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The media and the entire Democratic Party, agitated by the House Squad, seem to be having a meltdown over President Trump’s rather inelegant tweet last week:
Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
As Francis Menton observes, Trump’s tweet sounds more like an invitation to the radical Congresswomen to start behaving like grown-ups. They need to take responsibility for the absurd policy proposals that they throw around so recklessly.
GND – a Good Policy for U.S. and for Somalia?
But the “squad” thinks the Green New Deal is imperative for the U.S. Then why shouldn’t it also be the right policy path for Somalia? And if this plan is the route to a perfected world, what’s wrong with suggesting that its leading advocates bring some influence to bear on Somalia (or Palestine or Mexico) to implement their prescriptions? The backdrop of proposing Somalia for the GND seems to me like an excellent basis for an intelligent conversation about what policies might actually work in the real world.
An excerpt from Ayanna Pressley speaking at a Netroots Nation conference the same day as Trump’s tweet:
If you’re going to come to [the political] table, all of you who have aspirations of running for office. If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.
According to the Washington Examiner, writes Mr. Menton, both Omar and Tlaib sat next to Pressley during this outburst, and nodded approvingly.
Is there anything racist in this explicit statement that brown, black, Muslim and queer people aren’t permitted to have independent thoughts of their own in the political arena? If there is, you won’t find any mention of it in the New York Times (or in the many other outlets that so viciously condemned President Trump for a statement lacking any of this explicit racism).
(T)he people who yell “racism” and “white supremacism” at every turn have exactly one big idea of how to improve economic outcomes of blacks: more income and wealth redistribution programs. The big one now is so-called “reparations” (enthusiastically endorsed by the “squad” and by nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates), followed by Kamala Harris’s new idea of a $100 billion dollar handout program to assist blacks in buying homes. Really?
As Menton points out, the U.S. spends about $1.2 trillion in annual “anti-poverty” redistribution programs, yet none of these programs have succeeded in improving black economic performance.
In the WSJ, Jason Riley weighs in on the disconnect:
Government programs are no substitute for the development of human capital. If wealth-redistribution schemes lifted people out of poverty, we would have closed these gaps a long time ago. Liberal politicians and activists have little interest in addressing the ways in which black behavioral choices impact inequality. It’s easier to turn out voters and raise money by equating racial imbalances with racial bias and smearing political opponents who disagree.
The Manhattan Contrarian goes further. Redistribution programs, he claims, disincentivize and ultimately destroy the ability to build wealth.
Nearly all of them have some kinds of means tests, which are all different and constantly changing and impossible to keep track of. How much home equity are you allowed to have and qualify for Medicaid? How about for food stamps? Pell grants? Home energy assistance? Nobody could figure it out.
Once you start taking any of the government handouts, of course you want to max out on them; and if you want to max out on government handouts, your best strategy is to rent your home and keep bank accounts to a minimum. Or to put it another way, the whole idea behind the handout state is to make sure that the dependent populations remain dependent.
So who are the racist?
Read more here.
