The Mailbox for Evacuation Requests at State Dept is Full

For that matter, most of the mailboxes for all of government, the same is true including those in Congress. I have called at least 9 myself several times this past week. I was only able to speak to a real person in Congressman Ken Buck’s office, her name was Monica and she had some factual interesting things to say. I made a couple of requests and like wow….she said she would call me back…..SHE DID. Mission complete with my request.

Anyway….from Jim Geraghty at National Review:

This morning I heard from a longtime NR reader who spent years in Afghanistan working for a defense contractor. This reader’s company worked on the construction of camps and garrisons, parts of bases at Bagram and Kandahar, as well as several government buildings for the Afghan military and police.

“We directly employed thousands of Afghans,” he told me. “Their lives are in danger of retaliation by the Taliban because they helped the American military. Recognizing this, on August 2nd the U.S. government created another classification of asylum/visa processing called ‘Priority 2’.”

The announcement of the Priority 2 program can be found here. An unidentified senior state department official stated, “Many thousands of Afghans and their immediate family members are at risk due to these U.S. affiliations and are not eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa because either they did not have qualifying employment, or they have not met the time-in-service requirement to become eligible; however, they may be eligible for a P-2 referral, and thus, to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.” Priority 2 covers Afghans who worked with U.S. government-funded programs, as well as those who were employed in Afghanistan by a U.S.-based non-governmental or media organization that does not require U.S. government funding.

My reader said, “I’ve been busy the last week submitting referrals to the State Department on behalf of Afghans and their families who worked for us and whose very lives have been threatened. The submission is through email to a dedicated inbox at State. We began receiving messages that the inbox is full and that we should try later. This has been going on for half a day now.”

He shared with me an  automatic reply e-mail that declared, “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Please try resending your message later, or contact the recipient directly.”

My reader is furious. “Lives are in danger. Evacuations are in chaos  — don’t believe a damn word any American spokesman says – they’re either making it up or they are lying. And the damn system for prioritizing our Afghan workers is a cluster because the DOS can’t manage a damn email inbox! I have never been so disappointed and angry at my government than today. It is maddening.”

My reader has contacted one of his senators – a Republican – but had to leave a message on the constituent line.

I rest my case on this fact…sadly. But to continue on.

All week long, officials in the Biden administration have told us they don’t know how many Americans are stuck in various locations around Afghanistan. Only part of that is true. They know how many Americans are in Afghanistan, that is a fact…where they may be at any particular moment could be true. Understand this: anyone from the United States that travels to Afghanistan must get a visa and ensure they have a passport. Both of those things are permanent records and are maintained at the State Department in a database. As simple keyboard inquiry is all that is needed. Going deeper on the matter, is your passport and boarding pass. The TSA scans both. And in most airports with international travel gates, those two documents at the time of travel are merged. For details on the chipped passports, e-Passport or biometric passports, go here.

Is there a chance the actual database may be off on the actual number? Sure based on the traveler’s movement, but you can be assured our State Department knows the number with at least above 90% accuracy. The reason the ‘don’t know answer’ is given is because it would admit we cannot possibly get Americans out of likely peril in Afghanistan within the Biden timeline.

Once Americans arrive in Afghanistan, they are to register with the US Embassy so officials there know who is in country and why. Well, that too may now be a big problem as we evacuated the embassy and removed the flag that that database still is held by some official or was likely uploaded to a cloud system.

https://afgnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/US-embassy-staff-still-functioning-in-Kabul.jpg Building on the right is the US Embassy, Kabul – source

Now the Biden administration is telling us that anyone that is in Afghanistan and wants to leave, we will get them out. Really? ‘who wants to leave’? Who the hell would want to stay? C’mon are we that stupid?

Below is a map published by al Jazeera. While I have no use for this media source…at least it does given some timeline of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as of August 15.

The Taliban has captured 26 of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, with more than half of them falling to the armed group in less than two weeks.

The armed group is now at the gate of the capital Kabul after taking major cities such as Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif.

The group had already gained vast parts of rural Afghanistan since launching a series of offensives in May to coincide with the start of the final withdrawal of US-led foreign forces after 20 years of war.

***

Many in the diplomatic staff at our Kabul embassy knew precisely what the conditions on the ground were as far back as at least June. As it was getting more threatening, many of their warnings went unheard so they wrote a letter of dissent in July. Still our Secretary of State ignored the level of the threat and hence the Biden White House ignored all the same but slowly began a process.

WASHINGTON — Last month, two dozen diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, warned about the possibility of a Taliban takeover and urged the State Department to begin an airlift operation in a dissent cable sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The July 13 cable called on Washington to be firm and direct in describing atrocities by the Taliban, the source said. NBC News has not seen the cable.

A dissent channel cable is a confidential, formal way for State Department diplomats to voice disagreement or concern about U.S. policies without fear of retribution.

The cable was first Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.

The day after the cable was sent, the Biden administration announced Operation Allies Refuge, a program to transport Afghans and their families at risk of retaliation from the Taliban for their work with U.S. troops. State Department leaders sent a response a few days later thanking the writers of the dissent cable and describing the task force set up to facilitate evacuations of Special Immigrant Visa applicants, the source said.

“We value constructive internal dissent. It’s patriotic. It’s protected. And it makes us more effective,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday. “Maintaining the channel’s integrity and the notion of disciplined dissent is key to that revitalization. It’s why we keep communication strictly between the Department’s leadership and the authors of the dissent messages and why we don’t comment publicly on the substance of messages or the replies, regardless of the classification.”

Once the Taliban began the march to take over capitols and provinces, all actions needed to be launched. Nah…not until August did that even begin. Get the picture?

 

 

Biden Ends Combat Operations in Iraq, Except we Already Did

In part from Reuters:

(Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on Monday sealed an agreement formally ending the U.S. combat mission in Iraq by the end of 2021, more than 18 years after U.S. troops were sent to the country.

Coupled with Biden’s withdrawal of the last American forces in Afghanistan by the end of August, the Democratic president is completing U.S. combat missions in the two wars that then-President George W. Bush began under his watch.

Biden and Kadhimi met in the Oval Office for their first face-to-face talks as part of a strategic dialogue between the United States and Iraq.

“Our role in Iraq will be … to be available, to continue to train, to assist, to help and to deal with ISIS as it arises, but we’re not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission,” Biden told reporters as he and Kadhimi met.

There are currently 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq focusing on countering the remnants of Islamic State. The U.S. role in Iraq will shift entirely to training and advising the Iraqi military to defend itself.

The shift is not expected to have a major impact since the United States has already moved toward focusing on training Iraqi forces.

President Joe Biden, right, speaks as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, left, listens during their meeting in the Oval…

President Joe Biden, right, speaks as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi listens during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 26, 2021.  source

The real truth?

The Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi on Monday in his first meeting with the weakened leader, whose loyalties are precariously split between the US ally and pro-Iran factions at home.

At the heart of the meeting will be the presence of US troops in Iraq and more broadly, whether Baghdad has what it takes to stand up to residual Islamic State jihadist group cells within the country’s borders.

Just last week, the IS group claimed a deadly suicide bombing at a Baghdad market that killed 30 people, according to the official toll.

All the while, US forces in Iraq have been subject to repeat attacks by pro-Iran militias, who in turn have suffered military reprisals launched by Washington.

Some 2,500 US troops still remain in Iraq as part of an anti-IS coalition — a number on top of which there are likely additional special forces, whose numbers are not publicly known.

Kadhemi, whose country has been ravaged by a trifecta of violence, poverty and corruption, would like the United States to commit, at least formally, to a reassessment of its presence in his country.

With three months to go before legislative elections, the head of the Iraqi government is hoping to regain a bit of ground with his country’s powerful pro-Iran factions, which are overtly hostile to the US presence.

Technically, there are no actual combat troops on the ground in Iraq, where the US military has officially only deployed advisors or trainers.

Iraq is an important strategic link for the United States, which leads the international coalition fighting the IS group next-door in Syria.

Abandoning Iraq to Iranian influence is out of the question for the United States, with Washington and Tehran mired in renewed tensions — even if Biden has signaled his readiness to return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

In the context of this tug-of-war “it doesn’t seem likely that the number of US troops in Iraq will be reduced dramatically,” said Hamdi Malik of the Washington Institute think tank.

Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute, believes the Biden-Kadhemi meeting may cosmetically be “shaped” to help the Iraqi premier alleviate domestic pressures, “but the reality on the ground will reflect the status quo and an enduring US presence.”

What regional specialists fear most, however, is a continuation or even intensification of the attacks perpetrated by the pro-Iran factions.

Again on Friday, a drone attack was carried out on a military base in Iraqi Kurdistan that hosts American troops, but did not cause any casualties.

The Iraqi Resistance Coordination Committee, a group of militia factions, on Friday threatened to continue the attacks unless the United States withdraws all its forces and ends the “occupation.”

France Warned the US About the Wuhan Lab Often

Will this Biden ordered investigation within 100 days include anything from the past including what France warned us about regarding the Wuhan Lab? You be the judge…read on.

In part:

The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

Between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided $1.1 million to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to USAID. EcoHealth Alliance also received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that was subcontracted to the Wuhan lab, New York magazine reported. National Institutes of Health grants to EcoHealth Alliance totaling $600,000 between 2014 and 2019 were subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH, Defense Department and USAID should have stopped sending U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan lab back when the French warned the State Department in 2015, Asher said. More here.

***

Stephen Mosher, a REAL China expert and previous radio guest on my radio show (several times) had this piece in the NY Post in part:

  • China had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
  • Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
  • Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in ­microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ ”
  • As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.

Even at the time there was other evidence available, which likewise pointed to the lab — and to the PLA’s involvement:

  • The authorities ordered all of the early samples of the coronavirus collected by private and university labs in China — vital for tracing the origin and early spread of the disease — to be destroyed.
  • China’s civilian Center for Disease Control was completely shut out of the picture in favor of the PLA, suggesting a classified military program was involved.
  • Military academies and installations in and around Wuhan were closed around January 1, well before the Chinese public was notified that there was a problem.
  • China lied about human-to-human transmission, leaving the US and other countries unprepared for the rapid spread of the virus, ensuring that more lives would be lost.

The evidence was circumstantial, to be sure, but I was fairly certain by that point that I could have convinced a jury of China’s culpability. Even so, while I waited for more facts to surface, I was careful to call the “lab origin” just a possibility.

Facebook, however, didn’t wait. It quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17. The mainstream media likewise piled on, slamming The Post for publishing the writings of a “conspiracy theorist.” Others who raised questions about the pandemic’s origins were heavily censored as well — if not “canceled” entirely.

 Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Thomas Peter/REUTERS

China locked down the Wuhan lab, and the US virology establishment closed ranks, both denying that gain-of-function research — or a PLA bioweapons research program — had anything to do with the pandemic.

It has taken over a year, but the attempted cover-ups on both sides of the Pacific have gradually unraveled.

During that time China has burned through a half-dozen increasingly implausible cover stories. After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolins and raccoon-dogs, oh my! — for harboring the virus. We seem now to be back to bats, and are being told that many years ago, in a cave far away from the Wuhan lab, minors fell ill from being peed upon, pooped upon, and even bitten by those same nasty, virus-harboring creatures.

But the wildest tale by far being bandied about by the Chinese authorities is that CoV-2 was a US bioweapon, created in the U. Army’s research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. As to how the “American Virus” — as they unabashedly call it — got to China, they have an answer for that too: it was secretly released on the unsuspecting Chinese population of Wuhan by the American soldier-athletes who participated in the October 2019 Military World Games in that city.

Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at US Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Who makes up such bat-sh*t crazy stories about secret bioweapons and superspreading soldiers? The same people, it seems, whose fever dream for decades has been to do exactly the same thing. There are numerous scientific publications that prove Chinese labs were engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research, along with new evidence that these techniques were being used in an active bioweapons program that included the Wuhan lab. As China defector Dr. Yan Limeng has taught us, the PLA itself isolated the original bat coronavirus that served as the “backbone” or “template” for CoV-2. Additional genetic material was then spliced into this virus to make it more infectious and deadly to humans. This is not speculation.

Those doing the splicing left “signatures” behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.

The dwindling ranks of lab “deniers” continue to insist that the vast laboratory of nature is capable of infinite surprises. Of course that’s true. And it’s also true that if you have enough monkeys typing the four DNA bases A, C, G, and T on enough computer keyboards they will eventually produce a complete and accurate copy of the human genome, which is 6.4 billion such bases long. But what are the odds?

And what are the odds that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans?

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China February 18, 2020.
Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment in China on Feb. 18, 2020.
China Daily via REUTERS

Dr. David Asher, who headed the now-canceled State Department investigation, put that very question to a biostatistician, and was told that the odds were roughly … 1 in 13 billion. In the face of that vanishingly small probability, Asher remarked, “to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous.”

What we do know, as former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger pointed out in a February interview, is that the PLA had been “doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. While the Wuhan lab poses as a “civilian institution,” Pottinger said, US intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated with China’s military on publications and secret bioweapons projects.

That’s David Asher’s opinion as well. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” he says. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Dr. David Asher
Dr. David Asher believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was running a biological weapons program.
Rod Lamkey/CNP

A Chinese book that recently fell into the hands of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) further confirms that Chinese military scientists have been focused on what they called the “new era of genetic weapons” since at least 2015. They begin by asserting that World War III would be fought with biological weapons, and go on to describe how viruses can be collected from nature and “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.”

Sound familiar?

In fact, the scientists even singled out coronaviruses as a class of viruses that can be readily weaponized, and they suggest that the ideal candidate for a bioweapon would be something like the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. It is worth noting that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus, which is why the World Health Organization insists that we call it SARS-CoV-2. As in, the “second” SARS virus.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of ASPI, said the new document “clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed. It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use.”

Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market before its closure in Hankou, Wuhan city, central China's Hubei province, 31 December 2019.
After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolin.
Alamy

The document, he went on to say, is the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got.”

Is it really that surprising that the same murderous regime that has brought us forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, and genocide in real time would also be developing deadly bioweapons to release upon the world?

China had both the intention and the capability to take a harmless bat virus, turn it into a deadly pathogen, and then release it upon the world. And the evidence suggests that it did just that.

More than half of all Americans — including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — now believe the virus was made in a lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. Indeed, there has been a massive hardening of public opinion against the communist giant across the board, with 89 percent of adults now seeing the country as hostile or dangerous.

By killing 600,000 Americans, China has proven that it is both.

But whether the Biden administration makes China pay for its crimes is another question.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of the forthcoming “Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).

 

Biden Getting Softer on Moscow

Was any of this actually discussed in that summit between Biden and Putin? No mention of any of it during the press conference. Read on…

The state trials of Russia’s newest Zircon hypersonic missile from a surface carrier will begin in August 2021, a source in the military-industrial complex told.

source

Newsweek reports in part:

Moscow has warned the Pentagon that the U.S. deploying hypersonic missiles in Europe could unintentionally spark hostilities, just hours after Russia test-fired a weapon it wants to equip its warships and submarines with.

On Monday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby was asked about Russia’s claims that it had successfully tested a Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile.

“The tactical and technical characteristics of the Tsirkon missile were confirmed during the tests,” the Defense Ministry said, also releasing video of the weapon, which President Vladimir Putin had previously boasted would be able to reach speeds of Mach 9, and hit targets up to 700 miles away.

When asked about the test, Kirby said: “We’re certainly aware of President Putin’s claims, […] it’s important to note that Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are potentially destabilizing and pose significant risks because they are nuclear capable systems.”

Kirby added: “By contrast, the United States is developing solely non-nuclear hypersonic strike capabilities. So alongside our NATO allies we remain committed to deterrence while promoting greater stability in the region.”

But then we have the matter of the Havana Syndrome.

More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome – a mystery brain illness – since President Joe Biden took office in January.

The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.

It was first found in Cuba in 2016-17.

US and Canadian diplomats in Havana complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss and anxiety to something they described as “cognitive fog”.

The US accused Cuba of carrying out “sonic attacks”, which it strongly denied, and the incident led to increased tension between the two nations.

A 2019 US academic study found “brain abnormalities” in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.

The Vienna cases first came to light in the New Yorker magazine on Friday and were later confirmed by the US State Department, which said it was “vigorously investigating”.

Reuters quoted an Austrian foreign ministry statement saying it was “working with the US authorities on jointly getting to the bottom of this”.

Vienna has long been a centre for diplomatic activity and has had a reputation as a hotspot for espionage, particularly during the Cold War.

Countries like the US have a large diplomatic presence there.

The city is currently hosting indirect talks between Iran and the US over attempts to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Cases of the condition have been reported elsewhere in the world, but US officials say the numbers in Vienna are greater than in any other city apart from Havana.

In June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a wide-ranging review into the causes of the illness.

Then there is the matter of that pesky pipeline…Russia’s….Biden shuttered our own Keystone pipeline  on day one.

Legislating Bureaucracy as Infrastructure

Brilliantly true….wish I had thought of that but credit goes to Robert Mulligan. Infrastructure is really items like roads, bridges, ports and the power grid system….hardly expanding government agencies but read on.

Mr. Mulligan’s summary actually shows us how to think differently and correctly.

President Biden’s staggering $2.3 trillion requests for infrastructure appropriations tend to hide the extent Congress is further bloating them with their own wasteful earmarks. Congress is approving, and even expanding on, the president’s already far-reaching requests, though it’s doing so in installments—the House just sent a $715 billion “INVEST in America Act” to the Senate, where it’s all but certain to be packed with even more pork by legislators from both parties. The typical Orwellian-Kafkaesque title for this legislation—“INVEST”—is supposed to stand for “Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation,” a title that both helps hide the rancid pork actually contained in the bill, as well as head off any responsible scrutiny or debate.

Hidden deep in the House version are numerous provisions for expanding the federal bureaucracy and government programs that have absolutely nothing to do with infrastructure, including doubling the size of the IRS .

It is especially fascinating that the federal government has such little difficulty spending more money, regardless of how focused or unfocused its aims—being driven mainly by politicians with planning horizons not extending past the next election—but the government has a real problem with raising taxes directly, because politicians fear the potential blowback. Their preferred solution is apparently to expand one of the least-liked sectors of the federal bureaucracy, in hopes of increasing revenues through heightened tax enforcement. Never mind that the IRS has recently exhibited extraordinary misconduct, including leaked confidential tax filings and playing politics with nonprofit tax exemptions. The IRS is one federal bureaucracy among many that needs to be reformed rather than expanded. Without meaningful reform, expanding the IRS’s enforcement budget will be tantamount to unleashing a plague of locusts on already overburdened taxpayers.

Federal income taxes already disproportionately punish the middle class. The purportedly progressive income tax exempts the poor, and the complexity of the tax code with its superabundance of special interest loopholes mainly benefits the rich who can use loopholes to minimize their tax liabilities. Virtually all other taxes paid by households, such as sales taxes, are strongly regressive, further penalizing the poor. Taxes paid by businesses are simply passed on to households in the form of higher prices, creating a further regressive impact which disproportionately falls on the poor. Large corporations both benefit from corporate welfare, which is not provided so generously to small businesses, as well as have access to strategies to book their income overseas in tax havens—something small businesses generally cannot do.

As high as social mobility remains in American society, there is little doubt it could be improved with the simplest and most basic tax reform. Government’s regulatory burden also falls disproportionately on the poorest, who have the least access to education, credit, healthcare, and housing, and can least afford to surmount burdensome occupational licensing and educational barriers that keep them from joining needed professions.

As a nation, we badly need to devote adequate resources to maintaining the infrastructure the federal government owns and operates like the interstate highway system, but the government needs to ensure its expenditures meet reasonable and sustainable cost-benefit standards. A large part of the president’s $2.3 trillion wish list is devoted to harebrained social engineering and poorly defined political goals. These may appeal to various special interest constituencies, but do not reflect actual citizens’ wants or needs.

The U.S. tax structure already penalizes productive citizens far too much, as well as incentivizes businesses to focus on unproductive tax avoidance strategies. We got where we are through an ostensibly “Republican” administration that acted as if the only way to address any problem was to throw money at it. Now we have a Democratic administration doubling down on this failed and discredited strategy, and digging us into an even deeper hole. Earmarks for special interests from both parties make it easier to get bipartisan support in Congress, but with wasteful spending spiraling out of control, it’s hard to see that as an advantage.