The Six Phoniest Lines in Biden’s State of the Union
Plus, “disdain for the wealthy” as a variety of media bias; the declining dollar; a new “Day After” plan for Gaza
In some past years I’ve annotated the State of the Union address. This year to save time I’ve boiled it down to six highlights, or lowlights, from Biden’s speech.
1) The introduction:
In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. And he said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union”. Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.
President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.
Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.
And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.
Biden there not-so-subtly likens his political opponents to the World-War II-era Nazis and the Civil War-era Confederate slaveholder secessionists, and likens himself to FDR and Lincoln.
It’s arrogant of Biden to put himself in FDR and Lincoln’s league. And, by trying to define between 40 percent and half the country as Nazis and Confederates, enemies of freedom and democracy, it’s not conciliatory, but divisive.
2) The accusation:
Now — now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, “Do whatever the hell you want.”
AUDIENCE: Booo —
THE PRESIDENT: That’s a quote.
A former president actually said that — bowing down to a Russian leader.
It’s not accurate that Trump told Putin that. Trump was recounting that he said that to NATO allies in urging them to spend more on defense. It is best understood as a negotiating tactic to urge Europe to shoulder its share of NATO costs, not as an invitation for Russian tanks to roll through Eastern Europe.
The full quote, as the Associated Press has it, makes that pretty clear: ““You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted saying. “‘No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”
3) Big-bashing:
With a law that I proposed and signed — and not one of your Republican buddies work- — voted for it — we finally beat Big Pharma. .. We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion — (applause) — because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices to Big Pharma.
…I also want to end tax breaks for Big Pharma, Big Oil, private jets, massive executive pay when it was only supposed to be a million bal- — a million dollars that could be deducted.
If “Big Pharma”—Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna—hadn’t rapidly come up with and distributed the Covid-19 vaccines, the economic recovery that America has enjoyed under Biden would look a lot less rosy. Instead of offering gratitude for saving lives, Biden treats these companies as political punching bags. The Republicans are also into Big-bashing (see “Backlash Against Big Is Smallminded”) but that doesn’t make it reasonable or productive. That’s not to say the drug companies are perfect or that the government couldn’t do a better job of negotiating prices or making sure that Americans aren’t overpaying relative to the rest of the world. But with Robert Kennedy Jr. running as a longtime vaccine skeptic and with Trump, too, bashing Big Pharma, this was an opportunity for Biden to stand up in a principled way for American innovation. Instead, he piled on with populist demagoguery.
4) Billionaire-bashing:
I proposed a minimum tax for billionaires of 25 percent — just 25 percent. You know what that would raise? That would raise $500 billion over the next 10 years. (Applause.)
And imagine what that could do for America. Imagine a future with affordable childcare, millions of families can get what they need to go to work to help grow the economy.
That proposed tax would apply to unrealized capital gains, which would be questionable both practically and constitutionally. And for Biden to portray himself as a champion of freedom and democracy while proposing huge, confiscatory tax increases to be imposed on a tiny unpopular and unconsenting minority is disingenuous.
5) The 400,000 divide:
nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in federal taxes — (applause) — nobody — not one penny. And they haven’t yet.
It’s not accurate that “they haven’t yet,” as he already raised corporate tax rates, and anyone who owns a share of stock—including lots of people earning less than $400,000 a year—were the ones who paid. Biden’s additional corporate tax increases would also be paid by shareholders regardless of their personal annual income. This may be too sophisticated for some people to understand; they might think the corporation, not the shareholder, pays the tax. But it’s one of the things I learned in Economics 10 from Martin Feldstein, the incidence of the corporate tax is on the shareholder. There’s some more recent analysis that suggests some of the burden is also on labor, that is, workers at the tax-paying corporation. Plenty of them also make less than $400,00 a year.
6) The Israel section:
Israel also has a fundamental responsibility, though, to protect innocent civilians in Gaza. (Applause.)
This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed —
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Says who?
THE PRESIDENT: — most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents — women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned.
Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine.
It’s heartbreaking. …
To the leadership of Israel, I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.
How does Biden know how many of the Palestinians killed were or were not Hamas or how “innocent” they were? Israelis coming back from Gaza report that nearly every building has an arms stash or a tunnel shaft entrance. Some of the women and even, sadly, children are enlisted by Hamas, who themselves don’t really buy in to the Western conception of distinguishing between “civilians” and fighters. Some of the casualties in Gaza, especially early on, were the result of misfires of Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets aimed at Israel. To say that humanitarian assistance to Gaza “cannot be a secondary consideration” is to suggest that Israel should prioritize it over, or alongside, its military goals of destroying Hamas and winning the return of the hostages. No other army in wartime would do that, especially knowing that Hamas is stealing the humanitarian aid for its own use and that the UN agency ostensibly distributing the aid is full of perpetrators of the October 7 attack.
Someone suggested that instead of SOTU the speech should have been called TIUTB for Throw Israel Under the Bus. It matters more what Biden does than what he says, but this whole section sounded more like a misguided pander to those few thousand Arab-American voters in Michigan than any sort of genuinely reasoned message to Israel or its people.
I could go on—there were plenty of other phony lines—but what’s there is bad enough. Lincoln, he isn’t.
Bias against the wealthy: The 77-page demand letter from lawyer Elizabeth Locke of Clare Locke LLP to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on behalf of Neri Oxman is fascinating on a lot of levels. For one thing, Clare Locke was hired by Harvard to threaten the New York Post over the Claudine Gay plagiarism story, so it’s kind of funny to see the same firm now representing the wife of Bill Ackman, the Harvard graduate who was a prominent public critic of Gay. (The Harvard-Ackman-Gay story has lots of arcane twists and turns. If you haven’t been following closely, that’s fine—there’s a bigger point here, which I am about to get to.)
The demand letter claims that “Business Insider’s Coverage Of Dr. Oxman Was Driven By Biased, Anti-Zionist, And Purportedly Antisemitic Employees Seeking To Retaliate Against Ackman For His Criticism Of Former Harvard President Gay.” From the letter: “In June 2023, Long also made a post on X criticizing ‘billionaire Henry Kravis’ for ‘throwing a party for multimillionaire Henry Kissinger.’ Kravis is, and Kissinger was, Jewish. This post also exposes another one of Long’s biases—her disdain for the wealthy—that motivated her to attack Ackman and Dr. Oxman.”
This concept of “disdain for the wealthy” as a “bias” isn’t talked about much, but it’s a powerful factor in a lot of media, politics, and academia. It’s refreshing and welcome to see it explicitly named and called out as that. No matter the eventual resolution of the Oxman-Axel Springer fight, the battle against that bias is a cultural, educational, and moral fight that will take a long time and a thoughtful effort to win. It’s often, as is the case here, but certainly not always, intertwined with the fights against antisemitism and for Israel (See: The War Against the Jews Is a War Against Capitalism).
Declining dollar: I’ve been writing since back in March 19, 2023 that inflation is over (“Inflation is over”) but the combination of Bitcoin at $67,000 and gold at nearly $2,200 is a cautionary sign. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Benn Steil, who is smart, has a chart showing “rising inflation expectations,” from Apollo’s Torsten Slok, who is predicting the Fed will not cut rates this year. It’s not clear where that rising inflation expectation data comes from; the latest data from the Fed shows that inflation expectations are leveling off.
The gold rally is a mystery, a Bloomberg article declares: “the scale and speed of the recent ascent has caught many seasoned market observers off-guard, with no clear catalyst for the rally beyond long-standing pillars of support.” Bitcoin’s rise frequently gets attributed to regulatory approval and growth of new exchange-traded funds.
Yet perhaps the Bitcoin and gold rises are related; they are both alternatives to the dollar, suggesting that at least some investors have less than full confidence in the idea that the dollar will be a good store of value, that is, that it won’t be eroded by inflation. I still think inflation is trending down and the Fed will start cutting in May or June, but if I’m wrong, and the dollar’s value erodes more quickly either before or after the rate cut, the people betting now on gold and Bitcoin will look pretty smart in retrospect.
Media accountability: Holocaust ‘Shutting Down Debate’ About Treatment of Palestinians, New York Times Frets is the headline of my latest article over at the Algemeiner, criticizing a book review by Jennifer Szalai. “If the Holocaust indeed has had the effect of ‘shutting down debate about Israeli treatment of Palestinians,’ you sure wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times, where such criticism, even if not justified, is nonetheless pervasive.”
Day after: The Gaza Futures Task Force—a joint project of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America and the Vandenberg Coalition—is out with a plan for Gaza. The group—John Hannah, Elliott Abrams, Rob Danin, Eric Edelman, Gary Ginsberg, Emily Harding, Lewis Libby, and Steve Price—concludes that “Merely falling back on deeply-ingrained paradigms of the past two decades, such as moving expeditiously to a two-state solution, is likely to backfire and push prospects for peace even further away.” It also envisions combat stretching through the U.S. election: “Defeating Hamas will likely require Israel to maintain intrusive operations in Gaza at varying levels of intensity through at least the remainder of 2024, if not longer.”
They recommend creating an “International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction” that can restore basic services and rebuild civil society. It says the trust should be “governed by an International Board of 3-7 representatives from among states founding or supporting the effort. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are logical candidates for this Board, as would be the United States and Egypt, in roles to be negotiated among them.”
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