The Times on a High Horse

How’d you like to be the editorial writer who cranked out that opus the Times runs out under the headline “Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead”? It runs to more than 4,000 words calculated to generate such a hatred for the 45th president that the paper’s long-suffering readers might go out and vote for President Biden. Yet in the morning the hapless editors awoke to the news that President Trump was nursing a bullet wound from a would-be assassin.It’s not our intention to blame the Times or anyone associated with it for the attempt on the life of the 45th president. We’re just underlining the principle of editorial writing that one doesn’t want to get up on too high a horse, lest one have to dismount quickly. What, after all, are readers of the Times to make of the fact that as they tucked into their Sunday edition, Presidents Biden, Obama, and Clinton were calling for prayers for Donald Trump?Well, young scribes, we understand that this kind of embarrassment happens in the newspaper racket. What is less forgivable is a 4,000 word editorial that offers only a handful of phrases, en passant, on the economy that is the most important issue before voters — the inflation, high taxes, suffocating regulations, reckless spending and, among the Democrats, the almost total indifference to the historic collapse in the gold value of the dollar.The problem is that Mr. Biden adopted what’s called “modern monetary theory.” It was plumped for by his socialist ally, Senator Sanders. It holds that a country can spend, borrow, tax, and regulate without any adverse consequences for the economy. Mr. Biden’s gamble has been catastrophic — reducing take home pay for middle-class Americans as take-home pay has been oustripped by rising prices. So many young people, according to recent polls, have turned to President Trump over President Biden. They worry that skyrocketing home prices have put the American dream out of reach. Hardworking minorities see the ladder of opportunity growing harder to climb. Such things are why inflation has been called the cruelest tax of all. Inflation numbers have eased, but are still 50 percent above the Fed’s target.Mr. Biden’s energy policies and his war on fossil fuels have spelled price increases throughout. Cumulative increases in consumer prices since Mr. Biden’s acceded has run nearly 20 percent. With grocery prices soaring about the same amount, energy prices are up 40 percent or more. The public has rejected electric vehicles, even while gasoline prices have boomed to something like $3.60 a gallon from the $2.20 a gallon when Mr. Biden was elected.Bidenomics will bequeath the rising generation budget deficits of $2 trillion a year as far as the eye can see. This has led to the highest personal borrowing costs in decades, while crowding out the mom and pop enterprises that are the backbone of the economy. Even at this late date in Mr. Biden’s term, government spending in its entirety continues to be the dominant job-creator and largest contributor to the gross domestic product. As Uncle Sam takes over the economy in ways we haven’t seen since wartime, the dynamism of risk-taking and innovation has been blunted. According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin of American Action, an unheard-of $1.5 trillion of regulatory red-tape has had a demoralizing effect on small business and consumer confidence. None of this appeared to rate a mention in the Times’ denunciation of Trump’s candidacy.By Sunday evening the Times appeared to realize it needed to alight aways from its rhetoric of the day before. “It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties,” the Times argued in a new editorial, “and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it.” That, one imagines, would mean toning down its own vitriol when it comes to impugning the character of the candidates.

The Times on a High Horse

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