The emperor has no clothes.

     “Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. . . Therefore, choose life, so that you and your children may live."

            Deuteronomy 30

     "The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. . . . For Republicans, the path forward is clear. . . .We know how. But this will not happen if Republicans choose to abandon the rule of law and join Trump’s crusade to undermine the foundation of our democracy and reverse the legal outcome of the last election. History is watching. Our children are watching."

          Liz Cheney, Op-Ed, Washington Post May 5, 2021

     "GOP leaders shouldn't have to lie about 2020 to keep their job."

          Editorial, Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2021

Liz Cheney said Republicans are at a crossroads. The GOP can validate Trump's Big Lie, echo it, and send the country down the road to an American future when losing candidates for office send partisans to the streets or the Capitol to change the result by force, or we can reaffirm what Ronald Reagan called an American "miracle," the peaceful transfer of power.  Cheney, Washington Post:  Click: Op-Ed

She is saying what they know, but cannot say or bear hearing. 

She is expected to be ousted from her position of leadership in the House GOP within the week. House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy was heard on a hot mic saying "I've had it with her." Other GOP Representatives are complaining that she isn't creating unity because she is contradicting the Trump story line of a stolen election. That position is now the default, acceptable position for Republican officeholders. It need not be forcefully advocated, but it must not be contradicted. Cheney is doing just that, saying every officeholder really knows it. The silence of consent is poisoning our party and our democracy, she says.

Many GOP officeholders have stayed in good standing--or at least out of the line of potential fire--by mumbling and letting the story of election fraud be said by others, without contradiction. So, the Trump story thrives and spreads.  Liz Cheney is the latest example of the peril of truth-telling.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com

Trump is good at framing a political message. He knows how to attack and belittle. Trump has a platform, essentially a blog like this one, only with a "CONTRIBUTE" button, and no way to comment.

Political observers have no choice but to bookmark his site. He says controversial things in a powerful smash-mouth way, with familiar put-downs and insults. Other people read it and report on it, so it is news.

Readers have asked me "when are you ever going to stop talking about Trump?" The answer is whenever Trump stops being the major influence on GOP decision makers. At the moment they are terrified of him.

In a series of announcements yesterday Trump said Mike Pence failed to use his power as presiding officer to disallow electoral votes cast for Biden and he blamed 

"gutless and clueless MINORITY Leader Mitch McConnell (he blew two seats in Georgia that should have never been lost)" for having failed to engineer "a far different Presidential result, and our Country would not be turning into a socialist nightmare!"

He attacked Liz Cheney. 

Warmonger Liz Cheney, who has virtually no support left in the Great State of Wyoming, continues to unknowingly and foolishly say that there was no Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election.

Shortly later he announced his support for a change in leadership to avowedly pro-Trump  Elise Stefanik.

Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership. We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First. Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL endorsement for GOP Conference Chair.

Trump is speaking populism to a populist audience. Even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is contradicting Trump. On May 4 they ran an editorial titled "Purging Liz Cheney--GOP leaders shouldn’t have to lie about 2020 to keep their job."

The better part of political prudence would be for Ms. Cheney to ignore Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump won’t ignore her. He issued four statements on Monday and three of the four were attacks on fellow Republicans, including one on Ms. Cheney. She may be ousted because she is daring to tell the truth to GOP voters—and at personal political risk. . . .

Mr. Trump lost the popular vote in a rout and the Electoral College by a similar margin to what he won in 2016. Mr. Trump lost even as Republicans gained 12 seats in the House. The election was close, but not as close as others in American history. 

Republicans should find a way to speak this truth to voters in 2022.

Liz Cheney is on her way out. She is saying what Trump doesn't want to hear, and officeholders are listening to Trump. For now, still, it is Trump's party. 

How I voted in the local elections

Medford School Board and Rogue Valley Transportation District

I am flattered that people have asked me who I favored in the contested elections for local offices. My votes below come partly from personal observation and knowledge, but also from close consultation with people I consider very knowledgeable and who share my orientation toward local institutions.

My goal is for government to work well. We need schools. We need public transportation. I do not want the boards filled by ideologues wanting to "send a message." I don't want the services "shaken up." I want them to work. My intent is to vote for reasonable, moderate, sensible, public-spirited people.

If readers have a different orientation and goals from mine, they may want to vote differently.

Medford School Board:

Jeff Kinsella

Suzanne Messer

Cynthia Wright

Rogue Valley Transportation District:

(Here I relied solely on the advice of Bill Mansfield, a Medford attorney who has been on the board for many years. Bill shares my view that we want the RVTD to work well and efficiently. ) These are the candidates he recommends in the two contested races:

Don Stone

Jenna Marmon

RVTD Tax Levy

I voted "YES."

I suspect few of my readers use RVTD directly themselves. I do not. I happily voted "yes" anyway because I realize a significant body of people in Southern Oregon do NOT have access to a car and they rely on RVTD. Prosperous, comfortable people may not know many of the users personally, but they are there. They are traveling from home to Rogue Community College or Southern Oregon University. They are traveling to work at the "essential" jobs that we count on if stores are going to be open, if care facilities are going to function, and if agricultural crops are going to be grown and harvested.

China: Friend, Enemy, Supplier, Customer

Are we doomed to go to war with China?

Thucydides said yes.  

Writing 24 centuries ago, the Greek historian Thucydides examined the conflict between Sparta and Athens and concluded that conflict was inevitable when a rising power grew to challenge and frighten an incumbent power.

Port of Shanghai

A country whose economy is huge and growing bigger has interests it wants to protect. It builds a navy. It builds ports and garrisons. It develops relationships and it loans money to future trading partners and allies. It acts proudly and with impunity when it deals harshly with internal ethnic minorities and potential troublemakers. The USA did all that as we grew big, rich, and powerful in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now its China's turn to do the growing and muscle-flexing.

The behaviors that make sense for the rising power threaten the hard and soft power of the incumbent. They are competitors, then rivals, and then enemies. Then at war. Maybe. 

David Landis is a high school classmate who wrote here two weeks ago about his family's troubling experience with a prescribed drug. He brings a perspective based on another up close experience, this time with trade with China. He understands tariffs because his clients are American importers, and their American customers are the ones paying that tariff tax.  At this point, the U.S. and China are just jostling. Maybe it is the prelude to war. Maybe it is what countries do instead of war.

www.asiasourcenow.com

Landis' company, Access International Inc., has sourced and arranged contract manufacturing in Asia for North American and Western European importers for over 30 years. He has traveled to Asia on business over 80 times including to Mainland China at least 50 times.

Guest Post by David Landis

About 18% (worldstopexports.com) of China’s exports come here while 9% (census.gov) of our exports go there. We are inextricably intertwined. And there’s the rub, or is it?

For 4 decades, China has been modernizing, with great success on many fronts. Xi Jinping wants to vault China into what he believes is their destiny, to overtake the U.S. economically.

Landis, with a manufacturing client

But human rights violations, island building, other South China Sea transgressions, the Belt and Road Initiative, the bullying of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Huawei incident, COVID obfuscation, Fentanyl, and intellectual property infringement haveChina at odds with much of the world.

So what to do? Is a “hot” war inevitable? The good news is that China is unlikely to shoot its best customer. The bad news is they’re going to continue this behavior unless thwarted. They will only be stopped by a team effort of dozens of countries, led by the U.S. We must rebuild the international relationships damaged during the last administration and bring China to the table. Given the urgency of the issues, there is no time to waste.

Using tariffs to bring China to heel was doomed from the start. The current 25% punitive tariff (in the business it’s called “HTS Chapter 99”) affects over $450 billion worth of goods imported from China. It’s a crushing blow to American importers, especially those of higher ticket or price sensitive items.

America has been gaslit into believing that China pays these tariffs. This is ludicrous. The American consumer usually pays the tariffs, except in a limited number of cases, when the American importer pays them. This occurs when prices cannot be raised beyond current levels. In no case does the Chinese government pay them, however.

The International Trade Commission estimates that the tariffs are raising an additional $57 billion annually paid directly by Americans. Of that, $46.5B (cato.org) went to farmers to offset China’s retaliation. While this provided the necessary safety net for farmers unable to export their products, the need for this assistance was based on a false presumption: that the tariffs would induce new behavior from China. It did not. It did garner Trump plenty of support, at least for a period of time, from the farming community. A sound approach to dealing with China would have avoided both the tariffs and the need for the subsidies.

Rather than see China as a threat for producing goods we import, consider it as a bulwark. If made here, many of those imports couldn’t be sold because the retail price for those goods would be multiple times higher. In a perfect world, we’d import nothing. It’s not a perfect world and much of what we enjoy cannot be produced and sold here.

Currently we need China to need us and they do. Being their best customer assures this. Manufacturing in China isn’t so much a threat as China’s actions are. The key is how we deal with China while not harming ourselves as we are currently. It can be achieved.

The administration should eliminate most tariffs, aside from PPE, pharmaceuticals, and categories that relate to our R & D and American heavy manufacturing. Tariffs should be used to encourage domestic production, not as a cudgel in lieu of a multinational strategy. Besides continued misbehavior, all we’re getting in return from China are reciprocal tariffs on our exports. The American auto industry has been hit especially hard.

Let’s rebuild our alliances and create a unified strategy to control China’s behavior. It’s what American business wants and needs, across the board.

Our bodies, ourselves

“What next? And anything is the answer to that question. If the authorities are permitted to control a health care decision this intimate. . . then what can’t they do? Nothing. They will have total power over your body and your mind forever. What’s the limit to their power? There isn’t one.”

That sounds like Planned Parenthood. It isn't.

Younger Newt Gingrich

(It is Tucker Carlson, speaking against mandatory and forced vaccinations, something no one has proposed.)

Language like Carlson's sounds like the autonomy argument made by advocates of reproductive rights, i.e. people who say that personal decisions regarding sexual intimacy, contraception choices, family planning, and abortion are within the zone of personal privacy. They argue government has no right to interpose itself by banning abortion, which essentially requires a woman who becomes pregnant, from whatever means including rape, to bring the pregnancy to term. Her body, her decision.

Supporters of reproductive rights--I am one--do not argue that abortion is inherently good and a superior form of family planning, nor that the procedure is without potential risks and consequence. We argue that it should be safe, legal, and rare, as Bill Clinton put it. I would add the word "available." Most importantly, the decision on what to do belongs to the woman, not government.

In my own personal way of making that argument I have added a twist, saying "Better her deciding what to do with her own body than some politician, the likes of Newt Gingrich." I picked Newt Gingrich for a reason--the "creep factor." I wanted people to imagine an overweight, aggressive, bombastic politician, who was in the news for dumping wives and leading a House impeachment of Bill Clinton for reasons flowing from Clinton's own sexual behavior. During that very period Gingrich himself was widely known by his own caucus and later the general public, to be carrying on an affair of his own.

Older Newt Gingrich

I thought there might be a kind of bi-partisan feeling of "yuck." Republicans might imagine Clinton and a cigar. Democrats would imagine a smarmy hypocrite pointing a finger.

My argument for a woman's autonomy would be helped by association of politician hypocrisy and the face of Newt Gingrich. State power wasn't antiseptic and faceless. Yes, abortion was a choice, the woman herself or Newt Gingrich.

Tucker Carlson was attacking a straw man, "forced vaccinations."

The attack was occasioned by a brief ad by Barack Obama that made its way to TikTok. Obama said, “The vaccine is safe, it’s effective, it’s free. It’s the only way we’re going to get back to all the things we love from safely spending time with grandparents to going to concerts and watching live sports.” Obama urged young people to get the vaccine.

Carlson criticized the ad in an odd direction. He called Obama old and creepy. Obama is 59; Carlson is 51. Carlson transformed Obama's urging voluntary vaccinations into an imagined threat by some generalized out-of-control state power "authorities" to force people to be vaccinated against COVID against their wills.

“Some creepy old guy telling your children, your little kids to take medicine whose effects we do not fully understand. It’s totally normal, yeah, that happens every day. Don’t ask questions, just do it.”

“What next? And anything is the answer to that question. If the authorities are permitted to control a health care decision this intimate, if they can force you and your children to take a vaccine you don’t want and are afraid of, then what can’t they do? Nothing. They will have total power over your body and your mind forever. What’s the limit to their power? There isn’t one.”

Vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal have become center stage in the public talk of COVID. There is new worry about variations. COVID, like the common cold, seems to create new variations quickly. The more people who get the disease, the more chance for variations, and some may be much more dangerous. Variations and mutations are why the common cold is a chronic problem, not one defeated by a cold vaccine. In the U.S. a majority of people want the vaccine, but a critical mass, perhaps one third of Americans don't want to take it, now or perhaps ever. 

The new consensus is resignation that we will never get "herd immunity." We will never be able to go "back to normal" because there is now a prospect that the "new normal" is mask-wearing forever because COVID is forever. Too many people get the disease and spread it so it will never snuff out. The old and weak will keep dying, and maybe new variations will start targeting the young and healthy, the way the Spanish Flu did a century ago. 

The vaccine hesitant and vaccine refusers recognize they are being blamed and shamed. They resent it and are defending themselves. It is a matter of Constitutional rights. Of autonomy. Of privacy.  Don't blame us!  We are within our rights. Don't pressure us. Don't discriminate against us. Don't give privileges to the vaccinated. Don't tread on us.

The argument that has the greatest emotional reaction is to create an image of out-of-control state power. Again, to quote Next Door COVID chatter: 

The truth is the governor didn’t want to give up her emergency executive powers. She had to declare another emergency or her powers would have expired tomorrow. Look at the CDC and John’s Hopkins own numbers. Only 1.77% of infected have died. That’s 0.19% of total us population (using 300 mil as estimate). The entire thing is a scam at this point.

Tucker Carlson tried to add the "creep" element. It makes the act of injecting vaccine that much more objectionable. Humans have an instinctive aversion to putrefaction and defilement. Some things trigger a "disgust" response. We have to learn to eat smelly cheese.

The notion of all-powerful, creepy, interposing "authorities" gets traction from the diminished faith of Americans in institutions of credibility. Fake news. Fake media. Fake experts. Trump sold it and Americans were ready to buy it. Tucker Carlson is selling it now. Biden was dealt a difficult hand. Trump's ongoing insistence that the election was rigged and that Biden's election was fraudulent feeds the widespread doubt about the trustworthiness of all institutions. If nothing is true and reliable, then conspiracies make as much sense as anything else. 

"The entire thing is a scam at this point."

Kate Brown. Saving lives is a no-win problem

"From what I have seen at least 95% of people are wearing masks, and if they worked so well don’t you think after a year we would be in a different situation? The only reason our state is in the situation it is, is because our governor is out of control with power. As far as I know a virus has never been controlled once let out. The only way that our state opens is when businesses and people quit listening to commy kate and get back to living. "

Michael, comment on Next Door. Medford, Oregon, May 2

Brown: "I choose to save lives."

For the benefit of out-of-state readers, "commy kate" is a reference to Oregon Governor Kate Brown. Governor Brown just noted that multiple counties in Oregon have seen a sharp rise in COVID cases, causing her to re-classify them as "extreme" risk status, which re-imposes restrictions on indoor meal and beverage service.

Message boards are a way to sample public opinion. There is a school of thought that there is wisdom in crowds because the pooled opinion of a wide variety of people on anything--for example, the correct number of beans in a large jar--is likely to be close to the objectively "correct" answer. Therefore we can trust the crowd to determine the correct value of stock in Apple or Microsoft or to elect the best possible leader at any given time. Message boards make one doubt that. There are a lot of angry and opinionated people and it is hard to perceive wisdom there. But message boards do have value. They show the problems governors are up against when they attempt to reimpose COVID restrictions after having relaxed them.

COVID infections are back on the rise nationally, and especially so in Oregon, including my own community, Jackson County, with a population of about 221,000.

Cases are up. Deaths are rising again, but are still well down from four months ago presumably because the people most at risk from dying have had the opportunity to be vaccinated, and most have done so. The people getting and spreading the disease are younger people.

Currently, in Jackson County:

Below, the graph shows who ends up needing hospitalization. Notice that the big jump is at age 50 and above:

Most of the chatter in the Next Door website in opposition to vaccines is ideological. Vaccine opponents are usually also mask opponents and COVID minimizers. There is a libertarian every-man-for-himself streak, plus a generalized fear of government, in much of the opposition chatter.

The backward step on COVID shutdowns is infuriating to many. Some people are saying very intemperate things. The governor travelled to Medford last week with an entourage of security. Many people never wanted any COVID response, and a great more accepted it briefly but have lost patience with COVID masks, distancing, and shutdowns, especially since they thought we were on the home stretch. The constituency most concerned about COVID, has gotten vaccinated. That leaves a much bigger group of people who are less worried and therefore less inclined to accept COVID inconveniences. Making matters worse is that getting vaccinated had implied a return to normal, and yet CDC guidance retains use of masks. This circulated within Next Door chatter:

Democracies are better at dealing with clear and present threats than with potential ones. Events in India demonstrate that there are tens of millions of people worldwide carrying the virus. The more people doing so, the more mutations happen and the more likely it is that I new, more virulent and deadly strains can take root and circulate here in the USA. People who don't get vaccinated are potential carriers of the disease and its new variants.

Next Door chatter give some insight into the opposition to vaccines. It is a matter of privacy, autonomy, and freedom. Within the subculture of opposition, information circulates which gives practical reasons for opposition to justify the ideological one. Masks don't work. Masks make it hard to breathe and therefore make one more likely to get the disease. Masks concentrate the virus and make people sicker. The vaccines don't work. The vaccines are far more dangerous than reported. Vaccines might give you cancer later. The vaccines only give short-term protection, so don't bother. The disease is spread at homes, not restaurants and bars so shutdowns have no legitimate purpose. The disease is not very dangerous. The disease is totally fake. The numbers of people getting sick from COVID are far fewer than reported. People who supposedly die from COVID would have died shortly anyway. The vaccines have the sole purpose of creating health passports to control people in a new way. The best way to stop the disease is for more people to catch it, live through it, and have immunity.

It is Catch-22 for any governor. If their efforts succeed, then COVID becomes less of a threat, and therefore efforts to slow the disease will seem unnecessary and overblown. It will be much ado about nothing. If their efforts fail, then the disease got out of control, notwithstanding their having rules that damaged the economy; typical government incompetence. The people who did not get sick and did not die will not know that they owe their health and lives to the public effort the governors demanded. The families of people who do get sick and die, will note that the governors did not protect them.

Lose. Lose. Lose. Lose.

Believing is seeing: The coming Arizona mess.

     “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes” 

“Some very interesting things are happening in Arizona."

"This was a rigged election, everybody knows it, and we’re going to be watching it very closely.”

Trump, in Mar-A-Lago, speaking to guests

We can see it coming.

The firm hired to re-audit the Arizona election will find "irregularities." They will find "multiple unanswered and unexplained variations." They will find "suspicious ballots." They will find "unexplained marks." They will find "potential fraud sufficient to change the election result." 

Having suspicion is all that is necessary, and people can always be suspicious. Ballots will be questionable because people can always have questions.

That will feed the election-fraud meme:

 See? There is the proof. The election audit in Arizona showed questionable and suspicious activity!!!  I knew it!!!

The Arizona ballots had been counted three times by state officials. The third time was a hand-count of the ballots, which confirmed the earlier vote counts. All three counts were overseen by Republican election officials under extreme political pressure to find problems with enough ballots to change the outcome. Republican Governor Ducey's failure to do so earned him an official censure from his party.  Donald Trump personally pressured the Governor. 

There was a problem: The ballots were what the ballots were. Officeholders did their job. No good deed goes unpunished.

The majority-Republican Arizona state senate has the freedom to keep raising questions. They chose a firm led by a man publicly committed to the idea that widespread fraud took place. The Cyber Ninja firm says their methods of audit are "trade secrets" and cannot be revealed. They allowed workers handling ballots to carry with them blue pens which could mark and change ballots. They block the media from observing.

Of course they will find "irregular" and "suspicious" marks, especially on ballots that were mailed in--the ones that are predominately for Biden. They were handled by voters in their homes. They will find "suspicious grease marks" because some will have been marked on a kitchen table. Those grease spots, or fingerprint spots, will make the ballot "irregular." Or, alternatively, some ballots will be "suspiciously clean and free of signs of having been handled." Either way, suspicious. There will be extraneous marks where a pen touched the paper in a margin--or there will be a suspicious lack of marks. Under bright ultra-violet light an opaque ballot may show more or less transparency which an employee can note as "unexplained" or "irregular" and therefore "suspicious."  

We saw this with the "birther" gambit. Trump could never be satisfied. He questioned the Hawaii birth certificates. He said he found evidence Obama was born in Kenya. Or maybe Indonesia. Trump had this exchange with Today Show host Meredith Vieira. She cited his birth certificate in Hawaii.

Trump: "I’m not convinced that he has one.Three weeks ago when I started, I thought he was probably born in this country and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” 

Vieira: “You have people now, down there searching in Hawaii?”

Trump: “Absolutely, And they cannot believe what they’re finding.”

There is no evidence that he sent investigators to Hawaii, so nothing was reported found. He later said he believed Obama was born in Hawaii after all. It did not stop the birther meme. A majority of Republican voters still say they question Obama's birthplace. 

Will the cycle of election-fraud suspicion ever end?  Yes, probably, if there is electoral finality. If Republicans running in the mid-term elections, in order to remain acceptable to primary voters, assert the election-fraud story, and then endure surprising losses. Officeholders will realize that Trump's election-fraud assertions are leading them off a cliff. I don't expect this.

April, 2021: 55% of Republicans think election stolen

More likely, Republican officeholders will follow Trump's lead, keep talking openly about "likely fraud," or be silent in the face of the assertion, win in primaries, and then--as is common for the party not in the White House--do well in the mid-term elections. That would tend to validate the wisdom of echoing the Trump insistence the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. That would tend to justify efforts to "take our country back." This process is already underway, with Fox News hosts sympathetic to Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by Capitol police as she attempted to break through a door, and their descriptions of the January 6 insurrection as mostly a matter of concerned citizens assembling to right something they legitimately feared was wrong. 

In that case, Biden's overarching goal of returning America back to "normal" and "restoring America's soul," a delicate and marginal enterprise at best given his narrow 2020 mandate, will have utterly failed. There is a good chance of this.

On left and right, people think America's institutions are rigged and corrupt to the core. It is the premise behind Ralph Nader's and Bernie Sanders' critiques of the American economy and culture. This means that conspiracy language has bipartisan validation. It was outvoted on the left but took command in the GOP, where people open to this have a plurality of votes that lever up as a governing plurality, temporarily out of power by a tiny margin in a few states.

Donald Trump understood this group. He gave it voice and focus, and brought it to power. It is still there, perhaps as strong or stronger than ever. The results from the Arizona "audit" were obvious from the start.

Of course the Arizona vote was "suspicious" and the results "questionable."

Benefits for everyone, not just the poor.

There is an advantage to Biden going big. There is something for everyone.

Sharing is easier to sell than donating.

A big strategic error was embedded in the Great Society programs. The most visible programs are need-based. Food stamps. Aid to Dependent children. HUD housing subsidies. School lunches. Head Start. Pell grants. 

Middle-income people were taxed to pay for benefits they didn't qualify for.

Obama's Affordable Care Act continued that pattern. It has a sliding scale of benefits for the poorest, the not-so-poor, up into middle income people. People with jobs with benefits didn't need the ACA, but health benefits included in a job are a form of wages, so people whose efforts and good fortune entitled them to benefits--something earned--were paying taxes to help people whose efforts and less-good-fortune did not. It was donating down. 

Luke 14

There is a simple logic to allocating valuable things when valuable things are scarce: give them to people who need them. The morality of that is deeply embedded in Western Civilization, and the vast majority of Americans grew up in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We are taught to help the poor, feed the hungry, give hospitality to the stranger, but the Christian tradition acknowledged that this teaching was hard to follow and against our natures. The reward comes in heaven, not now.

I get Social Security and Medicare. As a child I got free public education for twelve years. There is no shame in this. It is near universal for people living and paying taxes in this country. All three of those "entitlements" enjoy overwhelming public support. "Welfare" does not, the Old and New Testaments notwithstanding.

Need-based benefits pick at the scabs of jealousy and resentment in a free, diverse, capitalistic, multi-ethnic country. Incomes are unequal; abilities are unequal; attitudes and ambitions are unequal; inheritances are unequal. America includes people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Some people find themselves--or work hard to make themselves--prosperous and secure and others do not or can not. 

Since there is a racial and ethnic component associated with outcomes, there is every opportunity for people who are prosperous and secure--or at least doing well enough to get benefits. They can assume the misfortunes of the poor are due to bad DNA, bad choices, bad attitudes, bad work habits. They made their choices and should live with the consequences. One can hear a dog-whistle of racial thinking, or not hear it, depending on ones inclination. Poverty is complex, with a multitude of overlapping and interconnected paths.

https://www.whitehouse.gov

Biden went big. Biden's plan is generous to everyone. It targets benefits to 99% of the population, everyone making less than $400,000/year. Biden says even that 1% shares in the benefits because government policies helped make them rich and spreading the wealth means they get to spend their fortunes in a country whose democracy is secure. Better to be rich and taxed in a country at peace, than a bit richer and less-taxed in a country amid populist insurrection. 

Can we afford to spend so lavishly?  Modern Monetary Theory says we can. A key to the Biden proposal was where he said "Buy American. Buy American." He said there is no reason wind turbine blades cannot be made in Pittsburgh rather than Beijing. If the money to pay for infrastructure and Aid to Families benefits is taxed out of Americans and then re-spent here in America, the money did not disappear. It circulated. Because of progressive taxation it would be re-distributed downward, but there is something for everyone, including the turbine-fabricator in Pittsburgh earning a family-wage union income.

Biden's appeal to American unity is not just a rhetorical and political change from Trump, who profited politically by presenting a divided America and then winning the tribal war by owning and conquering the libs at home. Biden said we are one big tribe, and therefore taxing Americans and buying American was the moral and political justification for big spending. Everyone shares in the big pot.

Americans may not want to hear that message. There is no consistent GOP policy message other than that Democrats are out to destroy America and they need to be stopped. Some Democrats on the left think racial and economic injustice is "systemic" and that the notion of one nation without class and racial conflict is naive. The incentives for GOP officeholders are to link arms and vote "no" on anything Biden does. The White woke left lost out to the policies and sensibilities of Black voters in South Carolina, but they are still a force in the Democratic Party.

Biden doesn't have robust majorities in Congress, but he has an edge and opportunity: People like getting benefits from the government. I like my Medicare and Social Security. And no one feels that sorry for the richest one percent of people, nor for corporations. People think they get away with not paying taxes. Square-shooter Mitt Romney paid taxes at the 15% rate. Trump is a billionaire and paid $750 per year. Try to convince middle-income Americans that the wealthy are overtaxed.

Biden has a shot.