1) The GOP Must Be Pro-Free Trade and Pro-Legal Immigration
We're worried.
A Wall Street Journal poll of Republican voters finds that the party's support for free trade and legal immigration is falling. Today, more than half of Republicans support higher import tariffs, and only 44% support more LEGAL immigration.
These are both troubling findings. Trump's tough on China trade stance makes sense, but America must not sacrifice the freedom to trade. As Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman have taught us, free trade is one of the five pillars of prosperity. Free-trade nations grow much faster than protectionist nations. They also enjoy higher wages, lower prices, and higher living standards – as our friends at the Heritage Foundation remind us.
On immigration, Americans are rightly angry as hornets about the open border policy of Biden. We must secure our border.
But LEGAL immigration is and always has been one of America's greatest comparative advantages. There would be no Silicon Valley and no American technology dominance without the trillions of dollars of added GDP if it weren't for the immigrant talent that comes to these shores from all over the world.
Given the aging of the U.S. baby boom population, it's almost impossible for the U.S. to attain the 3 to 3.5% real growth that we need to solve our fiscal debacle, without the fresh blood of young foreign workers. Most immigrants arrive between the ages of 16 and 35 – right in the prime of their working years. We must seal the border and then consider doubling visas for legal immigrant workers.
America's position should be: free trade YES; illegal immigration NO; legal immigration YES; welfare NO.
As Yogi Berra put it: predicting is hard when it's about the future. But how do you make faulty predictions about things that have already happened?
That question leapt to mind when we read in the Wall Street Journal about a cabal of top Wall Street and academic economists and a gaggle of Nobel prize winners who believe Biden would be better at combating inflation and debt and keeping interest rates low than Trump.
Hello! They've both been President. Their batting averages speak for themselves. Here's a chart we prepared on these measures:
It isn't even close. We're not defending Trump's record on the debt. It was pretty bad. But Biden's is atrocious.
How sad that economists have become political economists – and dismal ones at that. No wonder it's called the dismal profession.
So much intrigue and so many conspiracy theories about the Democrats’ scheme to oust Biden. Perhaps he really doesn’t have COVID, but the Democratic apparatchiks are providing him a face-saving out.
Jill is still insistent she’s not leaving the Oval Office.
Rumor is that Dr. Biden is so worried about another of Joe’s senior moments sinking their ship, that team Biden wants to lock in delegates by early August – significantly before the Democratic National Convention meets on August 19 in Chicago.
Axios reports "This means Biden would only need to withstand internal opposition and criticism towards his candidacy for another two weeks” to foil plans to replace him.
One headache for the Dems is that for years Dems have accused Trump of being a danger to democracy, just as they desperately think of a workable ploy to get Joe and Jill out – regardless of how the people voted. It’s fun to watch all the squirming.
The betting markets again have Biden at less than a 50% chance of being crowned with the nomination.
Our left-wing spies are telling us that President Biden is about to endorse proposals to rein in the Supreme Court. These “reforms” may include an enforceable ethics code, a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and executive branch officials, and term limits.
Biden has long resisted such changes, and his sudden shift now leaves the most important and obvious question unanswered. If he is re-elected and Democrats win control of Congress, will he also support packing the Supreme Court to add the four new justices to give liberals the control they desire? Such a move would only require a majority of both houses of Congress.
Biden has said in the past that he opposes Court-packing, but he now opposes Senator Ted Cruz's proposed "Keep Nine" Amendment that would permanently preserve the current number of nine Justices. (We are open-minded to that idea if it were done in a nonpartisan way.)
But if Biden wins, the left want to add perhaps four new liberal members to the Court immediately to create a rubber stamp for their government expansionism and assaults on the Bill of Rights.
We covered the madness of Biden's national rent control proposal when he first floated it at his "big boy" press conference. Yesterday the proposal changed from a cap of 5% annual rent increases to a cap of $55 – presumably because Joe had trouble reading the prompter.
Watch it here:
Elon Musk replied:
And our great CTUP senior fellow and University of Chicago professor Casey Mulligan, who teaches Economics of Socialism, added this astute observation:
