Tag Archives: spending

Because Housing Price Inflation Isn’t High Enough

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California State Senate Leader Toni Atkins (D) wants to exacerbate it with $10 billion more thrown at the State’s housing market to create even more buying demand for this supply-limited product.

Democratic State Senate Leader Toni Atkins on Wednesday unveiled details of a proposal she’s pushing to create a revolving fund that would provide interest-free loans for up to 30% of the purchase price of a home for low- and middle-income households.

Even spreading the money over 10 years would throw $1 billion per year at a housing market that’s already suffering enormous inflation—nearly 12% just since last August—due to the limited supply of houses for sale vs the burgeoning number of buyers, both institutional (viz., Blackrock) and individual.

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Local Control vs Federal Funding

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Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill

could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.

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Earmarks—Congress Has Them

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They’re back, in spades, courtesy of Congress’ latest spend-a-thon, the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill just rushed through under the guise of billions more dollars in aid and weapons for Ukraine. The funding for Ukraine is sorely needed, but that should have been argued and enacted through a separate, stand-alone bill. Instead, Progressive-Democrats and too many Republicans (vis., Senator Richard Shelby, R, AL) used the blood and bodies of Ukrainians to speed through their personally convenient spending wishes—earmarks.

The argument for earmarks is that Congress should direct this spending rather than leave it to the federal bureaucracy. But the bureaucracy is better placed to make trade-offs based on economic value and urgent need in a world of limited resources.

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One More Reason

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The last two administrations have dumped $3.5 trillion of supposed Wuhan Virus relief funds into our economy since the virus situation began in early 2020.

Now we’re learning that almost $100 billion of it has been stolen. That doesn’t seem like a large per centage of the total. However, as numbers have a quality all their own, and while those $100 billion are a small per centage of the trillions, they would have had their own use. Fighting the Wuhan Virus’ entry into our nation via our southern border, for instance, by building more of the wall that Biden-Harris has been so desperate to stop. Generating more—many, many more—of the home tests that Biden-Harris has been lying about producing. Plusing up our police forces so as to reduce the rate of crime that Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) insist are no big deal and that other Leftists insist is justified reparations. Plusing up our military. The list goes on.

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Big Progressive-Democrat Government

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A Rasmussen poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the socialism in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s encouraging, but I have some concerns about the policies anyway, given that they’re being jammed through without regard for the views of the government’s employers.

The socialism aspect of the Biden-Harris and Progressive-Democratic Party policies is less a matter of the raw spending and usurious taxes in them much more a matter of the strings attached to the spending and of who gets (punitively) taxed.

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Politicizing Things

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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….

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Partisanship

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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.

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Government Subsidies for Local Newspapers

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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.

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“It’s Paid For”

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That’s the Biden-Harris reconciliation bill that the House passed a version of Friday morning that’s “paid for.” And, no, that’s not Joe Biden’s quote—he said the bill would cost zero, which of course contradicts the headline quote, there being nothing for which to pay.

It’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen who said that when the CBO report on the bill was published before the House vote. Here’s her claim as cited by yahoo!news:

[T]he Built Back Better (BBB) Act is “fully paid for, and in fact will reduce our nation’s debt over time….”

What the CBO said, in summary:

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A Window on Biden-Harris Priorities

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Not so much from President Joe Biden’s (D) words or his Vice President and co-President Kamala Harris’ (D) careful silence, as much as what’s left in and left out of the current iteration of his reconciliation bill.

What’s still in after its seeming paring from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion (don’t believe those numbers or that any numbers are anywhere near close to finality or even accuracy, but take them at value for now): climate change initiatives.

What’s out (so far):

  • paid family leave and Medicare expansion
  • drug pricing, paid leave, Medicare expansion on dental and vision
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