![](https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/catherinerampell-670x300.jpg)
The American people possess better moral and intellectual integrity than those who rule them, and need to stop obeying all the fools behind all the curtains who believe that because of their IQ levels and resumes they are fit to bridle and spur the rest of us. Here is but one example.
Yesterday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” a person named Catherine Rampell, who graduated from Princeton University then went on to work for The New York Times and then Washington Post as an economics writer, had this to say about Congress’s latest attempted spending spree on America’s binged-out credit card. CNN host Brian Stelter asks, “And why is the number misleading, why is that 3.5 trillion figure misleading?” She responds:
Because it doesn’t really represent anything. It’s this weird shorthand that’s been used, but in fact the bill itself will not cost 3.5 trillion dollars, in the sense that it will be entirely or at least partly paid for. So the actual cost in terms of deficits will be smaller than that, perhaps even zero, although I think that’s unlikely.
And it’s not even, you know, fully spending, it’s not really right to call it a 3.5 trillion spending bill, because there’s probably about a trillion dollars of tax cuts in it too. So it’s really hard to boil down the essence of what this legislation is because it does so many things and because, you know, they’re still negotiating over the basic parameters.
Stelter replies: “Yeah, and it will be over ten years, et cetera et cetera. And isn’t the broader point, Catherine, that because the Senate is broken, and they don’t create laws, they don’t work on legislation all year long, they’re trying to do everything at once in one big bill?” Rampell responds:
It’s partly what you just mentioned, it’s partly that we no longer have majority rule in the Senate. So in order to get anything through through a party-line vote, which is, you know, what theoretically should happen when we have unified control of the government by the Democrats, they have to cram everything into this one major piece of legislation, this so-called reconciliation bill, whatever shorthand we use for it.
And so it has to cover all of the bases or at least everything that can ostensibly get pushed into a budget bill. They have to do climate, they have to do paid leave, they have to do child care, they have to do, you know, green energy tax credits for cars and things like that. They have to put everything in this one piece of legislation because they can’t do piecemeal, regular order bills because the Senate doesn’t function that way any more.
Here’s the video.
WaPo’s @crampell: Media focusing too much on the pricetag of Dems’ $3.5T bill: “The bill itself will not cost $3.5T in the sense it will be entirely, or at least partly, paid for. So the actual cost will be smaller than that, perhaps zero, although I think that’s unlikely" pic.twitter.com/mHHYyHbgRT
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2021
This is a prime example of America’s ruling class corruption. Rampell’s words are facile, but her ideas are garbage. They are so bad that any sixth-grader who earns money mowing lawns could understand why.
But Rampell is apparently one of those people who has been highly educated into utter ignorance. According to her personal website:
Catherine Rampell writes a twice-weekly syndicated opinion column for The Washington Post. She is a politics and economics commentator for CNN and a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour’s Making Sen$e series. She frequently covers economics, public policy, politics, and immigration, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism.
Catherine previously worked at the New York Times as an economics reporter, founding editor of the award-winning Economix blog, and columnist for the New York Times Magazine’s ‘It’s the Economy’ column.
Yes, it appears that a person who scored high enough on college-entrance mathematics test to obtain an Ivy-League offer, then went on to spend more than a decade of her professional life writing about economics and “data-driven journalism,” cannot do basic math nor exhibit any horse sense whatsoever about politics. The uneducated Irish immigrant day laborers of the early 1900s, as memorably represented by one George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, could mow verbal and mental circles around Rampell and her ilk in their sleep.
It’s no difficulty, either, to discern why: Those unwashed masses had one thing that the American Ivy Leaguers of today are purposefully bred to avoid at all costs and lie about if they happen to fail that: A daily encounter with reality.
Someone might ask how a woman who has top-decile mental abilities and has professionally reported on Congress’s budget process appears to not know a single key fact about federal deficits, which is one of the major political problems in her country over the last half-century and will be an even greater one very, very soon. For one thing, was she alive in the past two years? Did she watch Congress pass multiple trillions in additional deficit spending that they didn’t even pretend to pay for? Did that at all imbue in her any skepticism about Congress’s concerns about federal spending or deficits, let alone honesty?
Does Rampell know that Congress hasn’t passed a regular budget for two decades? Does she have any idea why that is? I don’t mean a deliberately falsified partisan talking point, I mean an actual reason. Or has she in all her years of schooling and living around the “best” people never heard one single fact that she can offer about this serious subject on live television, so all she has is the content-free claim anyone could make on any political topic, that the Senate “is broken”?
When a politician tells her something about a bill, does Rampell believe it, or does she check their facts? If she did, she would learn what 99 percent of Americans already know: that “politician” is another word for “professional liar.”
And from where does a person with a high mental processing capacity get the ridiculous idea that when one political party controls a branch of the government, every representative in that political party “should” join “a party-line vote,” that such a striking lack of dissent or ideological variation is a good sign? Has she ever heard even one reason that one-party rule with no dissent is usually a very bad sign? If she hasn’t, how can someone who lacks basically any political understanding at all be employed by the two most “prestigious” political media enterprises in the nation to tell Americans what they should think about such matters?
This is not an anomaly. Ivy League graduates run all the most corrupt and inept American institutions: Big corporate, big capital, big government, and big media. These people are supposed to be our best and brightest, and they cannot win wars, they cannot balance budgets, they cannot keep homeless people from filling our towns, they cannot secure the border, they cannot keep Americans working, they cannot teach American children to read and write and love their own country, they cannot get through a pandemic without devastating their own country, they cannot keep the trains running and the lights on, and they cannot think their way out of wet paper bags.
The point of the Ivy Leagues is clearly to execute at the highest and most ruthless efficiency possible the current goal of nearly all of American higher education: destroying people’s ability to think for themselves and instead training them to automatically spew and obey propaganda. I would say that I’m sorry for what Princeton has done to Rampell except that at this point she is an adult and she is willingly participating in her own humiliation.
All this would be hilarious if these people didn’t control the nuclear football.