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March 2023

Biden’s Budget Is an Assault on Social Security High taxes and crushing regulations will starve entitlement programs into insolvency. By Casey B. Mulligan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-assault-on-social-security-tax-increase-labor-productivity-wage-degrowth-education-medicare-acbc7704?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Biden released his 2024 budget request Thursday while continuing to accuse Republicans of scheming to cut benefits for seniors. But he’s got it backward. By advancing policies that hinder the economic growth that drives prosperity, Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues are the ones depriving Social Security and Medicare of the hundreds of billions of dollars those programs need to remain solvent.

Economic growth has worked miracles, producing new technologies, sharply reducing world poverty, and inventing the concept of retirement—a stage of life that previous generations never enjoyed. The Biden budget’s degrowth agenda would sacrifice all that in pursuit of vaguely defined social and environmental goals. It’s no coincidence that real wages have fallen during his administration while real investment returns have turned negative. Retirement savings plans have lost $4 trillion in value since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, according to a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

My own research on the Biden agenda’s effect on Social Security and Medicare makes clear that low economic growth translates into smaller benefits for seniors. These programs give the elderly a share of the earnings of the nation’s current workers. The more people who work, and the more each worker earns, the more payroll tax revenue is available to fund Social Security and Medicare. I estimate that degrowth policies since 2020 will cumulatively reduce Medicare and Social Security tax revenue by at least $400 billion—and perhaps as much as $900 billion. The tax base will shrink even more if Mr. Biden succeeds in levying higher wealth and business taxes.

In the near term, payroll-tax revenue shortfalls hasten the day when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out and both political parties will be forced to consider benefit cuts. By statute, less national labor income also means lower Social Security benefits for every worker entering retirement.

About That ‘Record’ Defense Budget Biden’s 3.2% increase is a cut in real terms despite rising threats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-budget-defense-pentagon-china-russia-ukraine-ae4f9adf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The White House is touting President Biden’s U.S. military budget for fiscal 2024 as a record, and Mr. Biden is betting busy Americans won’t look past the headlines. The truth is that he’s asking for a real defense cut, even as the U.S. is waking up late to a world of new threats.

The Pentagon’s budget request may seem large at $842 billion. But the figure is only a 3.2% increase over last year, and with inflation at 6% it means a decline in buying power. Compare the 3.2% growth with the double-digit increases for domestic accounts: 19% for the Environmental Protection Agency; 13.6% for both the Education and Energy Departments; 11.5% for Health and Human Services.

For all the talk about a bloated Pentagon, defense in 2022 was only about 13% of the federal budget. It’s about 3% of GDP, down from 5% to 6% during the Cold War, even though America’s challenges today are arguably more numerous and acute.

China is building a world-class military to drive America out of the Pacific. Russia is committed to grinding down Ukraine and then moving its military to the Polish border; Iran may soon have a nuclear bomb; North Korea is lobbing missiles toward Japan. Hypersonics and missiles threaten the U.S. homeland.

‘State-Sponsored Thought Policing’: Matt Taibbi Tells Congress About Vast Online Censorship Network by James Lynch

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/09/twitter-files-congress-censorship-network/

Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday about the online censorship network behind Twitter’s censorship practices.

The House Judiciary Committee invited Taibbi to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government as part of a hearing about the Twitter Files, a series of reports on the inner workings of the social media platform based on documents released by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and reviewed by Taibbi and other journalists.

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said. “What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi is a left-leaning journalist with 30 years of experience reporting primarily for Rolling Stone. Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who reported on the Twitter Files, also testified in front of the Subcommittee on Weaponization.

Our Lethal Frenemies 12 Comments / March 8, 2023 Víctor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/our-lethal-frenemies/

Over 100,000 Americans are dying from opiate overdoses per year—mostly fentanyl coming across the southern border. China ships to the cartels the raw product. They refine it and stamp it into pills for export solely to the U.S., deliberately using shapes and sizes to make their export seem similar to other less deadly drugs.

China sees fentanyl as divine nemesis for the 19th-century Opium Wars: Just as Great Britain in the 1830s and 1840s once sent mass death and addiction into China via opium, so it now will do the same as payback to the U.S.

Ditto Mexico. It feels that the loss of the American southwest by intrusive Texans and others in the 1840s is now divinely paid back by millions of Mexicans pouring northward de facto to reclaim lost lands (this fantasy is often explicitly boasted about in radical La Raza literature).

Or as President Lopez Obrador of Mexico recently boasted to a visiting clueless Biden of massive unchecked and green-lighted illegal immigration into the U.S: “Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!”

Lopez Obrador strangely thought it reflected well on his Mexico that 40 millions of his own citizens wanted to leave his country as soon as possible and at any cost.

The open border is now a conduit to mass death. Let me be clear: The cartels, the Mexican government (Mexico’s top drug enforcement officer is currently on trial in the U.S. for involvement in drug trafficking), and China are making billions of dollars on the mass death of Americans, a toll each year about 12 times more than all the Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over some 20 years.

Nakba Day and diversity at the Hebrew University By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733911

Following pressure last month from the Israel-based Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem rector Tamir Sheafer informed all members of his staff that they were not at liberty to promote their political agendas through the open-source-learning platform Moodle.

“Contact with students through [this online tool] is intended only for pedagogical purposes that are directly related to course content,” he wrote. “It may not be used for other purposes, even if those appear very justified and important to the course lecturer.”

It doesn’t take a PhD to realize that the issue at hand, which spurred complaints in the first place, was – what else? – judicial reform. More precisely, it was a call to action against what the “resistance” has been referring ridiculously to as the government’s evil moves to become a theocratic dictatorship.

Sheafer can be commended for reminding educators on the government-funded HU payroll to reserve their ideological pursuits for their free time, an abundance of which happens to be a perk of their profession. But he’s got a lot more to confront at the moment than professors imposing their views on malleable minds. That phenomenon is practically taken for granted these days on campuses around the world, including in Israel.

No, he and his fellow HU honchos need to go well beyond such a mild measure as a memo where the latest, far worse, transgression is concerned. The fact that it emanated from the “diversity” department, however, likely means it will be glossed over or excused through some rhetorical trick.

THE TRAVESTY was revealed on Monday, when an e-mail – signed by HU Vice President for Strategy and Diversity Prof. Mona Khoury and Diversity Unit director Sharon Ben-Aryeh – listed “Nakba Day” as one of the holidays/days of mourning coming up in the next semester.

The Secret History of the British and American Elite Who Worked for Hitler By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/the_secret_history_of_the_british_and_american_elite_who_worked_for_hitler.html

Susan Ronald’s meticulously researched book, Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923-1941, begins with a dramatis personae including lords, ladies, barons, dukes, duchesses, and many more titles. It also includes a veritable who’s who of the industrialists, businessmen, bankers, socialites, and media barons of the time from both sides of the Atlantic. But the most prominent British name on the list is Edward, Duke of Windsor, who ascended the throne in 1936 as King Edward VIII, abdicated less than a year later and, in 1937, married Wallis Simpson, an American socialite.

The first chapter describes how disappointed Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, was that he would be attending the 1937 coronation of Albert (George VI) and not Edward. Edward was enchanted with Adolf Hitler and Nazism and, later in the same year, visited Germany, met Hitler, dined with Rudolf Hess, and was taken on a concentration camp tour. As World War II was nearing its end, Edward is reported to have remarked that “it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler is overthrown.” If Hitler won the war, Edward hoped, he could be back as a “leader” in an England that did not want him as a king.

Hitler, too, was taken with Edward. The Fuhrer obliged when, at Edward’s suggestion, the British Legion, a charity that assisted war veterans, decided to visit Germany in the spirit of friendship. The visiting veterans were dazzled with a grand reception. They dined with Heinrich Himmler and were deceived into thinking that Hitler was a man of peace. The fit prisoners they were shown at Dachau were SS men. The delegation went back singing Hitler’s praises.

Lord Londenderry was another important British personage and Nazi sympathizer von Ribbentrop introduced to Hitler and top Nazis. As a member of the elite Anglo-German Group, he aimed to forge an alliance between the two countries, disseminating the German view that the Franco-Soviet pact was a valid justification for militarizing the Rhineland. At this time, most British elite believed there was nothing wrong with Neville Chamberlain appeasing Germany. Winston Churchill was the lone voice of dissent; he alone sensed the portents of war.