What Was Missing from the Debate Clashing personalities and verbal jousting aren’t enough. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-was-missing-from-the-debate/
Even at their best, presidential debates are glorified dog-and-pony shows. Voters always say they want a serious policy debate, but such discussions involve technical information, statistical data, and complex explanations, all of which a majority of people find tedious. They much prefer emotion, clashing personalities, drama, humor, flubs, gaffes, and, as Donald Trump has shown since 2016, street-fighting elan.
Those limitations are good for entertainment and marketing, rather than informing voters, the default purpose of these verbal jousts, which reduces their political utility.
Last week’s debate illustrated this flaw, especially the insult battles between Trump and Biden. The moderators’ questions covered the issues that concern voters and regularly show up in polls, such as illegal border-crossings and inflation. But the dueling narratives mostly comprise attacks on each other, rather than presenting specific policies.
Trump, however, had the advantage in that bout despite his trademark hyperbole, given his first-term successes on both fronts, compared to Biden’s surreal lies, incoherence, and obviously addled condition, not to mention his sorry record of exacerbating those very problems.
But especially on the economy, we didn’t hear the more detailed information needed in order to break through the partisan rancor and spin, and get closer to the facts. For example, a few days before the debate, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial about the Democrat’s “Tax Armageddon” scheme for undoing Trump’s 2017 tax reforms: “Democrats are saying out loud that they plan to use the scheduled expiration of the 2017 tax cuts at the end of 2025 to insist on the largest tax increase in history.”
Also, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week said she’ll hold the middle-class tax cuts that expire in 2025 hostage if Republicans don’t agree to soak corporations and people who earn more money than she thinks they deserve. ‘Better to let all the Trump tax cuts expire than be accomplices to another slash-and-burn tax bonanza for America’s billionaires,’ she said. Her plan also includes a 2% annual tax on the net worth of households with more than $50 million in assets.”
So of course, during the debate Biden preposterously claimed that Trump’s tax cuts were responsible for inflation and deficits, and enriched billionaires and corporations at the expense of the struggling lower classes––a riff on the dull Progressive class-warfare cliché about making the “rich pay their fair share.”
But the Progressives’ ambition to make the “rich” pay more ignores how much income taxes they already pay. According to the Tax Foundation, “though the top 1 percent of taxpayers earn 19.7 percent of total adjusted gross income, they pay 37.3 percent of all income taxes. Just 3 percent of taxes are paid by the lowest half of income earners.” The Dems remind me of the Roman emperor Tiberius, who scolded the famous, rapacious governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, “I sent you to shear the sheep, not to flay them.”
The fact is, the “rich” don’t have enough money to fix the debt, deficit, and entitlement crisis worsening every day. As economist Veronique de Rugy writes, “Brian Riedl, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, noted that if we were to confiscate 100% of the income of everyone making over $500,000 per year, it would fund the government for less than a year. This puts into perspective the enormity of the $34 trillion national debt versus the income of the rich.” And don’t forget that their money provides the investment funds that grow the economy and create new jobs.
The next topic that needs more empirical evidence and critical probing is the forced transition from fossil fuel energy to “renewable” energy, in order to mitigate anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming, supposedly on track to destroy all life on the planet. One of the moderators, aware that Trump is a global warming skeptic (along with a large group of physicists) asked Trump about his support for Global Warming, which triggered Biden into channeling a Greta Thunberg class fit of climate hysteria and virtue-signaling because Trump removed the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Like previous globalists’ assaults on our national sovereignty, these conclaves are mechanisms for fleecing the West and compromising their energy supplies. The warmists rely on computer models that are steeped in begged questions and confirmation bias, and rarely accurately predict actual climate measured by satellites and weather balloons. Yet the warmists have charged ahead with their “net-zero” carbon policies and regulations that aim to eliminate fossil-fuel energy and internal combustion automobiles in a few decades.
The most economically destructive fruit of this suicidal policy is the billions given to companies to build unpopular electric cars and charging stations on which the Biden administration has spent $7.5 billion to build eight. Such a disparity is typical: as Bjorn Lomborg reported in the Wall Street Journal, “Globally, we spent almost $2 trillion in 2023 to try to force an energy transition. Studies show that when countries add more renewable energy, it does little to replace coal, gas or oil. It simply adds to energy consumption. Recent research shows that for every six units of green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil-fuel energy
And the price tag for this policy? As Lomborg reports, “McKinsey & Co. estimates that achieving a real transition would cost more than $5 trillion annually. This splurge would slow economic growth, making the real cost five times as high.” Let’s not forget the companies like First Solar, which donated millions to Biden’s presidential campaign and other D.C. players, and was reward with perhaps the biggest subsidies from the nearly trillion-dollar 2020 Inflation Reduction Act.
And for what? The $2 trillion that we spent in 2023 didn’t lower emissions, and the use of fossil fuels is expanding, not shrinking, even as China, the world’s second largest emitter, keeps building dirty coal-fired plants by the hundreds.
Last, the most important omission in the debate is national security. Defense spending has been decreasing for decades, and is projected to drop below 3% of GDP in a couple of decades, if not sooner. Recruitment across the services is falling short of their personnel quotas, and materiel is facing innovation, production, and maintenance delays. Meanwhile, a new axis of enemies including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are collaborating to check and push back Western global power and influence. As the West’s premier military power, the U.S. must increase defense spending to meet this challenge to our freedom.
But our debt, deficit, and entitlements crises make raising defense spending politically fraught. Federal spending per annum has likely surpassed GDP, meaning we spend more than we produce. And the deficit spending’s rate of increase is accelerating: as de Rugy has written: “Back in 2020, the CBO projected that federal outlays would reach $7.5 trillion by 2030. The latest report puts that number at $8.5 trillion––an additional $1 trillion in just four years. The projected deficit for 2030 also increased by roughly 25%, or $450 billion, in those four years. Meanwhile, projected debt accumulation grew by 20%. In 2020, the CBO projected that the federal debt held by the public would by 2030 reach $31.4 trillion. The latest report now puts that at $37.9 trillion. It will, however, grow another $10 trillion by 2034, to $47.8 trillion!”
On top of all that, spending on entitlements, which already consume half of spending, is also projected to grow: “In 2023, major entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and other health care programs—consumed 50 percent of all federal spending. Soon, this spending will be larger than the portion of spending for all other priorities (such as national defense) combined.” Finally, deficits require borrowing money for servicing that growing debt, and so is hostage to increases in interest rates. This year net interest spent on servicing our debt will exceed spending on defense.
As last week’s debate showed, these critical issues are mostly ignored by citizens, media, and their political leaders alike. A presidential debate is the biggest opportunity to address these crises and how they should be resolved. But representative democracies for 2500 hundred years have preferred butter to guns, habitually kick cans down the road, and usually have to be pushed to the edge of a cliff before they wake up and make the hard decisions and sacrifices require to right the ship of state.
For now, we’d rather––as the 5th century B.C. Athenian demagogue Cleon accused his fellow citizens––treat politics as a form of entertainment, “very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a rhetorician than the Council of a city.” But also like the Athenians were during the Peloponnesian War, we’re living in a world that makes that a luxury we can’t afford.
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