The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1427054
C-6 Wednesday, November 10, 2021 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg House progressives detach from reality Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat left- wing "squad" member in the House, attacked Democrat Sen. Joe Man- chin for his opposition to the multi- trillion-dollar Build Back Better Act. Manchin is "anti-Black, anti-child, anti-woman and anti-immigrant," ac- cording to Bush because of his op- position to this mega-spending wel- fare bill. If Bush wants to identify politi- cians hurting Blacks, children, wom- en and immigrants, she needn't go further than to look in the mirror. Bush represents Missouri's 1st Congressional district, which in- cludes a big chunk of St. Louis. The district is 49 percent Black. According to Census Reporter, me- dian household income in the district is $50,163, compared with a U.S. av- erage of $ 65,712; the poverty rate is 16.4 percent, compared with a nation- al average of 12.3 percent; and 41 per- cent of households are headed by a married couple, compared with a 60 percent nationwide average. Only someone who thinks history is irrelevant would believe that plung- ing low-income Americans deeper in- to government dependency will free them from the cycle of poverty and underachievement. The Build Back Better Act, with child care subsidies that progres- sives like Bush are touting as critical for women and low-income families, is effectively a rebirth of the old wel- fare program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, that devastat- ed Black families by penalizing mar- riage and work to qualify for welfare. According to University of Chica- go economist Casey Mulligan, the child care subsidies are structured such that single parenthood will be rewarded and marriage punished. Per Mulligan, a single mother earning 75 percent of median in- come in her state would pay nothing for child care. But a married couple each earning 75 percent of median income would pay full price. Further, that "full price" will cost more than today because the bill reg- ulates how much child care providers must be paid — "equivalent to wages for elementary educators with simi- lar credentials and experience." Mulligan estimates this would in- crease the cost of child care provid- ers by some 151 percent. He also notes that various subsi- dies in the bill for Medicaid and "af- fordable housing" will discourage work because subsidies disappear as earned income increases. Mulligan summarizes saying the result of all this will be "more kids will come home from a regulated child-care facility to an unmarried parent who is out of work." The Commerce Department just reported horrible third-quarter re- sults for the American economy, showing growth at a sclerotic 2 per- cent. We're now seeing inflation at high- er rates than we've seen in years. Larding down with trillions in ill-conceived welfare spending while holding hostage legitimate work of government — the trillion-dollar in- frastructure bill — is not what we need now, and even Democratic vot- ers nationwide are seeing this. President Joe Biden's approval rat- ings are crashing. But so are those of Congress in polling among Dem- ocratic voters. Chuck Todd got to the heart of the matter in last Sunday's Meet the Press, asking his panel, "Is the elect- ed Democrats in Congress farther to the left than the rank-and-file Demo- cratic voter? " Despite mixed replies from his panel, the answer is clearly yes. In February, Democrats polled by Gallup gave Congress a 61 percent approval rating. In the latest results in October, this was down to 33 per- cent. And, of course, Biden's approv- al is now 15 points lower than where he stood at the beginning of the year. Biden is showing himself to be a very weak leader. The very narrow margin of Dem- ocrat control in the House is giving disproportionate power to the pro- gressive caucus. They are causing this havoc. Their president should be getting Military spending We're out of A fghanistan. Good. We should have gotten out before. Our involvement there was Ameri- ca's longest war, longer than the Civ- il War, World War I and World War II combined. We accomplished little good and plenty of bad. Tens of thou- sands killed. A trillion dollars spent. Now the Taliban wear American uniforms and fly American planes. Hawks say, "If we just stayed a lit- tle longer…" It's not true. Yes, there had been a drop in vi- olence in A fghanistan. But that did not mean we were winning. The Tali- ban were just waiting because former President Donald Trump announced we were going to leave. Now what? Will we continue to try to police the world? Probably. Washington defines U.S. nation- al interests so broadly, says the Ca- to Institute's John Glaser, "that virtu- ally no region of the world (is) con- sidered nonvital." This grandiosity started after W WII. "No longer would we canon- ize George Washington's warning against entangling alliances," writes Glaser. "Or extol the counsel of John Quincy Adams that America 'goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.'" Now we repeatedly go abroad, searching for monsters. Many Americans believe the mil- itary and our use of military force shrank after W WII and after the So- viet Union collapsed. But it's not true either. "The United States has engaged in more military interventions in the past 30 years than it had in the pre- ceding 190 years altogether," Glaser points out. We post soldiers all over the world: 50,000 in Japan; 35,000 in Germa- ny; 26,000 in South Korea. Why? Is it America's job to protect South Ko- rea from North Korea? Taiwan from China? Israel from Iran? We spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. We can't afford to keep doing that. We can't afford to keep funding de- fense contractors' cost overruns. In my new video, Cato defense an- alyst Eric Gomez explains why Con- gress never does anything about that. "A lot of members of Congress don't want it fixed," he says. Defense contractors cleverly pro- duce weapons in different states. Lockheed Martin boasts that F-35 parts are made in 48 states. "If you're a member of Congress," says Gomez, "they're spending that money in your district ... You don't want that taken away from you." An earlier draft of President Dwight Eisenhower's "military-in- dustrial complex" speech called it the "military-industrial-congressio- nal complex." In A fghanistan, America spent $43 million to build a gas station (normal ones cost $500,000). Why? Some central planner decided this gas station should dispense natural gas, even though almost no cars can use it. At least in A fghanistan our gov- ernment did try to limit American involvement. Instead of having U.S. soldiers fight ... forever, America would train and equip A fghans so they could defend themselves. But that didn't work either. The U.S. spent $200 million trying to teach A fghan soldiers to read. Five years later, half still couldn't read. The problem, says Gomez, is that American officials don't "have any clear sense of where things are go- ing to go, what our objective is." "We have an objective," I push back. "Make the world safe for de- mocracy." "In A fghanistan, we had objectives of making it safe for democracy," says Gomez. "We had objectives of turning Iraq from Saddam Hussein into a democratic and rich society. The record has not been very good." No. Now the military budget exceeds $700 billion, and the Defense Depart- ment says it will spend more mon- ey fighting climate change because the "climate crisis" is an "existential" threat. Give me a break. Spending patterns are driven by A good friend who owns a major au- to dealership in the Dallas area recent- ly told me he typically has about 500 to 1,000 cars and trucks on his lot. Now, he has 15. That's how severe the sup- ply chain problem has become. He said people are buying cars over the sticker price. You usually haggle down the price for a new car. Now, you haggle up the price! Welcome to Bidenflation. But now, the Commerce Depart- ment has reported that the high-fly- ing U.S. economy with a 6.5 percent growth rate for the first half of this year has crash-landed in the third quarter with an anemic rate of just 2 percent growth. Those lousy num- bers predate the supply chain crisis that emerged in October. At the start of the year, the Philadel- phia Federal Reserve Bank predicted seven percent growth. So, that's quite a downgrade we are seeing. Car sales, for example, are way down because of microchip shortag- es. The carmakers also don't have the metals they need to make the cars. Don't try to buy a used car ei- ther. Those prices in many parts of the country are up by more than 20 per- cent — even for clunkers. Many gro- cery stores now have empty shelves of produce and vegetables. It means we have slow growth while inflation has hit its highest level in more than a decade at 5.6 percent. In addition, consumer confidence in the economy has tumbled. All of this is a bit reminiscent of the economy of the 1970s. Does anyone re- member the term stagflation? Those under the age of 40 probably don't even know what that is, and they've certainly never experienced it upfront and personally. Here's the definition from Investo- pedia: "Stagflation is characterized by slow economic growth while at the same time accompanied by rising pric- es (i.e., inflation)." Under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, years of persistently high inflation triggered a surge in unemployment. That then led to the term "misery index." The sum of the inflation rate and the unem- ployment rate. It exceed- ed 18 percent in Carter's last year in office. And then it was, "So long, Jimmy." With the economy sagging, Car- ter lost a landslide elec- tion to Ronald Reagan. The lesson here is straightforward: The witches' brew of slow growth and higher pric- es is the ultimate curse for politicians. Inflation, which had been relatively tame for 40 years, has been a cascad- ing problem in President Joe Biden's first 10 months in office. The consum- er price index suddenly galloped from less than 2 percent in the Trump years to 5 percent and 6 percent in the past four months. The cross-your-fingers hope by the Federal Reserve Board and the White House that the stick- er-price rises at the grocery store, the restaurant and the gas station were on- ly "transitory" have melted away like an ice cream cone on an August af- ternoon. Inflation is accelerating, and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, pre- dicts hyperinflation. Let's hope he's wrong, but there is no plan in Washington or by the Fed to slow it down. In fairness to Biden, some of the steep rises in prices were bound to happen due to the depressed prices in 2020. As consumer spending popped like a cork from a champagne bottle when lockdowns ended and the econ- omy returned to normal, there was a natural demand response to reopen- ing. But nearly every Biden policy has made inflation and the economic slow- down worse. The absurd $1.9 trillion blue-state bailout bill passed in March marinated the economy with $100 bills as if dropping like confetti from heli- copters. According to Casey Mulligan at the University of Chicago, the ex- pansion of welfare programs such as food stamps and unemployment ben- efits (not tied to working) is paying people up to $75,000 for not working a single hour in many states. Big surprise that the labor force participation rate had shrunk and com- panies had 11 million jobs they couldn't fill. Last month, nearly 200,000 peo- ple dropped out of the job market. No wonder that the Job Creators Network says that small-business opti- mism has seldom been low- er than today. When you treat profit- able companies like villains, the own- ers go into protection mode. Why invest when the politicians in Washington are threatening to tax away your earnings in the name of pay- ing your "fair share"? Businesses that make profits are now demonized as en- emies of the people in this new liber- al anti-growth crusade. They keep for- getting that without employers, there are no jobs. The income redistributionists who seem to be driving the Demo- cratic Party agenda will soon learn that their pixie dust economic doc- trine called modern monetary the- ory, which posits that Congress can spend and borrow ad infinitum, is a gi- ant hoax. When the political class be- gins to plunder company profits indis- criminately in the name of "fairness," the profits and the businesses start to disappear. So, if Congress and the White House are afraid of the forces of stag- flation, as they should be, what should they do? The first and most urgent step to contain stagnation is to defeat Biden's $4 trillion spend, tax, borrow and print money scheme. This week's GDP report is a five- alarm siren warning that the Biden debt binge has to stop now. Hopeful- ly, temporary stagflation doesn't turn into runaway stagflation. Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks. He is also a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a Washington Examiner columnist. When I was nine years old, my par- ents separated and then divorced. When I was 15, I announced to my mother that I no longer would go to church. Apparently, in doing so, I was liv- ing out a common phenomenon. As marriage declines, so does reli- gious belief, John Van Epp and J.P. De Gance point out in their new book Endgame: The Church's Strate- gic Move to Save Faith and Family in America. This is not merely a psycho- logical issue, the authors argue, but a deeply spiritual one. Marriage is central to both the Christian and Jewish faiths: Scrip- ture begins with the marriage of Ad- am and Eve and ends with the mar- riage of Christ and his bride, the church. In the Old Testament, marriage is used repeatedly to symbolize God's love for his people, the Jews. In the New Testament, marriage is a symbol of Christ's relationship with the church. Paul, in Ephesians 5:25, commands: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it…" Yet the majority of churches in the United States seem to believe that the work of building and maintain- ing healthy marriages is best left outside the church. The authors of Endgame es- timate that church- es spend as much as $4 billion to $ 6 billion on youth ministry, but spend only a fraction of that on marriage or re- lationship ministry. Three out of four churches do not pro- vide relationship class- es or resources for mar- ried couples, and more than 90 per- cent of churches do not offer a min- istry for single adults. At the same time, the number of Americans who say they belong to a religious body has dropped precipitously in the past 20 years alone—from 70 percent in 2000 to 47 percent today. "In the fight for faith and family in America," the authors argue, "we have reached the endgame." De Gance and Van Epp make an airtight case for why the church must radically change its thinking about its role in nurturing and sup- porting the family. Not only must the church engage in the recovery of marriage if it is to survive, but there is also a pastoral imperative: Ameri- cans feel lonely and isolat- ed on an epidemic scale, and generational loneli- ness is worsening. Depression, anxiety, and suicide have risen dramatically. Loneliness is not the only problem: Sex and parenthood out- side marriage have led to a whole array of ill effects, including abortion, the spread of sexually trans- mitted diseases, a rise in poverty lev- els, and behavioral problems. As Patrick Fagan wrote back in 2001 in a report for The Heritage Foundation: "Throughout the so- cial science literature, we find an ever-present correlation between a breakdown in the family and increas- es in child poverty, juvenile delin- quency, child abuse, poor academic performance, addictions, and health problems." The good news, as De Gance and Van Epp point out, is that the church has a record of stepping up in the midst of civilizational crises: When Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Continued on page 7 Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore The wheels are coming off the Biden economy Heritage Viewpoint By Katharine Cornell Gorka Healing the family and saving the country Continued on page 7 Continued on page 7 Court