U.S. policy doesn’t make sense, until you reevaluate and question what the actual endgame is, and ask if this isn’t intentional.
May 6, 2024
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
Glenn Beck, for example, was talking about Cloward and Piven when Barrack Obama first hit the scene as the Democratic contender for the US presidency:
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize “militant anti poverty groups” to facilitate a “political crisis” by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and “redistributing income through the federal government”
Since then, others have jumped on that bandwagon.
Let me just pause there for a second.
This isn’t about foil hats and outlandish conspiracy theories, although there could be some unintended overlap. This is about patterns and explanations.
If you see that something isn’t working properly, your idea of what is “proper” would guide how you would fix, modify, or adjust that thing. So, if the economy isn’t functioning properly, there are economists the world over who would tell you quite simply what steps are needed to fix it. The solution isn’t difficult at all.
But if your goal to get the economy to do something is other than it’s normal, and proper use, then it’s worth examining how the power that be define “properly functioning society”. What EXACTLY are they trying to get the economy to do? Because it isn’t what everyone else is looking for. Everyone else is suffering needlessly.
When you start to tinker with the endgame rather than the events, the events make a lot more sense, and appear to be a lot more ordered, if not purposeful.
Three call-outs to consider: Global Crises (i.e. war and pestilence), Climate Agenda, and Taxes.
Global Crises
Whether you’re looking at the global response to the pandemic, or more recently the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, they have two glaring things in common.
First, there were always a few skeptical hold outs. In the pandemic, you had Sweden, and to some degree Japan. They didn’t shut their economies down. Japan was praised for what they’ve always done which is wear masks everywhere. But Sweden was condemned for not doing what everyone else in the developed world was doing. They would later be proven right, but the world isn’t as vocal about that as they were with their earlier rebukes.
In the case of the wars, you have South Africa holding out on the Gaza conflict, and after over two years in Ukraine, the support has long since waned. Still, even in the early days, the sentiment that involvement in Ukraine was ill-advised existed even in main-stream political groups.
Second, those who weren’t hold-outs never defined a goal or metric for success. “Flatten the curve” wasn’t a goal, as that came and went after two weeks. Neither was 100% immunization or total eradication of the virus. The poorly defined goals were the cover for protracting the “emergency policies” as long as they did.
Much like a “war on drugs” or a “war on terror”, the goal is to rid the world of bad behaviors. That’s not a real goal, because it’s not realistic. But because it sounds noble, people are quick to cosign it. That it’s unattainable allows it to keep going.
The same goes for the wars. There’s no goal. There is nothing defining success or movement in the right direction. Both the Ukraine and Gaza stem from historically rooted disputes that could have a semblance of a political solution, but that would mean the goal is peace and reconciliation… which is not the actual stated purpose. We need to “beat Russia” and “destroy Hamas”. That’s not a real thing.
So what’s the plan? If the goal isn’t peace and reconciliation, then what is it? If the goal isn’t to keep the economy going, what is it?
The Climate Agenda
The claim is that the earth is warming and the sea levels are rising because the ice is melting.
You can’t raise levels of water by melting the ice in it, and the reality is we are at the end of an ice age, which is a net good thing for humanity. Going into an ice age would be much worse.
There’s nothing humankind can do to change that course. It’s just a naturally recurring season for the planet. But if you don’t know or believe that, then you can believe any number of other things, including that the weather is man-made and can be man unmade.
The Green Agenda to hit “net-zero” or even absolute zero is preposterous. Again, that’s not a real goal. Better stewardship, and of course encouraging more efficient innovations are one thing. Banning things that have not yet overstayed their economic usefulness is another.
The Dutch farmers are still embroiled in a political battle to keep their livestock and farms. But in the UK, you have a few spots that have come around. First Scotland:
Scotland had reached the point where further net-zero progress would have made obvious and material demands of household budgets. That isn’t counting the additional costs of renewable power hidden in utility bills.
And also England:
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has toned down electric-vehicle mandates and ditched plans to require English households to install heat pumps. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, likely the next prime minister, has hedged his party’s commitment to phase out oil and gas drilling in the North Sea—so that he can promise unionized Scottish oil workers that they’ll keep their jobs—and abandoned an earlier pledge to spend £28 billion the British government doesn’t have on the green transition every year.
It’s all virtue signals and progressivism until the bill comes around, or at least that’s what the UK is realizing.
Not the case for the US. The US is economically teetering on the edge of a devastating downturn, and Biden is still imposing some of the harshest regulations. The article continues:
The puzzlement is that the U.S. is headed in the opposite direction. President Biden is pressing ahead with aggressive net-zero policies such as an electric-vehicle mandate and pouring trillions of dollars of borrowed government and hard-earned household money into climate boondoggles.
There’s no net benefit to switching to electric cars. Again, you first have to subscribe to a false premise in order for any of this to mean something. All you get is a more expensive cost of living. If you can’t afford gas, the solution isn’t to buy an electric car because chances are you can’t afford that car NOR are you having an easy time paying your energy bill.
So what’s the goal here? What are they actually trying to do? It’s not net-zero, that’s for sure.
Taxes
The economic issues of the US aren’t a secret. Even the mainstream media’s polls are saying that the economy is the top issue in battleground states.
Things are expensive and unaffordable. Wages remain stagnant while costs climb. Every “flation” known to man, with the exception of deflation, is happening: stagflation, shrinkflation, inflation. So what should we do, President Biden? Your people need you!
Say no more, peasants! Here’s the plan:
“Increase the top marginal rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends to 44.6 percent!”
He’s also calling for a hike in corporate income tax from 21% to 28%.
He’s also calling for a capital gains tax to be added to the existing death tax.
Capital gains taxes in this proposal are not only astronomically high, they are double taxing that which has already been taxed.
Again, I gotta ask: what is the goal? Without any significant restructuring of the budget, and only an increase in spending, what will all this additional taxation do for anyone? Higher taxes have never yielded more receipts or higher revenues on net. Higher taxes have never made anything more affordable.
That so many Western leaders are following the same destructive path, save a few hold-outs, tells me that the only way any of this makes sense is if we throw common sense out the window, and ask ourselves whether all this is intentional?
Is the system broken? Or is it doing what it was designed to do? Are we headed in the wrong direction? Or are we heading exactly where they want us to? And is that destination a crushing welfare state where we are no longer independent, but rather in dependence?
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