'Hell freezing over': Liberals shocked to agree with Jeanine Pirro on dead dog take Raw Story
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'Hell freezing over': Liberals shocked to agree with Jeanine Pirro on dead dog take - Raw Story
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After a decade of failed policies and inaction to address housing affordability, the Liberals have reaffirmed their commitment to forcing workers to raid their superannuation to access housing and have now indicated that they will make every cent of workers retirement savings available at auction which will further inflate house prices.
This is an act of compounding bastardry.
The Liberals would once again as they have with other universal entitlements when they have had the determination to do so pull the generational ladder out from under young Australians.
Peter Duttons plan for the housing market is to make this generation of first-home aspirants choose between a dignified retirement and a house, a choice he did not have to make himself.
This will supercharge house price growth. Every first-home buyer would be forced to raid their super just to remain competitive if all of their competitors are tapping their super balances too. This policy is absolutely salivating to property developers, boomer property investors, and the banks who will get to write ever-increasing mortgages with this generation.
In an auction where everyone is bidding with their super, the only winner is the seller.
The Liberals policy robs workers of the magic of compound interest to enjoy in retirement. Workers, with their unions, fought for universal superannuation alongside an adequate age pension to ensure every worker not just the wealthy and management had a pool of retirement savings that maintained their income and standard of living into retirement.
A report by the Super Members Council this year found that forcing first-home buyers to raid their super savings could force median prices in the five biggest Australian cities to increase by $75,000. If a couple of 30-year-olds withdrew $35,000 in super for a house today, they can expect to retire with $195,000 less in todays dollars.
If the Liberals have their way, their policy would also widen the gender gap in retirement savings and disproportionately harm working women, who already retire with $136,000 less in superannuation over their working lives, according to a 2023 report by The Australia Institutes Centre for Future Work.
This thoroughly bad policy wouldnt just rob the workers who are forced to drain their super for a deposit, it would cripple the retirement returns of every worker in Australia. The preservation of superannuation for retirement is a core reason why superannuation funds have been able to get phenomenal returns for everyone and why super funds generate better rates of return than banks.
The fact that superannuation funds do not have to have cash on hand for them to use at any moment means they can invest for the long term. This means that rather than investing in something for a short-run return, they can build and generate returns from nation-building infrastructure like roads, property and airports. If superannuation funds are required to have the cash on hand to pay out their members for a house deposit, the capacity for workers to benefit from compound interest is completely diluted.
Every aspect of this generates harm and perpetuates the problems it purports to solve.
It doesnt make houses more affordable it makes them more expensive.
It doesnt help first-home buyers get a house it just makes them drain their super for houses that might have otherwise been cheaper.
It makes those who drained their super poorer in retirement by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It makes every worker in Australia poorer by smashing the ability of super funds to invest.
It is clear that this policy, promulgated by one-note anti-super ideologue Andrew Bragg, is designed to undermine the super system.
Setting the housing market on fire will do nothing to help people buy a house. It is clear we need additional supply of housing to make houses and rents more affordable. Building more housing, including social, affordable, and public housing, will make housing more affordable. This can also be facilitated by taking the handbrakes off supply, which is a meaningful step forward.
We need better rights for renters, so they arent subject to excessive rent increases and have more secure housing. And we need to ensure theres a fair level of Rent Assistance for retirees and those out of work to alleviate rental stress.
Combined with more secure jobs and higher wages, an evidence-based housing policy will mean more workers will get access to permanent housing and affordable rents.
A policy distractions like the one Dutton is tying himself to is yet another example of a policy that doesnt work for working people, but does work for landlords, property investors and the big banks.
Joseph Mitchell is assistant secretary of the ACTU, and a former organisation political director and policy officer, as well as working with the Innovation and Growth Taskforces
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Liberals' plan to destroy super will drive up house prices - The New Daily
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Drea de Matteo, an actress of The Sopranos fame, says people in Hollywood are too petrified to disagree with liberals on social issues because of the current political climate with President Joe Biden in office.
As part of a discussion with Donald Trump Jr. on his Triggered podcast, the Emmy winner quipped about how she is so liberal that she is conservative in todays politics and there are so many in the industry who share her views.
The Biden administration has tried to perpetuate a bulls*** message of unity and has used social issues as pawns to further their administration, which Matteo said did nothing but divide people.
This administration has just been hammering all of these things and people in Hollywood are petrified, she continued. What, are you going to speak out against race, and sex, and all of that stuff?
Matteo added, People are afraid to have those conversations, because first of all, you never win with a liberal. Youre just never gonna win.
By contrast, Matteo suggested to Trump Jr. that his father, former President Donald Trump, shares her apathy for the very social issues being used to stoke disharmony across the United States.
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I think he cares about whats really going on, which is behind the scenes, and those are the things that need to be addressed before anybody is going to have freedom with any social issues, she said.
The actress indicated that she would not be as outspoken if her personal experience had been different.
I really did want to fight, but I didnt think I had, A, the voice, B, the balls, Matteo said, adding how she kind of got thrown to the wolves, I felt like, and once I was out there, I was like Im out here, what am I going to do? Im out of my cage.
Matteo also talked about her support network.
I do feel like Im supported, you know, by my boyfriend I know this sounds crazy, but, by God, my children. My children they believe in what we believe in, which is freedom and unity the right way.
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'Sopranos' Actress Says People In Hollywood Are Too 'Petrified' To Cross Liberals On Social Issues - The Daily Wire
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears as a witness at the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions in Ottawa, on April 3.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
We are partway through the mandate of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, a.k.a. the Foreign Interference Commission, which is to say we are all the way through the only part that matters.
The commission is supposed to report by May 3 two weeks from now on the first part of its mandate: to examine and assess interference by China, Russia and other foreign states in the 2019 and 2021 elections, and the flow of information to senior decision-makers, including elected officials and actions taken in response. In other words: what went wrong, who knew and what did they do about it?
The commissions final report, due by the end of the year, is supposed to assess more systemic issues surrounding how government agencies should best detect, deter and counter foreign interference. But these are not questions for which a public inquiry is the necessary, or even appropriate forum. They are the sorts of broad policy questions we elect governments, with the support of the civil service, to tackle.
The point of a public inquiry, and the formidable powers of investigation that go with it, is to delve into the sorts of things that governments would rather were not delved into: the critical failures, mistakes and omissions, including by current elected officials, that might have given rise to the situation being investigated.
That was never likely under the pseudo-inquiry conducted by special rapporteur and Trudeau family friend David Johnston, which was why it was established and why it failed. It remains to be seen how much further the current inquiry gets, given the limits placed on even its access to sensitive documents.
What can be said, however, after three weeks of hearings, is how much it has succeeded in establishing already. Recall the state of play before the inquiry.
In spite of a series of reports in The Globe and Mail and other media, drawing on scores of leaked intelligence documents and interviews with confidential intelligence sources, detailing how China, in particular, had attempted to interfere in the past two elections how it had run misinformation campaigns against certain candidates, particularly Conservatives, it considered unfriendly; how it had channelled funding to others, mostly Liberals, it considered friendly; how it had conspired to secure a nomination for at least one candidate in a safe Liberal riding, Han Dong, who went on to be elected; how it had attempted to intimidate a senior Conservative MP, Michael Chong; and how, despite the Canadian Security Intelligence Services repeated attempts to raise the alarm with senior government officials, up to and including the Prime Minister, nothing had been done about it, not even so much as informing the purported victims of the interference campaign it was still possible to pretend, if you tried very hard, that this was all a lot of fuss over nothing.
Who were these confidential sources, anyway? Were those documents accurately quoted, and in context? Besides, intelligence is not evidence: the documents could have been based, all of them, on hearsay and rumour. Maybe the leakers had political motives. Maybe there was other intelligence, not yet disclosed, that was exculpatory.
It is rather more difficult to play this sort of game now. We shall have to see, of course, what the commissioner, Justice Marie-Jose Hogue, says in her report. But nothing that has come out of the inquiry to date has materially challenged any of what was contained in the CSIS documents, or how it was reported.
Mr. Dongs appearance, in particular, did nothing to advance his case that he was an innocent victim of circumstance. There was his surprising admission, in testimony before the inquiry, that he had met with and solicited the votes of a group of Chinese foreign students who were later bused into the nomination meeting, a fact he had neglected to mention until then. He said a conversation with his wife had jogged his memory.
There was, too, his response to evidence that he had advised Chinese officials, in a conversation taped by CSIS, that an immediate release of the two Michaels would be seen as an affirmation of the effectiveness of a hardline Canadian approach as advocated by the Conservative opposition. It was not, as you might expect, I never said that, but I dont remember saying that.
Mr. Dongs memory failings perhaps explain why he has yet to be admitted back into the Liberal caucus, from which he exiled himself last year while he pursued his efforts to clear his name. But as efforts in self-incrimination they pale in comparison with the testimony of a parade of Liberal officials and cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister.
It has always been a mystery how, in the face of this hail of memos from intelligence officials, some at the very highest levels, warning of Chinas attempts to interfere, senior Liberals, inside government and out, could have remained so oblivious or having been alerted, could have failed to act.
Their testimony before the inquiry only accentuates the implausibility of the story. At every turn, Liberal officials responses were either we didnt see the memo, or it was not reflected in oral briefings, or in the face of evidence they received both, well, what does CSIS know anyway?
The Prime Ministers chief of staff, Katie Telford, testified that on a previous occasion she had ordered that a particularly incriminating CSIS memo be rewritten, based on her own intuition that it must be mistaken. Much to her delight, the agency obliged the very next day.
Intelligence agencies can of course get things wrong. And governments are not automatically obliged to accept their assessment. But can it really be acceptable that a government official can not just disregard an intelligence memo, but order its findings adjusted to her liking, without any checks or safeguards?
More worrying still was the aftermath of CSISs briefing of party officials on the Han Dong matter. The briefing, carried out during the 2019 election campaign, was classified, restricted to a small number of officials with security clearance. Yet, as a senior national-security official told The Globe last week, a party member tipped off Mr. Dong days later that CSIS had their eye on him.
Then there was the testimony of the Prime Minister. Much attention has been paid to Justin Trudeaus peculiarly vehement insistence that he seldom reads the briefing materials put in front of him. While he reads them when he can, as a summary of Mr. Trudeaus prehearing interview put it, in other cases he trusts that someone else will tell him if there is something he needs to know. Or as he said in his public appearance, the only way to guarantee, to make sure, that I receive the necessary information is to give me an in-person briefing.
This appears to conflict with testimony offered by Ms. Telford before a parliamentary committee a year ago, that of course the Prime Minister reads any documents he receives. But it is far from the only contradiction or anomaly in his testimony.
Mr. Trudeau testified that, while he was briefed by the partys national campaign manager, Jeremy Broadhurst (now a senior adviser in the Prime Ministers Office) on the Han Dong affair, he did not feel there was sufficient or sufficiently credible information that would justify this very significant step as to remove a candidate in these circumstances. Mr. Broadhurst, for his part, testified that he recommended that no action should be taken, because I thought the bar for overturning that that bar should be extremely high.
Oh please. This very significant step? If only. Political parties drop candidates all the time, and with far less justification because they posted something untoward on their Facebook page when they were 12, let alone because they are suspected of being the protgs of a hostile foreign power. This sudden respect for the sanctity of the local nomination process would be a lot easier to credit if there were any if the races were not often rigged by party HQ to favour one candidate or another, when they are not pre-empted altogether.
Indeed, Mr. Trudeau at another point smirked at CSISs naivet about the Canadian political process: nomination meetings, he said in a prehearing interview, are stacked with busloads of supporters for one candidate or another all the time. That may be true, but they are not usually under the direction of a foreign power told, as the inquiry also heard, that their families back home would face consequences if they did not show up.
So the Liberals, and Mr. Trudeau in particular, are left with many more questions to answer after their testimony than before. Their insistence, in particular, that briefing notes prepared by CSIS for the Prime Ministers Office, stating that Beijing had clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 general elections, that state actors are able to conduct [foreign interference] successfully in Canada because there are no consequences, either legal or political, and that until [foreign interference] is viewed as an existential threat to Canadian democracy and governments forcefully and actively respond, these threats will persist, was not reflected in what CSIS director David Vigneault personally briefed them, hangs by the slenderest of threads.
Recalled to the witness stand, Mr. Vigneault testified he might not have used those exact words in his oral briefings, but only because he had been telling them much the same thing for years. I can say with confidence that this is something that has been conveyed to the government, to ministers, the Prime Minister, using these words and other types of words, he said.
The question is why no one was listening. Or why, if they were, they stopped up their ears.
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Opinion: The foreign interference inquiry features a parade of senior Liberals protesting too much - The Globe and Mail
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In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribersthe big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
Although the prime minister had already announced most of its signature measures over the previous week or so, this weeks budget still contained one notable surprise: an increase to the capital gains tax rate for capital gains above $250,000 for individuals and at any level for corporations and trusts.
We had anticipated the budget would set out tax increases for corporations and high-income earnersin fact, the March 9 edition of the Weekly Wrap warned that the budget might appeal to class warfarebut we didnt expect changes to the capital gains tax regime. The disincentives for entrepreneurship and investment seemed too high in the face of a stagnant economy, low business investment, and declining productivity.
The budget proposal, which is projected to raise nearly $20 billion in new revenues over the next five years, has generated significant criticism from entrepreneurs and investors who rightly warn that it will discourage business start-ups and capital investment. Calgary-based investor Derrick Hunter has written about these risks for The Hub.
At a time when the Canadian economy is in high demand of capital to expand the housing supply, increase business starts, and boost productivity, this is a counter-productive policy. Theres a considerable body of research that shows that capital taxes are among the most economically damaging forms of taxation. The economic costs of extracting this capital from investors and handing it over to the federal government are therefore likely to be significant. Especially since it wasnt offset by accompanying tax reductions as Hub contributor Trevor Tombe set out in his post-budget analysis.
It prompts the question: why is the Trudeau government doing this?
We know for instance from former Finance Minister Bill Morneau that its been something the government had considered and rejected in the past. It strikes me that there are three explanations for adopting it now.
Whatever the ultimate balance of factors behind the governments decision, the economic effects are still the same: hiking taxes on capital is bound to worsen Canadas investment climate and ultimately its economy as a whole.
The Trudeau government has sought to define this weeks budget in terms of generational fairness. It spoke for instance of the need to restore a fair chance for Millenials and Gen Z. Finance Minister Chrystia Freelands budget speech even claimed that we find ourselves at a pivotal moment for these cohorts.
This political positioning is understandable yet insufficient. Theres plenty of evidence that younger Canadians are feeling anxious and agitated about their circumstances. They cannot afford homes. Theyre delaying marriage and family formation. And, as we outlined this week in The Hubs first bi-weekly DeepDive, theyre increasingly unhappy.
The numbers are striking. Younger Canadians used to report higher levels of happiness than older Canadians. Not anymore. Canadians under age 30 are now on average less happy. Canadas overall level of satisfaction ranked number 15 in this years World Happiness Report. But if you limit it to younger Canadians, we actually fall to number 58 along with countries like Paraguay, Malaysia, and China.
Theres a tendency to observe these dynamics through the lens of politics. A key reason that the budget is so focused on this cohort is because it has abandoned the Liberal Party en masse. The Conservative Party of Canada is the only centre-right party in the Anglo-American world that currently has a political advantage among younger voters. These developments challenge long-standing political axioms about the interaction between demographics and political preferences.
But the biggest issue here isnt politics. Theres something far more concerning about the demographic, socio-economic and even psychological effects of large numbers of young Canadians experiencing failure to launch syndrome. It can have long-run costs and consequences for individuals and society as a whole.
Its not a coincidence for instance that the fertility rate is at an all-time low at the same time that Canadians under age 30 are reporting rising levels of unhappiness. Causality is doubtless working in both directions.
An unmarried, childless future in an ugly and overpriced, small downtown apartment is a rather grim proposition. Nothing in the totality of human experience tells us that these are the conditions for human flourishing or a successful society.
Some of the budget measures may help on the margins. But one does get the sense that theres something bigger going on here and technocratic solutions are a necessary yet insufficient response. Howard Anglins article for The Hub this weekend about building aesthetics, textured neighbourhoods, and what Tim Carney calls family-friendly communities starts to get closer to some of the underlying factors behind this generational malaise. One could also point to the void of spiritual questionsthough thats beyond the scope of public policy and certainly this essay.
I would however make the case for a lack of growth and progress as a key (and perhaps the key) explanatory factor. Here I may respectfully part company with Anglin. I dont think that people are telling us that things are moving too fast. I think in a lot of ways theyre telling us that theyre moving too slow. I subscribe to the Douthian argument that economic and technological stagnation (outside of narrow cones of progress), cultural conformity and replication, and the absence of a common project have contributed to a self-reinforcing mix of stagnancy, sterility, and drift.
Douthats solution to what he calls decadence is a combination of divine intervention and renewed technological progress (So down on our kneesand start working on that wrap drive.).
Maybe hes right. But either way, these are the precise questions that we ought to be asking before we consign a generation or two of young Canadians to an uninspiring and unfulfilling future.
Today marks something far more important than politics or public policy: its the start of the NHL playoffs and the Toronto Maple Leafs elusive search for their first Stanley Cup since 1967.
George Will likes to say that he writes about politics to support his baseball habit. I can relate. The only job that I can envision leaving The Hub for is really any role with the Maple Leafs, from team president to the guy who fills the water bottles.
Ive loved hockey ever since I can remember. I played a lot as a young personthough not particularly well. I recently wrote about my playing days, including the occasional fight, for Cardus Comment Magazine. You can find my essay here.
Will also often says that at an age too young to make life-shaping decisions, he had to choose between becoming a Chicago Cubs fan or a St. Louis Cardinals fan. Most of his friends became Cardinals fans and grew up cheerful and liberal. He chose the Cubs and grew up a gloomy conservative.
Again, I can relate. Being a Leafs fan is good training for a conservative. Its a steadfast lesson in low expectations and the inherent fallibility of man.
But Im a North American conservative so Im susceptible, however wrongheaded, to a unique continental optimism. I cant help but succumb against my better judgment to a quixotic hopefulness.
No matter how hard one tries, the Leafs invariably tempt you into believing that this year is different. Last years first-round win against the Tampa Bay Lightning set off those feelings for me. The swift second-round defeat to the Florida Panthers caused a precipitous fall back to reality.
This season Ive once again watched most of the games. I began the year determined to protect myself from inevitable disappointment. But somewhere along the way, perhaps due to Auston Matthews 69 goals or the group-think of my hockey chat groups (yes, there are two), Ive come, at an almost sub-conscious level, to believe that this might be the year.
If so, Ill need to bring my boys to Toronto for the parade because even though theyre only one and three years old, theres a good chance that it wont happen again in their lifetimes.
I suppose this is a long way of saying that if Im a bit distracted in the coming days (and hopefully weeks) its because Im focused on my real passion: hockey. Hopefully, politics and policy will cooperate and take a break for a while.
Until then, Maple Leafs forever!
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The Weekly Wrap: The Liberals lean all the way into class warfare - The Hub
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