Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home

At Amazon, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America

At Amazon, Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending US Poverty.

A Manifesto on National Conservatism

This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist"). 

Some parts are just okay, though. 

The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts. 

The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.

See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

RTWT. 

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart

At Amazon, Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

History Is Speeding Up: Vindication for Neoconservatism

An amazing essay from John Podhoretz, at Commentary, "Neoconservatism: A Vindication":

In 2022, the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russia would actually roll the tanks and march the soldiers across the border into Ukraine seemed so irrational and peculiar to the Western consciousness that most of us—and in that “us” I would even include the heroic Volodymyr Zelensky—were living in a kind of weird haze of disbelief and denial that it could even happen.

Then it did.

And the surprise Jimmy Carter had felt in 1979 was as nothing compared to the shock wave across Europe in 2022. It took the United States three years to double its defense budget after the Soviet invasion. It took Germany three days. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would increase its defense spending from 47 billion euros to 100 billion euros 72 hours after the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border.

History. Speeding up. And rhyming.

Will this be a hinge moment in history as well? If so, the rhymes of history may be heard in the surprising present urgency of neoconservatism.

Throughout the 1970s, the band of writers and thinkers who came to be known as “neoconservatives” had taken defiantly unfashionable positions when it came to matters of defense and foreign policy. The neoconservatives opposed negotiations and treaties with the Soviet Union, which they considered a great evil. They reviled the United Nations for its “Zionism is racism” resolution at a time when the UN was almost sacrosanct (millions of little boys and girls across America, including me, had proudly toted orange tzedakah boxes on Halloween to raise money for UNICEF). And they feared that the United States had, in the wake of Vietnam, undergone what a 1975 symposium in this magazine called “A Failure of Nerve” that would have global consequences.

The general opinion among the American cognoscenti was that the neoconservatives were hysterics and vulgarians incapable of seeing shades of gray. A more mature sense of the world’s complexity was supposedly represented first by the hard-won realism of the establishmentarians who had embraced the policy of détente with the Soviet Union—and second, by hipper foreign-policy thinkers whose worldview was encapsulated by Carter’s May 1977 declaration that America had gotten over its “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Then came 1979. The year began with the Iranian revolution engendering an oil crisis. By the end of the year, Iran’s fundamentalists had taken 52 American diplomats hostage as crowds chanted “Death to America” in the greatest public humiliation the United States had ever experienced as a nation. A thousand miles from the U.S. border, Nicaragua fell to a puppet guerrilla army of the Cubans and the Soviets while a similar puppet force was threatening to do the same in El Salvador—thus potentially creating a Soviet-friendly anti-U.S. bloc on the American subcontinent.

Suddenly the vulgarity of the neoconservatives didn’t seem quite so vulgar. But they remained prophets without much honor in the quarters in which they had traveled for most of their adult lives. Both the old and new establishments were largely impervious to the way history was vindicating their warnings and fears.

Thus began the integration of the neoconservatives into the conservative movement and the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, who became the dominating figure in both in the 1980s. What they brought to Reaganism was one simple policy approach: deterrence.

This magazine was the epicenter of foreign-policy neoconservatism. Irving Kristol’s magazine, the Public Interest, was dedicated to domestic-policy neoconservatism. COMMENTARY hammered home the flawed ideas of the prevailing consensus on world order. The Public Interest did the same on matters ranging from housing policy to urban policy to energy policy to criminal justice. What they had in common was this: Neoconservatives believed that the purpose of government was both to defend and protect our liberties from threats at home and abroad. How could this best be effected? Deterrence.

If the greatest threat to our liberty abroad from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War was the Soviet Union, the best and only effective way to face it down was to work to deter its ambitions and its influence. You could not do so by entering into agreements with it. You needed to match its aggressions with countermeasures that would make those aggressions costly.

If they invade Afghanistan, you arm the Afghan rebels. If they seek beachheads in the Americas, you arm the Nicaraguan rebels even as you support the El Salvadorean government against their Communist rebels. Install medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe to counteract the huge Soviet military presence in the East. The ultimate move in this regard was the Strategic Defense Initiative, which sought to use American ingenuity and scientific knowhow as a countermeasure against the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

These policies were wildly controversial, even though their aims were actually rather modest: Pin the bad actors down and raise the cost of their bad conduct to unacceptable levels. But for those who believed the best way to deal with the Soviet Union was to imagine that it was not an enemy or even an adversary but simply a nation with a different approach to things with which we could still do business, the neoconservative notion of matching Soviet moves pawn by pawn seemed openly belligerent and crazy.

Domestically, deterrence was achieved by countering the worst human impulses through the proper use of defensive protocols that would prevent the bad behavior from taking place. Contain the impulses and you could let everybody go on with their lives. In practical terms, that meant eyes on the street and cops on the beat.

There had been a policy revolution in the 1960s known as “911 policing” that essentially changed the nature of policing—cops were to respond to crimes after they happened, to wait for the call after the violence had been done. It was the domestic neoconservatives who laid the groundwork over more than 20 years for the crime drop that changed America for the better beginning in the early 1990s. Every one of the ideas they presented—broken-windows theory, COMPSTAT-driven deployment of police forces—was designed to enhance deterrence. So too with the way America dealt with wrongdoers: It criticized the movement toward more lenient sentencing because it limited the deterrent effect of punishment, even going so far as to say it would be dangerous to eliminate the death penalty because without the ultimate sanction all other forms of punitive incarceration would gradually be compromised.

Deterrence in domestic matters went beyond crime. The general proposition that good policy largely involved containing dangerous human impulses meant also grappling with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned social policy gone awry—as when cradle-to-grave welfare made it a benefit to be a single parent. The problems brought about by welfare policy also led to revolutionary changes no one really believed would ever take place, such as the welfare reform Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996—just as no one really believed the Soviet Union would collapse or that crime would drop by 80 percent.

It turned out that deterrence was not only simple but very powerful. And very practical...

Still more.

 

Bombshell: Senator Joe Manchin Won't Vote for 'Build Back Better' (VIDEO)

He made the announcement on Fox News this morning, of all places.

At the New York Times, "Manchin Pulls Support From Biden’s Social Policy Bill, Imperiling Its Passage":

WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said on Sunday that he could not support President Biden’s signature $2.2 trillion social safety net, climate and tax bill, dooming his party’s drive to pass its marquee domestic policy legislation as written.

The comments from Mr. Manchin, a longtime centrist holdout, dealt the latest and perhaps a fatal blow to the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda, barely a day after senators left Washington for the year after Democrats conceded they could not yet push through any of their top legislative priorities, from the social policy bill to a voting rights overhaul.

“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation,” Mr. Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday,” citing concerns about adding to the national debt, rising inflation and the spread of the latest coronavirus variant. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there. This is a no.”

In a statement released shortly afterward, he was scathing toward his own party, declaring that “my Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face.”

“I cannot take that risk with a staggering debt of more than $29 trillion and inflation taxes that are real and harmful,” he said.

It amounted to Mr. Manchin’s most definitive rejection of the sprawling measure, which party leaders muscled through the House in November, after maintaining a drumbeat of concern about its cost and ambitious scope. With Republicans united in opposing the legislation, Democrats needed the votes of all 50 senators who caucus with their party for the measure to pass an evenly divided Senate, effectively handing each of them veto power.

Mr. Manchin’s comments provoked an unusually blistering broadside from Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, who accused Mr. Manchin in a lengthy statement of reneging on his promises. As recently as Tuesday, Ms. Psaki said, Mr. Manchin had pledged to work with administration officials to finalize a compromise agreement and had even shared his own outline for legislation that mirrored the size of Mr. Biden’s initial $1.85 trillion framework.

“If his comments on Fox and written statement indicate an end to that effort,” she said, “they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the president and the senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.”

Mr. Manchin outlined what he would support in a July 28 memo signed with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, which became public in late September. As of Sunday, it remained unclear whether an overhaul of the legislation could both salvage Mr. Manchin’s support and retain enough liberal votes in both chambers.

The impasse jeopardizes Mr. Biden’s reputation as a dealmaker — he had campaigned on his ability to capitalize on nearly four decades of Senate experience to helm negotiations and unite his party’s narrow majorities in both chambers. Mr. Biden had poured weeks of work into talks with Mr. Manchin, inviting the senator for breakfast at his Delaware home in October and insisting that the West Virginian could ultimately be swayed.

At stake is what Mr. Biden has hailed as transformative, New Deal-style legislation that would touch virtually every American life from birth to death, from subsidies for child care to price controls for prescription drugs to funding for the construction and maintenance of public housing.

Failure to pass the measure also would deal a setback to vulnerable Democratic lawmakers bracing for what is expected to be a challenging midterm campaign in the coming months. They had hoped that passage of the bill would help their political standing, given that Republicans are widely expected to reclaim control of the House...

Still more.

 

Build Back Brandon

 At AoSHQ, "#BuildBackBrandon Bill Is Unpopular in Competitive Swing Districts -- and That's Before the Public Realizes It's a Huge Billion Dollar Boondoggle In Tax Breaks for the Left's Plutocrat Donor Base."

House Democrats Pass Build Back Better (VIDEO)

Straight party line vote, just like Obamacare. Most of the bill's big spending is temporary, thus a Republican Congress will surely refuse to reauthorize the law's gargantuan social policy giveaways --- and that's if it passes the Senate, which is no sure thing. Not a single Democrat can defect. 

At USA Today, "House passes Biden’s Build Back Better bill, sending measure with free preschool, climate initiatives to the Senate."

And the New York Times, "Kevin McCarthy Speaks for More Than Eight Hours to Delay a House Vote."

More here, "House Narrowly Passes Biden’s Social Safety Net and Climate Bill":

WASHINGTON — The House on Friday narrowly passed the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, approving $2 trillion in spending over the next decade to battle climate change, expand health care and reweave the nation’s social safety net, over the unanimous opposition of Republicans. The bill’s passage, 220 to 213, came after weeks of cajoling, arm-twisting and legislative legerdemain by Democrats. It was capped off by an exhausting, circuitous and record-breaking speech of more than eight hours by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, that pushed a planned Thursday vote past midnight, then delayed it to Friday morning — but did nothing to dent Democratic unity.

Groggy lawmakers reassembled at 8 a.m., three hours after Mr. McCarthy finally abandoned the floor, to begin the final series of votes to send one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in half a century to the Senate.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the final push with what she called “a courtesy to” her colleagues: “I will be brief.” She then put the House’s actions in lofty terms.

“Under this dome, for centuries, members of Congress have stood exactly where we stand to pass legislation of extraordinary consequence in our nation’s history and for our nation’s future,” she said, adding, the act “will be the pillar of health and financial security in America.

The bill still has a long and difficult road ahead. Democratic leaders must coax it through the 50-50 Senate and navigate a tortuous budget process that is almost certain to reshape the measure and force it back to the House — if it passes at all.

But even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation could prove as transformative as any since the Great Society and War on Poverty in the 1960s, especially for young families and older Americans. The Congressional Budget Office published an official cost estimate on Thursday afternoon that found the package would increase the federal budget deficit by $160 billion over 10 years.

The assessment indicated that the package overall would cost slightly more than Mr. Biden’s latest proposal — $2.1 trillion rather than $1.85 trillion.

It offers universal prekindergarten, generous subsidies for child care that extend well into the middle class, expanded financial aid for college, hundreds of billions of dollars in housing support, home and community care for older Americans, a new hearing benefit for Medicare and price controls for prescription drugs.

More than half a trillion dollars would go toward shifting the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels to renewable energy and electric cars, the largest investment ever to slow the warming of the planet. The package would largely be paid for with tax increases on high earners and corporations, estimated to bring in nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Savings in government spending on prescription drugs were projected to bring in another $260 billion, though a scaled-back measure to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for some medications was estimated to save only $79 billion, far less than the Democrats’ original $456 billion proposal would have.

“This bill will be transformational, and it will be measured in the deeper sense of hope that Americans will have when they see their economy working for them instead of holding them back,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said Thursday during what was supposed to the closing debate.

The fact that the bill could slightly add to the federal deficit did not dissuade House Democrats from proceeding to vote for it, in part because the analysis boiled down to a dispute over a single line item: how much the I.R.S. would collect by cracking down on people and companies that dodge large tax bills.

The budget office predicted that beefing up the I.R.S. with an additional $80 billion of funding would bring in just $127 billion over 10 years on net. That is far less than the $400 billion the White House estimates it would bring in over a decade, both through enforcement actions and by essentially scaring tax cheats into paying what they owe.

The legislation is moving through Congress under special rules known as reconciliation that shield it from a filibuster, allowing Democrats to push it through over unified Republican opposition in the Senate...

 

Senator Manchin Could Singlehandedly Kill Build Back Better

The House is expected to vote tonight, but chances are slim in the upper chamber.

At CNN, "Democrats gear up to pass social safety net bill Thursday night but major obstacles await in the Senate."

Andrew Hacker, Two Nations

At Amazon, Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

Senate Democrats Pass $3.5 Trillion Social Spending Legislative Boondoggle

I could go for a lot in the package, as being neoconservative, I support a robust social safety net, but the traditional conservative in me is disgusted by all the poison-pill elements of the legislation, which covers every from carbon taxes, climate change efforts, added powers for the I.R.S., and especially the legalization of millions of illegal immigrants.

It's actually a shocking bill.

At LAT, "Senate approves Democrats’ $3.5-trillion budget blueprint in another win for Biden":

WASHINGTON — Democrats pushed a $3.5-trillion framework for bolstering family services and health and environmental programs through the Senate early Wednesday, advancing President Biden’s expansive vision for reshaping federal priorities just hours after handing him a triumph on a hefty infrastructure package.

Lawmakers approved Democrats’ budget resolution on a party-line 50-49 vote, a crucial step for a president and party set on training the government’s fiscal might at assisting families, creating jobs and fighting climate change. Higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations would pay for much of the plan.

Passage came despite an avalanche of Republican amendments intended to make their rivals pay a price in next year’s election for control of Congress.

House leaders announced that their chamber would return from summer recess in two weeks to vote on the fiscal blueprint, which would disburse the $3.5 trillion over the next decade. Final congressional approval, which appears certain, would protect a follow-up bill to enact the spending and tax changes from the threat of being killed by a Republican filibuster in the 50-50 Senate.

Even so, passing that follow-up legislation will be dicey: Democratic moderates who are wary of the massive $3.5-trillion price tag are sparring with progressives who demand aggressive action. The party controls the House with just four votes to spare, while the evenly divided Senate is under the party’s control only due to Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. Solid GOP opposition to the legislation seems guaranteed.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), once a maverick congressional progressive voice but now a national figure wielding legislative clout, said the measure would help children, families, elderly and working people — and more.

“It will also, I hope, restore the faith of the American people in the belief that we can have a government that works for all of us, and not just the few,” he said.

Republicans argued that Democrats’ proposals would waste money, raise economy-wounding taxes, fuel inflation and codify far-left dictates that would harm Americans. They were happy to use Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist, to try to tar all Democrats backing the measure.

If Biden and Senate Democrats want to “outsource domestic policy to Chairman Sanders” with a “historically reckless taxing and spending spree,” Republicans lack the votes to stop them, conceded Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “But we will debate. We will vote.”

The Senate turned to the budget minutes after it approved Biden’s other major objective: a compromise bundle of transportation, water, broadband and other infrastructure projects costing about $1 trillion in new and old spending. That measure passed 69 to 30, with McConnell among the 19 Republicans backing it. It will need House approval next.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) assured progressives that Congress would pursue sweeping initiatives that go beyond the infrastructure compromise, in a nod to divisions between the party’s moderates and liberals that he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) need to resolve before Congress can approve Democrats’ fiscal goals.

“To my colleagues who are concerned that this does not do enough on climate, for families, and making corporations and the rich pay their fair share: We are moving on to a second track, which will make a generational transformation in these areas,” Schumer said.

In a budget ritual, senators plunged into a “vote-a-rama,” a nonstop parade of messaging amendments that often becomes an all-night ordeal. This time, the Senate held over 40 votes before approving the measure around 4 a.m. Eastern time, more than 14 hours after the procedural marathon began.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) missed the budget votes to be with his ailing wife.

With the budget resolution largely advisory, most amendments were offered not in hopes of passing but to force the other party’s vulnerable senators to cast troublesome votes that can be used against them in next year’s midterm election.

Republicans crowed after Democrats opposed GOP amendments calling for the full-time reopening of pandemic-shuttered schools, boosting the Pentagon’s budget and retaining limits on federal income tax deductions for state and local levies. Those deduction caps are opposed by lawmakers from upper-income, mostly Democratic states...

Still more.

I Can't Leave My Spouse — I'll Lose My Healthcare

It's Jessa Crispin, at the Guardian U.K., "Like millions of Americans, I can never leave my spouse. I’ll lose my healthcare":

It was around the second dose of fentanyl going into my IV bag that I stopped trying to control how much all of this was going to cost. I had been arguing with every decision the caregivers at the emergency room were making – “Is this Cat scan actually necessary or is there another diagnostic tool?” “Is there a cheaper version of this drug you’re giving me?” – and reminding them repeatedly that I was uninsured, but either the opioids in my bloodstream, or the exhaustion of trying to rest in a room next to a woman who, given the sounds she was making, was clearly transforming into a werewolf, forced me to surrender.

I walked out of there four years ago alive, yes. And, as the doctors and nurses kept reminding me, if I had waited another 48 hours to discover I didn’t actually have the magical ability to self-diagnose and self-treat serious problems with Google and herbs, I might have gone septic. But all said and done, I was also walking home to a $12,000 bill, which was approximately half of my annual income as a single woman.

It took me several years of hardship, contributions from my friends and the assistance of the hospital’s charity program to pay off the $12,000.

Then, last month, it started again. I was at home. I turned my head a little, the whole world started sliding away from me, and I crashed to the floor. I tried to crawl back into bed, insisting, “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.” My husband, on the other hand, was raised in a country with compulsory public health coverage, so his first instinct upon something weird happening isn’t to lie down for 48 hours and see if it goes away. He immediately started plotting the route to a hospital on his phone.

I was back, but this time I was married. The whole hospital visit cost us $30, including the prescription. Everything was covered by his insurance. That’s when I realized I can never divorce my husband.

The first emergency room visit might have been an anomaly – a freak health problem that the nurse explained as “sometimes these things happen”. The intense vertigo was the result of the deterioration of the condition of my ears. It has been a problem since childhood, one left in “let’s wait and see what happens” condition until a weird virus last year – yes, I was the big idiot who caught a debilitating non-coronavirus virus during a coronavirus pandemic – forced me to a doctor, who discovered significant hearing loss and structural damage that will require lifelong treatment and intervention.

As a freelance writer who has tried and failed for years now to get a real job with real benefits, the costs of the surgeries and hearing aids and other treatments the doctor sketched out as part of my future would be suffocating. But almost all of it is covered by my husband’s insurance, making my health and ability to access healthcare dependent on his presence in my life.

While I convalesced from the virus last year, I watched the discussion about health insurance take over the Democratic primary debates. I had little hope that the bright, sparkly Medicare for All plan championed by candidates like Bernie Sanders would be made reality. But still I despaired of the excuses other candidates made for why they did not support guaranteed coverage for all. It angered me to see Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and the eventual winner, Joe Biden, defend their plans to largely maintain the status quo – a system in which employment and marriage determine access to healthcare – as though they were protecting our “freedom” to “choose” coverage that was right for us.

The coercions built into American social welfare programs limit freedom, not preserve it. People who are not financially independent are forced to maintain ties with family members who might be abusive or violent unless they want to relinquish their housing, healthcare or other forms of support. And as outlined by Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the dismantling of protections like food and financial aid in the 80s and 90s had the express purpose of increasing familial obligations in the name of “duty” and “responsibility”. Single parents seeking public support for their children’s well-being now had to first seek assistance through their partners, no matter how fraught or harmful those relationships might be. While politicians spoke of “strengthening families” and repairing the social fabric, one of the consequences of these policy changes was to limit the ability for people to make the basic decisions required to live the lives of their choosing, unless they had the money that in this country is our substitute for freedom...

Still more.

 

Biden Lobbies for Democrats' Infrastructure Scam (VIDEO)

 Passage of the bill really depends on one person: Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

At the New York Times, "Democrats Roll Out $3.5 Trillion Budget to Fulfill Biden’s Broad Agenda."

Leader McConnell May Back Biden's Infrastructure Boondoggle

Apparently this is the one piece of the Dems' legislative agenda that McConnell will support --- probably because the bill is larded with billions in bipartisan pork-barrel spending.

At Politico, "Pigs fly: McConnell weighs giving Biden a bipartisan win":

Something strange is happening in Washington: Mitch McConnell might go along with a central piece of Joe Biden’s agenda.

The self-appointed “Grim Reaper” of the Senate, a minority leader who said just two months ago that “100% of my focus is on standing up to this administration,” has been remarkably circumspect about the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal. He’s privately telling his members to separate that effort from Democrats’ party-line $3.5 trillion spending plan and publicly observed there’s a “decent” chance for its success.

Other than questioning its financing, McConnell has aired little criticism of the bipartisan agreement to fund roads, bridges and other physical infrastructure, even as he panned Democrats’ separate spending plans on Wednesday as “wildly out of proportion” given the nation's inflation rate.

His cautious approach to a top Biden priority reflects the divide among Senate Republicans over whether to collaborate with Democrats on part of the president’s spending plans while fighting tooth and nail on the rest. Many Democrats predict McConnell will kill the agreement after stringing talks out for weeks, but the current infrastructure talks are particularly sensitive for the GOP leader because one of his close allies, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, is the senior Republican negotiator.

McConnell is aware of the conventional wisdom that he will ultimately knife the deal and is taking pains not to become the face of its opposition...

RTWT. 

 

Biden Administration to Begin Monthly Family Subsidy Payments This Week

Hey, three-hundred a month to families with kids under 6, and $250 who are older. 

That's no chump change. In fact, the one-year cost for the first year is $105,000,000 ---- and extremist Dems want to add the program as a permanent feature of the U.S. social welfare safety-net. 

At NYT, "Monthly Payments to Families With Children to Begin":

The Biden administration will send up to $300 per child a month to most American families thanks to a temporary increase in the child tax credit that advocates hope to extend.

WASHINGTON — If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.

With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent.

But the program, created as part of the stimulus bill that Democrats passed over unified Republican opposition in March, expires in a year, and the rollout could help or hinder President Biden’s pledge to extend it.

Immediate challenges loom. The government is uncertain how to get the payments to millions of hard-to-reach families, a problem that could undermine its poverty-fighting goals. Opponents of the effort will be watching for delivery glitches, examples of waste or signs that the money erodes the desire of some parents to work.

While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.

“It’s the most transformative policy coming out of Washington since the days of F.D.R.,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. “America is dramatically behind its industrial peers in investing in our children. We have some of the highest child poverty rates, but even families that are not poor are struggling, as the cost of raising children goes higher and higher.”

Among America’s 74 million children, nearly nine in 10 will qualify for the new monthly payments — up to $250 a child, or $300 for those under six — which are scheduled to start on Thursday. Those payments, most of which will be sent to bank accounts through direct deposit, will total half of the year’s subsidy, with the rest to come as a tax refund next year.

Mr. Biden has proposed a four-year extension in a broader package he hopes to pass this fall, and congressional Democrats have vowed to make the program permanent. Like much of Mr. Biden’s agenda, the program’s fate may depend on whether Democrats can unite around the bigger package and advance it through the evenly divided Senate.

The unconditional payments — what critics call “welfare” — break with a quarter century of policy. Since President Bill Clinton signed a 1996 bill to “end welfare,” aid has gone almost entirely to parents who work. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, recently wrote that the new payments, with “no work required,” would resurrect a “failed welfare system,” and provide “free money” for criminals and addicts.

But compared to past aid debates, opposition has so far been muted. A few conservatives support children’s subsidies, which might boost falling birthrates and allow more parents to raise children full-time. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a larger child benefit, though he would finance it by cutting other programs.

With Congress requiring payments to start just four months after the bill’s passage, the administration has scrambled to spread the word and assemble payment rosters.

Families that filed recent tax returns or received stimulus checks should get paid automatically. (Single parents with incomes up to $112,500 and married couples with incomes up to $150,000 are eligible for the full benefit.) But analysts say four to eight million low-income children may be missing from the lists, and drives are underway to get their parents to register online.

“Wherever you run into people — perfect strangers — just go on up and introduce yourself and tell them about the Child Tax Credit,” Vice President Kamala Harris said last month on what the White House called “Child Tax Credit Awareness Day.”

Among the needy, the program is eliciting a mixture of excitement, confusion and disbelief...

More at that top link.

 

Joe Biden's Unsolvable Identity Politics Problem

Great piece from Michael Barone, at the Washington Examiner, "Biden: Identity politics and no apologies":

Even as the Supreme Court rejected the last pro-Trump lawsuit and the Electoral College confirmed his 306-232 majority, Biden seemed to be playing identity politics with his major appointments. “Identity-based groups,” the New York Times is reporting, “continue to lobby Mr. Biden to ensure racial and gender diversity at all levels in his administration.”

He’s facing demands for two cabinet posts for Hispanic women, for a black attorney general, and for a Native American interior secretary. He’s facing criticism for placing “people of color” in posts for which they have no apparent expertise — Xavier Becerra at Health and Human Services, for example, and Susan Rice at the Domestic Policy Council [and she's a fucking foreign policy "expert"!]. 

Every incoming president faces vexing choices and scornful criticism, but it’s an especially vexing problem for Democrats. Their party, since its creation in 1832, has been an often unwieldy coalition of out-groups with grievances and self-appointed advocates. Their urban political bosses developed the art of balancing party tickets (with Southern Democrats, decades and decades ago).

The plaints and pleas of identity group advocates can sometimes seem disconnected from reality. How many Hispanic-surnamed women out there are determined to renounce the Democratic party unless Biden appoints to his cabinet not just one but two Latinas? (At least the Times isn’t using the university-spawned and unpronounceable adjective "Latinx.") Will black voters really feel betrayed if this Democratic president doesn’t appoint a black attorney general as the last Democratic president did?

At this point in our history, it seems apparent that the public will not only accept but approve of appointees of any ethnic or racial description, depending on their performance and policies. And one suspects that among the public, if not in the press, most people care more about policy than ethnicity, more about competence than ticket-balancing...

RTWT.

Democrats Will Lie

A great post at Issues & Insights:

Dems Will Have To Lie About Their Agenda To Win, Poll Shows https://t.co/gC7eZKmDcL

— Andrew Malcolm (@AHMalcolm) September 19, 2019

Related, at Twitchy:

‘Wheeee!’ Bernie Sanders announces what else will be paid off for you if he’s elected president https://t.co/P9uq1Vtb3N

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) September 21, 2019

Decriminalizing Hard Drugs

It's Nicholas Kristof, with a long piece at NYT, FWIW:

Seattle is in effect decriminalizing the use of hard drugs, @NickKristof writes. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with drug abuse and more on the public health toolbox. https://t.co/3YvnxDaxAM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 23, 2019

Democrats Put Private Health Insurance Up for 'Debate'

Really, I hope Dems talk about obliterating private and employer-based health insurance right up to November 2020. It's going to be too easy, dang.

At LAT, "News Analysis: Democrats ask if Americans are ready to give up job-based health coverage":

Voters have repeatedly punished both Democrats and Republicans who've threatened to take away their health coverage, no matter how flawed it is. Are Dems ready to risk trying again? https://t.co/thjrXEdzsB

— Noam Levey (@NoamLevey) August 2, 2019

WASHINGTON —  Sharp disagreements among the presidential hopefuls at this week’s debates have crystallized a critical and explosive political question: Are Democrats willing to upend health coverage for tens of millions of their fellow Americans?
The party is closer than it’s been in decades to embracing a healthcare platform that would move all Americans out of their current insurance and into a single government-run plan.

Plans pushed by three of the four leading candidates — Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California — differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people.

That’s a hugely risky strategy, as more-centrist rivals reminded the three senators during the two nights of heated, sometimes confusing, debates.

Sweeping healthcare plans have never fared well in American politics.

For decades, voters repeatedly have punished presidents and Congresses — Democratic and Republican alike — who have threatened to take away existing health plans, no matter how flawed.

Just last year, the GOP suffered historic losses in the House of Representatives after the party’s unsuccessful effort to roll back the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

But at a time when rising insurance deductibles and medical bills are crippling growing numbers of American families, many Democrats on the party’s left believe public discontent with the current system has changed that dynamic.

“It’s time that we separate employers from the kind of healthcare people get,” Harris said Wednesday night, acknowledging that her “Medicare for all” plan would, after a lengthy phase-in period, end job-based insurance.

Harris, Sanders and Warren have made Medicare for all a central plank of their campaigns, riding a wave of discontent over rising medical costs to call for a historic expansion of government insurance.

Their more-moderate rivals say the three have misjudged the public mood and that by overreaching, they would squander an opportunity to enact significant, if incremental, reforms.

A survey earlier this year by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for a single government plan fell from 56% to 37% when respondents were told that it might involve eliminating private insurance companies or requiring more taxes.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to take away insurance from half the people in this room,” warned Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is among many Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who back more limited approaches.

The more-centrist Democrats would preserve the current employer-based system, as well as state Medicaid programs and the insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 healthcare law.

They would add an additional choice to allow Americans to buy into a Medicare-like government plan, often called a “public option.”

“Every single person in America would be able to buy into that option if they didn’t like their employer plan,” Biden said Wednesday.

Critics on the left say that approach would ultimately cost more and would preserve an outsized role for private insurance companies.

“We have tried this experiment with the insurance companies,” Warren said from the debate stage Tuesday. “And what they’ve done is they’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system. And they force people to have to fight to try to get the healthcare coverage that their doctors and nurses say that they need.”

But threatening Americans’ current health coverage has proved disastrous for previous Democratic efforts to expand protections, including President Clinton’s doomed initiative in the early 1990s.

The 2010 healthcare law was almost sunk by labor unions angry about a new tax on the kind of generous health plans many of their members enjoy.

And even though the law was designed to have minimal impact on the existing insurance system, President Obama faced a firestorm when a few million people found their health plans canceled after new rules took effect requiring plans to offer more-comprehensive benefits.

“Traditionally, fear of losing benefits — however flawed they may be — trumps hope of getting something better,” said Chris Jennings, an influential Washington health policy advisor who worked for Clinton and Obama...

Still more.

The Democratic Party No Longer Believes in Hard Work

From Betsy McCaughey, at the Post:

The Democratic Party no longer believes in hard work https://t.co/VslYyWvCdY via @nypost #tcot #MAGA

— Betsy McCaughey, PhD (@Betsy_McCaughey) July 26, 2018

Would you rather show up at work on time or stretch out on the sofa and watch TV? Stupid question. Most people punch a clock out of necessity. But progressive Democrats want to make work optional, and to guarantee a slew of benefits to everyone, whether they get off the couch or not. It's a slap in the face to America's workforce.

Some 70 Democrats in the House of Representatives -- more than one-third of the party's representatives -- endorsed a plan on Thursday to outlaw private health insurance and force all Americans into a government-run system. Let's be clear. This plan is not about helping the needy. The plan would rip away medical coverage from half of all Americans, including the 157 million who get their insurance the old-fashioned way -- earning it through a job. The plan, dubbed "Medicare for All," would prohibit employers -- even giant companies that self-insure -- from covering workers, retirees or their families.

Union workers with gold-plated health benefits would have to give them up and settle for the same coverage as people who refuse to work at all. Why work?

Apparently, the Democratic Party no longer believes in work.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking the opposite route -- beefing up work incentives. Last Thursday, the president's Council of Economic Advisers revealed that about half of able-bodied adults who collect benefits, such as food stamps, housing aid or Medicaid, work zero hours, while the nation's working stiffs pay the tab.

Why should people toil if they can get take it easy and get freebies instead? No wonder nearly 1 out of every 5 working-age adults collects these benefits. Dependence soared during the Obama administration, while workforce participation plummeted.