How is Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan working out for the country?

December 27, 2022

President Joe Biden campaigned on the phrase “Build Back Better,” and as president has frequently used the phrase. The point he was trying to make was that things were really not so good under then-President Donald Trump, and if the country just had the good sense to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House, things would improve.

Nearly half-way through his term, how is he doing?

A column by Beth Whitehead on The Federalist website is titled “11 Of The Biden Administration’s Greatest Failures So Far.” Let’s take a look at a few of these failures.

** Facilitating a Deadly Border - The effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce U.S. border and immigration laws are devastating. Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, has said before a Congressional committee that the border is not open. He also said that the problems were inherited. And, he later denied having said the border is not open.

Putting some detail on that claim, Newsweek reported in September that “Data from the U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations compiled by Newsweek show that the average number of encounters under Biden reached totals of roughly 189,000 per month, compared to an average of just under 51,000 per month during the Trump presidency.” Sounds like an open border, doesn’t it?

Our southern border is controlled by cartels, which make millions of dollars smuggling men, women, and children across the border, which can be, and has been deadly for many of them. 

They also smuggle drugs, like fentanyl, which is deadly, along with other dangerous drugs. The number of Americans and others killed by fentanyl is in the thousands, and other drugs have taken thousands more lives. 

Roughly 3 million persons will have walked or waded across the border in Biden’s first two years, and we know little if anything about most of them. Some of them are criminals. Some of them probably were ill. Some of them were likely kidnapped.

** Shipping Illegals to a Community Near You - The president secretly shipped illegal aliens across state borders and into suburban cities and neighborhoods, without taking measures to deal with them, or even notifying these cities that the illegals would be coming.

** Holding Kids Hostage to Trans Radicalism - “In May, the Biden administration attempted to strong-arm public schools into letting males who identify as transgender use girls’ bathrooms by threatening to pull federal funding for school lunches if they didn’t,” Whitehead reported. “That’s 30 million lunch-program students Biden took hostage to push his party’s trans radicalism.”

** Tapping into Emergency Petroleum Reserves - So dedicated to the idea of killing the American fossil fuel industry, Biden decided that he would kill thousands of energy jobs, cancel fossil fuel projects, and gives up our energy independence, which we gained in the Trump presidency, and make up for that loss of oil by releasing oil from the national reserve, which exists for emergency use. 

He tries to cover his tracks by blaming our shortage on Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war. But it doesn’t work. And Americans really enjoyed paying double for gasoline that now is only $1 or so per gallon higher than when he took office. He hasn’t told us how he plans to replenish the petroleum reserve’s oil, or if he knows he must. Perhaps he’ll buy the oil from Putin.

** Driving up Inflation - Biden’s brilliance has produced an economy that has chalked up 40-year high inflation of 7.9 percent. Trying again unsuccessfully to shift the blame to Putin, it is clearly Biden’s policies that have driven up the prices of everything Americans need and want, like gas, food, clothing, building materials and household items. 

He appointed Jerome Powell to be Federal Reserve chairman, and Powell printed money well after the “need” for it was over. That, along with the American Rescue Plan, set the stage for the current inflation cycle. So far there is nothing indicating an end to this misery.

“Under the Biden administration, consumer prices rose so much faster than wages that the average family lost $5,800 in real annual income,” reports the Heritage Foundation. “Skyrocketing interest rates account for another $1,300 in lost annual income,” for a total of $7,100.  

** Botching the Afghanistan Withdrawal - Moving American military out of Afghanistan was always something we knew we would do. But it was never intended to be the disaster that Biden created. We left too quickly, without giving the Afghan troops time to prepare, and abandoned Bagram Air Base. We left behind Americans and Afghan allies to fend for themselves. We also left billions of dollars in weapons and equipment, which are now in the hands of the Taliban.

No president is perfect, although some have done wonderful things. Biden, on the other hand, has set a new standard for imperfection. There is an ongoing debate as to whether these horrible ideas are his, or whether he is just doing as someone or some group is telling him. Regardless, the buck stops with him.

Summarizing Biden’s performance, his three Bs are actually four Ds: Dereliction, Dangerous, Disastrous, and Disgraceful.

The Democrats are moving the country in the wrong direction

September 27, 2020

We see liberal/Democrat prosecutors who deliberately refuse to enforce some laws, under-charge persons arrested for crimes, enact no-bail laws that release arrested persons back on the street hours after their arrest so that they can, and often do, commit more crimes. These dangerous moves are pro-criminal and anti-victim.

Liberals/Democrats also failed to curtail the crazy riots, arson and looting in well more than 100 cities that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. This rioting, which was often defended as “mostly peaceful,” did as much as $2 billion dollars of damage to insured property, an unknown amount of damage to uninsured property, and worse, cost 15 people their lives.

Then came the not-so-brilliant idea of defunding the police, “re-imagining” law enforcement. This resulted in crime spikes in blue-run cities at shocking levels. Police officers grew tired of the lack of support, anger and violence they experienced, and took retirement or just quit working. And that contributed further to the crime sprees that still exist.

Liberal educators and school boards have been secretly changing approved and traditional curricula to include indoctrination; teaching young kids about dangerous gender transition, that boys can become girls, and girls can become boys at will, except that they say there are no such things as males and females anymore. 

Instead of teaching legitimate school subjects full time, there is the idea that everyone must use each persons’ chosen pronouns instead of their birth pronouns; mothers and fathers are now “birthing parents” and  “parents,” aunts and uncles are a “parents’ sibling”; and they falsely teach that America is filled with white oppressors mistreating the oppressed non-white minorities in what is called “Critical Race Theory.”

While China teaches its youth about math and science, the U.S. increasingly is spending less time on real education, and more time on indoctrination of “woke” ideas.

One political party is proposing radical changes to fundamentals of our Constitution and the way the nation operates. The Democrats in Congress support eliminating the Electoral College, a device created by our Founders to protect smaller states from being under the thumb of the most populous states.

Also in their tool chest of dominance, is doing away with the Senate filibuster, which Democrats have themselves used when desired. The filibuster enables the minority party to act to stop the passage of measures it believes are bad law. Without this long-time feature, the tyranny of the majority can become reality.

The Democrat leader, the President of the United States, is accusing the opposition party — the party that defends the Constitution and generally supports the current ways of doing things — of doing what his party is actually doing, which is radically attacking our democracy, our democratic republic style of government.

This party also supports weakening the election process, the security and reliability of which must be beyond question. For example, it opposes voters being required to show photo IDs that prove who they are in order to vote. 

But it also supports mailing ballots to all registered voters, even to voters who did not request a ballot, and collecting ballots by mail. It also supports voted ballots being dropped into unguarded drop boxes along the streets 24 hours a day for days on end so that anybody can dump as many “ballots” as they want.

In-person voting is the most secure method, and voting by mail is the least secure.

Other things on the Democrats’ list of accomplishments are these items, highlighted by Virginia 9th District Congressman, Republican Morgan Griffith in his weekly email communication. “In less than two short years, unified Democrat control of the Federal Government has diminished our country in ways that would astound even a pessimist,” Griffith wrote.

“Inflation has risen to levels not seen in forty years. Gas prices hit record highs earlier this year. More than two million illegal immigrants have been encountered at the southern border this fiscal year before it has even ended, not counting the significant number that have evaded detection.”

“President Biden and the liberals in Congress wreaked havoc on the economy by pouring trillions of dollars into it,” he continued. “Too many dollars chasing too few goods is the classic formula for inflation, yet Democrats persisted.”

With control of the Executive Branch and both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Democrats could do so much to help the country. They could revise the U.S. tax code, designing it with fewer loopholes and sensible tax rates. They could have left intact our recently regained position of energy independence that would have allowed the U.S. to help provide energy to countries now buying energy from Putin’s Russia, among other things.

Instead, its control has botched the Afghanistan withdrawal that killed 13 U.S. military personnel and many local allies, allowed the highest inflation in decades, contributed to the death of many Americans from the Fentanyl flooding across the southern border, doubling the size of the Internal Revenue Service, and a new recession that shows no signs of letting up, to name a few.

And we have two more years of this disaster to come.

Ending fossil fuel usage is only a dream, at this point in time

Green Energy Mania (GEM) desires that we do away with fossil fuels immediately, without regard to whether the preferred types of green energy sources are available in the necessary quantities to meet the present and future needs of Americans and the rest of humanity.

Few people believe that burning materials to make electricity is a good idea, if there are other ways of producing it. There are, however, lots of people who believe that the GEM goal is so important that it needs to be forced on Americas right away, without regard to the reality that we are nowhere close to being able to produce enough electricity by wind, solar, nuclear, et al, to handle the needs of Americans.

This attitude produces many problems, such as rules and restrictions that were created that affect the production of fossil fuels, reducing their availability and increasing their price.

Furthermore, while the US is at the top of the list of nations reducing CO2 emissions, there are other nations, like China and India, that couldn’t care less about that, and are increasing their use of fossil fuels. Why are we punishing ourselves with expensive and inconvenient restrictions when the reductions they produce are made irrelevant by the increasing excesses of other nations? 

Perhaps the only thing good about Putin’s Russian attack on Ukraine might be that it has highlighted some of the fallacies of the GEM mindset. Not so long ago — 2020, to be exact — the United States had gained the status of being a net energy exporter. And then, Joseph Biden became President of the United States, and willingly gave that up through executive orders that hurt our fossil fuel production and usage.

We must sensibly balance our wants against our needs. No matter how badly people want to end fossil fuel use, we have no choice but to depend upon them until cleaner methods are able to meet our needs. And even more sensibly, let’s use our own fossil fuels, not those of other countries.

Buying oil from places like Venezuela, whose oil is the dirtiest in the world, and America-hating Iran, the world’s top sponsor of terror, is just foolish.

And when we start smartly using our own fossil fuels as needed, let’s stop foolishly making that more difficult and expensive by getting rid of rules and restrictions. Let’s finish the Keystone XL pipeline that will make it safer and faster to get fuel from Canada for use here.

On that topic, Global Energy Institute President Marty Durbin said last year that her organization “opposes President Biden’s action to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline — the most studied infrastructure project in American history — is already under construction and has cleared countless legal and environmental hurdles. This is a politically motivated decision that is not grounded in science. It will harm consumers and put thousands of Americans in the building trades out of work. Halting construction will also impede the safe and efficient transport of oil, and unfairly single out production from one of our closest and most important allies.”

“Several extensive regulatory studies conducted over the past decade as part of an unprecedented regulatory review concluded the pipeline would enhance the American economy while protecting the environment,” according to the Global Energy Institute.

Those that think not using a pipeline, and transporting fuels instead by trucks and trains — which burn fossil fuels while moving those fuels, putting lots of CO2 into the air, which a pipeline does not do — are not thinking clearly.

The Keystone XL pipeline would deliver over 800,000 barrels of oil a day. Its construction supports over 13,000 Canadian and American workers in the building trades.

And, while the U.S. and some other nations are working to phase out the use of coal for electricity production, others are increasing its use.

Citing data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Heartland Daily News, published by The Heartland Institute, reported that “Global coal demand fell by 4 percent in the pandemic year 2020, the biggest decline since World War II, but coal demand surged in 2021 as economies rebounded from the 2020 lockdowns. The IEA projects coal use will rise at an annual rate of 6 percent through 2024, surpassing its previous all-time high for use sometime in 2022.”

“According to the IEA,” the Heartland report continued, “the gap between the political commitments to meet net zero carbon dioxide emissions and the realities of the electric power demand and the increasing use of coal to satisfy it, is widening.”

We need fossil fuels, and will for some time to come. And, other nations are going to continue to use fossil fuels, regardless of what the U.S. and other nations decide to do, or what they may think is needed. 

Some nation or nations will benefit from producing those products. Why should that not be the U.S.? We will benefit from the jobs created, and the income produced, and we might as well enjoy the cost savings that using American fossil fuels will provide to us.