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(Pathetic) Politician of the Year
Senator Elizabeth Warren is a particularly noxious politician.
It’s not just that she’s a doctrinaire leftist on a wide range of issues (class warfare, corporate governance, government spending,business taxation, cronyism, wealth taxation, Social Security, IRS funding, etc).
She’s also a fraud, having falsely claimed Indian ancestry to get hired and promoted at law schools.
And she’s a hypocrite as well, opposing school choice while utilizing private education for her offspring.
Not to mention supporting higher taxes, but then failing to participate in a Massachusetts program that enables people to voluntarily pay extra.
In other words, a political hack with no redeeming qualities.
So I was greatly amused to see that Elon Musk has responded to some her demagoguery with some very clever Twitter responses.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a “Karen” is an intrusive, annoying, and officious woman who likes to control other people’s lives.
But, as you can see, she tried to pick on someone who doesn’t feel any need to kowtow to a politician.
By the way, I’m not sharing this because I’m a knee-jerk advocate for Musk.
Yes, he’s obviously a great entrepreneur, but I don’t like the factthat he’s also benefited from some cronyism.
But let’s get back to satire.
The Babylon Bee had some fun with the Musk-Warren feud.
In a heated exchange on Twitter, a powerful white man viciously attacked Elizabeth Warren—a noble Cherokee squaw and Senator from Massachusetts. “This violent verbal attack on me was literally a hate crime,” said Warren…“The white man continues to oppress my people by resisting the government’s efforts to tax them into oblivion and waste all their money on spending bills that we write to pay off our campaign donors. This basically makes him a freeloader.” The white attacker—named Elon Musk—simply responded with cruel memes showing Elizabeth Warren wearing eagle feathers and war paint to mock her proud heritage.
And since we’re sharing humor from Babylon Bee, this storyfrom 2019 also pokes fun at her penchant for mis-characterizing her background.
Elizabeth Warren has begun sharing stories illustrating the hardship and discrimination she’s faced. Recently, she revealed a particularly tough time back in the early ’70s when she lost a teaching jobbecause her fake mustache had fallen off, revealing she was, in fact, a woman… “It was tough for a woman back then,” Warren said at a campaign stop. “You had to wear fake facial hair and talk in a deep voice, or people would fire you.” …Warren says things have improved for women since, but they could still be better. To help the situation, she announced a plan to fund R&D for an adhesive that will easily keep mustaches in place all day.
Let’s conclude with this very amusing meme that tells you everything you need to know about the winner of the feud.
P.S. I have some Warren humor in the archives, including this extension of her class warfare philosophy and this collection of memes about her ancestry fraud.
Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Reward a Corrupt IRS
The IRS played partisan politics during the Obama years by targeting taxpayer organizations such “Tea Party” groups. Now the IRS is at it again, this time leaking the tax returns of selected rich people to advance Biden’s class-warfare agenda.
There are two logical responses.
- Cut the IRS budget so the bureaucrats learn a very important lesson that corruption is bad.
- Reform the tax code with a simple and fair flat tax so the IRS can be dramatically downsized.
I suspect most Americans would select both options.
But the crowd in Washington has a different perspective. Most of them like the IRS because it’s the bureaucracy that generates the money that they use to buy votes.
Many of them want to reward the IRS with more money(including plenty of brain-dead Republicans), which is bad enough, but what’s really troubling is that some of them even want to turn the IRS budget into an entitlement.
In an article for Reason, Eric Boehm explains that Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge for this reckless proposal.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) says her plan to more than double the annual IRS budget would allow the federal government to collect an extra $1.75 trillion over the next 10 years. …her plan seems based on little more than a hunch and some bad math.…Warren’s “Restoring the IRS Act of 2021” would hike the agency’s budget from $11.9 billion to $31.5 billion. …It would also…move the IRS from the…federal budget’s discretionary side…to the mandatory portion of the budget, alongside Social Security and other programs that run on autopilot. …In practice, that means giving the IRS a big budgetary boost and giving the agency the authority to dig through bank accounts and transaction records.
The Wall Street Journal also is not impressed with the idea of rewarding a corrupt tax bureaucracy.
Here are some excerpts from its recent editorial, which notes that the Biden Administration also wants to turn IRS funding into an entitlement .
The Internal Revenue Service leak of taxpayer returns to left-leaning media outlet ProPublica is a prime example of why Congress should refuse to give the tax agency more money and power. That includes President Biden’s little-noticed but politically consequential plan to put IRS funding on autopilot. …Like so much else in the Biden Presidency, this follows the Elizabeth Warren model.…The IRS would essentially become another mandatory budget program like Social Security and Medicare. …without the risk of having to answer to Congressional appropriators for its budget, the tax agency would have little to worry about. …Their plan would make sure the IRS doesn’t have to pay a price in the future for politically targeting taxpayers or leaking returns. The potential for abuse would grow since Mr. Biden’s plan would also give the IRS access to bank account inflows and outflows. …a tax collection agency shielded from Congressional budget supervision is one definition of tyranny.
All of this is true.
But let’s also remember that the case for more IRS funding (whether as appropriations or as an entitlement) is based on nonsensical and self-serving estimates of the supposed tax gap.
P.S. For those who want to understand the technical differences between entitlement spending and appropriated spending, click here.
P.P.S. Entitlement spending is America’s top long-run fiscal challenge, so it’s incomprehensibly foolish to expand such programs.
P.P.P.S. The bad news is that Senator Warren is an unreconstructed statist (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
P.P.P.P.S. The good news is that she is the impetus for some clever humor (see here, here, here, and here).
P.P.P.P.P.S. And she’s a hypocrite who doesn’t abide by her own policies.
When Capitalism Wins, Poverty Loses
Why do folks on the left support punitive policies such as high tax rates and a bigger burden of government?
Some of them are motivated by resentment against those who have achieved success. These are the people who support the hate-and-envy message of politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Others folks on the left, by contrast, are motivated by sympathy for the less fortunate.
That’s a noble sentiment. Where they go wrong is in thinking that the economy is a fixed pie. This leads them to the mistaken conclusion that some people are poor because other people are rich.
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think these people can be convinced to support good policy if they learn the facts about how free markets and limited government are a proven recipe for prosperity.
This is why I shared data earlier this year showing how per-capita economic output jumped dramatically once capitalism was allowed starting a couple of hundred years ago.
Today, let’s look at how poor people have been the biggest winners. Professor Max Roser of Oxford University recently shared a profoundly important tweet about the dramatic reduction in global poverty. We see not only that poverty rates have plummeted, but also that falling poverty rates are correlated with increases in per-capita GDP.
In other words, everyone is getting richer. There’s no fixed pie.
As you might expect, regions that are friendlier to capitalismhave enjoyed bigger increases in prosperity and bigger reductions in poverty.
The bottom line is that people who care about the poor should be the biggest advocates of free enterprise.
P.S. It’s worth noting that, according to both U.S. data and global data, the big reduction in poverty occurred before welfare states were created.
Milton Friedman
Biography:
Click here to see the Hoover project showcasing the works of Milton and Rose Friedman.
Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 to 2006. He passed away on Nov. 16, 2006. (Link to obituary.) He was also the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946 to 1976, and a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1937 to 1981.
Friedman was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and received the National Medal of Science the same year.
He was widely regarded as the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics, which stresses the importance of the quantity of money as an instrument of government policy and as a determinant of business cycles and inflation.
In addition to his scientific work, Friedman also wrote extensively on public policy, always with a primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedom. His most important books in this field are (with Rose D. Friedman) Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962); Bright Promises, Dismal Performance (Thomas Horton and Daughters, 1983), which consists mostly of reprints of columns he wrote for Newsweek from 1966 to 1983; (with Rose D. Friedman) Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), which complements a ten-part television series of the same name shown over the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network in early 1980; and (with Rose D. Friedman) Tyranny of the Status Quo (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), which complements a three-part television series of the same name, shown over PBS in early 1984.
He was a member of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force and the President’s Commission on White House Fellows. He was a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board (a group of experts from outside the government named in 1981 by President Reagan).
Friedman was also active in public affairs, serving as an informal economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964, to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign, to President Nixon subsequently, and to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign.
He has published many books and articles, most notably A Theory of the Consumption Function, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, and (with A. J. Schwartz) A Monetary History of the United States, Monetary Statistics of the United States, and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom.
He was a past president of the American Economic Association, the Western Economic Association, and the Mont Pelerin Society and was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences.
He was awarded honorary degrees by universities in the United States, Japan, Israel, and Guatemala, as well as the Grand Cordon of the First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government in 1986.
Friedman received a B.A. in 1932 from Rutgers University, an M.A. in 1933 from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in 1946 from Columbia University.
Two Lucky People, his and Rose D. Friedman’s memoirs, was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EwaLys3Zak
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