RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/our-punchline-in-chief/

Joe Biden is, quite literally, a joke.

F . Scott Fitzgerald was incorrect when he averred that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But, if we tweak his aphorism just a little, we will arrive quickly at the truth: There are no second acts in American lives once the American in question has become a joke.

Joe Biden has become a joke.

I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-we-lose-when-we-lose-thomas?token=

After years of debate and a unanimous decision by New York City officials, the statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in the City Council chamber since 1915 is on its way out. Banished from official display, the seven-foot likeness will find its new home, likely in the New York Historical Society, by the end of the year.

The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality. That is the accomplishment that the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, in a 2019 letter, called “the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.”

It is a fact known to all Americans that Jefferson didn’t live up to his own words. He owned more than 600 people over the course of his life. Unlike George Washington, moreover, he did not take even halting steps toward manumission. It’s little comfort that Jefferson recognized his own hypocrisy. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson asked in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” 

The removal of the statue isn’t just an attack on Jefferson, though. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it: “The New York City Council hearing on Monday to remove a statue honoring Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — a serious blow, especially to the most vulnerable among us, for whom Jefferson’s cry of equality is the last best hope.” 

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

On September 30, 1981, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries peaked. The yield on the 20-year stood at 15.78%. Nobody recognized that the bear market in bonds had ended, and a new bull market had begun. (Coincidentally, this was ten and a half months before the stock market bottomed in mid-August 1982.) Jason Zweig wrote in the October 1, 2021, edition of The Wall Street Journal: “The inescapable lesson of September 30, 1981, is that markets can keep moving in the same direction longer than anyone can imagine – and then shoot explosively in the opposite direction when no one expects it, impelled by forces no one may ever fully understand.” The current yield on the 20-year is 1.9%. On March 9, 2020, the yield on the 20-year was 0.87%. Are we in the early stages of a new bear market for bonds? If we are, lower prices will mean higher rates and increased costs for the American taxpayer. I don’t pretend to have an answer, but the question is relevant given the amount of debt our nation is carrying and the speed with which deficits are building, with few politicians on either side of the aisle seemingly concerned.

We live in an age when debt is considered a good thing. As long as interest rates remain low and one’s income allows the payment of interest and the repayment of the principal, borrowing at today’s interest rate levels may be a sensible strategy. It allows one to purchase and use something today, like a home, car, dish washer or college education, without having to pay for it until tomorrow. Yet not all sources of income are secure and not all interest rates are static. Incomes can disappear and interest rates can rise. Debt can have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.

Throughout most of history, debt was considered a form of servitude of the borrower to the lender, as suggested by Thomas Jefferson in the rubric above. Those of my generation remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 hit song: Sixteen Tons, which begins: “Another day older and deeper in debt,” and ends: “I owe my soul to the company store.”

The Bible’s Proverbs 22:7 reads: “The rich rules over the poor/And the borrower is servant to the lender.” In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) warned: “Interest works night and day, in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth.” A quote attributed to President Andrew Jackson is blunt: “When you get in debt you become a slave.” It was not only slave owners and Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson who equated debt to servitude, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, wrote in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom: “I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.” Today, with historically low interest rates, such concerns have slipped our consciousness.