A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Are you angry yet? You should be. Our economy is slowing, banks are reeling, inflation remains scorching-high, real incomes are dropping, home prices are falling and Americans everywhere are becoming poorer by the minute. On top of everything else, now we have the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, infuriating bailouts and the resulting panic over banks. As with nearly everything that has gone wrong on their watch, including the inexcusable border chaos, the catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan and harmful inflation, the go-to response by the White House has been to blame President Trump.
Specifically, to blame Trump for signing legislation that loosened regulations on regional banks in 2018.That was Joe Biden’s message in the pitiful 5-minute address in which he tried but utterly failed to reassure the nation that our banking system is sound.
Here’s what Biden didn’t say: they knew. Regulators knew that Silicon Valley Bank was on the brink of failure. Supervisors spotted fatal weaknesses at the tech lender last summer, including some deemed “matters requiring immediate attention”; they told SVB management last fall that its model was flawed and could result in a run on deposits.
Despite the grave warning, the New York Times reports, management failed to change course and supervisors failed to act. By early this spring, SVB was in yet another review, this one on its risk management practices. Bottom line: there were none.
In other words, there were plenty of regulations and processes in place to prevent the catastrophe that occurred at SVB. Critics have assailed the San Francisco Fed, the supervisory authority, and its chief Mary Daly, for negligence. Some have rightly said that having SVB CEO Greg Becker on the overseer Fed board posed an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest.
It is hard to dismiss those who assert that the eagerness with which the Fed, the Treasury and the White House stepped in to bail out SVB and Signature Bank, caught in SVB’s backdraft, stemmed from the cozy relationships and giant political donations that Democrats receive from the tech community. It is, indeed, one big Happy Valley.
After all, the bailouts (which must not be called bailouts) infuriated our European allies, and are a great embarrassment to our globalist Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who surely resisted the rescue. Yellen has spent much of her tenure atop our financial edifice working to cede U.S. tax policy to international organizations. To that end she has lobbied financial regulators around the world promising, among other things, that the U.S. would never again bail out banks.
The Financial Times reports that Europe’s “top policymakers are seething” over the decision to cover all SVB’s depositors, “fearing it will undermine a globally agreed regime.” Those critics are reportedly shocked at the “total and utter incompetence” of U.S. authorities.
It did not have to be this way. Do not forget who brought us to this sorry state. Do not be fooled. There is one and only one reason that Americans are struggling, that we are heading into a recession, and our banks are on thin ice.
President Biden, Democrats in Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jay Powell have orchestrated a reckless trashing of our economy. In a shameless bid to buy votes, Biden and the Democrat majority in Congress spent trillions of unneeded dollars, mainly aimed at politically favored groups like the teachers’ unions and the climate lobby, driving the economy into warp speed and igniting inflation.
Jay Powell, hoping to be reappointed Fed Chair, ignored rising prices for months, continuing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds and mortgage-backed securities even as inflation topped 6%, aware that his only competition for the job was Lael Brainard, an avowed “dove.” Moving faster to tackle inflation might have cost Powell his job.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Yellen became a cheerleader for blowing up the country’s deficits, all the while dismissing inflation as “small” and “manageable”; it wasn’t until the end of 2021 that she admitted it was not, after all, “transitory”. Once a respected economist, Yellen has become a political hack.
Joe Biden and Janet Yellen lie when they say the economy was “reeling” when he became president; it was actually growing at 6% and recovering nicely from the once-in-a-lifetime shutdown caused by COVID-19. Thanks to bipartisan efforts to prop up stalled businesses and consumers who had lost their jobs, the slump occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic was sharp but mercifully short-lived. The government expanded relief programs, the Fed lowered interest rates; the system was working as planned.
Jobs were coming back, inflation was only 1.4%, and consumer sentiment, key to spending, had rebounded sharply from the low of 72 on April 2020 to 79. (Last month, even before the bank problems, it stood at 67; in February 2020, before COVID hit, it stood at 101. Bravo Biden!)
Joe Biden took office and within weeks rushed to pass the American Rescue Act, throwing $1.9 trillion onto an economy plagued with supply chain problems. The bill passed with Democrat-only support, in part because Republicans recognized that it could prove inflationary (as even Democrat Larry Summers predicted.) Inflation indeed began to climb, to 4.2% in April 2021, and to a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
The banking sector will likely calm, and inflation has dropped, but we are not out of the woods. There are recession signs aplenty and Biden has offered up a ludicrous and wasteful budget that Republicans must oppose. There will be a fight over raising the debt ceiling as the GOP pushes for needed spending restraint, which could get ugly.
But voters need to remember as the next election nears: it did not have to be this way. This was not an act of God; this was a reckless hijacking of our economy that put the entire country at risk. Voters must fire those responsible.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
It’s painful for me to watch so many smart pundits and politicians on both the right and the left buy into a media narrative that seeks to blame “wealthy speculators” or “tech bros” or venture capitalists for a banking crisis that ultimately started in Washington. Let me explain.
If you want to understand the context for the crisis, look at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair’s March 6 testimony — a week before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse — where he explains that banks were sitting on $620 billion of unrealized losses from long-dated bonds. This provided the tinder for the crisis.
The match was lit when SVB announced on Wednesday, March 9, that it had effectively sold all of its available-for-sale securities and needed to raise fresh capital because of large unrealized losses from its mortgage bond portfolio.
Screenshot: Wall Street Journal
On Thursday morning, the financial press widely reported SVB’s need for new capital, and short sellers were all over the stock. The CEO’s disastrous “don’t panic” call later that morning only heightened fears and undermined confidence in the bank.
The idea that one needed “non-public information” to understand that SVB was at risk is drivel being peddled by populist demagogues. Any depositor who could read The Wall Street Journal or watch the stock ticker could understand there was no upside in waiting to see what would happen next.
By Friday, the run on other banks had begun. This became abundantly clear when regulators placed Signature Bank in receivership, announced a backstop facility for First Republic, and temporarily halted trading of regional bank stocks on Monday. Even trading of Schwab was halted.
Some unscrupulous reporters and political types have even claimed that I somehow caused this through my tweeting. Dang, they must think I’m Superman! Or maybe E.F. Hutton. But the timing doesn’t line up at all, as I already explained.
In the never-ending quest for scapegoats, some reporters and political types are asking if @theallinpod could have influenced the bank run. We didn't publish until Saturday morning when banks were already closed! I also never tweeted about SVB until it was already in receivership… https://t.co/ryRP3qx0Kl
Once the run on the bank started, decisive action by the Fed was imperative. This meant protecting deposits (uninsured are 50 percent) and backstopping regional banks. No matter how distasteful you may find those things to be, preventing a greater economic calamity was necessary.
But back to SVB: Its collapse was first and foremost a result of its own poor risk management and communications. It should have hedged its interest rate risk. And it should have raised the necessary capital months ago through an offering that didn’t spook the street.
SVB doesn’t deserve a bailout and isn’t getting one. SVB’s stockholders, bondholders, and stock options are getting wiped out. The executives will spend years in litigation and may have stock sales clawed back. Anyone who thinks there’s a “moral hazard” isn’t paying attention.
But it’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things. It arose from SVB’s over-exposure to boring old mortgage bonds, which were considered safe at the time SVB bought them. Perhaps this is why SVB had an “A” rating from Moody’s and had passed all of its regulatory exams.
What turned the mortgage bonds toxic? The most rapid rate-tightening cycle we’ve seen in decades. You can see the connection here between rapid rate hikes and unrealized losses in the banking system.
So, what caused the rapid rate hikes? The worst inflation in 40 years. And what caused that? Profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington — all while Joe Biden, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell assured us inflation was “transitory.”
I warned two years ago that pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into an already hot economy was an unprecedented and likely dangerous experiment. But this was Bidenomics.
Bidenomics = pumping trillions of dollars of stimulus into a rip-roaring economy. I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen next. AFAIK we’ve never tried this before.
So, when Joe Biden says he’s going to hold those responsible for this mess fully accountable, he ought to start by looking in the mirror. But I’m sure that’s not going to happen, just as I’m sure the hunt for scapegoats is just beginning.
David Sacks is an entrepreneur and author who specializes in digital technology firms. He is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital fund Craft Ventures and was the founding COO of PayPal.
Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.
At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had “created more jobs in two years than any president created in four years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. But Biden’s contention was exceptionally misleading, considering he inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown. If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open.
On more than one occasion during the night, a mercurial Biden contended that Covid-19 had shut down the economy. No, states did. Politicians did. Biden was an aggressive proponent of those shutdowns. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the president regularly attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal health officials. Even in August of 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was still criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a new round of Covid authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way” of those trying to “do the right thing.”
Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Today, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of 3.4 percent. More than 30 million people lost their jobs to Covid lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The one big difference is that the labor participation rate still hasn’t recovered to pre-Covid numbers. It’s great that people are working again. But millions fewer are in the market for jobs.
Biden also boasted that Americans were seeing “near” historic unemployment lows for black and Hispanic workers. These historic lows were achieved before Covid lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit for this, doesn’t Trump? Of course, there is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment rate 0.1 percent lower than the previous administration. Washington wasted trillions of dollars propping up an economy that it previously shut down.
Speaking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which you might recall was initially called “Build Back Better,” had helped alleviate spiking prices. Only when inflation became non-transitory, and a politically problematic issue, did Biden begin arguing that more spending would mitigate inflation. And only then did Democrats rename their bill, which was crammed with the same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive wish-list items. “The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate change,” Biden said during his address, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are often unduly blamed or given credit for economic events beyond their control. But it is no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped hundreds of billions into a hot economy (in the case of the “infrastructure” bill, with the help of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable problems with policies that disincentivize work and undercut energy production. All this led to the biggest inflation spike since 1982. We are still at historic highs. A slew of products that consumers rely on still remain atypically expensive, and fears of additional price hikes have started to seriously corrode consumer confidence.
Biden lied that “25 percent” of the national federal debt was incurred by the previous administration when most of that debt was driven by entitlement programs passed, expanded, and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t enough.
Biden went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the rich don’t pay taxes — “[n]o billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter!” — and proposed higher rates on the wealthy and corporations. He also promised to micromanage the economy with a slew of new regulations that would interfere in voluntary contracts struck between employees and employers and consumers and businesses.
Biden implored Congress to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would empower the government to impose unions on businesses and workers who want no part of them. Biden hawked an entire menu of crude economic populism — including price controls and protectionist trade policies that would undermine growth, competition, job creation, and innovation while driving up the cost of virtually every construction project in the country.
There were numerous lies, half-truths, and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated economic ideas and sloganeering. But, surely, the president’s biggest lie of the night was to claim, “I’m a capitalist.”
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A new poll found that a record percentage of Americans say they are doing worse financially under President Joe Biden’s leadership. 41% of respondents to the ABC News/Washington Post poll said they were financially worse since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, the highest figure for the question in 37 years that it has been polled. Only 16% of respondents said that they were better off. By contrast, under the Trump administration the poll found that 25% of respondents said they were better off while only 13% said they were worse off.
The poll also found that former President Donald Trump would easily defeat Biden in a hypothetical matchup, with 48% of respondents saying they would vote for Trump and only 44% saying they would vote for Biden. When narrowed to registered voters, the margin only shrunk by one percentage point.
The poll is the latest data point in the debate roiling the Democratic Party whether to have Biden run for another term or to replace him as the party’s candidate for the 2024 election. Many are pointing to his advanced age as a problem that might dissuade many voters from supporting his reelection campaign.
Of respondents who said they were Democrats or independents who lean Democrat, only 44% supported Biden as the party’s nominee in 2023. Nearly half, 49%, said that the party should choose another nominee.
The president angrily lashed out at a reporter in July after he asked him to respond to polling showing many Democrats didn’t want him to run again.
“They want me to run,” he exclaimed and yelled at the reporter. “You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92% of Democrats if I ran would vote for me.”
Biden is likely to tout his economic policies during the State of the Union speech on Tuesday. While the unemployment rate remains low, wage growth has been minor and mostly undone by the plague of high inflation.
The poll also found that 53% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s job performance and only 42% approved of his performance.
Here’s more about the damaging Biden poll: Breaking down the recent ABC News/WaPo poll ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union l ABCNL www.youtube.com
Such a smash success has Joe Biden’s presidency been so far that even the Chinese are sending up balloons. That’s more or less what Biden will say, over and over, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The economy is humming. Inflation is cooling. Electric vehicle sales are raging. There has never been a more orderly southern border.
It will all sound very scary to viewers who will rightly begin to question their own sanity. Or perhaps it will make you feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you’re inexplicably falling behind.
Don’t panic. When confronted with these anxieties, there are steps you can take to re-ground yourself in reality. For instance, when Biden says something confusing — something like, “Folks! Energy costs are down, folks!” — remember to yourself that this is a lie. As of Monday, national gas prices averaged higher per gallon than a year before. It’s more than a dollar per gallon higher than it was in January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated.
Biden will likely also mention “steps” he has taken to control the unabated flow of hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In that stupefying moment, take a deep breath and refer to this chart maintained by Biden’s own administration, showing that December had the highest number of illegal aliens encountered by border agents — ever. That month, there were more than 250,000 migrants who unlawfully crossed into the U.S. The month before, almost 235,000. That’s nearly half a million migrants throwing themselves into the care of the American taxpayer in just two months’ time. They openly say they’re here because of Biden.
Democrat congressmen will leap to their feet and clap with ferocity when Biden says inflation is down. (Or even that higher prices are actually a great thing!) He might even say costs increased less than 6 percent from this time last year. If you feel a spinning sensation, close your eyes, count to 10, then look at this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The less-than-6 stat is if you exclude food and energy prices.
In other words, if you don’t account for the things you depend on to survive, inflation really isn’t that bad! By itself, food cost is actually up more than 10 percent. It’s probably close to 12 — and maybe much more. Energy is up more than 7 percent. Mind you, this has been a year of rising costs, where each month it’s been more expensive to simply live than it was the same time a year before.
Biden’s vertigo-inducing speech will surely go on for what feels like an eternity, earning applause for assertions that are the exact opposite of reality. But remember, this too shall pass.
The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.
How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook
In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.
One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”
Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:
The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.
The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”
While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.
Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.
Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.
5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy
The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.
Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.
Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.
Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”
“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”
Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”
The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.
After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”
Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.
Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“
Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.
A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.
Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Arecession is coming in 2023, concluded more than two-thirds of the economists at big financial institutions recently surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. Inflation is also likely to remain high. Measuring year-over-year inflation by the U.S. government’s 1980s methodology put it at 15.23 percent in November 2022 instead of the government’s claimed 7.11 percent, according to economist John Williams.
Many commentators, including me, were wrong when we previously claimed our grandkids will be paying off America’s massively unaffordable welfare state. We are all paying for it right now and are likely to be for much of our lives in inflation and other economic devastation.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s maxim that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” — meaning, inflation is always caused by government overspending — predicts continued inflation for at least the next five years, if not longer.
That’s because government entities are continuing to engage in seriously inflationary actions. They’re doing this partly because of ideology, partly to buy votes, and partly because they prefer eating away Americans’ savings to paying off the unprecedented government debt that politicians have accumulated in the last 70 years enriching their friends and buying off voters.
Inflation Means Politicians Stealing from You
A 2021 Politico profile of a former U.S. Federal Reserve member noted, “Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years.”
That dissenting former Federal Reserve committee member, Thomas Hoenig, “was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else,” the profile says. “He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.”
Essentially, the Federal Reserve has been helping Congress manufacture money to buy up the public debt they contracted by promising Americans more stuff than we can pay for. That’s been ongoing since the 1960s Great Society, which basically paid Americans with unaffordable entitlements to shut up about the steady loss of their constitutional freedoms, according to scholar Christopher Caldwell.
The Borrowing Will Go On Until It Can’t
In 2021, 41 percent of federal spendingdependedon borrowing. In 2022, 22 percent did. This means raising the cost of debt by hiking interest rates, as the Fed is now doing, could provoke a crisis because it would make Congress’s unsustainable behavior even more painful.
As a Manhattan Institute analysis by economist Brian Riedl notes, “rising interest rates risk pushing government interest costs, annual budget deficits, and total government debt to unsustainable levels … once the debt surges, even modest interest-rate movements can impose stratospheric costs.”
This would call years of government bluffing about the state of federal finances and institutions. It would require Congress not only to stop spending but to cut programs, which means angering voters. It would usher in the unavoidable and painful new era of managing America’s decline.
“Once a debt-and-interest-rate spiral begins, it is nearly impossible to escape without drastic inflation or fiscal consolidation,” Riedl notes.
However this ends, it is likely to include a lot of economic pain, one way or another. Here are just a few of the many indicators that inflationary times are not going away fast.
1. ‘Covid’ Overspending Continues Until at Least 2024
The funds for the sixth waste-packed “Covid relief bill” will be distributed to big-government donors, states, and local governments through the end of presidential election year 2024. Yes, the American Rescue Plan Act from Covid-tide sends states and local governments $350 billion that is still being rolled out — by design.
That law’s total spending comprises more than 100 times states’ 2020 budget shortfalls, and many state and local governments can hardly figure out what to do with all the money. As they take years to spend it, that money will keep juicing inflationary pressure. A similar effect is occurring with all the so-called Covid relief bills, which together sent $6 trillion spinning through the economy, devaluing our currency. Much of this wild inflationary deficit spending has been electronically printed through the Federal Reserve.
Together, 2020s federal spending allegedly in response to Covid was more than double the inflation-adjusted federal response to the 1930s Great Depression. We’re already seeing the inflationary effects of all this so-called Covid spending, and it’s not over yet.
2. Democrats and Republicans Recently Went on Even More Inflationary Spending Binges
In conjunction with Democrats’ mega-spending “infrastructure” and “green energy” bills soon after Covid that also helped them win Congress and the presidency in 2020, all this extra spending is projected to increase the federal debt by an unprecedented $6.5 trillion, costing more than the 20 years of U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Riedl.
“In other words, the U.S. government is in the early stages of what is projected to be the largest government debt binge in world history,” Riedl notes.
That doesn’t even include the massive federal spending expansions to support a large army of grifters profiting off the human suffering of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Congress spent more on the first four months of Ukraine’s war than it did on the first five years of its undeclared war in Afghanistan.
Atop all this, more deficit spending is likely to come. In August 2022, Democrats confirmed yet again that historic levels of inflation that year were no impediment to their big-spending aims when Biden announced that he’d force taxpayers to assume up to nearly $1 trillion in student loans taken on by largely higher-income professionals. That spending is tied up in court and could be allowed at any time.
This all means that the source of inflation — government overspending — is at an unprecedented rate and pace, and even with the House Freedom Caucus’ negotiated limits on congressional spending activity, trillions in new spending is already locked in.
3. Build Back Bankrupt Shoveled Yet More Out the Door for Years to Come
In 2022, the Biden administration managed to get its top-priority grab-bag of increased government spending signed into law. By spending more money the government does not have and imposing more taxes, the ridiculously named Inflation Reduction Act is likely to increase inflation, said a Tax Foundation analysis.
“By increasing spending, the bill worsens inflation, especially in the first four years, as revenue raisers take time to ramp up and the deficit increases,” the foundation’s analysis says. “We find that budget deficits would increase from 2023 to 2026, potentially worsening inflation.”
Continuing to shovel money to cronies while ignoring major structural problems in the U.S. economy and federal budget process has become a hallmark of Congress in the 2000s. This has to end at some point, but until that point comes reasonable people can only expect such legislation to continue to pass, and to continue to worsen inflationary pressures.
Given how reckless both parties have been for decades on fiscal matters, it is likely this norm of spending money Congress can’t actually appropriate will continue until a major disaster ends their ability to fake.
4. Federal Officials Are Destroying the People’s Trust
Inflation happens “When money is no longer a trustworthy measure of value,” note Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames in their 2022 book, “Inflation.” Inflation is at least partly about a crisis of confidence in government — a warranted one, usually, because major inflation occurs as a result of politician malfeasance. Unfortunately, U.S. government officials are doing nothing to restore the people’s lost confidence in them — in fact, just the opposite.
In 2022, federal officials spent months denying inflation was happening. They also denied the United States was in a recession, insisting the traditional definition of two economic quarters in contraction was false when it was applied under Democrat rule. They’ve switched how they measure inflation to hide a large part of it.
U.S. leaders also refuse to stabilize our currency, instead taking actions that further erode Americans’ ability to put food on the table and get ahead through legitimately productive honest labor (as opposed to bullsh-t jobs). This does the opposite of what is needed: restore confidence in our markets by announcing strong steps to strengthen the U.S. dollar. They are also engaging in other activities that only erode confidence in the U.S. financial system, such as monetizing the federal debt and refusing to stop massive deficit spending.
Because politicians have created this situation and keep refusing to actually address it, Americans increasingly don’t trust their government or our debt-driven financial system. Polling shows public trust repeatedly hitting new record lows for every social and political institution. That’s an economic problem as well as a political and cultural problem, because a lack of confidence in markets can trigger economic growth, recession, and panics.
Usually, such crises build under the surface for a long time and then burst out into the open all of a sudden. As Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane said during a panel discussion, “Debt crises are like the Spanish Inquisition; no one expects them to come. If you knew they were coming, they would have already happened.”
5. The U.S. Federal Government Is Effectively Bankrupt and Inflation Helps It Hide That
The on-books U.S. national debt of $31.5 trillion is just the tip of the iceberg. Our entitlement systems are about to start going bankrupt, adding trillions in additional financial burdens on taxpayers. Riedl notes, “The U.S. government is projected to run a staggering $112 trillion in budget deficits over the next three decades, driven mostly by Social Security and Medicare commitments that are already set in law.”
If one adds unfunded and other liabilities that government officials keep off the books such as Federal Reserve debt, the amount the U.S. national government owes is more than $200 trillion. That doesn’t include what state and local governments owe, and many of them are also bankrupt or getting there.
“No matter what interest rate you use, the U.S. needs to immediately and permanently raise every federal tax by at least one third to pay, through time, for what our government plans to spend,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff wrote with fellow economist John Goodman in 2021. “The alternative? Massive spending cuts. And, no, the Federal Reserve can’t make this problem go away by printing the money needed by the Treasury. This would end where it always does — in hyperinflation.”
U.S. debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities — which together form a total picture of U.S. national economic entrapment — are the largest ever measured in world history. Besides Japan, which isn’t spending the majority of its debt on entitlements like the United States is, “Greece and Italy are the only other OECD countries with a total government debt exceeding that of the United States,” Riedl notes. Greece and Italy have had major sovereign debt crises that have destroyed their standards of living and brought their economies into long-term decline.
“When you look at these numbers, you realize we’re Argentina in 1910,” Kotlikoff told CNBC in 2018, before the alarmist Covid response and Biden presidency made things much worse. All it will take for these scary structural problems to become visible and impossible to ignore is a financial panic or another major event like a war. Oh, look, Congress is also pushing us ever-toward open war with Russia instead of toward peace. Brilliant.
6. Child Scarcity Will Drive Higher Prices
In March 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported the opinion of retired British central banker Charles Goodhart that global structural factors will drive higher inflation for years to come. Goodhart helped Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher break inflation in the 1980s. He told the Journal that the rising global crisis of child scarcity will also push inflation up for decades.
As labor becomes more scarce, he maintained, workers will push for higher wages, in turn driving up prices. At the same time, businesses will manufacture and invest more locally to help offset both labor shortages and the nationalist and geopolitical pressures curbing globalized supply chains. That will increase production costs and local workers’ bargaining power. Global savings will fall as older people consume more than they produce, spending particularly on healthcare. All that will push up interest rates, he predicted.
A meeting of global central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2022 for the first time since 2019 found the bankers publicly reflecting a similar assessment, the Journal reported. “I don’t think that we are going to go back to that environment of low inflation,” European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on a panel.
7. The People Who Did All This Are Still in Charge
This reality applies to nearly every major political problem: The same people who have created these messes are the same people who largely retain the power to respond to them. The same people writing massive spending bills that divert our economy away from productive labor and into rent-seekers’ pockets are still largely in charge of government spending.
There might have been a slight shift of power in the House, but there hasn’t in the Senate, nor in the presidency. The same guy who claims the power to “pen and phone” a trillion dollars in student loan bailouts is in office, and all his K Street and Wall Street buddies still have gleefully effective access. You can be sure this cabal of crooks isn’t going to be looking out for your best interests now that we’re about to have a potentially dangerous recession.
That may be the most significant systemic reason to expect our markets to be heading for an even rougher ride in 2023 than we’ve had from 2020 to 2022.
Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes.
Comments Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made on Tuesday show why he has become the single biggest obstacle to GOP success.
The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.
McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1
The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.
Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim. It ranked higher as a priority before American taxpayers gave Ukraine more than was given to their war effort by nearly every other country in the world combined. But even at the height of support for the effort, before it turned into a massive proxy war with an unclear relationship to the U.S. national interest, it was not the top issue for Republicans, coming behind the economy and the U.S. border.
A majority of Americans polled a few months ago said more money should be given to Ukraine only after wealthy European countries match what Americans have already sent — something nowhere near happening.
Republicans care deeply about borders and national sovereignty, but they rank the protection of their own open border far above the protection of the borders of other countries. It is worth remembering that the longest government shutdown in U.S. history occurred in 2019 over a fight between Congress and President Donald Trump over whether to commit a relatively paltry $5 billion to protect our country’s southern border, which Congress had refused to fund.
About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package
Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.
McConnell: "I'm pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities." pic.twitter.com/RuVcsvNX0B
The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.
Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.
The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.
Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals
What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.
It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.
McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.
However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.
The politically toxic McConnell has continuously ranked as the country’s least popular politician, well behind Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is so disliked by Americans that he is underwater by an average of 35.3 points in polls gauging his favorability.
Unfortunately for Republicans, he has been the top elected Republican in the country for the last two years, a period marked mostly by inexcusable impotence, fecklessness, and muddled messaging from the GOP.
Rather than present a coherent and persuasive vision of what Republican control of the Senate might look like, or even demonstrating consistent opposition to Democrat policies, too often McConnell overtly or covertly helped Democrats pass their signature policy goals. He had his deputy Sen. John Cornyn negotiate a bill to restrict Second Amendment rights. He notoriously and embarrassingly caved on a promise to help Democrats get huge numbers to pass their CHIPS subsidy, giving Biden a huge win he could celebrate with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo two weeks before the midterm elections.
McConnell also famously trashed Republican candidates and the voters who selected them, refused to advocate strenuously for the candidates, and failed to develop or pursue a persuasive message to Americans for voting to give Republicans control of the Senate.
When Democrats poured $75 million — not even counting the outside spending — into defending Mark Kelly’s Senate seat in Arizona, McConnell left Republican challenger Blake Masters high and dry. Masters had only $9 million. Instead, McConnell interfered in Alaska’s Senate race even though the top two contenders were both Republican. He gave his valuable cash to weak Republican Lisa Murkowski, the candidate who did not even win the Alaska Republican Party’s endorsement! Murkowski is known for not voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, among other notable decisions.
After the disappointing midterm loss, McConnell blamed others. He also allowed a dozen Republican senators to vote for a bill that would enable assaults on Republican voters who, on religious grounds, oppose redefining marriage.
So long as Mitch McConnell is the top elected Republican in D.C., eagerly trashing Republican voters, vociferously advocating for Democrat policy goals, pushing $1.7 trillion Democrat spending packages, and weakly fighting for whatever Republican goals he can be bothered to pursue, Republicans have a major problem. This is beyond obvious.
Everyone outside D.C. knows this even if few inside D.C. are willing to acknowledge it. Until they do, the Republican Party will continue to suffer.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Federal Reserve announced an interest rate hike of 0.75 percentage points, bumping the range of the federal interest rate to between 3.75% and 4% following a Wednesday meeting of Fed policymakers. The rate hike matches investor expectations and is the fifth consecutive hike since March and the fourth at this aggressive pace since June as the Federal Reserve attempts to cool the economy and blunt persistently high inflation, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. All eyes are now on the Fed’s December meeting, with investors debating whether the Fed will continue at its aggressive pace of 0.75 percentage point hikes or slow to 0.5 in a bid to ease the pressure on an economy an emerging consensus of analysts say is heading towards a recession. (RELATED: European Central Bank Takes Action As EU Teeters On Brink Of Recession)
Some investors were hoping the Fed would begin a “pivot” towards reduced rate hikes in December after various signs that the economy was beginning to slow, Reuters reported Tuesday. However, following a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Tuesday that showed an unexpectedly strong labor market, with job openings in September nearly recouping an August decline, some investors believe the Fed will likely see itself as having more work to do in prompting a slowdown.
“Despite other signs of economic deceleration,” Ronald Temple, head of U.S. equity at financial advisory firm Lazard Asset Management, told Reuters, “the job openings data taken together with nonfarm payroll growth indicate the Fed is far from the point where it can declare victory over inflation and lift its foot off the economic brake.”
The Fed is expected to raise interest rates again today by .75% in a poor attempt to curb inflation. Meanwhile oil companies have reported over $50 billion in third quarter profits exceeding expectations. Corporate greed is driving inflation.
So-called “core inflation,” which measures inflation less food and energy, ticked up to 5.1% year-on-year in September, according to the Fed’s preferred inflation metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index. The more well-known Consumer Price Index (CPI) has repeatedly come in hot, with its most recent reading also showing soaring core inflation, up 0.6% on a monthly basis in September and up 6.6% on an annual basis.
Heightened rates have pushed people away from buying houses at the fastest rates on record, as 30-year fixed mortgage rates hit their highest levels in 20 years. Elevated interest rates are also putting pressure on the federal government, with the cost of interest on the $31.1 trillion national debt set to surpass the $750 billion spent on defense this fiscal year by 2026, according to CNN.
Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina claimed during a Thursday MSNBC appearance that the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats knew some of their moves would spur inflation.
“All of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise. And we do know that price gouging takes place and that’s what Senator Warnock is concerned about in Georgia,” Clyburn told host Jose Diaz-Balart. “We knew the moment we went to aid the Ukrainians, the Russians would do what they could possibly do to undercut this administration, so they cut this deal with OPEC nations to reduce the production of oil so as to drive the price of gasoline up.” (RELATED: JPMorgan Chase CEO Issues Another Warning On US Economy: ‘This Is Serious’)
President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, which had $1.9 trillion in spending, into law in March 2021. Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which largely consists of green energy programs, healthcare spending and a massive increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, into law in August 2022.
WATCH:
The Consumer Price Index increased 8.2% year-to-year in September after rising by 8.3% in August, 8.6% in July, 9.1% in June and 8.5% in May. The Biden administration and Democrats have blamed high gas prices on Russian President Vladimir Putin, but some experts have said that President Biden’s hostility towards fossil fuel production is to blame.
“We are not going to allow these kinds of intimidations be it by big, corporations who are raising prices when they should not be or foreign countries who are doing untoward things in retaliation for our assisting our alliances that’s not going to trump, and that’s an intended pun, there our concern for people getting back on their feet in this country, getting more cash in people’s hands, getting people back to work, fixing our infrastructure,” Clyburn said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday if anybody approves of the administration’s handling of inflation.
Doocy asked the press secretary why inflation is continuing to skyrocket despite President Joe Biden continuously promising to tackle the issue. Jean-Pierre expressed the administration’s understanding of the American people’s frustrations and warned that Republicans are going to make inflation worse by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act.
“The president understands, and we’ve talked about this many times, that inflation is an issue. High costs, costs, is an issue for the American people and so he’s been very clear about making that his number one economic priority,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he has done the work, and he’s done the work with congressional Democrats when you think about the Inflation Reduction Act which is going to lower the cost for our seniors, millions and millions of seniors across the country. When you think about that $2,000 cap on their own Medicare prescription, when you think about the thousands of dollars that our seniors pay a month, now that’s going to be $2,000 a year.”
“That is the work that congressional Democrats and the president has done. Republicans did not vote for that at all and what Republicans want to do is that they want to repeal that very historic piece of legislation that is also going to lower energy costs, that is also going to help fight climate change. They want to get rid of it. So there is a contrast that we are going to make which is how Republicans are actually going to make things worse and Democrats want to do the opposite and make things a little easier,” she continued.
“But, who exactly think the president is doing a good job on inflation because we’ve got a new poll that finds he receives his lowest job ratings on inflation at -38 points,” Doocy said.
“Republicans in Congress refuse, they refuse to be partners with us on this,” she answered. “They refuse to help us. You think about the American Rescue Plan that has helped create an economy that is indeed resilient, that created jobs, they refuse to help.”
The Fox News reporter pointed out a general consensus held by most economists that the American Rescue Plan “has contributed” to inflation. She referred Doocy to Treasury Department Janet Yellen’s scheduled statement on these reports, then argued that the pieces of legislation passed by the Biden administration are “popular with the American people.”
“They are popular. They are popular with the American people,” she said. “They understand, the American people understand what these pieces of legislation that we have worked so hard to get across the line, that are now law, is going to change lives of the American people. Now, is there work to be done? There’s always more work to be done but we are taking the steps to do that. Again, congressional Republicans, they are doing nothing, absolutely nothing. They want to repeal, they want to take away the advances we have made.”
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) indicated that inflation rose 8.2% year-over-year in September. The issue has remained a prioritized issue among the majority of potential voters in the midterm elections.
Inflation increased 0.4% in September from August as “core” inflation, measuring the price of goods excluding food and energy, soared above expectations to a 40-year-high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The decline in overall inflation can be attributed largely to a decline in energy costs, although they remain elevated by 19.8% year-on-year compared to 23.8% in August, according to the BLS. Food costs remain historically high, with the overall food index falling slightly to 11.2% annually, down from 11.4% in August.
The big US data event today is, of course, the release of CPI #inflation where consensus forecasts are looking for 8.1% headline and 6.5% core. Earlier today, #Germany's annual inflation rates for September came in at 10.0% (1.9% MoM) and 10.9% (harmonized–2.2%), same as August. pic.twitter.com/CMTEjPHgb2
With both headline and core inflation still well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%, the Federal Reserve is unlikely to halt its aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes, CNBC reported Wednesday. Goldman Sachs warned investors late September that even in the event of a so-called “soft landing,” where the Federal Reserve tames inflation without inducing a recession or a significant increase in unemployment, the Fed is likely to continue aggressive rate hikes through the end of the year, raising rates from the current baseline of 3.25% up to 4.5%.
The U.S. added 263,000 jobs in September, the slowest rate of the year, as the labor market continued to cool. Bank of America’s chief U.S. economist Michael Gapen warned Monday that unemployment could spike if the Fed continues its rate hikes, pushing unemployment as high as 5.5% from its current level at 3.5%, costing the U.S. 175,000 jobs per month early next year.
“No doubt the Fed still has its work cut out for them, and if tomorrow’s CPI read is hot, don’t be surprised to see some investors come to grips with how long the road to tamer inflation may be,” Mike Loewengart, head of portfolio management at Morgan Stanley told CNBC.
The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses — the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion.
The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply.
In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.
This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in a recent powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.
Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that.
As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to strangle at birth.
Passage of the comically mistitled Inflation Reduction Act places this option beyond Biden’s reach, even if he were so inclined. Democrats are hardly going to take a vow of climate omertà when they’ve achieved a political triumph of pushing through Congress what they regard as the most significant climate legislation to date.
Although the price of oil has slipped back from recent highs, the factors behind high gasoline prices remain in place. Foremost among these is the steep decline in U.S. oil refinery capacity triggered when Covid lockdowns crushed demand but continued after the economy reopened. There has never been such a large fall in operable refinery capacity. Moreover, Gulf Coast refineries were operating at 97 percent of their operating capacity in June 2022. As Toomey remarks, “There isn’t any more blood to be squeezed out of this turnip.”
Toomey identifies five factors driving this decline in refinery capacity. EPA biofuel blending mandates impose crippling costs on smaller refineries. When conventional refineries are converted to processing biofuels, up to 90 percent of their capacity is lost.
Biofuel mandates cost consumers far more than federal excise taxes. Toomey demonstrates that the Biden administration’s claim that biofuel mandates protect consumers from oil-price volatility is totally false; biofuel prices, he writes, “are essentially indexed to the price of crude oil.”
Biden could order the reversal of the EPA’s retroactive biofuel threshold rules. That he has not done so demonstrates that the administration isn’t serious about making energy affordable again. High prices for fossil fuel energy are an intended part of the plan.
Corporate and Wall Street ESG policies are another factor driving refinery closures, especially of facilities owned by European oil companies to meet punishing decarbonization targets that will effectively end up sunsetting them as oil companies. If finalized as proposed, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate disclosure rules, with the strong support of the Biden administration, will heighten the vulnerability of U.S. oil and gas companies to climate activists and woke investors to force them to progressively divest their carbon-intensive activities, such as refining crude oil, and eventually out of the oil and gas sector altogether.
To these should be added aggressive federal policies aimed at phasing out gasoline-powered vehicles in favor of electric vehicles (EVs); an administration staffed from top to bottom by militants who believe that climate is the only thing that matters in politics; and an increasingly hostile political climate (“You know the deal,” Biden said of oil executives when campaigning for the presidency. “When they don’t deliver, put them in jail”).
These policies, argues Toomey, will see China become the world’s leading oil refiner for years to come. Will Biden find himself asking China for supplies of refined gasoline? He might well find himself being saved from such an unfortunate position, made more so by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan, by help from the other side of the southern border.
Mexico is constructing a $12 billion refinery, due to start producing gasoline next year. Perhaps President Biden’s next foreign trip should be to Mexico City.
The core index of the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation went up in August, despite a historically aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes intended to slow it.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), which measures the value of goods and services purchased by “persons” residing in the U.S., was down slightly in August from 6.4% to 6.2% annually, but was higher than economists anticipated, according to CNBC. This decline was almost entirely off the back of falling energy prices, with so-called core PCE, which does not consider the more-volatile food and energy indices, increasing in August from 4.7% to 4.9% annually, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
This new data closely mirrors the results of the more well-known Consumer Price Index (CPI), released earlier this month, which also saw core prices rise as overall inflation remained near historic highs. As inflation lingers, investors have grown increasingly concerned that the Fed’s aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes will continue unabated, prompting the Dow Jones Industrial Average to seesaw in and out of a major slump known as a bear market.
Aug PCE #inflation hotter than expected, w/headline +6.2% down from +6.3% in Jul but higher than expected +6%. Core +4.9% (up from 4.7% in Jul & ahead of 4.7% expectations). This is not positive, but it also won’t be terribly shocking after firm CPI & PPI, @knowledge_vital writes pic.twitter.com/uVoEUVl4tJ
The Fed has been consistent at all levels that high interest rates will remain “until the job is done,” even at the cost of jobs or triggering a recession, as Fed Chair Jerome Powel has said multipletimes. On Tuesday, Neel Kashkari, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said that the Fed would not repeat the mistakes of the 1970s by bringing down interest rates too quickly, with Vice Chair Lael Brainard echoing that sentiment in a Friday morning speech, according to CNBC.
This messaging, in conjunction with the Fed’s aggressive rate hike campaign, has led Goldman Sachs to slash its expectations for the S&P 500 stock index by about 16%, anticipating the Fed will raise rates by at least another 1.25% by the end of the year, to 4.5% from 3.25%.
Food, rent and utilities are among the critical products that the Fed anticipates will continue to face significant inflation until next year at the earliest as the Fed struggles to bring inflation back to its target of 2%.
Why have investors been restricted in buying GameStop shares?
The stock market closed out a week of intense losses with the Dow Jones falling more than 750 points Friday, entering bear market territory amid a wave of investor fears.
At time of writing, the index had, at its lowest point, fallen more than 2.7% during the day to around 29,300 points, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 down by 2.7% and 2.64% respectively at time of writing. With the Dow Jones officially falling more than 20% from its recent peak in June, stocks will have entered a slump known by investors as a “bear market” if the losses hold when trading ends Friday, according to CNBC. (RELATED: Stocks Stay Volatile As Recession Fears Loom)
The Nasdaq was down by 30.92% this year, with the S&P 500 down 22.98% this year, as of close of business yesterday, according to data from MarketWatch.
“Stocks were overvalued because their nominal price has been fueled by the inflation of the Federal Reserve,” Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As soon as the Fed took away the punch bowl… what happened? Stocks immediately took a nosedive and are continuing to do so, because the only thing that has been fueling this economic recovery hasn’t been real growth, but again, money creation.”
This Great Bond Bear Market is "thus far a doozy," with the worst losses since 1949, 1931 & 1920: BofA's Hartnett. This "threatens credit events & liquidations of the most crowded trades," long dollar, PE, big tech. "True capitulation is when investors sell what they love & own" pic.twitter.com/R3CSUXTJNo
After wavering early this week as investors awaited the Federal Reserve’s Wednesday announcement of a third interest rate hike in just four months, stocks tumbled, with Goldman Sachs warning clients that investors are preparing for recession and slashing its expectations for the S&P 500 stock index by 16%.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been clear that he is willing for there to be some economic “pain” in order to combat inflation, even as the Biden administration touts its economic record.
Antoni noted that major market moves such as this are typically driven by the “institutional investment class,” and that individual retail investors typically got crushed unless they had “incredible foresight.” Unless retail investors had an immediate need to sell, Antoni cautioned against doing so, urging retail investors to weather the panic.
“Now we’re faced with the reality of having to do it the hard way, of having to actually grow the economy and not just grow the money supply.” Antoni said.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The prices faced by producers rose by 8.7% year-on-year in August as inflation continues to challenge businesses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
While down from the near-record highs of 11.3% in June, the current price increases were over 4 times the typical rates — between 1 and 3% annually — seen in 2019 and 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures the prices suppliers charge businesses and other customers. These elevated rates mirror Tuesday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), which pegged inflation at 8.3%, according to the BLS. (RELATED: Food Prices Hit 40-Year High, Keep Breaking Records Every Month)
The progress that comes with the Inflation Reduction Act was declared a failure before it was a success.
But we didn’t give up. We had a vision, a plan, and we stuck to it.
And the result is we’re getting the job done for the American people.
A significant component of the decrease was accounted for by a 5.2% decline in energy costs, according to the BLS. Mirroring July’s results, the index for foods and all goods less food and energy rose by 0.1% and 0.2%, respectively.
The index for all products other than foods, energy and trade services rose by 5.6% year-over-year, less than the 5.8% posted in July, according to the BLS. The price for unprocessed goods was still incredibly elevated, at 36.1%, more than July’s value of 30.4%, as a spike in the price of natural gas kept prices up.
The Biden administration has been taking a victory lap on economic conditions, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claiming the economy had undergone one of the fastest recoveries in modern history. President Joe Biden claimed that the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act had helped to combat inflation “at the kitchen table,” in a Tuesday speech at the White House.
Simultaneously, the BLS’ monthly CPI report placed inflation at 8.3%, and found that food prices had increased 13.5% annually. Rent and electricity were also up, 6.7% and 15.8% respectively.
Increased rent prices have put pressure on families in particular, with the average cost of a single family rental home up about 13.4% this year, according to CNBC. At a median cost of $2,495 per month, families who might otherwise save to purchase a house are being priced out of home ownership, CNBC reported.
Gas prices also remained incredibly elevated, despite having fallen 12.2% month-on-month, and were still up 25.6% compared to the same time last year, the BLS reported.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Inflation was at 8.3% in August, significantly exceeding economists’ predictions with core prices jumping even higher, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Core prices, which measures all prices less food and energy, remained elevated at 6.3%, slightly higher than July’s 5.9%, according to the BLS. With core prices remaining strongly elevated, it is unlikely that the Federal Reserve will slow its rate of interest increases designed to combat inflation, and will once again hike rates by 0.75% next week, according to The Wall Street Journal. (RELATED: Fed Unveils Bleak Forecast In Another Troubling Sign For The Economy)
Economists had predicted inflation to decrease from 8.5% to around 8.1%.
“The Federal Reserve will require at least three months of reassuring inflation data—along with evidence of a cooling labor market—before considering softening its tone,” said Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, according to the WSJ. This estimate is in line with the Federal Reserve’s estimate that the fight against inflation will likely take until the end of the year, according to a report.
The energy index continued to fall 5% from July, but energy costs have still increased 23.8% year-on-year, according to the BLS. Gasoline in particular remains high at 25.6%, down from 44.9% in July, with fuel oil remaining up 68.6% even after falling 5.9% in August.
Food prices posted the largest 12 month increase in 43 years, with a 11.4% year-on-year increase in national food prices, up from July’s 10.9%, according to the BLS. Prices for shelter also remain elevated, increasing 6.2% year-on-year, compared to 5.7% in July.
Under President Biden’s economic plan, we’re: – Bringing home jobs that went overseas – Making things here in America – Making our supply chains more secure – Winning the race for the future
The Biden administration has been taking a victory lap on economic conditions, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claiming that the U.S. had undergone an exceptionally rapid recovery “by any traditional metric,” in remarks at a Ford electric vehicle facility Sept. 8. She went on to say that “Household balance sheets are strong.”
The Federal Reserve, which operates independently of the Biden administration, has been less optimistic, and described the economy as “generally weak” in a report just one day prior to Yellen’s speech. Roughly half of the regional banks that comprise the Federal Reserve system reported that their regional economies were either stagnant or declining, with the remainder reporting either slight or modest growth.
“Last month President Biden made a huge production over a 0.0% month-to-month change in the CPI from June to July,” said Peter C. Earle, economist at the American Institute for Economic Research in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There isn’t anything to celebrate in today’s July-to-August CPI numbers, so the likely spin will be to return to touting the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.”
Talk about irony: A governor who violated his own Covid lockdown rules by attending a party at a chichi restaurant could sign legislation that puts many fast-food establishments out of business.
Late in August, the California legislature passed a bill that would impose new mandates on certain dining establishments. Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-French Laundry, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the bill. If it becomes law, the measure would set an example that unions hope to export elsewhere, while raising inflation in the nation’s most populous state. Here’s how.
Separate Minimum Wage
The bill would create a council to mandate a separate minimum wage applying only to certain fast-food establishments. According to the bill, the council could impose a minimum wage for these establishments next year of as high as $22 per hour—an amount nearly 42 percent higher than the statewide minimum wage of $15.50 that takes effect on Jan. 1, and an amount subject to additional annual increases. Creating a higher minimum wage would raise business costs, and help push prices ever higher. As it is, families have struggled to keep up with the current high rate of inflation, with real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) average hourly earnings falling in most months over the past year. Hitting these families with even higher costs for a meal at a fast-food establishment—sometimes the only “luxury” working-class households can afford—would provide ordinary California residents another proverbial kick in the teeth.
The new council of 10 appointed individuals will “establish sector-wide minimum standards on wages, working hours, and other working conditions adequate to ensure and maintain the health, safety, and welfare of, and to supply the necessary cost of proper living to, fast food restaurant workers.” (The bill doesn’t specify whether the “cost of proper living” includes dinners at restaurants like the one Newsom decided to frequent in the fall of 2020.)
To put it more bluntly: A group of unelected bureaucrats will decide how to micro-manage hundreds of businesses across the Golden State. These mandates will of course raise costs for the restaurants, and the restaurants will have no choice but to raise prices in response.
Inefficient, Absurd Loopholes
The requirements in the bill only apply to chain restaurants with at least 100 establishments nationwide, and which serve food in the following manner:
(1) For immediate consumption either on or off the premises.
(2) To customers who order or select items and pay before eating.
(3) With items prepared in advance, including items that may be prepared in bulk and kept hot, or with items prepared or heated quickly.
(4) With limited or no table service. Table service does not include orders placed by a customer on an electronic device.
One could easily envision businesses changing their model to avoid becoming ensnared by the bill’s mandates. For instance, a restaurant could operate like Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City, where customers receive tickets upon entering and pay after eating, on their way out the door. Such a system would mean that restaurants would not meet the “pay before eating” definition contained within the statute, but it also could raise the risk of “dine-and-dash” incidents, which would raise a restaurant’s costs.
Similarly, establishments could try to exempt themselves from the reach of the new council by providing full table service. Of course, providing full table service would raise businesses’ costs (although perhaps not as much as complying with the mandates created by the new regulatory regime), exhaust employees by forcing them to wait on customer tables in addition to their existing duties, or both.
The idea that California could potentially do for fast-food restaurants what a full-service-only requirement has done to New Jersey’s gas stations—whereby McDonald’s and Burger King employees in California could only ask “Would you like fries with that?” while customers are reclined at table—illustrates the absurdity of this bill. Newsom should do his state a favor and veto the measure, sending this ill-tasting legislative creation back to the cooks in the legislature who created this mess.
Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of the book, “The Case Against Single Payer.” He is on Twitter: @chrisjacobsHC. Previously he was a senior health policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a senior policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, and a senior policy analyst with the Joint Economic Committee’s Senate Republican staff. During the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, Jacobs was a policy adviser for the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Mike Pence. In the first two years of the law’s implementation, he was a health policy analyst for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Jacobs got his start on Capitol Hill as an intern for then-Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from American University, where he is a part-time teacher of health policy. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Forty-two years ago this month, the Republican National Convention in Detroit nominated Ronald Reagan for president, a move that would not only forever change the GOP but alter the course of American history. Reagan’s acceptance speech from the 1980 convention is understandably the famous one, but another convention speech is also worthy of remembrance today, when so much of what ailed America in the Jimmy Carter era seems to be back with a vengeance.
That would be Sen. Barry Goldwater’s speech. Goldwater, the unlikely Republican nominee in 1964, was entering the final stretch of his long political career. In the 16 years since his failed run for the White House, he had become a kind of elder statesman of the conservative wing of the GOP that was then coming into power. He understood clearly the problems facing the country, and what to do about them. Above all, he told the truth.
Received at the convention hall to a loud, extended ovation, Goldwater launched into a speech that now reads like a commentary on the Biden administration. He opened with a “recital of the tragic miscalculations of the president and his administration.”
“Those economic decisions that have given us the highest rate of inflation in our history. Those foreign policy decisions which have cost us the respect of our enemies and destroyed the confidence of our friends throughout the world. And those military decisions which have reduced us to the rank of a second-rate power.”
These problems, Goldwater explained, are not the fault of the American people, who did not forget who they are or abandon the principles of the Declaration of Independence. “And yet this beloved country of ours stands in great peril,” he said. “Our fellow countrymen are distraught, confused, alarmed, and uncertain. Fear and distress abound.”
As in 1980, so it is today. The flurry of recentcomparisons in the corporate press between President Joe Biden and former President Jimmy Carter attest to the parallels. Never mind that most of these pieces are facile attempts to defend the Biden administration by arguing that, really, Carter wasn’t that bad, and the failures of his presidency weren’t his fault. The comparison is nevertheless apt.
The fact is, America in 2022 is beset with problems that look a lot like the problems of the Carter era: record-high inflation, gas prices at historic highs, rising crime, multiple foreign policy crises, flagging confidence in the American military, and economic recession hanging in the air. Like Carter, Biden is unequal to the task. Not only does he seem incapable of fixing these problems, he doesn’t even seem to understand them (and his administration refuses to acknowledge them).
Goldwater, who saw all these things playing out during the Carter administration, knew what was needed: “It is my solemn belief that we must order a dramatic change in the course this country is headed.”
The rising distrust of the government — as well-deserved in 1980 as it is today — must change to confidence in it, he said. There must be a change from uncertainty and weakness to strength and trust. We must “turn our backs on the false promises of something for nothing” and the “perpetual care and eternal bliss” of a “super-federal state,” and reaffirm our belief in a Constitution that “guarantees individual freedom, and demands individual responsibility.”
Not surprisingly, given the ongoing Iran hostage crisis and rising tensions with the Soviet Union, Goldwater emphasized the need for a strong foreign policy and a peerless military. Taking a shot directly at Carter over the Iran debacle, he said, “If our leaders had displayed the guts and the courage that America is noted for, no country in this world would ever have taken hostages from us.”
Instead, America was projecting weakness: “Other nations in the free world, dismayed and confused by the aimless, inconsistent, contradictory foreign policy of the United States, have lost confidence in our leadership.”
Almost every charge Goldwater leveled at the Carter administration and the Washington establishment in 1980 could be leveled at Biden and the political establishment today. What, after all, is Biden’s foreign policy if not aimless, inconsistent, and contradictory? After the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last fall, Biden has embarked on a muddled and ineffectual response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with an open-ended commitment of financial aid and weapons that has depleted our resources and distracted from the only genuine major threat to American national security: communist China.
Even if younger Americans today have no memory of the Carter years, their dissatisfaction with Biden after less than two years in office mirrors the dissatisfaction with Carter near the end of his single term in office. Recent polling showed Biden with a record low 36 percent approval rating, which is around where Carter’s approval rating was for the last 10 months of his presidency.
Goldwater ended his convention speech on a note of warning that America was in grave danger. “We are Republicans,” he said. “We love our republic. And our job, ladies and gentlemen, is to defend it — and let me tell you, save it.”
Perhaps more than any other figure at that time, Goldwater understood the peril of utopians getting control of government, and that taking power back from them was the only way to save the republic.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
It’s no exaggeration: Joe Biden is bringing the country down in a tailspin. From historic failures internationally to crises at home and dropping approval ratings, Biden’s administration makes every single thing it touches worse.
Taken alone, each of these failures is pretty damning, but as a whole — or at least even just this small sampling — they reveal the degree to which our 46th president is a danger to America’s well-being.
1. Facilitating a Deadly Border
On June 20, an abandoned semi-truck was found to contain more than 40 dead migrants, with the death toll later rising to 51. The deceased have been confirmed to be Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran citizens entering the United States illegally, although 20 others’ national origins remain undetermined.
On a recent trip to Mexico, Federalist staff saw firsthand the devastating effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce U.S. border and immigration laws. As a result, our southern border is controlled by cartels, which smuggle and exploit men, women, and children — a process that can be deadly.
2. Shipping Illegals to a Community Near You
In addition to ignoring the border crisis, the president is secretly shipping illegal migrants across state borders and into suburban cities and family neighborhoods. In February, he planned to dump 1,000 Afghan refugees right next to Loudoun High School without contacting local law enforcement about the plan.
According to The Daily Wire, the Department of Homeland Security said the Federal Protection Service would provide security for students located next to unvetted foreign citizens, but since FPS has no jurisdiction in Loudoun County, this pledge was meaningless.
3. Holding Kids Hostage to Trans Radicalism
In May, the Biden administration attempted to strongarm public schools into letting males who identify as transgender use girls’ bathrooms by threatening to pull federal funding for school lunches if they didn’t. That’s 30 million lunch-program students Biden took hostage to push his party’s trans radicalism.
4. Tapping into Emergency Petroleum Reserves
Laying all blame on Putin for gas prices that are double what they were before Biden took office, Biden has commissioned the selling of 1 million barrels of oil per day for six months from our national emergency reserve. Instead of saving our stockpile for an emergency and resurrecting the Keystone pipeline and other major American energy projects Biden killed, the administration is using up the largest release from the stockpile in our history — and suggesting you buy an electric car.
5. Botching the Afghanistan Withdrawal
Pulling out of Afghanistan was always the plan — but not the disastrous way Biden did it. By leaving before Afghan forces were prepared, abandoning the Bagram Air Base before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies, and leaving American citizens, weapons, and equipment for the Taliban to commandeer, Biden committed a tremendous strategic and humanitarian error.
6. Supporting Child Castration and Sterilization
The White House is openly championing “gender-affirming” surgeries and brainwashing attempts targeted at young children, and Biden is not simply a moderate bystander. He has threatened “immediate action” against state governors and attorneys general who decry castration of a kid as child abuse.
7. Driving up Inflation
As Americans are reminded every time they buy groceries or fill their gas tanks, Biden’s policies have caused, or at least exacerbated, record inflation and unsustainably high consumer prices. By throwing money at problems the government largely created through the so-called American Rescue Plan, relinquishing U.S. energy independence, and printing more money, among other fiscally irresponsible policies, the president has helped make just about everything Americans need more expensive.
8. Letting Babies Go Hungry
Due to government-mandated shutdowns that slowed deliveries, burdensome regulations, and then Biden’s Food and Drug Administration’s shutdown of the largest baby formula-making plants in the country, Americans found themselves unable to find needed formula, leaving infants in hospitals and families desperate. Their desperation turned to frustration with the Biden administration when they realized the president was using their tax dollars to buy and ship formula to illegal immigrants at the border.
9. Forcing the Covid Jab
Despite his so-called “pro-choice” posture, Biden sought to force Americans to put vaccines into their bodies by issuing a rule that all workers in any business of more than 100 employees must get vaccinated or else be constantly tested. His vaccine-or-test mandate for workers was overruled by the Supreme Court and later withdrawn by his administration.
10. Scheming to Enact Abortion Radicalism
Biden has expressed support for an abortion-specific carveout for the filibuster, advocating for an exemption strictly to empower Congress to codify Roe v. Wade without having enough votes. This radicalism is despite his previous passion for the filibuster and Democrats’ constant use of it during President Donald Trump’s tenure.
11. Tanking His Own Approval
Biden has utterly failed to keep the country’s approval, with his ratings down to record lows. The latest CNBC poll out this week shows Biden’s approval rating at an abysmal 36 percent. That’s even worse than Trump’s lowest ratings ever, despite the former president weathering instability over Covid-19 and cultural upheaval after the death of George Floyd.
Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.
Discontent with left-wing policy failures is triggering massive protests all over the world. Just don’t expect to read all about it in the New York Times.
If you skim the front pages of major corporate news outlets, you’ll find no mention of the economic protests raging in Spain, Morocco, Greece, and the United Kingdom.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, 11 countries are currently seeing protests of more than 1,000 people in response to the rising cost of living and other economic woes in 2022. As of July 5, Carnegie had recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, 5,000 in Iran, 5,000 in Peru, 1,000 people in Argentina, 1,000 in Morocco, and 1,000 in the U.K.
When vaccine passports were being implemented, protests took place around the world – but there was hardly any coverage from the media.
Due to the cost of living crisis, protests are happening around the world – but again, the media turns a blind eye.
Many of the French protesters took to the streets on May Day for salary increases and against President Emmanuel Macron’s increase of the retirement age. Fifty-four people were reportedly arrested in Paris after some demonstrations turned violent. France’s economy, Europe’s third-largest, shrank in the first quarter of 2022, and in June, inflation shot up 5.8 percent compared to last year. Protesters also held demonstrations in March, with some complaining they had lost 15 to 20 percent of their purchasing power. Meanwhile, France’s answer to inflation? Keep spending; the country is throwing $20.4 billion at the problem.
In Spain, with gas subsidies, direct grants, and an increase in the minimum wage, the socialist-leaning government has seen only rising inflation rates (10.2 percent), and the accompanying price hikes are driving thousands of people onto the streets to protest. The country is finding out the hard way what a 40 percent reliance on renewable energy will do to the labor market. With its high unemployment rate at 13.65 percent as of the first quarter of 2022, labor shortages are raising prices on staple grocery items to an almost 30-year high. Thousands of demonstrators protested in March for relief in the form of tax cuts.
Meanwhile, it’s no surprise that any supply issues, aggravated or initiated by the Russia-Ukraine war, would burden Greece’s weakened economy that only just emerged from a decade-long crisis in 2018 to be sent right back by Covid shutdowns in 2020. In April, thousands gathered at a labor union-organized rally outside parliament in protest of inflation, which followed a February demonstration where about 10,000 people showed up to protest electricity prices that had leaped 56 percent, fuel prices that had jumped 21.6 percent, and natural gas prices that had skyrocketed 156 percent in January.
In India, a country locked in a vicious cycle of going into debt to pay off interest of former debts, the increasing cost of living is racking the country. In March, an estimated 50 million workers participated in a two-day strike to protest the loss of jobs and income, with communist groups organizing rallies in May decrying the high rate of inflation.
The socialist government in Argentina that led the country to default seven times and produced the largest decline in the relative standard of living in the world since 1900 is trying to do something new. On Monday, Argentina’s new economy minister Silvina Batakis announced her plan to cut the fiscal deficit — a proposal more than a thousand Argentines are protesting.
Decades of government spending and faulty economic policies have led to Argentina’s inflation rate growing to 58 percent. Prices are liquid and through the roof, with iPhones costing six months’ rent and a two-hour plane ticket equaling the cost of a month’s college tuition. Batakis plans to hold Argentina to the terms of a $44 billion debt deal it made earlier this year with the International Monetary Fund. Thousands of Argentines meanwhile flocked to protest against the economic hardships felt by the country upon cutting spending and took up banners crying for Argentina’s separation from the IMF.
The United Kingdom is suffering from a high 9.1 percent inflation rate as of May, and many are tired of the government’s response. Brits flocked out in February to protest rising costs of living, with demonstrations held in at least 25 towns and cities and signs reading, “tax the rich” and “freeze prices not the poor.” The U.K.’s inflation rate was already at 5.4 percent in January of this year due in part to the 2020 Covid shutdowns, but it has since almost doubled, largely due to the EU’s sanctions on Russian oil. In June, thousands marched down central London in protest, wanting the government to boost its welfare response.
Still reeling from the worst drought it has had in 40 years, Morocco is seeing price spikes on even the most basic goods. Thousands of Moroccans joined protests in February to decry the increasing cost of living, with unions staging more demonstrations in April. The country has high unemployment rates and large public debt, along with a heavy reliance on imports.
Aside from a scant headline here and there, America’s most popular news providers, The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and NBC, did not cover these protests, despite the French and Spanish protests being 10 to 100 times larger than the protests these corporate media giants did report.
None of these four major outlets wrote a single line on the protests of more than 100,000 demonstrators in Spain, more than 10,000 in Greece, more than 1,000 in Morocco, and more than 1,000 in the U.K. The New York Times published one lone article on the strike in India, where an estimated 50 million people walked off the job. The Washington Post has two small articles on the Argentinian protests of more than 1,000 as inflation appears set to hit 70 percent, and it has reported once on the May Day protests in France where more than 120,000 people protested government pension reforms. NBC mentioned the May Day protests once in a world report. This is the entire 2022 coverage by these media giants of these countries’ protests over economic turmoil.
Of these 11 countries, only four made any major headlines. The corporate press oftentimes only highlights these economic protests when they get so loud they can no longer be ignored, as we saw with Kazakhstan’s kill order to quell protests and the Sri Lankans’ attack on their president’s home. Over the weekend, the biased media finally began covering the Sri Lanka protests that are over 10,000 people strong — but only because footage of demonstrators swarming the president’s residence by the thousands on Saturday went viral.
Corporate media won’t talk about the rest of these protests because the countries are struggling from economically disastrous policies akin to President Joe Biden’s. Any show of economic turmoil in EU member states could be traced back to EU sanctions on Russia or green energy failures, which would fly in the face of the corporate media’s agenda. Many of these countries have inflationary monetary policies.
The leftist media will tell you about Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Iran, and Peru, however, but only to bolster its pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia narrative that denies the realities of war to promote Biden’s efforts to empty our pockets and replenish Ukraine’s.
In its treatment of the Kazakhstan protests, The Washington Post made sure to mention the country’s relationship with Russia. The Times’ articles on the Sri Lanka protests framed the economic downturns in terms of problems stemming from Russia’s invasion and ignored Sri Lanka’s Green Deal ban on chemical fertilizer that ultimately crashed its economy. Both CNN’s coverage of protests in Iran and NBC’s reports of those in Peru likewise stressed the Russia-Ukraine war as the cause for economic turmoil.
The media only highlight these world protests when they grow too big to ignore or when the facts can be skewed toward their preferring narratives. Cherry-picking which protests to highlight gives media cover to paint them as isolated incidents in non-Western countries instead of a worldwide trend showing the consequences of embracing left-wing policies. After all, Biden is making the same blunders in the United States, and corporate media can’t have Americans connecting those dots.
The U.S. labor market is in shambles. Inflation has skyrocketed to a 40-year high at 9.1 percent. The Biden administration is drawing down our emergency oil reserves, shipping it overseas to nations that can’t function on their “Green Energy” policies any more than we can. Irony alert: The oil will go through a European pipeline despite Biden citing climate conservation to shut down our own Keystone pipeline.
Discontent with these policy failures is triggering massive protests all over the world. Just don’t expect to read all about it in the New York Times.
Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.
Videos of Sri Lankans swimming in their president’s pool and tens of thousands swarming his residence went viral over the weekend, but precious little news of the green policies that left the island nation in anarchy made headlines.
After months of protests, the Sri Lankan people stormed the presidential suite and burned the prime minister’s residence on Saturday after both leaders escaped. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives on Wednesday after resigning, and the prime minister is promising his resignation as soon as a replacement appears.
The fuel has run out in Sri Lanka, with tuk-tuk drivers being forced to wait for days just to fill their eight-liter tanks. Power blackouts are a daily occurrence. The inflation rate in Sri Lanka reached a whopping 54.6 percent in June, and the growing cost of food, clothing, transportation, and electricity — some of which are three times the normal price — has tanked the value of the rupee. Being an island country, catching fresh fish instead of buying food would be a relief, but there’s no diesel to go out to sea to fish for them.
This crisis in Sri Lanka started in 2019. Run down by years of gross mismanagement over successive governments, Sri Lanka was saddled with mounting debt and inadequate production rates. Rajapaksa succeeded his brother in 2019, and his administration issued deep tax cuts which only made the situation worse.
In 2020, the country was hit by Covid-19 and its debt grew to over 101 percent in relation to its GDP. The pandemic wiped out much of Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, which constituted almost 12 percent of its GDP. Increasing energy prices in 2022 only further entrenched the nation in an economic crisis, and its national debt for 2022 is estimated to be nearly 109 percent in relation to its GDP.
The 2021 inflation surge that has grown into a full economic crisis is in no small part thanks to climate radicalism. Suckered by European Green Deal propaganda, the Sri Lankan government implemented a ban in April 2021 on the main thing propelling its agriculture-based economy: chemical fertilizer. On an island where 15 million out of its 22 million people rely on farming, over 90 percent of them had used chemical fertilizer prior to the ban, which went into effect immediately with no time for contingency planning. By the time the government realized its mistake, it was too late.
One-third of the farmlands lay dormant in 2021, and 85 percent of farmers faced crop losses. Small farmers bore the brunt of the burden and reported a 50 to 60 percent decrease in yield. Carrot and tomato prices increased by five times their original price. Sri Lanka’s rice production fell by 20 percent and prices jumped 50 percent in a span of six months. Formerly self-sufficient in rice, shortages forced Sri Lanka to import $450 million’s worth of the grain.
Worst yet, the fertilizer ban hit the tea industry, its second-highest export. Sri Lanka exported $1.24 billion worth of tea in 2019. These exports paid for 71 percent of the country’s food imports up until 2021. After the April ban, the tea industry crashed, with production and exports down 18 percent from November 2021 to February 2022 for a 23-year low.
Rajapaksa gave up his goal to be the first nation to fully embrace organic farming and rescinded the ban in November of 2021, but the damage was already done. Sri Lanka’s stellar ESG score (a United Nations metric of investments made following supposedly better environmental, social, and governance standards) isn’t doing its people much good.
Even the European Union, which promoted these green policies, is noticing the Green Deal isn’t a good one. Earlier this month, after solar- and wind-derived energy failed to keep Europe’s gas prices down, the EU voted to include some nuclear and natural gas power under the label of “green energy.”
Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.
Not even CNN is hiding the depressing reality that sky-high inflation is imposing on most Americans. CNN Business correspondent Rahel Solomon explained Wednesday that American life is “being shaped by the really high inflation,” which topped 8.6% in May.
“Well, I think for a lot of Americans, their reality is being shaped by the really high inflation,” Solomon explained. “We know, under the hood of that number, it’s really high energy prices, really high food prices. The costs of new and used cars have gone up, pretty much everything broad-based has gone up. The cost of shelter has gone up, which has some economists really concerned.
“I think if you are an American at home, it’s really hard, perhaps understandably, to feel great about the economy right now, even though there are some silver linings, when you’re getting hit so hard with inflation,” she added, referring to decreasing unemployment numbers.
Solomon then used a personal anecdote to highlight the everyday reality of inflation.
“Even personally, you know, I talked to economists and traders and analysts every day about this, and sometimes I find myself shocked when I go to the grocery store and look at prices and think, ‘Wow, this costs this now?’ And so, it’s understandable,” Solomon admitted.
CNN Rahel Solomon: “Pretty much everything broad-based has gone up [in price]” 💡 Energy prices up 🍗 Food prices up 🚗 New & used car prices up 🏠 Shelter prices up pic.twitter.com/sHzDfpHBmg
Solomon and CNN anchor Ana Cabrera were discussing a new Monmouth University Poll, which found that nearly 9 in 10 American adults believe the U.S. is heading in the “wrong direction.” The poll similarly found that inflation and record-high gas prices are the issues that Americans believe impact them most right now. Those discoveries are particularly alarming for Democrats, who control the White House and Congress. Such polling, along with President Joe Biden’s approval numbers, suggests Democrats will lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has not yet released inflation figures for June. Unfortunately, the consumer price index will probably show yet another inflation increase, as inflation continued to skyrocket in Europe last month. If inflation does increase, the Federal Reserve will continue to raise interest rates, an action some economists believe could lead to a recession.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell contradicted President Joe Biden on Wednesday, explaining the ongoing inflation crisis is not being driven primarily by Russian President Vladimir Putin. As recently as Monday, the Biden administration called the Ukraine war “the biggest single driver of inflation.”
While Powell testified before the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) asked Powell whether Biden’s narrative — that Putin and the Ukraine war are responsible for America’s inflation crisis — is true.
“I realize there are a number of factors that play a role in the historic inflation that we’re experiencing: supply chain disruptions, regulations that constrain supply, we’ve got rising inflation expectations and excessive fiscal spending, But the problem hasn’t sprung out of nowhere,” Hagerty said. “In January of 2021, inflation was at 1.4%. By December of 2021, it had risen to 7% — a fivefold increase. Now, since the war in Ukraine began in late February, the rate of inflation has risen incrementally another 1.6% to a current level of 8.6%. So again, from 7% to 8.6%.’
“Given how inflation has escalated over the past 18 months, would you say that the war in Ukraine is the primary driver of inflation in America?” the senator then asked.
It took just one sentence for Powell to crush Biden’s narrative.
“No, inflation was high before, certainly before the war in Ukraine broke out,” Powell admitted.
LIVE: Fed Chair Jerome Powell testifies before Senate Banking Committee on monetary policy — 6/22/22 youtu.be
Because of high inflation — which topped 8.6% in May — Powell told Congress on Wednesday that aggressive action taken by the Federal Reserve, which is necessary to combat inflation, could trigger a recession.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, on the other hand, believes a recession is all but guaranteed, precisely because of the Fed raising interest rates.
“Look, nothing is certain, and all economic forecasts have uncertainty,” Summers said Sunday on NBC. “My best guess is that a recession is ahead.’
“I base that on the fact that we haven’t had a situation like the present with inflation above 4% and unemployment beyond 4% without a recession following within a year or two,” he explained. “And so, I think the likelihood is that in order to do what’s necessary to stop inflation the Fed is going to raise interest rates enough that the economy will slip into a recession.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin confronted Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the administration’s plans to tackle inflation during Monday’s “Squawk Box.” Sorkin brought up the issue of the administration’s plans to raise corporate taxes in light of President Joe Biden’s tweet Friday urging that “the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share” in order to bring down inflation. The host then pressed Buttigieg, arguing that corporate taxes and inflation are two separate issues for the most part.
“Yes, in the immediate term, maybe it will have some impact on inflation,” Sorkin began. “But corporate taxes is a long-term issue, you either do it because you think it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, not because you’re trying to deal with inflation right this second.”
“A lot of it is what you’re going to do with the revenue and again, we have an agenda to use tax revenue on things that are going to ease inflationary pressures,” Buttigieg replied. “But also, we have a very clear contrast right now. You have Senate Republican proposals that are about raising taxes on the poor and middle class, and you have the president’s worldview, which is shared by the majority of Americans, that if anybody needs to be carrying more of the load right now, it is the wealthiest corporations that have become extremely profitable—”
“That’s not how you’re going to solve inflation,” Sorkin interjected.
“Hold on, this is really important. Corporations that have invoked inflation as an excuse to keep prices high in ways that are not just reflected by the supply picture and are pocketing the difference,” the secretary continued.
Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos debunked Biden’s calls to raise corporate taxes, calling the “mushing” of tax rates and inflation “misdirection.”
“The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead,” Bezos said. “Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection.”
The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead. Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection. https://t.co/ye4XiNNc2v
Inflation reached its quickest uptick since December 1981 after soaring 8.5% in March. The price of fuel reached a new all-time record of $4.37 per gallon Tuesday.
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power. In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.
A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.
After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system – a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement and a credible criminal justice system – are dissolving. Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.
There is no southern border.
Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president – in a first – casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.
Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria.
Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.
There is no free speech anymore on campuses.
Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender or ethnic category.
When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.
What happened?
Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.
Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows – at a time of pent-up global demand.
The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.
Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories – “modern monetary theory,”critical legal theory, critical race theory – now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.
The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.
Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?
The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance.
Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.
So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.
Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous – as we shall see over the next few months.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
As of Tuesday, the AAA national average price for a gallon of regular gas reached $4.374, a staggering figure that marks a new record high when inflation is not taken into account. Gas Buddy also reported that the national average price of gas had hit a new high, though it pegged the price at $4.36 per gallon. While the prices mark fresh highs, reports indicate that when inflation is factored into the equation, the new record still does not eclipse high prices experienced in 2008.
High gas prices not only cost drivers dearly when they fill up their vehicles, but the fuel costs also drive up transportation expenses, which can lead to higher prices for various goods and services throughout the economy.
Americans have been getting hammered by soaring gas prices and high inflation, and if they keep experiencing pain at the pump and witnessing the purchasing power of their hard-earned savings erode each month, those economic issues could hurt Democrats during the 2022 midterm election cycle.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is slated to release April consumer price index data on Wednesday. The all-items index rose “8.5 percent for the 12 months ending March,” the agency reported last month.
President Joe Biden said in a speech on Tuesday that inflation is his “top domestic priority.” He attributed inflation to the COVID-19 pandemic and to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S. has prohibited the importation of oil and other products from Russia in response to that country’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We have the biggest inflation spike in 4 decades, record high gas prices, a massive border crisis, incompetent foreign policy, endless attacks on liberty and personal safety, and now even a baby formula shortage. The Biden presidency has truly been a epic disaster from the start,” tweeted GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York — the lawmaker is currently running for governor in the Empire State.
“Liquid fuels have turned into liquid gold, with prices for gasoline and diesel spiraling out of control with little power to harness them as the imbalance between supply and demand globally continues to widen with each passing day. Russia’s oil increasingly remains out of the market, crimping supply while demand rebounds ahead of the summer driving season,” GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan said. “There’s little, if any, good news about fuel prices heading into summer, and the problem could become worse should we see an above average hurricane season, which could knock out refinery capacity at a time we badly need it as refined product inventories continue to plummet.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Know-nothing pundits and politicians have been communicating to Americans that inflation is, like the weather, a mystery they can’t control. That’s simply not true, write three economic commentators in a soon-published book, “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, And How to Fix It.” On the contrary: inflation is a direct result of governments cheating their people, and solving it is pretty simple, if politically difficult.
In the book, businessman Steve Forbes, economist Nathan Lewis, and business journalist Elizabeth Ames give laypeople a concise, readable introduction to monetary policy. They also lay out easy-to-understand policy and personal prescriptions for responding to an inflationary economy such as today’s. The book is short and immensely useful for those of us who are not economic experts or finance minds and just want politicians to stop stealing our hard-earned money and endangering our nation’s security.
It would also be useful to members of Congress and other government officials with the authority to address what especially for the poorest Americans is a frightful economic situation. The authors lay out a one-year plan for stopping inflation in its tracks based on historical and international experience.
In the course of explaining what inflation is and how it works, the authors make the important point that it’s not just about money. Inflation is deeply connected to societal flourishing in general. Societies in which inflation is rampant are often unstable, chaotic, and violent.
“Markets are people,” the authors write. “When money is no longer a reliable unit of value, not only trade but social relationships ultimately unravel. Nations afflicted by extreme inflation end up experiencing higher levels of crime, corruption, and social unrest. As we have seen throughout history, the end result can be a tragic turn to strongmen and dictators.”
After electing a socialist president, Peru hit a 25+ year record inflation rate. The result? Citizens are now rioting over unaffordable food & gas prices.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Democrat elites dismiss Americans’ concerns over 40+ year record inflation. pic.twitter.com/X8YIHnsDc1
— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) April 8, 2022
In an inflationary economy, the winners are the rich, the well-connected, and the corrupt. The losers are the poor, the middle-class, and those who work hard and play by the rules. Thus, an inflationary economy is inherently an unjust system. This is the top reason it should be combatted.
Not surprisingly, then, the rich and powerful often insist some inflation is a good thing. Maintaining a consistent level of inflation is in fact the Federal Reserve’s open policy goal. But even a “low” level of inflation such as The Fed’s (often wildly missed) target of 2 percent a year effectively steals significant income from especially the working and middle class. For someone earning $50,000 a year, 2 percent annual inflation is a $1,000 pay cut every year. That can be the difference between saving and not saving.
Making it harder to put money aside essentially forces middle and working-class people to depend on welfare rather than their own industry. Inflation thus erodes the middle class that is the bulwark of all free societies. So when it increases, societies tend to experience chaos. More people stop working and creating, and start trying to steal from others, either through government or through crime.
It should go without saying that an unstable society and economic chaos are threats to national security. These invite aggression from foreign enemies and hinders a nation’s ability to respond. This should make policymakers take inflation seriously, but like usual, so far politicians are mostly playing the blame game instead of solving the problem.
What Causes Inflation
Inflation is not merely rising prices, even sharply rising prices. That can occur for sensible reasons, such as sudden consumer demand for some fashionable item, or a crop failure leading to natural shortages. The authors define inflation instead as “the distortion of prices that occurs when money loses value.”
That can be seen, for example, in much of the current housing spike: “If you’ve made few, if any, home improvements and the local housing market isn’t on fire, you can be sure that the near-million-dollar sale price of your house doesn’t mean that it has magically become more valuable. Its worth has been distorted by a gradual, and totally artificial, decline in the value of the dollar,” explains “Inflation.”
When people stop trusting a currency as a stable measure of value, we get inflation. This is another way inflation is not solely about economics. It’s also about the people’s faith in their government and markets. That’s why lower-trust societies are more likely to experience inflation, and inflation is likely to worsen social trust. That’s also why inflation tends to spiral until somebody steps in to restore trust in the economy.
What causes inflation? If it’s true inflation, not price shifts caused by other market factors such as fads or innovation, it amounts to “a corruption of prices resulting from the debasement of currency by governments.” In other words, inflation happens when governments decide to circulate more money without a corresponding increase in economic value. This usually happens when governments want to spend more than they have, which is what the U.S. government has been doing for decades.
Today, the Federal Reserve essentially passes on federal debts and deficit spending to American consumers by creating more money without also creating new value. It is now one of many Western central banks that “effectively financ[es] their [government] deficits by buying their debt.”
In very simple terms, inflation is the result of governments spending far more than they can openly tax from citizens, then attempting to hide their shenanigans with financial gimmicks. So it is absolutely fair to think of inflation as a tax, and as the direct fault of shady government behavior: “Moderate inflation results from short-term ‘stimulus;’ hyperinflation comes from regular money printing to pay the government’s bills…The United States has not begun directly financing itself with large-scale money printing. Unfortunately, that may already be changing.”
Ending Inflation Is a Question of Political Will
The book helpfully explains in very clear and simple detail how the Federal Reserve enables Congress’s refusal to pay for its insane spending and how that all fuels inflation. It also discusses several intricate maneuvers by which this happens and why there isn’t a direct correlation in every case between money printing and inflationary effects. I won’t go into those here, but as a non-economist I did find them very helpful for understanding what’s going on.
I also found especially insightful the authors’ observation that federal overspending is not passed on to future generations, which is what I thought previously, but is inflated away from today’s workers and savers. Inflation is a tax on a nation that is unwilling to live within its means, and it occurs not in the future but in tandem with runaway government spending.
Ending inflation is quite simple, the authors say: “Stabilize the value of money.” Yet most “inflation remedies… more often than not end up making things worse.” That’s because government officials typically either misunderstand the root causes of inflation or are unwilling to take the steps necessary to address it. Thus, governments implement price controls or “austerity” measures, which usually further destroy their economies.
Instead, what’s needed is to tighten the money supply. The authors get into the details for doing this effectively, including their recommendation for the best way to ensure reliable money, a “new gold standard that would work in the twenty-first century.” They discuss this and respond to common arguments against it, still in highly readable prose.
Our Chief Obstacle to Fixing Inflation Is Ourselves
The key obstacle to implementing the authors’ one-year plan for restoring currency stability is widespread economic ignorance cultivated by leftist economists to preserve their control over policy. Yet given these economists have been wrong time and time again, it seems it’s high time to pay attention to experts whose recommendations have a reliable track record.
Unfortunately, since the majority of people working in Congress, the Federal Reserve, and similar commanding heights are the reason we’re in a dangerously inflationary economy in the first place, it’s probably too much to expect they will do anything other than make the situation worse in the near future. That’s why you’re hearing Joe Biden and other Democrats hint at making things worse with price controls or other punitive regulations by demonizing various industries for raising prices.
Not just because such people are at the helm, but also because they’ve already baked more money devaluation into the economic pie for the next several years, expect significant inflation to continue for quite some time. We can only hope and pray that the worst disasters of historic inflationary economies will be averted for us. And obtain some backyard chickens so we have something affordable to stick in the pot for dinner.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has doubled down on his out-of-touch messaging to Americans who are struggling to pay skyrocketing prices at the pump. Last month, “Mayor Pete” made headlines when he said (in all seriousness) that the obvious solution for dealing with insanely high gas prices is to just go buy an electric vehicle. Maybe Mayor Pete doesn’t realize that most of us can’t afford to buy a new car at all, let alone an EV that costs “roughly $10,000 higher than the overall industry average,” according to Kelley Blue Book.
Now, our tone-deaf transportation secretary has let Americans know that we all need to get used to “wild price hikes” until we “achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy.”
Watch:
BUTTIGIEG: “Until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy,” get used to price hikes. pic.twitter.com/UMWBrVPe9R
It amazes me how they never understand where their electricity comes, how or even where the parts come from for these EV cars, and what to do with the used batteries from them. By the time you pay off your solar panels you need new ones. Where do 95% of them come from? China
The San Francisco Federal Reserve published a study this week that appeared to contradict President Joe Biden’s narrative about inflation.
Americans are battling historic inflation and growing economic woes that appear to have no end in sight. In fact, the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the consumer price index has increased 7.9% over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, the buck does not stop with Biden. The president has blamed inflation and other economic problems on COVID-19, the supply chain, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
The study sought to understand why U.S. inflation is increasing at a much higher rate than other advanced economic countries. The reason? The economists pointed toward COVID-19 relief bills, which pumped the economy, and Americans’ pockets, full of income. In fact, they argued the stimulus bills account for about 3% of inflation.
“Since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries,” the study said.
“Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021,” the bankers explained.
This is Bidenflation. SF Fed chart literally shows the impact on inflation of Biden’s $1.9T 3/21 gov’t spending spree. It shows US inflation vs that in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, & the UK – the chart ends before Russia invaded Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/aEJyglsI0Q
Without the massive COVID relief bills, the economists suggested the U.S. could have experienced deflation, which has benefits and drawbacks. Still, they argued the impacts of deflation “would have been harder to manage,” a comment that should be taken with a grain of salt considering the government is having a difficult time managing the inflation crisis. Importantly, the study failed to conclude that Putin is to blame for inflation.
Because of inflation, Americans will spend approximately $5,200 more than last year, Bloomberg reported.
Inflation will mean the average U.S. household has to spend an extra $5,200 this year ($433 per month) compared to last year for the same consumption basket, according estimates by Bloomberg Economics. The excess savings built up over the pandemic, and increases in wages, will cushion those costs, and allow spending to expand at a decent pace this year. But accelerated depletion of savings will increase the urgency for those staying on the sidelines to join the labor force, and the resulting increase in labor supply will likely dampen wage growth.
According to a recent NBC poll, a “plurality of Americans” blame Biden and his policies for inflation, while they overwhelmingly reject Russia’s culpability for America’s economic woes, NBC News reported.
Recent polling shows that very few Americans are buying the excuses the Biden administration are making for high inflation and instead blame the President Joe Biden and his policies. The NBC News poll asked Americans who they thought was to blame for the high inflation that they are suffering under and offered some of the culprits blamed by the president and his supporters as possible answers. Among the options listed, Biden and his policies were blamed by a plurality of Americans polled, at 38%. Only 28% blamed the coronavirus pandemic, another 23% blamed corporations raising prices, and barely 6% blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
Over recent months, the Biden administration has attempted to blame the invasion of Ukraine, the greed of meat conglomerates, and the pandemic for the high inflation eating away at Americans’ savings and wages. The same poll found the president’s approval rating to drop to 40% while an astounding 55% disapprove of the job Biden is doing. When asked about the economy, only 33% said they approved of the job he’s doing, while 63% said they don’t approve of the job Biden is doing.
The astonishing poll is just the latest in a long series showing devastating results for Democrats ahead of the midterms, where they would have faced an uphill battle even without horrible polling. The terrible polling has lead to greater division in the Democratic party among the centrist establishment wing, which blames progressive extremism, and the far-left progressive wing that blames Biden for not going far enough to the left.
Socialist Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Thursday said that the low polling came from progressives and young voters who were disappointed that Biden had done enough to satisfy their left-wing demands.
Here’s more about the terrible poll numbers for Biden:
Steve Kornacki: Biden’s Handling Of The Economy Numbers ‘Getting Worse And Worse’ www.youtube.com
Teachers have declared war on capitalism. what is on full display during this strike is the anti-capitalist position taken by the nation’s teachers’ unions.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Americans are watching gas prices shoot up a bit higher every single day. Thanks to President Joe Biden’s green energy dreams and relinquishing of U.S. energy independence since his very first day in the Oval, ordinary people are paying the price. As The Federalist reported, it’s affecting everyone — from stay-at-home moms to office commuters, to small and large business owners. Biden, however, doesn’t seem to care. The president and his administration are bizarrely blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the high prices, which have been rising ever since Biden took office. Even worse, they’re suggesting the best way for you not to have to worry about the high prices at the pump is to buy an electric car. To prevent the stress of high gas prices in the future, “The best thing we can do is reduce our dependence on fossil fuels” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday.
“Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices,” Biden tweeted the next day. “But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices. It will mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as a weapon.”
In other words, if you can’t afford to pay $4 or $5 a gallon for gasoline, just buy a Tesla.
The fact is that while the president and corporate media point the finger at Putin, Biden is the one really using “fossil fuels as a weapon.” The Democrats in charge don’t care that you can’t afford to leave your house if it means they can force their green energy agenda. Pricing gas-powered drivers out of the market is a feature, not a bug, and they’ve been admitting it all along.
You’ll remember how after the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, when low supply and high demand caused a gasoline price hike, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stressed she was “all in” on achieving Biden climate goals and said with a chuckle and contempt for fuel users, “You know, if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you, clearly.”
“If you disagree with our policy goals, we’ll make your life a living hell and laugh while we’re doing it” is the official Democrat position.
It’s no slip of the tongue. This has been the consistent refrain from the administration. Oh, you don’t like the price of gas? Good. Buy an electric car so we can hit our climate goals, rube.
The point of Biden’s “transition” was to drive up the cost of energy.
This isn’t just the Democrats’ way of handling the green energy versus fossil fuels debate, either. This is their posture toward all their policy goals — and all the Americans who disagree with them and might threaten to hold up their agendas.
We watched it throughout Covid. When enough Americans (many of them healthy and young) didn’t get the vaccine right away, the administration cracked down and issued federal mandates that workers must get the shot if they wanted to keep their jobs. “Oh, you’re not getting vaccinated. Fine. You’re fired.”
When children were home doing schoolwork under the watchful eyes of their parents, who soon discovered gender propaganda and divisive critical race theory in their kids’ learning materials, they took the fight to their local school boards — to the dismay of Democrats, who then branded them as domestic terrorists. “Oh, you don’t like masks, CRT, and soft porn for your kids? Fine. We’ll sic federal law enforcement on you.”
Now they’re continuing the same attitude with their climate goals and the Americans who aren’t on board. “Oh, you won’t drive electric. Fine. We’ll drive gas prices so high you can’t go anywhere.”
It’s remarkable in light of what Biden, the media, and even Trump-deranged Republicans promised Americans this administration would be: a return of decency and decorum, an outstretched arm, and “unity,” “unity,” UNITY!”
Instead, Americans got nothing but division, derision, and coercion — and the continuing clear message from the administration and its allies that if you disagree with their policy goals, that’s fine. They’ll just make your life a living hell until you have no option but to give in to their control and comply with their demands.
But hey, no mean tweets.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
The price of gas continues to soar in this era of Bidenflation. It is getting so bad, some experts are warning that we could see prices as outrageously high as $7 per gallon in some parts of the country. The current high prices are not new, either. Gasoline has been on the rise for seven straight weeks, according to GasBuddy data reported by Fox Carolina.
“Veteran energy strategist Dan Dicker said he can see gas prices going up to $5 a gallon. Dicker said some areas might even get to $6.50 or $7,” Fox Carolina added.
GasBuddy noted that the national average is almost twenty cents a gallon higher than a month ago and is nearly a dollar higher than one year ago. Worse, per gallon prices have already nearly doubled in just two years. Gas was only $2.17 a gallon average at the end of 2020. And it is no coincidence that 2020 was the last full year we had a president who wanted the U.S. to be energy independent. But already, in deep blue states, gas is getting perilously close to double those prices seen in 2020. In deep blue Illinois, for instance, gas now averages $3.60 a gallon for regular (nearly $4.50 for premium), while the national average is $3.50, according to traveler assistance group AAA.
It is even worse in California where the average price per gallon for regular is an unheard of $4.75 — more than a dollar higher than the national average!
Left-wing news sources continue to lay the blame for these skyrocketing prices at the door of Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the Associated Press is only worried over the high costs of gasoline because it will likely have a political impact for Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 elections, ……………………………
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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