Foreign desk: Weak China = US Opportunity
“China’s weakening economy offers an opportunity to win meaningful changes in Beijing’s policies,” argues Thomas J. Duesterberg at The Wall Street Journal.
But “it will take a hard-line approach.”
Xi “desperately needs relief from Western sanctions, tariffs and investment restrictions to prop up China’s faltering economy.”
And “carrots have never worked with Beijing.
Fortunately, at least four sticks are available” to Washington: “sanctions on the banks laundering China’s illicit purchases of Iranian and Russian oil”; “a U.S. TikTok ban”; opposition to “any Treasury or Federal Reserve dollar relief to China if its faltering financial system suffers a shortage”; and the expansion of “investment restrictions more broadly to American portfolio investments in any Chinese firm subject to sanctions by the U.S. or its allies.”
Waste watch: Covid’s Leaky Bucket
“The economist Arthur Okun famously described a social welfare system as a ‘leaky bucket,’ ” where cash meant for the poor “would ‘leak out,’ or be lost to fraud, administrative costs, and the bad incentives from both taxes and welfare itself,” recalls City Journal’s Judge Glock.
Post-Covid era, “The leaky bucket now appears bottomless.” Of the nearly $5 trillion in Covid relief programs, “hundreds of billions of dollars of relief money vanished into the ether.”
Plus: “The GAO estimates that federal agencies made almost $250 billion in improper payments” in FY 2022. These days, “it’s likely costing $1 or more to get $1 to a person in need.”
Time for Congress to ask “how much of our welfare spending is getting to its intended beneficiaries.”
From the right: End Daily WH Press Briefings
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “isn’t very good at her job . . . so why do reporters keep attending her press briefings?” asks The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby.
“Even if Jean-Pierre were as poised, articulate, and nimble at fielding reporters’ questions as her predecessor, Jen Psaki,” the briefings “would still, with rare exceptions, be devoid of real news.”
They’re “staged for show, not for conveying important information” and so “don’t illuminate the truth,” but “obscure it.”
As “vehicles for propaganda and sloganeering,” the briefings belong “in a campaign headquarters, not the White House.”
Eye on ’24: Third Parties Could Swing Elex
“Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling higher than any independent or third-party candidate in a generation,” notes CNN’s Harry Enten, and: “He, along with other non-major-party candidates, has a real chance to affect the outcome of the 2024 election.”
The last three independents to poll above 20% all wound up with more than 5% of the final vote, and such candidates could easily upend the major-party winner of various swing states, so e.g. “a clear Trump polling lead became a jumbled mess with no clear favorite to win in the Electoral College thanks to Kennedy.”
With multiple independents on next November’s ballot, “they are far more likely than usual to take a large chunk of the vote from the major parties, which a lot of Americans feel disenchanted with. The ultimate winner could come in with well less than a majority.”
Conservative: Dems’ Secret to Winning
Following “another disappointing election night for Republicans, questions need to be asked about supposedly non-partisan” get-out-the-vote operations Democrats are using to “ensure their low-propensity voters — and only their low-propensity voters — get to the polls,” fumes Fox News’ Jason Chaffetz.
In 2021, President Biden ordered agencies to turn out voters, particularly blacks, Hispanics, government workers and others with “a long history of lopsided support for Democrats.”
Yet “federal employees are hired to administer federal programs, not to help the ruling party get out the vote to specific groups that tend to vote for the ruling party.”
Team Biden refuses to disclose what specifically it’s done here; if it’s “so good and important,” why be so “secretive”?
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board