California Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, the Progressive-Democratic Party member who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, claims she’s open to a tax cut deal.
Our ask is simple: if we can provide tax cuts for America’s corporations, we can certainly provide a tax cut for America’s kids[.]
I agree, and it is a simple ask. Provide the tax cut for America’s kids by reducing the personal income tax rates their parents have to pay.
Sadly, DeLauro isn’t at all serious.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell had this to say about handling the burgeoning inflation extant in today’s American economy:
Slowing demand growth should allow supply to catch up with demand and restore the balance that will yield stable prices over time.
It’s impressive that a government official as steeped in economics as Powell is has such a deep misunderstanding of the situation.
It’s not a matter of slowing demand growth, it’s a matter of slowing government demand growth. The private economy, especially when it’s not competing with government for goods and services—and for the inputs to those goods and services—will easily and efficiently take care of itself, with changing supply and demand comprising self-correcting stabilizers on our economy.
Even if it might be politically difficult and short-term expensive.
Recall that EU member Lithuania expressed support for the Republic of China and in naked retaliation, the People’s Republic of China imposed a nearly complete trade embargo on Lithuania and blocked import of any other EU member’s products that contained Lithuania-originated parts.
Now, a year later, the EU is haling the PRC into the WTO in a suit over that embargo. Be still, my heart.
There’s a better and more effective and permanent solution to this sort of behavior from the PRC.
A year later, Lithuania has learned that it can get along without trade with the PRC, and by that example, so has the EU (and so have the US and non-PRC Asia, come to that).
The solution includes these straightforward steps.
Sadly, the parties involved make such moves politically difficult with their own fear of PRC retaliations. And certainly, through the middle-term, it would be economically expensive to locate and develop alternative markets and to move supply chain steps—from dirt in the ground to component parts to finished products—completely out of the PRC. However, once those transfers are completed, we’d all be better off politically and economically from no longer having our economies dependent on the good offices of an aggressive and acquisitive enemy nation.
The PRC’s behavior toward Lithuania and its attempt to extort Japan through withholding shipments of rare earths to that nation are just two examples of that benefit.
An example is in the housing market, provided by this bit in a Wall Street Journal article centered on housing costs as a major component of our current economic inflation. The article suggests, among other things, that housing cost inflation may be abating.
If shelter inflation does drag overall inflation closer to 2%, that doesn’t mean the inflation problem is over. Economists assume increases in rents and home prices will remain subdued, given the slowing economy and high mortgage rates.
Say that the shelter inflation is easing and that it does, indeed, drag overall inflation down. Inflation is a measure of the rate of price increases, it is not a measure of prices themselves. If shelter prices stop rising so fast, the cost of shelter—rent, house purchase (and associated interest rates on those mortgage), rent/housing utilities—and of fuel, food, and on and on all will remain at their current levels; they most assuredly will not fall back.
But those prices must be paid out of a household’s income, and that income—wages and salaries—has increased only at half to three-quarters the rate of inflation. That means that in real, practical, terms, a household has less money with which to pay those costs: a larger per centage of monthly household income will be absorbed by those monthly rent/mortgage payments and those monthly household utility, fuel, food, etc bills than was the case before this inflation explosion.
That’s the failure of the Biden administration’s and Congress’ fiscal policy of throwing trillions of dollars at our economy with no means for it to absorb that money though increased production and productivity. That failure is exacerbated by the Powell Federal Reserve’s monetary policy failure in artificially suppressing interest rates for so long, and in printing dollars like the presses would run out of ink tomorrow through its bottomless purchases of Treasury debt instruments.
In a Fox News piece on the refusal of Russia to continue negotiations on the mutual inspection clause of the current New START treaty that purports to limit the size of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals, there was this from Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball regarding the breakdown:
If there’s not a negotiation on some sort of replacement treaty, there will be no agreement for the first time since 1972 that limits the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers arsenals[.]
Kimball is ignoring—worse, President Joe Biden (D), his Secretary of State, and his Secretary of Defense are ignoring—the absence of the world’s third largest nuclear superpower in any sort of nuclear arms control negotiation.
If the People’s Republic of China, which is expanding its nuclear arsenal and modernizing with state-of-the-art equipment its delivery systems for that arsenal, is not an active and good faith participant in any such negotiation, than any arms limitation treaty between the US and Russia will amount only to the US’ unilateral disarmament relative to the PRC—and relative to Russia, which is rapidly becoming economically dependent on the PRC and which can rely on it in any nuclear war.
That growing disparity in military capability between the US and the PRC, keep in mind, comes against the backdrop of PRC President Xi Jinping’s avowed goal of “supplanting” the US as the sole world power.
We need to accept Russia’s decision, via its current refusal, to begin a new arms race. It’s a race that our survival as a free and independent actor in the world depends on winning, and it’s a race that we can win with our—so far—economic and technological superiority, just as we did vis-à-vis the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The time is now, though, to join and to push that race—the PRC already has been in it for lots of years, and that nation is far more economically and technologically capable than the USSR ever was.