Give Elizabeth Warren credit; she’s a true proponent of the phrase “go big or go home.” She might end up doing both before her presidential candidacy is through.
Warren has long carried the vibe of somebody who knows she doesn’t really belong in the prominence to which she’s been elevated, and her most recent policy offering, a colossally impractical $52 trillion “Medicare for All” scheme that will bankrupt both public- and private-sector America while throwing some 150 million people off health insurance the majority of them are perfectly happy with, is a monument to political insecurity.
Warren should be insecure. For all her denials, her origin story as a political figure is well known. Warren, who might be one of the whitest people in the Democrat Party, pretended to be a Cherokee early in her career as a means of elevating her career as an academic and rode that fraudulent status as an affirmative-action baby all the way to Harvard University. There, she met the right people, developed an angry-socialist shtick, and screeched her way into the U.S. Senate.
Now she’s cashing in on opportunities again. The Democratic field for 2020 is so devoid of political talent that Warren, at the age of 70, is what passes for fresh and new. When your main competition is Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, that can happen, of course.
Sanders nearly dropped dead of a heart attack earlier this fall, and Biden can barely go a day without making a major gaffe, not to mention the slow-motion train wreck of his poorly hidden foreign profiteering involving his son. Neither will be the nominee, or if one of them is, the electoral slaughter either faces against Donald Trump would be legendary. Forget about polls suggesting otherwise; those are meaningless.
Which means that if Liz Warren could simply shut up and sound sensible for a little while, she’d likely have the nomination delivered to her on a silver platter. The other potential challengers are mostly dropping out one by one; it’s a mercy that we won’t have Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, and Beto O’Rourke to kick around anymore, and soon we’ll be fortunate enough to be rid of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, too. And if Mayor Pete Buttigieg gets enough traction to make it past South Carolina and receives a full vetting by what’s left of the major media, you can bet he won’t last long, either. And for all the positive attention given to Tulsi Gabbard for her recent public sparring with Hillary Clinton, Gabbard has yet to show that she has any real support or organization within the party.
Warren merely needs to bide her time and wait until Biden’s scandals and gaffes finish him off, and then she’d be the “safe” choice against Sanders.
But she can’t do it. She just had to one-up Sanders’ own “Medicare for All” fantasy plan, the cost of which would top $30 trillion and break a federal budget that is already a trillion dollars a year out of whack thanks to runaway entitlement spending. And boy did she pull that off.
Power Line’s Steven Hayward perfectly pegged the stupidity of Warren’s pay-for mechanism, a 6-percent annual wealth tax on billionaires:
Warren’s Medicare-for-All will depend apparently on a 6 percent wealth tax on the super-rich, up from a previously proposed 3 percent. (Funny how the tax rate is rising already.) Here’s a riddle. Let’s just take Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, each worth something like $100 billion in round numbers. I am continually surprised by the number of people who think that Bezos, Gates, Buffett, etc., all have $100 billion in cash in a bank savings account or something — or even stacks of $100 bills in a vault somewhere. The fact that these wealth figures are the capitalized market value of the immense asset base (tangible and intangible) on paper (and only at the margin) is lost on everyone.
So let’s just take a hypothetical annual 3% wealth tax and run it out. Gates, Bezos, Buffett, et al. will have to sell $3 billion worth of their stock holdings—each year — to send their wealth tax check to the IRS.
Question: Just who is going to buy that much stock every year?
And what would the effect of the many forced liquidations have on stock values, not to mention credit markets if Bezos decided to borrow the money every year (and, incidentally, wipe out any income tax liability for the year — heh)?
What her idiotic wealth tax would do would be to crash the stock market, or possibly even worse, allow the Chinese Communist Party to soak up vast swaths of the American capital markets at a deep discount.
It would be tempting to say Warren ought to be seen but not heard. That isn’t quite true, as seeing her is no particular prize. But this is someone whose grating voice presents even more grating policy, and while she could well be the nominee it’s simply implausible to imagine someone with this many bad ideas — and on such a scale! — and such an ignominious background could possibly unseat a successful, if often-maligned, sitting president.
Democrats nominate this woman at their peril. This is not concern-trolling, by the way; at this point anything perilous for the Democrat Party is promising for America’s future.
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An example of just how bad Liz Warren’s ideas are came last week when, after the NCAA announced that it was going to allow college athletes to earn income from their likenesses and autographs, something that if done correctly (yes, that’s a big “if”) could very well resolve the long debate over whether or not those athletes should be compensated beyond their scholarships in a positive way, she had to step in and demand those athletes unionize.
The effect of this would be that the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback would have to forfeit a large share of his name for the benefit of reserves on the swim or soccer teams per the collective bargaining agreement SEIU or some other awful union would negotiate with fellow leftist college administrators, and in no time flat the NCAA would cease to exist.
There is nothing Liz Warren can’t make worse. Nothing.
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Speaking of making things worse, there is this: the Left claims to be the future, but they’re explicitly destroying the future in California.
California isn’t shy when it comes to making the daily headlines. Often heralded as a progressive utopia, the Golden State recently signed into law Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which will change the landscape of the gig worker economy. Stemming from the groundbreaking court decision established in Dynamex West Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, the California Supreme Court found Dynamex’s workers were misclassified as independent contractors rather than employees.
In a unique twist, the court shifted the burden to the nationwide courier and delivery service to prove their drivers were not employees by using the “ABC test.” Under this new test, an individual is presumed to be an employee, unless the employer can prove all of the following:
(A) the worker is free from the company’s control (B) the worker performs work that isn’t central to the company’s business and (C) the worker has an independent business, trade or occupation in that industry.…
According to the Freelancing in America survey, there is a reported 57 million American freelancers contributing an excess of $1 trillion dollars to the economy each year. Recent data shows more than 75% of freelancers are working independently by choice. Due to the accessibility of apps and sites like Upwork, Instacart and Uber, to name a few, people can work on terms they prefer and accept opportunities that feel right for them.
If freelancers are reclassified as employees, they’ll have to trade in their freedom for structure, potentially losing their ability to set their own hours. Of course, that’s only if the company chooses to continue the relationship and convert them into an employee. Lorena Gonzalez, author of Assembly Bill 5, insists the goal of this law is “to create new good jobs and a livable, sustainable wage job.” Supporters emphasize the benefits and protections gig workers will receive such as health care subsidies and a guaranteed $12 state minimum hourly wage, but fail to address the consequences of the new law.
The gig economy is what the world is moving toward, and better than half the people working in that economy say that no amount of money would incentivize them to work for anyone else. So naturally, California is busy killing the gig economy with regulation and litigation, which will deservedly finish off California as an economic powerhouse after it’s already on the ropes for having mismanaged its power grid in a fashion Puerto Rico would be shocked by.
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In a couple of previous entries in this space I’ve talked about what’s going on in Louisiana in just less than two weeks, namely a gubernatorial election in which Republican businessman Eddie Rispone is in a runoff with the Democrat incumbent John Bel Edwards. Rispone clearly has momentum in the race, and Edwards seems a little unsteady — something that was quite apparent when the incumbent resorted to screeching and hurling insults in a debate Wednesday.
And over the weekend Edwards’ camp unleashed a torrent of low-profile messaging, most notably with door hangers and yard signs in predominantly black neighborhoods, accusing Rispone of wishing to eliminate school lunch and food stamp programs, aligning Rispone with David Duke, and howling that Rispone had attacked military veterans after the Republican had suggested Edwards’ dishonesty in office was unbecoming of the honor code at West Point, where Edwards attended and which he has touted as a meaningful background distinguishing him from most in his party.
It’s the dirtiest Louisiana gubernatorial campaign in modern times, which is saying something. The polls show a statistical tie. On Wednesday President Trump will be in Monroe, Louisiana, to rally Republican voters to Rispone’s side.
