Biden’s Border Brouhaha is Just the Start
I tell you what really frosts me about the Biden administration. It is that, one way or another, I am going to have to pay for its terminal stupidity. And I ain’t responsible.
Illegal immigration? Wow, who could have foreseen that the illegals would be swarming the border? Surely the Biden people are in touch with the activist groups that are distributing Biden Let Me In t-shirts. And, by the way, we military history readers know that armies of migrants heading across Central America for the U.S. border don’t feed themselves. They aren’t feeding themselves “off the land” as armies from Xenophon’s Ten Thousand to Sherman’s “bummers” have done down the ages. Someone is organizing the feeding of these people, and someone is paying for it. I wonder who? Oh, so now Biden wants help from the Mexican president.
Oh, I get it. Somehow, somewhere, some Activist Second Class called Clarence needs to get his activist wings on the open-border front. But whatabout the current People of Color citizens? Do not you activists -- “allies” every one -- care that the unskilled migrants you bring into the country are competing with historically marginalized oppressed peoples for jobs? And that they lower the wage level, and that if you raise the minimum wage it will just distort the labor market more and make everyone from the white working class on down more despairing?
Whatabout the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus bill? Just this week I read how Warren Buffett’s index of stock market valuation to GDP is at an all-time high. Golly, Chuck and Nancy, what could go wrong with cranking up the debt some more? Remember when Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) did not apparently say “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.” Forget billions: now it’s trillions!
Oh, I get it. All over the country there are Democratic voters and special interests and blue states that are owed their loot and plunder. Vikings gotta go a-viking. Only this time, I predict, we won’t just get a painfully slow recovery from the Crash of 2008, but something worse. In your Trump hatred you Dems may not remember, but the economy was showing signs of overheating back in 2019, with a reverse yield curve developing in early March. Then, in September 2019, Trump jawboned the Fed into lowering interest rates and it was Katy bar the door once COVID was announced.
Oh, and house prices are now 37.6 percent above their April 2007 peak and have basically spent the last year rocketing into the stratosphere. Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed rate mortgage index has jumped from 2.73 percent to 3.04 percent just in the last three weeks. Golly, Secretary Yellen at the Treasury, what could go wrong?
Inflation? Stagflation? Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
And when things do go wrong, Fed chief Jerome Powell, are you ready? Have you reread Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street this month and reminded yourself that “lender of last resort” means Lender of Last Resort and you don’t shy at the second fence like apprentice jockey Little Ben Bernanke did in 2008?
But let’s stop talking about me, a well-provided-for OK Boomer. Whatabout the rest of the country?
Do you Dems not understand that unlimited immigration hurts the undereducated and underskilled PoCs the most?
Do you Dems not understand that the minimum wage prices undereducated and underskilled PoCs onto the unemployment line?
Do you Dems not understand that social insurance taxes combined with a hands-off attitude towards illegal migrant labor hurts the PoCs, because legal employees have to pay payroll taxes and their employers have to pay a variety of taxes from unemployment to workers’ comp., and the off-the-books employers and employees do not?
Do you Dems not understand that the subsidization of home mortgages that continues today despite the lesson of 2008 puts money in the pocket of OK Boomers like me and screws the young’uns and the PoCs to the wall? And if you do not understand that, then why not?
And do you Dems not understand that the subsidization of college tuition with student loans puts money in the pocket of educated-class elites and digs it out of the pockets of middle-income youngsters and their middle-income parents.
And do you Dems not understand that wokery like “decolonizing math” means that white Beckys go buy homeschool math books for their children and PoC children get screwed?
I’m halfway through Jordan B. Peterson’s new book Beyond Order, and he writes that on the book tour for 12 Rules one subject made the audience really go quiet and pay attention: Responsibility.
I wonder whether our liberal friends will accept responsibility as things start to go wrong: border chaos today, and maybe “stagflation” by 2022.
Because “responsibility” seems to resonate with people in America.
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: Pixabay
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