It’s The Economy, Stupid

Bob Lefsetz’s Original Post – “It’s The Economy, Stupid”

For gosh sakes, Bob, please seek some serious therapy for your Trump Derangement Syndrome and your acerbic hatred of everything to the right of Hillary Clinton! If you’re going to blame Reagan for today’s economic woes, do your homework and back up your rants with documentation and a few facts!

“It’s income inequality, come home to roost. And I do blame St. Reagan. Turns out greed is not good. And after four decades the proletariat is mad as hell and just won’t take it anymore.”

After Ronald Reagan’s two terms, Democrats in Congress and the White House had four decades to fix the problem of “income inequality”. Bill Clinton had eight years, Obama had eight years, and Joe Biden has had nearly three years to “fix” this problem. If the proletariat is “mad as hell”, they can’t blame a president from forty years ago – and neither can Bob Lefsetz.

“…akin to the Republicans and the Federalist Society. Yes, the Republicans realized they were getting beaten judicially and they organized, supported right wing jurists, and voila, decades later we’ve got a right wing Supreme Court.”

You don’t need no stinking right to an abortion, that’s for the gerrymandered states to decide!”

Did you even bother to READ the Supreme Court’s decision? It was fundamentally and almost entirely based on established Constitutional law and precedent. There is NOTHING in the Constitution or any of the Amendments to promise a “right to an abortion”.

“Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”

“Alito’s 78-page opinion, which has a 30-page appendix, seemingly leaves no authority uncited as support for the proposition that there is no inherent right to privacy or personal autonomy in various provisions of the Constitution — and similarly, no evidence that peoples’ reliance on the court’s abortion precedents over the past half century should matter.”

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades : NPR

“Bottom line? The spoils have gone to the wealthy. Not only Elon Musk and the billionaires, but you, with your 401k and two late model cars in the driveway. The average person doesn’t own stock. The average person lost their good-paying job when it was shipped overseas. They can’t make ends meet.”

“The average person doesn’t own stock?”

You need to fact check your crazy left coast tropes, but I’m willing to help:

“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup finds 61% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on its April Economy and Personal Finance survey. This is up from the 56% measured in 2021 and 55% measured in 2020, and is the highest it has been since 2008.”

What Percentage of Americans Own Stock?

And did Elon Musk become a billionaire by reaping the “spoils”? Or did he create PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, OpenAI and several other successful and important companies and then bought Twitter, all while spending tens of millions of his own money sending satellite equipment to Ukraine to provide free Internet access?

“And all you can do is laugh at the Trumpers. I certainly do. There are some great TikToks with people saying inane things. But based on their speech, their education can’t have been great, they can’t be making much money, they’ve been screwed for decades, been left behind, and they’re supposed to listen to the college graduates who did it to them say that they know better? It’s laughable!”

I’m sure you laugh about “Trumpers” all day long and go on to attack President Trump nearly every week in your music and entertainment newsletter. Suddenly you’re a political pundit and policy expert! LOL! And I’m sure you’d agree with your BFF Hillary Clinton that the people who voted for and continue to support Donald Trump are “deplorables”…

At least you got this right:

“And of course we have to blame Bush II and Trump, but as the article states, the Democrats were complicit in a deal that made over 80% of the tax cuts permanent.”

But still, you blame Ronald Reagan for today’s economy. Silly, demonstrably wrong, and quite sad. And as I said, Democrats have had four decades to fix the problem of “income inequality”. Why are you still whining about it now? You’ve got your millions and fly first class around the world, ski at expensive resorts a few times a year, stay in fancy hotels and charge high speaking fees to chat with music industry CEOs and record label executives.

“But the bottom line is the rank and file got screwed.

And I could rail against Trump for days, but in truth he gives people something to believe in, because economic prosperity certainly ain’t happening. Trump gives them hope.

We need a leader, we need someone to believe in.

That’s Trump.

Come on, that’s what he is, a leader. Maybe not your leader, maybe not where you want to go, but where is your leader?”

That’s pretty close to the truth, but you don’t really believe it, of course. You finish your tirade with:

“There’s a generation gap, as wide as the one in the sixties. But those who were challenging the status quo yesterday are the establishment today, and they just can’t accept it.”

That is true as well, and there is only ONE presidential candidate who is challenging the status quo, who is 38 years young, a legal immigrant, a person of color and who is using the GOP debates, text messaging, the Internet, X and even Tik-Tok to tell America about his detailed plans to do so:

Vivek Ramaswamy’s 25 Policy Commitments

“But I can’t write the above. Because I’ve got to shut up and support Biden and no one I know wants to give up a single thing they believe they’ve earned. They’ve been living in income inequality land for so long they think it’s de rigueur, unstoppable. Just like Jews in America believed antisemitism was a minor distraction.

But what about all those who’ve been left with the short end of the stick in the continuing divide between the rich and the poor? Where are they gonna go?

Wow. I find these facts self-evident. But too many can’t see them.”

Well, check out some of these self-evident facts from the U.S. Census Bureau:

“The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

As a group, America’s poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.”

How Poor Are America’s Poor?

You are free to have and express your opinion, of course, even though NOBODY signed up for your entertainment newsletter to hear you preach left wing politics. But, gee whiz, most of your stuff is just plain ignorant, inaccurate, and undocumented misinformation, and oftentimes outright lies! You are embarrassing yourself and annoying and offending many of your loyal subscribers and fans (which includes me!).

You want to be a political pundit? Start a new political WordPress blog and see how many people actually sign up to receive your bloviating left coast rants!

You won’t, of course, because you know very few people would. It’s SO much easier to abuse your fan base and subscribers by launching repeated attacks against Trump and Republicans that have become “de rigueur” in your newsletters. You seem to think you are “unstoppable”! 

 Why not show what a Free Speech First Amendment advocate you are and publish a link to THIS blog in one of your “mailbag” posts? I’m guessing you won’t…