The Cato Institute, a Washington, D,C.-based libertarian think tank, gave America a wake-up call Saturday.
“Congress recently approved a $95 billion foreign aid package to send to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo‐Pacific region,” they announced on Twitter/X.
“The US can’t keep spending so much without consequences, given our current financial path.”
The U.S. national debt is approaching $35 trillion with no letup in sight.
San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur David Sacks reported that the conflict in Ukraine is turning into a perpetual war.
“Zelensky announces that Ukraine is working on a security agreement with the U.S. that will fix levels of support for the next 10 years,” he tweeted. “The $61 billion was just the beginning. The next two U.S. presidents won’t be able to switch it off.”
Ten years. Apparently Zelensky got tired of coming to the United states every six months to beg for money. One more reason to vote for a regime change in November.
But Sacks also reported that a change in management may not help, and referred to a Politico story.
“Weapons for Ukraine are being ‘Trump-proofed,’ meaning that they will continue even if the next President wants them to stop,” he said. “The goal is a new Forever War.”
And for what? It’s looking like money down the drain. Days after President Biden signed the $61 billion Ukraine defense package, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that his troops were outnumbered and in retreat.
And the domestic expenditures make no sense either. Biden repeatedly diverts taxpayer dollars to pay off student loans, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s warning that he lacks the authority to do so.
And who benefits? Last month The Free Press reported that at least 750,000 households getting student debt relief are making over $312,000 in average annual household income.
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And tech billionaire Elon Musk observed another senseless domestic expense. We’re sending billions in taxpayer dollars to fund the very universities that host anti-Jew, anti-Israel, pro-Hamas terrorist riots.
Federal funding of universities, 2023:
- Columbia: $1.2 billion
- Penn: $955.6 million
- NYU: $805.5 million
- Yale: $776.8 million
- Cornell: $736.2 million
- Harvard: $676.1 million
Musk added that it “Doesn’t make sense that American taxpayers are forced to fund anti-American activities.”
It’s especially senseless given the universities’ multi-billion-dollar endowments.
The value of each of their endowments at the end of fiscal year 2022 (in the summer of 2023, usually June 30) was:
- Columbia $13.64 billion.
- Penn: $21.0 billion.
- NYU: $5.9 billion.
- Yale: $40.7 billion
- Cornell: just over $10 billion
- Harvard: $50.9 billion
These are just a small fraction of Biden’s profligate spending items. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act that didn’t reduce inflation, and the Infrastructure Spending bill that didn’t improve the infrastructure. They were mainly climate change bills.
We’ve felt the effects of Biden’s wrongheaded economic policies from the start. Mom and pop stores are disappearing, chain establishments cut locations, and consumers pay more for food, housing, and energy.
But instead of cutting expenses, Biden wants to raise taxes. His latest proposal is to raise capital gains taxes to their highest historical level — 44.6%.
Even worse, he’s proposing a 25% unrealized capital gains tax for high net worth taxpayers.
“Investment is the real driver of economic growth,” said E.J. Antoni, an economist and research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “Investment is what gives you productivity gains. Investment is where you get factories and machines — it’s where businesses are able to provide their workers with tools and equipment that allow them to increase their productivity, to increase wages, etc.”
He added that this is a terrible time to be taxing capital gains.
“If you’re going to tax something, you get less of it,” he continued. “And that’s just as true for investment as it is for anything else. Taxing capital gains means less investment, it means less economic growth, and it means the rise in people’s standards of living is going to slow dramatically.”
Last month the Philadelphia-based regional lender Republic First Bank collapsed, and it won’t be the last.
“This bank failure indicates that additional failures will occur and will range between smaller community banks and larger banks,” said Joseph Lynyak, a financial services attorney.
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But why is this administration making mistakes that would appall a first-year economics student? The answer may be found in the distant past.
Sixth century BC Chinese general, military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu once observed that “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”
That defines Joe Biden: An evil man — as well as a stupid one.
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