November 29, 2023
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Unable to Run on His Record, Biden Shifts Attack to Trump on Abortion and Even Takes Aim at the Press
By Rick Manning
It’s not a surprise that Biden’s polling numbers are abysmally low, with a majority of polls showing him trailing former President Trump by several points and losing double-digits with core coalitions of voters compared to 2020.
This severe erosion of support even among Democrats has prompted the Biden Campaign to spin up a new tactic for reinstalling Biden in the White House. Instead of addressing what voters want to hear about – which is solutions to crippling inflation, stagnant wages, and a housing crisis – Biden is abandoning “Bidenomics” and plans to run not on his own record but against Trump seizing power.
While this isn’t particularly surprising – Biden has a catastrophic record on the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and most other metrics Americans care about – it is a palpable shift from earlier in the year.
This summer, Biden was paraded across the country to espouse the virtues of “Bidenomics” and apparently advised to lean heavily into what his presidency had done for Americans. When it became clear that “Bidenomics” was agitating voters and confusing even Biden himself, who declared he didn’t “know what the hell that is” in a Philadelphia speech, campaign officials scrambled to move forward with the new strategy.
Gone, almost entirely, is a focus on Biden’s own record, and replacing it is a tried-and-true Democratic favorite – attack Trump and terrorize the public with doomful scenarios Democrats claim will engulf the nation if Trump is reelected. And of course, lean heavily on the press to paint that picture. But in this case the Biden campaign is actually calling the press out for not painting that picture clearly enough to distract from Biden’s economic record.
According to a press release from the Biden Campaign, his advisors are planning to combat widespread discontentment with his record with an attack launched at Trump, focusing on the GOP’s impact on abortion if Trump wins again. Biden’s team also took critical aim at the press, and is apparently embroiled in a battle with the New York Times over a piece The Times published that didn’t attack Trump’s anti-abortion record to the campaign’s satisfaction.
The Biden press release called on the mainstream media to, “meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.” While Trump faced a constant four-year hailstorm of bad press when he was in office, the Biden campaign is angry the press isn’t doing enough to distract from Biden’s economic record with fearmongering on abortion.
Even The Atlantic, which reported on the press release, admitted as much, saying, “the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.”
Certainly, no campaign strategist can fault Biden for not running on his record – it is quite literally the only option at this point for Biden to abandon running on his record and resort to an offensive attack on Trump. While it is Biden’s only option, it isn’t a very good one.
Trump’s ideology and growing support still send certain leftists into states of panic, and there is a significant share of the country who would do anything to keep him out of office. However, data shows that swing voters who were key to pushing Biden over the finish line last time are not only abandoning him, but overtly moving into Trump’s camp due to economic issues.
A recent YouGov poll found Americans say by a 27-percentage point margin (45% to 18%) their financial situation would be better under Trump compared to Biden with Independents saying so by a 33-percentage-point margin (43% to 10%).
Hispanics said their financial situation would be better under Trump by a 28-percentage point margin (47% to 19%), women said so by a 23-percentage point margin (41% to 18%), and voters under 30 said so by a five-percentage point margin (44% to 39%).
Recent YouGov surveys show that among issues important to Americans, abortion falls significantly lower on the list than economic issues like inflation, jobs, and healthcare. While 45% of voters say abortion is “very important”, only 4% say abortion is “the most important” issue they’ll vote on. Americans say inflation (20%), healthcare (11%), jobs (10%), climate change (9%), and immigration (7%) are all much more important than abortion. Even for women, only 6% cite abortion as their number one issue. For Democrats, that number is still just 5%.
Democrats employed an “anyone but Trump” strategy combined with a reliance on COVID induced mail-in voting to squeak Biden over the finish line in 2020. Much of the Biden campaign focused on removing Trump at any cost and a significant share of Biden voters admitted they voted against Trump, not for Biden.
However, that was when Biden’s record as Vice President under Obama was slightly more shrouded, and Biden hadn’t just spent four years at the helm of the country steering it straight into multiple disasters. Biden’s only means of attack now will be repeated attacks on Trump and further weaponizing the press to ensure the media stays a propaganda machine.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2023/11/unable-to-run-on-his-record-biden-shifts-attack-to-trump-on-abortion-and-even-takes-aim-at-the-press/
Plummeting fertility and the aging population is killing economic growth as the national debt is exploding with entitlement spending—should hit $100 trillion by 2037 or so
By Robert Romano
As the Baby Boomer retirement wave continues apace, the percentage of the working age population over the age of 65 continues to rapidly increase—since 1960, it has gone from 16 percent of the population to 26 percent of the population—and with it the $33 trillion (and rising) U.S. national debt, data from the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury shows.
At the same time, as the growth rate of the working age population participating in the civilian labor force has dramatically slowed down thanks to plummeting fertility, so has nominal economic growth, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data shows.
There are two simultaneous outcomes that emerge. First, as the population rapidly ages, so too do Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid expenditures that seniors depend on. Social Security will rise from $1.2 trillion in 2022 to $2.4 trillion in 2033, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. Medicare will rise from $747 billion in 2022 to $1.8 trillion in 2033. And Medicaid will rise from $592 billion in 2022 to $926 billion in 2033.
In the meantime, and second, thanks to slower growth, revenues will in no way keep pace with expenditures. Revenues will increase from $4.9 trillion in 2022 to $7.4 trillion, a $2.5 trillion or 51 percent increase over ten years. But expenditures will grow even faster, with outlays growing from $6.2 trillion in 2022 to $9.9 trillion by 2033, a $3.7 trillion or a 58.6 percent increase over the next decade.
If you find yourself saying to yourself “That’s not sustainable” then you might ask yourself how many kids you and your neighbors had, because the structural deficit is widening simply due to the drop in fertility, which has been primarily a result of birth control since 1960.
Fewer babies equals fewer workers who pay taxes. The more people who retire, the more we spend, and the fewer people working per retiree, the more we borrow. It’s that simple.
Yes, life expectancy has increased, but that would have mattered less if the Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials simply had more children. If we could have simply kept up with population replacement, this wouldn’t be as much a problem, as evidenced by balanced budgets emerging in the 1990s when the retiree to worker ratio dropped for a few years.
Knowing this problem, policymakers, rather than finding an ounce of political courage to implement policies that might incentivize women to have more children via tax credits or some other means, resort to opening the floodgates of immigration to offset a population seemingly bent on its own extinction through omission. Similarly, Malthusians and other green activists are okay with this outcome because then we can “save” the planet by slowing carbon emissions and conserving resources.
Every year, Congress nibbles around the edges of taxes and spending policies, addressing less than one-third of the total budget via so-called discretionary spending. In 2022, the $1.6 trillion discretionary budget amounted to 26.5 percent of the $6.2 trillion overall budget. By 2033, that will drop to 23.8 percent, or $2.37 trillion out of the $9.9 trillion budget.
By then, the budget deficit will be more than $2.5 trillion every single year. At that point (or even now for that matter), you could eliminate every department and agency in the federal government including the Department of Defense, and we would still be unable to balance the budget.
Every year we ignore the fertility crisis it gets worse. The debt has grown by about 8 percent a year since 1980 once recessions and wars are factored. At that rate, it should be about $100 trillion by 2037 or so, well north of 200 percent debt to GDP. When Congress comes to cut your benefits or raise everyone’s taxes or both, realize that the outcome was largely avoidable. To future generations who might read this missive, assuming fertility doesn’t go all the way to zero, be fruitful and multiply, or this is what happens.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.