Biden Presidency: The Dopes Have Taken Full Control

We’re barely a week into the Biden presidency, and it’s been a literal blizzard of Executive Orders, so many that nobody can even keep up with them. Trying to review them in at least a general way, I can’t find a single one that is a good idea. They range from bad to catastrophic.

The overall summary is that the dopes have taken full control. All adult supervision has now been banished from the vast federal government, and the wokest (and stupidest) of the woke progressives are to have the full run of the place. Resources are now infinite, tradeoffs among competing priorities are no longer necessary, and all human problems are to be solved and perfect fairness and justice instituted within a matter of weeks if not days. Best of all, the Bidenistas think that all this will work because they are so “smart.”

At Jacobin magazine, writer David Sirota captures the spirit of the moment in a piece titled “There’s Really No Need to Compromise, Joe.” The specific focus of the piece is advocating for immediate legislation to pass out checks for $2000 each— as opposed to any smaller amount — to most every American. But the bigger theme is that compromise is not needed because now there are no more limits on how much money the federal government can pass out, nor is there any cost or other downside to just throwing out money as fast as possible. The route to improving your and everyone else’s life is endless big handouts of free money from the Feds:

On January 4, Joe Biden made an unequivocal pledge, telling voters that by electing Democrats to Georgia’s Senate seats, “you can make an immediate difference in your own lives, the lives of the people all across this country. Because their election will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check.” . . . The president and congressional Democrats do not have to do what weak-kneed, wimpy Democrats of the past have so often done. They do not have to negotiate against themselves, word-parse their way out of campaign pledges, and delude themselves into thinking that Republicans are good-faith legislative partners.

What could be more obvious?

Looking through the various subjects of the recent EOs for a particular one to designate the very worst, I can’t even make that call. There are so many that are just so very, very destructive. So for today I’ll just stick to one of the subjects that I know best, “climate change,” aka energy policy.

There are multiple EOs on this subject of energy policy, but this one , issued yesterday, is the big one, going on and on for what would be the equivalent of maybe 40 pages if it were typed out on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets. The provisions run into the dozens and dozens. It’s all entirely fantasies and fairytales, with no attempt to estimate or even mention costs of anything, even though it’s clear that the costs will be enormous and destructive, and that it’s all going to get charged to you, and that the costs will fall disproportionately on the relatively low of income. I won’t try any comprehensive list, but here is a smattering of some of the more ridiculous items, together with some remarks from me:

• From Section 101: ”[C]limate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security. The United States will work with other countries and partners, both bilaterally and multilaterally, to put the world on a sustainable climate pathway.” They seem to have no idea that suppression of fossil fuel production in the U.S. will be gigantically destructive of national security. By achieving energy independence and driving down fossil fuel energy costs over the last five to ten years, the U.S. has hugely dis-empowered many of the world’s worst bad actors like Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Are the Biden people really so dumb as to intentionally undo the energy independence, re-empower the bad actors, and at the same time think that they are somehow working to improve national security? It’s completely incomprehensible.

• From Section 102: “This order builds on and reaffirms actions my Administration has already taken to place the climate crisis at the forefront of this Nation’s foreign policy and national security planning, including submitting the United States instrument of acceptance to rejoin the Paris Agreement.” The Paris climate agreement is something that no remotely competent American President could possibly have anything to do with. See many prior posts by me on this subject, for example here and here. From the second of those pieces, June 2017: “Even if you think that the climatic effect of human GHG emissions is an existential crisis facing the planet, it would still be completely incompetent for an American president to sign on to this particular [Paris] agreement. . . . The Paris accord imposes huge and uncapped costs on the American people and economy, for little to no climate benefit. . . . [E]ven if you believe that all the Africans and Indians and Chinese must be kept in perpetual poverty in order to avoid a hypothetical degree or two of atmospheric warming, the Paris agreement does not contain any commitment by them to go along with that. “

• From Section 205: “The [Federal Clean Electricity and Vehicle Procurement Strategy] shall aim to [achieve] . . . a carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035.” Currently, about 63% of U.S. electricity comes from fossil fuels, and most of the rest (about 20%) comes from nuclear, which the federal government has also been intentionally suppressing for decades. So we’re now going to shut all that 63% down — an investment in perfectly good, functioning, inexpensive and reliable assets representing hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars over many decades — and replace it with, what? And in fourteen years no less. The idea that wind and solar can replace all this is complete fantasy. They have no idea how to do it, or how much it will cost, or whether they can even make a functioning electrical grid with the not-yet-invented new technologies.

• Also from Section 205: “The plan shall aim to use . . . clean and zero-emission vehicles for Federal, State, local, and Tribal government fleets, including vehicles of the United States Postal Service.” I suppose that “zero-emission” vehicles means electric, except that there is nothing “zero-emission” about electric vehicles when 63% of the electricity comes from fossil fuels, and they have no idea how to replace the fossil fuels to produce the electricity. So really, we’ll just spend around, say, double per vehicle to buy premium-priced vehicles that don’t actually reduce emissions in any meaningful way. Oh well, this little item will probably only cost a few tens of billions, as opposed to the hundreds of billions or trillions of costs for the other items.

• From Section 208: “[T]he Secretary of the Interior shall pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters. . . .” As the Wall Street Journal points out in an article today, several states in the West are heavily dependent on revenue from oil and gas production on federal lands, particularly for education funding. New Mexico leads the list, along with Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota. “State Senator George Munoz [of New Mexico] . . . estimates New Mexico will take a hit of up to $400 million in revenue the next fiscal year, which begins in July, and up to a $500 million loss the following fiscal year.” Most of that goes to fund education. New Mexico’s entire state budget is under $20 billion. Currently, they send two Democratic Senators to Washington.

The EO goes on and on from there. As I said, this is just a smattering of the craziness.

It seems that Biden held a press briefing yesterday to introduce to the people the day’s crop of EOs, including the one excerpted above. The New York Times had a report on the briefing in the print edition this morning, with the headline “Biden, Emphasizing Job Creation, Signs Sweeping Climate Actions.” As the Times reports it, Biden’s pitch was that the big import of the “climate” initiatives was that they would “create jobs.” No kidding:

Mr. Biden argued . . . that technological gains and demands for wind and solar infrastructure would create work that would more than make up for job losses even in parts of the country reliant on the fracking boom. . . . Over all, the text of his executive order mentions the word “jobs” 15 times. “Today is climate day in the White House which means today is jobs day at the White House,” Mr. Biden said.

If there is one fundamental thing that a President needs to understand about domestic and economic policy, it is the distinction between policies that enhance the people’s income and wealth, and those that diminish income and wealth and make the people poorer. If an industry can only exist by government subsidy — key examples here being wind and solar power — then building out that industry with the government subsidies makes the people poorer, not better off. And yes, Biden and all the brilliant woke progressives around him are too dumb to figure this out.

Back to David Sirota. Do you recognize his name? He is the guy most famous for his May 2013 piece in Salon with the title “Hugo Chavez’s Economic Miracle.” 2013 was 15 years after Chavez took power, and by that time everyone with eyes could see that the Chavez program of vastly expanded government and blowout government spending and subsidies for wealth-destroying industry was destroying the Venezuelan economy. But Chavez, aided and abetted by international institutions like the World Bank and IMF, put out completely fake statistics to fool gullible leftists. Excerpt from Sirota’s 2013 piece:

[A]ccording to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). . . .

We all know where that has ended. The statistics on which Sirota relied were completely fake. After that kind of humiliation, you would think that Sirota would be unemployable today, but instead he goes on as a true believer, spouting the same nonsense as always (including during a stint as a senior adviser to the 2020 Sanders campaign), and completely impervious to any and all evidence. In other words, he’s basically just like Joe Biden and all the members of his incoming administration.

For me, here’s the big question: Would it be better for Biden and the Bidenistas to rapidly tank the U.S. economy with their radical destruction, or would it be better to rein in the destruction as best as possible, through Congress or otherwise, to try to minimize the damage? Certainly, I do not wish ill to the American people, least of all to the kinds of hard-working men and women whom Biden is trying so hard to throw out of work as fast as possible with things like these “climate” policies and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and the $15 minimum wage. But then, it should have been obvious to everybody how destructive Biden’s program was going to be, and nevertheless somehow he got elected. It seems that the only way to really learn about these things is through bitter experience.

Meanwhile, down in Venezuela, the Chavez regime used the fifteen years of “economic miracle” to consolidate their power, change the Constitution, and make it so that they could never be voted out. Take note.