St. Petersburg, Florida — Larry Gesick, a 77-year-old electrician by trade, leaves his home at 5:30 a.m. and heads for his part-time job unloading trailers at a local supermarket in St. Petersburg, Florida, for $14.75 an hour. This was certainly not part of his retirement plan.
His wife, 66-year-old Joyce, prepares for her workday, making $14 an hour as a full-time legal administrator.
“It’s not really a retirement,” Joyce told CBS News. “…It’s working every day.”
The Gesicks came out of retirement, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. About one in five people over age 65, or approximately 11 million Americans, are still working, according to the Pew Research Center.
“So, I call it the work, retire, repeat syndrome,” Ghilarducci said. “…More than half of the people who are retired right now do not have enough money to be retired.”
Ghilarducci says she blames “policymakers who experimented with our retirement system 40 years ago, and they are not saying the experiment failed.”
That experiment is what is known today as the 401K, named after part of a 1978 law that offered companies an alternative to the traditional pension plan.
“The thought was that Americans just need a little bit of financial literacy and they can just save on their own,” Ghilarducci said.
“I grew up on a farm,” Larry said. “Nobody there instructed any of us to put money aside and make your own way later on down the road.”
Whether you’re over 65, like the Gesicks, or nearing that age, there are a few rules of the road to keep in mind. Everyone needs a plan. First, calculate when it’s best to claim Social Security. Next, fund an emergency reserve. If you’re still working, set aside six-to-12 months’ worth of living expenses. If you’re already retired, make it one to two years’ worth of living expenses. And keep that reserve in a safe, easily accessible, interest-bearing account.
Like many working Americans, the Gesicks were more doers than savers, and they drained their 401ks.
“I think to us it felt more like a savings account than to focus on, ‘I need to have this piled up to actually live on,'” Joyce said.
Now, they have a mortgage, a car loan and they are paying down about $12,000 in other debt. But even with Social Security, some old pension funds and their paychecks, money is tight.
After all their expenses and debt is paid down every month, they say they are left with just $50. And had the Gessicks waited till age 70 to collect Social Security, they would be collecting more.
America’s dad” and would-be vice president has no problem associating with terror-linked groups.
Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is being skillfully marketed as an all-American average guy. That’s one thing he isn’t, and in reality, he is just about the diametric opposite of that. Most Americans are not even aware, and never will be, of how sinister he really is.
To hear the Democrat party’s propaganda machine, that is, the establishment media, tell it, Walz is your neighbor across the fence who has surprisingly sensible solutions to the nation’s problems, a homespun small-town high school teacher, a football coach, someone you can trust with your kids and a good-hearted man to whom you can trust our nation’s future.
This is, of course, a massive load of baloney, and it’s already falling apart, even as the establishment media continues to inundate the nation with nonsense about how everyone suddenly loves Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Walz’s stolen valor scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, and another one looms in its wake: Walz has repeatedly associated with Muslim leaders with known ties to Hamas and other jihad groups.
It is nearly twenty-three years since 9/11, and that means that for almost twenty-three years, Americans have been relentlessly and comprehensively indoctrinated with the dogma that Islam is a religion of peace that was hijacked on that fateful day by a tiny minority of extremists, but hey, every religion has them, and any concern about Islamic jihad violence or Sharia oppression of women is racist, bigoted, and “Islamophobic.” In that atmosphere, Walz’s hobnobbing with associates and supporters of jihadis is unlikely to raise many eyebrows, but as Islamic jihadis continue to grow more assertive and emboldened in the West, America’s dad may come to wish he had chosen his friends more carefully.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday that Walz “spoke at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in 2019, where he rubbed shoulders with an anti-Semitic scholar behind much of the Hamas propaganda on college campuses in the wake of Oct. 7, according to photos from the event.” It is important to recall that CAIR top dog Nihad Awad cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, leading even the Biden White House to drop his organization from an antisemitism task force, on which it had no business being in the first place.
Even worse, CAIR officials have refusedtodenounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.)
Walz appeared at CAIR-Minnesota’s 2019 “Challenging Islamophobia” conference. “Islamophobia” is a smear propaganda term designed to intimidate people into thinking it is wrong and “bigoted” to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression. Also there was “Islamophobia” professor Hatem Bazian. Discover the Networks notes that Bazian
founded American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), “a major supporter of the pro-Hamas campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Several of AMP’s recent board members and key officials were previously members of, and worked closely with, now-defunct Islamic extremist groups that funded terrorist activities.” These included the Islamic Association for Palestine “which, until its dissolution in 2004, served as the chief U.S. propaganda arm of Hamas”; the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, “which from 1995-2001 contributed approximately $12.4 million in money, goods, and services to Hamas”; and KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, “whose assets were frozen in 2006 by the U.S. Treasury Department because of its fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.”
Then on Friday, the Washington Examiner reported that Walz, “on at least five occasions as governor of Minnesota, hosted a Muslim cleric who celebrated Hamas‘s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israel and promoted a film popular among Neo-Nazis that glorifies Adolf Hitler.” The imam in question was Asad Zaman of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, who “said on Oct. 7 of last year that he ‘stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks.’” He has also “used his Facebook page over the years to share official Hamas press releases, blog posts on antisemitic websitesslamming Jews, and, in one 2015 instance, a link to a piece on a website for a pro-Hitler film called The Greatest Story Never Told.”
Now imagine if JD Vance appeared at an event with someone who spoke honestly about the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism, instead of repeating the familiar lies about Islam being peaceful, benign and cuddly. He would likely already have been made to step down at this point. But Walz hanging around with pro-Hamas Muslims? Why, it would be “Islamophobic” to object!
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat Party’s nominee for president, is trying to walk a political tightrope on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. On the one hand, to court as many moderate Jewish voters as possible, she repeats her canned statement of support for Israel’s right to defend itself, even going so far just recently to brand Hamas as “terrorists.” But at the same time, she is also currently entertaining the idea of an arms embargo against the Jewish state, according to pro-Palestinian advocates who spoke with her just before her campaign rally last week in Detroit, Michigan.
In which direction will Harris go if she is elected president? Her pattern of past actions and statements point to her leaning into the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party.
For example, Harris has expressed support for the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic protestors on college campuses, declaring that they are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.” She chose to snub Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, rather than attend in her capacity as president of the Senate.
In her first consequential decision as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Harris pleased the Democrat Party’s left-wing, progressive base by skipping over Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro to be her running mate. Instead, she selected left-wing radical Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Pro-Hamas agitators had conducted a “No Genocide Josh” campaign against Shapiro, a Jew who supports Israel. Not wanting to risk losing the votes of Arab and Muslim Americans, concentrated in such battleground states as Michigan, Harris gave the Jew-Hating “No Genocide Josh” crowd what they wanted.
“A man is known by the company he keeps,” as the saying goes, and Walz kept company with radical Muslim cleric Asad Zaman, who expressed solidarity with Palestinians on the very same day Hamas led the savage genocidal attack inside Israel. The Washington Examiner reported that as governor, Walz hosted Imam Zaman of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota at least five times. “Imam Zaman has a troubling history of playing into classic anti-Jewish themes and justifying violence against Israel,” an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson told the Examiner.
U.S. prosecutors pointed out in a court brief that the Muslim American Society “was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Hamas too was founded as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a violent history of supporting terrorism against “infidels” in the name of jihad. Nevertheless, according to state records reviewed by the Washington Examiner, Governor Walz’s administration awarded over $100,000 in funding to the Muslim American Society’s Minnesota branch.
On top of all that, Walz, the candidate of “joy,” revealed what makes him so happy at times: thinking about House “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn), who has a history of making anti-Semitic comments. “When I’m having a tough day …. and I’m feeling kinda down and the world is pressing on me, I think, ‘Ilhan Omar is a congresswoman,’ and it just brightens you up,” Walz said.
Picking the host of a Jew-hating Muslim cleric and a fan of Ilhan Omar as her running mate, rather than a Jew who supports Israel, Kamala clearly excited pro-Hamas activists, whose support she needs to win a close election. And that is only a fraction of her efforts to reach out to anti-Semites.
Before her campaign rally in Detroit on August 7th, Harris took time out to speak with Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed, who were waiting in an exclusive invitee line to take a photo with her. Alawieh and Elabed are the co-founders of the Uncommitted National Movement, which encouraged supporters to vote “uncommitted” in the Democrat Party presidential primaries but is very committed to advancing Hamas’ agenda. They demand a U.S. arms embargo against Israel and a so-called permanent “ceasefire,” which would enable the terrorists to rebuild in preparation for launching more October 7-style massacres, rapes, torture, and kidnappings of civilians within Israel.
Instead of immediately moving on to greet the other hundred or so people waiting in line at the Detroit rally for a photo, Harris paid special attention to what Alawieh and Elabed had to say. They told Harris that they wanted to support her candidacy in key battleground states that she needed to win, but in return they wanted her to consider their demand for the
The Democrats’ standard bearer in the 2024 presidential election did not miss a beat when Alawieh and Elabed asked for a sit-down meeting with Harris regarding their demand. Harris indicated she was open to having such a meeting and introduced them to members of her staff, according to a statement issued on behalf of the two Uncommitted National Movement leaders.
When pro-Hamas protesters later tried to interrupt her speech at the rally by chanting “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide” and demanding that she support an arms embargo, Harris responded by focusing on the importance of defeating her opponent: “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Kamala did not state her position one way or the other on the arms embargo when given an opportunity to do so during her speech at the Detroit rally. The next day, her security adviser tried to do damage control by posting on social media that Harris “will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups” and that she “does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
The Harris-Walz campaign puts out statements like this in Harris’s name to garner the support of as many Jewish voters and others who support Israel as possible. However, Harris remains mum herself on where she stands on the arms embargo issue to avoid offending Arab American and Muslim American voters who support the Palestinians’ so-called “resistance” (i.e., terrorist campaign) against Israel.
In her first press encounter of her presidential campaign on August 8th, Harris had a chance to clarify her stance on the arms embargo issue when she spoke with reporters briefly on an airport tarmac. She chose not to do so.
At a rally in Arizona on August 9th, Harris told Israel-hating agitators who were disrupting her campaign speech that “I respect your voices.” Her “respect” for their voices is reminiscent of the empathy she expressed towards the pro-Hamas mobs intimidating Jews on college campuses, whom she said were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
In another brief exchange with reporters on August 10th, Harris tried to have it both ways. She was asked to comment on an Israeli airstrike earlier that day aimed at terrorists operating in a Hamas command and control center, which was embedded inside a mosque in a school compound. According to the Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza, “more than 80” Gazans were killed.
Accepting these figures at face value, which do not distinguish between civilian and terrorist deaths, Harris said that “there are far too many civilians who have been killed” in Gaza. “I mean, Israel has a right to go after the terrorists that are Hamas. But as I have said many, many times, they also have, I believe, an important responsibility to avoid civilian casualties.”
When given another opportunity to state her position on the demand for an arms embargo against Israel, Harris avoided answering.
Kamala has also failed to acknowledge that Hamas is fully responsible for the civilian casualties in Gaza since the war started, not Israel. Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties despite fighting a terrorist enemy who uses civilians as human shields and hides fighters, command centers, and weapons within or under mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian facilities.
As Mark Penn, a past adviser to Hillary Clinton and to former President Bill Clinton, put it:
Hamas makes wild claims and Harris immediately responds to them as facts. Any serious presidential candidate would have said they were getting the facts on the Israeli strike (which Israel is providing) and then condemned Iran for the attack on US troops in Syria and possibly even mentioned the mass drone attack by Hezbollah.
Kamala Harris is trying to play both ends against the middle, placating her left-wing radical base while also trying to keep moderate Jewish voters and other supporters of Israel in her camp by making empty promises to support Israel’s right of self-defense. But based on Harris’ troubling record, it is disturbingly evident that the Jewish state will get the short end of the stick if she becomes president.
When the new administration was looking for an attorney general, Ben Crump, the ultimate BLM lawyer who represented the families of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and nearly every BLM case, recommended Tony West. Al Sharpton also mentioned West.
West, Crump argued, had been the third-highest ranking official in the Obama DOJ, “led various efforts to reduce racial bias, improve procedural fairness, strengthen the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement, and hold police departments accountable.”
Or as the New York Times put it, West “launched an investigation into the 2014 shooting death in Ferguson, Mo., of an unarmed 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer”. Michael Brown had assaulted a store clerk and then the police officer who shot him in self-defense, but West proved to be a crucial link in the chain that unleashed BLM on America.
The ‘Ferguson Effect’ and the lies around the shooting of Michael Brown would help cripple policing and lead to race riots and then a crime wave spilling across the nation’s cities.
West had helped start the fire that burned down the country and killed thousands of Americans.
Crump however pointed out that West had another major asset besides the Ferguson Effect, he was also “the brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.”
Big Government is indeed a small world.
While Biden’s inner circle proved wise enough not to bring in Kamala’s family into the cabinet, West wasted no time rushing in to consolidate Kamala’s position during the Biden palace coup.
The New York Times described West as her “secret weapon” who, coincidentally, was in Kamala’s residence when Biden ‘dropped out’ and ‘worked the phones’ helping “her reach out to would-be supporters” and “his own network of donors and business contacts”.
Since Kamala was in D.C. and West works for Uber in San Francisco (but also has a home on Martha’s Vineyard), thousands of miles away, he might not have just dropped by for a visit.
And West indeed worked fast.
Shortly thereafter, West pressed Kamala to bring in his former boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, to ‘vet’ vice presidential candidates. And West put himself on the 5-person vetting team. When Kamala picked Gov. Tim Walz, it was really the old Obama DOJ team that got it done.
Derek Anthony ‘Tony’ West, married to Kamala’s sister-in-law, Maya Harris, a radical ACLU activist, have been the power couple behind Kamala’s political career. Maya was the campaign chair of her sister’s 2020 presidential campaign. And when Kamala headed to her presidential campaign headquarters back then, Maya and her husband were by her side.
Maya was credited by campaign staffers with wrecking the campaign and this time around, Kamala’s campaign is officially being chaired by Biden’s old campaign chairwoman, Jen O’Malley Dillon, but West is very clearly acting as the unofficial chair of the 2024 campaign. West, who formerly co-chaired her transition team, has emerged as its number two.
The ‘slush fund’ amounting to between $1 and $3 billion was directed to leftist groups like ACORN and La Raza. And a House Judiciary Committee investigation obtained documents showing that West’s team had deliberately screened out conservative groups.
West’s deputy had emailed the Office of Legal Counsel asking, “[c]an you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money toward an organization of our choosing.” Explaining the final settlement to the press team, West’s deputy wrote that the donation provisions require banks to “[m]ake donations to categories of entities we have specified (as opposed to what the bank might normally choose to donate to).”
Such a level of corruption is concerning. West has suggested that he will go back to working at his extremely lucrative position at Uber after the election, but Crump’s op-ed touting him for Attorney General suggests that he was interested in that role. And might be yet again.
While serving at the Justice Department, West had praised Al Sharpton, linked to years of racial violence in New York City, including the Crown Heights Pogrom against Jews, the assaults on Asian groceries and the Freddy’s massacre of Latino women, for his work on “reconciliation”.
Sharpton brought up West’s name during discussions about Biden’s next attorney general. He warned that there should be no hesitation in providing Tony West with a “waiver”. A possible reason for such a waiver would have been to exempt West from anti-nepotism rules due to Kamala’s position. While the Biden team did not listen to Crump and Sharpton, and did not pursue such a waiver, it is likely that Kamala would be more motivated to do so than Biden.
Tony West helped set America on fire by legitimizing BLM assaults on law enforcement and the justice system. He brokered some of the most corrupt settlements in the DOJ’s history.
And the next time you see him, he might be the attorney general.
In the three weeks since Joe Biden handed her the nomination, Kamala Harris spent a total of 70 seconds in front of reporters and issued one specific promise, which she stole from Donald Trump.
This is the first presidential campaign in history that appears to be guided by Nancy Pelosi’s line about Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
At her brief stop before a handful of reporters while boarding Air Force Two, one of them oh-so-politely asked Harris when she’d sit down for a press interview.
Her answer: “I’ve talked to my team. I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”
Staging rallies around the country is easy. Sitting down for an interview with a fawning reporter? That’s complicated business!
This is all in keeping with Harris’ completely content-free campaign, which she apparently hopes to ride until November on the wings of an adoring press.
To date, her website is utterly substance-free, consisting only of a bio of her and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a donation page, and a page selling sophomoric merch.
So far, the only specific promise Harris has made — other than to “defend democracy” and “freedom” — is to eliminate taxes on tips, something she only now embraces because it’s been a winning idea for Trump. (Never mind that she cast the tie-breaking vote for the criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which gave the IRS $80 billion to catch tax cheats, after which it quickly announced plans to crack down on tip income.)
Harris claims she’ll release an economic plan this week that will explain “what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy.” We aren’t holding our breath.
To the press who are supposedly covering Harris, keeping her agenda vague and sticking with scripted remarks is a smart strategy. But that strategy only works if the press lets it. So far they are happily obliging.
When the New York Times reported on Harris’ lack of press access, it spent most of it defending her strategy. It’s “a cautious choice” and “political strategists” say is “exactly what she should be doing.” The Times quotes James Carville saying “Where is it written that you have to sit down for a press interview?”
Time magazine ran a sickly sweet paeon to Harris, even after she refused to sit down with them for an interview.
In a rare bit of honesty, The New Yorker magazine admitted that:
The task of filling in what Harris prefers to leave blank would usually fall to the press. But, to date, there have not been particularly loud or widespread calls for her to sit down and answer questions….I think it’s fair to say that, so far, the mainstream press has handled Harris quite gently.
You don’t say.
The press is — to the surprise of no one — bending over backward to help her win.
When the New York Times ran a headline that was the tiniest bit critical of Harris’ vacuous campaign, it quickly got revised.
Here’s the original:
And here’s the updated version that appeared later in the day.
But there’s a deeper reason for Harris’ hiding from the press. When she had to present a policy agenda in 2019, it was laughably amateurish. And when she talks off the cuff, she comes across as … well … stupid.
Early in Biden’s term, after putting Harris in charge of fixing the “root causes” of the border crisis, she sat down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, which was such an epic disaster that she basically avoided sit-down interviews for a year.
That didn’t prevent Harris from displaying her dim grasp on things whenever she spoke extemporaneously, repeating her “unburdened by what has been” line ad nauseam when not waxing philosophically about the “significance of the passage of time.”
Harris has no doubt spent three years preparing for this moment, so maybe she’s improved her skills. But when Americans held prisoner in Russia returned at the start of the month and a reporter asked her how she feels, Harris blurted this:
Issues & Insights @InsightsIssues · Aug 11 Kamala Harris On The Significance of Diplomacy @CSPAN
If she is so sharp and politically savvy and so full of great ideas, you’d think she’d be eager to show off all this off. Why keep her light under a bushel?
Having said all this, the real risk to the country isn’t electing someone who is stupid. It’s electing someone who’s been allowed to hide the fact that she is a hardcore leftist.
That’s what voters will learn about Harris if, God help us, she wins this November.
Biden was initially interested in Gretchen Whitmer – until the death of George Floyd.
A handful of Republicans have referred to Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, as a “DEI hire.” They were essentially saying that President Joe Biden picked Harris to be his running mate in 2020 because she was a person of color. Democrats have, of course, pushed back, calling the phrase “extremely offensive and dehumanizing,” in the words of former U.N. Ambassador and Obama and Biden White House insider Susan Rice. Some Republicans, like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, pushed back, too, calling the accusation “totally stupid and dumb.”
The issue goes back to the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. In March of that year, when he had all but wrapped up the nomination, Biden explicitly promised to choose a woman as his running mate. “I commit that I will, in fact, appoint a, pick a woman to be vice president,” Biden said in a debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s promise came in the same answer in which he promised to appoint “the first black woman” to the Supreme Court if he had the opportunity to nominate a justice. So, in that moment, Biden made a specific promise of race and gender for the court while promising only to pick a woman for vice president.
Later, during a July 20 appearance on MSNBC, Biden was asked, “Are you committed to naming a black woman as your vice presidential running mate?” Biden declined to say but said that among those under consideration at that moment, “there are four black women.” He then offered a few hints. Black women have long supported his career, he said, “and so they’re the ones, as that old saying goes, that brought me to the dance. I have been loyal. They have been loyal to me. … My administration, I promise you, will look like America, from vice president to Supreme Court, to cabinet positions, to every major position in the White House. It’s going to look like America. It’s critically important that that be the case. I can guarantee you that.”
It’s fair to say that Biden strongly suggested the pick would be a black woman. And three weeks later, Biden picked Harris. According to an Associated Press report, Biden was initially quite interested in Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the national nervous breakdown that followed, Whitmer withdrew from consideration and recommended that Biden choose a black woman.
“Forces in the country, and within the Democratic Party, were indeed pushing Biden toward a history-making pick,” the AP reported. “As protests over the death of Floyd and other black Americans filled the streets across the country, an array of Democrats urged Biden to put a black woman on the ticket — a nod to this moment in the nation’s history, to the critical role black voters played in Biden’s ascent to the Democratic nomination, and to their vital importance in his general election campaign against President Donald Trump.”
So Harris got the nod. In the end, Biden kept his woman-only promise for the vice presidency, and also made good on the strong hints he had given out that it would be a woman of color. And then he and Harris won the election. (In time, Biden also kept his promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.)
Now, the issue is less how Harris got the job of vice presidential nominee — it’s not hard to understand the dynamics inside the Democratic Party — but what she would do on the DEI front were she to step up to the presidency. The short version is that she would be the president for DEI.
Immediately upon taking office, Biden issued proclamations and executive orders concerning equity, the “E” in DEI. It began on inauguration day, Jan. 20, 2021, with his “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” The order said, “Our nation deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.” On June 25, 2021, Biden issued another executive order, “Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” building on the earlier order.
When the 81-year-old president talked about “equity,” it seemed clear he meant something along the lines of the old idea of “equality of opportunity,” as opposed to “equality of outcome.” The former is universally accepted; the latter is the opposite of the American way of life.
Kamala Harris is different. When she talks about “equity,” she means “equality of outcome.” In February 2021, when Harris had been vice president a little more than a month, she took part in a virtual celebration of Black History Month. She took the occasion to say this:
“We have always fought for equality. But now we are also talking much more rightly about equity, understanding that we must be clear-eyed about the fact that, yes, we want everyone to get an equal amount — that sounds right — but not everyone starts out from the same place. Some people start out on first base; some people start out on third base. And if the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place. And since we didn’t start in the same place, some folks might need more equitable distribution.”
It is hard to imagine a major-party nominee for president of the United States saying that. But that is what Vice President Harris said. That is what she believes. Should she become president, she would, of course, have much more power to pursue her goal of equity across the country — a president for DEI.
In case you haven’t heard, the Mother Country is finished. Under their new Communist prime minister, COVID-era censorship of social media has been resurrected. It’s not just censorship; it’s imprisonment for writing anything online that the government dislikes. Do you think the British can vote this tyranny down next time? There is no next time.
Great Britain was never perfect, but it provided the intellectual and political basis for Western civilization that gave rise to the First Amendment and the United States. Our soon-to-be elected or selected Vice Puppet has already made it clear that censorship will be the policy of the United States, very soon.
America is not far behind. Tim Walz openly calls for censorship. He has said that the government must “push back” against “hate speech,” and he made it clear that the words of Trump supporters, whom he has called fascists, certainly do constitute hate speech (meaning: disagreement). What will “pushing back” mean in practice, after next January 20 — or even sooner, if they push Biden out of the White House?
The U.K. government has actually posted on X: “Think before you post.” People know it’s a warning, because Facebook jail has been converted to real jail, at least in the U.K. Can you imagine the Harris-Walz regime doing the same in America? I absolutely can.
“Government is organized crime,” says a meme on social media.
Actually, today’s federal government in the U.S. is much WORSE than organized crime. It answers to nobody. It controls the police, the military, the courts– and, as we’ve seen, gleefully and unapologetically weaponizes them against all innocent people they dislike. It prints money. It brainwashes children and sexually (as well as intellectually) mutilates their minds and bodies, with no consent from parents — and forces unwilling parties to pay for it all.
Tony Soprano faced much more opposition than today’s monsters in what we still call a government ever face. Mobsters are on the run. Today’s tyrants do not have to run from anything, because we have allowed them unlimited power, including a monopoly on the use of that power.
“In 1776, the British demanded we surrender our weapons.
We shot them,” says another meme on social media.
In her first, wildly unsuccessful campaign for President (where she faced actual voters), Kamala promised an executive order on day one in office, an order to confiscate the guns of all Americans.
Let us know how that works out for you, Kamala.
Too few Americans seem willing to take the threat seriously; to demonstrate recognition that they’re in for (at least) the biggest fight since 1776.
The waking up, when and if it happens, will not be pretty. If most never wake up, then it will be even uglier to the rest of us.
Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial
Are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just too weird to win election in November?
Or are they the two Democrats that America needs right now dammit, a special pair that have the unique ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been?
I just can’t say. I’m just a guy who spent his life working in the American news media, much of that time writing a political column at a well-known conservative Chicago newspaper. But after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the paper went woke and then broke and neo-Marxists took the newsroom. I hear them and what remains of the chattering class talking gibberish and jaberwocky about how “Democracy Dies in Darkness” with Harris avoiding any meaningful news conferences, and I’m just about as dazed and confused as the rest of you.
But nagging questions persist. Chief among them: Will Harris and Waltz continue to hide their true selves as what is left of a broken media covers for them?
For example, is is too weird to suggest Vice President Harris–a famous coddler of criminals and George Soros prosecutor zero who unleashed a national crime wave allowed masked thugs to smash-and-grab up t0 $950 in stolen goods a day–has now transformed herself into a stern border warrior who is tough crime? Or is her tough-on-crime pose and her feigned concern over the broken border simply more tapioca pudding shoveled at foolish infants?
And is her Democrat running mate Minnesota Gov. “Tampon Tim” Walz too weird for mandating tampons for middle-school boys at Minnesota schools?
Hmm. Are feminine napkins for schoolboys just too weird, or is all this in keeping with the pursuit of the new “fweedoms” Harris and Walz keep yammering about to their chorus at MSNBC? It’s just rather confusing now that the left wing corporate “mainstream media” (which is anything but ‘mainstream’ ) allows Harris’ and Walz’ true identities to remain masked and hidden. But if they win this election will they finally reveal themselves as did the Jacobins of the French Revolution? Of course. Because by then it will be too late.
Currently, the true nature of the Democrat Party remains hidden. The Jacobins could not win election if their first promise was to crush freedom and lop off the heads of the nobles. It all remains obscure, like their smiles.
And rather like the masks Americans were forced to wear in lockdown states with lockdown governors like Minnesota and Illinois, where we were discouraged from gathering together in our homes on the holidays. We were prohibited from attending church services on Sundays, and public schools were closed, but our political leaders allowed us to worship of sorts at box liquor store and get high on state-approved weed. Remember?
Today’s Democrat is not the Democrat Party I remember, that party of Richard J. Daley in Chicago, the party that loved America like Harry S. Truman. But this Democrat Party preparing to gather in Chicago on August 19 is a gathering of Jacobins. They are all about selling abortion and racial hate. And as such they are nihilists, as were the French Revolutionaries. This is the Democrat Party that is driven to destroy the political system, the party that destroys the old icons and statues, the party that changes the foundational dates, from 1776 to 1619, the party that whips up racial animosity as they did during the insurrectionary Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The party that sells abortions as “freedom.”
Have you forgotten the BLM riots to glorify the criminal George Floyd, the thug who held a loaded gun to the abdomen of a pregnant woman? Those the leftist riots in his name destroyed Chicago and other cities like Minneapolis. Have you forgotten, even as the national news media wants you to forget? It was Gov. Walz who let Minneapolis burn, and he took days and days to call out the National Guard as his aides worried if the guard was diverse enough to handle the riots.
Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works.
But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called on-ramp is set to expire at the end of September—yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment.
The federal repayment “on-ramp” is set to expire at the end of September, yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment.FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareThe Looming Student-Loan Nonpayment Crisis
During the payment pause, no federal student-loan borrower had to make a payment, and interest rates were set at zero. During the on-ramp, payments are due and interest accrues once again. But borrowers who don’t pay their loans can avoid the worst consequences of failing to do so: Delinquencies will not appear on their credit records, nor will loans be placed in default or sent to collections.
Since most student borrowers had not made a payment on their loans for over three years, the logic of a one-year on-ramp was to allow borrowers time to make financial arrangements to recommence payment. Missing a payment or two would be no big deal. After a year, the logic ran, most borrowers should be comfortably paying their loans every month.
That ideal couldn’t be farther from reality. At the end of 2019, prior to the payment pause, 3.1 million borrowers were more than 30 days behind on their loan payments. As of March 2024—the latest month for which data are available—the number of delinquent borrowers had reached 7.3 million.
Another feature of the post-pause transition was a program to allow borrowers who had been in default prior to the pandemic a one-time chance to bring their loans back into good standing. Yet most defaulted borrowers have not availed themselves of this option. In December 2019, 7.7 million borrowers were in default; as of March 2024, the ranks of defaulted borrowers stood at 5.9 million.
Other borrowers are taking advantage of legitimate options to avoid paying their loans. As of March 2024, two million borrowers had entered loan forbearance, a status in which payments are not due.
The number of borrowers not paying their loans exceeds 20 million.FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareMany more borrowers are enrolled in an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, which allows them to pay less than the standard monthly amount—and sometimes nothing at all. The most popular IDR plan is the SAVE plan, a creation of the Biden administration that allows borrowers with even relatively high household incomes to qualify for $0 monthly payments. As of February 2024, 57 percent of the 8 million borrowers enrolled in the SAVE plan paid nothing towards their loans each month. (While the SAVE plan is currently on hold due to legal challenges, the Biden administration has placed all SAVE borrowers into interest-free forbearance while the court battle plays out.)
Add the 15 million borrowers who are delinquent or in default on their loans to the two million borrowers in forbearance and the four million who paid nothing under the SAVE plan, and the number of borrowers not paying their loans exceeds 20 million. Excluding those enrolled in school, there are around 35 million borrowers total. That means more than half of student borrowers who should be paying their loans are not.
What Happens to Borrowers Once the On-Ramp Ends?
All this is costly for taxpayers. It’s one reason the Congressional Budget Office expects the student-loan program to post a loss of $400 billion over the coming decade. But the nonpayment phenomenon also carries major implications for borrowers.
Think about the last few years from the perspective of a student borrower who doesn’t religiously follow the news. You’re allowed to make no payments on your loans for three and a half years, from the beginning of the pandemic until October 2023. During that time, you hear that student-loan forgiveness is coming. After October, your servicer starts sending you bills again, but you face no real consequences for missing your payments month after month. All the while, you continue to hear more promises from the president and media about loan cancelation.
It’s understandable that a borrower in this situation might assume that he can get away with not paying his loans forever—or at least until one of those loan-forgiveness promises comes true.
But things are destined to change after the on-ramp expires in October. First, loan delinquencies will be reported to credit bureaus, which generally happens when payments are 90 days overdue. That will adversely affect borrowers’ credit scores.
The Education Department has the power to garnish wages, withhold tax refunds, and seize Social Security checks.FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareA borrower who goes nine months without making a payment will enter default. After that, the Education Department will have the power to garnish the borrower’s wages, withhold his tax refund, or seize his Social Security checks. Defaulted borrowers can also be responsible for enormous collection fees.
Even borrowers on an IDR plan may not be out of the woods. Recent research has found that borrowers who qualify for a $0 monthly payment often become disengaged from the student-loan system and neglect to reapply for IDR each year. This can lead to higher rates of student-loan delinquency in the long run.
The Biden Administration’s Plans for Student-Loan Repayment
Facing a potential nonpayment crisis in October, the Biden administration could opt to kick the can down the road by extending the on-ramp period. This may be the most likely outcome, as it makes the nonpayment crisis the next administration’s problem. But extending the on-ramp is not sustainable in the long run, as it means tens of millions of borrowers will continue to skip their payments—leaving taxpayers to pick up the cost.
Of course, many decisionmakers in the Biden administration are ideologically opposed to collecting the loans at all, so they may be fine with that. In the meantime, they will keep trying to forgive the loans outright. Though the administration’s highest-profile forgiveness plans are on thin legal ice, there are other ways to discharge debts. The Education Department has canceled $170 billion so far by bending the rules on other loan-forgiveness programs.
In addition, the administration has announced new proposals to forgive student debt by executive action. One proposal, announced in May, would forgive around $150 billion for 28 million borrowers. Another scheme, expected in October, could be even more consequential. These plans are still working their way through the regulatory process, but the White House has signaled it hopes to begin canceling debt this way before the November election.
Perhaps the administration will give up on actually collecting the loans in the hope that one of these forgiveness plans will survive legal scrutiny. Or perhaps officials figure that allowing the loan program to descend into chaos will leave no option but mass forgiveness. Either way, advocates of fiscal responsibility need to offer a better way forward.
A more responsible approach would send a clear signal that borrowers are expected to repay their loans.FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareWhat Should We Do Instead?
A more responsible approach would send a clear signal that borrowers are expected to repay their loans. The on-ramp should end in October, as promised. Government officials should stop talking about mass loan cancelation to demolish any hint that borrowers should hold out for it.
There should be reforms to the repayment system, as well. A responsible policy would reverse the SAVE plan and institute a minimum monthly payment in remaining IDR plans, so borrowers remember they have a loan to repay. Long-term loan forbearance should no longer be an option, except in extreme cases.
But the government should meet borrowers halfway. Policymakers should make penalties for default less punitive and create simple pathways for defaulted borrowers to return their loans into good standing. Interest subsidies for lower-income borrowers who make a good-faith effort to repay their loans, as House Republicans recently proposed, would ensure borrowers can pay down their principal balances and eventually get out of debt.
Beyond changes to repayment, more fundamental reforms to student loans are necessary to prevent such a crisis from happening again. Congress should implement lower limits on student borrowing and require colleges to cosign the loans they foist on students. Privatization of the federal student-loan system (or at least portions of it) is also worth considering, as private lenders will make an apter assessment of prospective borrowers’ capacity to repay than does the federal government.
The political and legal wars over student-loan forgiveness are likely to stretch years into the future. By contrast, the end of the repayment on-ramp is an issue that demands attention today. More than 20 million student borrowers are not paying their loans, and the nation is about to discover what that means.
Preston Cooper is a higher-education policy expert based in Washington, DC.
The Imminent Student-Loan Disaster We’re Not Talking About Aug 7, 2024Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which …
Graduate Enrollment Is Softening? Good. Jul 25, 2024The number of students enrolling in graduate school is steadily declining, according to a recent report by the Council of Graduate Schools. Although grad-school enrollment increased by six percent between …
Academic Freedom Doesn’t Mean Grandstanding Aug 9, 2024Earlier this summer, Harvard dean Lawrence Bobo wrote an essay for the Harvard Crimson that provoked a chorus of criticism, much of it justified. Reflecting on the post-October 7 turmoil …
An Unconvincing AI Tract Aug 8, 2024MIT SMR Connections, an “independent content creation unit within MIT Sloan Management Review,” recently published an AI “strategy guide” commissioned by Anthology, Inc. Anthology is perhaps not as recognizable as …
The Imminent Student-Loan Disaster We’re Not Talking About Aug 7, 2024Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which …
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 