“Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism have been solved.”
– The Barbie Movie
August 22, 2024 – The DNC continues their media production this week, and the silly economic proposals keep coming…
The “Greatest Hits” already include:
- A proposal that the Feds provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 for down payments.
- Ending the money that “greedy” grocery companies are earning (1-2% profit margins, mind you) with price controls.
- And a proposal to tax unrealized gains in assets to ensure that billionaires pay their “fair share.”
The third proposal is particularly fatuous.
The idea presumes that a citizen’s private property – even citizens who are billionaires or 100s of millionaires – is actually the property of the Federal Government. Some clever (unthinking) strategist on the Democratic hit list for economic morons has suggested that the government should have the right to tax it whether said citizens plan to sell their assets or not.
In November 2023, we were challenged by a reader to dissect Biden’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year because he, she or they didn’t believe we understood government finances. That, or we were just opposed to the Biden White House spending habits for political reasons. One of those two. Or both.
We took up the challenge. But, shocker, didn’t get too far…
The linch pin for the entire economic budget was a tax on unrealized gains. Let’s repeat that: unrealized gains. That also means before the government can tax your wealth… the government determines what your assets will be worth in some fantasy-world future transaction.
Unreal. Literally. And metaphorically.
Now its part of the party platform. Their grandiose plan for social spending requires an unconstitutional tax to make the numbers work.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s unconstitutional, let’s remember that as of August 3, 2024, only six of the 12 spending bills have been passed.
Since 1977, Congress has only passed only all 12 spending bills four times in a single year – 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997. Every other year, including this one, Congress has had to pass a continuing resolution to keep the lights on in the buildings encompassing their sprawling enterprise.
A continuing resolution doesn’t require it to sell its own assets. No, that would be absurd. They either have to successfully steal it or… as is most commonly done issue more T-bills and borrow it.
And what’s this? Yesterday we also learned, they’re suddenly the party of freedom. Heh. Reason’s Liz Wolfe, this morning:
Party of freedom? Democrats make it hard for me to own a gun. They make it hard for me to get a gas stove or use the dishwasher I want to. Last year, the Democrats in my city tried to implement a tax on every single Amazon deliverythat makes it to my doorstep. They keep legalizing weed, then failing to permit dispensaries so that they can operate within the bounds of the law, so I still buy on the black market. During COVID-19, they made gathering for Mass essentially illegal, forcing capacity and distancing restrictions on people who simply wanted to worship. Don’t get me started on the taxes I’m forced to pay—money I earned, but can’t direct as I see fit—or the fact that, once I start homeschooling my son, I’ll have to ask for permission from the state.
So forgive me if I’m not buying the whole “party of freedom” line that they’ve just now decided to drop. If you define freedom as “the ability to cheaply and easily procure an abortion,” then Democrats are great on it. If you define freedom as “the ability to migrate across borders without proving one’s identity or putting a plan in place to secure legal residency,” then Democrats are great on it.
Devi has yet to speak to the press. The hypocrisy is palpable 1,ooos of miles away. One wonders how she’ll reconcile all the absurd positions the party has performed this week.
No matter. For now.
The Democratic Party faithful have fallen in line in Chicago are eating the whisper of economics up. When they get together in one place to collectively fantasize about eating the rich.
They’re making sh$t up so fast, it’s hard to keep up, really. We found ourselves having this recurring thought: Are we really so fiscally deaf, socially confused and economically illiterate as a nation as to elect a new president and vice president on social media vibes alone?
Really?! What will our friends say?
Let’s find out.
“As an Australian observer of the mess that America has got itself into,” writes John from Down Under. “I can understand why your correspondent is voting while holding his nose. Your comments are fair and reasonable, but until the electorate realises that the Trump tent is a Fake building and the social media is for the illiterate commentator there is not a lot of intelligent thinking going on. Carry on, and good luck.”
“I will keep subscribing,” John adds for good measure.
We also turn to the Scottish-born American historian Niall Ferguson, writing for The Free Press. Niall looks at the vacuous devotion to Harris and tries to balance it with the destructive potential of Trump… and draws his own conclusion. Enjoy ~~ Addison
The “Barbenheimer” Election
Niall Ferguson, The Free Press
I am sorry. I’ve seen this movie before. Or rather, both of these movies. Last year.
On one side, it’s:
I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
. . . Imagination, life is your creation
Come on Barbie, let’s go party.
And on the other, it’s:
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Except that this isn’t Barbie versus Oppenheimer, the great moviegoers’ dilemma of 2023. It’s the presidential election of 2024, the nationwide executive search for the leader of what we once called the free world.
Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, the architects of the Harris campaign have managed to create their own Dream House. This one isn’t bubblegum pink, but it has the policy equivalents of a pool party. “Why Kamala Harris’s New Politics of Joy Is the Best Way to Fight Fascism” is such a perfect headline. (I wonder which liberal propaganda organ will risk “Strength Through Joy”?)
While Kamala reads scripted lines, strikes staged poses, and avoids all press in a campaign of vacuousness unsurpassed in the history of American politics, on the other screen we have a different docudrama: The dark, fissile energy of Donald Trump, reviving his nightmare vision of American Carnage and taking it global.
Trump’s interview with Elon Musk last week was very Oppenheimer not just because of its tone, but because one of his central themes was the risk of nuclear war. “The biggest threat is not global warming,” Trump told Musk. “The biggest threat is nuclear warming because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power. . . . Let me tell you, it can lead to World War III. That can lead to World War III, the Middle East can lead to. . . . We have numerous places that could end up in a World War III right now for no reason whatsoever.”
The prospect of obliterating whole cities made Oppenheimer think of the Bhagavad Gita. The memory of nearly having his own head blown off also gave Trump a religious feeling. “For those people that don’t believe in God,” he said, “I think we got to all start thinking about that. You have to. I’m a believer now. I’m more of a believer, I think.”
Yet the most striking thing about Trump-Musk was the former president’s unconcealed and not very Christian indignation at the threat Harris now poses to him. “She is terrible,” he complained near the end of the conversation. “She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her in Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing.”
Even if you detest Trump, you can understand his frustration. Trump got shot a month ago, and leapt to his feet yelling, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”—the image even looked like Iwo Jima. Compare and contrast with the preposterously flattering portrait of the Democratic candidate as Disney princess, gazing serenely toward a future of government-issue American joy.
Speaking to Musk, Trump mostly stuck to his talking points: illegal immigration; inflation, which is “eating [Americans] alive”; and foreign policy. In Trump’s telling, the Biden-Harris years have been characterized by a succession of failures of deterrence: in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, and in the Middle East. Here’s Trump’s version:
. . . it’s so sad, October 7, because it should have never happened. . . . It’s so sad when you look at Ukraine. It should have never happened. . . . Russia would never have attacked Ukraine and we’d have no inflation. We wouldn’t have had the Afghanistan mess if you think of it. We wouldn’t have had Afghanistan. . . . I know Putin very well, I got along with him very well. He respected me. It’s just one of those things, and we would talk a lot about Ukraine. It was the apple of his eye. I said, “Don’t ever do it. Don’t ever do it.”. . . . I said. . . . “Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s going to be a bad day. You cannot do it.”
If you strip away the usual exaggeration and oversimplification, you cannot deny that he’s hitting the right issues. There has been a surge of illegal immigration on the southern border since 2020. There was a burst of inflation, though it culminated in 9 percent headline consumer price inflation two years ago. And the Biden administration’s failures of deterrence are undeniable, regardless of what Trump did or didn’t say to Putin.
For we do not live in a Barbie world. We live in a world of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction. But Trump’s solutions to the problems he identifies are not plausible.
The problem is that Trump’s solutions to the problems he identifies are not plausible. The deportation of tens of millions of undocumented U.S. residents is never going to happen. “Drill, baby, drill” is a nonexistent solution to an inflation problem that has receded. And reviving American deterrence is hard to imagine without a significant increase in military expenditure—which, in turn, is hard to imagine if Trump follows through with his commitment to make his tax cuts permanent. (When Trump says, “We’re going to be giving tremendous incentives,” that’s presumably what he means.)
The other policy proposals that came up with Musk had the same implausibility. Trump wants “to close up the Department of Education.” He wants to create a vast “iron dome over us” against hostile nukes. And so on. None of this feels like it’s going to win over swing voters in Pennsylvania.
So all that is left is to go after Harris’s record, which Trump dutifully did, calling her “a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco” and then an attorney general who “destroyed California.” Not that you’ll read much about that record in the press. As Trump pointed out:
“What’s happening overnight is they [are] rewriting history and making Kamala sound like a moderate, when in fact she is far left, far, far left. . . . She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero. Now all of a sudden, she’s saying, ‘No, I really want to see fracking.’ If they got in, the day she got in, she’ll end fracking. . . . [And] she is so anti-Israel. . . . She’s not a smart person, by the way. She can’t have this conversation.”
Maybe so. But what if she doesn’t need to have such a conversation?
In Charlotte Alter’s Time magazine profile of Harris, we have a near-perfect example of a political candidate in a Barbie world. “Suddenly,” gushes Alter, Harris “seems matched to the moment: a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon, a defender of abortion rights running against the man who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a next-generation Democrat running against a 78-year-old Republican.” You might have found it a little fishy that Harris was handed the nomination on a primary-free plate after Biden was defenestrated. That’s not the way Alter tells it: “She inherited a campaign infrastructure and policy record from her predecessor, but the energy is all hers.”
If the Harris campaign tells Time that “this race is as much about feelings as it is about fundamentals,” Alter’s happy to go along with it, uncritically accepting “Harris’s brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican ‘weirdos.’ ”
In the opening sequence of last year’s Barbie movie, all the vacuous doll’s vacuous friends praise her vacuously. Sound familiar?
Peter Buttigieg: “I don’t think anybody expected her to be so flawless.”
David Hogg: “Elections come down to vibes, and Kamala has got the vibes right now.”
UAW president Shawn Fain: She’s a “badass woman.”
Senator Cory Booker: “She has gone from being a Padawan to a Jedi master.”
Charlotte Alter (that’s right, the journalist writing the piece): “Now the moment is finally hers.”
Here’s the original passage from the Barbie script:
BARBIE ISSA Everybody—turn to the Barbie next to you, tell her how much you love her. Compliment her!. . . Reporter Barbie, you can ask me any question you want.
BARBIE RITU How come you’re so amazing?
BARBIE ISSA (giggling) No comment! No seriously, no comment.
[Barbie Issa looks to the Barbies around her:]
BARBIE ISSA I love you guys!
[A big ceremony, very official, proper. A Barbie Dignitary (in another flouncy ballgown) presides:]
BARBIE DIGNITARY The Nobel Prize in Journalism goes to “BARBIE!”
There are a few mainstream journalists left who are still capable of feeling shame.
Writing in the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang candidly confessed to his qualms.
“Does it actually matter,” he asked, “if Kamala Harris stands for something?”
Kang goes on:
“She has not explained what, exactly, happened in Washington after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate; or why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris Administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.”
Her campaign website, he admits, “does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs.”
But then again, reflects Kang, “I suspect that a majority of voters don’t really care about the answers to those questions, at least not in any serious way. On the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala.”
And off we go again.
In the words of Will Ferrell as Mattel CEO in the Barbie movie: “We sell dreams, imagination, and sparkle. And when you think of sparkle, what do you think after that? Female agency.”
That’s the Harris campaign in a nutshell. As Alter helpfully points out in Time: “Mass enthusiasm for a woman is nothing new: Harris’s run comes just a year after the blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Swift.”
The Harris campaign told Time that “this race is as much about feelings as it is about fundamentals,” as the magazine uncritically accepted “Harris’s brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican ‘weirdos.’ ”
Moviegoers will remember that last year, Barbie crushed Oppenheimer at the U.S. box office by a factor of roughly two. Christopher Nolan’s film, in fact, came in fifth, trailing not only Barbie but also The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Look at the latest polling, or the latest prediction market data, and it’s tempting to conclude that Kamala Harris is going to inflict the same kind of defeat on Donald Trump.
Then again, in U.S. politics as in Hollywood, winning the popular vote isn’t what matters. Oppenheimer, after all, won seven Oscars back in March. (Barbie won one, for best original song.) Yes, Harris now leads Trump in the popular vote and has pulled ahead of him in several of the swing states where Trump was leading Joe Biden. But not by much. Not by enough, despite Nate Silver’s model, to be sure of victory in the Electoral College Oscars. Because I remember the probability of victory Silver gave Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election (71.4 percent).
There are still 11 weeks to go—and Americans are nothing if not moody. Indeed, Barbie and Oppenheimer exemplify the twin poles of America’s mood swings. Just weeks ago, it was the exuberant Republican convention in Milwaukee everyone was talking about. There was even a whole theory about an epochal “vibe shift” from left to right. Who knows what next week’s vibe shift will be?
Maybe nothing will happen in these 11 weeks that requires the vice president to take a policy stance, beyond reiterating her conviction—the only one to which she has unwaveringly adhered—that women should have the right to abortions on demand. But I would be very surprised. I mean, it’s 2024. When did we last have a day without news?
Consider three things that should worry the Harris campaign.
First, inflation may be down, but the labor market is showing the first signs of slowing and that will be especially painful in those swing states—Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—where 40 percent of people live in counties with per capita GDP already below its pre-pandemic level.
Harris’s first contribution to the economic policy debate has been revealing.
Speaking in Raleigh, NC, last Friday, she promised “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food” (it came out as “gauging”). It would be hard to think of stronger proof that Harris is indeed an unreconstructed California progressive than her decision to back price controls, since ancient times the policy of choice for the economically illiterate. Even The Washington Post was dismayed. “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘communist,’ ” wrote Catherine Rampell, “maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.” (She quickly recanted.)
Next up is geopolitics. As the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett told Bret Stephens last week, Iran is not only the octopus whose terrorist tentacles — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and all the rest — extend across the Middle East. It is also “a de facto nuclear-threshold state.” The region teeters on the brink of another war, this time between Israel and Hezbollah, but Harris’s sole contribution so far has been to move the U.S. government even further away from supporting Israel’s right of self-defense than it has already moved under Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration’s mantra about de-escalation is no longer heeded in Kiev. The most extraordinary development of the month has surely been the Ukrainian invasion of Russia. I still have to pinch myself when I see photographs of Ukrainian troops taking Russian prisoners near Kursk.
Wasn’t this precisely what Putin said would lead him to use his nukes?
Finally, let us not forget homeland security, even as we stand in seemingly senseless TSA lines. In a troubling article for Foreign Affairs, Graham Allison and Michael J. Morell quoted blood-curdling warnings—from FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the commander of U.S. Central Command, General Erik Kurilla—that the threat to Americans from foreign terrorist groups has risen sharply since October 7.
You may not be interested in Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it is interested in you. And the lack of effective controls on the U.S. southern border is almost certainly being exploited by this and other groups.
There was, indeed, a certain grim symbolism in the fact that, earlier this month, a terrorist plot was uncovered in Vienna that was directed against a concert by Taylor Swift, whose stage outfits owe at least some debt to Barbie.
For we do not live in a Barbie world. We live in a world of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction. We live in a world with five major wars (conflicts with an annual death toll of around 10,000) and dozens of smaller conflicts. We live in a world with more than 117 million forcibly displaced people, of whom 49 million have been driven abroad. We also live in late-Soviet America, where the cost of paying interest on the federal debt now exceeds the defense budget.
This election may be over for the journalists who have signed up uncritically to spread the vibes for the Harris campaign. But for the voters in the real world, it surely is not. Like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer’s world—with the difference that the next Manhattan Project, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, will not be the kind of government program Democrats still love.
Come to think of it, the next Manhattan Project will probably be run by Elon Musk.~~ Niall Ferguson, The Free Press
So it goes,
Addison Wiggin,
Grey Swan
