Re - The final Trump-Biden debate

At the final debate last night Joe Biden was not a pale shadow of Brother Obama.

Perhaps, Brother Obama would have highlighted the current plight of Black communities where the agony of unemployment is on the rise and where poor living conditions have made African Americans disproportionately the most vulnerable victims of the deadly Coronavirus, also due to Trump’s late start in taking the invisible enemy seriously, a charge to which he continues to plead “Not Guilty”

Last night, Joe Biden did not disappoint, he did superbly. Of course, he could have hit harder, like Joe Louis and infinitely less politely, but Mister Biden is a gentleman, not a hooligan, a patriot, not a traitor, even if we have to be a little careful about using the word "patriot". As the Polar Prize Winner and Nobel Literature Laureate sang, quoting Samuel Johnson,

“They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king”

At least he did not sing,

Steal a lot and they make you a great president of the United States

 steal a little and like that little pirate you are requested to pay your taxes

 to Alexander the Great!

 I was thinking about that sort of thing when I read this juicy news item in a pre-Trump-Biden final debate article – Joe Biden Has Already Made His Closing Argument in The New Yorker:

“According to one count, the Chinese government has awarded forty-one trademarks to businesses associated with Ivanka Trump. A puppet of extremists? The feed-the-rich Trump-G.O.P. tax cut of 2017 was the most radically regressive piece of legislation that Congress has passed in many years.”

That’s a good illustration of the modern adage, those who live in a White House made of glass, shouldn’t throw stones at Hunter Biden. Indeed, the emperor has no clothes.

 There’s some speculation about to what extent the debate will influence those who have not already made up their minds and how it should affect the ups and downs in the opinion polls. It’s reported that 47 million Americans have already done their duty and voted early and we know for sure that it’s going to be either Joe Biden or Donald Trump’s last dance on the way to the White House. If only when the final results are announced it would turn out that it was a draw – the best diplomatic outcome of the election (at which point Trump would demand a recount in Florida where according to this morning’s Dagens Nyheter his support from young exile Cubans has doubled.

OK, every ignoramus knows that it’s not the number of votes cast for Lyin’ Hillary or Happy Joe Biden that counts, it’s the electoral college that has the last word…

More gossip and on the whole, as I have observed these past several months now, DN is not so very fond of Donald Trump and this morning’s paper features another malicious opinion piece with a headline telling us that at the final debate “Trump tried to act like a normal person - but failed”

The post-mortems on that debate will continue right up to the 3^rd of November, but in the next eleven days those post-mortems will be superseded by new scandals – I assume that Trump is desperate and probably has something/s up his sleeve; hopefully, in the coming days some accuser is not going to e.g. associate Joe Biden with any of the goings-on at Jeffrey Epstein’s island sex paradise…

I have just started my scavenging for news and views about last night’s debate. Over here in Stockholm, the sun goes down at 17.18 pm today and I still haven’t got to RealClearPolitics or Frontpage Magazine or Rolling Stone Politics yet but I have had a little taste of Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon on CNN (Clinton National Network) and as usual, unabashed they are salivating about any bad news and any fresh dirt they could spin and stick on the man they love to hate: Donald J. Trump

On my favourite (BBC World News – TV) there was some sound economic analysis by Thomas Hogan on what was said and left unsaid in that debate. I’ll transcribe what he said, shortly :

David Eades:  Interestingly, the economy per se wasn’t one of the topics laid out on this debate agenda but is still top of most voters minds even if tied into the covid pandemic. Did the debate tell us anything more about how the two candidates would steer Economic Policy? Well, joining me now is Thomas Hogan who is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. Thomas, thanks very much for joining us. Well, it did, didn't it would be the short answer.  Did we get some pretty clear policy differences on the economy?

 Thomas Hogan: Thanks. Good to see you. I don’t know. We did have a lot of discussion about the economy, but it was kind of randomly scattered throughout, we heard some comments about the stock market and a little about regulations and how they affect job growth, but we didn’t really discuss the economic plans of either candidate very much, so it’s hard to tell what information voters would have gathered from that.

David Eades: One of the issues that suddenly struck me was Joe Biden pushing for more than doubling the minimum wage and Donald Trump saying that if you’re going to deal with that at all, it shouldn’t be a federal issue, it should be one for each individual state to work out.

Thomas Hogan: Right, I think that’s true. I think that the size of an increase in the minimum wage will probably have some pretty serious effects on a lot of states and it would be very different across The United States. And so, you know, it’s hard to tell what a big blanket policy like that would have in different states. We’ve definitely seen some cases like when Puerto Rico was subject to a minimum wage that was applied to a lot of countries, they had a lot of low-skilled workers that became unemployed after that and so it had a much bigger effect in that one part of the country than it did in most other areas. And so, I think that’s a legitimate concern.

David Eades:  One of the other concerns Donald Trump was going to raise was basically levels of spending. He talked of a hundred trillion dollars as the cost for the Democrats meeting their environmental commitments. He talked about essentially socialising Healthcare and that it would all be funded by the government. These are huge sums. I’m not asking you to fact check, but do people buy into those sorts of figures, do you think?

Thomas: Hogan:  Yeah, you know, I think that the things that they mentioned in the debate aren’t always what people care about or remember, you know, most people aren’t watching this debate to find out the exact numbers for some certain policy, they are watching to sort of get a feel for the candidates and whether they, you know think that would be a good person as president. They learn a little bit from it. I mean we did hear some things about some specific numbers, but I think we basically know what policies of both of these candidates are going to be, we look at Joe Biden and we know he’s going to tax a lot more and he’s going to spend a lot more, you look at Trump and he’s going to spend more but he’s going to make taxes lower. So, we kind of know what they’re going to do already. I think even bigger than that is the fact that Joe Biden will probably be adding a lot of regulations to basically all sectors of the economy, whereas Trump says he wants to you know, potentially cut regulations to try to encourage businesses to hire new Imac desktops…

David Eades:  I think you hit that on the head. That that is why it’s such a polarized moment isn’t it, in the States?  Because you’re either thinking I’m going to lose my job or I’ve just lost my job, I need help, or you’re thinking how do I hold on to this, and the idea of more taxes, of more regulation, is the last thing I need.

Thomas Hogan:  It’s tough. And I think the context is important right now for us because you know the United States right now, we are just recovering from the worst ever economic downturn in US history, in Q2 we had a contraction of 31.4%  which was bigger than the Great Depression and yet we’ve largely bounced back from that, you know, and the unemployment rate in April was 14.7%  and already down to 7.9% in September. The long-term average is 6 %,  so we should be looking towards something like that by the end of the year, but the problem is a lot of states are still restricted from the lockdown policies from the coronavirus lockdowns.

Never a dull moment