Tag Archives: Catastrophe

Elizabeth Warren and AOC agree: give convicts and illegal immigrants welfare, enact rent control

Elizabeth Warren is telling people that we have 11 years to live
Elizabeth Warren has a much better way to spend the money you earn

This week, Warren and AOC announced their support for giving taxes paid by U.S. citizens, permanent residents and people here legally on work permits to illegal immigrants. Watch the video below, and read the story, and ask yourself whether you think it is your job to pay for welfare for people who wouldn’t even go through the process of coming into this country legally.

Here’s a short video clip from Fox News:

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren endorsed a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) policy proposal that includes taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, dubbed “A Just Society,” calls for nationwide rent control and bans the federal government from denying welfare benefits based on an individual’s immigration status and previous criminal convictions. Warren became the first Democratic presidential candidate to endorse the plan, calling it “just the type of bold, comprehensive thinking we’ll need” to make “big, structural change.”

[…]Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, consisting of six separate bills, calls for the expansion of welfare. Bills three and four make it illegal for the federal government to deny welfare benefits to ex-convicts and illegal immigrants.

[…]The last bill in Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal establishes health care, housing, and healthy food as government-provided rights.

[…]The legislation does not address how to pay for the rising cost of welfare, nor does it explain how it would accomplish its goals.

Remember, AOC and Warren already have the Green New Deal on the table, and the cost for that is $94.4 trillion over 10 years. So where will they get the money for this new plan? Would they do it with their own money? No, they want to do it with your money. They want to do it with your employer’s money. They want to do it with the money earned by the companies in your 401K plan. 

By the way, regarding the rent control. If there is one thing that you learn in Economics 101, it’s that rent control policies do more harm than good. It causes a shortage of living space for the poor, because the people who rent out living space cannot make enough money as they can in other investments. So, they stop investing in rental properties.

The Free Beacon article notes:

Ocasio-Cortez’s second bill, titled “The Place to Prosper Act,” calls for federal rent control by imposing a 3 percent national cap on annual rent increases. Similar legislation has failed at the local level amid concerns that such policies increased housing prices while limiting supply. A recent study by the American Economic Association found that San Francisco rent control policy “drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.” The Council of Economic Advisers found that in 11 metropolitan areas with housing regulations, deregulation would reduce homelessness by an average of 31 percent. More than 80 percent of economists surveyed by the University of Chicago in 2012 found rent control to be bad policy.

This is not controversial. Harvard University economist Greg Mankiw is the author of a very widely used economics textbook. In his textbook, he has a section where he reports on what economists (academic and professional) agree on, across the ideological spectrum. The number one item on the list, with the highest level of agreement, is that rent control does not work.

He writes:

My textbook covers business cycle theory toward the end of the book (the last four chapters) precisely because that theory is controversial. I believe it is better to introduce students to economics with topics about which there is more of a professional consensus. In chapter two of the book, I include a table of propositions to which most economists subscribe, based on various polls of the profession. Here is the list, together with the percentage of economists who agree:

  1. A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)

You can read the rest of the list on his blog, but AOC and her ally Elizabeth Warren probably disagree with all of them. And that’s who the American left are looking to for leadership. People with no knowledge. People with no achievements. People who have never solved economic problems in the private sector in their entire lives. Warren and AOC have no demonstrated achievements in the area of economic policy. There are just speaking words that make them feel good, and get applause. They don’t know what happens next, if they ever get their ideas put into law.

If you’re not already paying off your debts and saving money, you’d better start. Because when these Democrat demagogues get power, you are going to feel the effects of their economic illiteracy where you live and where you work. Remember Obamacare? We lost our doctors, we lost our health plans, and the costs of our health insurance went up. If you elect an imbecile to make policy decisions, you will be made to feel the effects of your choices.

South Korea and Canada face massive demographic crisis

South Korea

Story from LifeSiteNews. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The Republic of Korea has signaled its willingness to work to reverse a heavily pro-abortion culture through various measures, including beginning to enforce an abortion ban that has technically existed in the country for decades, in order to address the severe demographic implosion that threatens the country’s economic stability, Korean sources report.

[…]Official data from the Ministry of Health indicates that doctors perform 350,000 abortions per year, while they deliver on average just 450,000 babies, meaning 43.7 percent of pregnancies end in abortion.

However, the actual number of abortions may be at least five times the official estimate. According to the Korea Times, Rep. Chang Yoon-seok of the ruling Grand National Party said that a National Assembly inspection in October found that the number of illegal abortions in Korea exceeds 1.5 million a year or roughly 4,000 babies aborted per day.

If the National Assembly’s estimate is correct, the nation of 48 million commits approximately the same number of abortions as the United States, which has 300 million residents. Presuming the numbers of births recorded by the Health Ministry remains the same, that would mean approximately three out of four pregnancies in South Korea end in abortion.

Perhaps we need to undo anti-family policies like legalized abortion, unilateral divorce, high tax rates and a massive social programs. These policies discourage marrying and child-bearing, which prevent the creation of the next generation of taxpayers who must pay for these expensive welfare-state programs.

Canada

New research paper from the center-right C.D. Howe Institute. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The twin demographic challenges of an aging population and slow workforce growth will affect Canada’s Atlantic provinces more acutely than other regions of the country, according to a study released today by the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Stress Test: Demographic Pressures and Policy Options in Atlantic Canada,” authors Colin Busby, William B.P. Robson and Pierre-Marcel Desjardins warn that many years of low birthrates and youth outmigration mean that the Atlantic region faces diminished workforce growth and a fiscal squeeze as fewer taxpayers support a growing bill for public programs.

Massive numbers of elderly people retiring and very few young workers available to pay the taxes for their health care and retirement entitlements. Something has to give.

Massive changes needed to avert demographic catastrophe in European Union

Story from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

According to the report by Norway’s Institute for Family Policies abortion rates in Britain have leaped by a third among unmarried teenage girls and abortion is helping to age the population of Europe. Without a massive shift to family-friendly policies, the pattern of increased abortion and increasingly aging population will inevitably lead to the collapse of social welfare benefits, and, ultimately, to the bankruptcy of Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialist welfare state.

Presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday, the report said that the situation of the family in Europe is “a desolate panorama.”

“Europe is plunged in an unprecedented demographic winter and has become an elderly continent, with a large birth deficit, fewer marriages and more of them broken, homes emptying.”

“The aging population, critical birth-rate, escalating abortions, the collapse of marriage, the explosion in family breakups and the emptying of homes are the main problems of Europeans,” the 2009 Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe said.

[…]The dropping European birth rate, the report says, with its concomitant increasing health and pension costs, will lead to increases in public expenditure to care for the aging population and the eventual collapse of public revenues, leading finally to the bankruptcy of the welfare state. The average birth rate of EU countries is now 1.38 per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, even in relatively fertile countries like France.

Without a significant shift in family policies in all EU countries, the report predicts the result will be “catastrophic.” Starting in 2010, the population of Europe overall will begin to fall from 499 million to 472 million by 2050 and every third inhabitant will be over 65.

[…]Other indicators show the number of marriages, especially first marriages, is down and divorce rates are up. There are 1 in 4 fewer marriages than in 1980 and the marriage rate has fallen in 9 out 10 countries. One out of every 3 children (36.5 per cent) is born outside marriage. In some countries the fall in marriage rate has been around 50 per cent since 1983 and there are over one million divorces a year, the equivalent to one marital breakdown every 30 seconds.

You can take a look at the actual numbers here. It’s a mess. This should convince fiscal conservatives to support social conservatism. Abortion and the destruction of two-parent families imposes massive social costs on society, and it grows government to deal with the fallout. Government pay for all the social programs, welfare, police, jails, etc. But it also has to regulate broken families via the courts. It makes no sense to abandon morality and expect government to stay the same – it will have to grow.

Maybe we shouldn’t have let the secular socialist elites run things? Could it be that believers in traditional morality and small government were in the right? Could it be that there is a price to pay for believing in materialism and naturalism, and jettisoning morality for hedonism?