Archive for the ‘Reagan’ Category

The common theme amongst Democrat propagandists, aka Resistance journalists, is that the economy isn’t nearly as fantastic as people know it is. Take Juan Williams latest article, for instance.

Williams writes “After almost two-and-a-half years with Trump in the White House, including two years with Republican control of both houses of Congress, the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp. The rich got their Trump tax cut. GDP looks good. And the stock market is doing great for people with money to invest. But it is only the rich who get the big rewards in Trump’s economy. What about the middle class?”

Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, has an explanation for Williams in this interview with Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal:

Incomes keep rising, with the lowest incomes growing at the fastest rate. Minority unemployment is the lowest in history. The unemployment rate for women is the lowest it’s been in 50+ years. Paychecks are bigger, partially because of the rising wages, partially because of the tax cuts. Disposable incomes are rising, too. Williams’ spin that “the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp” is fiction.

The average family making $75,000 saved $2,300 in taxes last year. How is that like “getting squeezed to a pulp”? If that’s Williams’ definition of getting squeezed to a pulp, sign me up. Lost in all of this is the fact that wage growth for people in the bottom quintile are rising at a 6.4% rate, almost doubling the wage growth overall, which is at 3.4%.

I don’t know what Williams is talking about when he asks “What about the middle class”? Does he automatically trust everything that Media Matters feeds him? Listen to this BS:

Wages remain stagnant. Trump’s trade wars are hurting farmers. Coal mines keep closing. Teachers in several states have been on strike.

That first sentence is utter BS. That isn’t my opinion. That’s what the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is reporting. Further, people that’d left the workforce are returning to the workforce.

Further, President Obama’s trade deals had already been hurting farmers. At least with President Trump, there’s a strong possibility that they won’t be hurt in the future. As for coal mines closing, the markets are determining what’s happening; with newer power plants switching to natural gas, the switch was inevitable. With the Obama administration, they simply attempted shutting down the entire coal industry through regulations.

Do people who watch the markets agree with Trump? Not Rick Newman of Yahoo Finance. He wrote in his column last week:

“If Trump deserves credit for a roaring stock market then Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan do as well. In fact, all of them presided over more total highs in the S&P 500 than Trump so far.”

Certainly, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan deserve credit for robust economic growth. President Obama can’t take credit for robust economic growth during his time in office because economic growth during his administration was pathetic. Stock market growth the result of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, not President Obama’s economic policies.

When President Trump took office, economic growth was pathetic, wages were legitimately stagnant and people were leaving the workforce in droves. President Trump got rid of the Obama administration’s policies and replaced them with pro-growth economic policies. Since President Trump’s and the GOP’s policies have kicked in, economic growth has doubled, consumer confidence and small business confidence have hit all-time highs and people are returning to work. If Williams thinks that President Obama deserves part of the credit or that it’s purely coincidental, he isn’t paying attention.

There’s no doubt that Democrats will cave on building President Trump’s wall. The only question is when it’ll happen. Democrats have already admitted that what’s in effect isn’t working. Further, Democrats can’t hide the fact that they’ve voted for border wall funding previously. In fact, rather prominent Democrats have voted for the wall, including President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein. In fact, that quintet voted to spend much more than the $5,700,000,000 that President Trump is asking for right now.

How can these Democrats continue to say no with this information floating around out there? Let’s remember something important about President Trump’s election. Voters signaled that they were tired of politics as usual. They demanded politicians that actually got things done. Thus far, Democrats have sounded like obstructionists.

President Trump has made counter-proposals. Democrats haven’t. They’ve just repeated their mantra that they’re for border security, too. I’m not saying that Republicans have done the right thing. They’ve failed, too.

Byron York’s article highlights the Democrats’ hypocrisy:

In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated the construction of multilayer pedestrian fencing along about 600 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. It passed with big, bipartisan majorities: 283 votes in the House and 80 in the Senate. Some top Democrats who are still in the Senate today supported the fence: Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Debbie Stabenow, and Sherrod Brown. Just the next year, Congress made clear it didn’t really mean what it said. The new law was amended to make fence building optional.

In 2013, Congress got back into the fence game. The Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill included something called the “Southern Border Fencing Strategy.” It called for 700 miles of at least single-layer pedestrian fencing along the border. It wasn’t a standalone measure; the fence was to be part of a broader package of border security measures alongside provisions that would create a process by which the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants would ultimately gain a path to citizenship.

It’s just a matter of time before Democrats are forced to cave. They’ve been dealt a difficult hand despite what the MSM has written. At some point, they’ll have to do something that will upset their base. They can’t continue to play to the Democrats’ worst instincts.

When Democrats listen to their hard left wing, they lose bigtime. Democrats will lose because they’re liars. It’s painful to listen to this particular liar:

I just read President Reagan’s final speech from the Oval Office. Despite what Ms. Pelosi said, President Reagan never once mentioned the Statue of Liberty in that speech. That’s why I won’t trust her on border security.

When Johnny Carson interviewed Ronald Reagan on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in March, 1975, Reagan told Carson about a study called “The Demography of Happiness.” According to that study, which cost taxpayers $249,000, young people are happier than old people, healthy people are happier than sick people and that people who earn more are happier than people who earn less.

Reagan summarized by saying that it didn’t take a government study to figure out that people “who are rich, young and healthy are happier than people who are poor, old and sick.” I can’t argue with that statement.

Reagan said something else during that interview that I thought was profound. In fact, I’ve remembered it literally for more than a decade. Reagan said “If the American people would take a little inventory and take a look around, if you triple our troubles and were better off than any other people on earth.”

Let’s be honest. Despite all the whining from leftists, Americans are far better off than most nations. While it’s true that the rich in our nation make more than the poor, it isn’t because the poor are in terrible trouble. It’s because our top income-earners are that well off. Put differently, our poor would be considered rich in many industrialized nations.

Further, the truth is that many industrialized nations’ systems hold people in place. They don’t let lower income people rise. It’s explained in Friedrich Hayek’s classic book “The road to serfdom.” In that book, Hayek explains that “the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning.”[1] He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual.”

I suspect that Reagan would’ve agreed with most of Hayek’s thoughts. That’s because President Reagan wasn’t afraid to see what he’d seen.

Last night, Juan Williams was on Fox News @ Night to talk about Friday’s GDP report. Something he hinted at, which isn’t a first, is that the Trump GDP numbers are a continuation of the Obama recovery. Let’s be clear about things. First, it’s indisputable that the recovery from the Great Recession started early in the Obama administration. People arguing otherwise just aren’t telling the truth. Second, anyone that thinks that the Trump economy’s growth is based on a continuation of Obama-era policies simply isn’t informed.

From Day One, President Trump and the GOP Congress have done their best to sweep aside the Obama administration’s policies. That’s why people elected President Trump. They wanted a Disruptor-in-Chief. They didn’t want a Stay-the-Course administration.

One of the first thing the Trump administration was to unleash the energy sector, starting with green-lighting the Keystone XL Pipeline and increasing fracking for oil and natural gas. They stopped in its tracks the war on coal, thanks in large part to the rolling back of regulations put in place late in the Obama administration through the unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act. Time and again, that was used to rid ourselves of the anti-mining regulations that the Obama administration put in place.

Those things alone would’ve helped the economy soar. But that’s only part of the story. The highest profile legislative victory of the Trump administration is the passage of the Trump/GOP tax cuts. Those tax cuts are working and everyone knows it. Are they enough to push growth into the stratosphere? I’ll say it this way: they’re opening up new opportunities for entrepreneurship. President Trump has unleashed the animal spirits of this economy. That term was first used by John Maynard Keynes. Here’s what he said about animal spirits:

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

In other words, good things happen when people are optimistic. There’s no greater salesman of economic optimism than Larry Kudlow. Sandra Smith’s interview of Mr. Kudlow has me believing that robust long-term economic growth isn’t just possible. It’s likely. Watch this interview:

The only other guy who rivals Mr. Kudlow in terms of economic optimism is his old partner in crime in the Reagan administration, Art Laffer. One thing that I don’t want to overlook in the interview is what Kudlow said about the fundamentals in place. Regulations are reasonable. Taxes, which leads to capital formation, which leads to job creation, are low. The energy sector has been unleashed. Consumer confidence is high. Capital that spent its time on the sidelines during the Obama administration is rushing back into the United States in the hopes of increased return on investment. During periods in the Obama administration, investors were sometimes happy with a return of its investment.

Early in the interview, Mr. Kudlow summed things up beautifully by saying “My hunch is that it’s going to go on for quite awhile.” This of things contributing to this strong economy that Mr. listed was fairly lengthy. Anyone mistaking the Trump economy with the Obama economy isn’t paying attention. The differences are night and day differences.

While it’s still best to be cautiously optimistic about achieving a lasting peace between North Korea and South Korea, it’s indisputable that optimistic signals keep getting sent from the Korean Peninsula. This time, the signal comes in the form of “the South Korean government said on Sunday that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had told President Moon Jae-in that he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed to formally end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country.”

It’s best not to get too giddy until this initiative gets fleshed out more. The devil is still in the details. Still, it’s another hopeful development in negotiations between North Korean President Kim Jung-Un and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.

Further, “In Washington, Trump officials spoke cautiously about the chances of reaching a deal and laid out a plan for the dismantling of the North’s nuclear program, perhaps over a two-year period. That would be accompanied by a ‘full, complete, total disclosure of everything related to their nuclear program with a full international verification,’ said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s new national security adviser.”

Pundits have questioned whether President Trump would get hoodwinked by Kim Jung-Un, possibly because they still don’t think he’s capable of being president. If there’s anything I trust about President Trump, it’s negotiating abilities. If that’s what the left is worried about, they don’t have to worry. The thing that they’re forgetting is the fact that Trump studied the deals past presidents have made. That’s led to a different negotiating style this time. That’s what’s led to this:

This is still the best protocol when negotiating life-changing treaties:

I trust that President Trump and National Security Adviser Bolton will verify that North Korea is living up to its obligations.

UPDATE: Moon Jae-In, South Korea’s president, thinks that President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize “for his role in talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and end the decades-long war between the North and South.”

If that happened, journalists’ heads would explode. Here’s hoping it happens.

Oh, to be a government employee. Imagine a job that gives good benefits. Then imagine that job plus no accountability. Welcome to the life of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. Try as we might to force the media to hold Sheriff Israel accountable, it hasn’t happened. That’s thanks in large part to the fact that the Agenda Media is intent on making David Hogg the poster child in their latest push for gun control. This fits into the category of ‘the best defense is a great offense’. Specifically, the gun grabbers don’t have to defend their policies because they’re never questioned.

I hope that changes when people read Glenn Reynolds’ latest column. It deals with how government employees aren’t held accountable for their mistakes. It starts by saying “Law enforcement keeps failing, and people keep dying. Where are the consequences? Where is the accountability? Despite receiving a warning directly from the Russian government, the FBI failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers from staging the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite having plenty of resources, the Charlottesville police failed to stop a car attack that left a woman dead. The FBI interviewed Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter, and considered criminally investigating him. They didn’t, possibly because his father was an FBI informant.”

These reporting omissions aren’t mistakes. They’re part of a pattern:

The FBI also missed numerous “red flags” before the San Bernardino shooting. And despite having lots of warning, the FBI, the Broward County schools and the Broward Sheriff’s Department under Sheriff Scott Israel all failed to stop Nikolas Cruz from shooting up a high school.

But I digress. Glenn Reynolds has a partner in demolishing the Democrats’ narrative. His name is Ben Shapiro:

Reynolds continued, saying:

And yet these repeated failures, among others, keep getting swept under the rug as we look for “solutions” to the problem of violence. No doubt Israel and the others whose incompetence made it possible for Cruz to kill his classmates were relieved to see our national discourse veer into questions of whether Laura Ingraham should lose sponsors for mocking David Hogg’s college-admissions failures, instead of their own failures to do their jobs. But now comes a hero to remind us what it’s really all about. Parkland student Anthony Borges, who used his body to shield 20 fellow students from the gunman, emerged from the hospital over the weekend to remind us that the shooting resulted from the failures of the sheriff and school superintendent to protect students.

Anthony Borges used his body to shield 20 students during Nikolas Cruz’s murder rampage. Borges did what Deputy Scot Peterson was paid to do. It isn’t lost that Peterson is a government worker who never will be held accountable.

It’s time for the US to realize that Ronald Reagan was right when he said this:

Andy Puzder’s WSJ op-ed questions whether President Obama should take credit for the Trump Bump. In his op-ed, Puzder wrote “In 2010 the Obama White House forecast gross domestic product growth would ‘accelerate in 2011 to 3.8%’ and ‘exceed 4% per year in 2012-2014,’ consistent with the 4.3% growth rate in the other 10 recoveries since World War II. That never happened. Actual post-recession growth averaged an anemic 2.1%. And Mr. Obama’s last year in office saw measly 1.5% GDP growth—hardly the springboard to our current expansion.”

While Mr. Puzder’s GDP figures tell the story that economic growth during the Obama administration was anemic, that’s only part of the story. Besides tepid economic growth during the Obama administration, another hallmark of the administration’s economic record was wage stagnation. It’s difficult to argue that the wage increases that we’re seeing now are because of President Obama’s policies. Simply put, wages didn’t start increasing until after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed and long after the Trump administration cut regulations.

Further, the fact that the administration said that GDP “growth would ‘accelerate in 2011 to 3.8%’ and ‘exceed 4% per year in 2012-2014′” indicates that these figures were either made up or that the forecasters were utterly incompetent. At this point, I’m leaning towards the figures were made up.

Austan Goolsbee has called Mr. Trump’s growth goals unrealistic. In May Larry Summers declared that accepting the Trump administration’s forecast of 3% GDP growth was like believing “in tooth fairies.”

Call me foolish but I think that 3% GDP has nothing to do with tooth fairies. It just requires the right policies. This is what happens when the right policies are put in place:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people working full time increased by 2.4 million in 2017, compared with only 1.6 million in 2016. In other words, the overall number of jobs added was lower in 2017, but only because hundreds of thousands of people left part-time for full-time jobs.

Wages are up, too. The CEOs that are announcing these wage increases are attributing them directly to the Trump tax cuts. How can the Obama administration take credit to wage increases that happened because of a tax bill that President Obama hates?

Finally, there’s this information:

Both 2016 and 2017 set some year-end records. In 2016, BLS recorded the highest number of people working part time at year’s end since it began recording the data in 1968. In 2017, it recorded the highest number of people working full time at year’s end since 1968 and the fewest working part-time since 2011.

The good news is that President Trump’s policies are working beautifully. He’s unleashed the economy’s animal spirits. Don’t take my word on that. Just ask Art Laffer:

Saying that Jeff Flake is a legislative lightweight is to demean lightweights. It’s insulting that Sen. Flake compared President Trump with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. What’s worse is that he made the comparison on the Senate floor.

Sen. Flake is a wimp and an airhead. Anyone that thinks that a combative president should be compared with a brutal dictator who killed millions of people isn’t intellectually qualified to be a U.S. senator. Further, Sen. Flake essentially capitulated to the Democrats on border enforcement. Thankfully, that’ll make it easier for Arizonans who worry about border security and preventing cartel-related human trafficking to elect a serious senator who won’t cave like Sen. Flake just did.

Sen. McCain wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post (naturally) that criticized President Trump. In that op-ed, “Mr. McCain joined his fellow Arizonan in calling for the president to stop attacking the news media.” In the op-ed, Sen. McCain said “We cannot afford to abdicate America’s longstanding role as the defender of human rights and democratic principles throughout the world. Without strong leadership in the White House, Congress must commit to protecting independent journalism, preserving an open and free media environment, and defending the fundamental right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Coming from the man who wanted to gut the First Amendment, that’s rich. Further, Sen. McCain should know that the U.S. form of government isn’t a democracy. The Founding Fathers created a constitutional republic that said our rights come from “Nature’s God”, not from government. The difference between the 2 types of government is gigantic.

As President Reagan said in his farewell address, “‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the People’ are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do.”

When Sen. McCain collaborated with Russ Feingold to write their campaign finance law, they wrote a law that told citizens involved in the political process when they could criticize politicians and what times were off-limits. Anyone who didn’t hesitate in telling ‘We The People’ how they can react is someone who isn’t morally fit to instruct presidents about right and wrong.

When the ISD 742 promised to “repurpose” the Tech High School and turn it into the School District’s office, people didn’t imagine that the District would betray them. That’s what they did, though. Now, the District wants to transfer that property to the City of St. Cloud.

Matt Demczyk’s article states that “St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis says he and St. Cloud Schools Superintendent Willie Jett have come up with a proposal to have the district transfer the school and grounds to the city once the district vacates the property to move into the new Tech High School.”

Demczyk continues by quoting Mayor Kleis as saying “We are proposing to both the school board and city council that District 742, when it vacates Tech in 2019, that all of that property is conveyed to the city, so the city can plan in conjunction with the neighborhood the redevelopment of that site. And we’ve gone through this process many times where we will set, with the neighborhood and community, a process envisioning the best possible use.”

Let’s be clear about something. I don’t trust Willie Jett at all and I don’t trust Dave Kleis that much, either. I agree that the City has more tools to use and that they’ve gone through this process before. This is prime real estate. It should be zoned commercial so we can start getting property tax revenue from it. Since the City Council has to vote on the Jett-Kleis negotiations, they have the right to put stipulations on how the property can be used.

There’s little question that the planning board won’t want restrictions put on it. That’s tough. Since the property belongs to the people, the people should have a say in the matter. If the property isn’t put back on the property tax rolls and if the property doesn’t meet with the people’s approval, the Jett-Kleis initiative should be rejected.

Kleis says the city doesn’t want to hurt the character of the neighborhood, and will work with community members as plans are drawn up to renovate the historic part of the building. The Mayor is hoping city council and the school board sign off on the proposal in the next month or so.

If the people get what they want, we’ll sign off on the initiative. If we don’t get what we want, the City and the District will have its hands full. It’s time the District, the Mayor and the Council got a taste of trust but verify.

Especially when it comes to health care, Democrats can’t help but wildly distort the truth. First, the basics: the CBO scoring of the House bill says that approximately 22,000,000-24,000,000 fewer people will have health care if the American Health Care Act is signed into law.

Simply put, that’s BS.

According to the Democrats, the people most affected by the AHCA will be people with pre-existing conditions and the elderly. Again, that’s an outright lie. The elderly won’t lose coverage if the AHCA is signed into law because Medicare is still the law of the land. People with pre-existing conditions won’t lose coverage because of high risk pools.

Minnesota had a high risk pool prior to the ACA. In 2007, the Kaiser Health Foundation reported that 92.8% of Minnesotans were insured. With nearly everyone insured, it isn’t a stretch to think that the majority of seniors and the majority of people with pre-existing conditions were insured. In fact, it’s a pretty safe assumption that high percentages of those demographics were covered.

In short, whenever people hear Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton complain that millions of people will get thrown off of their health insurance, let’s remember that these are the same people that said that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Those of us who are old enough will remember this everlasting moment:

Whichever memory you choose, the results are the same. The Democrats’ primary tactic is to fabricate answers in the hopes of frightening people. It’s always been that way.

Technorati: Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Politifact Lie of the Year,Jimmy Carter, Scare Tactics, Democrats, Ronald Reagan, There You Go Again