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Richard Nixon announces a wage-price freeze on August 15, 1971, shocking the world. Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation

When I was a freshman college debater at Emory University in the fall of 1970, the national debate topic was not Vietnam, but the desirability of wage and price control. Little did we know that just months ahead a Republican president would impose a wage-price freeze, long the anti-inflationary prescription of the left wing of the Democratic Party. But the surprise known in financial circles as the Nixon shock, nearly a half-century ago (on August 15, 1971) showed how pervasive the fear of inflation running at just over 5 percent in 1970 had become.

Thats ancient history now, even to those of us who remember the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s, and the particularly horrid scourge of stagflation (high inflation and unemployment simultaneously). Inflation seems to have been tamed by wise monetary policies. The periodic warnings from 21st-century conservatives that low interest rates and federal budget deficits would create inflation didnt much bother me. It was like hearing an old priest chant a forgotten litany in a lost language just one among many ritualistic arguments for the tight credit and reactionary social policies these people favored instinctively as a sort of class self-defense posture.

The current surge in consumer prices doesnt necessarily change that picture; the current post-pandemic (we hope) economic environment was sure to produce a spike in wages and prices that cannot be projected into a future where something approaching normalcy will surely return (though the real-estate bubble is indeed troubling). But now I am beginning to hear echoes of the inflation panics of the not-so-distant past, which make me tremble.

Like Tim Noah, I suspect there may be a generational lapse in understanding the politics of inflation:

I dont care to be condescended to by a bunch of Gen Xers and Millennials about my 70s-bred fear of inflation. It feels too much like the condescension we Boomers directed toward Depression babies whenever they warned us that we were playing with fire in deregulating the financial markets. Poor dears, we thought, traumatized for life by the 1929 crash andone-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

The Depression babies turned out to be right, of course.

Noah makes it clear hes not arguing inflation per se is bad for the economy. It is, however, bad for progressive politics, and not just because stagflation probably killed the Carter presidency and ushered in the Reagan era far more than the Iranian hostage crisis or other better-remembered Democratic foibles. The deflationary economic strategies of the 1980s werent called austerity, but rather a corrective for undisciplined policies that fed wage and price spirals which in turned hammered the value of savings, the living standards of those on fixed incomes, and the political case for federal domestic spending.

Most lethally for progressivism, the conservative supply-side tax-cutting when combined with inflationary fears can create enormous pressure for public disinvestment and the shredding of safety nets (which is why reactionaries happily labeled the intended result starving the beast). We are still living with some of the long-term consequences of anti-inflationary backlash. As Noah points out, Californias Proposition 13 ballot initiative in 1978 and similar tax revolts were a by-product of price spirals that boosted tax assessments on property and income alike.

But sometimes lost in an examination of the rights exploitation of inflation fears is the abiding fact that the left has no clear prescription for dealing with it, either, other than by denying its existence or significance (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly). Ironically, that was made most evident by the supposedly illiberal Richard Nixons surprising use of the great liberal instrument for taming inflation.

The veteran ex-conservative economic and political analyst Bruce Bartlett has penned an exceptional explainer on the background and consequences of the Nixon shock, particularly its international dimensions, and the role played by Treasury Secretary John Connally, who like his boss and ally Nixon was more focused on short-term politics than on long-term economic realities. Whats clear is that Nixon was convinced a recession induced by the Eisenhower administration and its Federal Reserve Board appointees designed to kill inflationary pressures also killed his 1960 presidential candidacy. As prices spiked in 1970, he was terrified the same thing could happen in 1972.

Nixon had inherited (and temporarily extended) an income-tax surcharge from LBJ that was designed to pay for the skyrocketing costs of the Vietnam War, but its effects were limited. So with his signature televised bombshell reveal (the one he deployed a month earlier to announce his trip to China), amid great secrecy, Nixon rolled out a combo platter of initiatives to fight inflation and international economic instability. They included a suspension of fixed currency exchange rates and the convertibility of the dollar to gold (to head off a raid on gold supplies triggered by a British demand for a major conversion); an import surcharge (to prevent a worsening of the trade balance); and most significantly for most Americans, a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to be followed by an indefinite period of controls by federal panels.

As political theater, Nixons speech announcing a new economic policy was, well, Nixonian. He began with dessert: an assortment of tax breaks and job-creation incentives balanced by mostly unspecified spending cuts; only then did he mention the wage-price freeze. After promising to break the vicious circle of spiraling prices and costs, Nixon moved on to his international proposals, which he downplayed as very technical, while assuring viewers that if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

The wage and price controls were initially very popular (as polls had told the White House they would be) and did indeed hold down inflation through the reelection year of 1972, when Nixon won his famous landslide reelection over poor George McGovern, in part by goosing federal appropriations to create a mini-boom. By then the administration had moved on to a more discretionary system for regulating wage and price increases, which generated rumors of employers currying favor with generous donations to CREEP (the Committee to Reelect the President), the notoriously corrupt operation heavily complicit in the Watergate scandals that brought down the Nixon presidency. Between the suppressed and eventually unleashed inflationary pressures and the oil-price shock Nixons international economic policies helped create, the country paid a very high economic price for the brief respite from inflation the wage-price freeze earned him. He sowed the wind with even greater inflation, and his successors Gerald Ford (whose feckless Whip Inflation Now campaign was widely mocked) and Jimmy Carter reaped the whirlwind.

Before you dismiss these events from 50 years ago as irrelevant, consider how much Nixons short-sighted approach sounds like something President Donald Trump might have done if inflation had became a political problem during his tenure (or in, God help us, a future term). Indeed, any president mulling Nixons choice of recession-inducing fiscal or monetary policies might be tempted to resort to the easy-to-understand, if dangerous, strategy of wage and price controls in which the pain is mostly back-loaded, particularly in or near an election year. We old folks remember how it preceded Nixons landslide 1972 win, followed by a decade of economic pain and multiple decades of political misery for progressives.

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Why Inflation Panics Are Poison for Progressive Politics - New York Magazine

Its an article of faith among New York Citys progressive leadership that punishment does not deter crime and that putting criminals in jail is at least as evil as whatever they did to get there.

From this perspective, sending someone to jail is the worst thing that society can do: It not only destroys the life of the perpetrator but also creates a false sense of accomplishment, while ignoring the socioeconomic root causes of crime.

New York City has radically decriminalized quality of life offenses, from littering to public urination to fare evasion, largely on the principle that arresting people is never the answer. In the summer of 2020, the Mayors Office of Criminal Justice boasted that the number of New Yorkers held in New York City jails has plummeted, shrinking by 27 percent in 10 weeks, a steeper population decline than in all of last year, bringing the citys incarcerated population down to the lowest level since 1946.

This would be salutary if it reflected a falling crime rate, but the release en masse of prisoners, driven by concern about COVID-19, came at a moment when murders and shootings were rising more quickly than ever recorded before. When incarceration is conceptually decoupled from crime, politicians are free to boast about emptying jails.

The latest twist on the premise that jail is worse than crime is the notion that calling the police is itself a form of violence. Since, on this view, the police routinely commit brutality against black people, and interactions with police frequently result in the death of black men, it is unconscionable to call the police in most situations, especially when it may involve entwining a black life with law enforcement.

In fact, it may be tantamount to ordering a black persons execution. Alvin Bragg, the likely new Manhattan district attorney who opposes jail time for people convicted of violent felonies (his quotation marks) cautions that calling the police on black people risks the police shooting of another black man.

To minimize police intervention, advocates have called for treating violent crime involving guns as a public-health issue, akin to the campaign against smoking that reduced cigarette usage and the incidence of lung cancer. Mary Bassett, former city health commissioner, demanded community-based interventions to deal with shootings, employing the use of credible messengers and community-mobilization techniques that aim to mediate conflicts between individuals and groups and prevent retaliatory violence before it occurs.

Such violence interruption programs receive significant funding and get reintroduced every year as an innovative solution to violent crime. Claims that these efforts work are inevitably based on studies of tiny catchment areas that provide limited evidence for replicability of the model. Mayor Bill de Blasio has been promising a new rollout of more Cure Violence practitioners since July 2020, as shootings and murders continue to climb.

When New Yorkers of Asian descent were beingattacked and beaten routinelyon the streets, de Blasios wife, Chirlane McCray,advised witnessesto violent hate crimes to just try interrupting it by distracting the perpetrator for instance, by asking the victim of an ongoing beating to tell you the current time. This is risky, she concluded, after encouraging bystanders to intervene physically. At no time does the mayors wife advise people to call the police.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made asimilar pleain regard to anti-Semitic violence associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asking people on Twitter to take NYCs free, 1hr bystander intervention course. According to the Web site, the trainings explore the meaning of safety, of being an effective ally, and how identity plays a role in the ways we choose to intervene.

The resistance to calling the police is based on the premise that a racist institution will impose an inequitable intervention when it responds. But even thebystander-intervention trainingassumes that the identity of the intervenor plays a role in the act of intervention; a white person, one presumes, must tread lightly when intervening in a violent attack perpetrated by a nonwhite, lest racist modes of defusing tension intrude and replicate the racist structures that we seek to avoid.

Crime is a problem to urban progressives, but apparently not for the reasons that bother everyone else that crime victimizes people and has huge costs. The problem, from the progressive standpoint, is that the race of many perpetrators is a political inconvenience.

Seth Barrons new book is The Last Days of New York. Adapted from City Journal.

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Soaring crime but the fewest people in prison since 1946: Progressives' upside-down view of NYC crime - New York Post

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis argues that Democrats ever embracing defunding police "makes no sense at all," saying other Democratic-run cities must follow Bostons lead in bolstering the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve in order to drive down crime rates.

The longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history, Dukakis said Massachusetts, a state with one of the lowest murder per capita rates in the nation, shows how Democrats have gotten it right in the past when it comes to "community policing," which involves having officers patrol different neighborhoods in order to build relationships and establish a baseline of respect with members of the community.

That concept, however, has been threatened by progressives in the Democratic Party who have aligned themselves over the past year with the "defund the police" movement. As departments were scaled back, and crime rates soared in cities like New York and Chicago, community policing has taken a hit.

"Defunding the police doesnt make any sense. Building an excellent police force that it committed to community policing does make sense," Dukakis told Fox News. "The more the merrier."

BIDEN SCORCHES DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT BY PUMPING FUNDS BACK TO NYC

"Look, there were some people who started talking about defunding the police. I called it nuts," he continued. "I thought it was a mistake. It doesnt make any sense to me. Of course we need excellent policing. But its what kind of policing. How do you build that relationship with communities?"

Dukakis pointed to how community policing would "revolutionize police in the United States" during the 1990s, first when Boston Police Commissioner Bill Bratton successfully drove down crime, so much so that he was poached by New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to address record homicide levels. Bratton cut the number of homicides in half in New York City in just a two-year period, Dukakis said, before Giuliani fired him.

Bratton later became chief of police in Los Angeles, where he again applied the concepts of community policing by reaching out to American civil rights activist Connie Rice. Once a staunch critic of the LAPD, she grew to become one of Brattons bigger supporters, Dukakis said.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis speaks at the State House in Boston on July 20, 2016. (Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Speaking to The Washington Post last month, Bratton discussed how criminal justice reform has unfortunately contributed to rising crime in many cities, as some offenders who need to remain in jail have been let back onto the streets to commit additional violence. When asked about this issue by Fox News, Dukakis said, "Theres nothing wrong with looking at the criminal justice system to determine whether or not there are ways to improve it."

"But the idea that you can somehow walk away from community policing, if thats what some of the advocates of defunding are talking about, makes no sense to me at all. Of course we need a police force," he said.

Despite some progressives pushing to defund, reimagine or abolish police in the year since George Floyds death in Minneapolis, Dukakis was firm in saying thats not what true progressive stand for.

"Im a very proud progressive, and Im a strong believer in community policing," Dukakis added. "Most of the people who I know who call themselves genuine progressives understand the importance of community policing."

EVOLUTION OF THE DEFUND THE POLICE MOVEMENT: HOW IT HAS CHANGED

Dukakis credited Bill Clinton as the first president to get serious about community policing on the federal level, but the Massachusetts Democrat still stressed mayors and local officials must be the first to take on the responsibility of effectuating good policing.

It's the ingrained culture of community policing, and the fact that Northeastern University in Boston was one of the first colleges to offer degree programs for police, is whats driven Massachusetts to have one of the lowest homicide rates in America, Dukakis said.

As per the latest comprehensive statewide data published by the FBI, the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants in Massachusetts was 2.2 in 2019. Just Maine, Vermont, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, Minnesota, Utah and Wyoming had that rate or lower. The data for 2020 will be released this September.

"My capital city actually reduced the level of violence. Not that were violence free, dont get me wrong," Dukakis said, as homicides in Boston so far this year have declined by 29% compared to the same time period last year. "I think it is significant that Boston happens to be not only in a state of the least violence in the country, but seems to be coping pretty well with the pressures of the pandemic."

Boston has witnessed at least 20 homicides so far this year through July 18. Its driven down homicides since 2020, when homicides unusually spiked by 54% compared to 2019. That compares to New York City, which has seen 233 murders so far this year through July 18. Homicides there have increased by 3% compared to the same time period last year. In 2020, murders in New York City were up 47% compared to 2019.

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The need for more, better policing seems to be hitting home in the Democratic Party at the federal level, as President Biden seemingly scorched defund the polices efforts last week in announcing he was making $350 billion from the American Rescue Plan available to police departments across the country to in part hire more officers and fund overtime payments to get more police onto city streets.

That followed the Department of Justice also sending out strike forces to combat gun trafficking.

"The day-to-day, week-to-week ongoing relationship with the community is critical," Dukakis said. "Its not just snapping your fingers and saying well were going to do a mental health program."

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Dukakis calls progressive 'defund the police' push 'nuts,' says it takes away from proven community policing - Fox News

Comedian Jimmy Dore, an independent-progressive known for being outspoken against the U.S. establishment, told Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today" on Wednesday that former President Trump didn't "steal democracy" as Democrats repeatedly claimed, and Democrats like Joe Biden only pretend to care about progressive causes, often making things worse all around.

Dore, who supported socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary but also criticized him during the general election, said Democrats like Biden tend to virtue signal their progressive bona fides through identity politics rather than taking concrete actions to realize the progressive agenda.

In that way, he added, they along with the Republicans have formed an American "oligarchy" both unaccountable to the American people and predating the past two controversial presidents.

"It's all signals, but there's no substance. We're signaling that we want to help the minority community, but we're not actually helping them," Dore said of the Biden-led Democrats.

"So that's what identity politics is. It's a big diversion. And the joke I say, you know, if it was 1860, the Democrats would be bragging about their first transgendered slave owner."

Dore called out the Washington establishment for being beholden to corporate interests, no matter their populist rhetoric. On the Democratic side, he argued, voters may be captivated by certain politicians. However, Dore argued, they often end up disappointed when their candidate aligns with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and corporate interests like the enormous defense contractor conglomerate Raytheon or Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs.

"[N]o matter what they say, no matter what they believe, they're going to go along with Nancy Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi goes along with Goldman Sachs and Raytheon," he said.

"So when you're voting for someone inside the Democratic Party, you're voting for Goldman Sachs and Raytheon because they are not standing up to those people."

Previous Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Lawrence Summers, as well as Rep. James Himes of Connecticut and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine are alumni of Goldman Sachs, while current Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III was a board member of Raytheon from the time of his military retirement in 2016 through his nomination to the Pentagon by President Biden.

"The idea that we have progressives inside the Democratic Party -- it's actually more deleterious to the progressive movement to have them there because it gives people the false impression that there's somebody in government fighting for you, that there's one of the parties that are kind of on your side and they aren't," Dore said.

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"And the quicker people realize that both parties are not on their side," he continued. "That they only serve the oligarchy. We are, in fact, in an oligarchy. Your democracy was stolen way before Trump. Until that happens, we won't ever have real change."

Focusing on how politicians signal their support for certain endeavors through the lens of identity politics, Dore remarked that Biden could have lived up to his campaign promise of national unity and equity by seeking worthwhile progressive policy. Instead he sought to assuage his supporters' concerns by creating sweeping but simple achievements like declaring June 19 Juneteenth a federal holiday.

"The establishment has learned how to co-opt identity politics to put the brakes on economic progress and justice. So I would say if you want to help Black people, nothing would help them more than a free college student loan relief and Medicare for all and a living wage," he said.

"But Joe Biden comes in, does none of those things, but he makes Juneteenth a holiday."

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Progressive comedian Jimmy Dore calls out R-D 'oligarchy': 'You're voting for Goldman Sachs and Raytheon' - Fox News

News 12 Staff

Jul 23, 2021, 12:20am

Updated on: Jul 23, 2021, 12:20am

More than $200 million property tax rebates will be paid out to thousands of New Jersey families this summer.

Gov. Phil Murphy says that it is relief for the middle class thanks to his higher taxes on millionaires.

But Republicans are accusing Democrats of using the $500 checks as an election year gimmick. And even some progressives say the rebates wont help those who are most in need.

Our housing here in New Jersey is very expensive, so its important for our millionaires tax to contribute to property tax relief, says Sheila Reynerston with New Jersey Policy Perspective.

To be eligible for the payout, families must have at least one dependent child, make less than $75,000 per year if single or $150,000 per year for a couple

You put money in peoples pockets and obviously it influences their vote. And you know thats happening this year, says Republican state Sen. Kip Bateman.

Bateman has a unique point of view. In 1977, his father Ray Bateman was the Republican nominee against incumbent Gov. Brendan Byrne the year Byrne sent out property tax rebate checks right before the election.

"The day before the election, they sent out the form telling people what they were going to get the following year. And when my dad saw that, when he opened up the mail the day before the election, he knew he had lost the election, Bateman says.

Progressive groups like New Jersey Policy Perspective are upset the checks are only to going those who make enough per year to pay state income tax.

"It's really too bad that those who don't file taxes are being left behind. We're talking about people who make too little to owe any taxes, they are not getting any of this tax credit, says Reynerston.

Instead, the group would have preferred the governor and legislative leaders get behind a yearly, state level child tax credit.

"This is not a targeted tax credit. It leaves out those with little to no income, and there are better ways to change the tax code for those who need it the most, she says.

Gov. Byrne was the most recent Democratic governor to win a second term. Murphy is looking to replicate that success in November.

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Republicans, progressive groups say Murphy's tax rebate is election year gimmick - News 12 Bronx