The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts
For the Record
“So the Biden administration tracked the Chinese spy balloon all the way from China, allowed it to traverse the entire continental US without shooting it down, and is now shooting down random objects we can’t identify…and these are the adults in the room?” —Ben Shapiro
“Kamala Harris said the spy balloon won’t negatively impact diplomatic relations with China. This administration has no desire or strategy to deal with China. It’s appalling.” —Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)
Re: The Left
“Children do not lie at the top of our civilizational hierarchy: the interests of adults do. Increasingly, adults in the West see children as either a burden and thus avoid having them, or as validators of their own sense of subjective self-identity, requiring indoctrination into more liberal forms of social organization. And now children are paying the price. The social Left has been in control of virtually all levers of culture and policy for decades. Now they demand more control in order to alleviate the consequences of the chaos they have created.” —Ben Shapiro
“The new ideology might start in only a small number of classrooms, or magazines, or bureaucracies, but these little fringe ideas … can slowly but surely become the entire society’s dominant culture. Especially if the new ideology works to the advantage of political, financial, and cultural elites, they will be happy to adopt it as dogma in all the country’s institutions of power.” —North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park on the threat American leftists pose to Liberty
Re: Social Security
“The bipartisan commitment to not touch Social Security … is really a commitment to slash benefits by 23 percent in just over a decade. Under existing rules, the only way to ward off those cuts will be to sharply increase payroll taxes, which already consume 15.3 percent of every worker’s pay. As with all pyramid scams, the momentum of paying benefits to earlier investors can be sustained only by taking in more and more money from those who come afterward. But since the availability of new investors is never infinite, that momentum can’t be maintained.” —Jeff Jacoby
“Transfer payments now tally up to about $4 trillion annually, almost two-thirds of the federal budget. They now constitute over 20% of Americans’ disposable income, compared to 5% in the 1950s. In case some still think Social Security is an investment retirement program, please think again. It is a welfare state transfer program, in which taxes those working now pay are used to make payments to those currently retired.” —Star Parker
The BIG Lies
“Gas prices are down $1.60 a gallon, and they’re going to come down further from their peak. And inflation is coming down. Take-home pay for workers has gone up over the past several months. We got more to do, but, I’m telling you, the Biden economic plan is working.” —Joe Biden
“Inflation in America is continuing to come down. … Food prices at the grocery store are coming down.” —Joe Biden
Dumb & Dumber
“If you look at the last two years, this is a president that deserves a lot of credit. We’ve gotten a lot of things done.” —White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
“To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast.” —The Wall Street Journal
And Last…
“The problem we have … is that we are ruled by unserious people who are worried about fake problems instead of the real fact that our country is falling apart in some of the most important ways.” —Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH)