"The Democratic presidential candidates aren’t talking about the real economy because most of them don’t understand it."
The Wall Street Journal article is about the Democrat's war against corporations. That's strange because corporations create millions of jobs. They exist to make money by making their customers happy. The Democrat's war against corporations is just plain fucking stupid.
The Democrats have another problem. They're crybabies. Nothing makes them happy. They're always looking for an excuse to cry like babies. And this is one of the reasons why, despite my extreme contempt for Trump, I hope he wins.
Will Trump ever grow up and stop acting like a moron? No, of course not. I used to think it was possible but stupid can't be fixed.
Wall Street Journal - The Democrats’ Spooky Politics
Their party’s presidential candidates have created a bogeyman even scarier than Donald Trump. It’s ‘corporations!’
By Daniel Henninger
October 30, 2019
It was this weekend in 2012 that I went to a Halloween party wearing a quite realistic-looking Joe Biden mask. After about an hour, people said it was too spooky and asked me to take it off. When the Obama presidency ended, I threw the Biden mask away, assuming I’d never need it again. Wishful thinking is always a mistake.
With Halloween in the air, it’s the right moment to discuss the central role played in presidential politics by bogeymen—creatures conjured to distract and scare the citizenry. In politics, the bogeyman is always just around the corner. For John F. Kennedy it was “the missile gap”; for Barack Obama, “the wealthiest”; and for Donald Trump, criminals pouring across “the border.”
Naturally, the Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination needed a bogeyman, and they have created one even scarier than the Trump monster. It’s them—“corporations!” At their recent presidential debate, one candidate after another claimed corporations were wrecking the country.
Elizabeth Warren, who knows a thing or two about scaring people: “They have no loyalty to America. They have no loyalty to American workers. They have no loyalty to American consumers. They have no loyalty to American communities. They are loyal only to their own bottom line.” And by the way, “I have a plan.” Yikes.
Cory Booker ranted about “corporate tax incentives,” and Amy Klobuchar wants a rollback of “what we did with the corporate tax rate.” Beto O’Rourke somehow related a woman he said was working four jobs with “some of these corporations,” and Tom Steyer, billionaire, said we have to “break the power of these corporations.”
Finally Joe Biden, seeing where this was going, invoked the “corporate greed” of companies that are “not investing in our employees.”
Politics, as has been proved lately, can get crude, and one understands why candidates play the race card, the class-warfare card or the anti-immigrant card. But how has the Democratic Party arrived en masse at playing the anti-corporation card?
If one sits through any of these three-hour-long Democratic debates or their climate and LGBTQ town halls, it’s hard not to notice that there is an 800-pound elephant in the room that none of them (including the moderators) want to talk about—the American economy in the here and now.
Unless the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is another front for Donald Trump, the reality of historically high job creation and rising wages for people regardless of income level, race, sex or sexual orientation has become impossible not to notice.
Even the New York Times recently admitted the jobs boom was forcing “corporations” to dig deeper for workers: “With the national unemployment rate now flirting with a 50-year low,” it noted that companies are offering work-from-home options to parents, accommodating employees with disabilities, reducing educational requirements and waiving criminal background checks.
This 50-year unemployment low—and the self-respect and sense of personal possibility that comes with it—didn’t just happen. It is the explicit result of Congress and President Trump redeploying two proven pillars of Reaganomics. They dropped the tax rate on—yes—“corporations” to 21% from its investment-killing decades at 35%, and he unwound a waaay-overboard Obama regulatory regime that was imposed on virtually every private-sector producer in the U.S. economy.
You’d have to be obtuse not to recognize the historic burst of individual economic opportunity happening now. The wonder wasn’t so much the economic revival this produced but the astonishing scope of the Trump boom.
The Democratic presidential candidates aren’t talking about the real economy because most of them don’t understand it. The Democratic Party’s historic link to the real economy was private-sector labor unions affiliated with industries such as steel, mining and cars. With the decline of those unions, the Democrats have become an almost wholly public-sector party, for which the private economy, which employs millions of workers, has become a distant planet whose only function is to send the oxygen of tax revenue. Which is why Democrats propose unpriceable ideas like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Which is why so many blue-collar workers in 2016 managed to identify their lot with an unapologetic billionaire businessman.
This is the real reason a moderate and totally embedded private-sector Democratic figure such as Mike Bloomberg isn’t likely to run. The party, captured by cotton-candy socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has deserted him. The real-world disconnect even got to primo Never-Trumper Alec Baldwin, who recently lamented the attacks on “a country built on both freedoms and commerce.” Commerce? What’s that?
The economy slowed to a 1.9% growth rate in the third quarter as business investment fell beneath the enduring weight of the Trump tariffs, which could yet take some sheen off his accomplishment. But come the general-election debates next year, Mr. Trump will relentlessly pound his opponent with the fact of real work created for real people. Whether it’s Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, they’re going to need a better bogeyman to compete than corporate greed.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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