On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki appeared to admit—sort of—that inner-city minorities and other members of the radical Left who oppose over-policing would be better served by voting Republican.
In response to the incredulity of Fox News’s Peter Doocy at her suggestion that federal spending to boost low-wage, temporary employment for inner-city rioters might reduce surging crime rates, Psaki deflected with a straw-man fallacy to imply that Democrats were the new party of law and order.
“Some might say that the other party was for defunding the police,” Psaki said. “I’ll let others say that, but…”
Psaki made the claim while touting a racist $2.3 trillion boondoggle, “the American Jobs Plan, uh, that was voted into law by Democrats just a couple of months ago.”
Her mangled logic-salad implied that Republicans had actively opposed the Biden administration’s plan specifically due to its purported funding of law-enforcement.
Meanwhile, she insisted that President Joe Biden was laser-focused on “ensuring there’s specific guidance to communities across the country to ensure that they have funding to get more community police around the country.”
Republicans’ public criticism of the so-called American Jobs Plan focused mainly on wasteful spending and massive tax increases (plus rising inflation) that would accompany the bill.
In order to push entitlement polices like free socialized childcare and eldercare through Congress without any support from the opposing party, Democrats were obliged to redefine what was commonly understood to be “infrastructure” spending.
While the term has often been associated with basic public necessities—such as roads, schools and broadband internet—Biden encouraged his party to “think big.”
That proved to be a nonstarter for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, who said the Biden proposal was “something we’re not going to do” but that Republicans would support a “much more modest” approach to the tune of about 30% of what Biden was seeking.
Assuming—as Psaki did—that the bulk of the GOP’s requested cuts would have involved police spending, that means Biden may have planned to inject about $2 trillion extra in law-enforcement ‘infrastructure’ over the course of eight years.
Divided by the estimated number of black Americans—about 44 million—that means Democrats would have added roughly $45,000 per black person to the federal policing budget.
Given that the nationwide average salary for an entry-level police officer is around $48,000 annually, that might amount to just under one new rookie police officer per black person. However, since the spending was to be spread over eight years, the American Jobs Plan, according to Psaki’s reasoning, would actually add only one officer for every eight black Americans.
Although violent crime has spiked to unprecedented levels recently, many on the Left maintain that the issue is not the quantity but the quality of cops. Some now assert that the former rallying cry to “defund the police” was misinterpreted from the outset.
“I think it’s important to rethink and reimagine how we think about law enforcement,” said Baltimore activist China Terrell in May.
“But to implement whatever we think is a better idea is going to cost us more money, not less,” Terrell added. “That’s something the literal words of ‘defund the police’ don’t grapple with.”
It’s possible that Psaki was attempting to be coy in her remarks on Wednesday, attempting to flip the script on Republicans as many Democrats now acknowledge the massive failure of their anti-policing policies.
But given the certitude with which leftists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, and the activist group Black Lives Matter have insisted there was no misunderstanding about the rhetoric, one can only assume that Psaki, the top communications official within the executive branch, likewise intended to have her words taken at face value.
AOC: When We Say ‘Defund the Police,’ We Mean Defund the Police! https://t.co/NAHlvEbdn7
— PJ Media (@PJMedia_com) July 1, 2020
