Suppose I were a progressive strategist, high up in the rarefied air of the top-flight Biden transition team, planning for the glorious future of progressivism. What would I be thinking?
Well, of course, I couldn't be that person, because I would not want to be part of a team that was going to turn America into mush.
See, I see our Big Problem this way. The problem is that, as far as big government is concerned we've gone about as furr as it can go.
But government can never say, OK, bit of a cock-up on the spending front; we are going to have to cut all your favorite programs so that we can heal the nation's economy. As in, no, really, it's serious this time!
Exactly. No politician is ever going to get elected, or long stay in office, with that kind of a program. In reality, of course, it would have been a good idea not to pass Social Security, and instead implement a mandatory national savings program. If you are going to force workers around with a FICA payroll tax why not force them to put the money in a 401K at Fidelity or Vanguard? But it's too late for that. Because the folks that paid their payroll tax all their lives expect to get their gubmint pensions: I certainly do.
It's Chantrill's Law, last of the Four Laws. Government programs don't work because you can never reform them. The whole point of a government program is to bribe the voters. But the voters do not take kindly to being unbribed.
So now we have all these programs sucking the life out of the economy, but you can never unsuck them. Of course, with Medicare and student debt we have created monsters where the cost of health care and a college education have ballooned into the stratosphere as a consequence of the subsidies to the health-care professionals and the education professionals. It's like mortgage subsidies, peasant. If you subsidize mortgages so that peoples' mortgage payments go further and more people can qualify for mortgages, why, the result is that you bid up the price of housing, and you are back where you started, if you are lucky. No kidding!
But there is a problem. You can't get people to vote for you just because you gave them loot and plunder a couple of elections ago. You have to rejustify government every election cycle with new glorious vistas of the future. This is why the Democrats are pushing the notion of climate change.
On the one hand, climate change is a physical necessity, because we are burning the Earth up with the burning of fossil fuels. So we have to act now. On the other hand it puts money into the pockets of millions of educated gentry supporters of the regime. Only problem is that it will be paid for in reduced income for the vast majority of people, specifically ordinary Commoners with ordinary jobs and lives, and by the Clients, the lower classes that won't have the jobs afforded by a growing economy.
Meanwhile, what the US government ought to be doing in the next couple of years is putting America back to work after the economic devastation of the COVID epidemic.
But do you know, I think we are going to see a replay of the Obama administration. Instead of focusing like a laser on reviving the economy after the Mortgage Meltdown of 2006-08, the Obamis instead decided to go for Obamacare and burden the US economy with yet another entitlement program. The result was the slowest recovery from a recession in the post-WWII era.
Because Obama was a Lightbringer he was able to survive this foolishness and get reelected. But my fearless prediction is, assuming that the fix is in and Biden gets inaugurated on January 20, that by the Summer of 2022 the natives will be restless, and the Dems will lose bigly in November 2022. By November 2024, I dare say that there will be "mostly peaceful protests" against the feckless Biden administration, and whoever is running for president as a Republican -- as Trump or the heir to Trump -- will be conducting Trump Rallies that make the originals look like out-of-town tryouts.
Why do I say this? Because, for me, the consequence of the ruling class spending the whole of the last four years on getting Trump out by hook or by crook is that they have not begun to think about where they went wrong, and how it was possible for a clown like Trump to win the presidency, and how they should redirect their political and economic strategy for the future.
At least the colonialist Brits had the sense to understand that when the District Officers reported to the Governor that "the natives were restless" it meant something had to be done to quiet the natives back down again.
But our ruling class just does not seem to register that "the natives are restless" means that the rulers have a problem.
Maybe they can't do anything. Maybe politicians are like sharks; they have to keep moving forward to keep the water flowing over their gills.
So you keep moving forward until you run on the rocks and break up.
But I have a feeling that, to change the metaphor, when the ship of state goes aground on the rocks, the captain will not be going down with the ship. Instead the captain and officers will commandeer the lifeboat and the Deplorables and Bitter Clingers will be the ones left on the wreck of the USS America.
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