The WSJ editors cited Fed Chairman Jerome Powell as saying, on the matter of our current relatively high inflation rate,
…some people define transitory to mean “short-lived.” But at the Fed “we tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.”
This is misleading. It’s good that he’s not anticipating permanently higher inflation—if he’s right—but that’s unlikely in nearly any event—so far.
Congressman and Vice Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Jake Auchincloss (D, CT) had an op-ed in Tuesday’s Fox News Online in which he complained about the lack of bipartisanship regarding and the politicization of the current inflation period—and blamed it all on Republicans.
Never mind the irony of decrying partisanship and politicization while blaming partisanly.
But the irony—no, the dishonesty—didn’t stop there. Here are just a couple of examples; he led off with them.
…game of chicken with the debt-ceiling….
It turns out that when there’s no market competition, and when there’s no price signaling in any sort of market, some producers charge more than others, and consumers pay the price (to coin a phrase).
Some hospitals charge up to 10 times as much as others for standard medical scans, according to the latest analysis of previously secret market rates.
Median prices for taking images of the brain, legs, abdomen and chest differed across hospitals by thousands of dollars in some cases….
And
The Supreme Court has before it American Hospital Association v Becerra, which The Wall Street Journal suggests makes a sufficient vehicle for revisiting judicial deference to an Executive Branch agency’s claims about the legitimacy of this or that regulation promulgated by the agency. The specific item is HHS’ Medicare reimbursement rates for outpatient drugs.
The question is far broader than that, however.
Chevron deference and its still extant forebear, Skidmore, need to be overruled, rescinded, and done away with altogether, along with all other moves, even predispositions, to defer. A regulation (or a mandated drug reimbursement rate) is valid or it is not on its merit, not because a government expert says it is.
Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA), of FOXLA, known also for his reporting from our border along the Rio Grande Valley, had this Twitter thread concerning the close ties the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has with the People’s Republic of China, especially as concerns Americans’ DNA records. I’ve reproduced the thread below, absent the tweeting headers for easier reading.
One other thing: the Los County County Supervisor at the end of the thread that Melugin tried to contact, Hilda Solis, is the same Hilda Solis (D) who sat in ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Secretary of Labor chair and did so much damage during his first term.
Gerald Seib had a piece on this in the context of gerrymandering. Along the way, he had these as examples of partisanship:
Yet when the bill [the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill] came to a final vote, six of the state’s [Michigan’s] seven Republicans voted against it. Nor was the phenomenon limited to Republicans. Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib also voted against it, in part because Congress wasn’t also passing a giant social-spending and climate-change package that she and other progressive Democrats have been demanding.
Dean Ridings, CEO of an organization self-absorbedly called America’s Newspapers, thinks it’s a terrific idea that the Federal government (presumably, government at any level) should…subsidize…local newspapers.
The Local Journalism Sustainability Act will provide the local news industry time to continue its transition to a more digital future and to work out a better arrangement, either through legislation or other means, to be paid when Google and Facebook use its content. It is not a permanent handout.
It is not a permanent handout. That’s just risible; Ridings knows better. It would be both a handout and permanent.
Nadia Murad, sold into sex slavery by Daesh when she was 14, escaped that existence and wrote a book about it: The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity (due out next February).
She was scheduled to speak with students from some of the 600 schools that are part of the Toronto District School Board about her book and the life it describes, but her presentation and discussion were canceled by Helen Fisher, one of the board’s Superintendents of Education.
Deroy Murdock made one.
Recall that the City Council of New York City is contemplating—seriously—letting noncitizens, all 808,000 of them in New York City, vote in city elections.
Yet, as Murdock emphasized, there is no such thing a as a noncitizen.
Rather than non-citizens, these people are foreign citizens. While they are not American citizens, they remain citizens of the foreign nations from whence they came—Mexico, Haiti, Russia, Singapore, New Zealand, and dozens more.
He went on:
Buried in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill that they’re so desperate to hurry up and get passed before anyone can peruse it is this payoff to unions:
The bill the House passed would allow union members to deduct up to $250 of dues from their tax bills. The deduction is “above the line,” meaning filers can exclude the cost of dues from their gross income. In other words, union dues would get the same treatment now reserved for things like insurance premiums and retirement contributions.
The Progressive-Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, claims it’s no payoff at all; it’s because