I & I Editorial Board“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” — Howard Beale, “Network“
The mainstream press sees a glimmer of hope in recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s approval rating inching up and Democrats’ prospects looking brighter for the midterm elections. Don’t let yourself, or your friends, family, and neighbors be conned.
Biden’s string of “victories” includes getting a massive growth-killing tax-and-spend bill through Congress and canceling about $1 trillion worth of student loan debt to benefit a small minority of college-educated Americans.
The only thing these recent events have in common is that they are designed specifically to improve Democrats’ chances in November.
These are awfully big price tags for vote buying. And you are paying for it.
So why isn’t the public mad as hell?
Nobody believes the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Even liberal economists say it will boost inflation in the short term – that is, when we need relief the most. Nobody believes it will save the planet. At best, the enormous new subsidies for “clean” energy and EVs will have an immeasurable impact on global temperatures. Nobody believes the price control scheme on Medicare drugs will make a difference. An NBC Poll found that 71% of Americans say the Inflation Reduction Act will either make things worse or no difference at all.
But the bill does spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make the left feel happy about “doing something” on climate change, maybe even happy enough to get out and vote in November.
Likewise, nobody believes Biden’s student loan bailout is about confronting a debt crisis, or about rescuing young workers from the supposedly crushing burden of paying off heavily subsidized government loans.
For one thing, not everyone borrows money to pay for college. In fact, almost half of college graduates in 2020 got their bachelor’s degrees without going into debt. And those who did racked up an average of $28,000 in student debt – an amount less than most car loans. Plus, student loan interest rates are artificially low and borrowers have multiple ways to minimize payments.
In any case, as soon as Biden made his announcement, the left was out in force saying it wasn’t enough. Rep. Cori Bush took to Twitter to complain that “canceling anything less than 30% won’t come close to even touching the racial wealth gap.”
And Sen. Bernie Sanders complained that “if we could afford to cancel hundreds of billions in PPP loans to business owners in their time of need, please do not tell me we can’t afford to cancel all student debt for 45 million Americans.”
Nor does anyone buy the story that this massive loan forgiveness will help boost the economy. Mostly, economists say, it will help fuel inflation as borrowers rush out to spend their sudden windfall.
What’s left is straight-up vote buying.
Polling analyst Nate Silver had it right when he observed, “The thing about student loan debt relief is that, while other policies would be more economically progressive, it fairly efficiently redistributes well-being toward people in the Democratic coalition.”
This is, he said, a “very ‘transactional’ piece of public policy, directly serving the interests of the people who elected you.”
Transactional piece of public policy. How very polite.
What Silver means is that Biden is using $1 trillion of your money to pay off specific voters he and his party need to win elections.
Those paying the bill for Biden’s vote-buying schemes need to heed the advice of Howard Beale from the classic movie “Network” in a speech that is as relevant today as it was when the movie aired in 1976.
“We know things are bad – worse than bad,” he says during his crazed monologue. “They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’”
Then he goes on the issue his famous call to arms.
“I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad! … You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!'”
Will voters get mad this fall? Will they say that they’ve had enough of Bidenflation? Of open borders? Of crime-ridden streets? They’ve had enough of endless “public health” diktats? Of climate change hysteria? Of needless school closures? Of “critical race theory” indoctrination? Will they say they’re done with being called fascists because they believe in limited government and individual liberty?
Voters had better get mad, stay mad until November, and kick the left out of every leadership position it holds. Because Biden and Co. are setting the nation on a road that will lead to disaster. If voters don’t get mad now and force a course correction, they will only have themselves to blame when the inevitable crash comes.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Your polls give me hope that reality is making its way into Americans’ minds somehow despite a media that will not present bad news, unless it involves Republicans and is made up. I hope the election reflects it.
Until such time as voters can trust that the votes being cast then counted are 100% legitimate, we have nothing to trust about the system we’re trying to live under these days. I live in Wisconsin, well aware of the Zuckerbucks fiasco evident in 2020’s debacle.
If the polls are rigged (we’ve done almost nothing to fix them) it won’t matter how we vote.
Bad policies are one thing but now that the expected red wave in the midterm elections is trending toward a mere ripple, Democrats, seeing an opening, are putting their big lie pants on and claiming we are semi-fascists. Why not? As part of the pledge that Democrats swear when joining the party, shame at speaking falsely is forbidden and instilling fear is catechistic and rigorously enforced once Joe Biden’s ventriloquist programs the teleprompter. Speaker Pelosi, herself an expert on party rules and procedures, brooks no disagreement from her House partisans, nor does Senate leader Schumer. So the lies proliferate, the false testimony metastasizes, night becomes day and Pinocchio smiles along with media propagandists. But hey, it’s just politics.
Even if you think, as I do, that 2020 was rigged, you still need to get mad and vote. With enough votes we can beat the margin of fraud. It’s happened before.
In the 1982 election for Governor of Illinois, the Chicago Democrats’ Machine cast 100,000 fraudulent votes. Republican Jim Thompson won anyway, by just under 9,000 votes.
By the way, the Reagan Justice Department got 63 convictions for vote fraud after the 1982 Illinois election. That deterred vote fraud for a decade or two.
I am not buying the hype about the Democrat comeback, despite the transparent vote buying schemes being enacted, like student debt transfer. True, people need to keep their eye on the prize and get out and vote, but that shouldn’t be hard as there figures to be a continuing flood of bad news in all key areas between now and Election Day: out of control inflation, pain at the pump, sky-high heating costs, pointless wars in Europe, chaos at the border, crime in our streets, CRT and Gender Ideology in our schools, and two-tier justice outcomes, and an incoherent president that wants to go to war with half the U.S. propulatopn to name a few.
You don’t mention that US is in year #3 of “emergency government” with no end in sight. This suspension of normal government with no end date provided was decreed in March 2020 by a Republican president who’s in the news every day and could use his podium every day to offer legal steps to immediately restore regular government. But he doesn’t. Your whole thesis about blaming voters falls apart when you’re talking about Republican voters because the Republican Party despises them and wants Democrats to win. In Nov. 2018 midterms, 38 races had no Republican candidate on the ballot. Only 3 races lacked a Dem. (per Ballotpedia) Then-GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan wanted to give the House back to Dems. which he did. He then went on Fox News and blamed the losses on Trump. Several vicious security-state Dems. won by default. The GOP prefers to be the minority. Until 1994 the House had been controlled by Dems. for 40 straight years.
Hopefully we can retake our government from the communists before they kill America by turning it into N. Venezuela.
On the student loan forgiveness scheme topic, I did a small bit of research. It turns out that, of the 50 states plus DC, three of the top five highest average student debt areas are Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia. This suggests that a disproportionate share of the benefit of this wealth transfer will be taken from those who no longer have, or never had, student loan debt and given to those who work for the federal government. Don’t bother writing your representive in Congress because the person reading the message is a likely beneficiary of your involuntary largesse. Madder than hell yet?