Murders are tragic, regardless of motive. Plus: Trump left border blueprint. GOP can't diss $$.

By Gary Abernathy

Murders are always tragic, regardless of motives

Thoughts and prayers for the victims of deadly shootings in Atlanta and Boulder in recent days.

In the Atlanta incident, too many are trying to take that tragedy and morph it into another indictment of racism. Racism is abhorrent, but can we let an investigation take place and figure it out before we start printing the labels?

Senseless murders are tragic, regardless of motive.

Hey Joe, Trump left a blueprint on illegal crossings

The Biden administration is looking for “new ways” to slow the surge of migrants crossing the southern border, according to the Washington Post.

“The sharpest challenge is how to deal with thousands of children taken into custody under a policy of not turning away unaccompanied minors. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) on Monday released photographs of a temporary border tent in Donna, Tex., where children were placed in crowded areas divided by clear partitions, some huddled under foil blankets on modest bedding,” the Post reported.

The tone of reporting about Biden’s bungling of illegal border crossings compared with how Trump was covered is, of course, obvious in its stark difference. Trump was excoriated daily, while Biden is just trying to figure it out. Right. As former President Barack Obama insisted about plans he said he left behind to handle a pandemic, Trump left behind a pretty good blueprint for controlling the border if Biden would care to look.

GOP has lost standing to complain about spending

Since we obliterated the budget over the past year and went from talking “billions” in spending to “trillions,” that’s apparently the starting point from now on. USA Today reports, “Fresh off passage of the COVID-19 relief bill, President Joe Biden is assembling the next big White House priority, a sweeping $3 trillion package of investments on infrastructure and domestic needs.”

This time, for some reason, Biden has decided his spending has to be paid for, so he’s going to seek “higher corporate taxes and increases on people making more than $400,000 annually, effectively undoing much of the 2017 tax cuts by his predecessor, Donald Trump.”

Democrats always utilize rhetoric suggesting that they’ll only “tax the rich,” while protecting the poor and middle class. They, and too many in the media, always ignore the fact that “higher corporate taxes” end up being passed down to everyone else, and you can’t impose enough taxes on people over the $400,000 threshold to come close to paying for these extravagant progressive wish lists.

Democrats and Republicans – and President Trump – all fell into the trap of spending unconscionable amounts of money in the name of covid relief, most of which wasn’t needed. Local governments are still figuring out what to do with it all, as I detailed in a Post column in December. So congressional Republicans have little credibility to argue that Biden’s new spending plans are fiscally irresponsible.

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