote that inflation can crush the Democrats in 2022. After the Republican triumph in Virginia earlier this month, there’s no doubt about it. The 2022 and 2024 elections are the Republicans’ to lose.

Republicans need a clear program to eliminate inflation. Complaining about it won’t help (anyone else old enough to remember Gerry Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” campaign, or Jimmy Carter’s Moral Equivalent of War, or MEOW?). Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services. The Reagan approach was less money (monetary tightening) and more product (tax cuts as an incentive to economic activity). That was designed by the late Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell, the grandfather of supply-side economics.

Establishment Republicans haven’t learned anything in forty years. The Kemp-Roth tax cuts worked wonders because the top federal marginal tax rate stood at 70% when Reagan took office. Now it’s 37%, and cutting from 37% won’t have the same effect. Paul Ryan’s 2017 tax bill cut the headline corporate tax rate but reduced investment incentives, so U.S. corporations spent more money in 2018 buying back their own stock than they did on capital investment. That’s one reason that U.S. supply chains are so creaky today. Trump had the right intentions, but the details fell to Ryan and the tech lobby.

Another part of Reagan’s success was the explosion of digital-age technology, which created new businesses and reduced the cost of computation drastically. I’ve discussed this in a number of lengthier pieces, including this one for American Affairs. That’s because the Defense Department was a driver of innovation rather than a porkbarrel for established defense contractors.

Here’s a six-point program to restore growth without inflation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/11/14/misery-index-average-americans-feel-the-pinch-of-the-biden-economy-n1532815

Americans would do well to remember this misery and these economic numbers under Biden when it comes time to vote in 2022 and 2024.

Each month economists attempt to gauge how average Americans are weathering the ups and downs of the U.S. economy. By using the simple yet clever technique of adding the U.S. unemployment rate (4.8%) to the current rate of inflation (6.22%) economists quantify the economic well-being of the country into a Misery Index. The current U.S. Misery Index stands at 10.82%.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/14/why-the-left-always-projects/

The Left is addicted to projection—the psycho-political syndrome of attributing all of one’s own sins to one’s opponents. The woke apparently do this out of some Freudian effort to square the circle of their own guilt or sense of privilege, by fobbing off their own fearful realities onto others. It is the atheist version of confession or medieval penance. In addition, in the spirit of “always being on the offense,” wokists know that those who slander do so most successfully when they lodge exactly those charges most familiar and applicable to themselves.  

The Privileged Damn Privilege 

Take for example, the worn-out charge of “privilege,” as in the phrase “check your privilege.” This trope originates exclusively from the Left. Purportedly, it signifies a rigged system in which white males have gained, unfairly and undeservedly, “privilege” to exercise cultural, economic, political, and social control over the “other”—occasionally defined as women, more often “people of color,” and most frequently African Americans. 

How odd, given that by any indicator the political Left is the party of wealth and privilege. The wealthiest ZIP codes are found in blue states such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. Twenty-six of the 27 wealthiest congressional districts, gauged by per capita incomes, are represented by liberal Democrats. 

Registered Democrats on average have higher incomes than their Republican counterparts. Democratic presidential candidates have vastly outspent Republicans over the last 20 years. Note that the old liberal saw about “dark money” has steadily disappeared from the left-wing lexicon (nothing is darker than Mark Zuckerberg’s infusions of cash to warp particular voting precincts). Likewise, in the once trendy academic trifecta of “race, class, and gender,” class” has been dropped quietly.

The most elite and wealthy institutions in America are predominantly liberal bastions: Silicon Valley, entertainment, universities, professional sports, Wall Street, the mainstream media, and foundations. Most “people of color,” who are the loudest about focusing on the evils of privilege and lack of equity, are themselves multimillionaires or multibillionaires, such as the Obamas, Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Jay-Z, or Meghan Markle. 

Accusing an entire group—white people, or conservatives, or Trump supporters—of being privileged deflects the apparent shame of elitism away from oneself on the cheap. After all, accusing some part-time lecturer or Trump deplorable of “white privilege” is a lot easier, both psychologically and materially, than giving up a nanny, trading in the gas-guzzling big Mercedes, or just saying no to private jets.

The elite accuser knows especially how to level such charges given his own intimacy with what wealth, power, and influence bring. Worse still, the projectionist feels he is making the greatest sacrifice of all by his empty confessions—even as he is a beneficiary of the rigged system that he demands be ended.

When Barack Obama flies to Glasgow to lecture the western world’s climate-wrecking middle class that it is going to have to be content with less—while acknowledging that his own wealth and privilege mean he will suffer less than others—one wonders why Obama simply does not, right now pledge to live in just one mansion rather than two? 

After all, if Obama urges the middle to class to cut back on energy use and to forfeit lifestyle privileges, why wouldn’t  Obama himself set the moral example, given his huge carbon footprint. Why would he be so cynical to warn the world that our shores will soon be inundated shortly after he himself bought a shoreline estate?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/feds-warn-rise-domestic-violent-extremists-where-robert-spencer/

Diversity is our strength, y’all, and so here is some good news: a new bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that took effect Thursday notes that “the Homeland continues to face a diverse and challenging threat environment.” But before you start celebrating diversity too enthusiastically in this case, be aware: the diversity that they have in mind means that they think you and I are part of the threat now as well.

They say that the threat is coming from both “domestic violent extremists and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences,” and they really aren’t all that interested in the threat from those foreign terrorists: USA Today noted that “FBI Director Christopher Wray referred to the rising domestic terror threat, telling a Senate committee that domestic terror cases had more than doubled since early 2020.” If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about all this new domestic terrorism, it’s because you’re not looking in the place where the feds are finding it: in your mirror.

We know this because the ostensible president’s handlers, and even Old Joe Biden himself, have repeatedly warned about a “white supremacist” terror threat that is supposedly the greatest threat the nation faces today. The only thing this scenario lacks are actual white supremacist terrorists. And so they have to be invented. Old Joe and the establishment media defamed Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist last year, doing everything they could to make him fit their ridiculous myth of violent, racist, right-wing fanatics menacing the good and decent spiritual descendants of the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, the fine young men and women of Antifa.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/beware_of_infrastructure_bill_signing_ceremony.html

When the White House holds a triumphant signing ceremony today for the Biden/Pelosi Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, H.R. 3684, keep the following facts clearly in mind. 

Democrats claim the bill will “supercharge the American economy and will create thousands of good jobs.” Translation: high-paying government, i.e., taxpayer paid for, jobs for Democrat supporters. 

When you look beyond the title, H.R. 3684 has numerous provisions that Americans don’t want.  

The bill will “restructuring the permitting process.” This is an excuse to expand an already Byzantine, massively expensive, and user-unfriendly federal bureaucracy. Permits will, of course, only go to companies favored by progressive Democrats. Recall the vendor chosen by the Obama Administration to build healthcare.gov was a Canadian company, CGI Federal, with a track record of going over budget and failing to deliver on its contracts. Democrats spent more than $2 billion for a website, that didn’t work! 

There will be “more public-private partnerships,” which is code for giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to corporations that support the Democrat party and its candidates, not to the most efficient and lowest bidders. 

H.R. 3864 will extend the reach of broadband internet access, especially to rural America, where such access can be spotty or absent. However, this activity is better done – better coverage at lower cost – using the free market than federal procurement, which is famous for delays, inefficiency, and over-spending. 

Of the $1.2 trillion probably under-estimated price tag, less than 10 percent –$110 billion – will fund true infrastructure: bridges, roads, tunnels, and waterways. This will be billions as political patronage. Companies that contributed to the Democrat party will build out the projects late and at inflated prices. If things go wrong, there will be no accountability.