The Press-Dispatch
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C-4 Wednesday, April 6, 2022 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 Democrats spend low-income Americans into poverty I have been writing for years about how progressive policies champi- oned by the Democratic Party and served up under the guise of caring about low-income Americans wind up hurting these very communities. The latest chapter in this saga is the newly unleashed round of infla- tion, the worst our country has seen in 40 years. Two important points here are that first, we can lay responsibility for this inflation directly at the door- step of the Biden administration, and second, those being hurt most by this inflation are the very low-in- come Americans that this adminis- tration claims to care so much about. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis focus- es on the disparate impact of infla- tion on different communities, caus- ing the most damage to low-income Americans. According to the report, although one number for inflation is reported nationally, different households do not equally take the brunt of this. According to a Gallup survey from late 2021, 45.5% of all Americans re- ported experiencing "severe" or "moderate" hardship caused by in- flation. However, the story changes dra- matically when broken down by in- come. Among those with incomes of less than $40,000, 70.7% say they are experiencing "severe" or "moderate" hardship. And 46.5% of those earning from $40,000 to $ 99,999 and 28.3% of those earning $100,000 or above reported experiencing "severe" or "moderate" hardship. The report offers various expla- nations about why inflation hits low- er-income households harder. These include the fact that lower-income households have a lower percentage of interest-bearing assets, meaning their world is mostly cash. And in- flation takes its highest toll on cash. Higher-income households have more flexibility in adjusting behavior than do lower-income households. And lower-income households tend to be renters rather than homeown- ers, and rent is more volatile in an in- flationary environment. The tragedy is that inflation is not a surprise attack. We know what causes inflation. Like many physical diseases, we know what their causes are, and those that become victims do so not out of lack of knowledge, but out of irresponsible behavior. Despite the fact that we know the damage that smoking causes, or ex- cessive drinking, or improper diet, people still do it. We know that inflation is caused by pouring excessive money into the economy. If today an apple costs $1, and tomorrow the government prints another dollar, without producing an- other apple, the price of an apple will jump to $2. Economists were widely report- ing that the Biden administration was spending too much money and that this profligate spending was be- ing enabled by the Federal Reserve. Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Sum- mers wrote in The Washington Post last May, almost a year ago, "The in- flation risk is real," noting that the problem is "overheating, and not ex- cessive slack." This in the wake of the Biden ad- ministration's $1.9 trillion relief spending and the beginning of try- ing to pass the $4 trillion Build Back Better program, stopped by the cou- rageous renegade senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, under the leadership of chairman Je- rome Powell, in its statement at the end of last April, was still predicting 2 % inflation and calling the current jump in prices "transitory." In July of 2021, economists Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins Universi- ty and John Greenwood of Invesco predicted in The Wall Street Jour- nal that, "By the end of the year, the year-over-year inflation rate will be at least 6 % and possibly as high as 9 % ." It reached 7.9 % . Yet, in November, President Joe Let them in Millions flee Ukraine. Where will they go? Some want to come to America. But doing that legally is hard. A com- plex system is supposed to determine which people deserve to get in line to get in. "The line is broken," explains Rea- son Magazine editor at large Matt Welch in my new video. For example, America has a nurs- ing shortage, but immigration au- thorities turn away foreign nurses. A Mexican teenager who wants to help build houses might be admitted, but he'd have to wait 100 years. No won- der people sneak across the border. This month, President Joe Biden announced the United States would take in 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. "He could snap his fingers and make it 250,000 if he chose," says Welch, and he should, because "we're a refugee country, and the people who come here tend to be the best." "But they could be the worst," I point out. Even the supposed "worst of the worst," Welch replies, made Ameri- ca better. That's a reference to 1980, when Fi- del Castro let 100,000 people out of jail and encouraged them to go to Ameri- ca. Some were his political opponents, but most were, as a Miami T V anchor put it, "bums off the streets of Hava- na — murderers, thieves, perverts, prostitutes." Castro assumed they'd cause prob- lems in America. But "that was wrong," says Welch. Despite their past problems, "they enriched Miami. They added to the economy and didn't detract from the people who lived there." A study showed that the Cuban exodus raised wages of low-skilled Miamians. Immigrants improved America even when we took in people who'd tried to kill us, and who we had tried to kill. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Car- ter eagerly took in refugees from Viet- nam and Cambodia. Reagan, cam- paigning for the presidency, said im- migrants make us better. "They share the same values, the same dream." "He was bragging on this as a con- servative and American value," says Welch. "It is no longer a conservative value." Today, conservatives are more like- ly to argue against letting in refugees, saying, as Ann Coulter put it, "Things can turn overnight when you're bring- ing in these masses of people from very, very different cultures." Then she joked, "And make it a hate crime to ask them to assimilate." It wasn't entirely a joke. Some left- ists call asking Latinos to assimilate "racist repression." More reasonably, many Americans fear that crime will rise if we let in more immigrants. But that's unlikely. "They commit far less crime than native-born Americans," Welch points out. He's right. Native-born Ameri- cans were 11.6 times more likely to be jailed than A fghan immigrants. "It's hard for us to process that fact," says Welch. "It feels like it should be wrong, but it isn't. People who go to the lengths to get to this country tend to be less criminal than the native-born population." "What if they just feed off welfare? " I ask. "Then they would be the excep- tion," he responds. Immigrants, overall, collect less welfare than na- tive-born Americans. Still, people feel threatened when large numbers of foreigners arrive. Polish people protested when Syrian refugees came to Poland. But now Poles welcome Ukraini- ans. Some call that racism. "Maybe it is racism," Welch re- sponds. "But maybe when someone you speak a common language with, and have a common history with ... lives right next door, it's just a dif- ferent story. Can we spare a moment and say, they've just assimilated an astonishing number of refugees. And they're not in tents in camps, shiver- ing. They're staying with people in their apartments! " That sure seems like a good thing. Soon more refugees will come to America. Welch argues that we should let more in. "America is an assimilation ma- chine," he says. "It's something that we should do more of because we're really good at it! " I agree. As long as people are peaceful, let them come. Editor's note: Stephen Moore is off this week David Harsanyi is filling in his absence. Accusations of left-wing free- speech authoritarianism — wheth- er through corporate restrictions, the state targeting "misinformation," the shouting down of dissent in uni- versities or the canceling of dissent- ing voices — are well-documented. Attempting to even the ledger, liber- als have begun alleging that conser- vatives are engaging in "book bans" in public school districts. The newest outrage on this front comes from a ProPublica investiga- tion in which Superintendent Jer- emy Glenn of Granbury Indepen- dent School District in North Tex- as is taped saying chilling things like: "I don't want a kid picking up a book, whether it's about homosex- uality or heterosexuality, and read- ing about how to hook up sexually in our libraries." ("Minutes later," reports ProPublica, "after someone asked whether titles on racism were acceptable, Glenn said books on dif- ferent cultures 'are great.'") ProPublica repeatedly refers to the efforts of a volunteer commit- tee set up to review titles as a "book ban." This is a category mistake. Public school curriculum and book selection are political questions de- cided by school boards. Schools have no duty to carry every volume liber- als demand. Here are some examples: "The three books the committee voted to remove were 'This Book Is Gay,' a coming out guide for LGBTQ teens by transgender author Juno Dawson that includes detailed de- scriptions of sex; 'Out of Darkness' by Ashley Hope Perez, a young adult novel about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy that in- cludes a rape scene and other mature con- tent; and 'We Are the Ants' by Shaun David Hutchinson, a com- ing-of-age novel about a gay teenager that in- cludes explicit sexual language," according to ProPublica. Now, though I'd always rather see more books on shelves than fewer, Glenn's position isn't unreasonable. If parents want, they can, in only a few minutes, order "This Book Is Gay," "Out of Darkness," or "We Are the Ants" at a reasonable price. But Granbury Independent School District has no constitutional obliga- tion to stock its shelves with novels touching on rape, abortion or trans- genderism; there is no tenet of free expression that demands libraries make books on racial identitarianism available to kids; there's no rule that state schools must keep books on a shelf in perpetuity simply because a librarian ordered it. If such require- ments did exist, do they also have a duty to carry "The Road to Serfdom" or "The War Against Boys"? Why are schools banning Heroes of Liberty or Ben Shapiro's books? Refusing to carry a book is not tan- tamount to the heckler's veto, now regularly used by woke college stu- dents to shut down ideas in institu- tions where ideas are meant to be de- bated. Elementary-school-age kids do not get to choose the topics they learn. Adults do. The debate is about who gets to make that decision: par- ents or administrators? Parents who choose to live in conservative communities are now ex- pected to adopt progres- sive curricula and ideas. The same people bleat- ing about "democracy" are suddenly aghast at the prospect of school boards, elected by par- ents, using the same pow- ers that districts around the country take for granted. Libraries in liber- al school districts aren't — and I can attest to this personally — home to anti-abortion messaging or books about teens finding God and reject- ing gay lifestyles. The cultural condi- tioning that goes on in blue districts is simply relentless. And the kids — unless their parents are wealthy or make great sacrifices — are usu- ally held captive in state schools. Most of these districts never need to remove books (unless, perhaps, we're talking about classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Huckleber- ry Finn") because heterodox titles have never been welcomed in the first place. But why should parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, be empowered in ways that the par- ents of Hood County, Texas, are not? If you don't like this kind of stifling state-run school system, join me in advocating for choice. But you can't have it both ways. David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and author of "Eu- rotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent." The Biden administration is pub- licly proud of its open border policies and seeks to "expand on the historic progress" it has made over the past year to spend even more taxpay- er money in 2023 to process even more illegal aliens into the country and grant them asylum. In his statement for President Joe Biden's $ 97.3 billion Department of Homeland Security budget re- quest, Secretary Alejandro Mayor- kas makes an obligatory reference to safeguarding the American peo- ple and securing our borders against terrorists, transnational criminal or- ganizations, and other threats. However, his department's pro- posed budget clearly shows the ad- ministration wants the American taxpayer to fund more illegal im- migration and provide illegal immi- grants legal status through asylum. Starting at the border, the ad- ministration expressly calls for pro- cessing "non-citizens" (read: illegal aliens) into the U.S. A fter seeking $2 million for additional beacons to light the way for illegal immigration, the administration wants to hire 300 new Border Patrol agents ($ 65 mil- lion) and 300 new Border Patrol "pro- cessing coordinators" ($23 million) to "respond to" the border crisis. The administration explains that these coordinators will "receive and in-process" illegal aliens at Border Patrol facilities, "conduct and docu- ment personal property inventories, perform welfare checks, transport non-citizens with a Border Patrol agent escort, coordinate logistical and additional travel requirements, and perform various administrative duties, such as processing notes and completing paper/electronic file transfers." The administration unironically states that "the additional process- ing coordinators will allow existing agents to focus on their core coun- terterrorism, law enforcement, and security missions." It doesn't care that such processing will generate millions more migrants to illegally cross our border, overwhelming the Border Patrol agents and making a mockery of their core missions. Next, the president wants American taxpay- ers to fund the medical care of the endless flow of illegal aliens. His budget seeks $ 69 million for illegal alien process- ing and care requirements through contracted medical support for indi- viduals in Customs and Border Pro- tection custody at about 63 locations. Additionally, the administration wants $ 32 million for medical claims costs, and $29 million to further bloat the bureaucratic Department of Homeland Security with a new Of- fice of the Chief Medical Officer. To process even more illegal aliens into the U.S. faster, the administra- tion wants $140 million of taxpay- er money to design and construct a permanent joint processing center on the border. That facility would have "dedicat- ed space for multiple agencies and organizations to operate" and "will yield processing efficiencies." To continue assisting the illegal aliens' journey, the Biden adminis- tration wants U.S. taxpayers to fund transporting illegal aliens at the bor- der. It states: "Due to recent high vol- umes of family units and unaccom- panied children at the southwest bor- der, [Customs and Border Protec- tion] anticipates that an increase in flights, ground transportation, and facility guarding will be required to transport and secure" illegal aliens. That will cost Americans an ad- ditional $ 97 million. Again, the ad- ministration tries to justify the ex- pense by claiming it will significant- ly reduce the number of Customs and Border Protection agents and officers required for se- curing and transport- ing detainees, which al- lows those agents and officers to focus on crit- ical front-line law en- forcement operations. It won't acknowledge what Americans easily understand; namely, that Biden's pol- icies of releasing family units and enticing more parents to send their children across the border unaccom- panied cause the high volumes. Preventing such illegal immigra- tion saves taxpayers transporta- tion—and many other—expenses. The Department of Homeland Se- curity has wrongfully delegated a significant amount of what are inher- ently government functions as refer- enced above to organizations in the requested joint processing center. Those organizations include faith- based and other open-border advoca- cy groups. The administration uses taxpayer money to pay these organi- zations through Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. The proposed budget seeks an in- crease of $24 million for the Emer- gency Food and Shelter Program as humanitarian relief. The budget explains this grant program pro- vides food, shelter, transportation, COVID-19 testing, and care associ- ated with recommended quarantin- ing and isolation of this population. Once the illegal aliens have en- tered the U.S., with the assistance of Customs and Border Protection and nongovernmental organizations, the administration seeks to keep them in the U.S. by drastically decreasing de- tention and removals. Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Eye on the Economy By David Harsanyi No, school boards are not 'banning books' Heritage Viewpoint By Lora Ries Biden wants blank check to fund open borders, immigration priorities See BLANK CHECK on page 5 See DEMOCR ATS on page 5 Court