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The Joe Biden Presidency Thread


swordfish

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Biden 'inflation tax' erases gains in workers' pay, as Democrats' own economists admit fears

https://justthenews.com/nation/economy/thubidens-inflation-tax-already-erased-gains-workers-made-pay-even-democrats-fear-it

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One promise from the U.S. economy emerging from the pandemic was that American workers would benefit from a tight labor pool driving up salary and pay. And while that happened, the benefits have all been erased by the sudden surge of inflation on President Biden's watch.

 

That means workers aren't running in place, they are actually falling behind as rising prices force middle- and working-class families to make hard choices, like whether to fill the gas tank or the refrigerator.

Inflation topped out at 5.4% in July, the government reported Wednesday, the third straight month above 5%. When President Trump left office in January, inflation was in check at just 1.4%.

Economists fear the multitrillion dollar spending that Biden and the Democrats launched in Washington — $4.5 trillion more was added by the Senate in a 24-hour period on Tuesday — is fueling the disadvantage.

"I support heating the economy one log at a time, not throwing them all on the fire at once," Harvard economist Jason Furhman, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, tweeted on Wednesday. "To the degree the [latter] leads to prices rising more than wages it won't leave workers better off."

Furhman should know. He created an analysis two weeks ago showing the wage-to-price ratio fell in the 2nd quarter of 2021, meaning workers lost buying power.

"Paychecks aren't going as far as they used to," he wrote. "Price increases have outpaced compensation growth in 2021, causing real compensation to fall. In June 2021, real compensation was 0.7 percent below December 2019 levels, and 2 percent below its pre-pandemic trend."

The debate has some partisan shapes. Some Democrats argue the inflation surge is temporary and can't all be blamed on Biden. Conservatives see the closure of a U.S. pipeline, paying workers to stay home with extra jobless benefits, and trillions in new federal deficit spending launched since Biden's inauguration as the perfect storm.

What isn't in dispute is that Biden was forewarned, by a Democrat no less.

Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers issued multiple warnings in publications like the Washington Post that the Biden/Democratic agenda risked a punishing inflation surge that would hurt the very working- and middle-class voters who had just put them in office.

"The inflation risk is real," Summers wrote back in May, battling with fellow liberals who cast aside his first red flags.

Summers said he saw signs that some inflationary pressures were longer term and might force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

"Not everything we are seeing is likely to be temporary," Summers wrote in May. "A variety of factors suggests that inflation may yet accelerate — including further price pressures as demand growth outstrips supply growth; rising materials costs and diminished inventories; higher home prices that have so far not been reflected at all in official price indexes; and the impact of inflation expectations on purchasing behavior."

The liberal agenda, he noted, had some downside if applied too quickly. "Higher minimum wages, strengthened unions, increased employee benefits and strengthened regulation are all desirable, but they, too, all push up business costs and prices," he said.

Steve Moore, a former top economic adviser to President Trump, said Wednesday the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion spending plan that Senate Democrats passed this week threaten to pour kerosene on a raging fire.

The new spending contains "fiscal and policy atrocities" that will cause the national debt to "triple from 100% of GDP today to 300% of GDP by 2050 — which are banana republic levels of debt," Moore warned.

Moore found an unlikely ally when Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia issued a similar warning Wednesday about the spending.

"I have serious concerns about the grave consequences facing West Virginians and every American family if Congress decides to spend another $3.5 trillion," Manchin said. "Over the last year Congress has injected more than $5 trillion of stimulus into the American economy — more than any time since World War II — to respond to the pandemic.

 

"The challenge we now face is different: millions of jobs remain unfilled across the country and rising inflation rates are now an unavoidable tax on the wages and income of every American," he said.

Mayra Joli, an immigration lawyer now running for mayor of Miami, said the inflation is visibly impacting families in need, and Washington is completely disconnected from that reality.

"I can see it first-hand with the families that I have to help navigate the legal immigration system," she told Just the News recently, noting rising prices are forcing tough decisions at the gas station and grocery store. "Many people, even within my own family, cannot make it because of this skyrocketing inflation, and we're not seeing any signs of it ending."

 

Uni-party idiots like Mr. Biden are destroying this country with debt, a crushing load that will be born by our children and grandchildren.

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/afghans-cling-to-us-air-force-plane-as-it-takes-off-in-kabul/

A U.S. Chinook helicopter flies near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Footage from Hamad Karzai airport showed hundreds of people running alongside - and in front of - a US Air Force plane preparing to take off

Three stowaways are believed to have plunged to their deaths, with footage showing bodies falling from the underside of a hulking USAF transport jet as it climbed into the skies over the fallen city on Monday

Taliban fighters take control of Afghan presidential palace after the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country

President Joe Biden meets virtually with national security advisers from Camp David where he's currently on August vacation

 

Sure Joe, we can trust the Taliban to let us get out, go ahead and surrender Bagrahm AB, we still have Kabul......

SURPRISE!!  The child rapists lied.......

I'm reminded of the 911 jumpers from the towers when I see the terrified Afghans clinging to the aircraft as long as they could hold on then dropping to a certain death.

We all wanted this Afghan war to be over, but not like this.....Vietnam 2.0.

 

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Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Biden

https://mises.org/power-market/kabul-has-fallen-dont-blame-biden

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This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away.

The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war?

So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around.

Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along.

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep.

American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers.

Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

Truth.

 

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52 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

Agreed.

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

Agree more.....

Again - we all wanted this to end, but not like this.

 

 

 

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BREAKING NEWS this morning - The Biden Administration MAY be ready to recommend a booster shot after FDA final approval.  (almost 5 minutes worth)

Coronavirus Delta cases WAY up in the US as students head back to school and will probably be the most likely to spread the virus.  (solid 10 minutes of commentary)

3rd story in - Afghanistan issue.  (2 minutes - then on to Al Roker and weather)

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On 8/17/2021 at 8:07 AM, swordfish said:

BREAKING NEWS this morning - The Biden Administration MAY be ready to recommend a booster shot after FDA final approval.  (almost 5 minutes worth)

Coronavirus Delta cases WAY up in the US as students head back to school and will probably be the most likely to spread the virus.  (solid 10 minutes of commentary)

3rd story in - Afghanistan issue.  (2 minutes - then on to Al Roker and weather)

Looks like MAY has become HAS:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-vaccine-booster-shots-a10daad08f6d47aa5beca0b4da9da9d2

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U.S. health officials Wednesday recommended all Americans get COVID-19 booster shots to shore up their protection amid the surging delta variant and evidence that the vaccines’ effectiveness is falling.

The plan, as outlined by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top authorities, calls for an extra dose eight months after people get their second shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. The doses could begin the week of Sept. 20.

Health officials said people who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will also probably need extra shots. But they said they are awaiting more data and have yet to work out the details.

The overall plan is awaiting a Food and Drug Administration evaluation of the safety and effectiveness of a third dose, the officials said.

In a statement, health officials said it is “very clear” that the vaccines’ protection against infection wanes over time, and now, with the highly contagious delta variant spreading rapidly, “we are starting to see evidence of reduced protection against mild and moderate disease.”

“Based on our latest assessment, the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death could diminish in the months ahead,” they said.

*sigh*  This will be never ending,  just like the seasonal flu vaccine.  And record profits for Big Pharma, of course.

 

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Taliban Troll Biden On Twitter By Posing With Ice Cream

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/taliban-troll-biden-twitter-posing-ice-cream

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The Taliban sent Joe Biden a message Tuesday by posing for a photograph, which later end up on Twitter, showing fighters holding ice cream cones.

E9BDcDiXMAoz5Jz.jpeg?itok=y8JYuDK3

Here it is:

Between the comments about Facebook censorship, women’s rights, and now this … yes they are trolling Joe Biden with memes. https://t.co/4iyoB3ylEz

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 18, 2021

The message is clear. They know Biden is a weak, mentally disabled joke of a man, and they have zero fear of America under his leadership.

This is the image Biden has projected to America’s enemies.

Besides which ice cream flavor he orders, do you think Joe Biden really gets to decide anything himself? pic.twitter.com/RW6WBmCeHI

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) August 12, 2021

During a “press conference” in which Taliban leaders took questions from reporters (something Joe Biden refused to do Monday) they even commented that free speech in America is under more threat than in Afghanistan owing to the administration’s use of Facebook to censor dissent, and general big tech erosion of freedom of expression:

When pressed on the issue of free speech, Taliban spokesman points to Facebook's and Big Tech's censorship of Americans. pic.twitter.com/vi8kktLFgV

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 17, 2021

Biden waited and waited until Kabul had been overrun by the Taliban and chaotic images started to emerge before he finally said anything to the American people on the matter.

Sources also claim that Biden tried to get Kamala Harris to deal with the situation while he was at Camp David.

Shade War going hot - Kamala refused a request to do a presser today. Said she was focused on Haiti not Afghanistan. Now staffers for the rival teams have been openly fighting all day, per WH official

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 16, 2021

National Security advisor Jake Sullivan also admitted Monday that Biden has not spoken to any foreign leaders on the issue.

....

Truly a weak POTUS.

 

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Democrats: 4 years of Trump destroyed US international credibility.

Reality: Biden ended US international credibility in 4 days

Remember Biden's " America is back, baby!" proclamation? That is the real joke that we should be laughing at.

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Something Is Wrong with the President

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/something-is-wrong-with-the-president/

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On the menu today: The transcript of President Joe Biden’s interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos dropped, and the president’s incoherence, insistence that he was incorrectly briefed, denial that he was warned by his military advisers, and oddly low profile in the past week raise troubling questions about his ability to perform his duties.

 

After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.

As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today. He is scheduled to receive the president’s daily briefing from the intelligence community and meet with his national-security team. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he is scheduled to return to his house in Delaware today.

This is a highly unusual schedule for a president during a foreign-policy crisis. Yes, a president can perform his job anywhere, whether it’s Camp David or his own private residence. But Biden is barely appearing in public, not saying much of anything when he does, not answering any questions outside of his lone scheduled interview, and sounding angry when he did face questions from Stephanopoulos.

Biden began the interview by insisting that the intelligence community had given him unclear and excessively optimistic answers about the state of the Afghan military and government:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Back in July, you said a Taliban takeover was highly unlikely. Was the intelligence wrong, or did you downplay it?

BIDEN: I think — there was no consensus. If you go back and look at the intelligence reports, they said that it’s more likely to be sometime by the end of the year.

The first problem is that there is no way to square what Biden said yesterday with his July 8 declaration that the intelligence community had not stated that the Afghan government would likely collapse:

Q: Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.

THE PRESIDENT: That is not true.

Q: Is it — can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?

THE PRESIDENT: That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.

Then during the Stephanopoulos interview, Biden insisted that he himself had predicted that the Afghan government would collapse by the end of the year:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you know that Senator McConnell, others say this was not only predictable, it was predicted, including by him, based on intelligence briefings he was getting.

BIDEN: What — what did he say was predicted?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator McConnell said it was predictable that the Taliban was gonna take over.

BIDEN: Well, by the end of the year, I said that’s that was — that was a real possibility. But no one said it was gonna take over then when it was bein’ asked.

The president either does not remember what he said on July 8, or he is simply trying to gaslight everyone into believing that he did warn of the Afghan government’s collapsing.

This morning, Douglas London, a former CIA counterterrorism chief and former member of Biden’s counterterrorism working group, writes that the president is lying: “Ultimately, it was assessed, Afghan forces might capitulate within days under the circumstances we witnessed, in projections highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike.”

Biden not only dodged questions — we’re used to politicians doing that — he offered a barely coherent word salad in some responses:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So when you look at what’s happened over the last week, was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment?

BIDEN: Look, I don’t think it was a fa– look, it was a simple choice, George. When the– when the Taliban — let me back — put it another way. When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government get in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the ta– of the– Afghan troops we had trained — up to 300,000 of them just leaving their equipment and taking off, that was — you know, I’m not– this — that — that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.

Stephanopolous continued, “We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling-”

“That was four days ago, five days ago!” Biden interjected. It was two days ago, but that’s not really what is important; what is spectacularly odd is that Biden is reacting as if he thinks Stephanopolous was bringing up irrelevant ancient history.

Why was Biden indignant that Stephanopolous was asking about those horrifying sights?

Perhaps most unsettling was President Biden’s insistence that nothing could have been done any differently, and that none of the horrors we are witnessing could have been prevented.

“So, you don’t think this could have been handled — this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?” Stephanopoulos asked Biden.

“No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that, we’re gonna go back in hindsight and look — but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how that happened,” Biden replied.

Biden is now insisting that the chaos of a Taliban takeover was inevitable, even though he stood before the country on July 8 and specifically assured the country that a Taliban takeover was not inevitable:

Q: Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?

THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.

Q: Why?

THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.

Biden also said that day that, “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war” and “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Elsewhere in the Stephanopoulos interview, Biden insisted that, contrary to published reports, his military advisers had not recommended keeping 2,500 troops in the country:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.

BIDEN: No, they didn’t. It was split. Tha– that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They didn’t tell you that they wanted troops to stay?

BIDEN: No. Not at — not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a timeframe all troops. They didn’t argue against that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no one told — your military advisors did not tell you, “No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that”?

BIDEN: No. No one said that to me that I can recall.

There are notes of these meetings that can be declassified. We can see if, as the Wall Street Journal and other publications reported, “The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited, while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability.” If they did not, Biden is telling the truth and there’s been an insane effort by Pentagon brass leaking that they’re warning the president of about certain dangers, and then not doing so in the meetings. (There is a third possibility, of course: Biden genuinely does not remember what was said and recommended to him in a meeting several months ago.)

Jon Ralston, no knee-jerk critic of Biden, was appalled. “This is so bad. No mistakes? No responsibility? No contrition? My God.”

The obvious answer to why Biden rarely appears on camera or takes questions is because every time he does it, he inflicts more damage upon himself and his agenda. The president whose empathy is endlessly touted now sounds cold and dismissive when asked about Afghans’ desperately crowding into American planes or falling to their deaths. All of the available evidence indicates that the president ignored the warnings of his foreign-policy team, withdrew the armed forces before evacuating the civilians, gave up Bagram Air Base, and now is in a large-scale foreign crisis that is mostly the result of his own choices. There is no good defense to be made, so when cornered, the president invoked his late son’s military service in the Stephanopoulos interview::

STEPHANOPOULOS: I– I think a lot of– a lot of Americans, and a l– even a lot of veterans who served in Afghanistan agree with you on the big, strategic picture. They believe we had to get out. But I wonder how you respond to an Army Special Forces officer, Javier McKay (PH). He did seven tours. He was shot twice. He agrees with you. He says, “We have to cut our losses in Afghanistan.” But he adds, “I just wish we could’ve left with honor.”

BIDEN: Look, that’s like askin’ my deceased son Beau, who spent six months in Kosovo and a year in Iraq as a Navy captain and then major– I mean, as an Army major. And, you know, I’m sure h– he had regrets comin’ out of Afganista– I mean, out of Iraq.

He had regrets to what’s– how– how it’s going. But the idea– what’s the alternative? The alternative is why are we staying in Afghanistan?

The president turns 79 in November. He last released a summary of his health condition in December 2019. In May, a White House spokesman said Biden had not had a medical checkup or taken a physical this year, but that he would by the end of the year. There have been no updates on the president’s health since.

Back on July 26, John Ellis astutely analyzed how it was acceptable to acknowledge Biden’s age and mental condition if you used certain euphemisms:

Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from “young old” to “old.” Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. “He’s lost a step or two.” Or: “he’s lost something off his fastball.”

You’re not supposed to talk about it. If you do, and you’re a Democrat, you’re scolded for aiding and abetting the enemy. If you do, and you’re a Republican or (God forbid) a MAGA voter, you’re a horrible hate-mongerer, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election (and you probably watch Fox News to boot).

The problem is that it’s there for all to see. Pretending not to see it is untenable.

Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.

ADDENDUM: Mario Loyola points to recent history in Iraq as a vision of what our counterterrorism mission will become in Afghanistan with no military presence on the ground:

Most of us didn’t realize at the time that when Obama pulled U.S. forces out of Iraq, he also pulled out all our “ISR”: Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance. So when ISIS began its dramatic advance across the Middle East, all we had going was satellite intelligence — not much help against fighters who dress like everyone else and roll around in Toyotas.

In a region of the world teeming with U.S. military and intelligence assets, Iraq had become a black hole: No AC-130s, no helicopters, no drones, no special forces, no regular soldiers within hundreds of miles. That’s what the “over-the-horizon” strategy looked like in Iraq. Those assets all need local operating bases, and we had none. Satellites and supersonic aircraft were of no help against ISIS.

We don’t even have an embassy in Afghanistan anymore.

 

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Harris approval sinks further, but most say she’ll replace Biden

https://news.yahoo.com/harris-approval-sinks-further-most-144400476.html

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Vice President Kamala Harris is not viewed as qualified to be president by a majority of people, but they still expect her to replace President Joe Biden before his term ends.

In the latest survey charting her fall in popularity, Rasmussen Reports said that just 43% believe that she’s qualified to run the nation versus 55% who do not believe that she is qualified. Of that, 47% of likely voters said she is “not at all qualified.”

Those poor numbers probably result from the bad “impression” she has left on the country amid failures to fix the border crisis and get liberal election reform passed in Congress. There have been several reports of staff infighting, and she has been radio silent during the Afghanistan crisis despite earlier being a champion of Afghan women.

Rasmussen asked likely voters for their impression of the first black and female vice president. They are mostly underwhelmed. By a margin of 56% to 41%, those polled said they had an unfavorable view of the former California Democratic senator.

However, it won’t stop her from being elevated if Biden leaves office. His recent missteps in Afghanistan, and his fumbled public comments, have led to a new wave of reports that he will leave the White House early.

Asked how likely it is Biden will leave and be replaced by Harris before the 2024 election, 51% said it is likely, while 37% said it wasn’t.

Going from dumb to dumber.  Great.

 

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https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/18/business/afghanistan-lithium-rare-earths-mining/index.html

The swift fall of Afghanistan to Taliban fighters has triggered a humanitarian crisis, with thousands trying to flee the country. It's also brought renewed focus on Afghanistan's vast untapped mineral wealth, resources that could transform its economic prospects if ever developed.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest nations in the world. But in 2010, US military officials and geologists revealed that the country, which lies at the crossroads of Central and South Asia, was sitting on mineral deposits worth nearly $1 trillion.
Supplies of minerals such as iron, copper and gold are scattered across provinces. There are also rare earth minerals and, perhaps most importantly, what could be one of the world's biggest deposits of lithium — an essential but scarce component in rechargeable batteries and other technologies vital to tackling the climate crisis.
 
"Afghanistan is certainly one of the regions richest in traditional precious metals, but also the metals [needed] for the emerging economy of the 21st century," said Rod Schoonover, a scientist and security expert who founded the Ecological Futures Group.
Security challenges, a lack of infrastructure and severe droughts have prevented the extraction of most valuable minerals in the past. That's unlikely to change soon under Taliban control. Still, there's interest from countries including China, Pakistan and India, which may try to engage despite the chaos.
"It's a big question mark," Schoonover said.

Huge potential

 
Even before President Joe Biden announced that he would withdraw US troops from Afghanistan earlier this year, setting the stage for the return of Taliban control, the country's economic prospects were dim.
 
As of 2020, an estimated 90% of Afghans were living below the government-determined poverty level of $2 per day, according to a report from the US Congressional Research Service published in June. In its latest country profile, the World Bank said that the economy remains "shaped by fragility and aid dependence."
"Private sector development and diversification is constrained by insecurity, political instability, weak institutions, inadequate infrastructure, widespread corruption, and a difficult business environment," it said in March.
Many countries with weak governments suffer from what's known as the "resource curse," in which efforts to exploit natural resources fail to provide benefits to local people and the domestic economy. Even so, revelations about Afghanistan's mineral wealth, which built on earlier surveys conducted by the Soviet Union, have offered huge promise.
Demand for metals like lithium and cobalt, as well as rare earth elements such as neodymium, is soaring as countries try to switch to electric cars and other clean technologies to slash carbon emissions.
The International Energy Agency said in May that global supplies of lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements needed to increase sharply or the world would fail in its attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Three countries — China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Australia — currently account for 75% of the global output of lithium, cobalt and rare earths.
The average electric car requires six times more minerals than a conventional car, according to the IEA. Lithium, nickel and cobalt are crucial to batteries. Electricity networks also require huge amounts of copper and aluminum, while rare earth elements are used in the magnets needed to make wind turbines work.
The US government has reportedly estimated that lithium deposits in Afghanistan could rival those in Bolivia, home to the world's largest known reserves.
"If Afghanistan has a few years of calm, allowing the development of its mineral resources, it could become one of the richest countries in the area within a decade," Said Mirzad of the US Geological Survey told Science magazine in 2010. He led the Afghanistan Geological Survey until 1979.

Even more obstacles

That calm never arrived, and most of Afghanistan's mineral wealth has remained in the ground, said Mosin Khan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Middle East and central Asia director at the International Monetary Fund.
While there has been some extraction of gold, copper and iron, exploiting lithium and rare earth minerals requires much greater investment and technical know-how, as well as time. The IEA estimates that it takes 16 years on average from the discovery of a deposit for a mine to start production.
Right now, minerals generate just $1 billion in Afghanistan per year, according to Khan. He estimates that 30% to 40% has been siphoned off by corruption, as well as by warlords and the Taliban, which has presided over small mining projects.
Still, there's a chance the Taliban uses its new power to develop the mining sector, Schoonover said.
"You can imagine one trajectory is maybe there's some consolidation, and some of this mining will no longer need to be unregulated," he said.
But, Schoonover continued, the "odds are against it," given that the Taliban will need to devote its immediate attention to a wide range of security and humanitarian issues.
"The Taliban has taken power but the transition from insurgent group to national government will be far from straightforward," said Joseph Parkes, Asia security analyst at risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft. "Functional governance of the nascent mineral sector is likely many years away."
Khan notes that foreign investment was hard to come by before the Taliban ousted Afghanistan's civilian Western-backed government. Attracting private capital will be even more difficult now, particularly as many global businesses and investors are being held to ever higher environmental, social and governance standards.
"Who's going to invest in Afghanistan when they weren't willing to invest before?" Khan said. "Private investors are not going to take the risk."
US restrictions could also present a challenge. The Taliban has not been officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States. However, the group was placed on a US Treasury Department list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists and a Specially Designated Nationals list.

An opportunity for China?

State-backed projects motivated in part by geopolitics could be a different story. China, the world leader in mining rare earths, said Monday that it has "maintained contact and communication with the Afghan Taliban."
Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, left, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in China on July 28, 2021.
 
Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, left, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in China on July 28, 2021.
 
"China, the next-door neighbor, is embarking on a very significant green energy development program," Schoonover said. "Lithium and the rare earths are so far irreplaceable because of their density and physical properties. Those minerals factor into their long-term plans."
Should China step in, Schoonover said there would be concerns about the sustainability of mining projects given China's track record.
"When mining isn't done carefully it can be ecologically devastating, which harms certain segments of the population without a lot of voice," he said.
Beijing could be skeptical of partnering on ventures with the Taliban given ongoing instability, however, and may focus on other regions. Khan pointed out that China has been burned before, having previously tried to invest in a copper project that later stalled.
"I believe they will prioritize other emerging/frontier geographies well before Taliban-led Afghanistan," said RK Equity partner Howard Klein, who advises investors on lithium.

 

Is the Afghanistan debacle starting to make sense yet?  The Chinese needed the US out of there post haste.......before Uncle Joe can't control things anymore......

 

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https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/20/uks-parliament-holds-joe-biden-in-contempt-as-france-and-britain-forced-to-rescue-citizens-trapped-in-kabul/

UK’s Parliament Holds Joe Biden in Contempt as France and Britain Forced to Rescue Citizens Trapped in Kabul

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August 20, 2021

The Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the desperate situation in Kabul has angered U.S. allies, leaving them scrambling to evacuate their citizens and the Afghans who supported them during the 20 year war.

The United Kingdom’s Parliament on Wednesday held Joe Biden in contempt for Afghan debacle, with one veteran MP saying the U.S. abandoned its Afghan allies and disregarded their sacrifices.

Tom Tugendhat, a British Army veteran of the Afghanistan war and the Conservative chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, blasted Biden for his criticism of the Afghan National Army and said it was “shameful” to blame Afghanistan’s fighting force for the Taliban’s takeover.

After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Biden said, “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

“To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with—to claim that they ran—is shameful,” he said.

“Those who have never fought for the colors they fly should be careful about criticizing those who have,” Tugendhat added.

The withdrawal led to panic in Kabul, the capital city, on Monday, as thousands of Afghans flooded the Hamid Karzai International Airport, hoping to evacuate from Kabul. Some desperately clung to U.S. aircraft as they took off. One was found dead in a cargo jet’s wheel well. Two others fell to their deaths as the planes took off. Some Afghan mothers on Thursday even began throwing their babies over barbed wire fences as they shouted at British troops to save them from the Taliban.

The swift takeover has prompted protests by Afghans in Kabul and other cities. The Taliban has killed some participants by firing on the crowds.

More than 8,000 people have been flown out of Kabul this week. Biden said Wednesday that the U.S. military may stay in the nation past his administration’s Aug. 31 deadline to evacuate more Americans. But troops do not have the capability to aid anyone beyond Kabul’s airport, he said.

While American troops remain at the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKAIA ), Great Britain and France, are conducting military operations to evacuate their citizens trapped in Kabul behind the web of Taliban checkpoints lining the route to the airport.

Great Britain earlier this week deployed an additional 300 troops to Kabul specifically to extract trapped British nationals.

Within hours of touching down in Kabul, the British troops retrieved some 200 British nationals from around Kabul, the Telegraph reported. Prompting the mission were reports of Taliban hunting down former Afghan government officials, along with Britons stuck behind a web of Taliban checkpoints lining the route to the airport.

France 24 reports that the French military has been conducting similar operations since Monday. French President Emmanuel Macron thanked French security forces on Twitter for executing a ‘sensitive operation’ which evacuated more than 200 French and Afghans.

 

“France and the U.K. are having their troops leave the lines of the Kabul airport to help evacuate their citizens,” tweeted House Minority Kevin McCarthy. “Why has President Biden not directed the same to save stranded Americans?”

One British soldier broke down in tears during an interview with CNN reporter Clarissa Ward, telling her that he will suffer from PTSD from the horrific events of the past week.

The Taliban have been beating people in the streets and blocking access to the Kabul airport, contrary to their promises to the U.S. government.

 

During remarks from the White House on Friday, Biden boasted that there are now over 6,000 American troops on the ground providing “runway security” at the airport.

“This is one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history, and the only country in the world capable of projecting this much power on the far side of the world with this degree of precision is the United States of America,” he said proudly.

Update:

According to foreign policy/national security reporter Tom Rogan, a U.S. general has tried to pressure a British counterpart to stop conducting rescue operations outside of the airport perimeter because it’s making the Biden Regime look bad.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

 

Can you imagine the explosion of press if President Trump were to be "In Contempt" from the UK?

BTW - Read the last paragraph - The British military is embarrassing our troops?

 

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https://thehill.com/opinion/international/562037-china-will-be-the-next-empire-to-enter-the-afghan-graveyard

As Afghanistan descends into tribal warfare following America’s hasty departure, China plans to “swoop in” and “fill the vacuum.” 

“Beijing just can’t wait for the U.S. to get out of the way,” Syed Fazl-e-Haider of the Daily Beast reports.

Beijing, which runs a multiracial empire, does not appear especially concerned that land-locked, mountainous Afghanistan is often called the “graveyard of empires.” 

“Compared with other powers, China has the ability to get involved in Afghan affairs without becoming entangled in it,” writes Zhang Jiadong of Fudan University in the Communist Party’s Global Times. The title of Zhang’s July 6 piece says it all: “China will not fall into ‘Afghan trap’ as other powers have bitterly learned.”

Yes, China has some advantages in Afghanistan that other “empires” did not possess, but the Chinese appear overconfident, nonetheless.

China has long sought control of Afghanistan. For one thing, Beijing has coveted natural resources, especially copper — China has a 30-year lease on the deposits at Mes Aynak. Beijing also eyes the country’s gold, uranium and lithium. 

The Chinese still want the minerals, but now their ambitions include tying that country firmly into the Belt and Road Initiative, their global transportation-infrastructure program. Beijing planners, for instance, hope to complete a Kabul-Peshawar highway, linking the Afghan capital to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion series of projects that is part of the Belt and Road network.

More importantly, Beijing wants to deny oppressed Turkic minorities a sanctuary. Chinese officials have been surreptitiously working with the terrorist Haqqani network, inside Afghanistan, to go after activists and militants working to free Uyghurs brutally treated in what Beijing calls its Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The region shares a 47-mile border with Afghanistan.  

Perhaps China’s main advantages in Afghanistan are its firm lock on neighboring Pakistan and Beijing’s long-standing ties to the Taliban, which go as far back to the time the group was in power, from 1996 to 2001. China has supplied the Taliban with weapons and even helped it after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to news reports.  

The group now controls vast swaths of the Afghan countryside and appears set to eventually take control of Kabul. The Taliban, unfortunately for Beijing, has opponents operating in the country, and the Chinese could find themselves under attack from Taliban enemies. 

“The Taliban isn’t the only challenge to overcome,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center told the Daily Beast. “There are many sources of violence, both anti- and pro-state, in Afghanistan.”

Those sources can be manipulated by India, which is in a position to bedevil Beijing. It was Indian intelligence operatives, after all, who exposed China’s ties to the Haqqani network recently.

India, should it so choose, could cause trouble for China in Afghanistan, and New Delhi has every reason to do so. Chinese troops intruded into Indian-controlled territory in Ladakh in May of last year, and China’s military is now engaged in a massive troop buildup in the Himalayas. Moreover, there is a Chinese encroachment in India’s Sikkim, also in that mountainous range.

As important, Beijing has fully backed Islamabad’s troublemaking in Indian-controlled Kashmir and reportedly has provided support for Pakistani terrorism in India itself. Indian policymakers blame China for the cyberattack crippling the Mumbai electric system in October, as well as 20 recent deaths at the hands of Maoist insurgents. 

Moreover, siding with the Taliban could cause trouble for China with the United States, which already sees the People’s Republic as a dangerous actor. Beijing, with venomous propaganda, is going out of its way to aggravate tensions. Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, just blamed Washington “as the origin of problems in Afghanistan.”

The blame game is not wise. Washington is in a position to reduce or even cut off international funding to Kabul. Such aid, the World Bank estimated in 2018, accounted for 40 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. 

Beijing’s assistance to terrorist-supporting organizations like the Taliban will only erode its already low standing in countries important for China. Up to now, the international community has, by and large, not imposed costs on China for its destructive activities, but Beijing would be handing others leverage if it found itself mired in Afghanistan.

Chinese leaders are perhaps the most ambitious group anywhere, so it will be difficult for them to leave Afghanistan alone, especially as that country is one of China’s 14 land neighbors. China is an empire, and its imperial conquests are in its western areas, the ones bordering Afghanistan. The temptation for Chinese imperialists looks irresistible.

So despite what Fudan’s Zhang writes, arrogant Chinese leaders are bound to make mistakes and seek deep involvement in Afghanistan. So far, no “empire” has been able to tame that “country” — if it can be called that — or bring it into the international community. 

China will almost certainly fail in the Afghan graveyard.

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https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/biden-pressured-ghani-to-create-perception-taliban-wasnt-winning/

President Biden pressured Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani to create the “perception” that the Taliban weren’t winning, “whether it’s true or not,” in a phone call just three weeks before the insurgents seized control of the country, a bombshell leaked transcript shows.

Biden and Ghani spoke for roughly 14 minutes on July 23 in what would be their final call before the Taliban overran the government and Afghanistan descended into bloody chaos amid the botched US withdrawal, according to a transcript and audio obtained by Reuters.

Much of the call was focused on what Biden referred to as the Afghan government’s “perception” issue.

“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said.

“And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

At the time, the Taliban had already seized about half of the country’s district centers and was only weeks away from taking Kabul on Aug. 15.

Biden told Ghani that Afghanistan’s prominent political figures — including former Afghan President Hamid Karzai — should give a joint press conference that backed a new military strategy on how to defeat the Taliban, saying: “That will change perception, and that will change an awful lot, I think.”

“I’m not a military guy, so I’m not telling you what that plan should precisely look like, you’re going to get not only more help, but you’re going to get a perception that is going to change in terms of how , um … our allies and folks here in the States and other places think you’re doing,” Biden said.

Biden also heaped praise on Afghan security forces — which were trained and funded by the US before dissolving in a matter of weeks amid the US withdrawal — and offered aid if Ghani could publicly put out a plan that showed he could control the spiraling situation.

 

Our President (and his advisors) saw the real problems in Afghanistan, but asked Ghani to "change the perception" to "make it look better". 

A call to a leader of another country asking him to investigate someone doesn't seem so bad now, huh?

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Federal Government Debt Is Soaring: https://www.cato.org/blog/federal-government-debt-soaring

Quote

Federal government debt rose from $3.3 trillion in 2001, to $10.1 trillion in 2011, to $23.0 trillion in 2021. Under current law, the CBO expects debt to rise to $35.8 trillion by 2031. If Congress passes the spending increases in the Democratic budget resolution, debt will rise to $40.1 trillion by 2031, according to CRFB. This is “debt held by the public,” meaning federal borrowing from domestic and foreign creditors.

The chart scales the debt to the number of U.S. households. Debt per household under the Democratic plan would rise from $179,082 in 2021 to $288,047 by 2031. That debt is not like mortgage debt where households have a hard asset to match what they owe. Rather, it is the government going on a consumption spending spree and putting $288,047 on each household’s credit card. That is because just 5 percent of federal spending is for hard assets such as highways and fighter jets. By ballooning the debt today, politicians are imposing large and rising burdens on households tomorrow.

 

s

 

Here are further observations:

  • Federal debt today is 103 percent of GDP and would rise to 119 percent by 2031 under the Democratic spending plan. That level of debt is higher than the 31 percent reached in the Civil War, 33 percent reached in World War I, and 106 percent reached in World War II. Today we are not at war, and politicians show no interest in paying down the debt as they did after past wars.
  • Bill Clinton was the last president to balance the budget, but the chronic red ink began in the 1930s with the rise of Keynesian economics and the invention of auto‐pilot entitlement programs. Deficit spending has been supercharged in recent years by the rise in global capital markets, which makes vast borrowing much easier. From 1791 to 1930, federal politicians balanced the budget 68 percent of the years, but since 1931 they have balanced it only 13 percent of the years.
  • America’s combined federal and state government debt in 2021 at 141 percent of GDP is far higher than the OECD average of 100 percent of GDP, and much higher than debt levels in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden.
  • Rising debt may trigger an economic crisis with soaring interest rates and falling output. Greece’s debt crisis a decade ago created long‐lasting damage, and the country’s real income per capita is still down one‐quarter from its pre‐crisis level. America’s government debt today is about the same size relative to GDP as was Greece’s before its debt crisis.
  • With the Democratic spending plan, federal interest costs will top $1 trillion a year by 2031. But that assumes the CBO baseline projection of interest rates rising only to 1.9 percent on short‐term federal debt and 3.2 percent on long‐term debt. I think that is a rosy scenario. The risk is on the upside. If interest rates rise more than projected, it will have a huge budget impact because the debt is so large.

More on the history and costs of debt here.

Data Notes. The OECD debt measure is general government gross financial liabilities. OECD publishes the weighted average, but I calculated the simple average across countries. The number of U.S. households is here, and I estimated the 2031 figure based on the recent growth rate.

Yep, more throwing this nation's children and grandchildren under the bus.  For you out their with adult children,  do their families have $288K laying around to help cover their portion of the federal debt?  I think most do not, yet that bill will come due.

 

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Biden's Total Financial Surveillance

https://reason.com/2021/09/08/bidens-total-financial-surveillance/

Quote

Imagine living in a world where every one of your noncash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS.

That dystopia will become a reality if President Joe Biden gets his way. Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and key Capitol Hill allies such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are pushing a vast, intrusive financial surveillance system in the name of closing the "tax gap."

But don't worry: There's no need to fear if you've got nothing to hide.

"For already compliant taxpayers, the only effect of this regime is to provide easy access to summary information on financial accounts and to decrease the likelihood of costly 'no fault' examinations," the Treasury Department said this May in a nakedly authoritarian document called "The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda." But "for noncompliant taxpayers," the department continues, "this regime would encourage voluntary compliance as evaders realize that the risk of evasion being detected has risen noticeably."

The administration's proposed "comprehensive financial account reporting regime" would dramatically increase the types of financial institutions and transactions exposed to the feds' prying eyes. "All business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts," would be forced to "report gross inflows and outflows" to the IRS. And not just bank accounts: The dragnet would now include PayPal, settlement companies, and "crypto asset exchanges," for starters.

The new domestic surveillance program, which requires congressional approval, is one prong of a tripartite strategy for transforming the entire global financial system into a harmonious, haven-free collection funnel to the IRS. The second part, which has taken up the bulk of Biden's multilateral diplomacy thus far, is getting the industrialized world to agree on a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, while setting up a system to prevent multinational companies from registering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions.

Cutting corporate taxes is "a self-defeating competition," Yellen said in April, "and neither President Biden nor I are interested in participating in it anymore. We want to change the game."

In July, representatives from 130 countries, including finance ministers from the G-20 representing the world's richest democracies, agreed in principle to a worldwide minimum corporate tax. "We have a chance now to build a global and domestic tax system," Yellen crowed. "The race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end."

The agreement still has a significant obstacle to overcome—namely, the legislatures of 130 countries, including the U.S. Congress. But Yellen has some cause to be cocky, because the third prong of Washington's strategy has already been constructed.

In 2009, President Barack Obama promised to generate $210 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years by cracking down on "overseas tax loopholes." While the corporate-tax element of the plan was quickly killed by lobbyists, the individual component remained in the form of the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Built on a foundation of American exceptionalism (the U.S. is one of only two countries that tax citizens living abroad), FATCA imposed onerous new annual reporting requirements on Americans with more than $10,000 in overseas financial institutions. The law brazenly threatened international banks if they didn't rat out their U.S. clients to the IRS.

The results were predictable: Expats were locked out of banking services, record numbers of mostly middle-class Americans renounced their U.S. citizenship, and IRS collections went essentially unchanged. But for a very small political price (no one much cares about the estimated 9 million Americans living abroad), Washington was able to bend an entire global financial system to its will.

An IRS with the ability to compel global transaction data sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Yet here we are—unless we consciously cover our tracks.

"Another concern is that [the] information reporting regime will shift taxpayers toward a greater use of cash," the Treasury Department's compliance plan frets. It also notes that cryptocurrencies "already pose a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion." Cash and crypto may be the last currencies compatible with privacy.

"I promised to lead the world to deliver a foreign policy for the middle class, and today, we are doing just that," Biden said after the 130-country agreement. Just as long as the middle class has nothing to hide.

I already perform about 50% of my financial transactions with cash,  that percentage is now likely to go up considerably.   Sorry, the federal government has no business knowing that I, for example,  used my debit card to purchase some 2x4's at Menards.

 

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Medicare Is About To Run Out of Money. Democrats Want To Make the Program Cost Even More.

https://reason.com/2021/09/08/medicare-is-about-to-run-out-of-money-democrats-want-to-make-the-program-cost-even-more/

Quote

To understand the implications of Democrats' current plans for expanding federal health care programs, it's useful to start with some context from the biggest federal health care program that currently exists: Medicare. 

Last week, Medicare's board of trustees produced their annual report on the program's fiscal health. That report contained some expected yet nonetheless alarming news: Medicare's hospital insurance (HI) trust fund, itself a kind of accounting fiction, will be insolvent in just five years. Starting in 2026, the HI fund, which covers inpatient hospital services, will be depleted. 

The program will have to rely on the HI fund's incoming revenues, essentially operating on a cash flow basis—and there won't be enough cash. In 2026, the HI fund will only cover about 91 percent of its bills. In the years that follow, that gap will only grow larger. So without changes to the program's financing, doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers will face rapidly reduced payments from the program, with ensuing ripple effects on both the wider economy, roughly a sixth of which revolves around health care services, and on the provision and availability of health care.  

If anything, the program's fiscal problems may be even worse than that: The new report assumes that an array of cost-reduction measures, including a series of technical tweaks the physician payments and bonuses, will persist. But they also note that Medicare's "long-range costs could be substantially higher than shown throughout much of the report if the cost-reduction measures prove problematic and new legislation scales them back." 

As anyone who has even a passing familiarity with attempts to control the cost of federal health care programs through doctor payment tweaks knows, those sorts of measures often prove problematic—which is to say, doctors don't like them, and thus, for political reasons, Congress overrides those payment changes. 

In just a few short years, in other words, Medicare will face something like an existential crisis. Yet instead of attempting to deal with the program's deep fiscal challenges, President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are attempting to expand the program, adding a suite of costly new benefits to the program. Rather than attempt to pay for the program that exists, or manage its growing costs, they are focused on tacking on additional expenses.

The vehicle for those additions is the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that Democrats hope to pass before the end of the year. The bill is a sort of all-things-to-everyone social spending package, with handouts to a wide array of the party's domestic policy stakeholders and interest groups. It is now in the midst of being drafted and debated and will likely change, perhaps many times, before it passes. But in its current form, it calls for a substantial expansion of Medicare, plus additional new health care spending outside the program.

The Medicare expansion would add vision, dental, and hearing benefits, a longtime goal for congressional Democrats. There's no current cost estimate, but in 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a similar expansion of coverage (as part of a larger health care bill proposed by House Democrats) would cost $358 billion, the majority of which would go to dental care. The new expansion will almost certainly cost even more, although it is possible that the on-paper score will come in lower if the expansion is structured to push costs outside of the 10-year budget window, by, for example, delaying the start of the dental benefits until the end of the decade. 

Beyond Medicare, Democrats are also moving toward expanding other federal health care programs. The current reconciliation framework calls for making permanent a supposedly temporary two-year expansion of Obamacare's subsidies for private insurance. The temporary expansion, passed earlier this year as part of the $2 trillion American Recovery Plan, was priced at $34 billion for just two years—a decadelong expansion beyond the initial two-year window would presumably cost about five times that. One of the features of that expansion is that it raises existing income caps for who can obtain health insurance subsidies; the result is that in some parts of the country, families with mid-six-figure incomes could end up qualifying for tens of thousands of dollars worth of health insurance subsidies

And then there is Medicaid—and the possible creation of an entirely new federal health program.

This is the direct result of a decade's worth of legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. When Obamacare passed in 2010, it was designed to expand health insurance coverage in two primary ways: First, through the system of private health insurance subsidies I mentioned above, and second, through an expansion of Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for the poor and disabled. The authors of Obamacare assumed that the law's Medicaid expansion would be adopted by every state and included significant financial penalties for states that opted out. But a 2012 Supreme Court ruling said those penalties were so large that they were unconstitutional, amounting to a threat of force against the states for noncompliance. As a result, some states did not expand the program under the law or were slow to do so. Currently, about a dozen Republican-leaning states have declined to expand the program. 

So Democrats are hoping to use the reconciliation bill to expand coverage to the people in those states who would qualify for Medicaid under an expanded program—filling what they refer to as the "Medicaid gap." The legislation is still being drafted, so it is not entirely clear how this would be accomplished, but one option under discussion this summer was the creation of an entirely new federal health program, likely modeled on Medicaid, geared specifically to cover those in the gap. How much would this program cost? Would those costs be offset in any meaningful way? How would this tangle of programs and subprograms interact? 

It is possible that none of this will come to pass. Even if the entire package does become law, it will probably change in a variety of ways before it does. 

But it is nonetheless telling that in the face of a looming shortfall in the nation's largest federal health care program, congressional Democrats, rather than debating ways to control costs in the program that is already running out of money, are contemplating an expensive expansion of that same program; the permanent extension of a supposedly temporary health care subsidy in a separate health care program; and the creation of an entirely new federal health care program

The existing system clearly isn't sustainable in its current form. But rather than address or even really acknowledge its obvious shortcomings, Democrats are just attempting to build on top of it.

Disgusting.  Again sacrificing the future of our children and grandchildren.

 

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Talk about Executive Overreach:  https://reason.com/2021/09/10/two-big-new-ways-the-biden-administration-plans-to-overstep-its-pandemic-authority/

Quote

President Joe Biden has announced the next stage of his administration's COVID-19 pandemic response—and it's a doozy of dubious constitutionality and executive branch overreach. The biggest news is that Biden is ordering all private businesses with more than 100 employees to make their workers get the COVID-19 vaccine or submit to weekly testing.

Enforcement of this policy will be handled through the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). "OSHA will issue an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) to implement this requirement," says the White House. "This requirement will impact over 80 million workers in private sector businesses."

President Biden: "The Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their workforces are full vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week." pic.twitter.com/ockKwZAndq

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 9, 2021

 

The administration claims OSHA has the authority to do this because it's permitted to issue temporary regulations "necessary to protect employees" from dangerous "exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful." But interpreting this to mean not just limited toxic exposures within a particular area or workplace but any virus or disease plaguing the country would drastically alter the scope of OSHA's alleged authority.

The fact that this order is coming not from Congress but from Biden and an administrative body is also…problematic, to put it mildly.

"This is legislative action that bypasses the legislative branch," commented former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) yesterday. "If you care about representative government—if you're consistent regardless of who's president—then it doesn't matter that you like the policy; this mandate is an abuse of power."

"I am a strong proponent of vaccines (get yours if you haven't!) but President Biden doing an end-run around the legislative process by ordering an administrative agency like @OSHA_DOL to mandate vaccinations for employees of private business is outrageous overreach," tweeted Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.).

"Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power," suggested Reason's Robby Soave in a New York Times op-ed today. "Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency."

How OSHA—and employers—will actually enforce this mandate remains a big question mark.

So… as a practical matter how enforceable are these mandates really? The record of immunization most folks have is a tiny square of cardboard that's equally easily lost, destroyed, or forged.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) September 10, 2021

 

Obviously there are ways to check, in principle, via insurance or the direct providers, but that sounds like it would require significant infrastructure if suddenly you've got a massive number of employers needing to check vax status for 80 million workers…

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) September 10, 2021

 

Another big unknown: Will workers really walk away rather than get the vaccine? In polls, at least, many unvaccinated workers say they would quit their jobs before getting vaccinated:

"Among unvaccinated workers who are not self-employed, about 7 in 10 say they would likely quit if their employer required them to be vaccinated and did not grant a medical or religious exemption."https://t.co/2r0gwyxitt

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 9, 2021

 

In addition to mandating that workers at businesses of a certain size be vaccinated or regularly tested, Biden's new order says health care businesses—regardless of size—must see that all staff, volunteers, and contractors are vaccinated if these businesses take Medicare or Medicaid patients. The requirement includes volunteers and staff "who are not involved in direct patient, resident, or client care" and will "apply to approximately 50,000 providers and cover a majority of health care workers across the country," the White House says.

.....

 

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SF kinda thinks this "mandate" that isn't law will not stand up in court - not if, but when it gets there.  Also, HTF are they going to be able to enforce this?  Most likely a few OSHA guys are going to show up somewhere, issue a few penalties and publicize the heck out of it showing some company somewhere getting the book tossed at them to scare the rest of us into submission.  I guess companies are just gonna have to make sure their staffing stays below 100......Who's gonna have to go? Thank President Biden. 

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Biden's Vaccine Mandate Is the Latest Sign of the Presidency Becoming a Monarchy

https://reason.com/2021/09/13/bidens-vaccine-mandate-is-the-latest-sign-of-the-presidency-becoming-a-monarchy/

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President Joe Biden's national vaccine mandate sparked a lot of debate and set political seismometers jumping even more frantically than usual. Most commentary has focused on two issues: Is forcing people to take vaccines a good idea, and will the courts sign off on the government's authority to do so? Those are great discussions to have, though anything involving "forcing people" should be a non-starter by default. But another important question is raised by the president's gambit to displace the Afghanistan fiasco from the headlines: How, in the United States, can one guy just impose his preferred policies, whether they're good, bad, or indifferent?

To be fair, not everybody overlooked this point:

"There's no authority for this," former Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) noted. "This is legislative action that bypasses the legislative branch. If you care about representative government—if you're consistent regardless of who's president—then it doesn't matter that you like the policy; this mandate is an abuse of power."

 

Since this is America in 2021, the replies to Amash quickly degenerated into arguments over the benefits of vaccines (or their allegedly nefarious side effects) and assertions that the courts will certainly rule for/against the move. But again, how can one person do this in a country with a Constitution that lays out the limited powers of the state, and provides for two other co-equal branches of government? It's as if the president has become a king—and many people embrace the development, so long as they like the outcome. In fact, that's a fair interpretation of the system under which we live, and the direction in which it's evolved from the beginning.

"We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits, which after all he can interpret for himself," then-Secretary of State William Seward observed of the presidency during the Civil War. Admittedly, he described President Abraham Lincoln, whose powers were enhanced by the crisis. But it's not like the presidency snapped back within benign limits after the fighting ended.

"Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king," the Knoxville Journal snarked in 1896 during the presidency of Grover Cleveland, who was one of the less autocratic chief executives. But the implicit and growing power of the presidency remained, even when the office was held by somebody who exercised a modicum of restraint.

The fault lies in the Constitution itself, claimed conservative legal scholar F. H. Buckley in his 2014 book The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America. He pointed out that all Anglosphere countries were trending towards concentrated executive power (something only accelerated by the pandemic), but claimed that America's presidential system, despite built-in checks and balances, in practice lent itself to what he called "elective monarchy."

 

Buckley's book was reviewed for Reason by Gene Healy, himself the author of The Cult of the Presidency.

"The constitutional presidency, as the Framers conceived it, was designed to stand against the popular will as often as not, with the president wielding the veto power to restrain Congress when it transgressed its constitutional bounds," wrote Healy in his 2008 book. "In contrast, the modern president considers himself the tribune of the people, promising transformative action and demanding the power to carry it out."

Claiming to act in response to popular demand is how a president who, last year, told supporters "Executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds" can pivot months later to issuing vaccine mandates for private-sector workers—and be applauded for the move by supporters who would be horrified if an elective monarch they didn't like exercised such authority. 

"This is the correct policy. And you know you can't get it through Congress… so what is the problem?" one commenter responded to Amash's warning about executive overreach.

But presidents enthusiastic about power don't come in only one partisan flavor. 

"I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President," then-President Donald Trump told an enthusiastic conservative gathering in 2019. The same year he "ordered" U.S. companies to stop doing business in China before backing off amid pushback from even his allies.

Unsurprisingly, Trump was accused of acting like a monarch, just as his predecessor, President Barack Obama, was charged with kingly pretensions, and so was President George W. Bush before him. And the accusations were spot on—they all acted unilaterally and built on the precedents of those who went before them.

"Ease up on the executive actions, Joe," The New York Times editorial board advised the current White House occupant just a week into his presidency. "They are not meant to serve as an end run around the will of Congress."

Obviously, that advice fell on deaf ears. But it always does, because American institutions lend themselves to increasingly unilateral actions by presidents. And, while people mouth pretty words about democracy, a lot of our neighbors don't really care how things get done so long as they like the results.

According to the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, "87 percent of Americans say that a democratic political system is a good way of governing the country." That's great, but "one-third (33 percent) of Americans have at some point in the last three years said that they think having 'a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with Congress or elections' would be a good system of government. And about a quarter (24 percent) have said at some point that 'army rule' would be a good system. Put another way, while fewer than one in 10 Americans consistently supports an authoritarian option, a third of Americans 'dabble' in authoritarianism."

Before you ask, in the report Democrats were more inclined to bypass elections while Republicans were more inclined to bypass Congress. Independents came off as especially authoritarianism-curious. Yes, that's a minority of Americans—but it's a big minority, and probably enough to motivate politicians inclined to do as they please, anyway.

The answer, then, is that Biden issued a unilateral vaccine mandate because the presidency has always had monarchical tendencies and, through multiple administrations, chief executives succumbed to the temptation to exercise power and leave more for their successors. The courts may ultimately restrain the president, but you can bet that will leave many Americans angry that their king was thwarted.

I contend that this rise of the POTUS as a de-facto Monarch is due to a cowardly Congress not doing it's job.  All the vast, vast majority of U.S. Congressmen think about is getting re-elected and gathering political power, not serving their constituents.

 

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Biden's American Families Plan would put most working-age American households on the dole.

https://reason.com/2021/09/16/america-on-the-dole/

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After Congress passed the American Recovery Plan, Joe Biden's $2 trillion economic relief legislation, the president proposed roughly $4 trillion in further spending. The American Jobs Plan, also known as the president's infrastructure proposal, accounted for about half of that money. The rest was included in the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion package that the Biden administration described as a set of "investments and tax credits for American families and children over ten years."

In other words, it was a welfare bill, and quite an ambitious one. The plan would put most working-age American households on the dole, even when the economy is strong and the country is not in crisis.

The American Families Plan proposes spending on various new and newly expanded programs, including an extension of the American Recovery Plan's one-year child tax credit boost, increased subsidies for insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act's health exchanges, a new universal paid family and medical leave program, and federal funding for two years of "free" community college. The plan thus represents an escalation of the American Recovery Plan, which temporarily funded some new benefits based on the argument that they were necessary salves for the economic pain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The American Families Plan, by contrast, is premised on the idea that such benefits are necessary on an ongoing basis, regardless of the economy's condition. That shift would further enmesh such benefits into American life.

In a June working paper, the Hoover Institution's John F. Cogan and Daniel Heil report that the plan would add more than 6 million households, and more than 21 million Americans, to federal entitlement rolls. That would raise the share of nonelderly American households receiving such entitlements by seven percentage points and push it above the 50 percent mark. Although Biden has pitched the American Families Plan as an inequality-reducing boon to the poor and middle classes, about 40 percent of the benefits would go to the top half of the household income distribution.

The plan may not go into effect exactly as Biden proposed. But if it did, Cogan and Heil write, "this would be the first time in U.S. history"—with the possible exceptions of 2020 and 2021, for which data are not yet available—"that a majority of working age households are federal entitlement recipients." Biden wants to make most working-age Americans into beneficiaries of federal largesse, a sea change in the relationship between individuals and the state.

Disgusting.  And morally wrong.

 

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