Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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Sanders, Clinton Supporters Can't Condescend to Trump Supporters Print
By Timothy H. Lee
Wednesday, March 02 2016
[T]he income inequality that Sanders and now Clinton bemoan has reached record levels under Barack Obama, the most leftist president in U.S. history.

Regardless of whether one supports Donald Trump, opposes him, adores him, detests him or is indifferent to him, at least one thing is clear.  Trump and his supporters are endlessly slurred as sans-culottes, crude commoners worthy only of smug condescension, both intellectual and moral. 

That smugness is particularly concentrated among Bernie Sanders supporters and Hillary Clinton supporters. 

There's just one problem.   Sanders and Clinton supporters are themselves hoodwinked by crude slogans and unjust policy positions.  It's just that their sloganeering is of the far-left variety. 

Sanders and Clinton supporters would scoff at that suggestion, of course, saturated in their self-regard (at least superficially).  But it's true nonetheless.  And even a cursory perusal of the slogans and policy claims that their candidates deploy make that undeniably clear. 

To illustrate, start with what is perhaps Sanders's most trademark slogan, that our political system is somehow rigged and manipulated by the money of millionaires and billionaires: 

"In the year 2016, with a political campaign finance system that is corrupt and increasingly controlled by billionaires and special interests, I fear very much that, in fact, government of the people, by the people, and for the people is beginning to perish in the United States of America.  We cannot allow that to happen.  Six years ago, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, by a 5-to-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially said to the wealthiest people in this country:  you already own much of the American economy.   Now, we are going to give you the opportunity to purchase the U.S. Government." 

Really? 

Jeb Bush, in addition to his obvious pedigree and other institutional advantages, raised approximately $158 million between contributions to his official campaign and independent groups that supported him, according to The New York Times.  That is over $50 million more than his closest Republican competitor, and more than most of his GOP competition combined.  Yet today Bush is already out of the race. 

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton's $190 million total dwarfs even Bush's.  Yet she finds herself in a real fight for political survival against the supposedly hardscrabble underdog Sanders, an obscure Senator from Vermont whose name and face were almost wholly unrecognizable to the American public mere months ago. 

But question Sanders, Clinton or any of their supporters, and they'll reflexively label money the scourge of our political system, and the Citizens United free speech decision its greatest toxin.  Yet ask them the follow-up question of why Jeb and Hillary then haven't already secured their parties' respective nominations, and you'll be greeted with a blank stare. 

Better yet, ask them:  How is it that if the Citizens United decision six years ago opened up the floodgates to control of our political system, it was this year rather than some previous election cycle preceding Citizens United that Sanders was able to make his current run and Jeb's overwhelming monetary advantage proved particularly fruitless? 

As another example, consider Sanders's other bête noire, income inequality: 

"The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.  The reality is that since the mid-1980s there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country.  That is the Robin Hood principle in reverse." 

That assertion should embarrass any junior high economics student, let alone a U.S. Senator and leading presidential candidate of a major party.  There has been no "transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country."  Even cast in the most generous light, it's true that a greater proportion of total U.S. wealth is concentrated in the upper classes, but that doesn't mean those dollars were "transferred" from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.  The wealthy didn't become rich at the expense of the middle class or the poor.  Rather, Sanders and his supporters either deliberately or ignorantly ignore the fact that total wealth has grown during that period. 

To illustrate that dynamic, imagine that every American's income was instantaneously doubled.  That would obviously be a positive thing, because total wealth for everyone would thereby increase.  But guess what else would happen as a matter of simple mathematics:  income inequality would thereby increase, because doubling $100,000 extends the gap vis-a-vis someone whose $50,000 income was doubled. 

Moreover, Sanders ignores the fact that wealthier Americans pay almost all of the nation's income taxes, and their share of taxes paid is far greater than their portion of income earned.  The top 1%, for instance, earns approximately 20% of the nation's income but pays approximately 40% of the nation's income taxes. 

Additionally, the income inequality that Sanders and now Clinton bemoan has reached record levels under Barack Obama, the most leftist president in U.S. history. 

By the way, Sanders at other times claims that climate change, not income inequality, "is the greatest threat facing the planet."  So he and presumably his supporters can't even make up their minds.  And he labels himself a "uniter" moments after demonizing Republicans, upper-income Americans and entire U.S. industries. 

Clinton, feeling pressure from Sanders on the far left, has accordingly reinvented herself from the 1990s moderate to the crusading "progressive" that she once maligned as "Centrist Hillary" in order to repel his extremist challenge.  Combined, the two have changed the face of the Democratic Party and frightened more moderate Democrats away.  As the dean of American political analysis Michael Barone noted, "The number of moderates and conservatives is down 46 percent in Iowa, 38 percent in New Hampshire and a whopping 64 percent in Nevada." 

Perhaps those more moderate voters find the current field of Democratic candidates too extreme.  Or perhaps they recognize the childishness, crudeness and falsity of both candidates' slogans and platforms. 

Either way, neither candidate nor any of their supporters are in any position to condescend toward Donald Trump, his supporters or any of the opposing party's candidates or supporters, even though at times such condescension seems their very raison d'être.

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