Conservative: Harris Won’t Be President
“She was supposed to be the one-term president’s successor. The vice president who would take the torch from a by-then-80-something Joe Biden and carry on the administration’s agenda while becoming” the nation’s next president, quips The Hill’s Joe Concha. “But as things stand now, one has to wonder how Kamala Harris even remains on the ticket in 2024. . . . A USA Today-Suffolk University poll finds that just 28 percent of voters,” approve of the job she’s doing. “She’s practically invisible” and was “never liked much to begin with,” as low polls forced her out of the 2020 prez race before voting began. “Harris was supposed to represent the next generation of Democrats” — oops.
Econ watch: Joe’s Oblivious to Coming Crisis
Is President Biden “oblivious to a mounting economic disaster?” wonders National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “Inflation and the supply-chain mess are getting really bad,” with year-over-year prices up 6.2 percent, “the largest such increase in 30 years.” Gas prices are at a seven-year high, and since everything “has to get from the supplier to the store on a truck that runs on gasoline, higher gas prices mean higher prices for everything else — on top of our supply shortages.” No wonder economists say we’re “nowhere near the end of” this “painful bout of inflation.” Biden’s response isn’t “having much an effect”: Though he’s threatened fines for lingering container ships, a record 111 of them are floating near California ports waiting to be unloaded.
From the left: Behind Parents’ Revolt
Progressives are mistaken to dismiss the “critical race theory” wars as “fake or a ‘moral panic,’ ” explains Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias. Three key developments: School closures “hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes”; new “racial equity initiatives with little demonstrated efficacy in improving outcomes,” and “the stigmatization of the kinds of tests that are our main tool for assessing whether or not children are learning.” Non-parents may not realize that closures “were an educational disaster,” nor how “time and money is being wasted on [equity] initiatives that are run by people who are somewhere between stupid and fraudulent,” nor even how teachers unions selfishly drive the war on testing. Democrats need to “make a strategic retreat” to the approach of “Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”
Libertarian: Freer Markets = Cleaner Environments
Participants at the recent Freedom and Climate Symposium offered a range of market-based approaches to climate change — yet, notes Reason’s Ronald Bailey, markets already play “a clear role in cleaning up the environment.” In general, the freer a country’s market, the cleaner its environment. The United States, for instance, is ranked 20th in terms of its market freedoms and 24th in “environmental performance,” vs. China, which stands at 107th in freedom and 120th on the environment. Also notable: “Researcher Christian Bjørnskov found that carbon dioxide emissions begin to decline in a country when average income reaches around $52,000 per person.” Case in point: US carbon emissions “peaked in 2007 when per capita income reached about $48,000.”
Neocon: Why Wokeness Will Fail
Some protest movements, “even in ferocious dissent, believe that the American system is ultimately geared to fulfill its inner promises — of equality, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness” etc.; others “don’t think the system can meet its promises, or . . . never agreed with the promises in the first place,” argues The New York Times’ Bret Stephens. The first tend to succeed; the second, to fail. “Wokeness belongs to the second type,” and it lost across the nation in the last election. Blame its claim that “racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life,” and its “relentless” “race consciousness” that “defies the modern American creed of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
