Hard to believe it was just four years ago that President Joe Biden was elected with a promise to unite the country. After the misery of COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns and the riots in the streets of major cities, Americans wanted to be united by a unifying national purpose.
Alas, it never happened. Instead, Biden and his leftist allies were drunk with power and swerved the Democratic Party even further to the left. This alienated half the country, with a ruinous and unpopular progressive agenda on every issue, from running up massive debts to rampant inflation to transgenderism to electric vehicle mandates.
The country was only further torn asunder.
Can President-elect Donald Trump learn from these blunders and be the president who unifies the country by embracing traditional American ideals? The Make America Great Again agenda has some rough edges for sure, but if presented right, led by a message of hope, not malice, Trump can deliver an idealistic policy that the vast majority of Americans can embrace.
The way to do this is for Trump, as we approach our 250th birthday, to strike up the theme of a New American Patriotism. This should be a red-white-and-blue message centered around a renewed appreciation and celebration of American virtue and greatness. What better way to pull the country together? It should be an extension of the Reagan message of America being a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world.
Which we are.
For at least a generation and maybe two, our schools and our universities have denigrated America’s moral standing. We have been lectured that we should be ashamed of our nation’s past, not proud of our founding and our achievements of spreading freedom and free enterprise across the planet.
The hard left magnifies America’s failures — particularly slavery and segregation — not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the United States often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.
Biden was particularly guilty of this, when he falsely accused the United States of being a systemically racist country.
Wrong, Joe.
A strong case can be made that America is today the world’s greatest and perhaps only multiracial success story. The melting pot isn’t just a history-book fantasy. It is real. The rapid increase in interracial and intercultural marriages is making racial distinctions almost obsolete. The rapid rise in incomes of Asians, Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Blacks should be celebrated.
Recent polling suggests that our citizens do appreciate American greatness. The only group that doesn’t is the ideologically isolated cultural and “highly educated” elite. The vast majority of Americans of every race and income category believe America is “the greatest country on Earth.” But many white liberal elites reject this notion.
Another example: White conservatives and Hispanics soundly reject the idea that America is systemically racist. According to Pew Research Center, “about six-in-ten Black adults say racism” is a problem in America today. But it is telling that many white liberals also believe this.
Is there still racism in America? Of course, yes. But it is not “systemic,” and the nation is becoming less racially polarized with every passing year.
America’s inventiveness, our innovation and our technological prowess, which propelled the world into the modern age and helped reduce poverty rates by 90%, are somehow sinister. Damn those fiends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Fortunately, these are views of a class of modern-day intellectuals who never produced anything but instead sow the seeds of miscontent and division. They certainly have the right to hold these blame-America-first ideals, but we don’t have to allow them in our classrooms to pollute the minds of our kids.
This is an extension of the Reagan metaphor of America as a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for all the world. It’s truer today than ever before, and Trumpnomics will make it all the more true.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”
He had that right.
Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.
It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.
The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.
But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.
Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.
Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.
Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue-signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross that the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower income Americans bear to stop global warming.
Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.
It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned the voters against climate crusaders like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.
It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives who are out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government, seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.
The good news is this year’s voter revolts against the radical green agenda are not a vote for dirtier air or water. The air that we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that President Donald Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.
To try to sell middle America on the climate-change agenda of abolishing fossil fuels, the greens peddled bogus arguments that climate change would hurt poor communities most. In reality the financial costs of the climate policies and the paychecks lost were felt by the non-elite.
Democrats forgot to visit the steel-mill construction sites or the auto plants or the oil patch and ask those workers what they thought.
Well, now we know the reality. Americans think their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear-and-present danger. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is titled: “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
One recurring theme that no one in Washington seems capable of learning is that the best way to destroy an industry is to have the government subsidize it.
That lesson came shining through in recent days when Intel acknowledged that it suffered a $16.6 billion quarterly loss. That is more than the entire annual budget of some states.
Wait. Isn’t this the same Intel that is in line to be the biggest corporate welfare recipient of federal aid under the CHIPS Act — the Biden bill designed to make sure that microchips are made in the United States, not China? Intel is first in the soup line to receive $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in subsidized loans. The checks haven’t been written yet, but this will be one of the biggest welfare checks ever written to an American company.
Maybe President Joe Biden, who had a joyous photo op with Intel officials when the bill was passed, should have second thoughts. Intel’s near broke. They were just replaced by their rival chipmaker Nvidia in the Dow Jones composite. Nvidia gets none of the stash from the CHIPS Act, yet its stock price has soared more than five-fold. It has been on a hiring spree and has made hundreds of billions of dollars for American investors — including pension and 401k plans.
Talk about politicians betting on the wrong horse.
It gets worse. Semafor Technology reports that instead of pulling the plug on this near $20 billion aid package, Biden officials and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia — one of the lead sponsors of the CHIPS Act — “have discussed whether the company needs more help.” More?
This despite that Bloomberg reported that Intel has failed to provide federal officials with a viable plan to turn its financial woes around. Why do that when you have an umbilical cord to the federal Treasury?
Ironically, Intel made more than $20 billion in profits before the CHIPS Act welfare bill was passed. So far this year it has lost nearly $20 billion.
What is next? A federal takeover of Intel as happened with failing automakers and banks in 2008?
There is an important lesson here. Many Democrats and Republicans have become enamored with the idea of America adopting a Japanese-style “National Industrial Policy” that would direct hundreds of billions of tax dollars to nurture “strategically important industries” — such as manufacturing, tech products and “clean energy.”
The politicians think they can pick winners and losers better than private investors who allocate funds in our highly efficient multi-trillion dollar capital markets. Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has effectively declared war on the half-trillion-dollar booming private equity industry, which she calls “vampires,” because sometimes they make bad bets.
But maybe it’s Uncle Sam that sucks the blood out of viable businesses. Look no further than Biden’s EV handouts, which have only corresponded with a massive consumer rejection of an industry that was flourishing before Uncle Sam started passing out tens of billions of dollars to the car manufacturers and strong-armed the U.S. auto industry to produce them. Over the past four years the federal government has authorized more than $300 billion in green energy subsidies including wind and solar power grants and yet the amount of power they produce has barely budged — thanks to low-priced natural gas.
If we want American industries to be number one, the government should stop giving them money and the CEOs should stop taking it.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is The Trump Economic Miracle, co-authored with Arthur Laffer.
We all know that math scores have been scandalously trending downward for many years, but the folks in the government should at least be able to count.
We’re finding more and more evidence that the statistics the government is releasing to the public are increasingly suspect and unreliable. It seems like the errors are not random but perhaps manipulated for political advantage. Judge for yourself.
Let’s start with crime statistics. Former President Donald Trump said in the debate that crime is out of control, and Vice President Kamala Harris countered by citing government statistics from the FBI indicating that crime rates are falling.
But Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, finds a surge in urban violent crime since 2019. He writes in The Wall Street Journal that “the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019.” The urban violent crime rate was up 40%, and urban property crime rate rose 26%.
How can the Left keep saying crime is down? A big reason is the FBI figures are only measuring “crimes reported to the police.” More than half of violent crimes are not reported, thanks to what Anderson calls a new era of “lax law enforcement policies” in urban areas. Police in big cities also have an incentive to undercount crimes to make their performance look better.
Next, we have jobs data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics admitted last month that it has overstated job growth by more than 800,000 positions. And in just the last year the government has also overstated job growth by almost 500,000 from the original monthly headline numbers. This is an overcount of over 1 million. In 10 of the last 13 months, the errors were in the direction of announcing too many jobs.
So President Joe Biden gets the gangbuster headlines, and the whoopsie daisy comes later when no one is paying attention.
Those aren’t just random errors. Was the Biden Labor Department finagling the data? Maybe.
Then there was the decennial Census Bureau population count. The numbers from the 2020 census were wildly wrong, as the bureau admits.
In an analysis issued in 2021 called the “Post-Enumeration Survey Estimation Report,” the Census Bureau reported which states recorded overcounts of their population, and which saw undercounts. Florida, Texas, Tennessee and other red states were undercounted by some 1.5 million residents. The overcounting was in mostly blue states like New York and Minnesota. Again, was this just an accident?
The miscount may have cost Republicans three electoral seats. This means the presidential election and control of the House of Representatives may be decided because of an error in counting heads.
These government agencies are supposed to be politically independent, and historically, they have been filled with professionals devoid of bias. But when we see the errors all bending the data in the direction of benefiting one party, one has to wonder if this is deliberate misrepresentation.
I hope I’m wrong and that these are innocent errors. But we live in an era where everything in Washington is hyper-politicized. Elections have become a blood sport. The saying is that “all is fair in love and war.” And now add politics to that.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, “The Trump Economic Miracle,” coauthored with Arthur Laffer, will be released later this month.
President Joe Biden’s time in the White House is mercifully coming to an end. He is now officially a lame duck with six months to go.
Biden was a victim here of a corrupt Democratic machine that — along with a complicit media — thought they could pull off a grand election-year deceit, despite his failing cognitive abilities. The Democratic establishment and a compliant media convinced millions of primary voters that Biden was of sound mind and ready to serve four more years. This lust for power put America in danger.
How could they be so unpatriotic?
So, where will Biden stand in the history books? He was not a failed president because of his declining cognitive abilities. It was his policies that wrecked America.
It is hard to point to a single policy that he got right. On the economy, he was catastrophically bad.
The trillions of dollars of debt he rung up bought nothing. He sent inflation to the highest levels in almost forty years.
The average family lost $2,000 of income after inflation during his reign. More people died of COVID during his presidency than Trump’s — despite the availability of the vaccine.
Interest rates rose. Biden declared war on American energy. He put America back into the Paris Climate Accord—and the rest of the world went on using more fossil fuels than ever. By impeding U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines he played into the hands of our enemies — China and Iran.
Gas prices rose. Small business confidence sagged. Poverty rates rose.
Then there was the sheer incompetence. The bungled Afghanistan withdrawal was a national security disaster. The border became a broken dam with millions seeking to illegally enter the country. The government spent $7.5 billion on electric vehicle chargers and only a handful got built.
Biden gave away hundreds of billions of dollars for an illegal and immoral student loan forgiveness program. He put regulators in charge of key agencies even though — or because — they hate business. A majority of his appointees had no business experience. It showed.
When he departs the White House in the months ahead he will leave the nation poorer, weaker, more divided, more in debt, more vulnerable, and less respected than when he entered office.
This was a man who pledged to unite the country and did just the opposite. He deserves to go down in history as one of the five worst presidents of the 20th and 21st century.
Here is my list starting with the worst: 1) Woodrow Wilson; 2) Herbert Hoover: 3) Jimmy Carter; 4) Joe Biden; 5) Barack Obama.
Now the Democrats want to run Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on board with every Biden policy and helped oversee the worst border catastrophe in modern history.
Just when you thought things could not get any worse.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
