BARONESS NANCY PELOSI OF LA RAZA MEXIFORNA'S BAILOUT OF CA - THE MEX WELFARE STATE

 

$1.9 Trillion in Spending, $11 Trillion in One-Term Deficits

By William Levin

Passage of the $1.9 trillion spending bill has Democrats giddy.  President Biden termed it “historic.” Senator Schumer calls it “a great day for this country.”  Not to be outdone, Senator Debbie Stabenow gushed, “People on the floor, in our caucus, it was almost like tears in their eye.  I mean, I felt it.”

Here is what actually historic.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Biden one-term deficit will total a forecasted $8 trillion, including the $1.9 trillion, spiraling to $11 trillion if Democrats follow through on next month’s planned $3 trillion bill for “infrastructure.”

Republicans have widely noted the huge waste in the spending bill.  Of $1.9 trillion, only $465 billion is due to the $1,400 check, putting the bill’s pork and payoffs at $1.4 trillion. Economists have identified the enormity of planned spending, and its recklessness. Even stalwart Democrat supporters recognize the Biden administration utter disregard of fiscal responsibility.

But that is not the full measure of the worst. Driving the country exponentially into ever greater indebtedness fairly and objectively marks the end of the American dream.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

U.S. History and Public Debt

For two hundred years, after every great national crisis, the succeeding generations made sure to put the country back on sound financial footing.  Call it our blessed second greatest generation, the stalwarts who ensured national crisis did not eat up the chance for their children and grandchildren to prosper.

It is all here, in this one graph, the story of a nation caring for whom comes next. 

https://www.pgpf.org/sites/default/files/2020-fiscal-challenge-page-chart-1.jpg

Three times this nation has been tested to the utmost. 

• The Revolutionary War, a young nation at risk, through the War of 1812 -- our finances restored by the 1830s. 
• The grievous devastation of the Civil War -- our finances restored by the 1890s. 
• The worst consecutive toll on the U.S. and the world -- World War I, the Great Depression, World War II -- compressed into thirty horrific years, yet all of it fiscally restored within a generation.

But now, notwithstanding more than 200 years of fiscal responsibility, resolutely pursued by both parties in the aftermath of crisis, the Democrats use Covid, and the barest contrivance of a majority, to drive this country irretrievably off the cliff.

And for what?  $3.5 trillion in past Covid spending, a proven vaccine in hand, herd immunity around the corner, economists calling for up to a 10% increase in GDP, with savings at record highs, unemployment already at 6% and true growth in GDP, from pre-Covid levels, realizable by the third quarter of this year, or sooner.

The late Senator Moynihan spoke of defining deviancy downward.  If Covid is a present crisis of comparable dimension, crisis has been defined downward to insensibility.

The scope and depth of the appalling damage being done to this nation cannot properly be understood without slowing the story down.  We must collectively feel the grit and determination that hitherto has saved us all.

The Nation’s Founding and Young Years

The nation’s first and everlasting financial hero is undoubtedly Alexander Hamilton.  In September 1789, Washington gave Hamilton 110 days to keep the U.S. afloat.  Exiting the war, the U.S. owed $80 million set against federal income from tariffs and excise taxes of $4.4 million.

Hamilton’s response was in three parts.  First, he insisted that all debts be repaid in full, including assumption of state debts, even if meant rewarding speculators. Second, he created a national bank, over the heated object of Thomas Jefferson and many Southerners. Finally, he insisted on a specific plan to repay the debt, including western land sales and a new, highly unpopular liquor tax.

Hamilton set the country’s DNA. Spend only as much as raised, and once the crisis is surmounted, force the resolve and resources to repay borrowed money in the next generation.  Absent Hamilton’s fortitude, the U.S. would have lacked the creditworthiness to borrow loans in Europe to pay for the Louisiana Purchase, without which the U.S. would never have become the nation we know today.  Even more impressively, from 1789 to 1860, the U.S. built out a continent, fought two major wars and created the infrastructure for the nation’s growth, all the while without incurring a single dollar of incremental public debt.

The Civil War

The greatest test relative to the country’s resources was undoubtedly the Civil War.  Federal spending to fund the war jumped five-fold, resulting in a national debt in 1865 of $2.7 billion from a mere $65 million in 1860.

The national response was bipartisan and uninterrupted.  For 30 years, expenses were held below revenue, even with the generational burden of pension obligations to Civil War veterans and rebuilding a devastated nation.  The result was continuous surpluses that went directly to debt repayment.

By 1893, the national debt was under $1 billion, on far higher GDP, in the process dropping annual interest cost to $23 million from an unaffordable $146 million (versus $270 million in then total spending).  It is worth noting that President Grant accomplished this work by abolishing income and estate taxes.  Americans paid for the Civil War largely based on alcohol and tobacco taxes, working hand in hand with continuous, bipartisan restraint in spending by the federal government.

World War I, The Depression, and World War II

In the thirty-year dire hardship path from World War I to victory in World War II, the U.S. debt reached $242 billion, or approximately $2.9 trillion in current dollars, peaking at 110% of GDP.  Returning GIs, an ascendent U.S. without economic rival, the baby boom and re-conversion of a wartime economy produced steady growth in the 1950s.  Spending on the Korean War aside, it took President Kennedy’s justly praised tax cuts -- a 30% cut in personal tax rate and a drop in corporate rates -- to rev the U.S. economy into sustained growth in excess of 3% annually.

His words are worth hearing anew, when they truly represented the boldness of the Democratic party:

“The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed under our present tax system…In short, to increase demand and lift the economy, the federal government’s most useful role is not rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures.” [emphasis added]

Here then was the program that reduced the national debt below 50% in the 1950s and ultimately to 25% of GDP by 1970.  Restrain spending, all the while focusing the government on its proper role of lifting the economy through incentives and opportunities for private enterprise.  What a vision, a bipartisan, sound vision.

It is also the proper measure of how mightily the Democrat party has fallen in its present insane, insatiable, unfunded and unending program to increase spending.  To which they add regulatory burden, ruinous renewable energy mandates, “equity,” open borders, sky high income taxes, wealth taxes, and authoritarian controls.  All this, with risible self-congratulations, just as we should be entering a generational commitment to turn down the debt levels in relation to GDP, a debt that is far greater when including unfunded obligations for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The measure of the hypocrisy can be seen in the one Democrat who by instinct and life experience is closest to President Kennedy’s vision for America.  Born in the small mining town of Farmington, West Virginia, Senator Joe Manchin watched his grandfather and father make a living in dry goods, but found his path instead in politics, winning state office at 35, ascending to the Governor’s office for two highly popular terms, and then to the U.S. Senate.

Here is his heartfelt inaugural address as Governor. “I have hope for a West Virginia that is fiscally responsible and never forgets that taxpayer money doesn’t grow on trees.”  On this point he is adamant and specific, “I will personally take responsibility for developing a plan to pay off, once and for all, the long-term debts that we owe.”  “We cannot afford to wait even one more minute.”

“We must be successful and make no mistake, we will be successful and then our children and grandchildren will be proud to follow in our footsteps in building a better West Virginia.”

What was true for West Virginia then is true for the United States now.

The Democrats’ spending program is a grievous assault on this nation’s future, more serious and ultimately more dangerous than any crisis we have faced in the past.  Wars can be won.  Unfunded spending on this scale is surrender.

It must be stopped.

DEM-CONTROLLED SANCTUARY CITY San Francisco was already losing residents when the coronavirus pandemic hit, thanks to the rising cost of housing and increases in petty crime and homelessness. But migration from the area increased 30% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats’ $1.9 Trillion ‘COVID Relief’ Bill Includes $86 Billion in Pension Bailouts

Chris Kleponis - Pool / Getty

JOEL B. POLLAK

10 Mar 20211,055

2:55

The New York Times reported this week that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion “coronavirus relief” bill includes $86 billion for failing pension funds.

The Times reported:

Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income.

The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring groups of companies together with a union to provide guaranteed benefits. All told, about 1,400 of the plans cover about 10.7 million active and retired workers, often in fields like construction or entertainment where the workers move from job to job.

…

Both the House and Senate stimulus measures would give the weakest plans enough money to pay hundreds of thousands of retirees — a number that will grow in the future — their full pensions for the next 30 years. The provision does not require the plans to pay back the bailout, freeze accruals or to end the practices that led to their current distress, which means their troubles could recur. Nor does it explain what will happen when the taxpayer money runs out 30 years from now.

Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal noted Wednesday, the Democrats’ bill provides $360 billion in relief for states, some of which will be used to bail out ailing state pension funds:

Much of the relief will invariably flow to government union pension funds, which are underfunded in states like Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut. To inoculate themselves from GOP attacks, Democrats specified in the bill that relief funds may not be used “for deposit into any pension fund.” But money is fungible. States can pay out of their general funds for pensions and use the federal cash for something else.

The Journal‘s Jason Riley also described the bill as “the largest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpolla

Joe Biden’s ‘COVID Relief’ Bill Bails Out San Francisco Budget for Two Years

Justin Sullivan / Getty

JOEL B. POLLAK

10 Mar 2021619

3:09

The $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill proposed by President Joe Biden and approved by Democrats in Congress “will erase the majority of San Francisco’s projected $650 million budget deficit over the next two years,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The Chronicle reported Tuesday that “S.F’s budget will be saved from painful cuts thanks to federal stimulus”:

The state and local aid is part of a $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package that will also provide money for public transit, vaccine distribution, extended unemployment benefits and $1,400 stimulus checks for those who make $75,000 or less. The U.S. House of Representatives, lead by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, plans to hold a final vote Wednesday. Then, it will head to President Biden’s desk for a signature.

If passed, the stimulus package will inject about $600 million into San Francisco’s coffers over the next two years, Rosenfield said. That leaves Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors with a $50 million hole to fill, a fraction of what they were preparing to deal with.

“We still have a problem,” said Jeff Cretan, spokesman for the mayor. “We just don’t have a problem right now.”

Ironically, the city reported a $125 million surplus this year, but faced a deficit over the medium term.

San Francisco was already losing residents when the coronavirus pandemic hit, thanks to the rising cost of housing and increases in petty crime and homelessness. But migration from the area increased 30% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Republicans have described the COVID-19 relief bill as a “blue state bailout,” with much of the funding unrelated to the pandemic.

The New York Times reported this week that the bill allocates $86 billion for failing pension funds: “Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic.” There are no conditions attached to the pension bailouts that require reforms in how these ailing pension systems are run.

Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal noted Wednesday, while the language of the bill prevents states from depositing aid directly into state pension funds, the funds are “fungible” in ways that allow states to bail out their pensions.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Krikorian: Pro-Migration Zealots Control Joe Biden’s Border Agencies

AP Photo/Isabel Mateos

NEIL MUNRO

10 Mar 2021140

11:04

President Joe Biden has handed control over the nation’s immigration agencies to pro-migration zealots, and neither he nor his top aides may be able to contain the approaching worldwide wave of migrants, says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Biden’s picks “see this as a moral issue and [think] that people who present themselves at the border who come from dysfunctional countries have to be led in, regardless of what the effect on the United States,” Krikorian told Breitbart News. He added:

These folks look at the asylum issue without considering any of the other aspects like labor market and the rest of it … What they’re taking into consideration is not what the broad national interest is in this policy. Rather it’s a moral claim that we have no right to not to let them in.

Biden’s choice to run the Department of Homeland Security is Alejandro Mayorkas, who fled from communist Cuba in 1960 to the United States as a child refugee with his Cuban father and his Romanian-born mother.

In a March 6 interview with NBC News, Mayorkas showed his deep sympathy for migrants, saying:

I believe that asylum seekers, individuals who claim credible fear by reason of their membership in a particular social group, should have the opportunity to present those claims to the United States authorities, and they should be able to present those claims in an orderly, efficient, and safe way.

Mayorkas did not suggest any limits to the potential number of asylum seekers, nor any protections for Americans who lose wages and cheap housing when the government inflates the supply of labor.

Immigration is about migrants and the “values of our country,” according to Mayorkas:

To address the needs of the migrants themselves, and the American public, we’re taking a look at the immigration system writ large and seeing what reforms we can achieve to ensure that the manner in which we address the needs of individuals looking for a better life adheres to the principles and values of our country and its proud traditions.

The values cited by Mayorkas likely refer to the 1950s claim that Americans live in a “Nation of Immigrants.” In a February statement to USA Today, Mayorkas credited migrants — not Americans and their children — with America’s economic success, saying, “We are a nation of immigrants, built on their energy, aspirations, and ideas.”

Mayorkas told NBC that he would set major change in border rules in cooperation with “community stakeholders,” but did not mention Americans’ ordinary concern for jobs, wages, and affordable housing:

I’m going to take a look at the immigration system writ large and decide what reforms are needed. I’m going to do that in partnership with community stakeholders, of course the agencies that I oversee, [plus] state and local law enforcement. We’re going to be collaborative, we’re going to be a partnership, and I’m going to make the ultimate decisions in executing the President to the Vice President’s vision for a better nation, and to build back better. That’s what I’m going to do.

A flood of cheap migrant labor is actually good for Americans’ pocketbooks, according to Mayorkas. “Creating a new immigration system will help create jobs, raise wages, and grow our economy, not just for immigrant communities, but for all our families across this great, great country,” Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-amnesty group, the American Business Immigration Council, on December 3.

In reality, Americans’ wages have stagnated since the government began inflating the labor supply in the 1970s, and especially after the bipartisan 1990 immigration expansion. Many business groups openly say that additional migrants reduce wages.

Mayorkas also blamed the rising migrant wave in 2021 on so-called push factors from other countries — not the eagerness of himself and progressives to pull migrants from their home economics and steer them into better lives in America, regardless of the damage done to the migrants’ home countries: “We understand the significance of the number of children: It speaks to the fact that there is, quite frankly, pent-up desperation from three countries that have suffered so much violence, so much poverty, and other adverse conditions.”

But more than 70 percent of the younger migrants are teenagers, many of whom are being sent north by their parents to get jobs amid Joe Biden’s welcome. Yet Mayorkas portrayed the younger migrants as young children during a March 1 event at the White House:

We are not apprehending a 9-year-old child, who has come alone, who has traversed Mexico … whose loving parents sent that child alone. We’re not expelling that 9-year-old child to Mexico when that child’s country of origin was Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.

The Title 42 anti-epidemic barrier against the migration of people should be taken down as soon as possible, Mayorkas told NBC. The healthcare barrier is the most successful — and the most lawsuit-proof — of President Donald Trump’s border measures. But Mayorkas said, “it is our effort to reduce reliance on Title 42 as swiftly as possible to address the public health imperative on the one hand and to be able to process asylum claims of individuals on the other.”

Mayorkas’ views are widely shared by the Democrat Party.

“We’re nothing if we’re not a nation of immigrants,” Democrat leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a December meeting of pro-migration business leaders. “Immigrants built this country with their hands, enriched our culture with their minds and spirit, and provided the spark that drives our economy.”

The view is reflected in the Democrats’ legislation. For example, the Democrats’ new amnesty for agriculture workers would replace much of the U.S. agriculture workforce with an extracted population of low-wage, indentured, temporary foreign workers. That switch from an American to an H-2A visa workforce would slow technology upgrades, push many Americans out of agricultural jobs and rural districts, and so shrivel the spending and taxes needed by small towns.

Similarly, Biden’s major amnesty legislation allows Fortune 500 companies to sideline American graduates and to fill all their white-collar jobs with low-wage, indentured foreign graduates.

But Mayorkas’s policies are causing distress among some Democrats who fear the public will blame them for the inflow.

“It’s imperative we get this situation under control or we are looking at another crisis on our hands,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) said in a March 8 statement whereby he asked to meet with Biden’s deputies. “I look forward to meeting with President Biden and Secretaries Mayorkas … to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to the influx of people at our border.”

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal immigration, illegal migration, and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

On March 7, amid growing media focus on the border, Mayorkas traveled to the border with a group of administration officials. Several of those officials are like-minded pro-migration activists, including Esther Olavarria, the deputy assistant to the president for immigration; Katie Tobin, senior director for transborder at the National Security Council; and Marsha Espinosa, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS.

Some of the officials, however, are long-time staffers for Joe Biden who may subordinate Mayorkas’ migration priorities to Biden’s broader political agenda.

“The Democratic Party has become radicalized on immigration in a way that it just wasn’t in 1980,” said Krikorian. Back then, President Jimmy Carter eventually blocked the Cuban government’s deportation of many Cubans to America after seven months of rising political pressure.

“Who in the President’s party is going to say, ‘Okay, we need to go back to [President Donald] Trump’s approach, and, you know, shut this down.’ There isn’t anybody,” Krikorian said.

Besides, Mayorkas and his progressives may prefer to ignore the public’s opposition, said Krikorian. “It could well be that they figure they’re going to lose the House anyway [in 2022], so go for broke for a year and a half.”

Also, he added, Biden and his immediate staff may not have the clout to block Mayorkas and his many fellow zealots:

Biden is weak in a whole variety of ways, and if you’ve got competing interests [in an administration such as] the [pro-migration] Human Rights Crusaders tussling with the green-eyeshade election guys, who’s going to put his foot down and make a decision? It’s not Biden, He’s incapable of that. If you don’t have somebody in charge, things like this can get out of control.

In the next several months, Mayorkas is more likely to widen the avenues for migrants to enter the United States by writing regulations to create new “particular social groups” that are eligible for asylum, Krikorian said.

“They’re going to be issuing new asylum rules that will essentially grant asylum to every one of these people if they come from a place where there is violence or domestic violence, or there’s gangs or whatever. They’re going to include all of that under a ‘particular social group’ so that these people will all just get asylum eventually.”

The establishment media may not save Biden from Mayorkas and his pro-migration appointees, Krikorian said. Right now, “they aren’t totally carrying Biden’s water … There is a certain amount of bogus politically slanted ‘fact check’ stuff going on. But the numbers are numbers, and they’re reporting them. So there’s a limit to how much even the semi-official legacy media can do to protect Biden here.”

The radical policy put in place by Mayorkas is likely to discredit the public’s support for the nation’s asylum rules, said Krikorian. “Because of what they’re putting into motion, there’s a really good chance we’re gonna have a Republican President and a Republican Congress in 2024. And if the Democrats have delegitimized the asylum process, we will see a real push to dramatically restrict asylum far more than it was before Biden took over.”

Estb. media is posting many stories about migrant"'children" crossing the border — but 70%+ are teenagers, many of whom are (rationally) seeking jobs.
IOW, Biden's DHS & estb. media are waiving in huge numbers of Latino child workers. #CharlesDickenshttps://t.co/cfWf1Bz9ic

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 5, 2021