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‘It’s The Economy, Stupid’ And The Democratic Socialist Platform Frame This Election

Jobs, taxes and economic progress are the keys to this election as they were nearly 30 years ago, when President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville uttered his endearing reminder “It’s the economy, stupid”. Current polls reveal Americans broadly agree that President Donald Trump has done good work on jobs, taxes and the economic growth of our nation, and oppose the Biden/Harris threat to repeal Tax Reform.

Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone recently made it clear that the middle class will not be exempt from Joe Biden’s tax plan:  “When you take money out of the hands of the middle class you have a dramatic negative impact on the economy.”  He continued, “You aren’t going to get the revenue numbers by just taxing the rich…there is not going to be enough money generated from the rich to meet the Biden/Harris spending demands.” 

But other issues linger that tug at the minds and heartstrings of undecided voters.  With the publication of the 2020 Democrat Party Platform – 92 pages of mostly unbelievable, leftist, so-called progressive, socialist mantras – the issue should no longer be in doubt.  This Biden/Sanders Socialist Manifesto indicts itself. Consider some salient provisions:

The Manifesto calls for defunding the police who are trying their best to stop the riots and destruction in cities now ruled by Democrat Governors and Mayors. And it calls for disarming citizens, in violation of the 2nd Amendment, leaving them unable to defend themselves against the rioters. Unbelievably, it calls as well for making gun manufacturers liable for how their guns are used.

The Manifesto also calls for trashing the First Amendment with a new U.S. Agency for Global Media “to ensure that only accurate information is reported in the news or on the internet”.  And it calls for a new “Big Brother” Federal Agency manned by 100,000 bureaucrats to trace every American. And trashing Democracy by restoring voting rights for all convicted felons, funding all mail-in voting, and voting from home. All while adding more “progressive” Democratic votes in Congress by making Washington, D.C., the 51st state.

The Manifesto calls for a $70 trillion Green New Deal that would phase out all U.S. oil, natural gas and coal. That would end America’s energy independence, now extant for the first time in 70 years. That would also involve terminating all gasoline-driven cars and trucks from our roads.  All of this would end fracking across America, which most efficiently produces more oil and natural gas. 

Biden/Sanders claim to be doing this in the name of climate change, and demand that America rejoin the Paris Climate Accords.  (The global warming crowd continues to base their fears of the future on phony science. They need to read the thousands of pages in the Heartland Institute’s factual Climate Change Reconsidered 2.0”)

The Manifesto also calls for eliminating all border walls and immigration enforcement. It also calls for immediate citizenship for all illegal aliens, and “Medicare for all” including illegals (now “citizens”).  It also provides for free college for all and forgiveness of all student loans.

The Manifesto would extend abortion rights for all women and girls, and provide preferential treatment for all transgenders who want to enter America from abroad.

To suggest that the current Democrat Party leadership has left traditional working family Democrats to fend for themselves would be a gigantic understatement.  This on top of tax increases, job destruction and small business ruptures should be enough to foreclose support by average American families for the Biden/Harris ticket.

In sharp contrast, Trump calls for more tax cuts and deregulation in his second term, which were the foundation for his first term Blue-Collar Boom. That would complete his V-shaped recovery for the middle class, working people, and the poor. He would continue to appoint conservative Justices and Judges, like Amy Coney Barrett. He would continue to fast track a COVID vaccine, and therapeutics developed by world-leading American pharmaceutical firms. He would complete building his southern wall.

There has never been any sharper contrast in American history for voters to make their choices for president and Congress.

Lew Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and collaborator of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country.

Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow of NTLF. He served as a member of the White House of Policy Development under President Reagan, as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W, Bush, and as a Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics for Kings College in New York.

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1 comment

  • However much Donald Trump may have undermined progressive values, deconstructing America has been de rigueur for elite graduate students and their mentors for decades, especially those captivated by the idea of revenge by destroying traditional structures of society most of us enjoy, ironically the very structures the vulnerable admire when immigrating.

    Comprehending just why some of the highly educated find razing success so attractive requires a deep dive into the psyche of the dissatisfied and the guilt-ridden, but the most recent acceleration of cancel culture can be marked by the stinging rebuke an Electoral College majority gave in 2016 to Hillary Rodham Clinton by a reprobate, a deplorable, a man who could not possibly win. To add insult to the crushing defeat, the deplorable victor provided the best economy and best foreign policy we have seen for decades, giving another strident rebuke to the erudite elite by casting aside eight years of Barack Obama. How could this happen? If a deplorable can defeat what Mr. Obama called the most qualified candidate for president in our history, then something must be irredeemably wrong. And if something that formidable is wrong, isn’t it the patriotic duty of every able-bodied elitist to cancel the wayward American culture and construct a righteous edifice, an autocratic one with re-education camps for us wayward folk?

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