https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-election-r...inion_lead_pos1WSJ ჩემი აზრით ყველაზე მაგარი ედიტორიალები აქვს, ყველაზე ობიექტური
As Americans like to tell the world, a hallmark of democracy is the willingness to accept defeat and the peaceful transfer of power. The tragedy of the last two presidential elections has been the refusal of partisans to accept defeat, and public trust in American self-government is eroding as a result.
Democrats in 2016 abused the FBI to push the Russia collusion myth and refused to accept Donald Trump’s legitimacy. Hillary Clinton still doesn’t. Now some Republicans are returning the disfavor by challenging the ritual counting of the Electoral College votes by the new Congress this week. Neither one justifies the other, and these columns have called out Democrats for their anti-democratic panic attack.
But the main issue now is that too many Republicans refuse to accept Mr. Trump’s defeat. More than 100 House Members and, as of this weekend, at least 12 Senators say they will formally object to the Electoral College count. This won’t change the result, though it will delay it as Congress spends up to two hours debating the objections to each state’s results. More corrosive will be the precedent and resulting political damage.
The leading culprit here is Mr. Trump, who as always refuses to accept responsibility for defeat. Recall that he also claimed the Iowa caucus result was stolen in 2016 when he lost to Ted Cruz. He’s now spinning conspiracy theories and election falsehoods daily on Twitter. He doesn’t seem to care what damage he does in promoting the myth of his victory.
The damage is spreading as Mr. Trump puts pressure on other Republicans to take up his lost cause. A dozen Senators have issued a statement demanding an Electoral Commission that would investigate claims of fraud and report within 10 days. The plan is to persuade state legislatures to overrule their Dec. 14 Electoral College certifications for Joe Biden. Throw the election into the House and Mr. Trump might salvage a second term.
Note that the Senators in their statement don’t allege specific acts of fraud. Instead they cite “allegations of fraud and irregularities” that feed “deep distrust” of the results—distrust they and the President are feeding.
The courts have rejected every Trump campaign attempt to intervene in the state results, often by judges appointed by the President. Mr. Trump’s lawyers make charges in public that they won’t even bring to a court, perhaps because they know there are penalties for speaking falsely before judges.
As Republican Sen. Pat Toomey has shown, the voting evidence from Pennsylvania is that Mr. Trump lost fair and square. Republicans down ballot did well. Mr. Trump did relatively better in Philadelphia in 2020 than in 2016, but he lost ground in the suburbs and his margin shrank even in some rural counties he won. Mr. Trump’s narrow loss was personal as voters decided they didn’t want four more years of his raucous governance.
The Electoral College gambit won’t work this week because House Democrats won’t go along, but imagine if Republicans ran the House and did. Eighty-one million Americans who voted for Mr. Biden would be disenfranchised by an insider scheme. The political response would be volcanic, and understandably so. Republicans would be crushed in the 2022 midterms, and Mr. Trump would promptly be impeached again. More Senate Republicans might vote to convict.
In our view this week’s exercise is also unconstitutional. The text of the original charter, elaborated by the 12th Amendment, gives state legislatures the power to appoint electors. The Vice President is charged to open the votes to be counted—nothing more.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which the House and Senate will act upon, is unconstitutional in giving Congress the ability to second-guess those state decisions. In stretching this law for a partisan exercise, Republicans are also giving Democrats more ammunition to use in their campaign to overturn the Electoral College in favor of a direct popular vote.
This is the fire Republicans are playing with, no matter their political calculation. Some may figure the vote Wednesday is merely symbolic; they can show solidarity with Mr. Trump’s voters and dodge a primary challenge in 2022. Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are making their own presidential calculations for 2024. But the cost of this showboating will be more political cynicism, and a precedent that Democrats are sure to exploit in the aftermath of some future close election.
This is also a lousy political strategy for returning to power. By indulging Mr. Trump, Republicans are helping him divide the party and remain as a potential kingmaker. This could hurt what should be their very good chance to retake the House in 2022. As for 2024, good luck trying to court his support. He could run again for the nomination or, if he lost, run out of spite as a third-party candidate and guarantee a victory for Kamala Harris.
The GOP electoral focus now should be on minimizing the damage of the Biden-Nancy Pelosi agenda, and that includes making the case for reforms to restore trust in elections. This is mainly a state duty, but the national party can do better at exploiting the rules as they exist. That includes more consistent rules for securing the integrity of mail-in ballots, and a better litigation strategy before elections to block Democratic attempts to change rules at the last minute.
The good news is that many Republicans have been willing to stand up for proper constitutional conservatism. That includes the Federalist Society judges appointed by Mr. Trump who have made independent rulings based on the evidence. They have made their Democratic critics look foolish. Republicans in state legislatures have also stood on principle.
Credit as well to Senators Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Ben Sasse, Roger Wicker, Mr. Toomey, among others, who seem poised to support the election result as the Constitution advises. Their votes this week will look even better in the long light of history.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-the...inion_lead_pos5When President Obama’s last Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, made the extraordinary claim that the Obama economic recovery failed because Washington “stopped [spending] too soon last time, and fiscal tightening after 2010 slowed the recovery” it sounded like another over-the-top argument for more stimulus. But with President-elect Joe Biden now making it clear that the recent $900 billion stimulus will “at best only be a down payment” and the now $3.3 trillion of total stimulus spending “is just the beginning,” it sounds like America is headed into a program of permanent stimulus.
Did the Obama recovery atrophy because spending tightened after 2010? Tightened compared with what? Between the start of the subprime mortgage crisis and the end of the recession in mid-2009, net new spending of $1.6 trillion was enacted. In 2009, federal spending as a share of gross domestic product surged by an unprecedented 4.2 percentage points to reach 24.4%, the highest level since World War II. Spending was 23.3% of GDP in 2010. In the entire postwar era through 2008, federal spending averaged 18.9% of GDP. For comparison, consider that the Korean War pushed federal spending only to 19.9%, even as defense spending made up 13.8% of the economy.
But what happened after 2010? At 23.4%, 2011 had the second-highest level of federal spending as a share of GDP since World War II—almost one-fourth higher than the postwar average before the Obama era. This is the year when, according to Mr. Lew, federal spending started to plummet. In 2012, federal spending was 22% of GDP, less than the stimulus years but still the fourth-highest level in the postwar period to that point. And 2012 was 3½ years after the recession ended.
When the recovery began some six months into the Obama administration, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office both confidently predicted an economic boom, with real GDP growing an average of 3.6% from 2010-13. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve projected 3.4% growth for 2010-11. These predicted growth levels were well within the historic norm for postwar recoveries, and were buttressed by the largest stimulus package in U.S. history—larger than all previous postwar stimulus programs combined. Since this spending surge was financed entirely with debt, the stimulus impact should have been maximized as the Keynesian multiplier worked its miracles.
To further help the economy, the Fed initiated a massive monetary easing. The Fed purchased, or offset by purchasing other securities, more than 55% of all federal debt issued during 2010-13—far more than the 10% of government debt the Federal Reserve purchased during the entirety of World War II.
Yet the greatest stimulus, the biggest deficits and the largest monetary accommodation were no match for the negative onslaught of Mr. Obama’s program of tax, spend and control. Economic growth from 2010-13 averaged less than 2.1%, half the 4.2% average growth rates in the four-year periods following the previous 10 postwar recessions. The Obama recovery didn’t falter for lack of sustained stimulus; it was shackled from the beginning by his economic program.
The argument that spending tightened too soon after the last recession implicitly assumes that it should never drop below stimulus levels. When Congress belatedly reacted to the four-year explosion in federal borrowing that doubled the national debt, the March 2013 sequester of $111 billion didn’t even begin until halfway into the fiscal year—four years after the recession ended and three months after Mr. Obama’s massive tax increase. And since there is always a bipartisan majority for spending, the brief commitment to restrain discretionary spending growth quickly faded.
The suggestion that anything less than stimulus levels of spending is economically harmful is effectively a call for a new era of permanent stimulus. This appears to be what Messrs. Biden and Lew, and future Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, are now proposing.
Because Mr. Biden’s proposed program is little more than Mr. Obama’s tax, spend and regulate agenda on steroids, and because his appointees are merely grayer retreads of the Obama administration, it is excessively optimistic to believe that his stimulus will do any more good for the economy than Mr. Obama’s did.
In reality, stimulus spending has nothing to do with good long-term economic outcomes and everything to do with political outcomes. What is socialism except a permanent stimulus? When private investment buckles under confiscatory taxes and productivity falters with the decline of private innovation, socialism employs unending stimulus to substitute public “investment” for real private investment, and public initiative for private initiative in research and development funding. Mr. Biden and Bernie Sanders’s “Unity” document is a ready-made playbook for this program.
The case for another stimulus appears entirely political. The most recent Commerce Department estimate for the third quarter of 2020 has real GDP up at an annualized rate of 33.1%—largely offsetting the record decline in the second quarter. The Atlanta Fed estimates that the economy grew 10.4% in the fourth quarter, up from its initial forecast of 2.2%. Household income is higher than it was before the pandemic, retail sales rose from Nov. 1 through Christmas by 2.4% compared with last year, total household savings are near a record level, the economic harm of the latest wave of infections is far less than the damage from earlier one, and consumption, based on all economic indicators, is set to leap when pent-up demand is unleashed as the vaccine reduces the virus transmission rate. Further stimulus combined with an accelerating vaccination rate could in fact produce an overheated economy.
With or without permanent stimulus, if tax, spend and control policies are about to return, the economy won’t stay strong. And if private investment and individual initiative falter under such a program, a permanent stimulus will be demanded. How does it end? With Treasury debt already set to reach 108% of GDP, and Fed assets to finance that debt already 7.8 times the precrisis level in 2008, it isn’t a question of if government is going to run out of other people’s money, but when.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-...he-cruz-eleven/ამათაც მიათახსირეს
kaiser Sozeკრუზს ეტყობა იმედი აქვს რომ 2024 წელს ტრამპის ბაზას მოაჯდება. მარა ეხლა იმხელა მინუსს იწერს რომ პრაიმერში მაგრად გაუდებს ბენ სასის მაგვარი ტიპი.
ბენ სასი მე რაც ვიცი ყოველთვის კარგი სენატორი იყო, იმედია ამ ცირკიდან გამომდინარე მისი პოზიცია წინ წამოიწევს. მაგარი კონსერვატორია, არადა პოლიტიკოში მოდერეითი დაარქვეს რახან ტრამპისტი არაა
This post has been edited by პეტრუჩი on 4 Jan 2021, 07:40
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