Townhall Review | Commentaries

$52 trillion dollars. That’s the price-tag for Elizabeth Warren’s plan to bring single-payer, government-run health care to America. And, believe it or not, that number may actually be a conservative estimate for what Medicare-for-all would cost.

Analysts across the political spectrum have panned her plan to pay for all of this. And it’s no surprise, given the details.

For example, she wants the IRS to do better at collecting tax revenue … 65 times better than even the best independent estimates suggest they can do. And even though she’s said the middle class won’t pay more under her plan, she’s calling for $9 trillion in tax hikes on payrolls—an increase that’s sure to affect job prospects and wages for the middle-income Americans.

It’s hard to believe that Elizabeth Warren’s plan stands any chance of being passed into law. But voters are the ones who ultimately have to guarantee that her ridiculous plan gets left on the ash heap of history.

 

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Abraham Lincoln remains our most revered political leader, but even some of his admirers misunderstand his rise to power. They believe Lincoln only became president in 1860 because Democrats divided, and three major candidates split the votes against him. In fact, those three opponents drew a combined total far less than Lincoln’s hefty majorities in 15 of the 18 free states of the union—providing more than enough electoral votes for decisive victory. The only states Lincoln failed to carry were the fifteen slave states, which naturally opposed a candidate who said: “If slavery isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong.”

In Lincoln’s re-election run in 1864, he won an even greater landslide: winning the popular vote by 10 percent, and carrying 22 of 25 states. His example reminds us that great presidential leadership relies on clear-cut majority support, not the cobbled together, squeaker victories that seem to obsess too many strategists and commentators as they look toward 2020.

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Representative Ilhan Omar, known for demagoguery about the Middle East, recently displayed her appalling ignorance about the United States.

Just last week, 405 members of Congress united to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenian Christians by Turkish Muslims in 1915. As one of only 14 House members refusing to support this resolution, Omar declared: “A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include … Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of indigenous people in this country.”

In fact, peak indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans amounted to 3 to 5 million, and no credentialed historian has ever claimed than more than 18 million lived on this continent. Omar’s claim of “hundreds of millions” of victims laughably misses the mark and historians agree that the vast majority of native losses came through disease, not massacres.

Ilhan Omar’s instinct to insult and assault the USA flippantly disregards historical facts.

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The Pew Research Center is out with a sobering new report revealing dramatic changes in the American religious landscape.

The survey from 2018 and 2019 found 65 percent of American adults described themselves as Christians when asked about their religious affiliation. That figure, however, is down 12 percentage points just over the last decade. The share of the population identified as religiously unaffiliated, the nones—n-o-n-e-s—are now at 26 percent. That’s up 17 percent just over the last 10 years.

That’s a tremendous change in just one decade.

Even more alarming is the generational breakdown of the pattern.

The growth of the religiously unaffiliated, “is most pronounced among young adults.” That fact, above all, should have our attention.

We’re witnessing the rapid and accelerating secularization of America.

And the data would indicate no sign that these trends will be slowed, much less reversed.

For the Christian world, the mission field is getting ever closer to home.

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“You don’t hear it enough. You do an incredible job. The people of this country know it. And the people of this country love you.”

That was President Trump’s message to police officers in his recent address to police chiefs from across America.

He used the backdrop of Chicago, the most violent big city in America and perhaps its most anti-Trump, to contrast his values with those of Leftist enclaves like Chicago.

Trump recognized a Chicago police officer recently injured in the line of duty declaring, “An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans.”

He also took direct aim at Chicago’s sanctuary city dogmatism announcing, “I will never put the needs of illegal immigrant criminals before I put the needs of law-abiding citizens. It’s very simple to me.”

His message was very simple indeed. Trump stands with law enforcement and the law-abiding. His detractors do not.

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Recently, candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax, which is a tax on wealth that has already been earned, taxed and saved.

This sounded historically familiar to me, so I talked to my friend Amity Shlaes, a renowned economic historian and author of “The Forgotten Man,” a history of the Great Depression. She confirmed to me that under the New Deal there were, indeed, several wealth taxes.

The result of this general war on business and war on wealth was what she labeled “the Depression within the Depression”—that brutal period from 1937-1938 when unemployment, still over ten percent, shot back up even higher. The anti-business attitude of the New Deal prolonged and, she said, “put the ‘great’ in Great Depression, no doubt about it.”

A wealth tax? We’ve been there. Done that. Crashed the economy. This is one experiment that we’d be fools to try again.

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News reports came out last week that the transgender athlete Rachel McKinnon has, for the second year in a row, won the women’s bicycling championships in Manchester, England.

McKinnon is a biological male competing as a female. That has left some female athletes upset.

McKinnon pushed back in a statement we should listen to closely:

“All my medical records say, female. My doctor treats me as a female person. My racing license says female, but people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male. So, if we want to say that I believe you’re a woman for all of society except for this massive central part that is sport, then that’s not fair.”

McKinnon has a point.

If people offer the delusion that a biological male is a female in other dimensions, it’s inconsistent to deny that same designation in sport.

We’re watching a secularizing world mired in inconsistency, and whenever that inconsistency is pointed out, it’s our responsibility to see it for what it is. But this is where Christians also have to recognize that the last thing we should hope for in this world is for the world to be even more consistently wrong.

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On the day after the bold and successful American raid that killed the world’s most-wanted terrorist, the Washington Post ran an instantly infamous headline: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at the Helm of Islamic State, Dies at 48."

The obituary featured a deceptively genial photo of the purported “religious scholar,” resembling a kindly Islamic Santa Claus, and the headline gave no hint that his death, like his life, had been unspeakably violent—pursued by American raiders, he exploded a suicide vest that also claimed three children.

The Post later changed the headline to read “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Extremist Leader of Islamic State, Dies at 48,” but the term “extremist” still fails to capture the hideous cruelty of prolonged torture, mass rape, enslavement and genocidal murder associated with this unlamented monster.

On occasion, significant slip-ups make the bias and blindness of the nation’s prestige press not just obvious, but undeniable.

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The Democrats seem to have an impeachment problem.

Recent polling from The New York Times and Siena college shows that in six swing states that President Trump won in 2016, registered voters generally support the impeachment inquiry, but oppose impeaching the President and removing him from office, by a margin of 53 to 43 percent.

So, the more Democrats pursue the impeachment of President Trump, the more it seems to work against them. That’s because this pursuit seems to come at the expense of progress on the issues voters actually care about, like jobs, the state of the economy, and keeping our communities and country safe. Historically, it’s been these issues that have a greater impact on the outcome of elections.

Nancy Pelosi has boasted that Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time—in other words, pursue both impeachment and progress on the pocketbook issues that Americans care about. But in watching them recently, you have to wonder if that’s really true.

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An uproar has broken out over a Texas custody battle involving Jeffrey Younger. He’s the father of a seven-year-old boy named James. James’s mother has enrolled him in school as a girl. She told him for years that he is a girl because he said he once liked a toy meant for girls. Now she wants to put him on puberty blockers and is pursuing a future “transition” to girlhood for James.

Jeffrey Younger is fighting the case in court and was just granted some say. He and his ex-wife will have joint conservatorship over James.

Do not be confused: we’re in the midst of a gender revolution — change that — children are in the midst of a gender revolution.

We should stand against the gender transitions of children.

We should speak truth. And we should protect children from life-altering treatments.

This is madness.

We cannot be silent.

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