I used to consider the Cato Institute as home to the craziest think tank nonsense, but that’s changed. The Heritage Foundation has proven itself to be totally lost in an extremist fantasy land of lies, dangerous assertions and dictatorial goals.
The right is sowing doubt about the election and putting so much emphasis on immigration, because they know the country’s demographics are shifting away from the Republican party. They knew it after Obama was reelected in 2012, but instead of accepting reality and changing direction as recommended by the RNC, they let Trump take over the party.
The report, called the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” lays out an extensive plan the RNC believes will lead the party to victory with an extensive outreach to women, African-American, Asian, Hispanic and gay voters.
During college, participating in Campus Crusade for Christ, I saw the beginnings of Evangelical Christianity’s conservative political agenda. An agenda that is now operating in full force. Listen to this Southern Pentecostal pastor, quoting the Bible to justify his support of Trump.
Without the pandemic I’m certain that Trump, for all of his incompetence and dishonesty, would have nonetheless been reelected in 2020. Covid may have been the cause, but the fact is that Trump left office with the economy in shambles.
Biden shouldn’t have added another economic stimulus while the supply chains were still tangled up. The result was inflation, but interest rates needed to be brought back up to a reasonable level anyway. The commercial real estate market is suffering from a combination of remote work and years of borrowing money for free, following the financial crisis of 2008.
If Trump wins the election next week, he’ll inherit an economy that’s once again in good shape overall, as it was when he took over from Obama. That doesn’t mean there aren’t middle class families that are struggling. There always are, even without a recession. Something I’ve noticed in many stories about the economy is they often feature a single mother, as this one does.
While driving with good, ol’ Denro this past weekend to see Joe Sinnott’s family at the Albany Comic Con, we noticed a lot of highway construction. There are overpasses under construction at a Mass Pike interchange, and we rode on plenty of new pavement along the way. If Trump wins, he’ll also inherit the benefits of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. Trump kept talking about an infrastructure bill, but he never delivered one. Maybe he had concepts of a plan.
On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.
Along with Covid, we continue to live with the profoundly harmful effects of the 2008 financial crisis. I don’t know if this documentary is any good. I’m putting it here to watch later. Maybe you’ll see it before I do.
Follow-up: It’s all right. There’s no new information, but I liked that somebody brings up how the excesses of the trading floor spilled over into the private lives of the brokers; i.e., cocaine and hookers.
The documentary begins with an independently operating Ponzi schemer who got caught and went to prison. He’s the sort of guy who you’d expect to see on an episode of American Greed. From there the theme is, “Why him and not the big Wall Street bankers?” The most interesting comment, and one that I agree with, is at 46:45.
