It’s normal for the media to give a new president a “honeymoon,” a chance to get his house in order and establish a plan of what he hopes to accomplish and how he plans to do it. Granted, Trump never got a honeymoon, but then, he never had a plan and was given what he gave. Biden, however, is different again. He’s whirling and spinning, massive plans at massive costs justified by massive claims of massive problems.
And nobody in the media seems to seriously question any of it.
Ten years ago, I would have been aghast at this leftward shift. But like everybody else, I’ve seen inequality widen, the social fabric decay, the racial wealth gap increase. Americans are rightly convinced that the country is broken and fear it is in decline. Like a lot of people, I’ve moved left on what I think of the role of government and income redistribution issues. We surely need to invest a lot more in infrastructure and children.
Did “inequality widen”? Did the “racial wealth gap increase”? Americans are concerned that the country is broken, but the primary reason for that is they are constantly told it’s broken, led to believe absurdly false claims like “inequality widened” and the “racial wealth gap increased” when neither is remotely true. Remember how people assumed thousands of unarmed black men were being slaughtered by the cops when the real number was 27? Yet here’s New York Times Columnist, David Brooks, citelessly spewing vapid crap as if his feelz are any more empirical than your basis college sophomore’s.
He may be right that we “feel” this way. That’s about our feelings, not about any facts to support them as a time when we are closer to eradicating some racism than ever before in our history. It has never been better and we have never been more sensitive to it. Some wags may even suggest we are bit oversensitive to it, if they don’t redefine racism to whatever serves their favorite race at any given moment.
But even Brooks, who picked a bad week to give up sniffing glue, can’t ignore the coming fall.
But I worry about this new economic philosophy that asserts you can have everything you want without trade-offs. This week I was reading a smart blog post from a progressive economist and I came across phrases that startled me: “Public debt doesn’t matter” and “Work incentives don’t matter.” Really? Have the laws of gravity been suspended, too?
Well, David, gravity does keep people down, you know.
I worry there’s a great historical amnesia going on — that we’re overlearning the lessons of the financial crisis and forgetting the lessons of all the other economic downturns. I worry we’re unwittingly committing ourselves to decades of higher taxes down the line that will sap American dynamism.
Biden’s first foray into the fun world of uncritical denial was the $1.9 trillion “America Rescue Plan,” which has a name that nobody could argue with so why look at the nuts and bolts and realize that it’s $900 million in COVID relief and $1 trillion in unrelated progressive pork. Next up is the $3 trillion “Infrastructure Plan.” As Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who advised Biden on the bill, explained:
A big, bold infrastructure bill, he said, was “a racial justice bill, a Covid safety bill and the most important climate bill of all time, all in one.”
What? When you heard “infrastructure,” you were thinking this was about rebuilding failing bridges and highways?
After dinner the other evening, a friend of mine who comes out of corporate America told me that people were suffering and something had to be done. We all nodded, but then I asked, “but what?” He told me about the America Rescue Plan and I asked him what was in it beyond the $1400 payments. He told me it would fund schools that needed the money and provide a “path to reopening.”
After explaining that schools not only didn’t need the money, but wouldn’t get the money for years, and that the money wasn’t tied to reopening any school, he gave me that quizzical look, the one with knitted eyebrows and doubt. That can’t be so, he explained, as everything he’s heard is that this was a glorious fix that we desperately needed. That’s what all the news folks were saying, and why would they lie?
Why would they lie? Or are they just giving President Biden a free pass on his empty rhetorical and carefully chosen names for his new laws? Or do they not know any better, think any harder, realize the issues that are being raised by these schemes that will comeback to bite us in the ass, both because they won’t work and because they are outrageously expensive. Nobody talks about “transfer payments” anymore. The phrase is as unacceptable as “illegal aliens.”
This is columnist heresy, but I’m going to take my time making up my mind on Biden’s $3 trillion spending package. But I do appreciate that this is a moment in which Americans are rethinking their fundamental values and the political-economic system that grew out of those values. This is necessary — and big.
Say anything negative about Biden and a chorus of ten thousand college students and their profs will reply, “tRump.” That may be, but it doesn’t make Biden’s plans better or viable. Even if Brooks won’t commit the heresy of being factual about racism, he draws the line at defying gravity. He is, he says, “going to take my time making up my mind” about throwing $3 trillion more, atop the $1.9 trillion, atop the Trump payouts, atop the small business failures, the student debt fiasco and the myriad other problems facing America.
Biden held his first press conference, and he was heavily questioned about immigration and the filibuster, which he adored when the Republicans held the Senate and is now “systemic racism” when the Democrats hold a one-vote majority. The media is focused on the things that “really matter,” at least to them at the moment, and won’t have any clue how they could have missed it when everything flies off into space without gravity.
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