VDH UltraOne Long, Long Angry Letter. Part Three
As for your “fact-checking attachments,” what follows is a systematic reply to your distortions and often incoherence. As readers will see, both your letter and fact-checking illustrate not just your blinkered partisanship and confusion, but a certain childish mean-spiritedness that seeks to silence those with whom you disagree and apparently cannot refute through the force of argument and analysis.
[Mr. Dernburg commented in red on my 10 questions, and I now reply to his critiques in italics.]Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:
- How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?
- Facts about inflation: The inflation has already come down to 2.9% due in large part to the Inflation reduction and American Recovery Act signed by Joe Biden. Wages have increased faster the inflation. Inflation has more to do with supply and demand and rates set by the Federal Reserve and worldwide shortages and has can just be marginally controlled by any administration. Harris has also proposed to provide increased child care tax credits, incentives to builders to provide low affordable housing with a goal of 3 million homes in the next four years, a $25,000 credit to new home buyers, clamping down on price gouging, by her opposition to large corporate mergers and corporate landlords, and supported increasing the minimum wage. , today the Biden Administration announced negotiated reduction of prices for 10 drugs which will reduce the cost of Medicare by 1.5 billion$. On the other hand, Donald Trump has proposed to levy a 10 or 24% tariff on all imported goods which the CBO has speculated that these tariffs would raise the cost of living 3-4%. If immigration were totally restricted, who would take the unfilled jobs that are required for the service and agricultural economies. Would not raising the wages for these jobs to be then filled by non-immigrant citizens increase the inflation?
I am surprised that you are arguing for open borders to supply cheap labor that will lower wages, and—according to you—reduce inflation. You sound like a corporatist eager to undercut American compensation.
With all due respect, your “fact-checking” on almost everything here is pathetic. A $25,000 housing federal grant will only spike house prices by that very amount and transfer the added cost to the broke federal government. The child credit, as the nontaxable tips and no tax on Social Security income, was lifted by Harris from the Trump campaign.
The housing subsidy will punish those who scrimped and saved to buy modest starter homes and who will not be eligible when they seek to buy a new home using their hard-won equity.
What is “price gouging”? Does Harris cite any data that corporations have raised their prices inordinately in a manner that they did not between 2017–21? Are we then to believe good non-gouging corporations suddenly then became bad ones only when Biden-Harris arrived? And why did she not implement her unhinged wage controls to stop “price gouging” when she and Biden entered office in 2021—some 20-30 percent inflation ago?
Is not the real cause of hyperinflation vast federal spending, interrupted supply, and pent-up consumer demand—an explosive trifecta that the Biden administration ignited?
You utterly confuse the rate of inflation with the vast escalation in prices that have not come down. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inherited a 2020 inflation rate of 1.23 percent. (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/inflation-rate-cpi#:~:text=U.S.%20inflation%20rate%20for%202022,a%200.63%25%20decline%20from%202018.)
They were warned by liberal economists not to print and disseminate trillions of dollars at a time of supply chain uncertainty and recovery, and pent-up consumer demand—and then added insult to injury by naming their reckless spending an Orwellian “inflation reduction act.”
The result was that in one year an annual inflation spike of 4.7%, followed in 2022 by yet another hike to over 8%, then yet another 2023 hike of 4.1%, and a likely similar one in 2024. In other words, in the 3.5 years of the Biden administration, prices have soared by a cumulative rate to somewhere between 18-19 percent. The rate of hyperinflation has cooled but largely because prices rose to such high levels and stayed there that consumers could no longer purchase items as before and consumer demand fell as shoppers did without.
But Prices have not gone down as you seem to believe when hyperinflation cools to moderate inflation.
The reason why Biden-Harris suffer low polls on the economy is that the key staples of life—food, fuel, power, rent, interest, insurance, etc.—have soared 20-30 percent since they took office—and have not come down. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/finance-and-economy/2964417/inflation-how-much-price,s-for-important-goods-and-services-have-risen-under-biden/
Wages have most certainly not increased across the board by 18-19 percent and surely not by 20-30 percent for staples, as consumers can attest.
The Federal Reserve nearly tripled interest rates which has led to a doubling of home mortgage rates because they had no confidence that the Biden-Harris agenda would ever stop borrowing trillions per year, and thus correctly acted to raise rates to prevent additional and permanent hyperinflation.
If you look at the Biden plan to reduce the cost of “10 drugs” you will notice that it is mostly a gimmick, given they chose either just those drugs most of whose patents were set to expire (https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/medicare-drug-price-negotiation-pharma-biotech-response-venture-investment/724430/a) and thus allowed cheaper generic alternatives by other drug companies or others that were already set to be discounted (https://www.biospace.com/policy/medicare-negotiated-drug-prices-are-hollow-victory-for-biden-harris).
You also fail to mention Harris’s plan of “snatching” patents from private ownership to lower drug causes—a crazy act that would destroy all incentives to produce new life-saving drugs.
Donald Trump, in the manner of Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, and often Democratic President has called for, as he did in 2017–21, targeted tariffs on asymmetrical trading practices, defined as implementing tariffs on those countries who place tariffs on U.S. exports. In his first term, he did not level tariffs on all imported goods and despite the rhetoric likely will not again.
No one has called for restricting all immigration. You know that and thus you deliberately conflate legal with illegal immigration. Trump and conservatives wish to preserve now vulnerable legal immigration by not allowing illegal aliens to crowd to the front of the line and destroy the legal process of entering the U.S. through the unrestricted influx of 10 million illegal aliens, none of them audited with background checks or being self-supporting.
Assimilation and integration work best when immigrants arrive from diverse areas, in reasonable numbers, legally, and with some knowledge of English and skills to become rapidly independent of government.
Currently, millions of illegal arrivals are unvetted and some arrive with criminal records, as well as facilitating the annual fentanyl importation that is killing 100,000 Americans a year. To the degree illegal aliens work upon arrival, less so now with massive state and federal subsidies on arrival, they likely drive down wages for American workers in entry-level jobs, aside from the vast outlay needed to provide housing, food, education, medical and legal, subsidies.
Concerning unchecked immigration: Border crossings have been reduced by the Biden administration to their lowest level in the last four years. A by-partisan bill was proposed in the US Senate to bring some solutions to the border problem. The proposed bill included more funds for border control officers, immigration judges, more security apparatus, and temporary housing. Harris has proposed passing the Bi-Partisn [sic] Reform Bill previously by the US Senate. Unfortunately, Donald J. Trump put pressure on the Republican Senators vote against the proposed bill because it would make the Biden Administration look good and would take away one of the main issues in the upcoming election. In a stunning admission, one of the most conservative Republican Senators, Senator James Lankford, admits that it was Donald Trump who sabotaged the toughest border security legislation proposed in decades. Vice President Harris was charged to bring on some pressure to the Central American governments to reduce the emigration of their poor by providing these governments some financial incentives to accomplish these goals.
Some 10 million illegal aliens entered the U.S. after Biden-Harris deliberately canceled the ongoing construction of the border wall, reinstituted catch-and-release, and allowed aliens to apply for refugee status after illegally crossing the border. This was an intentional effort to create new dependent constituencies (and soon voters) loyal to Democratic benefactors and to appease woke pressure groups. It hurt terribly in inner-city minority cities, whose budgets were wrecked by billions of dollars spent on migrant housing and support. Illegal immigrants overwhelmed border communities that were not equipped to handle the record numbers.
Trump and the vast majority of Republican senators and congressional representatives opposed the “bipartisan bill” for two reasons. One: the bill contained a provision allowing the Homeland Security secretary authority to prohibit entry for most individuals only if an average of more than 4,000 people per day try to enter the country unlawfully over the course of a week. If the number reached 5,000 or if 8,500 sought to enter unlawfully in a single day, the use of the restrictive authority would be mandatory. Why after nearly 8-9 million had then illegally entered the country to the furor of the vast majority of the American public, would Democrats institutionalize that very illegality by allowing 120,000 more illegal aliens a month or 1.44 million per year to enter unlawfully?
Your logic is similar to your confusion over inflation: numbers soar and then under pressure taper off, and therefore the problem is solved given the reduced trends—when in fact the massive inflation or illegal alien influx do not recede and are instead institutionalized.
And two, the Republicans understood that this was a 2004 election gimmick given terrified Democrats looked at the polls, saw that open borders were their losing issues, and thus cobbled together a plan not to end illegal immigration (impossible for them given their open-borders base), but to reduce it to thousands per day rather than tens of thousands. Politicians like Harris, who compare overwhelmed border agents to the Ku Klux Klan and lie that they whip immigrants, are no friends of border enforcement.
Note this tactic was similar to the Biden energy policy: upon arrival curtail federal leasing, heckle frackers, cancel ANWR and the Keystone Pipeline, and talk up the Green New Deal. Then when gas and energy prices doubled before the midterm election and panic set in, suddenly Biden-Harris began draining the strategic petroleum reserve, begging illiberal regimes abroad to pump more oil, and badgering their former nemeses in the domestic oil industry to start pumping like mad—all cynically to lower gasoline prices in time for the 2022 midterm and 2024 general elections.
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