RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3615803-next-up-bidens-energy-crisis/

We’ve had Biden’s inflation and Biden’s recession; now we face Biden’s energy crisis. It didn’t have to be this way.

Twenty million Americans are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

Who is surprised? Even as real wages tumbled 3.6 percent over the past year, electricity prices increased 16 percent, squeezing consumers. Unhappily, things are about to get worse.

Natural gas, used to create power and to heat almost half of America’s homes, is trading at prices nearly double those of last year, and the winter heating season promises to bring even higher prices.

The price of natural gas today is the highest since 2008, before the fracking revolution unleashed almost unlimited gas deposits trapped in tight formations that were previously inaccessible.

Why should the United States suffer a giant increase in costs if we have so much gas? In part, because President Biden pledged this year to double our exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which means less natural gas available to American consumers.

Biden made that grand gesture to help our allies, who are increasingly cut off from Russian oil and gas because of the war in Ukraine. But he made that promise to send more U.S. natural gas overseas even though the price was already soaring and inventories were low.

But barring an adverse court ruling, young Americans with student debt are now set to receive a five-figure handout. And everyone else is set to pay for it.

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-cancellation-of-student-debt-indefensible

After months of will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, President Biden has announced his executive actions on student debt. The administration plans to cancel up to $10,000 for borrowers currently earning up to $125,000 annually ($250,000 for married couples)—with the maximum forgiveness doubled for the students who, based on their parents’ finances, received Pell Grants when they attended college. Biden will also extend the pause on payments “for one final time” through the end of the year and allow those with undergraduate loans to cap their payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income, as opposed to 10 percent under current policy. Because the “cancellation” is really a transfer, the combined changes will cost taxpayers something like $500 billion—about $1,500 for every person in the United States.

Forgiving student debt may be a savvy way for Biden to appeal to young, left-leaning voters, but it’s indefensible as policy. Beyond the baseline question of whether the government should ever wipe out the willfully assumed debts of a preferred class of Americans at the expense of everyone else, the program is a poorly targeted use of taxpayer funds, rewards the dysfunctions of the higher-ed sector, and is likely illegal.

Yes, the limits placed on the program make it less of a bonanza for the upper-middle class than it could have been. The largest debt loads are typically held by those with advanced, not just undergraduate, degrees, so blanket forgiveness would have been a massive windfall for young lawyers. But the $125,000 income threshold doesn’t come close to targeting the most sympathetic cases: those who were preyed upon by low-quality colleges, often didn’t even earn a degree, and wound up working at the proverbial Starbucks. The median earnings for a U.S. female working full-time and year-round were about $50,000 in 2020; for a male, the number was roughly $60,000. Yet the White House set its cutoff for five-figure handouts at more than twice those amounts—and, citing numbers prepared by its own Department of Education, boasts that 87 percent of the debt relief announced yesterday will go to those earning less than $75,000 in individual income. Even that would be an odd threshold for taxpayer largesse, as it’s above the 2020 median household income and more than triple the 2022 Federal Poverty Level for a family of three. But rest assured: “only” about $65 billion will go to individuals earning even more than that by themselves, at a cost of $200 per U.S. resident.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/under-biden-youre-4-times-more-likely-face-irs-daniel-greenfield/

“I direct that any additional resources… shall not be used to increase the share of small businesses or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Treasury Secretary Yellen wrote to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

That directive has been used by media “fact checkers” to deny that the massive increase in IRS personnel under Biden’s Inflation Increase Act will also increase audits of the middle class.

Yellen’s statement initially seems reassuring until you look closely at its curious language.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Julia Krieger used the same phrasing when claiming that “audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year” would not increase.

“Historical” is an interesting term. Media fact checkers act as if it means current rates. But if it means current rates, Yellen and the Treasury spokeswoman could have just said so. The specific use of “historical norms” by both women is not an accident: it’s policy.

What’s the difference between “current rates” and “historical levels”?

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that from 2010 to 2019, audit rates dropped from “0.9 percent to 0.25 percent” due to “reduced staffing as a result of decreased funding”. Audit rates for taxpayers earning from $25,000 to $500,000 were even lower at 0.17%.

Would “historical norms” cover 2010? It’s hard to believe that they would not. Even the most generous interpretation of Yellen’s language is that IRS audit rates would significantly increase.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/25/student-debt-forgiveness-bidens-illegal-inflationary-inequitable-attempt-to-buy-votes/

President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt “forgiveness” is nothing of the sort. It merely takes money from one group of taxpayers and gives it to another. It will not increase access to education, or improve it at all. And it will drive up inflation. In short, it’s yet another leftist sham intended to cull votes from the unthinking herd.

After leaking that the debt forgiveness scheme would amount to about $10,000 per eligible student, the White House — surprise! — made it $20,000 instead, doubling the damage that will ensue.

Under the program, Pell Grant recipients will be eligible for that $20,000 in relief, versus $10,000 for all others. And it goes only to those earning less than $125,000. It also extends the current loan repayment “pause” though the end of this year, while capping the amount a student has to repay at 5% of income.

There are so many problems with this idea it’s hard to know where to start.

How about this: The president doesn’t have the right under the Constitution to “forgive” anyone’s debts. It’s not in his list of superpowers. But that’s just some crazy right-wing idea, you say?

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no shrinking violet when it comes to leftist lunacy, understands this:

https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/23/mar-a-lago-trump-archives-raid-fbi-biden/

The Biden White House authorized the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to waive former President Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege in the Justice Department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents, according to a NARA letter.

The letter, first reported by Just the News, was sent by National Archivist Debra Wall to Trump attorney Evan Corcoran on May 10 and shows that President Joe Biden personally delegated the decision to waive Trump’s claim to executive privilege to NARA following a request by the DOJ to view classified documents Trump handed over to the agency. Trump had voluntarily turned over 15 boxes of documents he had taken with him to his Mar-a-Lago home after he left office earlier this year, and the investigation into his handling of classified documents ultimately culminated in the Aug. 8 FBI raid on his Florida home.

“The counsel to the president has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal counsel regarding whether or not I should uphold former the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege,’” Wall wrote.

“I have therefore decided not to honor the former President’s ‘protective’ claim of privilege,” Wall wrote.

https://amac.us/bidens-87000-irs-agents-set-to-become-woke-army-of-equity-enforcers/

Many Americans are by now aware of the Biden administration’s plan to hire some 87,000 new IRS agents with $80 billion set aside for that purpose as part of Democrats’ misleadingly titled Inflation Reduction Act. But even more terrifying than this army of new “tax enforcers” prying into the finances of millions of ordinary Americans is the fact that, under the Biden administration’s “equity” agenda, all of them will be trained in the tenets of wokeism and ordered to advance Democrats’ far-left social agenda.

On day one of his administration, Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Specifically, the Order directed every federal agency to develop and implement an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face.” Notably, Biden included the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy in the “Equitable Data Working Group” that the Order established.

This move immediately raised the alarm for conservatives, who had by then become all-too familiar with the left-wing concept of “equity.” While the term sounds similar to “equality,” it in fact refers to the exact opposite approach – using government power to dispense unequal treatment among different groups in an attempt to force “equal” outcomes for all. As Vice President Kamala Harris explained in a tweet in November 2020, “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”

The Treasury Department – which oversees the IRS – released its “Equity Action Plan” in accordance with Biden’s Executive Order in October 2021 to little fanfare. But contained within the document are hints at a scheme to radicalize the IRS in accordance with left-wing identity politics – a plan that the agency will soon have the manpower to implement.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/23/racism-to-achieve-diversity-harms-all-americans/

If you’ve navigated the thicket of microinstructions, hectoring, guilt-tripping, institutionalized resentment, establishment-generated misinformation, double standards, and bizarre new terminology, then welcome to the world of woke antiracism in America today.

One of the biggest absurdities spread by the woke antiracists is that white people must practice “allyship” and refrain from sharing their opinions on race relations with “people of color.” There is nothing wrong with listening as well as talking, but for white people to remain silent in the face of one of the most destructive movements in American history is negligent and cowardly.

As it is, progressive elites in America, almost all of them white, are indoctrinating nonwhites in America to believe that they live in an oppressive, racist nation. They are falsely told that unjustified police violence disproportionately targets blacks. They are falsely told the biggest threat to the nation is white supremacists. Worse still, they are told that every disparity in achievement between races is a product of white racism, and that white racists are to blame for any failures in their individual lives or within their communities.

The motivation for this indoctrination is political and economic. America’s corporate socialist uniparty—all of the Democrats and a sizable percentage of Republicans—finds power and profit in selling this narrative. It justifies expanding government, nurturing dependency, unchecked immigration, and building the welfare and diversity bureaucracies. It creates a divided and fractious electorate that is incapable of recognizing this political betrayal and unifying to stop it.

The fruits of woke indoctrination are that an overwhelming majority of blacks, Latinos, and Asians vote for “progressive” politicians. In the 2020 election, Biden was supported by 87 percent of black voters, by 61 percent of Latinos, and by 63 percent of Asians. These partisan margins have become the decisive swing vote that is changing the destiny of America. Which is to say, America used to be a country where property rights and free speech were paramount values, but today it is being converted into a corporate socialist dystopia where there are only oligarchs and serfs dependent on government handouts. And as this epic, life-changing transformation occurs, white people are told to just shut up and be “allies.”

There are plenty of brilliant conservative black intellectuals who are doing a good job of exposing how the fraudulent, destructive essence of woke ideology harms everyone regardless of their ethnicity: Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, and other well-established luminaries, along with thousands of younger entrants such as Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum. The emergence of black conservatives, too numerous to mention, is an encouraging pushback against the woke minions and their corporate backers. Others, such as Indian-Americans Vivek Ramaswamy and Dinesh D’Souza, have also become important conservative thinkers.

So with their help, it’s time to mainstream a position that is unfairly depicted by the “woke” as something only a “far-right extremist can think”—namely, that for several decades America has been a systemically racist nation against white people, and has more recently begun to also discriminate against Asians, especially in college and university admissions. This is harming everyone, including the nonwhites it is alleged to help.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/24/the-morning-briefing-the-delicious-stupidity-of-liz-cheneys-presidential-folly-n1623691

It has been just over a week since the Republican voters of Wyoming let Liz Cheney know what they thought of her stabbing them in the back by joining the Democrats’ J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues.

The mental unwellness that Dick’s daughter began exhibiting that night hasn’t improved. Soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman Cheney is still harboring delusions about the viability of a presidential run in 2024. So much so, in fact, that she’s lining up some Koch money and some experienced Republican consultant firepower to help her, per Rick’s reporting.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to see her go through with this. I may have to rent a storage space for the extra schadenfreude I’ll have when this ego train wrecks.

Here is a snippet from a VIP column I wrote last week:

There is no great GOP silent majority just waiting for a milquetoast squish alternative to Trump. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that if faced with AOC, Mayor Pete, or Kamala Harris on the ballot, millions of Republicans are going to think, “Hmmm… better that than mean tweets.”

We should also remember that the disgruntled GOPers who would get behind a Cheney run are the same ones who were behind the Great Evan McMullin Gambit of 2016.

In short, Cheney’s merry band of potential voters is made up of a handful of morally bankrupt Never Trump grifters and maybe one drunk Democrat named Chet.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/08/23/a-dying-desperate-establishment-is-a-dangerous-beast-n1623454

The best piece of U.S. political analysis published in recent weeks is Michael Anton’s essay at Compact Magazine, “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” Writes Anton, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration: “Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three.” The brazenly partisan perversion of the justice system that was the Mar-a-Lago raid validates Anton’s warning in spades.

Trump threatens what the elites call the “rules-based international order,” which simply means an international order in which the elites make the rules.

Our elites are as incompetent as they are malicious. If anyone bears the blame for tearing down the post-war international order—the NATO alliance and the dollar-centered monetary system—it is the elites themselves, whose arrogance, overreach, and outright pigheadedness threaten to ruin the West. Long before the next U.S. president takes office in January 2025, the “rules-based” order and the institutions attached to it will be in ruins. The elites will be desperate.

The Ukraine war is a dealbreaker for the “rules-based order.” Despite the drumbeat of propaganda channeled through the echo chamber of international media, Russia is NOT losing—not militarily and not economically. China has doubled its imports of Russian oil and India has quadrupled its imports. The two countries alone pay Putin $150 billion a year.