WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 01: U.S. President Joe Biden (Center R) and Vice President Kamala Harris … [+]
This week, the U.S. House passed, along party lines, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. A vote in the U.S. Senate is expected soon.
Buried within the 591-page bill is a $350 billion bailout for 50 states, tribal governments, U.S. territories, and more than 30,000 cities and counties.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com finally located the $350 billion allocation, line-by-line, in a supplemental database hidden on the back end of the House Oversight Committee’s website.
We mapped the data to each of the 50 states. Click here to see how much taxpayer money Congress earmarked your hometown to receive from the COVID “relief” bill.
Congress tried to hide these line-by-line appropriations, but thanks to technology and the internet, you can search it for yourself.
VIDEO – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.
The Democratically controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president.
The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors.
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican House members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other.
Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs — and yet will not be removed from House committees.
So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues.
The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state and the political left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now-citizen Donald Trump.
Apparently they fear that one day he will rise from the infernal regions to wreak his revenge.
Meanwhile, life in America goes on.
Win or lose, America’s 45th president deserves credit for a more competitive economy, a nation at peace and a secure rule of law. Donald Trump doesn’t trample Americans’ rights. He doesn’t start wars; he ends them. And he makes comments that offend people. The cost of supporting Mr. Trump is enduring awkward moments when he says things that presidents shouldn’t say. The benefit is that he champions U.S. liberty and prosperity, and a thriving America is a benefit to the world.
It may seem obvious that a president should prioritize the interests of his country. But when Mr. Trump arrived in Washington, too many politicians seemed to view America as one of the world’s problems. Barack Obama began his presidency with a series of overseas speeches in which he described American flaws. In 2016 he visited communist Cuba where he noted that the U.S. had once sought to “exert control” over the country. Many suffering Cubans wish that we’d succeeded.
Mr. Trump doesn’t apologize for America. When it comes to foreign relations, he thinks that in many ways the U.S. has been too nice. But he also brought the nicest news to the Middle East in decades, a series of historic peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In contrast with the expansive ambitions of the Bush era and the apologetic retreats of Obama days, Mr. Trump leads an America that is ready but not eager for war and that encourages former foes to engage in peaceful commerce.
The pursuit of commercial vitality at home has defined his presidency, as it defined his unconventional candidacy. “Is Donald Trump Serious?” asked a New York Times headline in September 2015. A columnist mocked him for seeking to sharply reduce the tax on corporate profits. The real mockery was the damage the levy inflicted. When combined with state and local taxes, the tax rate on corporate income amounted to nearly 40%, the highest in the industrialized world. U.S. companies were fleeing for business-friendly countries.
In 2017 Mr. Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the top federal corporate tax to 21% from 35%. The law triggered an increase in business investment and a surge of optimism among employers, which turned out well for employees. The Trump economy was characterized by historically low unemployment rates, massive job openings, and rising wages for low- and middle-income workers. The Covid pandemic and shutdowns wrought historic economic destruction, but it’s now being followed by a historic rebound.
The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928—Hoover—and we aren’t about to change this year. But we do try to sum up the risks and promise of the candidates every four years, and we’ll start today with the contradictory candidacy of Joe Biden.
The former Vice President is running as a reassuring moderate, a man of good character who can reunite the country and crush Covid-19 after the disruptive Trump Presidency. Yet he also is running on the most left-wing policy program in decades.
Voters have little idea about these policies because Mr. Biden mentions them only in the most vague, general terms. The press barely reports them. Americans may think they’re voting for Joe’s persona, but they will get the platform of Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
In Mr. Biden’s sunny telling, he will be the anti-Donald Trump. He won’t kick down, won’t trash norms and won’t alienate allies. He’ll work with Republicans to forge bipartisan policies, restraining the passions of his party’s left. In that sense he has been the perfect Democratic nominee to appeal to women and suburban Republicans tired of polarized politics. He has run a disciplined campaign on character and Covid that has made the election a referendum on Mr. Trump.
We too would like to believe Mr. Biden could govern in a less divisive way because it would be better for the country. Left to his own instincts, and if he were a decade younger, he might pull it off. Every Republican who negotiated with the White House over a budget compromise in 2011 told us they made progress when Mr. Biden was in the room, only to have Barack Obama take it all back when he joined the talks.
But what evidence is there today that Mr. Biden will restrain his increasingly radical party? Across his long career he has been the consummate party man, floating right or left with the political tides. As a presidential candidate this year he has put no particular policy imprint on the Democratic Party—not one. The party has put its stamp on him.
Joe Biden has a problem, and his name is Hunter. Because the former vice president hasn’t had to answer any questions on this topic—and continued to refuse to do so in Thursday’s debate—that problem could soon become America’s.
That’s the reality now that a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s has come forward to provide the ugly details of the “family brand.” Tony Bobulinski, a Navy veteran and institutional investor, has provided the Journal emails and text messages associated with his time as CEO of Sinohawk Holdings, a venture between the Bidens and CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai-based conglomerate. That correspondence corroborates and expands on emails recently published by the New York Post, which says they come from a Hunter laptop.
In a statement, Mr. Bobulinski said he went public because he wants to clear his name, which was contained in those published emails, and because accusations that the information is fake or “Russian disinformation” are “offensive.” He attests that all the correspondence he provided is genuine, including documents that suggest Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name and that Joe Biden was involved. Mr. Bobulinski says he was also alarmed by a September report from Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley that “connected some dots” on the CEFC deal, causing him now to believe the Bidens sold out their U.S. partners.
Mr. Bobulinski’s text messages show he was recruited for the project by James Gilliar, a Hunter associate. Mr. Gilliar explains in a December 2015 text that there will be a deal between the Chinese and “one of the most prominent families from the U.S.” A month later he introduces Rob Walker, also “a partner of Biden.” In March 2016, Mr. Gilliar tells Mr. Bobulinski the Chinese entity is CEFC, which is shaping up to be “the Goldmans of China.” Mr. Gilliar promises that same month to “develop” the terms of a deal “with hunter.” Note that in 2015-16, Joe Biden was still vice president.
The great Jackie Gleason once said, “The past remembers better than it lived.” And so it is, apparently, with the Obama years.
There was no economic “boom” as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are misremembering. This was an economy that skidded into a financial ditch and seemingly never pulled out of it and got back on the prosperity hot lanes until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.
You can mark the real recovery — an economic inflection point almost the day after that surprise election outcome.
Every liberal forecaster and most academic economists had guaranteed America that, if Trump were elected, the stock market would crash; workers would be flattened; and, as New York Times economist Paul Krugman famously predicted, the economy would “never” recover.
Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared by 257 points the morning after the election (that’s some crash), and it rose for the next three years, as it has again over the last several months. A few days after that election, small-business optimism surged by its most considerable amount ever measured, going back many decades. Family incomes surged to record-high levels in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as deregulation and tax cuts fueled a powerful engine. In three years, ordinary people had made more income gains than in eight years under the Obama-Biden administration.
But now we are being told a fairy tale that the Obama economy was booming and Biden miraculously fixed it and Trump “blew it.”
Here’s the reality check. Under Barack Obama, the economy barely grew 2% — rather pathetic for a “recovery.” The people who made the preposterous bullish claims that Obama saved the economy are the ones who now say the Biden economic plan will gain millions of jobs.
Promises Kept and Accomplishments made by President Donald Trump: www.promiseskept.com/
Getting kids back into schools & back to a normal life ASAP {townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/07/07/experts-explain-why-its-crucial-for-children-to-go-back-to-school-this-fall-n2572053}
Bringing normalcy back into our lives, rather than a new normal {www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-rejects-the-new-normal/}
Putting a stop to high density higher crime housing from being built in your neighborhood {www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/08/10/the_democrats_put_th e_suburbs__and_family_life__on_the_november_ballot_501470.html}
Trying to stop police funding from getting cut, because they are the ones that can stop the lawlessness & rioting in our towns, but only if they are not hindered {www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mob-rule-attorney-general-william-)barr-defund-the-police/2020/06/08/id/971149}