Americans' Losing Battle With Non-Substance Abuse
Remnant Review
The American public is not interested in anything of political substance. I call this non-substance abuse.
I go to Matt Drudge's site every day. I rarely find anything on the site that I use in my writing, but it keeps me abreast of what Drudge thinks are important stories.
Why do I care what Drudge thinks? Because the site is around #40 in Web traffic. Why? His headlines. They are clickbait for tens of millions of readers. He knows what readers want to read. Drudge's function is something like what the Reader's Digest was for a generation. From the mid-1930's certainly through the 1970's, articles in the Reader's Digest were what people wanted to read. The founder of the magazine had a kind of sixth sense about what readers were interested in reading. Drudge has this same sense.
We are now gearing up for the presidential extravaganza next year. What are the hot stories that the public wants to read about, assuming that Drudge knows what he is doing?
NON-SUBSTANCE ISSUES
First, there is the endless Russiagate nonsense. If ever there was a nothing burger, it is this. Now that a federal judge has forced Robert Mueller to stop talking about his main piece of non-evidence, the Democrats in the House of Representatives are not going to be able to pry the information out of him. If they do, maybe he will get jailed for contempt of court. That would be nice.
I don't think people are interested in the actual details of this non-story. They are interested in all of the noise that it has created from the media, and by Democrats in Congress, over the last two years. It is a nonstarter judicially, but it never goes away.
Conservatives are hoping for the Right shoe to drop. They think the real story may be related in some way to the Clintons. They want to believe that just about every political dirt story goes back to the Clintons. They want to believe there is a cover-up going on. There probably is. There were coverups for Clintons going back 40 years. He never got caught. She never got caught. They are the masters of the phenomena known as Teflon politics. Nothing sticks to them. But, when you think about it, nothing that Bill Clinton ever did stuck. Except for his dalliance with Lewinsky, he is remembered for nothing except maybe his wife. He was in power for eight years, and there is virtually no trace of anything he ever did. The substance of his political career was Teflon all the way down.
Second, there is now the story about Jeffrey Epstein. Drudge recently made it #1.
The headline linked to this story. Because this is probably the most salacious sex scandal in my lifetime, the public cannot get enough of it. It has already led to the resignation of Trump's Secretary of Labor, a government lawyer who let Epstein off the hook a decade ago. I wish Trump would leave the office empty. America does not need a Secretary of Labor. It doesn't need a Secretary of Commerce, either.
If anybody in the mainstream media wants to follow the breadcrumbs of this story, they lead back to Bill Clinton a lot more often than they lead to Donald Trump. Clinton supposedly flew on Epstein's jet 26 times. The mainstream media have reported this, but no one seems interested in getting details. If Trump had flown with him 26 times, there would be a lot more interest. There are no flight logs that indicate Trump ever flew on "the Lolita Express," as it was known. He did attend social events sponsored by Epstein. A lot of people did.
There is now a back story going around that Epstein may have been a front for the Deep State, which was collecting evidence of serious sexual deviation on political figures. It would make great blackmail material. I wouldn't put it past the Deep State to do this, but any reporter who follows up on this story is going to wind up a suicide.
Third, there is the story of Kamala Harris, the half-Jamaican, half-Tamil junior Senator from California, who fired a torpedo into the good ship Biden on the racial busing issue. It really embarrassed him. He was tongue-tied. It turns out that he had favored parents who didn't want their kids bused, or who didn't want students in other neighborhoods bussed into their districts. He took the right moral stand, which was the right political stand. In the debate and after, he was embarrassed to say that he took the right stand.
Then, a few days later, Harris backed down, sort of. She said that it is really not a federal issue. It is a matter for local school boards. This takes the issue off the table politically. She insisted it was different back then.
Here was the point in the 1970's, and here's the point today. The racial mix in tax-funded schools is not a matter of federal intervention. But federal judges kept intervening. So, Biden now looks like a tongue-tied wimp. The whites long ago moved out of the school districts that were threatened by busing, and by the mid-1980's, racial segregation was off the table politically because the whites moved out. They took their money with them. Inner-city school districts are still as underfunded as they were before. They are simply a lot larger.
The public schools have continued to decline in quality, and nobody has a solution. Bush had "no child left behind." Inner cities are still far behind. Obama had "race to the top." Inner-city students don't get anywhere near the top. And so it goes with tax-funded education. But voters are still overwhelmingly in favor of the public schools as the hope of America's future.
Where is any politician dealing with substantive issues? In foreign policy, Trump is a bust. Nothing that he has done has turned out well for the country, nothing that he is likely to do is going to turn out well for the country. We are still in Afghanistan. We are still in Syria. He is rattling a saber against Iran. I think Fred Reed's assessment is correct. He has not had a single foreign-policy victory. But nobody notices. The media don't like anything he does. Republicans don't care what the media think. He is basically on the side of the foreign-policy establishment. The media will blow up Trump anyway, simply because they hate Trump. He is doing all of the things that Obama did.
Fourth, there is immigration. Nothing changes. As I said in November 2016, soon after he was elected, nothing was going to change. There would be no wall. There would be few deportations. It was all rhetoric to get elected. I even outlined a low-budget program for him to seal off the border. Of course, my advice was ignored.
Ann Coulter was completely sucked in, but she has now gone on the offensive against him. Too late.
Fifth, nobody in politics talks about the federal deficit. The deficit is out of control, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. The increase in the federal debt ceiling is always something like half again as great as the increase in the debt.
The U.S. budget deficit increased by $140 billion during the first nine months of this budget year to $747.1 billion as government revenues and spending both hit records.The Treasury Department reported Thursday that the deficit for the current fiscal year through June is up 23.1% over the same period a year ago with receipts rising by 2.7% while spending increased 6.6%.
The Trump administration is forecasting that the deficit for the full budget year, which ends on Sept. 30, will top $1 trillion, up from a deficit of $779 billion last year.
The Congressional Budget Office is not quite so pessimistic for this year, forecasting a deficit of $896 billion this year. But the CBO projects that deficits will top $1 trillion beginning in 2022 and will remain above $1 trillion annually through 2029.
The CBO's estimate is fake. If you want fake news, look at the CBO estimates. The CBO never factors in a recession. I think John Mauldin is correct, in the next recession, we will see the deficit rise by at least $2 trillion a year. Actually, he thinks the deficit in a recession will be $2.5 trillion. This is a sensible forecast. This is not some nutty guy standing on the sidelines.
The media are silent on this for the most part. There is no political mobilization against it. It doesn't matter who is going to be president in 2021. This is where we are headed. And this doesn't count the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security.
The one area where Trump does seem to have had some success is the reduction of the number of pages of the Federal Register. Here is where the administrative state tightens the noose on businesses. There is some reduction in regulation.
2015: 82035 pages
2016: 96328 pages
2017: 61949 pages
2018: 68082 pages
His administration claimed $23 billion in savings in fiscal 2018. This is marginally positive for freedom. He issued an executive order in February 2017 that requires agencies to offset the cost of major regulations by revoking two rules. "Unless prohibited by law, whenever an executive department or agency (agency) publicly proposes for notice and comment or otherwise promulgates a new regulation, it shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed." This may be the reason why the number of pages fell. But is it enforced? By whom? With what negative sanctions? He has spoken occasionally of the need to reduce regulation. But he doesn't tweet about it. The media don't talk about it. The Democrats don't talk about it. The Republicans don't talk about it. They never have. It is bi-partisan silence. The gigantic growth in federal regulation that has taken place over the last generation has been ignored the whole time.
CONCLUSION
There is nothing coming out of Washington by way of the media that indicates that any substantive issue is up for discussion, despite the fact that we are now entering the season in which the issues of the 2020 campaign are going to be set. The issues are completely peripheral to the fundamental problems that are facing the country in foreign policy, domestic finance, the loss of privacy, and regulation.
American politics is a wasteland . . . as usual. It reflects American television, American movies, and American institutions of higher education.
Where is the backbone of the country? Where are institutions led by individuals who focus on fundamental issues of substance? They are out there, but they do not get media attention. The public is generally unaware of them. The public does not care.
Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, put it this way: "To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle." American politicians have lost this struggle. American voters have lost this struggle.