Timothy Birdnow

Americans are FINALLY waking up!

CNN ChiefData Analyust AStonished to See Democrats Historic Key Advantage Completely Disappear in New Poll

Democrats have always been the "party of the Middle Class" in polls, enjoy leads of over 20% for a long time. Now it's neck-and-neck.

If the GOP handles this properly they can flip this entirely. They need to pass the Big Beautiful Bill, for instance.

I caught Rand Paul, one of the B cubed's detractors, on Sean Hannity yesterday. I like Paul, I really do, but he's more liberttarian than Conservative and he makes idiotic libertarian arguments. His argument against BBB was that it spent too much. I agree. But right now the political calculus is such that you can't just say "I'm voting on principle" becuase then you will lose, get nothing, and that means a major tax increase for the Middle Class. There will be no tax releif. And then every few months we'll have to go back and fight this battle over and over with the Democrats and the RINO wing and come next election the GOP will likely lose the House. Then the real fun begins; investigations, stunts, impeachments...

To accomplish any good you first have to win elections. While I think the best way to accomplish that is to be bold and lead, not follow along behind polls, I do think there is no reason to saw off your proboscis to spite your anterior head. There is a principled stance and just plain stupidity. Paul is teetering on the latter.

This is not the hill to die on. The B cubed does a lot of good, keeping the old tax cuts and adding a few more, much needed cuts. It spends too much, no question. But we need to get this through; so much is at stake here. Drilling. Border security, etc. If Congress doesn't pass this the public will rightly see them as useless.

But that is vintage libertarian. Libertarians have a number of beliefs I find quite odd. They reject border security, for instance, because they say it's not government's business who comes or goes or gets hired or whatnot. In a world governed by angels that may be true and we could avoid having a border at all, but this is not a world governed by Angels; it's a world where a lot of bad people mean us great harm.
You cannot have a country or maintain a culture if you have no control of who shows up.

History is replete with examples of cultures dying solely because a more numerous society decided to simply settle and take over. Our own nation was built that way, I might add. (Granted, the Native Americans were a fierce lot who practiced ritual torture and raped innocent women they stole and who were constantly at war, which is why they fell so easily to the white settlers. Oh, and they didn't really develop the land or build much.) The Japanese took Japan away from it's aboriginal inhabitants, the caucasian Ainu, who now number just a few hundred. India was conquered and reconquered. The Arabs exploded out of the Arabian Peninusla and now dominate most of North Africa and the Middle East, erasing the traditional cultures of the conquered lands in the process. The Spanish conquered multiple civilizations in the Americas and we call that area "Latin America" to this day. The German tribes conquered Britain - the Angles, Saxons, Normans, and Danes drove the aboriginal Britains (a Celtic People) out of their homeland and into the highlands of Wales. Border defense is a kind of law enforcement designed to keep out people who would simply squat here and drive us out.

Libertarians also tend to support legalization of narcotics. While that sounds "fair" it leads to broken lives. Just ask China how that turned out after the Chinese were forced to accept the opium trade.

And they support "Free Trade" but what is free trade? What does that even mean? Trade passes borders and there is nothing in this life that is truly free. The fact is what we call "free trade" isn't free at all; almost all countries have barriers and restrictions. The U.S. became enamoured of this idea during the Reagan era and Clinton pushed forward with a series of trade agreements (whose purpose was to knit the world together economically to ultimately promote world government, much like the European Common Market led to the unification of Europe). Of course, we lost most of our manufacturing industry (and mining, and other good-paying blue collar jobs) because Third World countries can pay much less and offer no benefits or have health and safety standards. And with tariffs imposed by these countries as well as Value Added Taxes (VAT) American goods were kept out of many nations while they flooded our markets. Good for consumers since these products were cheap (and made by slave labor, or at least serf labor) but they KILLED American's ability to make a living. The vaunted "service jobs" so highly touted by the champions of this turned out to be losers, and there weren't many of them. A guy making forty bucks an hour isn't going to be asking people "want fries with that" for minimum wage.

And of course with open borders even these service jobs didn't materialize as companies could hire immigrant labor for cheaper.

Much of the hoopla surrounding free trade comes from Milton Friedman. While I admire Freeman immensely he was wrong about some things. From Adam Smith onward, almost every free market guy advocated using tariffs when other nations did so to us. But Friedman argued tariffswere never a good idea, that we were better off taking it in the shorts than in reciprocating. He's been proven spectacularly wrong. (BTW Adam Smith was fine with recioprocal tariffs, and said so on numerous occasions.)

Free trade and "libertarian" style open borders have become a suicide pact between fifty former states turned provinces under the imperial government.

And all of this could be seen in Rand Paul's commentary while speaking with Hannity. Sad but true.

Paul doesn't seem to understand that right now we need economic growth to grow our way out of the mountain of debt. He is holding out for fiscal discipline in a place without any, and he doesn't seem to understand that we can cut spending when the receipts start coming in during a huge economic boom. That boom is coming; Trump has all the ingrediants he needs except Paul and friends are going to torpedo the whole things to save a few dollars.

The phrase "penny wise and pound foolish" was coined for just such an occasion.

All Paul can be is a spoiler, handing victory to the Democrats. He's not going to win anything. There will be no major budget cuts because he stood his ground. Right now all he's doing is greasing the rails for the people who hate what he's selling.

Quite foolish.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 06:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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