As the 119th Congress met for the first time last week, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had this to say:

For far too long in this country the cost of living has gone up, but the size of the middle class has come down. Housing costs are too high, grocery costs are too high, childcare costs are too high, insurance costs are too high, utility costs are too high. America is too expensive.

How long were you asleep, Rep. Rip van Winkle, while America went up in smoke with eight years of President Obama (D-IL) and four years of President Biden (D-DE)?

Oh, and don’t you dare cut Social Security or Medicare, roared Rep. van Rip!

But wait, in FY 2024, OASI spending was $1.3 trillion and OASI revenue was $1.1 trillion. So, taxes are short $200 billion a year in funding Social Security under Biden. How could you do this to us, Rep. Jeffries?

How to protect the benefits of the poor helpless middle class? I have an idea. Go for the billions in unjust spending and subsidies going to the Democrats’ biggest supporters and beneficiaries, the educated class that wallows in the government bureaucracies, that runs the regulatory agencies, that gets the grants for NGO contracts, that piles up political contributions from George Soros, that benefits most from EV subsidies.

Eliminate green energy and EV subsidies. Cut regulatory bureaucracies to the bone. Eliminate all NGO contracts. And who would get hurt? Not the working class, not the middle class, not the billionaires, but the privileged educated class, the oppressor settler-colonialists of the welfare state.

Here’s how to do it, from the Epoch Times:

• “end Biden’s generous tax credits for EV leasing, which account for 85 percent of EVs on U.S. roads.”
•  Stop “funds for Biden’s “National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure” plan… [for a] national network of charging stations would cost between $53 billion and $127 billion[.]”
• Go for the EPA, whose “‘budgetary resources’ increased by more than 400 percent, rising from $17.2 to $84.4 billion”, under Biden.
• Stop the Department of the Interior, ballooning from “FY2021’s $48.8 billion to FY2022’s $84.1 billion, and it now has $92.1 billion,”
• Stop the Department of Energy, whose budget has gone “from $61.1 billion in FY2021 to $129.9 billion in FY2022” and now “$153.4 billion.”

Did you know almost half of the Department of Energy budget goes to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)? I had no idea.

And by the way, Rep. Jeffries, if you want to know why the “cost of living” and “housing costs” and “grocery costs” and “utility costs” have gone up, it’s because zoning regulation, and environmental regulation, and green energy regulation, and subsidies and grants and lawfare and a bunch of things that we don’t even know about. Oh, and gunning the money supply for COVID.

So if we eliminated all that, housing and living costs would go down and our Democratic friends would have to “learn to code” and get real jobs.

There’s a Canadian version of this, courtesy of Jordan Peterson’s 42m views podcast with Pierre Poilievre.

19:09 Poilievre: Young people say, look I went through, I got an education, I work non-stop, and I have made the calculation that there is no mathematical path for me to own a house.

Poilievre adds that with an average income and average house price it takes 29 years to save up for the down payment for a house in Toronto.

Peterson (28:00) notes that inhabitants of Ontario, Canada’s richest province, are now poorer per-capita than Mississippi, the U.S.’s poorest state. And real-estate prices in Canada are twice the U.S. prices.

Poilievre is upset about “a very heavy and restrictive state” and he wants to push a homebuilding boom by fast-tracking permits.

I’m going to say to the municipalities that they either speed up permits, cut development charges, and free up land or they will lose their federal infrastructure money.

Trump administration: are you listening?

What with “Two Tier” Keir Starmer stumbling around in grooming-gang Britain and the Germans and French suffering a mental health crisis over the prospect of “far right” parties winning the next election, and President Biden handing out Medals of Freedom to George Soros and Hillary Clinton, you realize that the level of cluelessness in western leadership is beyond belief.

Maybe it’s always been this way. Correction: of course it’s always been this way, with politicians and intellectuals and rich billionaires cluelessly messing up the world.

But today there is a difference. Today we have independent media giving us a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. And just like in the movie, he’s a complete clown.

By the way, Rep. Jeffries. I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi ever deigned to tell you, but there’s a Real Simple way to stop “the cost of living” from going up. Stop printing money.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio