On Saturday, Mr. King tweeted praise of Geert Wilders, the anti-immigration leader of the Dutch Party of Freedom, running for prime minister, saying on Twitter, “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
.. He said many people who come to the country illegally refuse to “assimilate into the American culture and civilization.”
.. Mr. King said his comments weren’t related to race, but to culture. “It’s the culture, not the blood. If you could go anywhere in the world and adopt these little babies and put them into households that were already assimilated into America, those babies will grow up as American as any other baby,” he told CNN.
.. In June 2014, he called former President Barack Obama “Kim Jong POTUS” for supporting canceling the patent for the Washington Redskins logo.
In July 2013, he criticized children brought to the country illegally by saying that “for everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
.. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office tied the comments to recent bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers and the Kansas shooting that targeted two Indian men and called for Speaker Paul Ryan to address the comments.
.. Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill said. “The GOP Leadership must stop accommodating this garbage, and condemn Congressman Steve King’s statements in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.”
AshLee Strong, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman, said: “The speaker clearly disagrees and believes America’s long history of inclusiveness is one of its great strengths.”
Things look bleak for liberals now. But they’ll beat Trump in the end.
He and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
But fears that Trump will set back the left’s agenda dangerously and irreparably are not well founded. Core advances can’t be undone. Although Trump could do some real temporary damage, he and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
.. Take the standard question about whether immigration levels should increase, decrease or stay the same. The 38 percent of people who say “decrease” is about as low as it ever has been since Gallup started tracking the question in the 1960s. The current number represents a massive drop, of about 30 points, since the early 1990s, when Pat Buchanan first raised his pitchfork high at the Republican National Convention. There has also been a considerable change in views about whether immigration is a good or bad thing for America — and it’s positive, not negative, change, even if one confines the data to white Americans. According to Gallup, the “good thing” response by whites was as low as 51 percent in the early 2000s but has been around 70 percent in the past two years...Nor has there been any kind of spike in negative racial attitudes in recent years — in fact, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey , such attitudes were far more prevalent in the early 1990s than they are today, including among white Democrats and Republicans. This is true even as perceptions of the quality of race relations have been dimming, thanks primarily to conflict around police shootings and to a tiny minority of genuine haters whose rhetoric and actions have been widely covered. But the underlying trend toward racial liberalism continues... And he can’t hold back the one true inevitability in demographic change: the replacement of older generations by newer ones... Another locus of disquiet, if not hysteria, on the left is the environment. But consider this: In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire; in 1979, when Obama was attending college in Los Angeles and remembers constant smog, there were 234 days when the city exceeded federal ozone standards. Our water and air are now orders of magnitude cleaner than they were back then... World investments in clean energy, chiefly wind and solar, have reached levels that are double those for fossil fuel. Renewables now provide half of all new electric capacity around the world. The cost of solar has fallen to 1/150th of its 1970s level, and the amount of installed solar capacity has increased a staggering 115,000 times... Capitalism is certainly capable of performing much better — but Trump is not the man to make that happen. All he’s going to succeed in doing is blowing up one of the main roadblocks to better economic performance: the conservative Republican anti-government, quasi-libertarian consensus around economic policy... The dominant ideology in the United States is one that combines “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to take more action in a wide variety of areas)... Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more.. With all due respect, Sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panel. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country if people can’t afford to get insurance.”.. There will probably be tax cuts for the rich and underfunding of important social programs. There will be more harassment of immigrants and no progress on comprehensive immigration reform. But its ability to remake America in the libertarian image (privatize Social Security! voucherize Medicare!) envisioned by Paul Ryan is distinctly limited
Buffett Assails Money-Manager Fees as Berkshire Reports Profit Rise
Billionaire also declares victory in his $1 million bet with another asset manager that low-cost index funds would out earn hedge funds over a decade
Warren Buffett intensified his attacks on Wall Street money managers Saturday, saying that investors wasted more than $100 billion over the last decade on expensive advice... “The bottom line,” Mr. Buffett wrote, is that “when trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients.”.. Book value, a measure of assets minus liabilities that is Mr. Buffett’s preferred yardstick for measuring net worth, rose 10.7% in 2016, compared with a 12% total return in the S&P 500, including dividends... Berkshire’s BNSF railroad subsidiary. Net earnings at Berkshire’s railroad fell 16% in 2016 due largely to a drop in coal demand... Ajit Jain, widely considered to be one of the leading candidates to take the Berkshire CEO job when Mr. Buffett is no longer on the scene.. Berkshire, he said, is still willing to buy back its shares if prices fall below 120% of book value... Mr. Buffett praised some companies, including Bank of America Corp., for buying back shares. “Some people have come close to calling [buybacks] un-American—characterizing them as corporate misdeeds that divert funds needed for productive endeavors,” Mr. Buffett said. “That simply isn’t the case.”.. Berkshire has warrants to buy 700 million shares of Bank of America at $7.14 apiece. The stock closed Friday at $24.23, so Mr. Buffett is looking at a paper gain of about $12 billion... He attributed America’s “miraculous” economic growth to “human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law.”.. He instead saved his sharpest comments for pricey money managers who pledge to beat the market, saying that in his lifetime he has identified “ten or so professionals” who can do so successfully... “If 1,000 managers make a market prediction at the beginning of a year, it’s very likely that the calls of at least one will be correct for nine consecutive years,” he wrote... In 2007 Mr. Buffett bet $1 million that his chosen index fund, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund Admiral Shares, would outperform hedge funds over the next decade... Mr. Buffett in his letter Saturday praised Vanguard founder Jack Bogle as a “hero.”.. “If a statue is ever erected to honor the person who has done the most for American investors, the handsdown choice should be Jack Bogle.”
The National Death Wish
A few weeks ago, Tom Cotton and David Perdue, Republican senators from Arkansas and Georgia, introduced an immigration bill that would cut the number of legal immigrants to this country each year in half, from about a million to about 500,000.
.. Cotton offered a rationale for his bill. “There’s no denying this generation-long surge in low-skilled immigration has hurt blue-collar wages,” he said. If we can reduce the number of low-skill immigrants coming into the country, that will reduce the pool of labor, put upward pressure on wages and bring more Americans back into the labor force.
.. Nationwide, there are now about 200,000 unfilled construction jobs, according to the National Association of Home Builders. If America were as simple as a lake, builders would just raise wages, incomes would rise and the problem would be over.
.. construction is highly cyclical. Hundreds of thousands of people lost construction jobs during the financial crisis and don’t want to come back. They want steadier work even at a lower salary.
.. In other words, the labor shortage hasn’t led to higher wages; it’s reduced and distorted the flow of the economic river. There’s less home buying, less furniture buying, less economic activity. People devote a larger share of their income to housing and less to everything else. When builders do have workers, they focus on high-end luxury homes, leaving affordable housing high and dry.
.. immigrants did not push down wages, but rather freed natives to do more pleasant work.
.. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why so many Republicans prefer a dying white America to a place like, say, Houston.
.. The large immigrant population has paradoxically given the city a very strong, very patriotic and cohesive culture, built around being welcoming to newcomers and embracing the future
.. Cotton and Perdue are the second coming of those static mind-set/slow-growth/zero-sum liberals one used to meet in the 1970s. They’ll dry up the river. I wish they had a little more faith in freedom, dynamism and human ingenuity.