Biden-and-company are looking for redemption through destruction, or as disgraced foreign correspondent Peter Arnett once incorrectly penned about a Vietnam village, “We had to destroy it to save it.” They are, of course, looking in all the wrong places.
For conservatives, this is sad and ironic truth because under the cover of American success, many of us have become pawns in the crescendoing progressive upheaval. As Lloyd Billingsley states, “In America alone, our political class has exploited the pandemic to override the rights of the people, cast themselves as heroes, expand government, and justify vast amounts of spending… Freedom is seldom lost all at once, and once lost, is difficult to recover.”
We look around and what becomes sadly but abundantly clear is that through “progress” our world has morphed into something barely recognizable to us, and by several standard deviations worse. I have always been an optimist but am confronted with an increasingly pessimistic world every new day.
First, consider that our nation’s financial regulators have set the stage for hyperinflation and a consequent drop in the value of the dollar. As John Greenwood and Steve Hanke explained in the Wall Street Journal, “Our monetary bathtub is overflowing…by the end of 2024 the money supply will grow another $5.1 trillion. Out of the total $10.6 trillion in new money, real GDP growth will drain roughly $1.4 trillion. Another $1 trillion will flow down the money demand drain. Since the amount of money flowing into the bathtub far exceeds the two outflows, the excess money in the tub—around $8.2 trillion—will hit the inflation overflow drain.” Inflation consequently, will be persistent.
A recent piece by the Wall Street Journal editorial board analyzes the Biden tax sh*# show calling it a tragi-comedy of errors. ”One day it’s an increase in tax rates on corporations and the affluent. But wait, that doesn’t have the votes. How about a carbon tax? That won’t fly either. Hey, there goes Jeff Bezos. Let’s tax him and 699 other billionaires. It polls well. Everyone hates billionaires! Oh, but that may be unconstitutional. We still need money, so let’s try a 15% corporate minimum tax—though be sure to exempt investments in green energy and other pet progressive ideas.“
Second, the progressive nirvana during Obama ignored the building housing crisis for years, allowing easy lending standards so that everyone could buy a home, whether or not they could actually afford it. This led directly to America’s boom and bust housing market cycle that Mark Calabria of the CATO Institute told Congress, increased the number of vacant housing units from 15.6 million in 2005 to a current level (2011) of 18.7 million, leaving a dearth of buyers and the value of homes plummeted. We are now back in a housing boom cycle, voraciously consuming American wealth since so much less can be taxed by Biden.
Third, the professions are emphasizing wokeness amid declining professional competence. Kenin Spivak reveals how the AMA’s “Equity Plan” has fallen into Marxist lockstep with Critical Race Theory. Instead of American medical schools demanding the best and brightest, they have set the composition of medical students to read like those in Biden’s administration. Sady, we know how incompetent that is--adopting a radical agenda that places health care at risk by subordinating merit, individual empowerment, professional standards, and the Hippocratic Oath to “first do no harm.” Rachel Levine was recently chosen as the LBGQT poster child for the Biden Administration, becoming the first transgender assistant secretary to the Department of Health and Human Services. Chucky Schumer announced, “another important milestone for the American LGBTQ community”…but America?
The legal profession has been on a woke roll, even before the Obama years, becoming a shill for every woke fantasy you can possibly imagine. It has gotten so bad that a good friend, a CPA and tax attorney, resigned his membership in the ABA because of their efforts to abet the undoing of President Trump. The U.S. Constitution now takes a very back seat to race, gender and socialistic manifestos.
A distant second is the accounting profession that now feels the need to celebrate its commitment to gender equality by flaunting a three woman triumvirate of firm partners on the cover of Accounting Today and a morbidly obese female partner on the cover of the Journal of Accountancy. There is no mention of tax accountants’ real role which is to preserve for their clients the money that they have earned or inherited. Apparently, it’s simply show-and-tell to gain industry woke cred.
Fourth, America’s learning systems have become repressively woke, and consequently broke from the top down. John D. Salter has pegged, the progressive Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Combine CASEL with the K-12 teachers unions and you have a daily-double of progressive indoctrination.
Of particular note and cause for deploration is America’s higher education establishment. As a professor in higher education for 42 years, I can personally attest to the academy’s corruption, both in my liberal arts department and the dearth of potential in most of today’s college students. I was derisively referred to as the “token Capitalist” simply because I believed my job was to educate both undergraduate and graduate students for careers that would make them economically independent of their parents and our government. God forbid, right? Today, college students are all but guaranteed at least a passing grade because universities care less about truly educating students and more about taking their student loan money and firmly implanting their post-Marxism ideology.
Victor Davis Hanson has characterized our universities, save for a few exceptions like Hillsdale College, BYU, Regent University and the like as, “largely responsible for the current $1.7 trillion in aggregate student college debt. Such a staggering encumbrance is not just the concern of higher education, but affects the entire country in manifest ways, well aside from emboldening our global rivals and enemies. Even communist China is spending far more of their higher education budgets on the sciences, math, and liberal arts than therapeutics, social justice crusades, and diversity, equity, and inclusion audits…The country itself is experiencing a glut of the over- but not necessarily well-educated: history’s menu for radicalized and angry youth who feel they are properly credentialed with various letters after their names but suspect they lack the training and skills to enter the workforce, be productive, and earn commensurate good pay.”
“The racialized civil strife of 2020-21, and indeed the entire woke and cancel-culture revolutions originated ultimately from campus fixtures who never suffer the real-life consequences of their abstractions. And meanwhile, China, the greatest threat that the United States has faced in 30 years, smiles at our universities’ importation of most of the bankrupt and suicidal ideas abroad, from Frankfurt School nihilism and Foucauldian postmodern relativism to Soviet sclerosis and Maoist cultural revolutionary suicide. “
Biden is looking for redemption in all the wrong places. As the late, great Tom Petty once said, “Redemption comes to those who wait, forgiveness is the key.” Living down sins of the ancient and even not so ancient past is a fool’s errand. We can only be responsible and, therefore, guilty for the things that happen on our watch. The ship is going down hurriedly on the Biden watch, but he can’t comprehend it.