Black Georgian men helped Biden win the White House
Georgia is among half a dozen swing states that will decide the all-important electoral college next November. Despite its history as a bastion of conservatism in the south, Democrats have scored notable wins in presidential and Senate elections in recent years. African American voters have been fundamental to that success, with Biden securing 88% of the Black vote in 2020. [theguardian]
The Critical Mass
A vital middle class is necessary for capitalism to endure…. [https://tacking.substack.com/p/beggar-thy-neighbor]
Attacking Wealth among the Middle Class
America's decades-long love affair with homeownership is holding back the economy, hobbling the Federal Reserve, and exacerbating a national housing crisis.
Why it matters: We're stuck here now — at this point there's just too much wealth stored in too many houses for anything to meaningfully change.
The big picture: Life is an unpredictable journey. People change where they want or need to live all the time, and a country with a 66% homeownership rate is not conducive to that.
Houses are like credit cards: They're a combination of something we all need with a complex and inefficient financial product. In the case of credit cards, a convenient payment mechanism is blended into a very costly line of credit; in the case of houses, basic shelter is incorporated into a cumbersome and expensive forced savings device.
Houses — or rather, mortgages — have become the primary means of American middle-class wealth creation. That savings device — the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage — is distorting the U.S. economy and making it much harder for the Federal Reserve to do its job.
The bottom line: All humans need shelter. But homeownership has created a class of winners (think of everyone smugly sitting on a mortgage fixed at 3% regardless of what the Fed does) — who also have a financial incentive to deny new shelter to others. [AXIOS]
‘The old American dream died’
“I think most of us in America would define the middle class as somebody who can work a 40-hour-a-week career and can have the income to purchase the average home in America,” Freddie Smith, an Orlando realtor and TikTok creator, told Fox News Digital.
“A lot of us grew up middle class, and we watched what middle class was in the 80s and 90s as millennials. And nowadays, what has moved the goalpost more than anything is the housing market…”.
[J]ust a few years ago, $60-$70K a year would have been sufficient to qualify for a home.
With the average cost of a house being around $400K-$420K in 2024, people’s salaries would need to be around $120K a year for people to even qualify….
“Rent prices are taking up 30-40% of people’s income, making it harder for them to save for a house. So it’s this perpetual cycle that is keeping people out of the middle class…”. [T]his trend has been continuing at a rapid pace over the last few years.
Smith also explained how a $120K salary, even without children, becomes a far lower number when confronted with the crippling debt most Americans are facing today.
“Most people are carrying student loan debt, which is at an all-time high, and the average payment in the country is $500 a month for your college degree. [There are] some people I’m seeing in my comment section saying ‘$500, I wish, it was $1,200 a month for me’,” said Smith.
Credit card debt is also at a record high in America, and while Smith acknowledges that reckless spending could be a factor, he has learned from many Americans commenting on his posts that many are forced to use their cards for groceries because they ran out of money.
According to DQYDJ, the average American income in 2023 was roughly $69K a year, with only 18.8% percent of Americans reaching $100K or more a year. According to the same source, the top 10 percent of individual earnings started at $135,605 a year.
The middle class is in a segmented state, Smith argues, largely determined by how much debt one finds themselves in.
“If you are someone who bought a house before 2020 and you have it paid off or you have a 3% interest rate, you are not burdened by the housing costs like the 2024 adults are now,” the relator said, explaining how debt, especially college debt, housing costs and childcare are burdening millennials and Gen Zers starting their lives. [NYPost]
And, there’s this: The M.B.A.s Who Can’t Find Jobs
An M.B.A. can cost more than $200,000 at a top school but typically pays off as a launchpad for a new, more lucrative career or the corporate leadership fast track. Many in the spring class of 2023 say they are still awaiting that payoff. These M.B.A.s entered the job market just as three sectors that heavily recruit them—consulting, tech and finance—hit downturns and put the brakes on hiring. Some graduates with consulting jobs have had their start dates pushed to later this year. Meanwhile, the number of openings in software development, marketing, banking and other professional fields has fallen from a year ago.
Even at some top business schools, the number of recently minted M.B.A.s without jobs has roughly doubled from a couple of years ago, when U.S. companies were rushing to hire as many workers as they could, according to data from the schools.
At Harvard Business School, 20% of job-seeking 2023 M.B.A. graduates didn’t have one three months after graduation, up from 8% in 2021. At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, 18% didn’t, compared with 9% in 2021. About 13% of those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management didn’t have a job within three months, up from about 5% in 2021. [WSJ-2024.01.15]
Why President Biden opened the Border
Governments—federal, state, and local—are intent on steering freewheeling immigrants into becoming wards of the state. As such, they will become another burden to be borne by the Middle Class—one more straw on the camel’s back.
Sanctuary Cities, Border Crisis Costs, and a Rude Awakening for the Left
Record numbers of illegal immigrants are entering the country illegally and spreading throughout the interior of United States—and it’s playing out in a sadly predictable way.
Those [open-border] policies are expensive, imposing tens of billions of dollars in costs on state and local governments and U.S. taxpayers every year. Increasingly, those costs are incurred by states nowhere near the southwest border.
Last year, a special committee found that taxpayers in Tennessee spend an extra $3.9 million per year to educate unaccompanied alien children in public schools and another $240,000 to provide them with state-funded health care.
Florida, too, has raised concerns over the cost of illegal immigration. Even before the Biden-inspired surge across the border, the state was paying $2 billion per year to provide health care and education for the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens living there.
Other services drain public purses, as well. Last year in New York, a $2.1 billion state fund paying unemployment and stimulus benefits to illegal aliens was exhausted in just three months
Last year, Philadelphia elected to budget $300,000 to publicly fund immigration attorneys for aliens facing deportation. The New York City Council budgeted $16.6 million the same year for the same purpose. Local taxpayers there should expect actual costs to exceed those budgets, as the numbers of illegal aliens, cases and appeals continue to rise.
Certainly, that’s been the case in Chicago, a city that continually increases its funding for its Legal Protection Fund and refuses to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to police databases and information.
And then there are the costs associated with crime. Crimes committed by illegal aliens had been declining for years before Biden opened the borders. Since then, those numbers have skyrocketed in virtually every category of crime, from homicide and manslaughter to robbery and theft, from trafficking in drugs and weapons to sexual offenses.
Southern border governors are now bussing some illegal immigrants to New York City, Washington and Chicago, giving the mayors of those unashamedly pro-open borders and sanctuary cities a taste of what they’ve had to deal with for years.
And the mayors don’t like it a bit. New York City’s Eric Adams calls the situation there “horrific.”
“We need help,” pleads D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
This is typical of many on the left. They push for a supposedly compassionate, globalist utopia. Then, when reality sets in and their pie in the sky agenda comes crashing down, they cry for help and bailouts. [Heritage]
Advancing the Middle Class should be a high priority for Republicans
Iowa caucusgoers see immigration as more important than the economy
WASHINGTON (AP) — Iowa Republicans are headed to their state’s caucuses Monday with a greater desire to focus on immigration than address the health of the U.S. economy – a possible sign that cultural fights might be eclipsing pocketbook issues as a motivator.
The findings from AP VoteCast reinforce the severe polarization seen in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The answers by people headed to Republican caucuses point to a desire for major changes from Democratic President Joe Biden’s policies on issues that include abortion, race, gender identity, education, U.S. support for Ukraine and whether immigrants help or hurt the country. [PBS]
Separation of Powers
During the founding era of the United States, James Madison expressed the importance of separated powers in a constitutional government. In the 47th paper of “The Federalist,” Madison wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the hands of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” [Annenberg Classroom]
James Madison and the Power of the Purse
The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse—that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. The power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representative of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.1
Advice for House Republicans
“The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort”. [CONFUCIUS: Analects, IV, c. 500 B.C.]
Spalding, Matthew, David F. Forte, and Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Fully revised 2nd edition. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2014. P. 213.