The party of compassion and intellectualism, according to them, is selling two things this election season. One, they hate Trump, and they want you to.
Forget that Trump stopped illegal immigration and deported millions of Biden’s illegals.
Forget that Trump emasculated Iran and re-masculated America’s would-be trannies.
Forget that Trump called out overpriced woke colleges for their hiring, admissions, grading and testing on the basis of skin color.
Forget all that. Just remember that Trump’s hair, adjectives and vanity make you feel . . . well, deranged. Your derangement is his fault.
Remember only that. And to vote early and often.
The second thing the Democrats are selling is “affordability.” If you vote for them, they tell you, they’ll make stuff more affordable.
The Democrats are light on the details here, for good reason.
For example, the Democrats could, but don’t, say that they’ll lower the price of gasoline.
The Democrats don’t say that because, for two generations now, they’ve argued that the price of gas in the U.S. is already too low (and indeed it’s still lower than anywhere else in the developed world). If gasoline cost more, they argue, we’d use less of it and – voila! – the climate would be Goldilocks. Never too hot, never too cold.
Forget that the Democratic Republic of California enjoys extremely high gasoline prices, and we nonetheless have cold winters and hot summers the way we always have. Maybe the climate Giai hasn’t gotten the memo. And neither have carbon-spewing China or India.
Forget, too, that the average price of gasoline during the Trump administration is less than the average price of gasoline during the Biden administration. As for Jimmy Carter’s administration, let’s not even go there.
In talking about this “affordability” issue, Democrats could also say, but don’t, that they’ll lower the cost of housing.
The Democrats don’t say that because for many years, they’ve enacted rules and regulations to do the opposite. They favor unionized contractors, even – or especially – when the housing is government-subsidized “affordable” housing. They favor burdensome building codes that display omnipotence more than making buildings safe.
The Democrats also don’t say that because they don’t like the outcome of their own experiment. They know that the cost of building a house in their stronghold of California with its crushing land-use regulations and unionized workforce is almost triple the cost of building the same house in free-market – and Republican – Texas.
In California, it seems that a construction worker is required to be either a member of a union or a citizen of somewhere in Latin America.
How about the affordability of college? Under Democrat administrations, the tuition at the nation’s universities has skyrocketed, due largely to the availability of government student loans which the Democrats turn into gifts.
These universities are mostly controlled by a bunch of group-think Democrats who seem to delight in free-speech inquiry if, and only if, they agree with it, and delight in free market economics if, and only if, it benefits them.
Maybe the Democrats would address the unaffordability of college in the same way they always have. They’d make more student loans-cum-gifts. The outcome of that approach would be the same as always. Their collaborative Democrats at the universities would be grateful, because they could thereby raise tuition some more.
Except they’d still give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.
Many Democrats think socialism leads to affordability. The elders of Eastern Europe would beg to differ. What socialism leads to is not affordability, but scarcity. Meat in Soviet-occupied Poland cost pennies a pound, but you literally had to wait in line for hours to get it. Talk to a person who lived through socialism in Poland (which, significantly, is now booming under a free market economy).
How about the cost of electricity? Democrats have long proposed to make electricity cheap by simply mandating that.
But price controls don’t work because they destroy incentives for production. What they could do instead is increase the production of electricity by means of nuclear energy. But “nuclear” is still a dirty word in much of Democrat-land. Better to put windmills in the DC mall and solar panels on the Washington Monument.
The only energy source the Democrats like is the scarce kind, which serves their plan to return us to the utopia of the Stone Age.
With no real plan to lower costs in order to increase affordability, Democrats advocate what they’ve always advocated – higher wages. They propose to double the federal minimum wage, for example.
Why not triple it? Why not increase it to $100,000 an hour? If the Democrats seriously think that higher wage costs can be imposed without producing higher prices, then let’s go whole hog!
Why not hand out free money, the way they did in Covid times?
Ah, the organizations that used to be called the “news media” tell us to forget all that and forget the consequences of all that. Let’s not be too specific. Let’s not be specific at all – what is this, a racist merit-based test or something?
Instead, remember only the bad hair, bad adjectives and bad vanity of the guy – that guy! – who is not on the ballot.
