Economic Stagnation, Downturn In Middle-Class Incomes, and Our Declining Position On The World Stage
In January 2017, the man that would eventually become an attorney for the so-called “Ukraine whistleblower” sent a cryptic tweet.
“The coup has started,” he wrote.
And perhaps it had…
In the months and years that followed, America dealt with the Russia-Mueller investigation, followed by the Ukraine impeachment scandal… And now, on the eve of the 2020 election, the so-called “coup” has been thrown into high gear.
The Speaker of the House just unveiled the most political of political moves. Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she intends to create a commission to evaluate President Trump for removal from office under the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Three weeks ahead of a presidential election, the Speaker of the House wants to use our 25th Amendment – which allows the vice president and Congress in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation – to remove the president from office.
The similarities between the political antics of the Left and those of Banana Republics I’ve spent years reporting on are growing eerily similar.
The similarities between the political antics of the Left and those of Banana Republics I’ve spent years reporting on are growing eerily similar.
Pelosi’s idea is to create a new “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office” in an effort to “ensure effective and uninterrupted leadership in the highest office.”
I suspect this idea will backfire in an epic way. Instead of focusing on the issues at hand, she’s signaling that she’s willing to effectively steal the votes of the millions of Americans that chose the president before they have an opportunity to decide for themselves. Once again, Pelosi’s proving her critics right when they say she and her party care nothing for the individual and only for bureaucracy and big government.
It’s a given that her proposal will not see the light of day. She’d need the Senate and the Vice President’s approval… and that’s not going to happen.
So, if you’re Pelosi, why do it?! I mean this is a rather big deal, right? The Speaker of the House is leveling a pretty hefty charge… suggesting Trump’s not mentally capable or healthy enough to be president?
Perhaps she wants to distract from the president’s efforts to declassify all documents surrounding Hillary Clinton and her server, and the role of our intelligence community and the Obama Administration in the scandal?
Or maybe she’s just trying to appeal to her party’s base?
The “let them eat ice cream” modern-day Marie Antoinette still doesn’t understand why so many Americans voted for Donald J. Trump in the first place.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear to me… The “let them eat ice cream” modern-day Marie Antoinette still doesn’t understand why so many Americans voted for Donald J. Trump in the first place. Nor does she understand why any American might vote for him again.
(It really IS the economy, stupid.)
Abandoned in the Rust Belt
For all Joe Biden’s bluster on how he cares about the middle-class, in his 47 years in politics – including eight in the White House as vice president – his policies themselves have created little for the constituents he purports to care so much about.
He insists he’s a champion of civil rights, yet, as Kamala Harris so devastatingly pointed out in the initial Democrat debate, he campaigned alongside a segregationist to prevent the integration of schools by busing black students into white neighborhoods.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said, her voice quivering. “That little girl was me,” Harris said.
It was a powerful moment in the debate…
Biden also insists he’s in favor of ensuring the best education for American students, yet he’s so beholden to the teachers’ unions (a pitfall even President Barack Obama avoided) that he’s unable to campaign on behalf of the students themselves. He currently continues his crusade against school vouchers, a tactic that penalizes poor and middle-class students, especially during COVID-19, with so many of their schools closed.
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And when it comes to the working class? Well Biden’s promising loyalty… But his record, and the record of the administration for whom he worked, show otherwise.
Last week, while campaigning for white middle-class votes in Pennsylvania, Biden pledged his loyalty to union voters, telling them, “There was an expression when I was growing up: ‘You go home with them that brung you to the dance.’ And labor brought me to the dance a long time ago.”
And then he honed in on the elephant in the room… the reality that this group, like so many hard-working Americans, have felt neglected by their party.
“A lot of people around here voted for Donald Trump the last time, and I get it,” the former vice president added. “I hear them.”
Well, he better keep listening…
Because so many people in this so-called rust belt part of the country – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin – assumed that Biden and Obama and other party elites had given up on them.
And it certainly seemed as though they had…
In 2010, at a fundraising event for Russ Feingold in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Biden told the people gathered for the dinner they just had to accept the “new normal.” “There’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession,” he told voters.
That same year, America heard Obama tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that this slow growth, lower-wage economy was just “the new normal.”
It was a message the Obama administration tried to sell America… The jobs were just gone – for good.
According to a Herald Tribune, in 2012 Obama asked the late Steve Jobs at a private dinner, “What would it take to make iPhones in the United States?” To which Jobs allegedly said, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
And the Obama-Biden administration? They accepted that… So much so that by July 2014, Obama was trying to pitch his “dose of reality” to Michigan voters, telling them the jobs lost in the auto industry would not be coming back. “They are casualties of a changing economy,” he said on a trip to the region. “And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and industries to replace the ones we’ve lost, and of preparing our workers to fill the jobs they create.”
Even as late as June 2016, it was a message Obama kept on pitching… At a televised town hall event in Indiana, he told a steel worker union official “some jobs are just not going to come back.”
And yet today, Biden is singing a very different tune…
His new platform is manufacturing. In August, he said that he didn’t “buy for one second that the vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past.”
Except of course, that was his OWN message. And President Obama’s message. And the Clintons’ message.
So, what changed?
Donald J. Trump.
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The Disappearing Middle Class
Listening to the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, you would hear, feel, and sense a difference. All of a sudden, there was someone on the scene who said, “To heck with that… we CAN bring jobs back!” To a population that had experienced the worst of ‘08 and was being led to believe that this was simply the hand they’d been dealt… Trump offered HOPE.
And who doesn’t need a little of that?
“Make America Great Again” was and is an aspirational slogan… It’s nostalgic. It speaks to a simpler time when you didn’t need a PhD to feed your family.
“Make America Great Again” was and is an aspirational slogan… It’s nostalgic. It speaks to a simpler time when you didn’t need a PhD to feed your family. When a mother could stay at home to care for her family and children full-time. When men felt like they had a firm place in the world as providers. And when there were two cars, a picket fence, two kids, and two vacations a year. Life was simple. And life, it seemed, was great…
Whether or not it actually was is debatable and an issue for another column, but one thing is clear… People long for the simplicity of yesteryear. And they long for the assurance that if they work hard, they’ll be rewarded.
Throughout the Obama years, we saw the antithesis of that. Hard work didn’t equate to a return. In fact, Obama’s economic policies – combined with an overly aggressive Federal Reserve – created a greater class division than America had ever seen… with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer… And the middle class? Well, the middle class kept on getting squeezed.
You could think of it a little like an hourglass, with the rich on top, the poor on the bottom, and a small squeeze in the middle.
Throughout Obama’s tenure, we saw the market grow in value while our economy barely moved. Incomes for the poor and middle class declined… And most importantly, there was a sense of despair. Depression. A sense that America had lost its place and position in the world.
Between the economic stagnation, the decline in middle-class incomes, and our declining position on the world stage…
America was ready for change.
Between the economic stagnation, the decline in middle-class incomes, and our declining position on the world stage…
America was ready for change.
So, when Trump emerged onto the scene for the 2016 elections promising a life America so dearly missed, he captivated our imaginations… our American spirit. Optimism… a belief in the American dream… a belief in fairness and meritocracy… these are values Americans hold dear.
And under Trump, Americans regained hope that some middle-class manufacturing jobs might return. In actuality, only about 500,000 manufacturing jobs were added – a growth trajectory that is similar to that of Obama’s tenure. But the distinguishing factor here was… aspiration.
By telling people to essentially “forget about it,” the Obama-Biden era party elites had signaled to middle America’s jobs that their livelihoods weren’t worth saving.
By telling people to essentially “forget about it,” the Obama-Biden era party elites had signaled to middle America’s jobs that their livelihoods weren’t worth saving. Understanding how it would “play in Peoria,” as they say, was both Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s failure.
Biden – who does have a better feel for the American middle class that his predecessors – needs to ensure the rust-belt voters that he really does have their back.
While voters may question Biden’s loyalty, Trump’s base is confident that he is 1,000% behind them… And for better or for worse, he is. Trump seems to take it personally when a CEO mentions job cuts, and his base senses that.
Meanwhile, incomes for the poor and middle class, per a new Fed report, grew more than they have in decades during 2016 to 2019. Middle-class wages during Trump’s presidency grew by nearly 7% and the poor saw growth of 9%. Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows the majority of Americans saying that even despite the coronavirus pandemic, they are in a BETTER place than they were four years ago.
Filmmaker Michael Moore got it right when he predicted that Trump would win in 2016… Moore noted that when Trump came to the Detroit auto club and stood up there in front of the auto execs and told them he’d slap 35% tariffs on any products coming in from Mexico…
It was an amazing thing to see… No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Moore’s most notorious line was: “Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F-U recorded in human history and it will feel good.”
The Left Doesn’t Trust the Vote
He was right in his prediction. And it did feel good for people. Maybe too good. So good that the Left and the mainstream media, in a state of total shock after election night, just couldn’t stop their attacks.
In the last four years, we learned that President Obama’s intel community spied on the Trump campaign, effectively weaponizing the intel community to go after Trump. That led to the Russia investigation, which was two-plus years of our lives and $30-plus millions of our taxpayer dollars. Then they impeached him over a phone call…
And now, they’re trying to use the 25th amendment to go after him because he’s got COVID-19?
Come on…
It should backfire. The Dems have just proven they are incapable of leading and having any kind of normalcy. If you believe in America, then you believe in the people to vote him out… But quite possibly, these Leftist leaders don’t believe in the people, nor do they trust the people…
They don’t trust us to vote. And they don’t trust us to provide for ourselves.
They don’t trust us to vote. And they don’t trust us to provide for ourselves. As such, the Biden-Harris economic plan will mean new ideas and new ways for the government to spend your money. All this, just as our economy shows signs of recovery. Free school, free health care, free housing, free basic income… high taxes and income caps… Wow.
When you combine the freebies with the sky-high taxes, along with the increased limits on freedom of speech… it’s starting to feel a little USSR style.
So before we throw out our capitalist system – the very system that has led us to be the most prosperous nation on earth – let me share some important facts about where we are right now…
We’re fighting back against this virus, economically…
The Atlanta Fed predicts 33% growth in the third quarter, the highest in history… as unemployment declines to 7.9% – a level the Fed assumed would be at least double at this point in time.
It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement. And we need more of it.
But instead, Biden and Harris – who are still refusing to tell us if they’d pack the court – are falling in line with the squad and promising higher taxes on income, businesses, and investments…
They say, “Oh don’t worry about it, it won’t matter unless you make more than 400k…” Everyone needs to worry about it because of the massive ripple effect their anti-growth policy will have on the rest of the economy.
First of all, Biden wants to nearly double capital gains to 40%. He again says, Don’t worry about it unless you have more than a million bucks.
The problem with this (frankly) lousy policy is, regardless of income levels, an increased tax will dampen investment… Everyone would sell before his policy goes through, and then whatever is left would become illiquid… because if you take it out, you’ll get taxed.
Honestly, this isn’t rocket science.
Meanwhile, Biden also wants to take business tax from 21% to 28%. This will kill small-business owners, who are the lifeblood of our economy. That increase will not hurt the big corporations – they’ll find a work around, as they often do.
And then there’s the ripple effect, which a recent University of Chicago study predicts will cause median household income to decline by as much as $8,000… Because when there’s less investment and small mom-and-pop businesses are paying more in taxes, there’s less money in the economy and everything gets suppressed.
Unfortunately, Biden and Harris want the power and the money in the hands of the bureaucrats and the elites.
I prefer to see the money in the hands of the people… the people that earned it. And this is the fundamental difference between the Left and the Right at this moment.
I prefer to see the money in the hands of the people… the people that earned it. And this is the fundamental difference between the Left and the Right at this moment.
But the Left wants Trump gone… And to accomplish that, they’ve turned this election into “good versus evil,” with good being Biden, and evil being Trump, of course. And that was their goal all along. Remember the Time magazine cover that painted the new president of the United States with devil ears?
The media wants him gone… And the Left is determined to kick him to the curb (even if it means using the 25th amendment).
So the question now is, Do the people want him gone?
We are still the United States of America – with a government that is for the people, by the people.
The people will decide.
And for the record, Michael Moore thinks Trump could win again.
Trish Regan is one of America’s brightest and most recognized conservative economic thought leaders. An award-winning journalist, Trish is the host of “American Consequences Podcast with Trish Regan,” a weekly radio show dedicated to economic and political truth, as well as a columnist for several publications.
