Kanye West: The Trump Economy is Delivering The American Dream

It’s no secret Kanye is a fan of President Trump. Recently, he was greeted with boos for performing a pro-Trump riff as the closing musical act on “Saturday Night Live.” Kanye says his support for President Trump stems from the ability “to do the impossible,” but hardly the first prominent African American suggest as much.

While in law school, former President Barack Obama said that American’s commitment to “individual freedom and mobility” transcends race. Americans as a whole, he wrote, have such “unfounded optimism” their American Dream is to be Donald Trump. In a fateful twist of irony, Trump has done in two years what Obama could not achieve in eight — creating a climate of opportunity for minorities to achieve the American Dream.

Trump and Congressional Republicans have enacted significant tax cuts, repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate, reformed the banking system, and rolled-back a host of oppressive Obama-era regulations.  The outcomes speak for themselves: 4.2-percent GDP growth last quarter, wages are on the rise, and unemployment is at a 50-year low.

For minority communities, the booming economy has been nothing short of a miracle — the wand has been waived and jobs are coming back. African-American unemployment is 6.1 percent, Hispanic unemployment is at 4.5 percent, and Asian-American unemployment is at an astonishing 2.7 percent. Cumulatively, these are some of the lowest unemployment numbers since race-based records began in the 1970s.

In a reboot of his 2012 “you didn’t build that” message to business owners, Mr. Obama has hit the campaign trail taking credit for Trump’s economy. With the mid-term elections on the horizon, it’s important for all minorities to take stock of the gains over the last two years and fully understand the platform Democrats are running on.

Mr. Obama said in a recent speech that Democrats are running on “good new ideas” like “reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts,” “putting a price on carbon” and “Medicare for all.”  These are not “good new ideas,” they are doubling down on old failed ideas.

Perhaps one of the most significant provisions of last year’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was the permanent reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.  According to the non-partisan Tax Foundation “[e]conomic evidence indicates that it is workers who bear the final burden of the corporate income tax, and that corporate income taxes are the most harmful for economic growth – raising this tax rate is not advisable.”

The only thing egregious about the TCJA’s corporate income tax cut was that it was not done sooner.

With respect to pricing carbon, well it’s not a new idea at all. In 2009, Nancy Pelosi passed a carbon cap-and-trade bill out of the U.S. House of Representatives, but Harry Reid just couldn’t get the votes for it in the U.S. Senate despite his comfortable majority. This legislative failure didn’t stop Mr. Obama from attempting to regulate the energy industry at every turn.

Thanks in part to President Trump’s regulatory rollback in the energy sector; the United States is now the world’s top producer of oil, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. This is more welcome news for minority communities. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that in this pro-development climate the oil and gas industry will create another 444 thousand jobs for minority workers by 2025.

As for Medicare for all, well that’s a $32 Trillion boondoggle that is unmoored from economic and political realities.   The fact remains all of these “new ideas” from Democrats would expand the size and scope of government – which has been shown to negatively impact economic growth – and return the United States to the old “new normal” of continual stagnation of the Obama years.

Kanye’s right, President Trump is doing the impossible and for the first time since the Great Recession, “unfounded optimism” has transcended race and faith in the American Dream has been restored.  Mr. Obama’s rhetoric may have provided hope in the past, but Trump’s actions delivered on the change.

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Socialism Destroys

John Stossel
   
Socialism is hot. Famous actors recently made a commercial proclaiming that “democratic socialism” creates some of the best parts of America. It’s “your kids’ public school” (says Susan Sarandon), the “interstate highway system” (Rosario Dawson), “public libraries” (Jay Ferguson), “EMTs” (Ethan Embry), “workers who plow our streets” (Max Carver) and “scientists” (Danny DeVito).

Wow. I guess every popular thing government does is socialism.

The celebrities conclude: “We can do better when we do them together.”

There is sometimes truth to that, but the movie stars don’t know that America’s first highways were built by capitalist contractors. They also probably didn’t notice that the more popular parts of government — public schools, EMTs, snow plowing, libraries, etc. — are largely locally funded.

“They should wake up,” says Gloria Alvarez. She is from Guatemala and says, “I’ve seen the impact of socialism. My father escaped Cuba. My grandfather suffered under Communists in Hungary before escaping.”

This week I turn my video channel over to Alvarez so she can give her perspective on democratic socialism’s new popularity.

“As a child, I was taught to mock socialism,” she says, “but democratic socialism sounded OK. It made sense that government should take care of the economy. Then I watched democratic socialism fail in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua and Uruguay. I learned that every time a country started down the socialist path, it fails.”

But every time a country tries it, even just a little of it, people applaud. When Castro came to power, people cheered because he was going to help the poor and make everyone equal.

But governments can’t plan things efficiently without the prices and constant individual decision-making that free markets provide.

The result in Cuba was economic stagnation and horrible loss of freedom.

Cuban refugees who now live in Miami’s “Little Havana” neighborhood warn Americans about socialist promises. Michel Ibarra told Alvarez, “You don’t see any future. Everything is stagnated. Health care, education — nowadays they’re in ruins.”

Venezuela didn’t learn from Cuba’s problems. They voted in Hugo Chavez when he said that “capitalism is the realm of injustice” and promised wealth would be distributed equally.

But when there was no more money left to take from rich people, he did what many governments (including our own) do: He printed more. That’s caused inflation approaching 1 million percent.

When business owners raised prices to try to keep up, Chavez and his successor just seized many of them. Again, Venezuelans applauded. Taking from the rich is popular. Ramon Muchacho, a former mayor in Caracas, told Alvarez that when Chavez seized businesses, people were “clapping so hard. They were like, ‘Oh, finally there is somebody here making social justice!’”

But government grabbing private businesses creates shortages. Governments aren’t good at running supermarkets. One Venezuelan refugee told Alvarez, “It’s like the apocalypse. No food. No medicine.”

But in the U.S., socialism still holds appeal.

“Plenty of (socialist) countries are nothing like Venezuela,” says comedian John Oliver.

“When I talk about democratic socialism, I am not looking at Venezuela,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders, “not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark, like Sweden.”

So many American politicians now cite Denmark as a socialist paradise that Denmark’s prime minister felt compelled to go on TV to say, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Exactly. Socialism, democratic or tyrannical, means government owns or controls businesses. In Scandinavia, business is largely left alone. Governments don’t even set a minimum wage. Economic freedom rankings give Scandinavian countries high scores on property rights and business freedom.

Those countries do have big welfare programs, but they are funded by thriving free enterprise. In addition, many cut back on their welfare programs after they discovered they were unsustainable or discouraged work.

Think about that the next time you hear celebrities saying “Sweden” and praising socialism.

As one Venezuelan refugee told Alvarez, “You don’t need the government to dictate how to live your life, how much money you should make, how your family should be treated.”

Increased government control rarely helps people. It wrecks economies. It wrecks lives

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How Democrat Rage is Destroying America

A deranged radical movement gets high on its own fury.

“Use the rage,” former Attorney General Eric Holder scream-tweeted. “Get people out to vote and be rid of these people.”

Had President Trump urged his supporters to channel their rage into politics, the quote would have been good for a week of sanctimonious media lectures about his destruction of democratic norms. Not to mention his dangerous divisiveness, the risk of violence and the high price of tea in Outer Mongolia.

But the media has neither the interest nor the inclination to even note Holder’s ‘rage’ tweet. It’s too busy preaching anger, fury and hatred to the same shrieking choir of maddened lefties screaming at the sky, having meltdowns on social media and clawing madly at the doors of the Supreme Court.

"We need to stay angry about Kavanaugh," E.J. Dionne Jr. fulminates in the Washington Post. But that’s nothing compared to the New York Times where the old gray lady is frenziedly distempered all the time.

"Get Angry, and Get Involved," an op-ed screeches. "Tears, Fury or Action: How Do You Express Anger?", an op-ed from a few days before shrills. “Fury Is a Political Weapon And Women Need to Wield It,” a third howls.  That’s a lot of anger from the megaphone of the privileged wealthy northeastern left.

There hasn’t been this much peevishness on Martha’s Vineyard since they raised the yacht docking fees.

The New York Times and the Washington Post are echoing Holder’s call for political anger. Rage will solve all of America’s problems. If the Democrats stay angry, they’ll take over the government and be truly ready to unleash their rage on “these people”. Otherwise known as the rest of the country.

Even as the media preaches the virtues of leftist rage, it warns about the threat of Republican anger.

"Brett Kavanaugh's Anger May be Backfiring," the Washington Post had hopefully speculated earlier. "Judge Kavanaugh is One Angry Man," the New York Times spat. "Kavanaugh Borrows From Trump's Playbook on White Male Anger," it threw in.

But there’s a fundamental difference between Kavanaugh’s anger and that of the media left.

Brett Kavanaugh was angry because he had been falsely accused of rape by the media, with no actual evidence. His life was torn apart. His family, as he testified, had been “destroyed”. Democrats demanded that a 53-year-old man account for every detail of his high school and college years.

His accuser was held to zero standards while he was told to disprove an accusation lacking basic essentials like a specific time, place and witnesses. Had a black teen in the ghetto been hit with equally flimsy charges, the left would have gone into a rage tantrum in support of the accused rapist.

But, unlike Brett, the left wasn’t angry because it had been personally abused. Despite the efforts to pass off paid leftist activists as “sexual assault survivors”, the progressive bilious bile was purely political.

Kavanaugh was angry because his life had been destroyed. The left is angry because it wants power.

Leftist political anger inflicted sadistic torments on Brett Kavanaugh for political reasons. And the media pretends that this political anger is somehow more worthy than that the outrage of its victim.

Obama activists, Senate Dems, Soros social justice flunkies, sleazy lawyers and fake news reporters put a decent man through hell so that they could, as Holder tweeted, “use the rage” in the midterm elections.

The media left demanded to know what right Brett Kavanaugh had to be angry. They mocked his pain, ridiculed his suffering with the venal contempt and snarky hatred that now passes for leftist comedy.

But a better question would be what right does the left have to its endless anger?

Eight years of running the country didn’t leave it any more generous toward its opponents, any less hungry for power, or any less tribal, partisan and furious than it had been in 2007. The left isn’t angry because it cares about rape victims. Not when it’s lining up to buy tickets to Bill and Hillary’s latest tour.

It’s angry because, as Holder tweeted, it wants power.

And it’s willing to destroy every political, civic, cultural, social and moral norm to get it. The left doesn’t believe in norms because it doesn’t believe in any compromise or standard. All it has is its will to power.

Some people have the right to win elections (Hillary Clinton) and others (Donald Trump) don’t. Some justices have the right to be confirmed without campaigns of personal destruction (Democrat nominees like Kagan and Sotomayor) and others (Republican nominees like Bork, Thomas and Kavanaugh) don’t.

And some people have the right to be angry (New York Times and Washington Post readers) and others (Trump supporters and Front Page Magazine readers) don’t. The entitlement of double standards is essential to the leftist quest for power which is about manufacturing perceived inequality in order to administrate mandates of total inequality. Disparate impact justifies affirmative action. If black workers or students underperform, then poor white workers and students must go to the back of the line.

But if replacing the norms of political discourse with livid tantrums is bad, then it’s bad for everyone.

There’s no way to mandate anger as affirmative action. If you insult, deprive and oppress people, they will become angry. And the only thing you can do is get angry right back or outlaw their anger.

The choleric left is working on the latter. But in its conniption fits, it’s settling for the former.

It deprives people of their rights and it responds to their anger with more anger. In its rage, it wipes out every political and social norm it can manage until its opponents are being hounded out of restaurants, fired from their jobs, assaulted on the street, shot at charity baseball games, smeared as rapists, doxed by reporters and staffers, censored on the internet and eavesdropped on by corrupt federal agencies.

There isn’t a legal or political norm that Obama didn’t violate during his time in office. Reporters were spied on. So were Republicans. The IRS and the FBI were used to target political opponents. A man was sent to jail for making a YouTube video. The DOJ was used to go after folks who mocked Obama.

After eight years of political terror, the Democrats have settled into accusing their political opponents of treason and demanding their imprisonment, everything from intimidation to death threats to attempted murder, and trying to destroy a Supreme Court nominee based on the most baseless allegations.

This is what leftists have done to our political norms. And what enrages them about Kavanaugh is not any feigned concern for our political norms, but that our norms survived their tantrums and dirty tricks.

The media claimed that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the Supreme Court by reason of his temperament. That’s rich coming from a deranged political movement getting high on its own fury.

"If you're not angry yet, you should be," a riled New York Times editorial yelps. A forum for readers discusses their struggles “expressing rage” and urges them to turn “anger into action”.

The media used to believe that basing national politics around anger was destructively bad. Now it’s been radicalized enough that it celebrates hate, rancor and rage. As long as it’s leftist rage.

Love can be one-sided. But anger rarely is.

When the media riles up leftist fury, it’s also rousing Republican anger. The Kavanaugh hearings are a clear example of how rage-driven abuses by the left lead to a wrathful reaction on the right.

The Democrats and their media allies furiously preach anger, and their rage is tearing apart America.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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