Mark it down; the great bifurcation of America hits another gear today. With Biden inaugurated, progressives will accelerate an illiberal re-set of the US economy, forcing business owners and taxpayers to cope with new strains of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. With the US national debt at $27.8 trillion and US total debt at $82.2 trillion, a FUBAR economy grows near.
While the binary reaction of the election dominates the news (voters either ran a good man out of Washington or purged the GOP of a sociopath), let’s move on and consider the true “insurrectionists” who’ve breeched the Capitol. I am, of course, thinking of progressives with the ways and means to re-make the USA with some very bad ideas (hear stains of Pretty Boy Floyd: “some rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen”). Here are just a few FUBAR magnets.
A national $15-per-hour minimum wage law – Now at $7.25 (average hourly wage is $11.34), progressives think this will help 1.8 million un-skilled workers today and 1.1 million high-school graduates annually. They assume employers will just adopt a starting wage that’s 106% higher and just absorb a 32% payroll increase. Based on a real world business career, $15.00 invites a stampede toward automation (robots and artificial intelligence) and off-shoring. Tell AOC not to trip over the body bags.
The unintended consequences are many, including more unemployed minority youths (and higher urban crime rates). This is true, and there’ll be broken “factory towns” and un-competitive US supply chains that face BMC and Apple to off-shore all production. Less obvious is that $15.00 makes open borders a certainty; thereby infusing an infinite migrant under-class that strains public services (schools, police, and hospitals), right when 72,100,000 baby boomers go on the dole.
Forgive student loans and create tuition-free college – 42,000,000 debtors owe $1.7 trillion, and forgiving their student loans increases the national debt 6.1% (with no return on investment). In the Land of Opportunity and Free Markets, Democrats will create 42,000,000 middle-class cripples, who will forever count on government bail-outs and hand-outs – without ever asking, what can I do for my country?
Biden’s one-two punch includes tuition-free college at $79 billion-per-year – as if the US needs 197,000,000 college-educated adults. In Germany, 28% go to college (33% in America). In fact, Germany is proudly biased toward applied-skills training (e.g. mechanics) and demonstrably more STEM-savvy (science, technology, engineering, and math) than America at the grassroots level. US national debt is now 130% of annual GDP: is this money well spent?
Pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved black Americans – William Darity of Duke University believes the odds are good today for 41,000,000 blacks to each receive $244,000, costing taxpayers $10 trillion. I’ll leave the moral debate to others, but the economic argument against is powerful. The US economy cannot fund it, because a $10 trillion hand-out isn’t within America’s $21.3 trillion GDP. Plus, conventional wisdom holds long-term prosperity is best earned (e.g. Ben Carson studying medicine).
After four years of Bidenomics, the US national debt will be $41.8 trillion. The math is frightening: to the current $27.8 trillion, add $1.7 trillion COVID stimulus, $1.7 student-loan forgiveness, $10 trillion reparations, plus four years of free college ($316 billion) and Jobamacare ($300 billion) to achieve $41.8 trillion national debt. This is why smart Republicans hate Trump: by buggering up the Georgia senatorial run-offs, he put the
.
