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As you almost certainly already know, in another flash of political genius, President Trump accelerated his plans to announce his Vice President and yesterday named freshman Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. The Associated Press ran the widely-covered story under the headline, “Trump picks Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, a once-fierce critic turned loyal ally, as his GOP running mate.” One of my best lifelong friends immediately texted me yesterday noting that Vance remarkably resembles the “Chad” meme:
To that strong comparison, you might also note that the Senator from Ohio also looks like he could be directly related to our second Republican President and brilliant Civil War general, Ulysses S. Grant:
Right? You see it too? I’m not imagining things, am I?
There is a lot that could be said about Trump’s bold choice. Vance is Mike Pence’s reverse opposite. J.D. is a political newcomer, having won his Ohio Senatorial seat in 2022 as his first public office. Vance is a veteran Marine, Yale lawyer, and bestselling author. His 2016 rags-to-riches story Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a Netflix movie starring Glenn Close as Vance’s troubled mother. Close was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.
J.D. Vance is 39 years old — just a few years younger than U.S. Grant when that military veteran ran for office.
Demonstrating Trump’s political brilliance, Vance started his political career in 2016 as a self-described “Never Trumper.” But by 2021, he’d apologized, recanted, and joined Team MAGA. This was politically masterful since Vance’s early skepticism builds a sympathetic bridge for anti-Trump Republicans, helping cure Trump’s greatest intra-party weakness. And Senator Vance ticks all the C&C boxes. Vance was deeply skeptical of pandemic overreach and opposed vaccine mandates. He was one of East Palestine’s strongest advocates. And his nomination is catastrophic for Proxy War proponents; Vance once famously remarked, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”
Without seeming unsympathetic to the plight of Ukraine’s luckless citizens, at this point in history we prefer that our politicians focus on fixing our border instead of fixing Ukraine’s. Ukraine’s border has received more U.S. taxpayer money than has our own porous border, and we are still waiting for the thank-you cards.
Additionally, he has made lots of statements virus fear mongering (when there was nothing to fear monger about), he is invested in mRNA company, and his position is that mRNA shots are “relatively experimental vaccines” (what is “relatively experimental”, I would like to know?) and that “people should have choice”. Of EUA poison. As a Yale Law School graduate and editor of their journal, he can’t be bothered to look at the kill box EUA Countermeasures law! God help us all. ...
I am not going to comment more specifically on the assassination attempt, other than quote this post (although I do not agree with the author 100%):
So the shooter cleary (sic) intended to kill Trump. Well, why now? Well, it’s before the Republican National Convention and Trump hasn’t announced his Vice President yet. If he was killed it would create huge chaos with no clear front-runner; the Republicans would be in an even worse situation compared to the Democrats. In other words, the motivation for this shooter to be backed by globohomo institutions is extremely strong.
My own opinion - one of the main goals of globohomo is to get rid of the elections permanently. Elections already do not really matter in practice of government, but they take a huge effort, risk, cost, and take a lot of fighting between political campaigns over the same set of mega-donors. The One World Government agenda envisions a Platonic-Marxist system of “ideal” government: a fake-unified Politburo that opaquely rules over subdued, dumbed-down, zombified, asset-stripped global slave class who own nothing but are “happy”. Understanding that this is the end state that the Blob aims at, we can chart a few possible migration paths to reach it from the current state of affairs. A very plausible path would include some sort of violence/civil unrest right before the elections, which an assassination of a popular political figure like Trump may easily precipitate. And that is a big motive!
Well, that's a big negative for Vance
2. Advocates appeasement of Putin. A policy of appeasement toward aggressors weakens America and the entire West. How often has appeasement worked? A better approach would be a demonstration of power by unification of the west and give Putin an ultimatum. A unified West is much, much stronger than Russia, and appeasement is simply a show of weakness.
Damn.
Well, that's a big negative for Vance, but maybe he will come to see the truth about the death jabs like he saw the truth about Trump - through Trump himself has not yet admitted the screamingly obvious horrific harm that the death jabs have inflicted on the whole world.
Damn.
RWSGFY says
Damn.
Wait a minute, given that that's AFTER the previous tweets, he's being sarcastic, not serious.
Nice!
On the other hand his floppability (is this even a word?) means he'll flop in whatever place Trump wants him to be. So his positions now (or in the past) don't really matter.
2) Kamala wore knee pads.
RWSGFY says
On the other hand his floppability (is this even a word?) means he'll flop in whatever place Trump wants him to be. So his positions now (or in the past) don't really matter.
Yeah - some pretty major flip flops from this guy over the last few years. Still light years better than any democrat.
One of the problems of electing young people is that their worldviews are not fully formed.
I know he is from Ohio and has local constituencies to appease, but not a fan of his big Union boosterism that helped decimate the auto industry in the Midwest.
I don't think that's a negative. We need a younger prez to follow Trump and changing your positions over many years is part of youth and actually ad advantage. There are more young people converting to Trump than elderly
We really had some old Byrds practically die in office.
VANCE: “Together, we will protect the wages of American workers—union and non-union alike—and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of our hard-working citizens.”
The Trump-Vance Divide--Kim Strassel
They agree on trade, but the ticket’s No. 2 marks a major shift on economic policy.
On the surface, this GOP convention is the most ebullient and unified in decades. Beneath it, many elected officials are deeply uneasy.
The source of that agitation is Donald Trump’s running mate. At a glance, Mr. Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance makes sense, as he appears to be a prototype of Mr. Trump. Protectionist. Passionate. America First.
But he isn’t Mr. Trump—not at all—in ways that are hugely consequential for the conservative movement and its future. In choosing Mr. Vance now, Mr. Trump sets him up for 2028, which means a monumental internal fight is coming. We’ll soon find out how much control Mr. Trump really has—and intends to keep—over his party.
To listen to the convention speeches and the on-the-record GOP chatter, Mr. Vance is a perfect running mate for a candidate laser-focused on winning this election with working-class votes. He’s right there with Mr. Trump on tariffs and the border. He talks passionately on inflation. He connects to the workingman, whom he delights by skewering the media and the Biden administration.
That’s where the similarities end. Mr. Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was mostly a social and cultural critique. His later political opinions initially sounded distinctly Democratic. He reveled for a time as a Never Trumper, with a 2016 essay in the Atlantic, “Opioid of the Masses,” in which he explained, “Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis.” He now says he was wrong about Mr. Trump, but his record since joining the Senate last year suggests he still rejects much of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda.
Mr. Vance believes government is needed to right the problems in his hometown. He’s OK with raising the minimum wage to $20. (Even Bernie Sanders is asking for only $17.) He bashes banks and thinks Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan is “doing a pretty good job.” He wants government to direct industrial policy, with tax credits for favored industries. He’s “not philosophically against raising taxes on anybody.” Maybe because he wants more welfare for low-income households.
He and his “national conservative” allies may call this populism, but Mr. Trump’s successful Republican formula couldn’t be more different. The former president has certainly shifted the party, but as Ohio Rep. Jim Jordanput it recently, he has made the GOP into “a populist party rooted in conservative principle.” A businessman at his core, knowledgeable about markets, an invoker of Reagan, Mr. Trump’s first-term success was anchored in the core beliefs of limited government, more freedom, trust in providing opportunity to the American people. His tax cuts, impressive deregulation and handcuffs on the bureaucracy worked magic. One instance of the Grand Canyon between the two men: Mr. Trump’s belief in workers vs. Mr. Vance’s skepticism of right-to-work laws, which empower workers who don’t want to join unions.
The majority of elected Republicans view the still-small Vance crew with deep skepticism, but they won’t say so publicly. They’ve happily embraced Mr. Trump’s transformation of the party: They like its fight, see its electoral appeal and (except for some elements of trade policy) believe it gels well with their deeply rooted principles. But Mr. Vance is a bridge too far.
Don’t expect defense hawks to climb down from their principled belief in supporting the military by rebuilding defense capabilities. Don’t expect free-market conservatives to embrace government control of wages, higher taxes or Ms. Khan and the unbridled administrative state.
It’s unclear how this split would play out in a Trump administration. Mr. Vance is ambitious and may try to use his position to “manage” his boss. His Wednesday night speech suggested as much; it never got crosswise with Trump policy, yet subtly and skillfully injected Mr. Vance’s worldview. Mr. Trump might consider that left-leaning policy shifts risk blow-ups with Republicans in Congress, and could squander a GOP majority in 2026.
Then again, Mr. Vance has shape-shifted before, and possibly could again under Mr. Trump’s tutelage. Unspoken is that most Republicans viewed the Vance pick as a starting gun for a wide-open primary in 2028. No one views him as the heir, and it’s far from clear that Mr. Trump was himself thinking of the future when he made the pick. He was undecided until the final hours, and his other top choices were men vastly different from Mr. Vance in style and substance—Glenn Youngkin, Doug Burgum.
Mr. Trump may or may not have been thinking of his legacy, but he’ll need to do so now. A policy shift toward the Vance worldview risks destroying the former president’s chance to repeat his first term’s economic prosperity. And it risks leaving its next chapter in the hands of those who claim a Trump agenda but distort it for their own ends. Only Mr. Trump can decide if his unique version of the party—a party that, let’s note, is currently united and determined in a manner not witnessed in ages—endures.
J.D. Vance's Incoherent Argument for Higher Minimum Wages-- Eric Boehm
Jun 14, 2024 | 7:40 AM
In an interview published this week by The New York Times, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) calls for a more muscular federal government to intervene even more aggressively in the economy than it already does, to create what Vance calls "incentives" for American workers. In doing so, Vance inadvertently reveals one of the major flaws in this line of analysis.
Vance's opinions about these things carry significant weight, in no small part because he's on the shortlist to be Donald Trump's running mate. With an eye towards that possibility, the Times' Ross Douthat asked Vance to explain his "populist economic agenda." Here is part of the senator's response (emphasis mine):
The populist vision, at least as it exists in my head, is an inversion of [the postwar American order of globalization]: applying as much upward pressure on wages and as much downward pressure on the services that the people use as possible. We've had far too little innovation over the last 40 years, and far too much labor substitution. This is why I think the economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs. Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things—though I think it's massively overstated—but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.
It's a classic formulation: You raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour, and you will sometimes hear libertarians say this is a bad thing. "Well, isn't McDonald's just going to replace some of the workers with kiosks?" That's a good thing, because then the workers who are still there are going to make higher wages; the kiosks will perform a useful function; and that's the kind of rising tide that actually lifts all boats. What is not good is you replace the McDonald's worker from Middletown, Ohio, who makes $17 an hour with an immigrant who makes $15 an hour. And that is, I think, the main thrust of elite liberalism, whether people acknowledge it or not.
The basic fallacy here is one that President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and plenty of other politicians make regularly: They talk as though America is made up of one group of people who are "workers" and another group who are "consumers."
If this was so, you could focus on policies that raise wages for one group—the workers—at the expense of the other. But since most people are sometimes a worker and other times a consumer, policies that artificially apply "upward pressure on wages" also apply upward pressure on the prices consumers pay (because those wages have to come from somewhere). If you want to see how this plays out in reality, just look at California's experience with a $20 minimum wage. Prices have skyrocketed and jobs are being lost.
Pitting the two fictional camps of workers and consumers against one another might be a clever electoral strategy, but it's not the basis for sound economic policy.
There is another, deeper problem with Vance's argument here. In the second section I highlighted above, he argues that there's nothing wrong if a job is automated away after the government mandates a higher minimum wage, because the workers who get to keep their jobs will earn more. But if your job is lost due to market forces—because someone else is willing to do the same work for less—that's a problem he implies the government has a role in solving.
Taken together, those two premises effectively absolve the state from being blamed for the inevitable negative side effects of its interventions in the economy. Think about the two scenarios Vance lays out. In both, a worker has lost a job. If a centrally planned wage mandate is the cause, Vance says that's actually good because it means the remaining workers will earn more and be more productive.
Kudos to him for recognizing that automation isn't something to be feared or banned—not every populist gets that. Even so, the fact that automation can help make some McDonald's workers worth $20 per hour is likely to be little comfort to the worker who would have been willing to earn $17 per hour but is now out of a job because of a government mandate. For that matter, even though automation is a natural market response to artificially higher wages, it's not clear that the trade-off is an economically beneficial one. If it were, why shouldn't Vance want a $100 per hour minimum wage?
Meanwhile, Vance is worried about that same guy being replaced by a different worker who is willing to do the same job for $15 per hour. (That scenario, you'll note, is tinged with xenophobia. Why can't the wage competition come from another native-born American worker willing to do the job for $15 an hour?)
That seems pretty incoherent, but I think Vance is trying to play a clever game here. He's arguing that job losses (or other negative economic consequences) due to well-intentioned governmental interventions should be ignored, and the focus should be on how workers benefit from those interventions.
If you're someone who favors greater governmental intervention in the economy, as Vance does, this is exactly the framework you'd like to work within. Sure, a higher minimum wage means some workers lose their jobs and consumers pay more, but other workers earn fatter checks. Sure, cutting off immigration would probably make inflation worse, but it would protect some workers from wage competition. Sure, dumping tons of tax money on politically favored businesses and industries means higher taxes or borrowing costs foisted on everyone, but look at the shiny new semiconductor factory and the jobs created.
There's nothing new about this line of thinking. Vance is simply adding a more conservative-coded twist to the same tired arguments that progressives and other advocates for big government have used for years. In either case, the argument rests on the premise that government officials know exactly what levers to pull and what "incentives" to offer. Is a $20 per hour wage enough or should it be higher? How many factories does this town or state need? Which jobs are important enough to protect? Conservatives used to have enough humility to recognize that government officials won't have the answers to all those questions.
In place of that humility, Vance and other right-wing populists are substituting a different idea: that when the government inevitably makes mistakes while picking winners and losers, we should simply ignore the costs and focus only on the benefits.
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