Inflation is Upon Us

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…or is it?

The editors at The Wall Street Journal worry that the current rise in inflation might not be as “transitory” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell thinks it will be. It’s a concern worth taking seriously. As the editors cite Milton Friedman as saying,

inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon

and the Feds—and the Fed—have been pumping lots of tons of cash into our economy.

Couple of things, though, on this inflation…spike.

The current inflation is impacted by all the “stimulus” checks coming from the Federal government, and money is the source of demand, not how much folks want things. It’s money that pays the prices, not folks.

The current inflation also is impacted by the return to more normal pre-Wuhan Virus situation demand levels being faster than producers can ramp back up to meet that recovering demand.

That slower production ramp-up is itself impacted by producers’ inability to get employees back to work. So much of the value of those “stimulus” checks makes not working more valuable than working, and recipients, far from being lazy, are making the economically rational decision to not return to work yet.

Underlying all of this is that 2020 was an aberrational year. The economic drop was caused by politics, not a confluence of economic forces, and the present interference with recovery also is politically caused; a slowing unwinding of that confluence isn’t a factor. Inflation comparisons with 2020 are themselves distorted.

A better inflation measure would be against 2019.

Bipartisanship Progressive-Democrat Style

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President Joe Biden (D) and his Co-President Kamala Harris (D)—it is, at Biden’s behest, the Biden/Harris administration—held an infrastructure meeting last Wednesday with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) in which he pushed for acceptance of his $2.3 trillion version of an infrastructure bill along with his commensurately large tax increase plan with which he claims he’ll pay for his infrastructure plan.

Shortly after the meeting, Biden gave an interview to MSNBC, in which he said,

I want to know what we agree on and let’s see if we can get an agreement to kick start this, and then fight over what’s left, and see if I can get it done without Republicans if need be[.]

Since he’s going to pass his stuff along strictly party lines, anyway, what was the point of the meeting?

Plainly, Biden Bipartisanship—Progressive-Democratic Party Bipartisanship—means Republicans go along quietly or be kicked to the curb.

It’s Party’s version of republican democracy: Progressive-Democracy.

Necessary Corrections

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Two, in fact, for a recent Wall Street Journal article concerning the blacklisting of People’s Republic of China smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp. The blacklist barred US investors from investing in Xiaomi, and Biden is backing away from that.

The first correction is the article’s headline. Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge s/b Biden’s Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge.

It’s misleading to imply that the Pentagon did this on its own, without President Joe Biden’s (D) instruction, especially with the body of the article making it plain that the Pentagon, in its original action, was acting on then-President Donald Trump’s (R) instruction.

The second is this one. The retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing… s/b Biden’s retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing….

Biden didn’t even have the courage to challenge the DC trial court’s ruling in the DC circuit or, potentially, the Supreme Court. Overruling the trial court, even at the circuit level, would have been a distinct possibility.

Self-Serving

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The World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus set up an inquiry board to look into efforts to deal with the Wuhan Virus situation as the virus was beginning go out from the People’s Republic of China.

The Tedros’ WHO board has made a couple of very unsurprising findings.

The World Health Organization should be given the power to swiftly investigate threatening pathogens in any country….

National sovereignty be damned. A supranational entity should be able to go where it pleases. Especially WHO.

The second finding centers on these:

The panel’s report, however, doesn’t directly criticize [the People’s Republic of China] and instead praises it….

Never mind that the world first learned of the virus from the Republic of China (which the People’s Republic of China continues to block from participating in any WHO proceedings). The board’s report also spikes

mention [of PRC] authorities’ efforts to prevent medical staff and health officials from sharing information on the emerging disease.

This against the backdrop of PRC…influence…over the WHO and over Tedros in particular.

Nothing self-serving here. Not a bit.

A Test of Biden

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The Wall Street Journal editors wrote of a Hamas test of Israel and of President Joe Biden (D) in the context of the Hamas terrorists’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli cities and oil facilities and of Iran’s funding and supplying of its client, Hamas.

The editors concluded their piece with this:

[Biden] has not endorsed the left’s distorted interpretation of the conflict as a dichotomy of privilege and victimhood, with Israel responsible for every wrong.

That was supposed to be a (sort of) favorable remark about a part of Biden’s performance so far.

However.

That lack of endorsement is a bit of a non sequitur here. The Left isn’t distorting, so much as its “interpretation” is a precise reversal of the situation. The actual privileged are the terrorists, so enamored of by the Left and by the core of the Progressive-Democratic Party as embodied by the likes of Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Ilhan Omar (D, MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D, MI). The victim is Israel, so openly hated by that same collection of persons, and now so plainly under terrorist attack by Party’s heroes.

Their beloved terrorists are murdering children over property.

Stipulate, arguendo, that Palestinians deserve that property and that their lives would be so much better if they had it.

Today, the murdered children are still dead, and the Palestinians, without that property, are still alive.

But, but–children in Gaza are being killed by the hated-Israelis’ as the latter respond to being attacked? True enough. The Left’s heroes should stop hiding behind their own children, stop using them as cover for their own launch sites.

This is the test that Biden and his Progressive-Democrat henchmen are failing.