Let us suppose that the best and brightest setting up the Biden regime in 2021 all confidently knew that by the spring of 2024 everything would be copacetic and Bidenomics would prompt a blowout election in 2024 that would consign Trump and Trumpism to the waste heap of history. The inflation would be transitory, the various mega-spending pushes would be nailing down Democrat support, wall-to-wall DEI would have Black support guaranteed for 50 years, the glorious push for NetZero would herald the dawn of a new era led by proud EV-driving virtue-signalers, and as an insurance policy, Donald Trump would be compromised six ways from Sunday by multiple prosecutions featuring Black prosecutors, with a backup from regime heavyweight Jack Smith.
I’d like to suggest that all five strategies are failing.
I’d say that when you gun the M2 money supply by 40 percent in two years, from $15.3 trillion in early 2020 to $21.7 trillion in early 2022, you are starting a prairie fire. Hey, but it was great for a baby-boom retiree like me. My net worth went up 50 percent in the same period. But for the average angry racist White voter it meant two years of shutdown followed by soaring prices and interest rates. I wonder what life has been like for Hispanic roofers and aspiring rappers. Anybody know?
I would say that a mega-spending push is not the best way to right the economy after an inflationary lockdown. Yes, I know that experts agree that FDR’s New Deal saved America after the 1929 Crash and Obama’s stimulus saved America after the 2008 Crash. If you believe those government-funded experts, I have a bridge in Baltimore… Fact is that when you take resources away from funding the most urgent needs of consumers and businesses and venture capitalists you are making things worse. And that is what FDR did in the 1930s and Obama did in the 2010s. Wanna gun the economy? Cut spending and cut tax rates.
I would say that, apart from its disgusting racism, DEI is a strategic mistake. When you hire and promote on the basis of race and sex — let alone gender orientation — you are not sending the executive suites your best. Put it this way. Do you think that rich White girl Katherine Maher, she of the woke tweets, is going to turn NPR into a journalistic powerhouse? Or do you think she is just going to recite the narrative and NPR will descend deeper into woke virtue-signaling?
discovering that they don’t have the resources or the skills or the ships to build their offshore wind farms, let alone beef up their electric grid to handle the all-electric load. Just imagine what electricity will cost in the UK at the end of it all. The untold story of the last 200 years is that each invention made things staggeringly cheaper: energy, food, transportation, communication. I remember a three-minute long-distance call costing a couple of bucks back in 1970. Today I can do a video call to anyone in the world on my $99.95 smartphone for free! And it all happened without heroic meetings of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. I tell you: renewable energy is going to be the biggest economic meltdown since Mao decided to increase crop yields by killing the sparrows.
I suspect that the Biden insurance policy to destroy Trump with multiple prosecutions will be seen, in retrospect, to have been a NetZero. I’m sure that if you are a DEI administrator that listens to NPR it all looks like Justice! But if I am an ordinary American I am wondering what’s with these Black prosecutors running on a platform to Get Trump? What’s with siccing the FBI on Trump’s private residence? And “88 criminal offenses in four criminal cases”? Hello? So I think the whole effort will just confirm everyone in their priors. Except for the uncommitted voters, and who knows where they will come down in November?
Of course, all this low-rent street-fighting occurs in the shadow of the bigger, Rodney Dangerfield issue, that the ordinary middle class “don’t get no respect” from the educated ruling class. The silent majority asked for respect in Nixon’s time, and the Reagan Democrats asked for respect in Reagan’s time. The Contract with America asked for respect in 1994; the Tea Party asked for respect in 2010; the MAGAs asked for respect in 2016.
Today in 2024 the middle class still don’t get no respect. What will the next Dangerfield moment be like? Probably not like the movie Civil War; let’s hope it’s no worse than the Spartacist League vs. the Freikorps, as in post-World War I Germany.
Truth is, nobody knows.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Executive Office of the President of the United States
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