The Washington Post and Fox Business both had stories about the confirmation hearings of former mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend) to become Secretary of Transportation. Fox Business noted that Mr Buttigieg acknowledges Keystone Pipeline workers, thrown out of jobs due to President Biden’s cancellation of the border crossing permit into Canada, may need to get ‘different’ union jobs, while the Post omitted that part.
Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan (Ala.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) challenged Buttigieg over an order Biden signed Wednesday halting construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The project’s supporters say the order will cost thousands of jobs.
Buttigieg said the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs and stressed the importance of curbing the use of fossil fuels.
Note what Mr Buttigieg said, that the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs. Meaning, in a time of high unemployment, those to be created jobs don’t exist yet! Perhaps some of those Keystone XL Pipeline workers will get some of those newly created jobs, but what do they do between today and then?
Oops! For the left, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Mr Buttigieg never got his manicured hands dirty trying to weld two sections of pipeline together, or excavating material in the pipeline’s path. The sheltered son of University of Notre Dame professors, he never had to worry whether there’d be food on the table or a roof over his head.
This is the problem for the left elites: they claim to be all for the poor and the working class, but they have no concept about how the poor and the working class actually live. It’s nothing for Democratic Governors to issue shutdown orders that throw millions of people out of work, because they have no idea what missing even one paycheck can mean for people.
The Federal Reserve noted, in May of 2019 — before the economic dislocations caused by COVID-19 — that 61% of Americans could cover an unexpected, $400 emergency through cash, savings or a credit card that they could pay off at the next billing date. And that means that 39% could not cover such an expense.
And how would that 39% take care of that bill? Borrowing, selling something, or putting off paying something else. But Mr Buttigieg apparently thinks nothing of throwing those unionized workers out of a job; they’ll just have to get ‘different’ union jobs.
If they exist, that is.
I grew up poor, and while not quite as badly off as some other folks in eastern Kentucky, things were tight.
I’m going to tell you a story, a kind of nasty story, but a true one nevertheless. Sometime when I was in high school, the water pipe in the basement froze, and burst. My mother — my father was long gone — did not have the money to afford a plumber to repair it. In high school at the time, I was able to figure out how to shut the water off in the basement where it came out of the foundation wall, but repairing the burst pipe was beyond my knowledge.
We went without running water for at least two months! My mother worked hard, every day, my long-gone father hadn’t contributed a dime in years, and she just didn’t have the money to get it repaired. Our house was in town, so there was no outhouse. I don’t know how my mother and sisters took care of things — as a teenaged boy, I really didn’t want to know — but with no working toilet, when I had to urinate, I pissed out the attic window.
It wasn’t too bad: my bedroom was in the (barely heated) attic, and there were no houses across the street, because there was a ravine there, so I was able to just open the dormer window and let fly. The roof extended under that dormer window, and the urine went into the gutter.
Of course, urine isn’t the only bodily waste. “Number two”? That was at school, or anyplace else I could find on the weekends.
Bathing? Showers in the school gym locker room.
Yeah, that’s a nasty story, but that was my mother’s unexpected $400 expense, backdated fifty years. But that’s an experience which taught me what it was really like to be poor, and we weren’t the poorest people around.
Joe Biden knows nothing about this, Pete Buttigieg knows nothing about this, nobody in the whole damned Biden Administration has any flaming idea what poor people go through, and they are willing to keep adding on and keep adding on and keep adding on more ‘little’ expenses and more ‘sacrifices’ for the good of all.
We’re not poor now, thanks to a lifetime of hard work, but even at my advanced age, my memory is still good, and clear. Mao Zedong once sent the urban elites in China out into the fields, so learn how the peasants lived, and while I would never advocate that kind of totalitarian action, but at least those elites learned — if they survived it — how the other 90% lived. It would be nice if someone in the Biden Administration had some experience, some concept of what the President’s policies will do to people in this country.
Right now, it doesn’t seem as though they give a damn.
