RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-would-make-daycare-even-pricier-child-care-cost-quality-regulation-build-back-better-11639084122?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Child care is already a major expense for parents, and President Biden pledges to reduce its cost with his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better bill. Yet while some of those who receive government subsidies may see reduced costs, millions of other working parents could see their child-care costs double. The new program would act like a $20,000 to $30,000 annual tax on middle-income families.

The bill’s latest draft proposes to reinvent child care with a trifecta of cost-increasing forces. First, it would remove much of the incentive to offer lower-cost care. Millions of families would have their child-care expenses capped by statute, which means they’d pay the same at an expensive facility as at a cheaper one.

Providers would quickly discover that lower prices no longer are much of a competitive advantage. Moreover, the providers would be reimbursed extra for what Congress calls “quality,” which is a euphemism for having more staff per child. The history of rate regulation is that cost-plus schemes result in needless waste and higher prices for consumers without quality improvements.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-covid-vaccine-mandate-wipeout-courts-11639076342?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

What legal sage advised President Biden to impose vaccine mandates? The adviser needs to have his law licence pulled because the courts are repudiating the Administration’s mandates at an astonishing pace. A federal judge in Georgia was the latest on Tuesday when he blocked its vaccine requirement for employees of federal contractors—the fifth judicial rebuke in less than a month.

Judge R. Stan Baker ruled in a challenge brought by seven states that the Administration had exceeded its authority under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act. The President claimed his executive order would “promote economy and efficiency in procurement” by contracting with sources “that provide adequate Covid-19 safeguards for their workforce.”

But the law does not give the President “the right to impose virtually any kind of requirement on businesses that wish to contract with the Government (and, thereby, on those businesses’ employees) so long as he determines it could lead to a healthier and thus more efficient workforce or it could reduce absenteeism,” Judge Baker wrote.

Last week federal Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove enjoined the Administration from enforcing the contractor mandate in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. While conceding that Congress delegated broad power to the President, the judge noted that his “authority is not absolute” and the President’s overreach raises “several concerning statutory and constitutional implications.” The mandate “intrudes on an area that is traditionally reserved to the States,” Judge Tatenhove wrote, noting the Constitution grants the states general police powers to regulate public health and welfare.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/09/1062453165/npr-marist-poll-biden-democrats-infrastructure-build-back-better

Americans don’t feel the direct payments or expanded child tax credits doled out earlier this year helped them much, according to the latest NPR/Marist poll, and they don’t see Democrats’ signature legislation as addressing their top economic concern — inflation.

Additionally, they’re down on the job President Biden is doing, don’t give him much credit for the direct payments or tax credits, and have soured on the direction of the country.

The results, out Thursday, come as Democrats prepare a nationwide push to sell voters on their policies ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when the party will defend its slim majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Americans do mostly endorse the new infrastructure law but are less supportive of Democrats’ Build Back Better bill that has passed the House. And while that legislation would expand the social safety net, survey respondents weren’t convinced that it would help people like them.

“They [Democrats] don’t have a unified message for what they’re doing, and that does not bode well for the party,” said Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll.

Views on direct payments and the child tax credit

More than 6 in 10 respondents said they received the onetime direct payment of up to $1,400 earlier this year. As of late April, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that more than 163 million people had received payments from that program.

However, 4 in 5 of those who received the payments said the money helped at least a little, but only a quarter said it helped a lot.

Democrats have called their agenda under Biden “transformative” for most Americans. They say policies like the direct payments and changes to the child tax credit are part of a broader plan for the federal government to provide needed services and support to people who have historically been disadvantaged in the economy.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-your-family

My wife and I are scrambling to find daycare for our 16-month-old son. We’ve had a “nanny share” up until now, which means we and another couple employ a nanny for both couples’ kids and split the cost. Our nanny is wonderful, and she lives just a few blocks from us. But a few weeks ago, someone walked up her street spraying bullets into random houses. One of the bullets found its way into her living room, as she and her family ducked for cover. At that moment, she and her husband decided they were moving their family out of Oakland.

The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes. 

Perhaps you’ve heard about some of them or seen the videos.

Shoplifters casually walk into Walgreens stores in San Francisco filling garbage bags full of merchandise. They’ve spat on, bitten, assaulted, and thrown bottles of urine at employees. 

The flashmob-style “smash and grab” robberies that originated here—in places like Union Square in San Francisco and the shopping plaza in affluent Walnut Creek—have now spread across the country. 

Asian seniors are brazenly assaulted in the street; one octogenarian was body slammed to death. This week, an Afghan refugee—a father of three who had worked as a translator for the U.S. army—was shot dead near a playground in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

And now freeway shootings are a thing. A few weeks ago, at nine in the morning, a 29-year-old mom on her way from Oakland to San Francisco for a job interview with her fiancé and two kids was randomly shot and killed in her SUV at the Bay Bridge toll plaza. In an interview, the victim’s mother recalled being heartbroken after hearing the story of an earlier crime, in which Jasper Wu, a two year-old who was sleeping in his car seat, was shot and killed by a stray bullet fired from another car driving in the opposite direction. It was not even two weeks later when she lost her own daughter the same way.

I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens.

And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-functional-america-wants/

The United States is still rich enough to meet higher-order needs and call them entitlements. The decades-long response to race, class and gender proves the point. Americans can fixate on respect, status, self-esteem, hurt feelings and positive recognition because the essentials just happen.

Potable water, traffic lights, microwave ovens and freedom from fear. They are there, like magic. Because all Americans are fed, reasonably policed and more civil than not — this point cannot be overstressed — authorities can sidestep policy basics and empirical findings.

The radical left evidently wishes to dismantle much of what makes this plenty possible — and what many rely on for survival — in the name of social justice. Functional America notices. Yet any rebuke to equity is likely to trigger renewed disorder of the kind condoned by blasé blue-state officials and the Democratic Party in 2020. The state’s clients and their paid handlers intend to keep a catastrophic tribute system and flow of public resources intact, and in many states and localities have the political power to do so.

For seventy-five years, US wealth and surpluses have allowed the expansion of a welfare state that provides vital support — food, medical care, housing, utilities and, in some cases, spending cash — to perhaps 20 percent of the population. These do not include the unemployed or Social Security and Medicare recipients.

Clients of the state include indigent single mothers whose children are neglected. The fathers are elsewhere. Yet their hardship still compares well with global poverty. America’s welfare class possesses cars, cable televisions and air conditioning. But basic needs like safety, love and trust that governments cannot conjure go missing. So the charity and benevolence are not working. They are instead producing monsters like Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha parade killer, and the shock troops of the radical left.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/150045/

The first time Victoria White visited the nation’s capital was on January 6, 2021. Listening to President Trump’s speech—with her teen daughter and three friends alongside her—would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, White thought.

Instead, the day turned into a personal nightmare with real-time flashbacks to her years as a victim of domestic abuse.

White, a mother of four, recounted to me this week by phone in horrifying and heartbreaking detail how at least two D.C. Metropolitan police officers viciously assaulted her inside a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building on January 6. Fierce battles between police and protesters took place inside the tunnel, which leads to a set of doors that allows access to the building. It is the location where Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia, died.

Amid video evidence, court filings, and firsthand witness accounts, new questions have emerged about the exact cause of Boyland’s death. A report issued by the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office in April claimed Boyland, a recovering addict, died of an accidental drug overdose. But others in the vicinity of Boyland when she lost consciousness insist her death was caused by law enforcement officers, who deployed a toxic chemical spray and, in some cases, used metal sticks, riot shields, and their own fists against Trump supporters.

White, 39, found herself in the tunnel near Boyland—and her harrowing account describes nothing short of criminal misconduct by still-unidentified members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. Further, her experience bolsters allegations that police contributed or directly caused the death of a second unarmed female Trump supporter on January 6.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, White traveled from her home to Washington, D.C. to hear President Trump’s speech and protest the results of the rigged 2020 presidential election. A resident of Rochester, Minnesota, White, her daughter, and friends took turns driving so they would arrive in Washington on time. They stayed at the home of one of her friend’s parents in suburban Virginia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/hillary_clinton_reminds_us_what_an_awful_president_she_would_have_been.html

Yes, Joe Biden is far and away the worst president in the history of the United States. However, the four-year Trump interlude between Obama and Biden gave the U.S. at least a little resiliency to stand against Biden’s hard-left administration. Imagine how much worse things would have been if Hillary had immediately stepped into Obama’s shoes. America wouldn’t have stood a chance. And lest you forget just what a horrible human being Hillary was, she just gave us a reminder as she spoke with Today’s Willie Geist about her decision to read her “victory speech” aloud for a MasterClass.

A snippet of her reading the speech made headlines because Hillary started to cry when she got to the part in the speech that saw her imagining telling her long-deceased mother that Hillary was America’s first woman president. Ironically, this emotional breakdown occurred in a masterclass the topic of which is “the power of resilience.” A woman who has spent the last five years whining about losing the election and now cries because she couldn’t, in her imagination, tell her mommy she won, is not resilient.

Still, any student who signs up for a MasterClass taught by Hillary Clinton has already drunk the Democrat Kool-Aid and will already have taken the side of a woman who rode her husband’s coattails as far as he could take her, at which point she fell down all by herself. A presidential candidate who calls at least half of the American electorate “deplorable” is a fool and deserves to lose.

There’s also the little problem of Hillary’s incredible corruption (making her and Biden birds of a feather). And of course, the fact that Hillary’s unsecure server damaged national security in a way that would have seen an ordinary, politically unconnected person spend the rest of her life in prison—which, not coincidentally, is where Papa Joe belongs for using his debauched son Hunter as the bagman for decades of anti-American corruption.

Still, even considering all those bad things about Hillary, there was still something worse: It was clear that she ran for office, not for America, but for Hillary. Sure, she wanted to turn the country as far left as Joe Biden is doing but, just as with Biden, Hillary was in it for self-aggrandizement. Biden, though, being a more savvy politician (it pains me to say that), hid his enormous self-centeredness a bit better than Hillary ever did.

And that gets us to Hillary’s prepared victory speech. You can listen to the part where she cries because that’s the newsworthy part, but I found most interesting what she told Willie Geist about her thinking as she wrote the thankfully unused speech (emphasis mine):

I worked on a speech that really was about my journey and that had a real emphasis on my mother’s life and journey as a way of, you know, making it clear that, yes, I would be the first woman president but I, like everybody, stood on the shoulders and lived the lives and experiences of those who came before us.