Who Are the Neofascists?
- By Stephen Moore
In just the last few weeks, Liz Truss, Britain's new prime minister, has been denounced by critics as a "fascist." So has Giorgia Meloni, Italy's newly elected prime minister. Along with all Republicans in Congress, Texas and Florida GOP Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and, of course, former President Donald Trump. Every one of the tens of thousands of "MAGA Republicans" who attend Trump rallies, too.
Dangerous fascists, for that matter, all of whom critics say need to be shut up.
Truss is a fascist because she wants to cut taxes. Meloni is a fascist, and getting banned from several social media platforms, because she gave a rousing speech endorsing God, family and country. What a dangerous tyrant. Republicans in Congress are fascists because they support work for welfare and are trying to block the Green New Deal.
America Needs Political Prediction Markets
- By Stephen Moore
Just in time for the heat of the election season, a federal agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has announced it will no longer allow betting on political and election outcomes.
These online wagering platforms, most notably PredictIt, allow betting on all sorts of political outcomes: the odds that Republicans win the Senate in November, the odds that Joe Biden will be the next Democratic nominee for president (right now 33%) or the odds that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wins the GOP nomination in 2024 (right now 38%). You can also bet on whether a piece of legislation will pass.
Biden Is Losing the Race for the Cure
- By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden recently announced, with great fanfare, his Cancer Moonshot initiative. Biden used soaring and promising rhetoric about, at last, finding a cure for one of the world's leading killers.
Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Sept. 12, the president declared: "Beating cancer is something we can do together, and that's why I'm here today." For perhaps the first time in his presidency, Biden seemed to cross the aisle and reach out for Republican support by saying: "Cancer doesn't discriminate red and blue; it doesn't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat."
Biden is right that the race for the cure is and should always be bipartisan. After all, who doesn't want to defeat cancer? Well, actually, the president and every Democrat in Congress seem not to have this as a top priority -- or even a priority at all.
Why Is the Left Always So Deathly Afraid?
- By Stephen Moore
What is it about those on the Left of the political spectrum that they seem to not just live in perpetual fear of apocalypse and doom but they actually embrace it? It is their raison d'etre.
Is there something in the collective psyche or the DNA of modern leftists that they crave fear? And doom?
This cult of apocalypse started in the late 1960s with the doomsday predictions of "the population bomb," the title of a mega-bestselling book by Stanford University biology professor Paul Ehrlich. "The Population Bomb" predicted that mankind was breeding at a pace that would bring about a Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation, starvation, war, poverty and water shortages. All that was missing was a swarm of locusts. We were running out of everything.
Now, They Are Coming for Your Car
- By Stephen Moore
The left has always hated cars -- or at least the idea that there should be a car in every driveway. Now, it is stepping up its assault.
In 2035, every car purchased in California, with its nearly 40 million people, will have to be an electric vehicle. Why? The automobile is arguably the most liberating invention in history, or at least is in the top five of all time. It allows people to travel anywhere at any time at fast speeds. The increase in mobility from mass auto ownership has been a major driver of increased incomes and wealth. One of the best ways to help low-income people out of poverty is to get them a car so they can drive to jobs that may be located far outside their neighborhoods.
The Dumbest Union Ever
- By Stephen Moore
In September 2020, at the first presidential debate between him and President Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden infamously declared, "Nobody's going to build another coal-fired power plant in America" if he won the White House against Trump.
Even with comments like this, the United Mine Workers of America endorsed Biden for president. It was a head-scratcher, for sure.
Biden and the Democrats hate coal, and they hate mining. Their endgame agenda is to put every miner in America out of a job. The Biden Interior Department is vetoing most mining permit applications.
Is Modern Environmentalism a Pagan Religion?
- By Stephen Moore
The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that "the modern environmentalists worship the created, not the creator." I was reminded of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $369 billion to the climate change-industrial complex.
Pelosi (D-CA) claimed the wind, solar and electric subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act would placate an "angry" planet. "Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of that," the speaker said.
An IRS That's Armed and Dangerous
- By Stephen Moore
The Biden administration has a lot of nerve proposing to double the budget of the Internal Revenue Service and add 87,000 employees.
This plan is set to become law as part of the soon-to-be-enacted Inflation Reduction Act. And it comes around the same time as the outrageous FBI raid of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida. The Biden administration has converted the FBI and the Justice Department into functionaries of the Democratic Party's character assassination campaign. Think they will do the same with a Yankee Stadium full of new IRS auditors? They will be on search-and-destroy missions.
Biden Puts IRS Funding Ahead of Military and Border Security
- By Stephen Moore
Everyone should be deeply troubled by the recent report that the Army is on pace to miss its recruiting goal by dozens of thousands of troops and by the report that followed a few days later, alleging that the Border Patrol is running short of agents in Arizona and Texas. The border is so porous these days that even mayors of sanctuary cities are starting to complain about illegal immigration.
So, what is Congress doing about these crises? They are going to spend tens of billions of dollars to increase the number of ... IRS employees. The plan calls for spending some $80 billion to hire some 80,000 new agents and investigators. This will give the IRS the resources to double the number of people who get audited every year.
The Left Wants To Abolish Everything, Even This Column
- By Stephen Moore
Any aging baby boomer (like myself) knows that the anthem of the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s was sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Let the good times roll. Back then, the joke was that a conservative was someone who lived in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, was having fun.
But if this new generation of authoritarian liberals has its way, sex and rock 'n' roll will be illegal.
As I've said in the past in these pages, the ironic ideological twist that has occurred over the past 20 years is that the once permissive "live and let live" Left is now the nonpermissive Left. The leftists in America are the new puritans.
When Millionaires and Billionaires Leave, Everyone Loses
- By Stephen Moore
Liberals are very good at chasing rich people out of their states.
Blue states lose billions of tax dollars and many tens of thousands of jobs as a result of the migration of rich people leaving high-tax and high-crime states. It seems to happen nearly every day.
Consider Elon Musk. He left California for Texas. He paid $11 billion in federal taxes last year, and the state of California will likely lose billions in tax revenues in his absence -- and that doesn't include all the property and sales taxes that his Tesla employees will now pay in Texas rather than the Golden State. Texas has no state income tax, of course.
How Angela Merkel's Green Agenda Caused the Economic Collapse of Germany
- By Stephen Moore
Remember how the world, especially the American media, fawned over former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?
The adoration was so over the top that in 2015 Time magazine named Merkel its "Person of the Year." It described her as the "Chancellor of the Free World."
Time owes whatever readers it has left a solemn apology. Today, Germans are suffering the bitter fruits of nearly every major economic and geopolitical decision Merkel made as chancellor.
Start with the German economy that she attempted to reset for the 21st century, which is reminiscent of how President Joe Biden explains to inflation-weary voters that we are going through "an incredible transition."
Biden's Green New Deal Is Increasing Greenhouse Gases
- By Stephen Moore
Here's an amazing but true statistic. After more than a decade of declining carbon emissions here in the United States, in 2021, President Joe Biden's first year in office, emissions rose.
In other words, not only have Biden's energy policies been a disaster for our economy and national security as we have become more dependent on Russia and Iran, but they haven't worked as a global warming solution.
To understand the utter futility of Biden's "renewable energy" crusade, we must go back about 15 years in time to when the amazing shale revolution, thanks to energy pioneers such as Harold Hamm of Oklahoma, the man who drilled the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, began. These new drilling techniques have vastly expanded America's natural gas production over the past decade and turned America into the world's leading oil and gas superpower.
Biden Is the Economy's Supply Chain Problem
- By Stephen Moore
Joe Biden has become America's "it's not my fault" president. Whether it's the inflation, the border, the crime, the gas prices, the Afghanistan exit fiasco or the stock market collapse, Biden has become an expert at pointing the finger at someone else.
His presidency so far reminds me of the famous campaign slogan of then-New York Mayor David Dinkins, who admitted that everything was going wrong in the Big Apple on his watch and confessed, "I'm doing the best I can." New Yorkers believed him. And they wisely tossed him out of office for Rudy Giuliani, who actually fixed things.
Take the supply chain crisis. Biden constantly blames shortages, empty shelves and back orders of everything from cars to tampons to baby formula on "supply chain" disruptions. For example, if you try to buy a new car these days, you will probably have to wait for weeks or even months to pull into your driveway. Or you will have to pay $5,000 to $20,000 above the sticker price to get a car immediately.
The Great Biden Recession of 2022 Is Already Here
- By Stephen Moore
Last week, I was invited to testify before a House committee hearing titled: "How the Biden American Rescue Plan Saved the Economy and Lives." I am not making this up. Can you imagine taking a victory lap, given our current conditions?
I told the Democrats on the committee that the idea that Congress would hold a hearing like this when the economy is coming unhinged only reinforces the suspicion held by most people that the Washington swamp is totally out of touch with the lives and hardships of everyday America.
The reality of our predicament is best summarized by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who warned investors to "brace yourself" for what he called a fast-approaching economic "hurricane."
The Swamp vs. America: Biden Policies Are Making America Poorer
- By Stephen Moore
I've been struck by the opinion divide on the state of the economy between people with real jobs in America and the elite opinions in Washington.
Gallup and other primary and reputable pollsters find that the public is very worried. About 2 in 10 respondents rate the U.S. economy as good or great. That compares with nearly 6 in 10 people who thought the economy was good or great throughout Donald Trump's presidency. In other words, three times the number of people liked the way things were going under Trump policies than feel the same way about Bidenomics.
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Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: "Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy." To find out more about Stephen Moore and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
