What's the big issue for 2024?
The big issue is that we need a sea change in governmental philosophy.
I’ve held on to this little nugget for awhile, but perhaps the impetus for writing this piece was paying my electric bill and eating my lunch yesterday.
I’m blessed to be one of those folks who can pay my electric bill the day it shows up in my e-mail without thinking about it too much. But over the last year I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, and this month’s bill was no exception: I used 242 kWh (14%) less electricity than I did last year at this time (courtesy of a rare warmish and snowless winter on my slice of the Delmarva) but paid $13 MORE (a 7% hike) on my bill compared to 2022. (I shudder to think how much more it was than 2020’s bill.)
And then there’s my Chick-Fil-A habit, which consists of the Friday lunch I always get: a spicy deluxe sandwich and a side salad in lieu of the fries. (Not that I don’t like the waffle fries, but a salad is healthier and balances my diet a bit.) Back a couple years ago that would set me back on the order of $8.50 or so, but yesterday the tab was $11.49 for the same great food. That’s a 35% increase in a couple short years.
So I’m paying 35% more for my lunch (inflation) and 7% more for 14% less electricity (shrinkflation.) Funny, I don’t recall my paycheck going up like that. Now that could be my fault, but imagine if we were on a fixed income.
It’s been about a month since he wrote this, but fellow Substack writer Erick Erickson nailed this phenomenon with a piece he did on his radio show, transcribed to Substack for our convenience.
It was convenient for Erick as he was at the Nikki Haley announcement that meant the battle for the GOP nomination was officially joined as Donald Trump’s first major opponent, with a Ron DeSantis bid expected to be formally announced later this spring. Whoever wins on the GOP side should be expected to address this issue, particularly as we now know what Joe Biden’s budgetary prescriptions are. (Hint: they won’t do a thing to help us out.) This is how Erickson put it:
This is a message that the Republicans need to embrace. The Democrats are willfully pricing the middle class out of the American Dream. The Democrats have embraced policies that drive up the cost of car ownership. They drive up the cost of home ownership. They drive up the cost of rent. They drive up the cost of education. Democrats' policies make it more expensive for the middle class to grow in income, to prosper. They make it more difficult for the poor to become the middle class. They make it very difficult, except for everyone who's already rich in this country.
That's the American Dream for the Democrats. You stay poor and move to a city and take a bus to a miserable job, as opposed to buying land and moving to the country. You can't, because your battery-powered car can't make it to the city. You can't, because you can't afford the battery-powered car.
Yet Erickson puts things a little too simply by looking at just one election. Let’s say we somehow overcome all the headwinds presented to us by a Biden administration and its allies desperate to remain in power and secure a non-Trump GOP administration. I don’t think the problems will go away, even in eight years and even with the blessing of a continuing Pax Americana, unless Americans develop a remarkable patience and fortitude we’ve not seen out of them for a couple generations. Without that, we won’t get the Coolidge-style successor to whoever is Number 47 - as well as the long run of their Congressional allies - that we need to have any hope of rightsizing government within his or her two terms in office, a total of four terms in all. And that still may not be sufficient.
That’s because the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about on his way out the door in 1961 is still in force in Washington, D.C. (That’s why we’ve never really had a “peace dividend.”) But it has been joined by an arguably far more dangerous alliance: the Government-Big Tech axis. Combining the greed of rent-seeking with the thirst for absolute power, these are the Swamp creatures inhabiting our nation’s capital and others around the globe. Yet even that Death Star has its vulnerability, an Achilles heel we can exploit to bring it down to size.
Immediately after the 9/11 attack, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. Speaking about defeating the terrorists who had attacked America, he vowed, “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”
We the People can do the same, with the election of a conservative president and Congress in 2024 being a “dramatic strike” and the work required to thwart this shadow government on a lower level by speaking truth to power (particularly in a humorous vein) and living your life as you wish - perhaps through the creation of a “parallel economy” - being some of those “covert operations.”
Unplug your smart phone and plug into your friends and neighbors, your small groups at church, and your Scripture. (Heck, just lean on Almighty God because they REALLY hate that.) Sure, the Death Star will try to intimidate all of us into compliance but they don’t have the resources or the backing to get everyone.