Hey, what’s $3.5 trillion among friends?
Amidst everything else, this happened yesterday:
Striking a deal with moderates, House Democratic leaders have muscled President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar budget blueprint over a key hurdle, ending a risky standoff and putting the party’s domestic infrastructure agenda back on track….
Not only are we building the physical infrastructure of America, we are building the human infrastructure of America,” Pelosi said on the House floor.
Yes, fundamental change.
It used to be that neither party would try to effect fundamental change with an extremely small, razor-thin majority. But that’s been the Democrats’ specialty in the 21st Century when they have any majority at all, no matter how small. Then, if they lose majority control of Congress in the next election cycle as a result, the enormous changes they’re pushed through already can be difficult if not impossible to reverse (with Obamacare, if you recall, one of the reasons was that they caused the old insurance system to be dismantled).
Pelosi likened the bill to some historical precedents:
Pelosi told her colleagues before the vote that the legislation would lead to a federal investment on par with the New Deal and the Great Society.
Two programs that may have done more harm than good; that question has been argued for decades. But at least both were passed when the Democrats held huge Congressional majorities rather than narrow ones (see this as well as this). And they had some bipartisan support, as well. Not so this time – not only is the majority very narrow and obviously imperiled for 2022, but in recent years it’s tended to be the opposition to these huge legislative initiatives that has been bipartisan.
More:
Republicans blasted Democrats for pursuing their priorities at a time when they said all focus should be on Afghanistan, as thousands of people including Americans are trying to flee the country as the U.S. withdraws its forces.
Good point – except the goal is to distract America from Afghanistan while at the same time that Afghanistan distracts America from this monster bill.
That familiar Senate Democrat duo, Manchin and Sinema, say they won’t vote for it. But it remains to be seen whether they mean that.
It’s almost as if allowing the federal government to control 1/6 of the American economy was a bad idea in the first place—very possibly to the point of warranting a new Revolutionary War.
Time to reverse the ratchet.
The idea that Biden, Pelosi and all the delusional, demented, and destructive donkeys have some kind of “mandate” for the fundamental transformation of our republic is beyond absurd (it is clearly a highly partisan attempt to secure totalitarian control), and the trillions in this monstrosity (which, among other unconstitutional elements, would hasten the federalization of elections, stripping away rights from the legislatures in “red states”) far exceed the whole federal budget, for the entire year, of two decades ago (roughly two trillion). Nor should the trillions squandered as a result of LBJ’s grotesquely misguided attempt at social engineering ever be forgotten.
When I think of all that’s going on now, the common feature is rushing things through. Rush the withdrawal. Rush the budget legislation. Rush the vaccine mandates before they lose their grip on power. Speaking of the “vaccine”, I see that Pfizer gave theirs a new name (“Cominarty”) prior to receiving full FDA approval. If you read the approval letter, they say that the Emergency Use Authorization remains in effect for the “old” vaccine, because they don’t have enough of the “new” vaccine to distribute. Ergo, anyone forced to get a shot by their employer in the near term is getting the old one with no protections against Pfizer. And they claim there is no real difference between the two. I bet they tweaked some aspect of the formula to be able to give it a new name, the same way they tweak formulas to fight off generics when the original patent expires.
Here’s the FDA approval letter. Be sure to read footnotes 8 and 9.
https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download
Does this go back to the Senate? I know Mitch, Deb Fisher, Mitt and other collaborators voted for it before. But things have changed. There is NO WAY that the Senate should reward Biden for his foreign policy failure. Biden and the Dems need to be punished. And punished harshly.
I’m expecting very bad optics from Kabul after 8-31 and especially on 9-11-21.
“…monster bill…”
A monstrous bill rammed through by a monstrous party “controlled” by a monstrous egomaniac.
https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/81421-1
(But it’s “for the people”(TM), which is why they absolutely MUST sneak it past…the people.)
Just another “First-we-have-to-pass-it-and-then-we-can-read-it” bill, bo doubt—but we’ll all have plenty of time to read while sitting in the Poor House.
– – – – – – – –
In the meantime, if this is true, Cuomo REALLY should have his Emmy RESTORED to him. The whole repulsive, murderous legerdemain has clearly turning into a “Pardoner’s Tale” of sorts (this time about a murderer-pardoning murderer).
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-governor-adds-12000-deaths-to-covid-count-that-went-unacknowledged-by-cuomo/
– – – – – – – –
…And of course there’s always a lot to giggle about in the “Biden”sphere…..
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kamala-upstaged-after-beijing-swoops-vietnam-and-doubles-vaccine-donation
(Though why Vietnam would even consider a CCP vaccine verges on the inscrutable…except that one probably doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say—especially when proffered by the 300-pound gorilla just next door.)
And so, one MUST giggle while the giggling’s good. (And then cackle a bit for an encore….)
Speaking of encores, it does look as though the “National Review” is stepping up…FWIW…
I had the television on for hours yesterday waiting for that greatly delayed Biden teleprompter spectacle. Why the delay? Maybe the blowback from the G7 teleconference was so great he will have to backtrack on the 8-31 deadline. Maybe some other Afghanistan development.
Some have said, and I tend to agree, that he was waiting for Pelosi to push through that vote so that uncle Joe Sugar can boast about all that human infrastructure money he is going shower down on the country. Don’t worry about thousands of U.S. citizens being held hostage, tortured or beheaded. Just think about tapping into all that cash.
Free childcare, more Head-Start, more teacher’s salary and benefits (& higher union dues), more EITC, more child tax credit, and free community college. These are all investments in human infrastructure (formerly known as human capital). I’m just guessing on this list.
Don’t worry about keeping Manchin and Sinema as no votes because the Dems can always count on finding a McCain or Paul Ryan type when they need one. I’ll guess Romney or Ben Sasse will start feeling compassionate about The Children or some such.
I told my two nearly useless R senators (Tillis, Burr) that they were being rolled by voting for the abominable “infrastructure” bill with this thing on the horizon. I think the Rs will all vote against this “reconciliation” monstrosity. I have more confidence in Sinema than I do Manchin, but who knows how much less that $3.5 trillion she would settle for?
If the NC GOP establishment types think I will vote for a Tillis clone in the primary (McCrory), they should think again.
the legislation would lead to a federal investment on par with the New Deal and the Great Society.
What the Press sycophants faithfully fail to report is that the ‘investment’ is targeted more toward harvesting future Dem votes than in purchasing anything worthwhile for the average American. Much of it is targeted for ‘activist’ organizations with vaguely patriotic names.
@ Barry Meislin:
Kamala knows just how to counter an upstaging.
“Kumala Lays Flowers At… the Vietnam Memorial Celebrating the Heroic Shoot-Down of John McCain”
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395339.php
Two programs that may have done more harm than good; that question has been argued for decades.
Neither the New Deal nor the Great Society were ‘programs’. They were sets of programs.
New Deal programs had their good points and bad points. The highest ratio of good-to-bad would have been found in the bank holiday, the devaluation of the currency, open market operations at the Fed, and the foundation of the FDIC and HOLC. The lowest ratio of good-to-bad would have been found in the National Industrial Recovery Act, parts of the Agricultural Adjustment Acts (especially marketing orders), the minimum wage law enacted in 1938.
The two beneficial things to come out of the Great Society were the foundation of Medicare and Medicaid, and even these had structural defects which have never been corrected with any thoroughness and generate policy problems today. Otherwise, the only good thing about the Great Society lallapazoola was giving the world demonstrations of what doesn’t work. (Of course, failing programs sometimes prove immortal – see compensatory education).
Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong in this country which would justify anything analogous to the New Deal or Great Society. The invocation of them is just an aspect of the Democratic Party’s cargo cult. It’s just an excuse for Democratic politicians to seize resources to distribute to their preferred clientele. Nor is their any justification for an orgy of federal public works spending, a category of expenditure which should not extend beyond maintenance of long-haul Interstates, construction and maintenance of federal installations, projects to manage the territorial waters, projects to manage multistate watersheds, projects to manage federal lands, and The Wall every partisan Democrat hates. There is hardly any justification for federal programs to invest in human capital either, except on the margins. With some modest qualifications, state and local government are perfectly capable of performing these tasks and there’s no good reason to transfer discretion to Washington.
What Kurt Schlicter said: every item in their rhetorical toolbox is a lie. It’s a perfectly sociopathic political movement.
Without having read the fine print (oh, you say there is no bill yet?), I fully expect the bill to include new programs and expansion of existing ones that will create more federal government jobs* that will never go away and at the same time increase dependency on more and more federal government handouts. But you all knew that already. The initial trillions are just a down payment. And did I forget about the inflation that is certain to follow? The only way to “pay” for this now and forever more is to print more money and devalue our currency.
* The only good paying jobs the government knows how to create are called government employees.
The bill is mostly about redistribution. The old Robin Hood schtick. Take from the rich (and middle class) and give to the poor. And a lot of the money sticks in D.C. on its way through. This has been the Democrat playbook since FDR. Leads to inflation and stagnant economic conditions. Stagflation is coming.
Instead of growing a bigger economic pie, the Dems wan to change the way the pie is doled out while actually shrinking the pie. Madness. And I’m letting my Senators know that they are fools for buying into such ignorance.
Democrats don’t really care much about the size of the pie, they care about how much (the percentage) of the pie is controlled by government. Both control by spending, control by regulation, and control by getting lobbied by one and all to change laws and regulations. It’s about power and only secondarily about money.
They are not taking from the truly rich, they can use the laws and get changes in the laws to exempt their wealth. It’s the upper middle class, the high earners striving to become wealthy, who get the hit along with the middle-middle, all being the ever hated bourgeois.
‘…and give to the poor…
Ah, but WHICH poor?
The poor unions?
The poor Democratic-run cities whose Democratic mayors seem intent on destroying (and who have run up humungous deficits because of negligent government)?
(Ditto, in some cases, for Democratic-run states.)
The poor pouring across the border?
The poor BLM real-estate magnates?
The poor newspaper and magazine publishers and syndicates who just can’t seem to turn a profit despite doing yeoman’s work in support of the Democratic Party?
Other….?