This is how desperate Democrats already are this election cycle: They’re talking about tax cuts, just like the angry Tweeter did at the start of his presidency. Except Donald Trump actually followed through, with real and lasting tax cuts to launch an explosive, job-creating phenomenon.
Of course, these Democrat tax cuts would only be short-term to look good before the voting starts.
It’s a daunting challenge of their own making. Biden and Democrats are faced with soaring inflation (the worst since 1980, when the last ineffectual Democrat served only one term) and a stunning swing in party identity away from their party after only 14 months of their reign of error. So, the dynamic duo of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and frightened congressional Dems, are conferring on what to do that allies can make look them good to angry voters.
They tell gullible D.C. media that they’re thinking – ‘pondering’ gives it gravitas — about suspending the federal gasoline tax. Oh, wow! Democrats giving up government revenues? For the rest of 2022. Which happens to be only until after the looming November midterm elections. That’s when D.C. Democrats will stop caring what voters think.
(And if current polls are indicative, that’s when voters once again will discard the idea of one-party, Washington control.)
Remember that moderate, congenial, unifying Joe Biden before the 2020 election? Then after, we got grumpy, demented, lying, forgetful, bumbling, indecisive, casually cruel Joe Biden, who covers his scrambled thoughts by saying, “I’ve talked enough.”
So, it’s really not a tax cut. It’s a tax “holiday.”
Worse, it’s phony relief. Remember last summer, just before Biden’s horribly botched Afghan troop withdrawal when the so-called Delta variant was just getting underway, Joe Biden was boasting how his policies made the average July 4th cookout 16 cents cheaper?
That was good for days of online hilarity, as people planned how they were going to spend their extra 16 cents. Actually, it’s still pretty funny.
Well, stand by for renewed laughter: Suspending the federal gasoline would save drivers a whopping 18 cents per gallon.
First of all, under the profligate spending policies of Biden-Harris, the price of a gallon of gasoline has not stopped going up since Biden promised that the adults were back in charge at the White House.
Gas prices in some places have touched $6 a gallon. Today, the average national price of gas is $3.52, according to the AAA. That’s up five cents a gallon from a week ago. Up 21 cents from a month ago. It’s also – are you sitting down? – up $1 from a year ago, which is a 40 percent jump.
But, wait! There’s more. A short-term holiday on an 18-cent a gallon federal tax is chump change. Because 47 states have their own gasoline taxes that are larger than the feds’ levy, in some cases many times larger. And they’re not observing any expedient holiday.
Pennsylvania’s gas tax is 57.6 cents per gallon. California’s is only a penny less. And their spendthrift governors sure aren’t offering any tax holidays. Oh, look! They’re both Democrats.
If electric vehicles ever do seriously catch on (and don’t crash the power grids), watch those state taxes jump even more. As gas-tax revenues drop, they jack up the taxes to cover the shortfall, as they did with cigarette taxes to cover the revenue drop-offs when millions gave them up over health concerns.
Imagine what gas prices will be when Russia invades Ukraine, as Biden promised it would last Wednesday. But, oops, Vladimir Putin didn’t come through as the American promised. So, Biden says (on Friday) it will happen any day now.
Strangely, the American president has become something of a loud publicity agent for Putin’s manufactured crisis, touting an imminent Russian advance any day, despite denials from Russia and other European nations. Does Hunter have investments in Moscow, too?
Biden’s urgent, but helpless and hapless, warnings make him look quite weak. Which is easy to do if you watch his old-man shuffle gait. The guy is in no position to do anything meaningful to counter Russian annexation of yet another country’s territory, after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. Like a third-grader standing atop the jungle gym, announcing the school bully is striding across the playground. Here he comes. He’s closer now. Almost here. He’ll probably beat up someone.
After a refreshing Trump presidency that saw no new U.S. military involvements abroad, Americans have no interest in any more. Which Putin well knows. Which China’s leadership knows, eyeing Taiwan. Which Iran’s mullahs know, funding terrorists here and there. And which even North Korea’s deadly, little prince knows, back testing his ICBMs and a hypersonic missile.
Biden, however, is real big on appearing to do stuff, like promising to stop the pandemic in its tracks or bragging about all the new jobs he’s created, which aren’t really new jobs at all. They’re existing jobs finally being restored after the lockdowns.
So, he’s vowing to impose really, really serious sanctions on Russia this time, maybe even stopping Putin’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, the pipeline Biden endorsed as an attempted suck-up to Putin early last year.
But there’s a really, really big problem with economic sanctions, as we detailed here the other day.
They don’t work. Not at all. Syria. Iran, North Korea. Venezuela. Even Russia, a few times. Their people suffer. But the same bad guys are still enjoying their thrones. How would it look for any self-respecting dictator to cave to demands from a 79-year-old U.S. president who can’t remember the names of people standing next to him?
We’re screwed in that area, at least for the next 1,065 days in our mental bunkers.
Another sign of Democrat desperation is gun control. Each party has go-to themes it trots out to unite its gullible base. Biden, whose job approval numbers are still taking on water at 40 percent (down from 55), brought that talking point up again last week.
The occasion was a $73 million settlement with Remington, for the deaths of 20 children and six adults in the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., by Adam Lanza.
What Biden did not mention last week was that Barack Obama placed him in charge of the talking point about a renewed congressional drive back then for gun control legislation. That’s what Obama did with jobs he didn’t want because he knew they’d fail. Huh, that’s likely why Biden gave Harris the assignment to fix his southern border mess.
With his new assignment, then-Vice President Biden immediately went to Capitol Hill to begin talks because, reelection year. And that’s all that ever happened there – talk. Yada-yada need new gun controls. It worked, though. Obama-Biden got reelected.
Obama also put Biden in charge of implementing his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus bill in 2010. You may recall Joe’s promise of hundreds of thousands of new “shovel-ready jobs” almost immediately. By next month perhaps. Or surely the month after.
They never happened, of course. Not until years later, when Trump got in with a Republican Congress that enacted corporate and income tax cuts and deregulation as genuine incentives to grow and hire.
My favorite Obama task for Biden to fail at in those years was to oversee their administration’s promised goal of increased government transparency. To drive home the appearance of openness for Americans to see the Obama-Biden team hard at work for them, Biden set up a series of meetings with administration officials to discuss that historic transparency.
And closed them to media and the public.
