The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1429961
B-6 Wednesday, November 17, 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 Bad news continues for President Biden. His approval numbers are now lower than every president since Truman except for Trump. Critics of the administration are equating Biden's performance to that of Pres- ident Jimmy Carter. Carter was at the helm during the 1979 energy crisis when gas was in short supply and prices soared, sum- mer was hot, tempers were short, and inflation ran 12 % . Carter gave a nationally televised speech on Ju- ly 15, 1979, addressing the ener- gy shortage and related issues. He called his speech "a crisis of the American spirit." Political opponents seized upon his speech, dubbing it the "Malaise" speech. Ronald Reagan used it as a campaign rallying cry and won the White House in 1980. Critics of the president are dusting off the "Mal- aise" moniker to award it to Biden. Is this a fair comparison? There are many serious political, social, and economic issues con- fronting America. The government's response to Covid has morphed in- to a Constitutional crisis. Abortion rights and the war on the unborn continue as the federal government resists states' rights to protect the unborn. The antagonistic tension be- tween Russia and China continues with forewarnings that things could accidentally go hot and nuclear at any moment. Inflation is on the rise and the Fed says things will get worse be- fore they get better. Biden allows our southern border to become overrun with foreigners trying to enter the US illegally. He is more concerned with the border crises in Poland than Texas. Gas and energy prices are rap- idly rising, shortages of consumer goods are widespread, and the only sound heard from the White House is, what problem? If Biden is being compared to Carter and his "Mal- aise" we should re-examine Carter. Carter became our 39th Pres- The political center is gone In a new USA Today/Suffolk Uni- versity poll, President Joe Biden's ap- proval is down to 38 percent. Which looks pretty good compared to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose ap- proval now stands at 28 percent. Democrats have just been repri- manded by voters, with the upset victory of Republican candidate and political novice Glenn Youngkin in the governor's race in Virginia, an al- most upset victory in New Jersey by Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, who came within 2 percent of the vote of winning, and revolts in school board elections na- tionwide, pushing back against crit- ical race theory and COVID-19 gov- ernment interventions. It's not rocket science that Biden and his party have lost touch with the voters who elected them. Large per- centages of these Democrats did not vote for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cor- tez and the "squad." And they are un- happy with Biden's capitulation to the far-left elements of his party. Respected Democrat strategist Mark Penn has a piece in The New York Times urging Biden to shake off these progressives and reconnect with the moderates in his party. This is what Bill Clinton did, he reminds readers, to save his presidency in the mid-1990s. Former Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal offers up a similar mes- sage in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Both parties, after victories, tend to relinquish too much influence to the "extreme" elements in their par- ty, he says. Statesmanship, the mes- sage goes, means understanding the need to move to the middle. But there are problems with this sage advice. One, voters themselves are moving away from the middle. And, two, the reality of culture and politics of the country is things keep moving left. The only difference be- tween when Republicans are in con- trol and when Democrats are in con- trol is how fast it happens. Yes, it's true that Bill Clinton saved his presidency by turning to the mid- dle. But then, in 1994, according to Gallup, 25 percent of Democrats self-identified as liberal, 25 percent conservative and 48 percent as mod- erate. Today, per Gallup, the percent- age of Democrats identifying as lib- eral has doubled to 51 percent; the percentage identifying as conser- vative is half what it was in 1994 — 12 percent — and the percentage of moderates has dropped from 48 per- cent to 35 percent. At the same time, Republicans have become more conservative than they were in 1994. In 1994, 58 percent of Republicans identified as conservative. Today, it's 75 percent. Statesmanship and compromise are only realistic when most voters, of both parties, are generally on the same page regarding our core val- ues. But what happens when the common ground of core values is lost? I started writing several years ago, noting the similarities of what is hap- pening today in our country to where things stood in the 1850s when the institution of slavery was tearing at the soul of the nation. Where is compromise about whether slavery should be accepted or not in a country that is supposed to be about freedom? Some insist- ed yes, some insisted no, and every- thing exploded into a civil war. What is happening today is sim- ilar. In a Pew Research survey from last November, 80 percent of Biden vot- ers and 77 percent of Trump voters agreed with this statement about vot- ers from the other party: "Not only do we have different priorities when it comes to politics, but we funda- mentally disagree about core Amer- ican values." Culturally, there is no more room for compromise about differences of opinion regarding those accept- ing and those rejecting biblical, tra- ditional values regarding marriage, family and sex than there was about slavery Fiscally, government involvement in the lives of Americans is off the charts. In 2020, government spend- ing at federal, state and local levels was already at 43 percent of our GDP. With the Democrats' spending blow- out, government will be headed to- ward taking half our economy. Let parents choose As Virginia's gubernatorial elec- tion drew to a close last week, Dem- ocrat Terry McAuliffe brought in teachers union president Randi We- ingarten. He thought that would help? I suppose he, like many progres- sives, believes everyone thinks the way he does. "I'm not going to let parents come into schools and ... make their own decisions," he'd said. "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." That's the political attitude: Gov- ernment runs things. We, the ex- perts, know what's best. Parents as "customers" who make choices? Nonsense. I hope his defeat means Americans are figuring out that such politicians are enemies of progress. Years ago, I was surprised to discover that NYC's failing public schools spent $20,000 per student. Teachers had been holding protests where they shouted: "Fund schools! We don't have enough money! " But they spent $20,000 (now near- ly $ 30,000) per student! At 25 stu- dents per class, that's $500,000 per classroom! Think what you could do with that money: hire five good teachers? Where did the money go? No one in the bureaucracy had a good an- swer. Governments make money ... disappear. I researched different education systems and did an ABC T V spe- cial called "Stupid in America." It showed how American students do worse than kids in other countries. I suggested that parental choice would help. A fter all, competition brought us better phones, cars, su- permarkets, etc., while holding pric- es down. Competition forces provid- ers to constantly try new things to please their customers. But not in government schools. This year, most private and Cath- olic schools opened, while "public" (government-run) schools often stayed closed. Monopolies kill innovation. When public schools began, most Ameri- cans worked on farms. That's why schools took a summer break, so kids could help on the farm. Today, fewer than 2 percent of us work on farms, yet nearly every government school still takes the summer off. "Unionized monopolies like yours fail," I told Weingarten (when she still would speak to me). "It is the children who you are failing." "We are not a unionized monopo- ly! " she snapped. "Folks who want to say this ... don't really care about kids." But I do care about kids. Of course, government-run schools are a monopoly. Don't like your school? Tough. School is ter- rible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. Suppose we bought groceries that way: no more supermarkets offer- ing choices. We vote on whether we want meat or fish. Whichever wins — that's what everyone eats. When I interviewed Weingarten, I pointed out that civil service and union rules meant it could take 10 years to fire a bad teacher. "We'll police our own profession," she said. "I'd like to police my job, too," I re- sponded. "But that's not how it works in life! " Apparently, I was wrong. When it comes to public education, it's still how things work. A fter "Stupid in America" aired, and millions watched, Weingarten held a protest outside my office. Hun- dreds of teachers carried signs,and shouted, "We are here to demand an apology from '20/20's' John Stossel! " I surprised them by coming out of the ABC building to let them yell at me personally. Teachers told me I'd insulted them. Some said (probably correctly) that I had no clue how hard their jobs were. So, Weingarten came up with a plan to educate me. "Teach for a week! " she shouted at me, through the loudspeaker. "We've got high schools; we've got elementary schools." The teachers liked that idea. They started chanting, "Teach, John, teach! " I think I surprised them again by saying, "OK! " Be honest. Does anyone really be- lieve that any of these new schemes that President Joe Biden conjures up every few days to "tax the rich" will cause Bill Gates, Elon Musk or War- ren Buffett to pay more taxes? It's clear why the superrich are a tempting target to, as Biden puts it, "pay their fair share." We have bil- lionaires with almost unfathomable riches. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, calls their wealth "obscene." Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has at- tained a wealth that exceeds some countries. Amazon's stock is now worth close to $1 trillion. He owns perhaps 15 percent of the stock, which would mean his net worth is somewhere near $150 billion. But as he has correctly pointed out, it also means that he has collectively cre- ated some $ 850 billion of wealth for all of the millions of people who own Amazon stock — which is probably close to one-third of all Americans. That's not all. Amazon has add- ed, conservatively speaking, $1 tril- lion of consumer surplus for all of the tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world who go online and click to buy prod- ucts on Amazon. A "consumer sur- plus" is the value of a product that people buy beyond the price they pay for it. If I can buy a can of tennis balls for $ 3 but I derive $10 of plea- sure from playing with those balls, that $7 dif- ference is my net bene- fit. Multiply that by the billions of purchases people make from Am- azon every day. Or consider Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. He is a billion- aire many times over, but he provides an in- tricate search engine that finds for you nearly any information you want in about five seconds. And the mir- acle here is that he charged you ZE- RO for it. So maybe there is an elu- sive free lunch after all. Progressives like Rep. Alexan- dria Ocasio-Cortez argue that peo- ple like Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg became multibillion- aires thanks to government pro- grams, such as schools and roads. Maybe. But it is arguably more ac- curate to say that they could reach their empire of riches because the government didn't stand in their way. There's a good reason eight of the 10 most valuable companies in the world were sprouted here in the land of the free, the U.S., and not in China, Japan, Germany or France. The Democrats argue that rais- ing income, capital gains or wealth taxes on these rich people to as much as 55 percent, or half their annual earn- ings, is good for the econ- omy because it will help pay for social programs to help the poor, such as free child care. But if you had to choose someone to in- vest your money in a way that will reward you with a high payoff, who would you choose? An entrepreneur with a proven golden touch like Musk or a politician like House Speaker Nan- cy Pelosi? Higher tax rates on the rich are al- most sure to make our society poor- er, not richer. The government can't even run a railroad, stop $75 billion of unemployment fraud or build a health care website. Then there is the question I asked above: Will the rich really pay more if the top tax rate goes to 55 per- cent on millionaires? Doubtful. Bil- lionaires like Buffett and Gates hire squadrons of lawyers, lobbyists and tax accountants who find or invent new loopholes in the tax system to shield them from the IRS tax col- lectors. This is why over the last 50 years, higher tax rates have gener- Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al- Kadhimi survived an armed drone attack Sunday on his official resi- dence in Baghdad that wounded sev- en of his guards. The attack, which involved Irani- an-made drones, was an assassina- tion attempt that sends a message of intimidation to Kadhimi and any oth- er Iraqis who pose a challenge to the influence of Iran and its proxy mili- tias inside Iraq. Although no group has claimed re- sponsibility for the attack, Iraqi se- curity officials blamed Iran-backed Iraqi militias, which increasing- ly have challenged the authority of Iraq's weak coalition government. They claimed that Kataib Hezbol- lah ("Brigades of the Party of God") and Asaib Ahl al-Haq ("League of the Righteous"), two of Iran's most powerful Iraqi surrogates, carried out the attack. Those two Iraqi Shia militias also have launched many drone and rock- et attacks on U.S. military person- nel supporting the Iraqi armed forc- es. In January 2020, the United States retaliat- ed for repeated attacks on American troops in Iraq by launching a drone strike that killed the command- er of Kataib Hezbollah and his Iranian master, Gen. Qassem Soleima- ni, the leader of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Quds Force, which trains and equips Iran's network of regional proxy groups, has transferred thou- sands of drones, rockets, and mis- siles to Iran-backed groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. Iraq's Growing Internal Tensions The drone strike against the prime minister's residence is undoubtedly linked to rising political tensions in- side Iraq. Kadhimi, a former journal- ist serving as Iraq's intelligence chief before he was appointed prime minister in May 2020, has clashed repeat- edly with pro-Iranian mi- litias whose influence he has sought to reduce. Although Kadhimi has made little progress in whittling down the power of the militias, Iran's mili- tia proxies were stung by their disastrous showing in Iraq's Oct. 10 elections, in which they lost about two-thirds of their seats in Iraq's parliament. Although their political coalition once enjoyed considerable Shia polit- ical support due to the militias' role in defeating ISIS, many former sup- porters turned against the militias because of their role in fueling cor- ruption and shooting peaceful pro- testers who sought to reform Iraq's Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Continued on page 7 Continued on page 7 Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore There they go again with the 'tax the rich' ruse Heritage Viewpoint By James Phillips Points to Ponder By Rev. Curtis Bond Iranian drones cast intimidating shadow over Iraq People chose bondage over freedom Continued on page 7 Continued on page 7 Court TEACH