Tag: Reagan

Up for Discussion

Will President Biden use Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs report as an argument against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to raise the federal debt ceiling without budget cuts? You can bet on it. 

Remember, from the get-go Biden has argued for his big spending programs as a sort of reversal of trickle-down Reaganomics, which itself was a reversal of FDR’s New Deal, a philosophy dear not as much to the Red Hats as to mainstream, traditional conservative Republicans. 

Also Up for Discussion: After the House of Representatives removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the Foreign Relations Committee Thursday (see left column), Speaker Kevin McCarthy was asked whether he thought a Capitol Police officer who fatally shot Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to break into the speaker’s office (then Rep. Nancy Pelosi) on January 6th, was doing his job. McCarthy responded; “I think he was doing his job.” Context is that ex-President Trump posted a lengthy screed on his site, Truth Social, strongly disagreeing with McCarthy and accusing police of “murdering” the pro-MAGA rioter (per MSNBC’s Morning Joe). 

Scroll down for …

•The House Judiciary Committee, under its new chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has begun investigating Biden’s “border crisis.” (Right column.)

•New hope for revival of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act? (Left column.)

•Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor is planning to announce a run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. (Right column.)

•Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wants to be running mate for the only Republican who has announced his candidacy, so far, Donald J. Trump.

Go to the Comment section below or in the left column (if that’s how you lean) or email editors@thehustings.news with “for the right column” or “for the left column” in the subject line.

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Follow the Money

By Stephen Macaulay

Jesse—Big Daddy—Unruh, California politician during the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and, yes, ‘80s, famously said: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

He also said regarding lobbyists, “"If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them you've got no business being up here.”

So the question is whether Unruh was a cynic or a realist. I’ll go for the second choice.

Even in cases where there is what is generally accepted “normal” behavior by the men and women who hold higher office, in point of fact their insatiable need for money to keep the wheels of their careers well oiled often puts them in positions wherein temptation is at an intensity that most of us will never experience.

And when you have the Trump Family, things are really off the rails.

What is surprising is the number of individuals and corporations Team Trump have, to put it indelicately, screwed. Whether it was contractors who didn’t get paid or hotels that had to send invoices to a collection agency, the Trumps, led by the paterfamilias, have had a thing for other people’s money. Getting into the Oval Office was hitting the jackpot. Presidents don’t need to carry wallets.

One reason why we have heard ad nauseum about how the election was stolen, rigged, etc., about how he “won in a landslide,” probably has more than a little something to do with dead presidents—and I don’t mean Bush 41, Reagan, Johnson, etc.—than any concern with the well-being of the polity.

Remember those tax returns we’ve only seen by fits and starts? Or the return that showed Trump paid $750 in taxes in 2017?

Odds are good that Trump is going to realize that he’s going to make more money being out of office than would back in office (remember that he is 74 and although his parents lived long lives — his father to 93 and his mother to 88 — according to the Social Security actuarial table he has an average 11.76 years left, so he might as well optimize his earnings, such as they may be). What about the kids? Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka? Might they try a run? Anything is possible, but fealty seems to be to Senior, and there is less likelihood that they could pull it off with the bold bluster of the Old Man. And if there is a — and I use this term technically — a shit-storm of lawsuits that come raining down on Trump, the brand is going to be largely besmirched for all but the most dedicated, so the money won’t come raining with it.

So if not Trump, then who? Marco Rubio — a.k.a., “Lil’ Marco” — will probably give it another run. And Mike Pence hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory during his tenure in the White House, nor endeared himself to the Base, so there doesn’t seem to be a path for him to take, so odds aren’t good there. (And that second Unruh quote would undoubtedly be too upsetting to him to contemplate.)

It could be that the Republicans try to do a bit of a reset and go for a more “normal” Ben Sasse — although it should be noted that while Nebraska has been a reliably Republican state, in the last presidential, for only the second time in its history, it awarded one of its five electoral votes to someone else, in this case, Joe Biden.

It should not be forgotten that before the chairman and CEO — then, as now — of The Trump Organization won the Republican nomination, there were Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry all in the game at one point.

Politics is a nasty game and corporations play hard ball. Make no mistake: they’re not going to put their efforts behind people supported by grown-ups who wear Viking garb — and I don’t mean the Minnesota team — when it isn’t Halloween.

Follow the money.

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Leave it to the Free Market Instead

By Andrew Boyd

I have a B.A, in economics from the University of Maryland, whose only real value is in providing me with the pretext to imagine that I know more about how an economy functions than anyone else. Reagan not-so-famously said that an economist is someone who sees a thing working in practice and wonders if it can be made to work in theory. Food for thought.

Let’s cut the crap here. Government spending and fiscal policy is a really, really, really poor substitute for the allocation of resources by free markets made up of millions of individuals pursuing their own self interests. There are circumstances, be they few, where externalities to free-market mechanics, constrained by constitutionally founded legal principles, provide some rationale for big government intervention and management of resource, such as national security and environmental protection, where the benefits do not accrue to the individual in such a manner that markets can effectively account for the opportunity cost. 

There’s a concept worth ruminating on, opportunity cost, which you might otherwise think of simply as tradeoffs. Everything is thus, and every dollar the government collects and attempts to redistribute wisely, while lacking any real wisdom, is economic drag being traded against some espoused social or political priority that tends toward political cronyism, politicians at large being the most wretched and craven among us. Devils stomping about where angels fear to tread.

All that said, is COVID-19 an externality? Yes. Does it require government intervention? I'd say yes there as well. Now, who gets the money? Everyone in accordance with what they put in, IMHO. Enough of this picking winners and losers, capital vs. labor, essential vs. non-essential. It’s a damned dumpster fire and, oh by the way, immoral. It wasn’t their labor, their ingenuity, their value to society to begin with! Pick a number, they’re equally arbitrary, ratio it according to individuals' or households' federal income tax rate and cut the checks. And then someone grow a pair and own up to the fact that modern monetary policy is a train wreck whose destructive energy just hasn’t made it back to our particular car yet (car being a stand-in for time, here).

None of this is really economic policy, by the way. It’s triage. What we're calling stimulus is more like an economic inertial damper, spreading impact over time to presumably slowing the spread of fear that left unchecked will overwhelm our economic immune system. If we want to talk Supply vs. Demand fiscal policy, we need to decouple the conversation from COVID. They’re apples and oranges. But if I must, I’ll argue it this way: Government, you have no good goddamn idea what you’re doing. Get out of the business of managing the economy. You suck at it, completely. Get off people’s necks and let them pursue what ends seem best to them, with one and only one real caveat -- your rights end at the top of my nose and visa versa.  That’s a little thing called freedom, and it’s so much more delicate a thing than we can possibly fathom.

And, oh yeah, flat tax.

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