Monthly Archives: August 2022

To Repeat

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the problems volatile energy prices cause for central banks, there’s this allegation:

The pass-through of higher energy prices to other goods and services, along with their volatility, could make it harder for the Federal Reserve to tell what price shocks are temporary and thus set interest rates appropriately.

Wrong answer.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Instead of trying to play the market, or even to time it, the Fed needs to set its benchmark interest rates at levels historically consistent with the 2% inflation rate that it’s historically used for its target inflation rate, and then sit down and shut up.

Full stop.

Press Dishonesty Made Manifest

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According to a just released Harvard study of the motivations for the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capital building, a study that looked at a bit over half of the court documents filed by the 6 January defendants, about 20% of the rioters said their motive was loyalty to former President Donald Trump (R), and about the same number said they acted because they believed Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

Fewer than 8% were interested in starting a revolution. That’s the dishonesty of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians along with the press: they’re hyping the revolution claim, and that’s the central thesis of the Jan 6 Committee’s inquisition.

Here’s the kicker, though. Only 4% of the rioters were motivated by their belief in a QAnon conspiracy theory, and that outcome prompted this reaction from one of the study’s authors, Kaylee Fagan:

The folks with QAnon T-shirts, and signs, and flags were so prominently displayed in much of the visual imagery that came out of the Capitol attack. So we expected to see more QAnon-related concepts come through in the documents.

And who so prominently displayed all that visual imagery? The journalists of the journalism guild, who were so intent on hyping anything that supported their anti-Trump narrative, that they…forgot…to report all of the facts, the whole story of the riots.

Part of the Agreement

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…on Reduced-Build Back that Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) settled on last week is this Progressive-Democratic Party gem, and which illustrates in no small part the depth of the betrayal that is Manchin’s agreement.

The Senate drug agreement would require the Health and Human Services Secretary to “negotiate” prices for 10 of the top-spending drugs in Medicare starting next year and 20 by the end of the decade. If drug makers don’t accept the government’s offered price, they would get slapped with a 95% excise tax on their sales. Take his offer or else.

If that’s not the opening shot in the destruction of the American pharmaceutical industry, it’s certainly the beginning of the end of the industry’s interest in innovating and in leading the world in innovation.

That’s to the severe detriment of every American citizen who gets sick.

Some Lipstick for the Pig

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Here’s some of what’s in the Build Back Reduced bill—formally styled Inflation Reduction Act—that Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) agreed, which Manchin euphemizes as an all-in energy policy:

[T]he Interior Department would be required to offer up at least two million acres of federal land and 60 million acres of offshore acreage to oil and gas producers every year for the next decade. If Interior officials fall short, they wouldn’t be able to advance some permitting aspects of the wind and solar projects on federal land.

Offer up. But at what price? And for what duration before the leases expire? Look for the Biden administration to use lease pricing to actively discourage producers from buying leases, to slow walk the subsequent permit applications that would enable the leases to be acted on, and to use the failure to get the permits on time as excuses to terminate the leases/allow them to expire.