Class Warfare

The Democrats today are dividing Americans into two classes, but they aren't the classes you think. Not strictly so, anyway.

It's not Democrat and Republican, left and right, blue and red, liberal and conservative, progressive and MAGA. It's not really the haves and the have-nots, the elites and the commoners, the one percent and the lower class, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the degreed and the non-degreed, white collar and blue collar, the rich and the poor.

No, the classes the Democrats are dividing us all into cross some of those lines, drawing into each of these two classes some folks from either side of those more traditional divides.

The classes the Democrats are dividing us into today are the Sharks and the Remora.

The Sharks may be those people on Shark Tank, successful, rich entrepreneurs ruthlessly striking deals to get even richer. But they also include teachers, handymen, consultants, veterinarians, physical therapists, bank tellers, hairdressers, firefighters, policemen, auto mechanics, landscapers, fry cooks, painters, and plumbers. A good many of them are immigrants, many of whom may have originally come here illegally, believe it or not.

By Sharks, I don't mean ruthless, greedy, Type-A people, though many of them are Sharks. I mean people who understand that you eat what you kill. That you and you alone are responsible for providing for yourself. That, like a shark, you hunt for your own food, provide for your own sustenance, don't expect anyone to give you anything. And that expect the government to get the hell out of their way and let them do it, and let them keep what they kill.

Remora, in case you're not familiar with them, are bottom-feeding suckers. Now, they serve a purpose in the whole oceanic eco-system, as cleaners. They suck onto the sharks and get a free ride, and clean up after them, eating what the sharks discard. The sharks, for the most part, leave them alone, because, for the most part, the remora are fairly unobtrusive.

Enter the Democrats, who would seek to upset the entire eco-system. They're doing everything in their power to create a larger, and permanent, Remora class. When the government shut down the economy due to covid - which will forever rank in history as the single most stupid decision humankind ever collectively made - Democrats and Republicans alike made all kinds of aid available as accommodation for those adversely affected economically by the shutdown. PPP loans, extended unemployment benefits, student loan payment pauses, etc.

Once the economy rebounded, though, the Democrats sought to extend those benefits. They kept the unemployment benefits going far longer than was necessary, in order to keep unemployment high, businesses suffering, and the economy sputtering, in order to hurt Donald Trump's chances at re-election in 2020. In Republican-run states, the jobless benefits were terminated early, and job growth in those states took off much faster than in Democrat-run states, where the benefits were extended. The Democrats didn't care if their states' economies suffered; there was a Bad Orange Man to defeat!

The Democrats also extended the pause on repayment of student loans, long after unemployment returned to pre-pandemic levels. Why? To buy the youth vote in the 2022 mid-terms. See, the Dems are taking a beating in the polls, what with a porous southern border, soaring crime (especially in Dem-run cities), skyrocketing inflation, horrendous foreign policy, and a President who can't think straight. So, even though everyone who wants a job now has a job (and there are still more job openings than there are available people to fill them), people who owe money on student debt aren't being required to pay it back until (drum roll, please) after the mid-term elections.

Now, Joe Biden, in utter defiance of the Constitution that he has used so often to wipe his diarrhetic arse, has, without the requisite Congressional approval, authorized the "forgiveness" of $10,000 of student loan debt for anybody who makes, or whose parents make, $125,000 a year individual or $250,000 combined. (FYI, a combined income of $250,000 is pretty darn near the top 5% of income earners in the U.S.) If that person qualified for a Pell Grant when they went to college, they can double down and get $20,000.

Get this: the current maximum amount for a Pell Grant is $6,895. So, if you qualified for the maximum amount (note that this is this year's maximum; if you were in school one to four years ago, the maximum was lower), you can parlay that $6,895 into $10,000 of additional student loan forgiveness. That's not a bad arbitrage, and proof positive that Joe Biden flunked every math class he ever took. But it gets better. The minimum Pell Grant amount is $650. In its sheer and utter brilliance, Biden's plan stipulates that if you got any Pell Grant, in any amount, you get the full extra $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. So, you can go full-on arbitrageur and turn $650 into a cool $10k.

Brilliant, Joe.

Now, the Democrats would argue that the dollar amount of the Pell Grant doesn't matter; if you were poor enough to qualify for one, you ought to get the additional student loan forgiveness. The problem with that argument is this: your parents might have been relatively poor, such that you got a small Pell Grant, sure. Now, you've finished your degree, and you're making a cool $120k a year. Your spouse is making the same coin, putting the two of you near the top 5% of the income scale. If you had college-age kids today, they wouldn't come anywhere close to qualifying for grant money. Yet you still get that extra $10k. And who pays for it? The Sharks - the plumbers, painters, landscapers, and fry cooks. People who make a hell of a lot less than $120,000 a year.

Some Remora are not to blame for being what they are. They simply believe they're taking advantage of something the government is legitimately offering them - just like a Shark will deduct his mortgage interest from his income taxes, assuming he itemizes deductions. (I'm using male pronouns here. If you don't like it - well, my pronouns are she/it. Meaning, if you can't figure out my gender without asking my pronouns, you don't know she/it.) And it's the government's fault, really, for offering all of these handouts, for creating and expanding the Remora class to begin with.

But the difference between the mortgage interest deduction and student loan forgiveness (well, one difference, anyway) is that student loan forgiveness isn't actually forgiveness at all. See, the debt isn't being forgiven, it's being PAID. Who's paying? The Federal government. Who funds the Federal government? The taxpayer. In other words, it's a massive transfer of wealth, from the Remora class to the Sharks. Those of us who eat what we kill - from the fry cook who didn't go to college; to me, the guy who was a CEO and also went to college on student loans, but paid his off like he was obligated to - are stuck paying for this criminally stupid scheme.

Welcome to Joe Biden's America.

Maybe some of these hapless, unwitting Remora never do figure out that they're bottom-feeding suckers. Maybe they never do realize that they're living off the Sharks, that their smack-on-the-forehead, well-golly-will-ya-look-at-what-I-found-in-my-pocket good fortune came at the expense of someone else's initiative, pluck, and labor.

In other words, maybe they're just that stupid.

Others do figure it out, however. They may start out not realizing it, but pretty soon they do. And you know what? They don't care. Because they have no incentive to be a Shark. They've been conditioned to be bottom-feeding suckers, living off the efforts of others. They've been conditioned to be a Remora.

But it's the rest of the Remora class that are the most insidious. These are the ones that know exactly what they're doing from the get. It's their goal to be a Remora. It's their intent to never be Sharks. Oh, they're smart enough - most anyone is. They're capable of the work - most everyone is. No, for them, the Remora life is a grift.

An excellent example of this type of Remora is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You know her as AOC. You probably think she's dumb, because she says really dumb things. She's not dumb. She doesn't know much; that's true. Her grasp of things like education, economics, energy, foreign policy, is as weak as a Joe Biden air-handshake. But she's smart. Smart enough to play the system.

Smart enough to play you.

She got a degree from a pretty prestigious private college; never mind that she didn't learn much, except how to tend bar and how to dance. She then got herself elected to Congress by promising free stuff to poor people - in other words, by offering to make Remora out of them. Her current income is definitely Shark-worthy. But she's no Shark.

See, she doesn't work for it. Never sponsored a bill. Hell, she showed up at a protest, pretended to be arrested, and had to fake getting handcuffed. She's got the best benefits going. She gets enough in donations to buy fancy designer dresses, plaster them with Socialist slogans, and wear them to tony society balls that you and I couldn't get an invitation to no matter who we bribed.

Think she's not smart? On her website, she sells kitsch with anti-capitalism slogans. SELLS it, for money. And people buy that shit. Let that sink in.

And guess what? Remember that prestigious college she went to? How did she fund it? That's right, student loans. And guess what?

The Sharks are gonna pay off $10,000 of those loans for our favorite professional Remora.

The problem with all three types of Remora - the unwitting buffoon Remora; the reluctant-at-first Remora who eventually figure it out, but remain Remora; and the professional grifter Remora - is that they have zero incentive to stop being Remora, and become Sharks. The Democrats give them every reason to permanently remain in the Remora class, and to forego the opportunity to move into the Shark class.

For it is an opportunity: to break the chains of dependency, become your own person, enjoy the pride and satisfaction of knowing you made your own way in the world; and, more than anything, to have unlimited upside, being able to go as far as your brains, your drive, your willingness to work hard will take you. And to do it all honestly, with integrity.

But at the same time the Democrats are creating more and more incentives for people to become and remain Remora, they are discouraging people from becoming and remaining Sharks. By increasingly burdening the Sharks with these inequitable wealth transfers, disincentivizing hard work, increasing taxes on individual initiative, they are discouraging expansion of the Shark class.

So the Democrats are upsetting the balance of nature, by increasing the number of Remora in the eco-system relative to the number of Sharks. What's the outcome when that happens in nature?

Well, scientists (the real ones, not the guys like Tony Fauci) are already concerned about how well the Remora are gonna fare long-term, because in the world's oceans, sharks are becoming endangered.

So, too, in the U.S. (and in Canada, and Australia), Sharks are becoming endangered. And that endangers the Remora. Because when there aren't enough Sharks for the Remora to suck off of - or, when the Sharks don't collectively have enough left to feed all the Remora what they think (or have been led to believe) they're entitled to, the Remora will begin to die off.

Or - and this will work in my analogy; it wouldn't work in the ocean - they'll figure out that they'll have to become Sharks to survive. They'll figure out that it's time to say a big, hearty FU to the Democrats, and vote in leaders who will stop creating incentives to become Remora, and start creating incentives to become Sharks. Leaders who will stop taking from the Sharks and giving to the Remora.

Now, there's another, quicker path to this equilibrium, and I offer it for consideration by all my fellow Sharks.

We don't have to wait for the Remora class to get hungry, and decide they've had enough, that it's high time they become Sharks.

See, we're the effing apex predators here, am I right? We can do what some species of sharks do in the ocean. Namely ...

We can eat the Remora.

Think about it.

The Kansas Vote: I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means

In the wake of last week's spate of primary elections that saw voters in five states head to the polls, pundits on the national cable news outlets - including conservative Fox News - were focused on ... Kansas, of all places. Not 2020 swing states like Arizona or Michigan, which also held primaries that day, but Kansas, which went for Donald Trump in 2020 by a 56-42 margin, with the former President carrying all but five of the state's 105 counties.

Why?

On the ballot in Kansas was Amendment 2, which related to abortion. In a nutshell, all the amendment would have done would have been to eliminate the right to an abortion from the state's constitution - a "right" that was put there by the state Supreme Court - and place the power to regulate abortion in the hands of the people, through their duly elected legislature (and subject to the veto power of their duly elected Governor), rather than leave that right in the hands of a largely unelected group of seven judges.

However, the amendment was couched in language that confused many of the few voters who bothered to read its actual language. And the opposition movement - which drew thousands of supporters from both coasts - used a campaign of lies to battle the amendment. Yard signs said, "Vote No - Stop the Ban," even though the amendment would not have banned abortion by any stretch of one's paranoid imagination. Campaign ads featured more lies, and scare tactics. Mailbox stuffers bore dire warnings reminiscent of the kinds of religious tracts handed out by the Westboro Baptist Church loonies. The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri - a little despot who let his mandate powers go to his head in 2020, to the point that he came to see himself as the sovereign of the entire metro area - crossed the state line to knock on doors to persuade Kansas suburbanites to vote no.

Uninformed voters took to Facebook to proclaim that a vote for the amendment meant that a pregnant woman couldn't terminate an ectopic pregnancy, which - if one actually understands what an ectopic pregnancy is - is so laughable a falsehood that the only people who would fall for it probably shouldn't be having children in the first place.

In the end, the campaign of lies was a smashing success. Nearly two-thirds of voters voted "No," and the amendment failed. Thus the Kansas Supreme Court remains sovereign over all Kansans, a sobering fact that could have implications that make this Kansan shudder (and consider moving outside the state he has called home for 62 of his 64 years).

So, back to the national news pundits. All eyes were on Kansas, because, in their deep analytical view, the Kansas vote is a harbinger of things to come in the November mid-terms. They reckon that, in a post-Dobbs world, the pro-abortion-on-demand crowd (and let's face it, that's what they are; no lipstick-on-a-pig terminology like "pro-choice" here, please) is so up in arms, so rabid, that they'll come out in force across the land, and the Dems will retain control of the House and the Senate.

Good, I say. Keep thinking that. Because the Kansas vote doesn't mean what you think it means.

First, those pundits are sitting there in Washington and New York, not understanding the dynamics of the Kansas vote. They don't know how the amendment was worded; heck, they didn't even read it themselves. (I did.) They themselves referred to it as a "ban." So they don't know that a number of voters voted against it because they were confused, and that large numbers voted against it because they were swayed by the campaign of lies.

See, most voters - and especially Democrats - don't read source documents. They vote on the basis of the news they watch, campaign ads, and maybe yard signs and mailbox stuffers. They vote with their hearts, not their heads.

Now, you may be crying "foul," especially if you're a Democrat. How can I say that "especially Democrats" don't read source documents, and instead base their vote on the news?

Easy. The covid pandemic gave me all the evidence I need to make that assertion with a high confidence interval. You watched the news and panicked; I dug into the data and did not. I called out the media for their hysteria on the basis of sound research using source documents and real data. You bought the hype. And by and large, the people that bought into the hype hook, line and sinker, the ones who panicked the most, were on the left, while the skeptics were on the right. Dems believe what their beloved media outlets tell them.

The pundits don't get all that. They think that these were informed voters who went into that vote eyes wide open. They were not. They were emotional voters fueled by misinformation who reacted to it.

The second thing the pundits don't get is the numbers. Again, I look at the data. If the Kansas amendment vote really were a harbinger of things to come in November, that would have played out in the numbers in other races in the state. Let's look at some of those races.

Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, is running for re-election. She won her primary handily, winning 94% of the Dem vote against a challenger most of us have never heard of. Her opponent, Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt, also easily won his primary, but by a narrower margin: 81% to 19% over an equally relatively unknown challenger.

However, let's look at the vote count, and here's where it gets interesting: Schmidt got 367,604 votes to Kelly's 264,857. Kelly's opponent got just over 17,000 votes, so in total, the Dems had about 282,000 votes on offer. Yet you know they came out in droves to vote on the abortion amendment, so low turnout on the blue side wasn't a factor. Yet Schmidt got nearly 100,000 more votes than the total votes cast by Democrats. And his primary opponent got another 88,000 votes.

Think Laura Kelly views the amendment vote as a harbinger of things to come in the fall? Think again. Her camp hustled up more than 5,000 signatures on a petition to get a far-right state legislator's name on the ballot as an Independent in the general election, in hopes of splitting the Republican vote. Why? Because she knows she can't beat Schmidt in a fair fight.

See, Kelly burned her bridges in 2020 by acting like a little tyrant, wielding her mandate powers using false information (yes, the same false information her Democrat followers swallowed whole, without questioning the data provided by her KDHE Director - but which data I dug into, and debunked), and Kansans got sick of it. So, no more experiments with a Dem governor running this red state. Hence her resorting to dirty politics to try to split the vote and beat Schmidt. She'll have to hope that her Independent lackey can get about 170,000 votes. It's not likely, as he's less well-known than Schmidt's primary opponent was.

Oh, did I mention that Schmidt opposes abortion?

Then there's Kris Kobach. Remember him? Former Kansas Secretary of State, former Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. Known for his strong stance against illegal immigration. Hated by the left. Lost the 2018 gubernatorial election to Laura Kelly. Rumored to have been considered for the post of "immigration czar" by President Trump.

Kobach ran in the primaries against first-term State Senator Kellie Warren for Attorney General. Kellie Warren: Nice. Suburbanite. Woman.

Kobach, who was seen as more conservative than Warren, won. Who won the Democrat primary?

Chris Mann, whoever the hell he is. Who was unopposed. No one else bothered to run, because the Dems know they'll be crushed in November.

See? The numbers show that, even though the Democrats came out in force to "stop the ban," and a number of Republicans who don't want a ban on abortion were swayed by the campaign of lies voted against the amendment, the Republican votes in the actual races still clearly point to a red wave in November.

Now, Kansas is a red state. But, across this great nation, there are two things I know.

First, there aren't likely to be a lot of abortion amendments on ballots across the country come November 8 (which, by the way, is my birthday, and I'm expecting one hell of a celebration).

And second, the issues that Americans care more about than abortion - the ones that touch every man, woman, and born child in this country - still demand change. Inflation is 9.1% year over year, and rising. GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters. 401(k) balances are shrinking. Prices are rising nearly twice as fast as wages. Crime is soaring. Our southern border is wide open, and every state is now a border state. Property rights are becoming non-existent: a Portland homeowner recently listed his home for sale as-is, because it's occupied by squatters and he can't afford the legal fees to get them out. He went to the house to persuade them to leave, and they put him in the hospital. He's hoping an investor will take the risk, or will have the resources to remove them.

("Lack the resources to remove squatters from your property?" I'd call that an ammo shortage.)

More people - mostly young people - are dying of fentanyl overdoses, thanks to the free flow of drugs across our southern border, than died with covid. And more people died with covid under this administration than under the last, even though the last administration left this administration with vaccines, treatments, and a plan. Neither our President nor our Vice President can string two coherent sentences together, and we're the laughingstock of the world. We're afraid of our enemies, and our allies don't trust us. Our first family is corrupt to the core, but so are the agencies that should be investigating them. We're about to spend another trillion dollars in an inflationary environment, raise taxes in a recession, and increase IRS enforcement on people who can't afford to buy gas or groceries.

And these pundits think that, come fall, voters will forget all that and keep this party in power because some uninformed knuckleheads in Kansas voted against a poorly-worded amendment based on yard signs and mailbox stuffers?

Good. Keep thinking that.