Frenzy from the Left

By Evdoha @Adobe Stock

Hysteria, Fury and Street Terrorism

Victor Davis Hanson addresses opposition to Donald Trump’s initiatives and the rise to a near “unprecedented fevered pitch.” The frenzy, he notes, is manifested in strange ways.

At the bottom end, there is an epidemic of street terrorism, including the keying of Tesla, bullying their owners, firebombing dealerships, or vandalizing charging stations.

In the words of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Elon Musk, and according to media and Democrats who brand Musk as a foreign-born counterfeit citizen and a disloyal un-American foreigner, is deserving of being ”taken down.”

Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster didn’t offer a single word that might provide his supposedly better way to address crushing debt and deficits. And so, America continues on with no “alternate agenda on trade deficits, budget deficits, and debt.”

No one on the left or on the libertarian right or the now inert Republican establishment—” can outline an alternate pathway to Trump’s remedies for America’s dire problems.”

Remember when the left worshipped Tesla’s breakthrough EV autos? No more. Now they want to destroy them. Don’t forget being lectured on the “merits of tariff-enforced symmetrical trade—until Donald Trump made that his signature issue.”

Instead of serious proposals, we get vulgarity from the left and street terror against fellow Americans.

What does the left support? Could the left not admit that they were wrongheaded in supporting tariffs? What, asks VDH, exactly does the left support? Mini-tariffs? No tariffs? Reciprocal tariffs?

What isn’t mentioned is our ticking time bomb of $3 billion in interest payments on the debt per day, in addition to the monstrous $37 trillion in debt itself. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t read anything about Cory Booker addressing ways to reduce our 125% debt to annual GDP.

Per year, the interest cost on the debt is larger than the defense budget; does AOC ever note that? The current Biden vestigial budget is nominally $1.7 trillion in the red. Is there a Democrat agenda to head us toward balanced budgets?

Who Would Pay Their Fair Share?

Doies the left want the top rates to rise from 37% to 40%, 45%, 50%, so that their own constituent “affluent” in blue states like “high-tax California, Illinois, and New York should properly and deservedly pay the IRS 50% to 60% of their earnings in income tax alone?”

Does the tax-and-spend left prefer instead a value-added tax or some sort of federal sales tax?

Or are the current levels of spending just fine? The left sees no waste, fraud, or abuse in the federal budget. All they see are too few federal workers.

To modern monetary theorists, “money is but a construct,” where government can do what it wishes. Remedy debt by:

• Printing more of the construct
• Expropriate private wealth
• Inflate our way out of debt

VDH asks the left again to explain to him its superior agenda to that of Donald Trump’s quick, efficient, balanced budget and a reduced national debt.

If, as some on the left assert, debt is not a problem, then are interest rates the real crux?

… if interest rates are no more than the rate of inflation, then essentially, the government can borrow all it wants at zero interest—and literally did so at times over the last half century. Is that their remedy?

Republicans could help by pausing from their “napalming of the Trump initiatives.” How do we get either to a balanced budget and reduced debt? Convince us that debt in all manifestations is no big deal.

Why the utter silence on trade deficits?

No counter-proposals, no alternate agenda, just fury and hysteria—or denials that deficits and debt are a problem at all.

Over 50 years of continuous trade deficits do not seem to matter to the right or the left. Does no one care that we run about $1 trillion annual outflow in the gap between what we export and import?

VDH pleads for the argument that the real losers are the recent economies of India, China, or Mexico, which supposedly foolishly tax imports and yet demand tariff-free exports, all to run up surpluses. “Are they suicidal and we, the masters of trade deficits, the real geniuses?”

Does it matter that almost all of the proposed Trump tariffs are in some way responsive? In that sense, they are calibrated on autopilot, leaving the proverbial ball in the court of those with high tariffs and huge surpluses to set new shared reciprocal rates.

• Was Trump wrong to level reciprocal tariffs? Then was it right for others to initiate asymmetrical tariffs on us?

• Where is the logic to damn those who object to $1 trillion in annual trade deficits rather than those whose tariffs resulted in their warped surpluses?

• How about blaming the victims? The U.S. deserves its trade deficit because it is too affluent, too naïve to object, or too profligate to be saved?

• Must we turn the other check, as we have done for over ½ century? Sort of take the hit for the global team?

Counter proposals from the left or right are not forthcoming. Instead, there is a complete news blackout of what Trump has already accomplished in 10 weeks.

• Seemingly overnight, America’s southern border is now magically secure, with virtually no illegal immigration—and without the much-ballyhooed need for “comprehensive immigration reform?”

• How did we go from 10,000 illegal aliens a day to near zero? What was so bad about identifying hundreds of billions of budgetary dollars in fraud and waste in a mere two months?

• Now we are talking about ways to end the Ukraine war rather than boasting “as long as it takes” to feed the new Stalingrad.

• The Houthis, abandoned by the Iranians in a matter of weeks, are no longer the feared bully of the Middle East. Were not their terrorist tentacles just months ago considered unstoppable and sacrosanct?

• Were 80 percent of the American people, who do not want biological males to overturn a half-century’s worth of hard work to obtain parity for women’s sports, wrong?

Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness suggests that as a nation, we need to calm down.

If you aren’t ready to acknowledge Trump’s good accomplishments in the first 10 weeks, speak up. Say you are for open borders, an accelerated war in Ukraine, or women need to get over losing to transgendered men.

Make the argument that huge trade and budget deficits and unsustainable national debt is no big deal.

You believe Trump is addressing these existential and long-neglected crises in the wrong way. Great. Please present your alternate plans for quicker and better resolutions or better messaging.

Should he limit tariffs only to those nations with deficits and asymmetrical tariffs? Should he speak more quietly and mention more frequently that he was moved to act only by a half-century of neglect? Could he emphasize more that the $3-4 trillion in promised foreign investment will ignite job growth within a year?

Don’t listen to those without an alternative agenda or without constructive criticism. They got us into this mess and have no clue how to get us out.