By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
February 13, 2024
Painful
consequence one: If
you haven’t read it already, you must read our Ryan Mills’s reporting about Chicago Democrats who
are infuriated with how city and state leaders have prioritized taking care of
incoming migrants over impoverished local citizens:
Smith-Members, an independent Democrat, is
frustrated by the response of her party’s far-left leaders to the influx of
migrants who have flooded the city over the last year and a half. In a desire
to be “welcoming,” the state under Governor J. B. Pritzker has directed $640
million towards sheltering, feeding, and caring for the migrants, while the
city of Chicago under mayor Brandon Johnson has paid out at least $138 million,
according to media reports. . . .
Smith-Members, a leader in the Chicago-Cook
County Coalition for Humane Migration Management, is among the growing chorus
of Chicago residents, neighborhood activists, and business owners — many of
them left-wingers and Democrats — who are calling foul over the city’s and the
state’s handling of the ongoing migration crisis. Neighborhood leaders are
increasingly angry over having their parks and community centers taken away and
turned into shelters. Business leaders have complained about soaring cases of
shoplifting as well as the deteriorating conditions outside some shelters that
are driving their customers away.
The migrant crisis has also exposed sharp
divides in Chicago’s Democratic base, with the progressive response to the
crisis infuriating some more traditional Democratic groups. Black Democrats
such as Smith-Members have been some of the most vocal critics.
If
the policy of the United States is that we will have spotty enforcement of
border security along our 1,954-mile southern border, and that once inside the
country, a person seeking asylum may remain in the country until their court date in 2033, then just about everyone
who can get across the border will choose to do so. Technically, that’s not an
“open borders” policy, but it is effectively indistinguishable from one — just
about anyone who shows up can claim they seek asylum, and then spend the next
near-decade living their new life in America.
What’s
particularly fascinating, Mills reports, is that these Chicago Democrats reject
the scapegoating of Republican border-state governors for busing migrants to
their city:
“It’s a Biden thing. It’s a Pritzker thing.
It’s a Brandon Johnson thing. They wanted sanctuary cities,” said
Smith-Members, who is running for Johnson’s former seat on the Cook County
commission. “It’s not Abbott’s fault, because he didn’t ask for it. We asked
for it.”
Dr. Lora Chamberlain, a peace activist on
Chicago’s North Side, said she doesn’t blame Abbott “one little bit” for busing
migrants to cities that previously said they would welcome them.
“What state could possibly take in millions
of refugees?” said Chamberlain, who is angry at city leaders for converting her
neighborhood’s beloved community center into a migrant shelter.
In
1989, San Francisco was
the first city to enact policies barring local officials and
authorities from assisting federal immigration officials. What did residents of
San Francisco and other cities expect would happen, once they announced to the
world that anyone who entered the country illegally had a better shot at
avoiding arrest and deportation within their city limits?
Painful
consequence two: The
federal government has now borrowed so much that we will be spending $870
billion on interest payments on the national debt this year. For perspective,
that is more than we are projected to spend on Medicare ($851
billion) or defense ($822 billion). The federal deficit is projected to reach
$1.6 trillion in fiscal year 2024, grow to $1.8 trillion in 2025, and then
return to $1.6 trillion by 2027. And this is when federal tax revenues are near record highs.
There
was a time, in the Obama years, when a trillion-dollar deficit was
a shockingly large number.
Our Veronique de Rugy observes:
These additional interest payments aren’t
paid for with lower spending elsewhere. If anything, everyone on the right and
the left has programs they would like to expand or create. It means we are
borrowing more money for these interest payments and sending the message to
investors that no one is serious about fiscal management. Who truly believes
that this can go on without consequences?
In
other words, we’re borrowing more money to pay the interest on the money we
borrowed earlier.
Daniel
Wilson and Brigid Meisenbacher of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco examined how the
U.S. managed to reduce all of its debt from the years after World War Two, and
wondered if any of those policy decisions from those years could be helpful
today. Unfortunately, the conditions that allowed that reduction in national
debt are unlikely to be replicated in this era; we’re an older country, and
while it’s difficult to precisely predict future rates of economic growth,
we’re not likely to enjoy a boom comparable to the post-war years:
The United States was able to reduce its
post-WWII debt ratio from a historic high of over 100 percent in 1946 to a
historic low of roughly 25 percent in 1975 by a combination of a balanced
primary budget and economic growth that surpassed the interest rate on debt. .
. .
The main source of the long-run upward
pressure on the primary deficit is spending on mandatory programs such as
Social Security and Medicare. Current legislated formulas used to determine
spending per recipient for Social Security benefits and government health-care
programs, especially Medicare, combined with the projected aging of the
population, point to large increases in spending for these programs as a share
of GDP. This pressure was absent after WWII because the overall U.S. population
was younger and because Medicare was not enacted until 1965.
Also
note that the Congressional Budget Office has updated its calculations of
the “Inflation Reduction Act” and increased its “estimate of the budget deficit
in 2024 by $25 billion and its projections of the cumulative deficit from 2024
to 2033 by $428 billion. More than half of the increase in the 10-year deficit
— $224 billion — is from revised projections of amounts claimed for clean
vehicle tax credits and of revenues from excise taxes on gasoline.”
Painful
consequence three: Down
in Georgia, the state legislature belatedly realized that eliminating cash bail
was putting too many dangerous criminals back on the streets too quickly.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board lays out the hard lesson:
The Georgia General Assembly passed a bill
this month to mandate cash bail for 30 crimes, including certain types of
domestic violence, rioting and drug dealing. The change limits the power of
judges to return arrested suspects to the streets without a pretrial deposit.
The bill awaits a signature from GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, who began an anticrime
campaign last year by tightening sentences for gang-related offenses.
The new bail law is a quick reversal for
Atlanta lawmakers, who in 2018 granted judges the power to release people
arrested for most misdemeanors. Dispensing with bail was part of a package of
reforms enacted under former GOP Gov. Nathan Deal, which also included tripling
the threshold for felony theft. The GOP-controlled Legislature whooped these
reforms through amid the relatively low-crime 2010s.
By 2019 Atlanta police were raising the alarm
about the number of crimes committed by defendants out on bail, and Judge
Robert McBurney described a “revolving door” of offenders. Atlanta convened its
Repeat Offender Commission of law-enforcement officials to report on how to
curb the trend, only to see crime surge along with the rest of the nation after
the summer 2020 riots.
In
2022, the Atlanta Police Department’s Repeat Offender Tracking Unit determined
that roughly 1,000 people were responsible for 40 percent of the
crimes committed in Atlanta: “In just one week, Atlanta Police arrested 20
repeat offenders who had a total of 553 previous arrests and 114 felony
convictions.” That year, the city experienced about 22,300 “type A” incidents
— homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and six different kinds of
property crimes — which means that on average, those 1,000 criminals committed
nine felonies per year.
This
strongly suggests that our cities are not overrun by an overwhelming number of
criminals; they are plagued by a limited number of felons who are not kept
behind bars for a sufficient amount of time considering the seriousness of
their crimes.
Painful
consequence four: Jonathan Martin, writing at Politico about
why there is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that Joe Biden will voluntarily
step down as president or as the Democratic nominee in 2024, lays out that the
Democrats’ current predicament is a direct result of their unwillingness to
have this discussion until it was too late.
Put
directly: Democrats had their chance to speak out against Biden running for
reelection at nearly 82, they failed to do it, and there is no “they” now
poised to intervene.
Last
year, at exactly this time, more elected Democrats were saying in
private that they hoped Biden would step aside. Few wanted to say it out loud
for fear of aiding Trump and, even more delicately, being asked the inevitable
follow-up question: So, are you for Vice President Kamala Harris?
Instead,
most Democratic leaders kept quiet and hoped either Biden’s numbers would
improve or he would, without being pushed, decide on his own terms not to run
again. (One of the few lawmakers at the time to go on the record? Minnesota’s
Dean Phillips, whose frustrations with others for not speaking up, let alone
challenging Biden, led him to his own quixotic primary bid.)
As
I have mentioned before, this is arguably the single most
predictable problem that any president has ever faced. All you needed to see it
coming was a calendar.
And
the country is in this mess because Democrats didn’t want to talk about
it.
ADDENDUM: In case you didn’t see it yesterday, certain progressives
have convinced themselves that Americans think Joe Biden is too old to serve
another term because the national mainstream media is unfairly biased against
Democrats, and always takes it easy on Donald Trump.
Don’t
do drugs, kids.
No comments:
Post a Comment