Tag: Rasmussen

TBT: Global Poverty in Decline

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Yesterday I wrote about homelessness, particularly the sense that many “homeless” panhandlers are simply shakedown artists well-versed in emotional manipulation, guilt-trips, and implied violence or mental instability.

The United States enjoys incredible prosperity, unprecedented in history.  That prosperity doesn’t necessarily give our lives meaning—a key critique of traditionalists like my intellectual hero, Richard Weaver—but it’s probably a moral good to not have to worry about your ability to feed and shelter yourself.

But the United States is not the only beneficiary of wealth and abundance.  The rest of the world has enjoyed huge increases in quality of life since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the end of the Cold War.

So, contrary to Leftist myth-making, the United States has not kept the rest of the world down (and, by implication, is therefore morally responsible for taking in its impoverished, unassimilable hordes).  Instead, capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty.

That is the subject of this TBT feature, August 2018’s “Global Poverty in Decline“:

Regular readers know that I frequently cite pollster Scott Rasmussen’s #Number of the Day series from Ballotpedia.  I do so because a.) his numbers often reveal some interesting truths about our world and b.) blogging is, at bottom, the art of making secondary or tertiary commentary on what other, smarter, harder-working people have thought, written, and done.

Yesterday’s #Number of the Day dealt with global poverty; specifically, Americans’ ignorance to the fact that global poverty has declined substantially over the last twenty years.  Indeed, global poverty has been reduced by half in that time.

I’ll confess I was ignorant of the extent of this decline, too, although it makes sense that poverty has decreased, especially when you consider the rise of post-Soviet market economies in Eastern Europe and China’s meteoric rise since the 1980s.

I suspect that the perennial culprit of the Mainstream Media is to blame, in part, for this ignorance, coupled as it is with progressive politicians.  The rise of “democratic socialist” candidates—as well as the lingering effects of the Great Recession—would have Americans believe that the global economy is in terrible shape, and that “underprivileged” parts of the world labor in ever-worsening poverty (so, let’s just move them all here—that’ll solve poverty!).

It’s refreshing to see that capitalism is working its economic magic, and people all over the globe are lifting themselves out of poverty.  If representative republicanism and strong civil societies can take root and flourish in more places, the ingredients will be in place for continued economic and cultural growth.

Immigration by the Numbers

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Yesterday I wrote about the dangers of inviting in large numbers of immigrants from a fundamentally alien culture into Western societies.  The Somali population of Minneapolis has created a veritable “Little Mogadishu” (consider paying homage to such a blighted place) in the heart of the Twin Cities, a neighborhood riddled with crime and terrorist recruitment.

Most immigration to the United States is not nearly so pernicious—unlike Europeans, Americans generally don’t have to worry about waves of unassimilable Muslims conquering entire swaths of our major cities—but while our immigrants are more assimilable than Europe’s, the sheer number of immigrants makes that assimilation more difficult.

As I wrote yesterday, the old friction of immigration is no longer there.  Families can instantly contact one another across oceans and time zones, and travel back home—or, more likely, travel to the new home in the West—is more affordable than ever.

Couple that ease of travel with our ludicrous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which allows foreign nationals to spit out “American” citizens if they can just cross the border when the contractions begin, and you have a recipe for invasion.

The family situation goes beyond the “anchor babies” phenomenon and the child migrant crisis.  Our immigration system prioritizes family members over skilled, English-speaking immigrants.  As Scott Rasmussen notes, nearly 750,000 immigrants annually enter the United States legally simply because they’re related to someone already here.  Immigrants can send for their spouses, children, and parents under this system—who then can bring over their spouses, children, and parents, creating the “chain migration” President Trump has decried.

The president is not alone.  According to Rasmussen, 75% of voters believe our immigration system should prioritize skilled immigrants, not family members.  That cuts across partisan lines (suggesting that immigration reform is a winning issue for electoral candidates).  And that 750,000 number reflects 66% of legal permanent residents admitted to the United States.

Remember, another key source of friction in immigration is that, in the old days, it could be years before an immigrant could bring his family over.  Indeed, some immigrants might never see them again.  It’s probably humane to allow Pedro to bring his wife and eighteen kids.  But his doddering parents?  His alcoholic uncle?  His son’s wife and kids? Where do we draw the line?

A further issue is that, with the ease of wire transfers, more and more wealth produced in the United States is sent back home.  Rasmussen reports that immigrants send a whopping $148 billion home.  That’s wealth produced working in the United States.

$30.02 billion of that $148 billion goes to Mexico.  When President Trump campaigned on Mexico paying for the wall, he didn’t mean the Mexican government would cut us a check.  Instead, he argued that the United States could tax these remittance payments to fund the border wall.

It’s an idea brilliant in its simplicity, and it shifts the costs of illegal immigration to the immigrants.  Want to pick our tomatoes at slave labor wages and send the money back home?  Fine, but you’re going to pay for the means by which we’ll prevent your mountain village from crossing over, too.

Immigration policy should benefit America and its citizens first.  I often hear the specious argument that “Americans won’t do certain jobs.”  Hogwash.  Big corporate farmers and Silicon Valley billionaires just want cheap fruit-pickers, coders, and nannies.  There are millions of working poor Americans who, for a living wage, could fill those jobs.  Alternatively, mechanization and automation could complete many of those roles.

The South went through the same issue with slavery:  wealthy Southern planters wanted cheap labor to grow cotton, and Northern textile mills were happy to pay a reduced rate for slave-produced cotton.  The losers were poor working folks and farmers.

Similarly, elites profit financially (and socially—they get to feel virtuous for employing Consuela to raise their kids) while wages for working men stagnate.

President Trump and Republicans in Congress should push again for the taxing of remittances, and a major push should begin to rid ourselves of “birthright citizenship,” a ludicrous misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment (which was intended to naturalize the former slaves and their progeny, not the children of foreign visitors who happened to give birth on American soil).

More importantly and immediately, we need to build the wall and deport any and all illegal immigrants.

To the Moon!, Part II: Back to the Moon

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I’ve long been an advocate for space exploration.  I don’t possess any deep technical knowledge of aviation or aeronautics; I just think the idea of colonizing the moon is cool, and that space holds forth endless opportunities.

In the context of our own nation’s history, space exploration and colonization take on an additional significance:  space is a new frontier for liberty.  People cross the Atlantic to settle the New World, in part because of the promise of being left alone to pursue their own destinies.  What is space but a boundless, inky ocean to be crossed?  What are new worlds but potential bastions of hardscrabble liberty?

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about space exploration or lunar colonization, but today’s Scott Rasmussen Number of the Day brought the topic back to my attention.  The occasion is NASA’s announcement that it plans to put humans back on the moon by 2024—four years earlier than previously scheduled.

The rationale behind the accelerated schedule is political:  NASA officials wager that they have a better chance of accomplishing the mission prior to a change in executive administrations.  The Trump Administration has vocally supported revitalizing NASA’s role in space exploration, and Space Policy Directive 1 ordered the return by 2028 following an executive order.

A manned mission to the moon would be the first one since Apollo 17 in 1972.  If NASA succeeds in its mission, the proposed 2024 landing would be the first time a human has set foot on the lunar surface in fifty-two years—a short lifetime.

Rasmussen’s poll found that 37% of voters believe NASA will get humans back to the moon before private companies.  36% believe it will be the other way around.  59% of Americans think both NASA and private companies should be tackling space exploration—a rather prudent opinion, I would argue, though I’d like to see the private sector continue to expand in this area.

Another interesting number from the polling:  60% of men are okay with the additional $1.6 billion in funding this year that would get the project moving, while only 41% of women approve.  That’s an interesting gender gap, but not a surprising one:  women are far more likely to prefer that cash be allocated to more terrestrial matters, like bolstering social programs.  I also suspect there’s something of the boyish wonder at play here, as men are more likely to relish adventure and risk-taking.

Regardless, the prospect of returning to the moon inside of five years is exciting.  Even with pressing concerns here on Earth, we should continue to look outward to our Solar System.  What opportunities might it contain?  Like funding the border wall, $1.6 billion is a drop in the bucket of our federal budget.

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Distrust in National Media

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Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day feature on Ballotpedia.  These pithy daily posts give a snapshot of the nation’s mood, occasionally with some historical content or relevant tidbits tossed in for good measure.

This week, Rasmussen highlighted two poll figures regarding Americans’ distrust of national news media.  On May 1, Rasmussen reported that only 38% of Americans consider national political news accurate and reliable.  On May 2, he reported that 66% of voters believe national political reporters often get the story wrong.

These figures will come as no surprise to conservatives, who have long distrusted the mainstream media, or “MSM” (Rush Limbaugh calls them the “drive-bys,” for their tendency to spew disinformation before fleeing the scene, then burying corrections or mea culpas on the back pages or in thirty-second sound bites).  The “Great One,” Mark Levin, ran through just a handful of the most recent media hoaxes on his radio program one night this week, and it’s astonishing how frequently the media is either wrong (as in the “hands up, don’t shoot” Michael Brown myth) or outright mendacious.

Indeed, CNN essentially traded its reputation as the “centrist” news network to indulge in anti-Trump hysteria, trumpeting every crumb of the Mueller investigation as manna from impeachment heaven.  The results speak for themselves:  its credibility is utterly in tatters.

The very same media decries President Trump’s attacks on “fake news”—itself a clever appropriation of a slur the MSM attempted to apply to Trump—as an assault on the First Amendment.  Such concerns are hysterically overwrought.  President Trump has done nothing to curtail press freedom; he’s merely had the temerity to call out bad reporting.  The First Amendment is not a magical talisman that protects media outlets from criticism, even from elected officials.

Indeed, that same amendment protects the president’s right to denounce media outlets.  Unless and until he uses the power of the government to silence the media—and he won’t—President Trump is entirely justified in labeling bad, inaccurate, or outright false reporting as “fake news.”

The real danger is that ostensibly objective journalism is anything but.  If anything, opinion programming on the major television and cable news networks is more authentic and reliable, as it doesn’t seek to hide the hosts’ views behind a smokescreen of presumed neutrality.  When biases are stated outright and upfront, it allows viewers to assess a host’s claims in that light.

Of course, increasingly we can’t even agree on the facts, or we’re not allowed to express certain facts aloud.  That’s the real threat to free speech, not President Trump blasting CNN for negative coverage.

Lincoln’s Favorability

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One of Scott Rasmussen’s recent Number of the Day entries for Ballotpedia deals with the Abraham Lincoln’s current high favorability ratings:  90% of Americans have a favorable view of the Great Emancipator.  88% have a favorable view of our first president, George Washington.

That was certainly not the case when Lincoln was president.  He was an unlikely figure when he first took office, and many in his own party—the young Republican Party—doubted his ability to see the United States through the American Civil War.

It’s easy to forget—or even to imagine—that Lincoln believed he would not win re-election in 1864.  Thus, he picked Andrew Johnson, a pro-Union, pro-slavery Democrat from Tennessee, as his running mate.  (Of course, Lincoln never dreamed his symbolic gesture of political goodwill and unity would lead to an unqualified boor becoming president.)  Regardless, the fall of Atlanta and subsequent Union victories boosted Lincoln at the polls, securing his reelection (he was touched to find that soldiers overwhelming supported their Commander-in-Chief).

Blogger SheafferHistorianAZ at Practically Historical posted a piece recently entitled, “Finest Two Minutes,” about Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address.  That speech is, indeed, one of the most moving and powerful political speeches in the English language, and it’s less than 300 words.

What caught my eye was this quotation:

The Chicago Times recorded, “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”

It’s instructive to remember that, while history views Lincoln fondly (SheafferHistorianAZ rates him as a “Great”-level president), he was not universally beloved at his time, and only won in 1860 because the race was split four ways:  there were two Democratic candidates (Northern and Southern), the Republican (Lincoln), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party.  Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in many Southern States.  Lincoln had to earn his greatness, and much of it came with posterity.

Similarly, President Reagan was not universally beloved in his own party when he was elected in 1980.  The parallels to our current president, Donald Trump, and his own struggles with his adopted party are striking.

The lesson seems to be to aim for greatness, regardless of contemporary naysayers.  Few Americans remember George McClellan, but everyone remembers the Great Emancipator.

Happy Monday: President Trump’s Approval Rating at 52%

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It’s a damp, dreary Monday morning here in South Carolina, but we’re all smiles here at The Portly Politico:  Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll has President Trump at 52%, Trump’s highest approval ratings since shortly after his Inauguration.  That puts President Trump two points above President Barack Obama’s approval ratings for the same point in his presidency.

39% “Strongly Approve” and “Strongly Disapprove” of President Trump’s performance, giving him a “Presidential Approval Index rating of 0,” according to Rasmussen’s poll.

I’ve followed the Rasmussen daily tracking poll intermittently since President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, and it’s heartening to see the Presidential Approval Index rating at 0 (it’s been negative most of Trump’s presidency).

The president’s tour de force State of the Union performance surely has helped his numbers.  It seems, too, that ending the government shutdown has improved his approval ratings, and the promise of a deal to prevent another one this Friday probably helps.  If the $5.7 billion the president requested for border barriers at key points on the US-Mexican border is part of the deal, Trump will be sitting pretty with his base and independents (that said, I rather relish another extended shutdown, just to slow the Deep State down a bit).

Public opinion polls are fickle, especially daily ones, but if Trump can keep this momentum going, he’ll have no problem winning reelection in 2020.  November 2020 is still a lifetime away, and I have concerns about some of the declared Democratic hopefuls, but you can’t argue with a robust economy, a strong national defense, and greater border security.