Your letters for Sept. 6, 2024

By NewsPress Now

Your letters for Sept. 6, 2024

How Kamala and Nixon were similar in more ways than one

Kamala Harris unveiled her “economic plan”, such as it is. Among the usual “free stuff” for the uninformed: $25,000 for first time home buyers; $40 million to help fund a new home construction boom with a target of 3 million new homes in her “first term;” also included are price controls on grocery providers to bring prices “in line.” Of course, no tip of the hat was given to the real reason prices on everything, including groceries are so high, the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless spending over the last 3½ years.

So how are Kamala and Nixon alike? President Nixon in 1971 set forth price and wage controls on everything, contrary to his core belief that price controls are a long-term bad idea. Instead, Nixon chose to trade off longer term economic costs to the economy for his own short-term political gain.

Nixon’s exact words on the subject:

“The difficulty with wage-price controls and a wage board as you well know is that the God-d things will not work. They didn’t work even at the end of World War II. They will never work in peacetime.”

“I know the reasons, you do it [wage and price controls] for cosmetic reasons, good God! But this is too early for cosmetic reasons.”

And yet for his own short term re-election goals, Nixon adopted them anyway, which resulted in higher inflation, closings, shortages, gas lines, etc. Yes, just like Kamala’s reasoning, it looks like both Nixon and Kamala are doing something to control the economy to help the rank and file, but in actuality the Nixon Administration, aided and abetted by the allegedly independent Federal Reserve Board, had turned the inflationary spigots wide open and so it will be true of any future Harris Administration.

Harris would be better off distancing herself from her socialist/Marxist economic professor father and adopting “supply side economics” with lower taxes for all including corporation and the job providers, “enterprise zones” to encourage business growth where previously it lagged (championed by JFK and Jack Kemp), and a fairer, more equitable and simpler income tax.

In addition, is it too much for this writer to dream of getting back on the gold standard that Nixon also unfortunately removed the U.S. economy from, so that we can return to some logical economic thinking for future administrations?

David Hurst

St. Joseph

Affluence and leisure

The effort to provide equality of opportunity was transformed into a vast government project of deficit spending and new more intrusive federal powers to ensure a coerced equality of result, as the Great Society and Vietnam War divided us.

The culprits for our decline and mutual hostility? Not dearth and bone-breaking work, but affluence and leisure.

Currently, we are on the threshold of several existential dangers: a $36 trillion federal debt, swollen with an additional $1 trillion in deficit spending every 90 days. We are up to 123% percent of GDP and pay out $1 trillion a year just to service what we have borrowed and squandered.

Our enemies are becoming more powerful and uniting in their common hatred of us —especially China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Old allies like Israel are in mortal danger, and once-solid allies like Turkey harbor a visceral dislike of the U.S. The nuclear club is expanding, while our own military is short 45,000 recruits, short munitions and short of talented leadership as we witnessed in Kabul.

We have no border — and no idea what to do with the 11-12 million immigrants that the Biden administration welcomed across a destroyed border — without legality, legal audit, health checks. As 100,000 thousand Americans die from fentanyl and opioids, drugs deliberately sent to America by Mexican cartels .

As our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace? Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming.”

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants? Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptops, social media and Google searches.

The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution. Those who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward classes, whose millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor and abundant natural resources.

The new multibillionaires reinvented the Democrat Party into a concord of the hyper-rich and subsidized poor. Their targets were the relics of a vanishing America who salute the flag, go to church, believe there were still only two sexes, honor America as always far better than the alternative.

The real multibillion-dollar fortunes in America are now in tech and investment. The hierarchies that own and manage Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Chase, Microsoft or Morgan Stanley are now decidedly left-wing Democrats.

Elite hard-left universities are flush with multibillion-dollar endowments They were to be free to apply their bankrupt agendas — open borders, DEI, globalism, climate change gospels, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory, critical race theory — to distant others.

The world at large could surge into a humane and progressive America — without the ossified and illiberal idea of background checks, or legal “technicalities,” where Martha’s Vineyard, the locals immediately rushed to reveal to us concern for the downtrodden; that bus them out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible to where they “belonged!”

Employers “level the playing field” by eroding meritocratic criteria such as calcified SAT tests, background checks, resumes, etc., and began hiring by race, gender and sexual orientation, while at some Ivy League schools and their kindred elite campuses, grades are “adjusted” to ensure 60-80% are A’s.

We are to assume that sweaty truckers should have no problem juicing up their battery engines every 300 miles. Lower-middle-class moms should learn the advantages of high-cost electric stoves and ovens, not natural gas.

The model is John Kerryism. They must avoid messy airports, 9-hour delays due to missed connections and the stuffy, cramped middle seat on modern commercial jets.

The idea of 100,000-200,000 legal immigrants admitted annually and meritocratically, charter schools in the inner city, nationwide civic education, reemphasis on assimilation, integration and intermarriage of the melting pot, wide use of nuclear power — all the things that might make the life of the middle class more secure, more prosperous, and more confident — are deemed corny and passé.

Ben Pecora

St. Joseph