The political gluttony of the leisure class

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : Since the 1930s, there have been vigorous debates over whether increasing or decreasing government spending will tend to produce optimal levels of employment and whether increasing or decreasing interest rates by central banks will do so.
53% : This leaves the nation with an unbalanced electorate, a significant share of which is aware it has a concrete interest in greater government spending, but no substantial segment that cherishes a concrete interest in holding down spending.
52% : On issue after issue -- gun laws, crime control, immigration regulation, voting procedures, macroeconomic policy -- politics as the leisure of the theory class has been found wanting.
50% : No line got greater cheers for Donald Trump in 2016 than his vow to build a "beautiful wall" on the southern border, and no Trump line aroused more fury among liberals.
50% : But recently large percentages of those waved through the southern border are from Haiti, the Middle East, and other even more distant locales.
46% : Anyone purported to be seeking asylum is admitted, often flown to the Northeast, and, sometimes, given an easily ignored order to attend a hearing.
43% : Democratic mayors in major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Portland, and Minneapolis, did, in fact, reduce police funding, even as murders rose at a faster rate than during any year since 1960.
40% : The weeks after Floyd's death saw Black Lives Matter go national, with demands to "defund the police" and "mostly peaceful" demonstrations across the nation that turned into violent riots in 500 cities.
40% : Many noticed that after the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession, government deficit spending and low interest rates didn't produce inflation, as many Republicans predicted.
39% : Since the middle 1990s, violent crime had been in decline nationally and in major cities, starting with New York, with an uptick in several cities after Black Lives Matter was founded to protest an incident in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
39% : Some embraced "modern monetary theory," the idea that, according to James Whitford and Scott Centorino, "no amount of printing and spending money can cause real problems because the government can always raise taxes on the middle class to pull the devalued money out of the economy."
37% : For those unwilling to call for open borders publicly, the theory behind the Biden policy appears to be that Trump was betraying America's tradition of welcoming immigrants and that any surge at the southern border could be solved by assigning Kamala Harris to reform dysfunctional societies in Central America.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.