2020 watch: Dems Hope Voters Forget the Economy

The thriving US economy creates a dilemma for Democrats: “In 2020, most voters would likely say ‘yes’ when asked if they are better off than they were four years ago,” notes The Washington Examiner’s Byron York. That means the only way for a Democrat to beat President Trump is by “convincing millions of Americans to vote against their economic interests.” That leaves the candidates claiming that “America under a re-elected Trump would become a racist dystopia, in which all the beliefs Americans hold near and dear would be under constant siege.” Democrats can’t erase the country’s jobs, wages and growth gains under Trump. But with all the hot-button ideological distractions, “the question in 2020 will be whether that matters.”

Economist: NASA Isn’t Going To Make You Rich

NASA is reportedly planning to dispatch an unmanned mission to an asteroid made of gold and other precious materials worth $700 quintillion. But Bloomberg’s Noah Smith warns you not to get too excited: “Once those metals start hitting the market in large quantities, they’re unlikely to be precious for much longer.” Wealth comes from “the ability to create things that satisfy human desires.” A major influx of gold won’t “increase the world’s total demand” but only decrease the metal’s rarity. Indeed, a giant golden asteroid would likely “cause gold prices to crash to zero.”

From the right: AOC’s Drama Is a Strategy To Divide

The explosive if rarely accurate rhetoric of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “is part of a long-range plan to delegitimize the government of the United States as a whole,” argues Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics. Much like the hard-left’s anti-American rhetoric during Vietnam, “it is the institutions of power in the United States that Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders want to destroy, and they will take any opening to do it.” AOC’s latest targets are the “jack-booted thugs” of the Border Patrol, whose facilities alone can make her feel threatened. Her tale of Border Control predators who force women to drink out of toilets is “just one more rhetorical flourish from a woman who will say anything to get attention.” AOC and “her fellow revolutionaries” are on a mission to “divide the country,” and the scary part is she “knows exactly what she is doing.”

Libertarian: Kim Kardashian Is Right About Law School

At Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader cheers Kim Kardashian’s plan to ­become a lawyer by apprenticing at a firm, rather than going to law school, before taking the bar exam. She’d do it in “California, one of a few states in which the old method” — used by the likes of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson — is still kosher. “I learned little about the law when I ­attended Harvard Law School,” Bader recalls, “partly due to professors whose teaching focused on ideologically trendy topics rather than common legal problems more often encountered in the real world.” Requiring a law degree “drives up both the cost of becoming a lawyer, and the hourly rate charged by lawyers to ordinary people,” he notes, yet the requirements “weed out few bad lawyers.”

Restrictionist: More Migrants Won’t Fix Entitlements

At National Review, Steven Camarota writes: “There is a significant amount of research on how much immigration can offset population aging in low-fertility countries such as the United States, and the answer is clear — not much.” So much for the idea that migrants are a demographic lifeline for Social Security. Camarota’s research into Census numbers shows that under a high-migration scenario, “59 percent of the population will be working-age (16 to 64),” whereas under a zero-immigration scenario, it’s still 57 percent. Put another way, immigration doesn’t meaningfully shift the ratio of taxpaying workers to people collecting tax-paid entitlements. The reason: “While it certainly adds a lot of new workers, it also adds children,” and by the time the kids grow up, “a significant share of their immigrant parents will have reached retirement.” Bottom line: “One could favor liberal immigration policies for many reasons, but it is no fix for an aging society.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board