Trump’s Palestinian Economic Plan:
Faint or Feint?
By John C. Wohlstetter
{ spectator.org } ~ Having reshaped the Arab-Israeli conflict by moving our embassy to Jerusalem, slashing aid to the Palestinians, and annexing the Golan Heights... Team Trump floats an economic plan for the Palestinians that is anchored firmly in the obsolete Oslo “land for peace” formula. But a Jewish World Review article from a top Middle East journalist says this is a feint and that Team Trump is working on a deal with Russia on managing Middle East conflicts under which the Palestinians will be bypassed. The author, Zev Chafets, who handled press matters for Israeli Prime Minister (1977-1983) Menachem Begin and was an active participant in the Camp David “peace process” negotiations, writes that the Bahrain conference is an “orchestrated exercise in futility” that masks the real Trump agenda: a Middle East rapprochement with Russia that will accommodate common geostrategic regional interests and help stabilize the endemically unstable Mideast. If true, this is an important step in marginalizing the Palestinians, who offer nothing constructive, and it would limit the damage done by President scumbag/liar-nObama in inviting Russia back into the Middle East after forty years in the Middle East geostrategic wilderness. First, we can look at the Trump plan and its implications, were it enacted; for purposes of this analysis, I will discount the contrary report and treat the deal as if it is a genuine proposal. Second, we can factor in certain Middle East realities that bear on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And third, we can then assess the implications of a possible Trump-Putin Middle East deal. The Trump Plan: On June 22, the Trump administration rolled out its economic plan for the Palestinians. Peace to Prosperity, (PTP) proposes “a new vision for the Palestinian people and the broader Middle East.” In fuller formulation, the plan proposes “to transform and improve the lives of Palestinians and the peoples of the region by unleashing economic growth, unlocking human potential and enhancing Palestinian governance following a peace agreement.” Incredibly, the PTP’s opening paragraph flags the Palestinian peoples’ “historic desire to build a better future for their children.” Israeli pundit David Horovitz notes that the “historic endeavor” of the Palestinians has been “just the opposite.” PTP calls for a new Marshall Plan, the 1947 four-year plan that underwrote Western Europe’s post-World War II recovery Russia turned down an invitation for itself and its Eastern European satellites to participate and avowedly places implementation into private-sector hands. A Wall Street Journal report notes, however, that of the $50 billion regional aid total actually $50.7 billion $39.1 billion (77 percent) is in the form of grants and loans, and only $11.6 billion is earmarked for private-sector investment. Priced at $15 billion in 1948 dollars — $160 billion today — the MP amounted to $337 per person, adjusted to 2019 dollars. Since Oslo, the Palestinian territories excludes UN-administered refugee camps received $5.5 billion. Since 2007, another calculation shows $12 billion — some $14 billion in 2019 dollars — from donors...
https://spectator.org/trumps-palestinian-economic-plan-faint-or-feint/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=aea600d91e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_02_01_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-aea600d91e-104608113 .
.
.
.
Judges Could Solve All Our Problems
By Marc Berman
{ spectator.org } ~ Concert tickets are expensive. It’s risky to rely on music reviews to choose which performances to attend. Critics are fallible. They don’t always recognize true art... In contrast, the United States Supreme Court has long regarded itself as infallible, because of its self-assumed role as the final, authoritative interpreter of our Constitution. State supreme court judges claim similar power regarding state law. I have often prayed that such judges might give us humans the benefit of their omniscience in other fields besides law. Like, say, in music criticism. My prayers have finally been answered. The New Jersey Supreme Court recently decreed that all music is art. Now, the New Jersey court’s foray into music analysis, while welcome, seems untraditional. How did judges undertake to decide which music has aesthetic value? Aren’t they supposed to stick to interpreting legal texts? Fortunately, judges, by and large, no longer view themselves as interpreters of the law. Rather, they see themselves as volunteer legislators. For example, many of our infallible federal Supreme Court justices believe that their Ivy League education establishes them as sages who needn’t be bound by parochial concerns. Like the text of the Constitution. As renaissance people, it’s not surprising that these high court members are experts not only in law, but also in astronomy. Few deplorables remember that “penumbra” means “the shadow cast by the earth or moon over an area experiencing a partial eclipse.” But Supreme Court justices remember. Indeed, in 1965, some of them discovered that the Constitution itself casts “penumbras.” Constitutional “penumbras” are doctrines that the justices understand are implicit in the Constitution, yet aren’t found in its text. Apparently, the Founders were smart enough to realize that overeducated judges 200 years later would know what the document really meant. Since the 1960s, woke Supreme Court members have used these penumbras, and other free association techniques, to improve our benighted lives. Fittingly, these justices implement their personal preferences for social policy, rather than minding what the Constitution actually states. As a recent piece in the Harvard Law Review declared, it’s “past time that … the American people accept that … the Constitution means what judges say it means and the text just doesn’t matter.” Other judges follow the lead of the Fab Nine. These lower magistrates also decide cases as their internal Ouija board dictates. The New Jersey justices who decreed all music to be art merely ratcheted judicial lawmaking closer to its logical climax...
https://spectator.org/judges-could-solve-all-our-problems/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=aea600d91e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_02_01_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-aea600d91e-104608113 .
Student-Loan Forgiveness: Moral Hazard on SteroidsArnold Ahlert: It’s almost impossible to maintain a current list of Democrat Party efforts to buy votes. “Free” health care, “free” college tuition, and reparations for slavery, Native Americans, and gay and lesbian couples are just the tip of the iceberg for a party that would also decriminalize sneaking into America, provide health care to illegal aliens, and raise taxes on middle-class America to pay for it, even when such proposals would blast an already unconscionable level of national debt further into the stratosphere. Yet the most pernicious pandering — courtesy of Sens. commie-Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth dinky-Warren — is the idea that $1.6 trillion of outstanding student-loan debt should simply be canceled.
“People are not truly free when they are unable to buy a home, start a family or pursue the career they want because they owe tens of thousands of dollars for the crime of getting an education,” commie-Sanders declares. “This is why, as part of my proposal for a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, I have this week introduced legislation to free generations of Americans by canceling the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.”
If a shamelessly suck-up proposal with the words “21st Century” attached to it has a familiar ring, it’s because “socialism of the 21st Century” was the term used by the late Hugo Chavez, who promised it put Venezuela on the road to utopia.
commie-Sanders thought so too, as recently as 2011. “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger,” he wrote. “Who’s the banana republic now?”
Certainly not Venezuela. It has devolved from a banana republic to a completely failed state.
In contrast to commie-Sanders, dinky-Warren’s giveaway is more intricate. She would eliminate$50,000 in student-loan debt for every person with household income under $100,000, partially cancel debt for those with household incomes between $100,000 and $250,000, and make private student-loan debt eligible for cancellation — and also provide free college to everyone. In a tweet dinky-Warren called her plan “the kind of big, structural change we need to make sure our kids have opportunity in this country.”
Structural change? The same shopworn socialist/Marxist redistributionism that has produced “equality” — of misery and poverty — everywhere it’s been tried, is more like it.
How dishonest are Democrats? What could be more dishonest than the word “free” attached to any government proposal? Nothing is free, and the use of the word to describe any transfer of costs from one group of Americans to another is Orwellian doublespeak.
Moreover, it reeks of elitist contempt. Democrats are convinced a large percentage of Americans are either so bereft of common sense and economic acumen or so imbued with a sense of self-entitlement that they’ll climb aboard the socialist gravy train.
No doubt much of that contempt is derived from knowing that they themselves have heartily embraced the wholesale dumbing-down of America’s public-school system, where contempt for a nation in need of “fundamental change” has become an integral part of the curriculum.
Yet who’s kidding whom? There are two primary reasons that college students have accumulated $1.6 trillion of debt Democrat would “forgive.” First, all student-loan defaults are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayers, many of whom have never even sniffed the inside of a college classroom. Thus colleges can — and have — raised their costs with impunity: since 1985 tuition has increased at nearly quadruple the rate of inflation. Moreover, a large percentage of those increases have been dedicated to expanding college bureaucracies, whose costs rose at nearly twice the rate of teaching outlays between 1993 and 2007.
What kind of bureaucracies? Last April, Georgetown University President John DeGioia announced the creation of a Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One month later, University of Rochester created the same position with the same title. Ivy League colleges Yale and Harvard also inflated their ranks of diversity “specialists,” all of whom are undoubtedly tasked with making their respective universities what DeGioia described as bastions of “racial justice” and “educational equity.”
Second, many students can’t pay off their loans because they can’t get good enough jobs to do so. “I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month, but I had no money, no sustainable income,” stated Chad Albright, a graduate who fled to China to escape paying his $30,000 debt. “College ruined my life.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps obtaining a degree in public relations was a bad choice.
Yet maybe he wouldn’t have made that choice if colleges were required to publish data on student graduation rates, the level of debt they’ve accumulated, and what students earn after graduating — so potential enrollees know exactly what they’re getting before they go into debt. And maybe colleges wouldn’t be so expensive if they were required to underwrite a percentage of those student-loan defaults, largely engendered by majors that do virtually nothing to prepare students for real-world jobs.
Such truth in advertising coupled with market-based cost controls would produce genuine structural change. Yet for panderers like Sanders and Warren, what it wouldn’t do is far more important: it wouldn’t burnish their social justice warrior credentials.
Thus, both prefer preserving an utterly corrupt system and forcing the “rich” to pay for it.
Yet far worse is something few people talk about any more: moral hazard. Like their obsession with providing a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of people who entered the nation illegally — and making an utter mockery of those who have emigrated here the right way — commie-Sanders and dinky-Warren would make a similar mockery of all those former students who have struggled to pay back the money they willingly borrowed.
In short, for nothing more than political gain, they would toss honor, integrity, and commitment to one’s legal obligations on the ash heap of history.
Unsurprisingly, they have their champions. “Student debt is a potent issue that has the potential to drive turnout and influence votes, in 2018 and beyond,” gush columnists Richard Eskow and Sean McElwee. “Individuals holding student debt may well decide which party will control the House of Representatives next session.”
Really? And then what? Columnist Dov Fischer sarcastically ups the morally hazardous ante for the rest of the “woke” Democrat contenders. “Howzabout a zero-percent candidate shooting up from the pack with this proposal: Buy off the whole American Middle Class by promising Home Mortgage Loan Forgiveness!” he writes.
Why not? And why stop there? How about car loans, credit card debt, or even one’s gambling losses at the race track? Isn’t it just as unfair that millions of Americans struggle to cover those costs? Once moral hazard is eliminated, shouldn’t any debt that engenders even the slightest iota of hardship be forgiven?
As our Nate Jackson has wryly noted, “Never get in a bidding war with a true socialist.”
No doubt. Moreover, don’t get into moral arguments with people who believe the accumulation of power — by any means necessary — constitutes the totality of their “moral” universe. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/63979?mailing_id=4378&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4378&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
Comments