Political Preferences and Public Policy
Emotions matter a lot more than policy in determining vote
Social scientists who study elections tend to assume that voters have public policy preferences and that parties and candidates design their platforms to conform with those preferences. In fact, the direction of causation (mostly) goes the other way. Members of the political elite draw up their platforms, and voters adopt the policy preferences of those candidates and parties.
Public policy issues are numerous and often complex, with compelling arguments on all sides. Meanwhile, citizens and voters, as individuals, have no influence over public policy outcomes, so they have little incentive to become informed.
Voters know that their one individual vote will have no influence over an election outcome. Think about this yourself. If you had voted for Joe Biden for president in the last election, who would be president today? If you had voted for Donald Trump, who would be president? And if you didn’t vote in the election, who would be president? The answer to all those questions is Joe Biden.
Realizing that their one vote will have no influence over public policy, voters vote for candidates and parties that make them feel good about themselves rather than considering whether the policies those candidates and parties support are good policies. If their friends or family members support a candidate, people get a good feeling of group solidarity by supporting that candidate. If voters think of themselves as having a certain ideology or political orientation, they will vote that way to reinforce that political identity.
Citizens and voters anchor on political identity. It might be a party, a candidate, or an ideology. Most of their political preferences are then derivative of that identity. People don’t think: I support a woman’s right to have an abortion, I support more gun control, I believe the government should be more involved in health care, and I think impediments to voting should be relaxed. Therefore, I am a Democrat. The reasoning goes the other way. People identify as Democrats; therefore, they support a woman’s right to have an abortion, more gun control, and so forth.
Citizens and voters adapt their public policy preferences from the political elite–the people who actually determine public policy. One implication is that citizens and voters have less influence over public policy than a romantic notion of democracy would suggest. The political elite tells voters what to think, and they fall in line behind their leaders.
https://blog.independent.org/2022/01/14/political-preferences-and-public-policy/
********************************************Washington Cashes In on Inflation
The country may be upset with inflation, but in many ways political Washington has never had it better. Covid-19 has been the excuse for record government spending and the abuse of regulatory power such as vaccine mandates and an eviction moratorium. And now we learn that tax revenue is rushing into the Treasury even as politicians plead poverty.
That’s the news you haven’t read about last week’s December budget review from the Congressional Budget Office. The budget gnomes report that federal receipts in the first fiscal quarter, from October to December, increased by a remarkable 31%. That’s a cool $248 billion increase to $1.05 trillion for the quarter.
Individual income taxes revenue soared by 55% in the quarter, or $189 billion, to $536 billion. Corporate income taxes rose 44%, or $30 billion, to $99 billion. Payroll taxes and a variety of other receipts, including a 16% increase ($4 billion) in remittances from the Federal Reserve, made up the rest.
This boom for the Beltway reflects the strong growth in nominal GDP. With 7% inflation, nominal GDP is increasing by double digits, which leads to higher nominal profits, wages and salaries. Washington gets the revenue windfall from taxes on those nominal increases even if average wages for workers falls behind inflation, as they did last year by 2.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A 7% rate of inflation is Christmas all year ’round for the federal government. State governments are also reaping revenue windfalls.
CBO says the federal government still had a $377 billion budget deficit in the first fiscal quarter as outlays increased 6%, or $75 billion, to $1.43 trillion. The spending increases came mainly from the pandemic-related transfer payments passed by Congress last March. That included increases of $59 billion in refundable tax credits (mainly the higher child allowance), $21 billion more for food and nutrition (mainly food stamps), and $18 billion more for schools.
The lesson here is that Washington doesn’t need a tax increase. As the economy grows, the revenue will keep flowing, even if the pace of increase slows. Even amid Covid’s Omicron variant surge, the economy is growing smartly and doesn’t need new spending. Everyone who wants a job can get one—or two. The economic problem is inflation, which is hurting workers even as it rewards politicians.
***************************************
HS Football Coach Fired for His Post-Game Prayers Will Have His Case Heard by the Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday it will hear the case of a former assistant football coach in Bremerton, Washington, who was removed from his job because he refused to stop praying on the field.
Joe Kennedy, a devout Christian who coached at Bremerton High School, started kneeling and offering silent or quiet prayers that evolved into him giving motivational speeches to players that frequently included religious content and prayer.
After a game in October 2015, Kennedy knelt on the 50-yard line. He was then surrounded by other coaches and players, as well as spectators who came onto the field from the stands.
A week later, after again praying on the field, he was placed on leave. The Bremerton School District did not re-hire him for the following season.
Kennedy sued. What followed was a series of lower court decisions that sided with the school district.
In 2016, a U.S. District Court judge in Tacoma declined to issue a preliminary injunction requested by Kennedy asking the court to have the school district re-hire him immediately.
In 2017, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Kennedy was not entitled to immediately get his job back because he took advantage of his position when he prayed on the field after games.
In 2019, Supreme Court declined to review the case in which the court’s conservative wing made its concerns known.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that “the Ninth Circuit’s understanding of free speech rights of public school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”
In 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Leighton ruled in favor of the school district’s motion for summary judgment and Kennedy’s lawyers appealed.
On Friday, the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case, according to The Hill.
Kennedy’s attorneys were pleased.
“No teacher or coach should lose their job for simply expressing their faith while in public,” said Kelly Shackelford, the head of First Liberty Institute, which is representing Kennedy, in a Friday statement after the nation’s highest court agreed to hear the case.
“By taking this important case, the Supreme Court can protect the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of punishment.”
Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents the school district, was less enthused about the Supreme Court taking the case.
She said the district had followed the law, characterizing Kennedy’s actions as “coercive prayers.”
“This case is not about a school employee praying silently during a private religious devotion,” she said in a Friday news release. “Rather, this case is about protecting impressionable students who felt pressured by their coach to participate repeatedly in public prayer, and a public school district that did right by its students and families.”
The First Amendment to the Constitution reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The case is expected to be argued in spring, with a ruling to follow in June, NBC News reported.
*********************************************
The Senator Fauci Called a ‘Moron’ Is Now Publishing Disclosures Much of the Public’s Never Seen
The Republican senator who was mocked as a “moron” by Dr. Anthony Fauci has posted revealing details about Fauci’s finances on his website.
Based upon those documents and analysis by Adam Andrzejewski at Forbes, during the pandemic year of 2020 as many Americans were struggling to survive, the Fauci household raked in about $1.7 million overall.
During a Tuesday hearing, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas said that Congress and the American people should be getting a full disclosure of Fauci’s finances.
“All you have to do is ask for it,” Fauci said. “You’re so misinformed, it’s extraordinary.”
Fauci later said the information Marshall seeks “is totally accessible to you if you want it.”
“We look forward to reviewing it,” Marshall said.
Then came a hot mic comment from Fauci. “What a moron,” Fauci said softly “Jesus Christ.”
Marshall then demanded copies of unredacted records of Fauci’s finances Friday. When he got them, he put them online, according to a news release on Marshall’s website.
“Dr. Fauci lied to the American people. He is more concerned with being a media star and posing for the cover of magazines than he is being honest with the American people and holding China accountable for the COVID pandemic that has taken the lives of almost 850 thousand Americans,” Marshall said in a statement on his website.
“Just like he has misled the American people about sending taxpayers dollars to Wuhan, China to, fund gain-of-function research, about masks, testing, and more, Dr. Fauci was completely dishonest about his financial disclosures being open to the public – it’s no wonder he is the least trusted bureaucrat in America. At the end of the day, Dr. Fauci must be held accountable to all Americans who have been suing and requesting for this information but don’t have the power of a Senate office to ask for it,” he said.
The documents on Marshall’s website cover a wide variety of income sources.
Andrzejewski, a Forbes contributor, posted a detailed analysis: He noted that over all, “the Fauci household’s net worth exceeds $10.4 million.”
The Fauci family income for 2020 totaled $1,776,479, he wrote, “including federal income and benefits of $868,812; outside royalties and travel perks totaling $113,298; and investment accounts increasing by $794,369.”
The Forbes post said Fauci’s investment account was worth $8.4 million and his wife’s investments came in at $2.1 million, with a variety of accounts contributing to that total.
“Some on the right have speculated that Fauci may have profited off the pandemic. The disclosures show that he’s invested in fairly broadly targeted mutual funds, with no reported holdings of individual stocks,” Andrzejewski wrote.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made $434,312 in salary in the 2020 fiscal year, while his wife, Christine Grady, the chief bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, earned $234,284, Andrzejewski wrote, noting that the documents put the salary of Fauci’s wife at $176,000 for FY2020.
Figures for the 2021 fiscal year, which ended in September, have not yet been made available.
Writing for the Center for Public Integrity, reporter Liz Essley White noted that while the documents Marshall wanted are available if anyone is familiar with the rigmarole to get them, that does not mean the process is as transparent as it ought to be.
“It doesn’t need to be this difficult to obtain documents that the law gives the public the right to see. Congress could change this by requiring agencies to preemptively post the financial disclosures of high-level career officials like Fauci, as the government does for political appointees and senators,” she wrote.
To that end, Marshall has said he will file the Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals Act, or FAUCI Act, to make financial disclosure information easily available.
https://ijr.com/senator-fauci-called-moron-publishing-disclosures/
**************************************Trump is right. The election was rigged
David Flint
It was inevitable that 6 January would be used in a desperate attempt to breathe life into a regime undoubtedly America’s worst in living memory. Yet again, a compliant media beat up an incident which the authorities encouraged, one which resulted in no deaths attributable to the trespassers, but during which a Capitol police officer shot dead a female air force veteran without any apparent justification.
The mainstream media still report the untruth that President Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was compromised by widespread fraud. His claim is neither false nor is it restricted to fraud. It is centred on manifest breaches of the plain words of the Constitution which demonstrate, conclusively, that the election was rigged.
Not that the fraud was insubstantial. Despite media polling which could not have been more wrong, the election was significantly closer than in 2016. If only 22,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin were found to be Trump’s and not Biden’s, the Electoral College would have been tied with the decision constitutionally going to Trump.
Fraud seemed to be everywhere. A key example was the announcement on the night of the election, when Trump was clearly leading, that counting in key states would close because of a water leak in one place. Scrutineers (‘observers’) were sent home. Then, without re-calling the scrutineers, counting was resumed in the early hours. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s lead was dramatically and overwhelmingly reversed. Only a well-paid defence lawyer could say with a straight face, that this was not fraud.
Television viewers across the world were subsequently amazed to see a security video showing counting after scrutineers had been sent home, where boxes of votes were pulled out from under the tables. Viewers also saw scrutineers seated either at such a distance from the counting that they could see nothing, or outside the room with the viewing window papered over.
The respected African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas makes the important point that the absence of strong evidence of systemic fraud is not, in itself, sufficient for the public to have faith in the integrity of elections.
‘Also important,’ he says, ‘is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.’ The system has to be such that the declared results will be accepted by the losers.
Americans used to have this by adopting crucial reforms which have been undermined in recent years. These are the secret or ‘Australian’ ballot, a single election day, and the fair administration of the elections. Subject to an overriding legislative power vested in Congress, the Constitution makes it clear that it is for state legislatures, and state legislatures only, to regulate elections.
Invariably ignored by the mainstream media, the constitutional mandate in Article 1, Section 4, could not be clearer: ‘The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof…’.
A vast number of breaches of this provision by state governors, bureaucrats and often elected partisan state judges resulted in the whittling away of these key safeguards.
But both the secret ballot and the single election day are crucial to ensuring electoral integrity.
One notorious method was the mail-in ballot, especially where the roll is so questionable that it is even larger than the population of the constituency.
The vastly extended periods for voting and the receipt of mail-in votes makes a mockery of the longstanding legislative prescription of the election always being on ‘…the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November’.
Discussing the results with a conservative Australian former politician sceptical about Trump’s objection, he asked me to suggest something he could read showing systemic electoral fraud.
Pointing out Trump’s objection was not just about fraud, I recommended he read the pleadings in the Supreme Court case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, where Texas and 17 other states alleged that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin violated the Constitution by changing election procedures through non-legislative means. (Today I would also recommend Mollie Hemingway‘s recent superb book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.)
The Court squibbed hearing this case on a mere technicality. Apart from those brave souls, Justices Alito and Thomas, the judges must have been terrified about the violence likely to be unleashed by the Democrats’ terrorist arm, the BLM. After a summer of unmitigated violence, and for daring to hear an abortion case, Senate Democrat Minority Leader Charles Schumer made this threat from the very steps of the Court:
‘I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.’
(Schumer would be in gaol if he did that in Australia.)
As for the election, the real losers are not only the American people, but a world dependent on American leadership to defend freedom.
Through a rigged election, a corrupt establishment removed probably the greatest president since at least Ronald Reagan, in terms of achievement at home and abroad.
The establishment has waged a constant war against Trump from using a ‘paid-for’ fake dossier about Russian collusion to brief the electoral college in an attempt to overthrow the 2016 election, to the Obama administration, in its dying days, working out ways to protect officials who had lied to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Their final success was to install an administration led by an under-achieving career politician, patriarch of a family demonstrably involved in the sale to foreign plutocrats, including Chinese communists, of access to and influence in the very heart of Washington, a betrayal of both the American people and the free world.
But they have not succeeded in their ultimate goal of destroying Trump and that for which he stands.
Now that Americans have seen what the establishment has planned for them, Trump and indeed Trumpism is, in terms of support, more unassailable than at its high point in 2020, which even those who rigged the election have to concede.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/01/trump-is-right/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment