See if you can figure out what these three news items have in common.
First, high-profile political efforts to defund and demoralize entire police forces are giving rise to an unlikely anarcho-capitalist trend. Police are retiring or leaving the profession in droves, and their former departments are failing to recruit new officers in many major cities, thanks in large part to the deep antipathy shown toward the police by elected officials. Meanwhile, wealthy people are increasingly hiring their own expensive private security to protect themselves, their possessions and their businesses. As a result, private security officers now outnumber the police by more than 50%.
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Second, new cars have become unaffordable for ordinary people, with the national average selling price reaching $48,000. Part of the problem has been a recent chip shortage that made cheaper vehicles less profitable to produce. But while this problem is going away, high prices are being maintained thanks to government policies. This includes federal corporate average fuel economy standards, a Cash for Clunkers program that destroyed 677,000 perfectly good cars, many of which would otherwise still be around today by driving down new car prices, and government regulations that require unnecessary and expensive features such as video displays. and security cameras.
The result? Cars have become supercomputers on wheels, and the cost of owning a new one has risen from less than 30% of real median household income in 1995 to 59% in 2023. Just wait until everyone is forced to , as California aspires to do, to buy even more expensive electric vehicles.
This policy-driven price increase is creating a widening gap between those who can afford new cars and those who can’t. The bottom quintile of workers, the Washington Post spent less on new cars in 2021 than in 11 years, while the top quintile spent more than at any time since the government began tracking the data in 1984.
Third, green energy policies are making the nation’s power grid less reliable, causing the wealthy to target backup energy sources. The News from New York coverage weakly links generator build-up to “extreme weather related to climate change.” But his own piece inevitably admitted that “blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels, an essential shift to limit climate change.” . In other words, the problem is climate change politicssuch as electric vehicle mandates and grid-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels.
Blackouts due to bad weather have always been common, but weather can’t explain why California, where the weather is almost always perfect, has more blackouts than any other state, head and shoulders above the rest. California, where severe storms are extremely rare, accounted for 24 percent of the nation’s blackouts in 2022 despite accounting for less than 12 percent of the nation’s population. Californians also pay 80 percent more than the national average for their unreliable electricity, according to a recent study from the University of California, Berkeley.
If you haven’t picked up on the common thread between these three stories, it’s that they all show how Democratic policies are making the American dream unattainable for ever-increasing numbers of people. Left-liberals are excluding large swathes of the population from basic comforts that people have long taken for granted: in these particular cases, personal safety, transportation, and access to reliable, cheap energy.
The result, ironically, is precisely the dystopia of inequality that Democrats suggest they care about. Thanks to their bad ideas, the rich buy new cars, stock up on generators, and pay small fortunes for private security, while ordinary people face more dangerous streets, desperately try to keep decades-old cars on the road, and it pays much higher. electricity bills for increasingly unreliable power.
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The same could be said of dozens of other policies, such as the Biden administration’s effort to ban 96 percent of commercially available stove models or its policy of punishing homebuyers who pay their bills on time and maintain good credit scores.
The Democrats’ policies are leading to a world sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots, in which middle-class families must pay double or triple the prices for amenities their parents could easily afford. Voters, pay attention before the Democrats turn your country into the next New York or California. Unlike today’s Californians and New Yorkers, you won’t have anywhere to move.
