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?