Proof that an Empty Chair President can always get 38% of the Country to approve of him so long as he has a (D) after his name.
Friday, December 20, 2024
Andy Harris Voted AGAINST the Trump CR in Congress
All the above is a lie. He's 100% out all for HIMSELF, and NOT DJT!
Andy Harris (R) MD no longer knows how to put on his big boy pants. It's time to vote his stupid ass OUT of Congress. His website no longer even lets his constituents send him a message, even if you enter your 9 digit zip. It's a fund raising capture site.
Dump Andy in 2026!
He's a useless unserious tool.
He wants to keep pretending that Congress is a "serious" institution. It is NOT!
The country voted for DJT, not the Freedom Caucus. Regular Order for budgets ended decades ago.
DOGE is COMING! They will sort the budget out, not YOU!
Andy, stop being part of the "No Caucus".
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Mitch McConnell for Global Conquest via WWIII
When he begins his second term as president, Donald Trump will inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago. China has intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide. Russia is fighting a brutal and unjustified war in Ukraine. Iran remains undeterred in its campaign to destroy Israel, dominate the Middle East, and develop a nuclear weapons capability. And these three U.S. adversaries, along with North Korea, are now working together more closely than ever to undermine the U.S.-led order that has underpinned Western peace and prosperity for nearly a century.
The Biden administration sought to manage these threats through engagement and accommodation. But today’s revanchist powers do not seek deeper integration with the existing international order; they reject its very basis. They draw strength from American weakness, and their appetite for hegemony has only grown with the eating.
Many in Washington acknowledge the threat but use it to justify existing domestic policy priorities that have little to do with the systemic competition underway. They pay lip service to the reality of great-power competition but shirk from investing in the hard power on which such competition is actually based. The costs of these mistaken assumptions have become evident. But the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation.
Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere. Most of these voices will argue for focusing on Asia at the expense of interests in Europe or the Middle East. Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself. The right has retrenched in the face of Russian aggression in Europe, while the left has demonstrated a chronic allergy to deterring Iran and supporting Israel. Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers. If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void.
Trump would be wise to build his foreign policy on the enduring cornerstone of U.S. leadership: hard power. To reverse the neglect of military strength, his administration must commit to a significant and sustained increase in defense spending, generational investments in the defense industrial base, and urgent reforms to speed the United States’ development of new capabilities and to expand allies’ and partners’ access to them.
As it takes these steps, the administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy. It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.
A FALSE CHOICE
China poses the gravest long-term challenge to U.S. interests. But although successive presidents have acknowledged this reality, their actual policies have been inconsistent. Administrations have failed even to agree on the basic objective of competition with China. Is it merely a race to produce more widgets? An opportunity to sell more American soybeans, semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles? Or is it a contest over the future of the international order? The Trump administration must recognize the gravity of this geopolitical struggle and invest accordingly.
In so doing, it must not repeat the mistakes of President Barack Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia. The Obama administration failed to back up its policy with sufficient investments in U.S. military power. Inverting the traditional relationship between strategy and budgets, it prioritized defense cuts for their own sake, abandoning the decades-long “two-war” construct of force planning. The bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011 compounded this mistake and harmed military readiness.
Partners in Asia came to understand what the pivot meant for them: that they would receive a larger slice of a shrinking pie of American attention and capabilities. Partners in Europe, for their part, were not happy to see Washington ignore the Russian threat. Republicans who consider Ukraine a distraction from the Indo-Pacific should recall what happened the last time a president sought to reprioritize one region by withdrawing from another. In the Middle East, Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum for Iran and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) to fill, and the ensuing chaos there consumed Washington for years. By 2014, as Obama struggled to consummate the pivot to Asia, dithered on the Middle East, and failed to enforce his own “redline” on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and seized Crimea.
Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine. A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, hesitation in the face of Putin’s aggression has already made these interconnected challenges more acute. The George W. Bush administration’s failure to respond forcefully to Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a missed opportunity to nip Russian aggression in the bud. Obama’s “reset” with Russia doubled down on this miscalculation, snuffing out hope for a concerted Western response to Russian aggression. In pursuit of arms control negotiations, he pulled his punches as Putin grew emboldened. This weakness continued in Obama’s tepid response to the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.
Trump deserves credit for reversing the Obama administration’s limitations on assistance to Ukraine and authorizing the transfer of lethal weapons to Kyiv. During the first Trump administration, the United States used force against Russia’s ally Syria to at last enforce the redline against chemical weapons, killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries who threatened U.S. forces in Syria, and increased U.S. energy production to counter Russia’s weaponization of its oil and gas reserves. But Trump sometimes undermined these tough policies through his words and deeds. He courted Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. These public episodes raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so.
Despite Biden’s tough campaign rhetoric about Russia, his policy of détente with the Kremlin resembled Obama’s reset. Immediately after taking office in 2021, Biden signed a five-year extension to the New START treaty, giving up leverage over Russia that he could have used to negotiate a better agreement and tying the United States’ hands as nuclear threats from China and North Korea grew. In June of that year, he, too, withheld critical security assistance from Ukraine. And in August, he oversaw the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which no doubt encouraged Russia to further test the limits of American resolve. The Biden administration’s apparent belief that Putin’s imperial ambitions could be managed with arms control and U.S. restraint was not dissimilar to right-wing isolationists’ misplaced interest in accommodating Russia.
As it became clear that Putin would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I urged Biden to offer meaningful lethal aid to Ukraine and expand the U.S. military footprint in Europe. But the president demurred. Even after the invasion, the Biden administration’s assistance to Ukraine was beset by hesitation, needless restrictions, and endless deliberation. These delays repeatedly ceded the initiative to Moscow and diluted the effectiveness of U.S. aid, prolonging the conflict and diminishing Kyiv’s negotiating leverage. The weakness of the Biden administration’s policies was drowned out by frenzied attention to some Republicans’ objections to supporting Ukraine. Their misguided opposition delayed passage of the “national security supplemental,” but when the chips were down, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly supported the measure, as did many Republicans in the House. Congress passed the supplemental in April 2024. And not a single Republican legislator who voted for Ukraine lost a primary.
Despite legitimate misgivings about Biden’s approach, a majority of my GOP colleagues appreciated that support for Ukraine is an investment in U.S. national security. They recognized that most of the money was going to the U.S. defense industrial base or military and that this security assistance, a mere fraction of the annual defense budget, was helping Ukraine degrade the military of a common adversary. But more work is required. For now, Putin’s indifference to his own people’s suffering has allowed him to increase his defense industrial base’s capacity to pump arms and soldiers into Ukraine. His ability to do this in perpetuity is questionable; Russian victory is inevitable only if the West abandons Ukraine.
THE ALLIED ADVANTAGE
Trump will hear from neo-isolationists who discount the importance of American allies to American prosperity, ignore the need for the United States’ credibility among fence sitters in critical regions, and misunderstand the basic requirements of the U.S. military to deter or win faraway conflicts. Their arguments elide the fact that the enemy gets a vote, too, and may decide to confront the United States simultaneously on multiple fronts, at which point allies become more valuable than ever.
In Europe, Trump will find encouraging progress. After major surges in their defense budgets, U.S. allies on the continent now spend 18 percent more than they did a year ago, a far greater increase than the United States’. More than two-thirds of NATO members now meet or exceed the alliance’s target of spending at least two percent of GDP on defense. This progress is not without exception. One of the West’s most glaring vulnerabilities to the influence of Russia—and China and Iran—is Hungary’s self-abnegating obeisance to those countries.
But aside from this noisy exception, it is not lost on the United States’ European allies that Trump called on them to take hard power and burden sharing more seriously. NATO allies are also buying American, and since January 2022 have ordered more than $185 billion of modern U.S. weapons systems. But Trump will be right to encourage allies to do more. At the next NATO summit, allies should set a higher defense-spending target of three percent of GDP and commit to increasing their base budgets accordingly.
The most inconvenient truth for those calling on Trump to abandon Europe is that European allies recognize the growing links between China and Russia and increasingly see China as a “systemic rival.” During a visit to the Philippines in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted that “security in Europe and security in the Indo-Pacific is indivisible.” U.S. allies in Asia understand the same thing. As Hsiao Bi-khim put it in 2023, when she was Taiwan’s representative in Washington, “Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival.”
The unwillingness of the “Asia first” crowd to welcome European allies’ progress is curious. They ignore a glaring need to work with allies to counter Chinese threats to shared interests, raising the question of whether they are really interested in contesting China after all. Some even seem to have seized on the need to counter China as a rationale for the United States to abdicate leadership everywhere else, suggesting that “Asia first” is merely an excuse for underlying isolationism.
These critics ignore the growing strategic alignment of China and Russia, Russia’s own influence in Asia (including its increasingly capable Pacific fleet), and the inescapable reality that U.S. competition with both powers is global. In the Middle East, for example, Russia has undermined U.S. interests for years through its intervention in Syria and partnership with Iran. Putin’s use of Iranian attack drones in Ukraine should have come as no surprise: the West’s collective failure to stand up to Iran earlier has allowed it to become a more powerful partner to China and Russia. Beyond embracing Iran, the two countries have also sought to deepen their relationship with traditional U.S. partners in the region.
China has for years sought to drive a wedge between the United States and its partners. It is tragic that the “Asia first” crowd would so obviously play into Beijing’s hands, just as previous administrations that had turned their back on allies in the Middle East opened the door to Chinese influence in that critical region.
HOLIDAY FROM HARD POWER
The U.S. government spends nearly $900 billion annually on defense, but considering the total amount of federal spending, the challenges facing the United States, the country’s global military requirements, and the return on investment in hard power, this is not nearly enough. Defense is projected to account for 12.8 percent of federal spending in 2025, less than the share devoted to servicing the national debt. And each year, a larger portion of the defense budget pays for things other than weapons; nearly 45 percent of it now goes toward pay and benefits.
The situation is grave. According to an estimate by the American Enterprise Institute that rightly incorporates the paramilitary functions of China’s space program and coast guard, China spends $711 billion a year on its military. And in March 2024, Chinese officials announced a 7.2 percent increase in defense spending. The Biden administration, by contrast, requested real-dollar cuts to military spending year after year. If defense budgets cannot even keep up with inflation, how can Washington keep up with the “pacing threat” of China?
Moreover, because its immediate military objectives are focused on countering the United States in the Indo-Pacific, China, unlike the United States, mainly needs to allocate resources to its own backyard. The requirements of global power projection necessarily spread U.S. defense expenditures far thinner. Although bipartisan recognition of U.S. interests in Asia is welcome, it is reckless for U.S. politicians to visit Taipei or talk tough about China if they are unwilling to invest in the capabilities necessary to back up U.S. commitments.
The United States needs a military that can handle multiple increasingly coordinated threats at once. Without one, a president will likely hesitate to expend limited resources on one threat at the expense of others, thereby ceding initiative or victory to an adversary. The United States must get back to budgets that are informed by strategy and a force-planning construct that imagines fighting more than one war at once.Trump must reject the myopic advice that he prioritize China by abandoning Ukraine.
And yet for years, congressional opponents of military spending absurdly insisted that there be parity between increases in defense spending and increases in nondefense discretionary spending, holding military power hostage to pet political projects. Meanwhile, domestic mandatory spending skyrocketed, and massive expenditures that circumvented the annual bipartisan appropriations process, such as the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, included not a penny for defense.
Isolationists on both ends of the political spectrum unwittingly validate this artifice when they peddle the fiction that military superiority is cost-prohibitive or even provocative, that the United States must accept decline as inevitable, or even that the effects of waning influence won’t be that bad. Calls for “disentanglement,” “leading from behind,” and “hard prioritization”—amplified by historical amnesia—amount to defeatism. The United States’ security and prosperity are rooted in military primacy. Preserving that decisive superiority is costly, but neglecting it comes with far steeper costs.
Past levels of U.S. defense spending put today’s needs into perspective. During World War II, U.S. defense spending hit 37 percent of GDP. During the Korean War, it reached 13.8 percent. At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, it stood at 9.1 percent. The defense buildup under President Ronald Reagan, which followed a low of 4.5 percent of GDP during the Carter administration, peaked at only 6 percent. In 2023, the United States spent 3 percent of GDP on defense.
During this American holiday from hard power, China and Russia have invested in asymmetric capabilities to offset the U.S. military edge. Today, their munitions in many categories can outrange U.S. versions, and their production can outpace the United States’. This is to say nothing of their numerical advantage in key platforms, from missiles to surface vessels. Quantity has a quality of its own. What’s more, the wars of the future may well last longer and require far more munitions than policymakers have assumed, as both Israeli and Ukrainian munitions-expenditure rates suggest. U.S. stockpiles are insufficient to meet such a demand. For years, the military services have shortchanged munitions in favor of new weapons systems and platforms. This is not to downplay the need to modernize major weapons systems but to highlight the harmful tradeoffs imposed by inadequate defense budgets.
If the United States finds itself embroiled in conflict in a far-flung theater, it will also have difficulty resupplying its forces. China, for one, intends to contest U.S. logistical supply lines. This reality, combined with the possibility of being challenged in different parts of the world simultaneously, doesn’t just require building larger inventories of platforms and munitions. It also requires ensuring that such capabilities are pre-positioned in multiple theaters. That, in turn, requires securing basing, access, and overflight rights—yet another argument for strengthening U.S. alliances globally.
Thanks to Republican efforts, the national security supplemental included necessary investments to expand the production capacity of key items, such as solid rocket motors, needed for long-range munitions and interceptors. But my efforts with Susan Collins, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to expand this investment beyond the Biden administration’s request faced the same headwinds as our annual campaign to build bipartisan support for greater overall defense spending. In fiscal year 2023, congressional Republicans overcame Democrats’ insistence on parity between defense and nondefense discretionary spending. That was a step in the right direction, but Democrats need to permanently abandon this misguided obsession. The demands of U.S. national security are not political bargaining chips.
Progress on this front begins with real increases in defense spending. In 2018, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy—a bipartisan group of defense experts established by Congress—stressed that preserving the United States’ military edge would require sustained real growth in the defense budget of between three percent and five percent. By 2024, the commission, noting the worsening threats, called that range a “bare minimum” and advocated budgets big enough to “support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.”
The Trump administration must heed the commission’s warning. To pay for increased defense budgets, it should take an axe to extravagant nondefense discretionary spending and tackle the unsustainable level of mandatory spending on entitlements that is driving the deficit. It should also reform an overly burdensome economic regulatory environment to counteract these drags with higher growth and revenue.
THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY
At the same time, the United States must tend to its atrophied defense industrial base. The Pentagon, Congress, and industry all deserve blame for its sorry state. The Defense Department and Congress have sent inconsistent demand signals to industry, which has discouraged companies from investing in expanded production capacities and resilient supply chains. To solve the problem, administrations must submit defense-budget requests that are big enough to meet the United States’ true military needs. Congress must pass appropriations bills on time. If it doesn’t, the resulting “continuing resolutions”—temporary measures to keep the federal government funded—delay contracts and prohibit new program starts.
Congress has given the Pentagon the authority to sign multiyear procurement contracts—which limit the uncertainty sometimes caused by the annual appropriations process—for certain critical munitions. This approach and the money to back it up should both be extended to other long-range munitions and missile defense interceptors for which long-term demand is nearly certain. To expand production capacity, the Pentagon can also use the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law that allows the government to prioritize and steer resources toward the production of goods for national defense. Unfortunately, recent administrations have used this authority for purposes that have nothing to do with national security. Biden, for instance, invoked it for the production of solar panels. It is past time to put the “defense” back into the Defense Production Act.
But industry cannot simply wait for the government to invest. I am sympathetic to companies’ frustrations with a slow federal bureaucracy and an inconsistent Congress, but only to a point. It should be obvious to private-sector leaders that the need for air and missile defense interceptors, long-range munitions, and other critical weapons is steadily rising and unlikely to abate anytime soon. The demand is inevitable. Industry should be leaning forward to meet it. Trump should put the Pentagon and the defense industry on notice about the need to act.
Bureaucracy has also stifled innovation even when its military utility is obvious. The Defense Department is to be commended for its Replicator Initiative, a program designed to hasten the adoption of emerging military technologies, but creating an entirely new acquisition process raises the question of why the Pentagon doesn’t just fix its existing one. The department must figure out how to adopt and integrate disruptive technologies as soon as possible, or else the military will find itself on the receiving end of smarter, cheaper, more autonomous unmanned systems fielded by adversaries moving faster than the speed of bureaucracy.Tariffs have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers.
Just the contracting process for weapons—to say nothing of actually building them—moves unbelievably slowly. For weapons systems that cost more than $100 million, it takes an average of more than ten months between releasing a final solicitation for bids and awarding a contract. Foreign military sales move even slower: it takes an average of 18 months for American partners to get U.S. weapons under contract. The Biden administration made a halfhearted attempt to reform the foreign military sales process, but making it more efficient needs to be a joint priority for the secretary of defense and secretary of state. The arsenal of democracy will not endure if the United States’ own inefficiencies—or the opposition of vocal minorities in Congress—dissuade vulnerable allies from buying American.
The Trump administration should consider dramatically streamlining the process for commonly used munitions or preemptively building up inventories for export. The military should also consider maintaining larger stockpiles of weapons that can be more easily shared with allies and partners in times of crisis. Once the shooting starts, the time to build production capacity has passed.
To build an allied coalition of cutting-edge forces that can work together seamlessly, the United States must also be willing to share more technology. AUKUS, the United States’ security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, can be a model for greater technology sharing with other trustworthy allies and partners. Defense-technology transfer isn’t an act of charity; increasingly, it is a two-way street, with allies such as Australia, Finland, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, and Sweden bringing cutting-edge capabilities to the table. The United States should expand coproduction with its allies and encourage them to produce interoperable capabilities, thereby reducing costs, shoring up inventories, improving supply chain resilience, and enhancing collective capacity to compete with China.
THE ECONOMIC ELEMENT
The United States would be foolish to compete with China by itself. U.S. allies and partners represent a significant share of the global economy. It would be simply unaffordable to replicate all their supply chains domestically.
Obama deserves credit for negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with U.S. allies in Asia, and I do not regret working with him to overcome the objections of protectionist Democrats in Congress. Beyond lowering trade barriers and expanding market access for U.S. companies, the agreement was designed to establish favorable rules of the road for international trade in a critical region of the world. The parties to the proposed agreement represented 40 percent of the global economy. But rather than strengthen and harness the power of Western economies, the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration sometimes actively antagonized them, including with tariffs that have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers. This abdication was an invitation for China to expand its economic influence in Asia at the United States’ expense.
There is plenty of evidence that the globalist optimism of the 1990s was unfounded. Welcoming China and Russia into the World Trade Organization has not transformed their governments or economies, at least not in ways beneficial to the free world. Rather, both countries have exploited and undermined this and other international economic institutions. I am not naive about the downsides of international trade, but there is no question that free markets and free trade have been responsible for much of the United States’ prosperity. That’s why the United States and like-minded free-market economies must work together to reform the international trading system to protect U.S. interests from predatory trade practices—not abandon the system entirely. Without U.S. leadership in this area, there is little question that Beijing will be able to rewrite the rules of trade on its own terms.
Although flagging military primacy is the most glaring impediment to national security, the United States cannot neglect the role of foreign aid, either. As the former chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for foreign assistance, I take seriously James Mattis’s admonition when he was head of U.S. Central Command that if Congress shortchanged diplomacy and foreign aid, he would “need to buy more ammunition.” Unfortunately, these important tools of American power are increasingly divorced from American strategic interests. It is past time to integrate foreign assistance more deliberately into great-power competition—for example, by working with allies to present credible alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
NO TIME TO TURN INWARD
In January 1934, William Borah, a Republican senator from Idaho and an outspoken isolationist, addressed a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Because peace had prevailed for 15 years following the end of World War I, Borah argued, global military spending was excessive. Tensions between European powers, he insisted, could not be solved by outsiders: “It will be a long time, I venture to believe, before there will be any necessity or any justification for the United States engaging in a foreign war.”
Of course, by the end of the 1930s, the Nazi conquest of Europe had driven a dramatic swing in U.S. public opinion away from Borah’s isolationist daydream. By May 1940, as German forces invaded France, 94 percent of Americans supported any and all necessary investments in national defense. By June, more than 70 percent favored the draft.
The United States saw the light during World War II. But must it take another conquest of a close ally before the country turns its belated attention to the requirements of national defense? Isolation is no better a strategy today than it was on the eve of World War II. Today, in fact, in the face of linked threats even more potent than the Axis powers, a failure to uphold U.S. primacy would be even more catastrophically absurd than was the refusal to assume that responsibility 85 years ago. The last time around, the naive abdication of the requirements of national defense made reviving the arsenal of democracy on a short timeline unnecessarily difficult. As Admiral Harold Stark, then the chief of naval operations, observed in 1940, “Dollars cannot buy yesterday.”
The United States urgently needs to reach a bipartisan consensus on the centrality of hard power to U.S. foreign policy. This fact must override both left-wing faith in hollow internationalism and right-wing flirtation with isolation and decline. The time to restore American hard power is now.
Flirting with Armageddon
Linguistics for Edumacated Persons: The MSM Fact-Checker PolitiFact's 2024 "Lie" of the Year...
There are all sorts of lies in this world. Little white lies all the way to Bernie Madoff-sized piles of them.
Some lies don't hurt at all, some lies only affect one or two people, and some lies cover vast swaths of lives.
There are deadly serious lies with equally awful consequences, and then there are hilarious lies that only get funnier the more desperate they get.
Then there are the lies in politics, which are both, to a certain degree, expected and potentially devastating.
That's why the self-anointed, "unbiased" truth sniffers class, like some of the bigger 'fact checkers,' are "supposed" to be so important.
They root out the truth, protecting justice and the American way for all the non-savvy believers of everything they read types.
The most august in reputation of these used to be Snopes before a spectacular progressive flameout - plagiarism, coke, and prostitutes, (wheee!) - brought it down off the pinnacle in a fiery ball like a satellite returning to Earth.
The gold standard "Snopes-checked" is now met with snickers or "Who?"
So we are left with industry-leading - you'll notice I didn't mention quality - Politifact, another organization with whom one could take up any number of questionable issues.
But every year, it is sort of entertaining to see what the progressives who run the site decide what the "Lie of the Year" will be after magnanimously calling for suggestions from the public. The Politifact staff then spends countless hours reportedly agonizing over choices during the waning weeks of the year.
This year is no different although I would say as far as big fat whoppers go, there has been a wealth of material to choose from.
Right off the top of my head is one repeated by everyone from the Vice President of the United States on down: that this obvious vegetative mass is 'sharp as a tack.'
Just pick a name and put "Lie of the Year" next to their quote. It's a target-rich environment in a single article alone and there are dozens.
"...And I’m telling you, this guy is tough. He’s smart. He’s on his game,” Landrieu said."
...Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered a similar defense, calling Biden “sharp.”
“The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused,” Mayorkas told “Meet the Press.”
That's the most obvious big fat one, affecting the entire world.
The most recent whopper in the public eye is also pretty obvious and caused a whale of a brouhaha. Weirdly, it didn't even rate a 'false' from Politifact, much less mind one of their iconic screaming "Pants on Fire" Truth-O-Meter readings.
You remember - that one about Biden not pardoning Hunter? And then he did?
To the non-biased fact-checkers at Politifact, that was a 'flop,' not a 'lie.'
President Joe Biden and his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on multiple occasions over several months that Biden would not pardon his son Hunter. Then Joe Biden issued a pardon anyway. We rate that a Full Flop. https://t.co/dtGlW1X2Sn
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 3, 2024
Democrat Party Politicians never LIE, they "flop"
If it's not PolitiFact, it must be PolitiFiction!
Monday, December 16, 2024
The Tail End of Woke Is Finally Disappearing Over the Political Laughter Horizon!
Is no social group beyond moral criticism any more? And can anyone any longer pretend to be so based upon their historical "victimhood" status? SoJus is being retransformed back into Mo' Justice!
...and best of all, Comedy is Coming Back, too!
Guilt-Pride is giving up the Ghost! Hurray!
High Anxiety over Russia...
...all those resources, so near and ripe for exploitation.
Russia possesses vast natural resources estimated to be worth around $75 trillion, making it a global leader in natural resource wealth.
Taking the 1st bite...
Ukraine is home to a vast array of critical minerals with an estimated value in excess of US$26 trillion, making it a significant player in the global supply chain. The country boasts approximately 20,000 mineral deposits, covering 116 types of minerals.
Muh! Russia!
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Friday, December 13, 2024
Dividing Syria...
Turkey gets a piece, the Kurds get a piece, Israel gets a piece... and who else, ISIS?
...maybe give the Gazans and Pseudostinian's a slice next to ISIS?
Why Can't Europe Just Elect the Right Leaders...
...and Save their OWN "Democracies"?
Let's Ask Bernie!
Slava Ukraini, eh Bernie?
Foreign Influence Campaigns...
Why is Bibi Speaking in English?
...and Ahmed al-Sharaa in Arabic?
...and CNN, English?
Thursday, December 12, 2024
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Democracy 'Saved' in Romania!?!
Thank Goodness for the World's 'Intelligence' Agencies!
God Bless the NED! </sarc asm>
In an extraordinary and unprecedented move, Romania’s constitutional court announced last week the annulment of the results of the first round of the presidential elections held on Nov. 24, in which the independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu came out on top. The ruling, which restarted the entire electoral process, came just days before the scheduled runoff between Georgescu and the pro-EU candidate Elena Lasconi, which Georgescu was tipped to win by a large margin.
It’s the first time a European court has overturned the result of an election, signaling a troubling escalation in the EU-NATO establishment’s increasingly open war on democracy. The justification for this brazen act was a report by the Romanian intelligence services—“declassified” and published two days before the ruling—alleging that the country was the target of a “Russian hybrid attack” during the electoral campaign, involving a coordinated TikTok campaign to boost Georgescu’s candidacy.
The report was the culmination of a two-week-long campaign aimed at delegitimizing Georgescu’s victory, which shocked Romania’s ruling elites and the Western establishment at large. It was the first time since the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1989 that the two parties that have come to dominate Romanian politics since—the Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party, which are united in their commitment to the European Union and NATO—both failed to make it past the first round of a presidential election.
Adding to elites’ dismay was Georgescu’s status as a political outsider. The candidate had consistently received negligible scores in polls throughout the campaign and avoided televised debates. He doesn’t even belong to a political party. Instead, he relied mostly on social media to get his message out, first and foremost TikTok, which is very popular in Romania. His campaign’s grassroots strategy starkly contrasted with other candidates’ reliance on mainstream media and established political machinery.
The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and aggressive. The first step involved launching a media blitz—both in Romania and abroad—to paint him as a “pro-Russian far-right extremist,” all-around crackpot, and agent of the Kremlin. This has become the standard reaction of liberal establishments to electoral outcomes that deviate from the Euro-Atlantic consensus—especially in post-Soviet countries, as seen recently also in Georgia and Moldova. As in other cases, the evidence for such claims tends to be rather scant.
The first thing that stands out is that Georgescu doesn’t have the résumé of your typical populist. For most of his career, Georgescu, an agronomist, has been an establishment insider employed in a field not known for being rife with populist sentiment: sustainable development. His past positions include special rapporteur for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, president of the European Research Centre for the Club of Rome, and executive director of the UN Global Sustainable Index Institute. His political outlook reflects, it would seem, a longstanding focus on the importance of economic and especially agricultural self-sufficiency.
It is true that Georgescu has made some controversial claims in the past, including expressing support for the pro-Nazi leaders of the country during World War II, referring to the Covid-19 crisis as a “plandemic,” and speaking of the existence of a transhumanist pedophiliac cabal. But his campaign largely focused on concrete issues like the economy and Romania’s geopolitical position. Georgescu emphasizes national sovereignty and reducing Romania’s dependence on foreign powers and often critiques the influence of international bodies like the European Union and NATO on national affairs. His platform includes reducing Romania’s reliance on imports, supporting local farmers, and ramping up domestic production of food and energy.
What really sent the establishment into a frenzy, however, was Georgescu’s stance on the war in Ukraine. He has criticized NATO’s role in the conflict and expressed a desire for Romania to engage in dialogue, rather than confrontation. He rejects the framing of this position as “pro-Russian,” contending that it is simply pro-Romanian. His argument boils down to the fact that the war isn’t in Romania’s interest. As he put it during a talk show: Ukraine “is none of our business. We should worry only about Romania.”
Georgescu has also condemned NATO’s installation of a ballistic-missile shield in the south of the country. He has denied claims that he aims to withdraw Romania from the Western Alliance or from the European Union, arguing instead that membership shouldn’t involve automatically signing up to those organizations’ policies.
Georgescu’s call for self-determination increasingly resonates across Europe, where growing numbers of people are pushing back against the erosion of national sovereignty by the EU-NATO establishment. As the Romanian journalist Teodora Munteanu observed: “Georgescu focused on the call for peace and people’s fear that [the other candidates] would get us into war. He also addressed grassroots issues, like people with toilets in their yards, low wages, real problems that everyone understands.”
Astonishingly, the intelligence dossier against him provides no clear evidence of foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply points to the existence of a social-media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers, and coordinated messaging.
It goes without saying that there is nothing out of the ordinary in using social-media platforms to promote a message. Indeed, this happens everywhere, and is simply the modern-day equivalent of old-school political ads. It’s unclear how exposing people to one’s message could be considered a form of electoral manipulation—except insofar as it obviously rewards the candidates with the greatest financial resources. But according to the intelligence report, Georgescu spent around $1.5 million on his TikTok campaign—far less than the roughly $17 million received in state subsidies by the two main parties. In any case, if spending money on a campaign were a guarantee of winning votes, Kamala Harris would have effortlessly clinched the recent US election, considering that the Democrats poured twice as much cash as Trump into advertising.
The intelligence report provides no concrete evidence of foreign state involvement or manipulation; it simply suggests that the campaign “correlates with a state actor’s operating mode” and draws parallels to alleged Russian operations in Ukraine and Moldova. Essentially, when all the layers are peeled back, Romania’s top court annulled an entire presidential election based on a TikTok social-media campaign, which the intelligence services claimed—without providing concrete evidence—bore similarities to Russian tactics allegedly used elsewhere. It’s hard to conclude that this was anything but an “institutional coup d’état,” as Georgescu put it. Even the pro-EU candidate who lost to Georgescu said the decision “crushes the very essence of democracy, voting.”
The ruling sets a terrifying precedent. If vague accusations of foreign interference can nullify election results, any future electoral outcome that threatens entrenched elites could similarly be overturned. Unfortunately, what happened in Romania isn’t an outlier. It is an escalation in an all-too-familiar trend now afflicting Western societies, whereby unpopular and delegitimized elites resort to increasingly brazen methods—such as media manipulation, cognitive warfare, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure, and surveillance and intelligence operations—to influence electoral outcomes and suppress challenges to the status quo. Consider that in the United States, the security apparatus and its media allies spent almost the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term attempting to undo the outcome of the 2016 election via the #Russiagate hoax.
In other words, actual disinformation and electoral interference tactics are deployed by the establishment to counter alleged (and often fabricated) disinformation and foreign interference campaigns, usually claimed to be coming from Russia to the benefit of domestic populist politicians and parties. However, such tactics are proving powerless to manufacture consensus and are, in fact, beginning to backfire, which is why even the formal elements of democracy—including elections—are now being called into question.
It is no coincidence that these measures are employed most aggressively in those countries with particular strategic value for NATO. Romania is a case in point. The country has been instrumental in providing military aid to Ukraine. Additionally, it is at Romania’s 86th Air Base where Ukrainian pilots receive training on F-16 fighter jets. This facility serves as a regional hub for NATO allies and partners. Moreover, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, on the Black Sea coast, is undergoing significant development to become the largest NATO base in Europe. This expansion aims to support NATO operations and strengthen the alliance’s presence in the Black Sea region and its control of Russia’s “near abroad.” The Western Alliance clearly can’t afford to allow mere popular sovereignty to jeopardize Romania’s role as a NATO garrison.
No wonder, then, that the US State Department supported the court decision on the grounds that “Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people.” It’s also highly unlikely that the EU-NATO establishment wasn’t involved in some way or another in the judicial coup against Georgescu. The measures employed to undermine Georgescu are indicative of a broader willingness to erode democratic norms in pursuit of geopolitical objectives. For the same reason, the same powers are attempting to foment a Ukraine-style violent overthrow of the government in Georgia, where the pro-peace ruling party recently won the elections.
NATO’s aggressive military posture isn’t just destabilizing its official adversaries, but also its members, as well as those countries the alliance intends to draw into its sphere of influence. It’s only a matter of time before the tactics deployed against front-line states are turned against any core NATO country in Western Europe that stray from the alliance’s prescribed path. That scenario is likely just one “wrong” election away from becoming a reality.
A Renewed American Timocracy
Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain, Hampden died in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail, etc. This is cold comfort. Politics are an ordeal path among red-hot ploughshares. Who, then, would be a politician for the pleasure of running about barefoot among them? Yet somebody must. And I think those whose characters, circumstances, education, etc., call them, ought to follow.-John Adams to James Warren, June 25, 1774
Yet I do not think that one or a few men are under any moral obligation to sacrifice for themselves and families all the pleasures, profits and prospects of life, while others for whose benefit this is to be done lie idle, enjoying all the sweets of society, accumulating wealth in abundance, and laying foundations for opulent and powerful families for many generations. No. I think the arduous duties of the times ought to be discharged in rotation, and I never will engage more in politics but upon this system…---
Shortly after Donald Trump’s stunning election to a nonconsecutive second term, Vanity Fair released a digital cover for the event. Alongside a close-up of The Don staring with grim determination into the camera, there was a litany of damnations: “34 Felony Counts. 1 Conviction. 2 Cases Pending. 2 Impeachments. 6 Bankruptcies.” And then the kicker: “4 More Years. The 47th American President.”
In case there was any doubt of Vanity Fair’s tone — horrified incredulity that such a man could be restored to our highest office — associate editor Eric Lutz explained: “Four years after launching an unprecedented attack on democracy, and after leaving the White House in disgrace, Donald Trump will return to Washington, DC, as the 47th president of the United States. His 2024 election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris marks a startling political rebound for the Republican demagogue since his losing reelection bid of 2020 — and a deeply troubling turn for the country, as a twice-impeached convicted felon with authoritarian aspirations will assume the most powerful job in the world.”
Clearly, Vanity Fair meant to indict not just the anti-democratic, disgraced, demagogic, felonious, authoritarian Donald Trump, but the Americans who re-elected him despite — or was it because of? — his many crimes.
But for anyone who doubts the impartiality of our justice system toward the 45th and 47th president — or, indeed, for anyone who simply seeks to understand the once and future POTUS — Vanity Fair’s litany raises an obvious question.
What kind of man would put himself through all of this?
Since 2016, liberal commentators have worked themselves, and a disturbingly large part of the country, into hysterics over the manifold Badnesses of the Orange Man. They have not stopped at condemning his morals, his policies, or his actual record governing the United States: they have also psychoanalyzed him, seeking to expose his (evil) motives for all to see. Since Trump is obviously not a Christian conservative, they have been unable to swing their favored beating-stick — that this here Republican is a theocratic fanatic or a Christian nationalist or something to that effect — with their usual vigor, though these old habits explain why they swung so hard at the relatively tame proposals contained in Project 2025.
Instead, they have searched again and again for darker impulses that must be lurking in Donald Trump’s heart. The more sophisticated Trump critics have sometimes reached back to classical philosophy and sought to wrap their partisan revulsion in philosophic pretensions. Perhaps Trump has “a tyrannical soul,” in Plato’s sense of the term: he is enslaved to his own base desires, and thus seeks to dominate others so as to put them at the service of those desires. Or else, again following Plato, he is an oligarch: obsessed with wealth, seeking political power in order to enrich himself and his family.
These attempts to psychoanalyze Trump fail to explain why, having achieved wealth and fame as a businessman and entertainer, he would seek prestige in a new, more demanding, and more dangerous arena. A tyrannically souled hedonist or acquisitive oligarch could “live his bliss” far better by staying out of politics. They also fail to explain the appeal of Trump — an appeal that, four years ago, Carson Holloway rightly observed is due to his thumos, or spiritedness.
Trump has the soul, not of a tyrant, or even of an oligarch, but of an honor-lover. Plato called this type of soul timocratic: a man in whose soul the love of honor (timē) is the passion that rules (kratia) over his whole self. Such men may enjoy, and pursue, other goods, including wealth and power; but above all, they wish to accomplish something great and to be rightly celebrated for their accomplishments.
Trump said it himself in 2013: “If you fail once, twice, three times, it doesn’t matter. Learn from your mistakes and push forward to VICTORY – the sweetest feeling there is!” Only a timocrat — not a hedonist, and not a man consumed by love of money — would identify victory as “the sweetest feeling there is.”
Trump the timocrat desires victory and honor above all else. Notably, “honor” here means not mere popularity or reputation (the “fame” of a celebrity, which Trump already had in spades before 2015), but the esteem and gratitude that are bestowed on a champion by his community for fighting, and winning, on their behalf. This love of honor is classically expressed in military service (Plato pointed to Sparta as a timocratic regime), and we might think of American heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt as more-or-less classically timocratic men.
Aman’s type of soul will also reveal what he esteems in others. Here again Trump appears to be a timocrat.
Why is Trump not just a longstanding supporter of the UFC and friend with its CEO, Dana White — why did Trump’s affinity for the UFC take on a new prominence this election cycle, from his rockstar entrances to his election victory party at a UFC fight, entourage of cabinet appointees and political allies in tow? A UFC fight is one of the clearest examples, short of actual battle, of the kind of victory a timocratic man is interested in.
Why did Trump spend no less than 10% of his election night victory speech describing SpaceX’s October 13 “chopstick arms” catch of its Super Heavy booster? Trump the timocrat loves to celebrate “winners,” and condemns his opponents as “losers;” and victory comes in many forms. Americans have always been a pioneering people, and in the 20th century we acquired world domination by marrying this pioneering spirit to our technological ingenuity.
So far, the greatest accomplishment of America’s distinctive technological civilization — the achievement that will likely dominate later generations’ understanding of the 20th century — has been the 1969 moon landing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the most prominent and impressive example of a technological “winner” in 21st century America. Musk’s determination to revitalize space travel harkens back to the era that Americans of all political persuasions recognize as our pioneering, technological civilization’s Space Age peak — and promises to renew it for our time.
In 2026, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump’s timocratic tastes were clear when he announced his semiquincentennial plans. Prominent among them were a Great American State Fair, to include contests for high school athletes that Trump dubbed “Patriot Games,” to “show off the best of American skill, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit.”
Trump is also determined to “bring back the National Garden of American Heroes,” first proposed amid the iconoclastic 1619 Riots during his first term, “and commission artists for the first 100 statues to populate the new park.” Champions in athletic competition, and heroes who embodied “the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love” — these are the kinds of “winners” that a timocratic soul loves, and hopes that others will love as well.
Whatever else happens before, during, or after his second term, Donald Trump has already given his name to the current era. His promise to Make America Great Again resonates so powerfully in our dispirited and dispiriting times because it directly contradicts the End of History’s shriveled aspirations — to have one’s “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night,” unable to “launch the arrow of [our] longing beyond man,” unable anymore “to give birth to a dancing star.” That promise directly contradicts the Left’s denunciation and renunciation of the American heritage — not just a catalogue of ideas or abstractions or progressive achievements in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but a truly timocratic legacy of vitality and conquest: of the wilderness, of the open seas, of the continent, and of the stars.
The American poet Robinson Jeffers wrote that “the love of freedom has been the quality of Western man,” but that it has taken different forms for different civilizations: “For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery. … And you, America, that passion made you.” Let us hope we can recover that passion, so that it can make us ourselves once again.
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
More Chips, EV Chargers, and Internet, Oh MY!
$Billions for Corporate Donors$
$Debts$ & Broken Promises for You!
Monday, December 9, 2024
Democrats Express the Racism of Low Expectations...
They're all verba non acta instead of acta non verba!
Democrat's "Count 'till You Win" Cheat Didn't Work in PA
Ari Fleischer, "Pennsylvania Almost Saw a Stolen Election"
In the Pennsylvania Senate race, Democrats claimed they wanted to “count every vote.” What they really wanted was to count illegal votes in Democratic counties. With a 15,115-vote margin, Republican Dave McCormick defeated an organized effort by national Democrats to reverse his win over Sen. Bob Casey. If Mr. McCormick’s lead had been smaller, Democrats would still be trying to cook up ways to flip this election.
Under the Pennsylvania election code, ballots that lack a secrecy envelope, are unsigned, or are cast by an unregistered person are not to be counted. Any attempt to make them count is an attempt to break the law. The Democrats’ Pennsylvania playbook should be a warning to everyone who cares about accurate, lawful elections.
In Bucks County, the Democrat-run Board of Elections voted 2-1 along party lines to count mail-in ballots that weren’t dated or were incorrectly dated. Mr. McCormick sued and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Bucks County board’s decision on the merits. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro didn’t object as the board nullified state law, speaking out weakly only after the high court ruled.
In Philadelphia, the Board of Elections rejected 2,073 provisional ballots because they lacked a secrecy envelope and required voter signatures. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Casey campaign wanted to count these votes in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and they appealed. Fortunately, a judge upheld the rejection of illegal ballots.
In Montgomery County, the Democrat-run Board of Elections rejected nearly 200 ballots lacking a required secrecy envelope. The DSCC and Casey campaign dropped their appeal only when Mr. Casey conceded. The Montgomery board also voted to count hundreds of undated or incorrectly dated ballots. As in Bucks County, the state Supreme Court put an end to that.
In Dauphin County, of which Harrisburg is the seat, the Democrat-run Board of Elections rejected 96 ballots because they lacked required secrecy envelopes and voter signatures. The DSCC and Casey campaign dropped their appeal only after Mr. Casey’s concession. In Luzerne County, the Casey campaign asked the Board of Elections to approve about 500 disputed ballots cast by people who weren’t registered to vote in the county. The election board allowed a small number to be counted but rejected most of these votes.
The McCormick recount team, along with the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, mobilized to defeat these efforts. In all 67 counties, the campaign deployed well-trained lawyers to fight tooth and nail. They were vigilant, making certain there would be no mischief. The McCormick campaign shined a light on many of the Democratic tactics, regularly informing the media of what the Democrats were doing, making certain Democrats could slip nothing through without public scrutiny.
But what would have happened if the Casey appeals continued? What would have happened if friendly judges ruled that illegal votes were suddenly legal? That’s the formula the Democrats employ in close races.
In football, when the clock runs out, the game is over. Everyone knows the score—and the rules. In politics, when the election is over, Democrats demand more time be put on the clock. Sometimes they argue that Republican touchdowns shouldn’t count. Sometimes they demand that Democrats be awarded extra points. All it takes is a close score and a friendly commissioner or judge, and the call on the field can be reversed.
Mr. McCormick won, but Democrats aren’t done. They’ll take their Pennsylvania tactics to other states.
It’s time for the Pennsylvania Legislature and Gov. Shapiro to show leadership and enforce their laws. It’s time for Congress to pass a nationwide voter-identification requirement. Law-abiding citizens everywhere should know what’s in the Democratic recount playbook and be prepared to fight it.
Sunday, December 8, 2024
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Scott Bessent - The Skeleton Key to Trump 2.0
Eric Revell, "Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent's '3-3-3' plan: What to know"
Bessent modeled his 3-3-3 plan off late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's '3 arrows' idea
President-elect Trump's nominee to serve as Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has touted a "3-3-3" economic plan that would seek to reduce budget deficits while boosting growth and energy production.
Bessent discussed the 3-3-3 plan this summer at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute. He said it would involve cutting the budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2028, the last year of Trump's second term; boosting GDP growth to 3% through deregulation and other pro-growth policies; and increasing U.S. energy production to the equivalent of an additional 3 million barrels of oil per day.
His 3-3-3 plan was inspired by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who adopted a "three arrows" plan that featured aggressive monetary policy along with fiscal stimulus and structural reforms aimed at lifting Japan's economy from stagnation and persistent deflation.
"It would be 3% real economic growth – how do you get that? Through deregulation, more U.S. energy production, slaying inflation and forward guidance on confidence for people to make investments so that the private sector can take over from this bloated government spending," Bessent said.
Bessent said Trump should tout a deficit reduction goal as part of the plan: "I would urge him to make public his desire to get the deficit down to 3% by the end of his term. He didn't get us to these 6% or 7% deficits. I think they averaged 4% under him, so get that down to 3%."
Bessent added that boosting energy production would help bring down future expectations about inflation, given that energy and gasoline prices are a key element of household budgets reflected in inflation measurements.
"Three million more oil barrels equivalent a day from U.S. energy production. That would be my 3-3-3. That would substantially decrease the oil price, which – that's one of the No. 1 drivers of inflation expectations," he said. "And then, back to the Fed, they could go into a proper easing cycle."
Bessent said the federal government's fiscal trajectory means that time is dwindling for the U.S. to try to use growth to stabilize the situation and said, "I think we're at the last-chance bar and grill for growing our way out of this."
He added that the U.S. should extend and reinstate expired provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 with pay-fors to offset some of the revenue reductions caused by the extended tax cuts. Bessent then went on to discuss other ways the U.S. should restrain spending.
"The Green New Deal, we could probably save $1 trillion over 10 years on that. I think there's probably something to do on Medicaid in terms of empowering states, no cuts. On discretionary spending, we probably need to do some kind of a freeze except for defense," Bessent said. "I think the market will respond to that."
Bessent went on to say that the federal government's "high deficits are going to create a national defense problem" because the elevated levels of spending and debt reduce its ability to leverage an increase in spending during times of crisis and war.
"U.S. Treasury was able to save the country during the Civil War by expanding the deficit… They saved the economic well-being of the country during the Great Depression by spending. And then we were able to save the world during World War II. So we have to get this down, or we have no room for maneuver," Bessent said.
He added that with the budget deficit on track to widen, "I think that President Trump, with the right policy, could create a reflexive, self-reinforcing cycle on the downside."
Bessent acknowledged that the federal government's mandatory spending – particularly the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs – is a major driver of budget deficits. However, he said he thinks it's more realistic for the incoming Trump administration to focus on curbing discretionary spending, a much smaller portion of the overall federal budget, to create momentum for a future administration to take on entitlement reform.
"These entitlements are massive. I think the next four years isn't the time to deal with them, that we've got to deal with the discretionary portion of the budget and get that under control. But I think the signal – I always say, crawl, walk, run – we've got to crawl, maybe walk our way to get the current deficits under control, then the next step is for a future administration to have the confidence to be able to deal with entitlements," Bessent said.
Friday, December 6, 2024
Thursday, December 5, 2024
83 Year Old Bernie Begins to Dump the Dems...
...but as always, way too late.
He later shills for "non-corporate" media with corporate media's Jon Stewart. The hypocrisy and self-serving patronizing BS couldn't be any more evident.
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