Year: 2021

No-Shows, New Voters Swung Georgia Runoff Election

Buck Banks

752,000

Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later. … More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates. … Meanwhile, 228,000 new voters cast ballots in the runoffs who hadn’t voted in the Nov. 3 election. They were more racially diverse and younger voters who tend to back Democrats.”

Republican Presidents Are Bad for the Economy

Buck Banks

“A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones. … It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office.”

— David Leonhardt

Hey Mitt, Consistency Is No Substitute for a Party Platform

Buck Banks

“When we had a Republican president and House and Senate, we kept on spending massively and adding almost a trillion dollars a year to the national debt. Now we say this is outrageous adding so much to the debt? They say we did the same thing when we were in charge. It does show that you have to be consistent in your arguments.”

— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.

Newsom’s Future Is Looking Gruesome

Buck Banks

46%

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval rating has plummeted to just 46% as the public sours on his pandemic management, according to a new Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll.Politico: “Those findings put the Democratic governor in a precarious place as he confronts the possibility of a recall election fueled by anger over the governor’s pandemic response. … If it makes the ballot, Newsom’s support is tepid: just 45 percent of voters said they would vote to retain him, with 36 percent backing removal and about a fifth of voters undecided.”

Trump’s Delay in Signing the December Relief Bill Cost $17.6 Billion That Should Have Gone to Those in Need

Trish
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

Just because Trump is out of office, it’s too soon to stop hating him. Especially when we keep finding out more about how incompetent and self-absorbed he was as a president, including when it mattered most, toward the end. That was when the pandemic was out of control, thanks to his mismanagement.

A new report from the Century Foundation shows that by playing golf on Christmas Eve 2020 instead of signing the bill to extend pandemic relief to out of work Americans, he cost them — and all of us — about $17.6 billion.

One month after the law’s enactment, nearly a quarter of the states have not resumed paying out federal pandemic aid. Moreover, an additional twelve states took three weeks or more to start up the payment of PUA, and fifteen states needed three weeks or more to reup PEUC.

By our calculations, these delays have resulted in shortchanging jobless workers by about $17.6 billion in benefits for the first four weeks in January 2021—38 percent less than these workers were due to receive. This is money that these workers and their families needed to pay rent, put food on the table, stay out of poverty, and keep America’s economy running while they looked for work.

You probably remember Trump’s grandstanding about signing the bill. […]

Joe Biden — Lefty

Buck Banks

“The fact is that Biden is governing as he promised — further to the left of his own record, further to the left of his ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, and further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left. … The lesson is that the most important thing that any movement can do is influence the direction of a major political party. If the center of gravity of a party moves, the entire establishment moves with it. So it is that Biden, who has never been woke or surrounded himself with radicals, is attempting to deliver victories to the left-wing of his party almost unimaginable eight or 12 years ago — and do it quickly.”

— Rich Lowry