OPINION

How to make things worse

If DNA were measured as a portion of your body, Elizabeth Warren's genetic Native American heritage would amount to a speck on the little toe of her left foot--everything about her is leftist. A scientific test showed that her DNA is maybe no more than one one-thousandth Native American. But not to fear. It's still 100 percent true that she once identified herself as a racial minority in a law school directory.

It's also something close to 100 percent sure that she will run for president in 2020 on spooky issues in some ways reminding you of how she dealt with this question. For instance, she calls herself a capitalist--perhaps assuaging voters of that bent--even though her socialistic impulses are enough to make Karl Marx grin. For instance, she has a plan to put corporations making at least $1 billion a year nearly in the control of employees.

Her method is called the Accountable Capitalism Act. Under this bamboozlement the 50-plus percent of Americans who own stocks would have depleted rights. Employees would get to choose at least 40 percent of the boards of directors, who themselves would be governmentally informed to quit worrying so much about profits and passing so much money on to presumably greedy shareholders. She also wants to get taxes way up there for corporations although she would then have to make multiple excuses for the disappearance of jobs.

What she apparently has not noticed is that her hated corporations, besides helping to institute unheard-of wealth in America, have showered citizens with about every need imaginable, including supermarkets you can get into without standing in lines three blocks long, as in some socialist countries. Even our poor would seem rich in many other places, and corporations are investing and creating jobs like crazy.

Owing to Trumpian tax reductions and less fear of last-minute tax bombs falling on new plants and the like, corporations, along with bustling small businesses, are setting some of the lowest unemployment rates ever.

Federal revenues are booming and don't forget that, by allowing for efficiency and common sense, presidential deregulation is another cause of growth. Warren, on the other hand (her left one), was a proud founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that didn't have to answer to Congress, was packed with fellow progressives and gave consumers more to worry about, not less.

Our current president does have mighty faults, one of which is doing nothing about a debt that could suck the economy dry. Warren's plan is to make things worse by spending more on everything. Let's have Medicare for all. Let's extend Social Security. Let's institute free college. All of this and more would cost trillions of dollars we don't have and, soon enough, even a doubling of all taxes wouldn't take care of it. The borrowing would move us ever closer to disaster.

Given these worries, the question of Warren's Native American heritage may seem trivial, and in a sense it is, but you do wonder why she ever made her claims without a tad of research first. Is it because she simply believes what she wants to believe? Is it that sort of thinking that carries her beyond facts into ideological fiction. And was President Donald Trump making fun of Native Americans when he called her Pocahontas? On this last question, no--he was making fun of a white woman pretending to a status that would more closely associate her with a revered historical figure.

Trump did promise to give a charity $1 million if she ever came up with proof, and he should give at least one-thousandth of a million--$1,000--to the Cherokees objecting to Warren's presumptions.

------------v------------

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service.

Editorial on 10/22/2018

Upcoming Events