People Like Me

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President Joe Biden’s Climate MFWIC, John Kerry, traveled to Iceland to accept an Arctic Circle award for his climate “leadership.” Of course, Kerry traveled by flying in his private jet (which has a much larger per-passenger carbon footprint than a commercial jet, but we won’t mention that).

An Icelandic journalist, Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson, asked him how that works. Kerry said,

If you offset your carbon—it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.
I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States.
I’ve been involved with this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris.

Of course. “I’m so special. I negotiated all this cool, yet vapid, stuff. I even got Xi to think about doing something decades into the future so we could get to the emptiness of Paris.

“Did I mention that I’m also rich enough to afford the carbon indulgences, unlike the little people—don’t they look like ants from my jet’s altitude?”

He’s so self-importantly oblivious, too, that he can’t conceive of spending his precious time in a commercial passenger jet. ‘Course, he’d be cooped up with so many of those ants.

I wonder if he invited James Taylor along on any of his private jet travels.

“We Are Deeply Disturbed”

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That’s what President Joe Biden’s (D) State Department claims (through a carefully unnamed “official”) regarding the People’s Republic of China’s systematic rape, other sexual abuse, and torture of Uighur women in the PRC concentration reeducation camps.

And

These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences[.]

Indeed. The Biden administration, like the Obama administration that Biden is reconstructing, surely will shake its collective finger very firmly at the PRC. And if that fails, the Biden administration will engage in stern chit-chat and tongue clucking.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Party and Equity

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Jason Riley’s Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal focused on the idiocy of racial equity and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s zealous proselytization of that ideology. His closing paragraph, though, had this misapprehension:

Mr Biden surely understands this reality, but he’s also the head of a Democratic Party full of people who worship at the altar of identity politics and held their noses to elect a straight white male out of political expediency.

However, if Biden, who surely understands this reality, actually were the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, he’d put a stop to Party’s far-left shenanigans. On the contrary, he is not the head; he’s merely an expedient. The Far-Left is in charge, to the detriment of Party, if not to its power, and to the nation.

Needed Stimulus

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…or not. Mostly—nearly entirely—not.

real per capita disposable income in [Wuhan Virus situation-ridden] 2020 grew 5.5%

The Wall Street Journal noted that this is all before the December-passed $900 billion stimulus “took effect.” It’s also after that stimulus—which still hasn’t had much effect since much of that money hasn’t even been sent into the economy by Government.

What happened to the $2.6 trillion Government had already lobbed into the economy?

Preliminary data for 2020 show total savings for 2020 was $1.6 trillion higher than in 2019.  And that was before the $900 billion stimulus.

It’s also after those $900 billion….

Some folks are squawking that the money wasn’t really all that stimulative—it was saved rather than spent, which was the purpose of the stimulus. Some folks misunderstand. Savings do get spent—in the short term, if not immediately, on short-term needs and wants. Savings that aren’t quickly spent become deposits in financial institutions, where they join the pool of what economists call loanable funds—and get lent to borrowers, who then spend. Loanable funds might not be promptly spent, but they most assuredly do get spent.

Given this and the fact that the December stimulus remains uncommitted to the economy, why the urgency, and the need, for an additional $1.9 trillion in stimulus? According to the CBO,

The office said gross domestic product would return to pre-pandemic levels by mid-2021 and will continue growing until 2026 as a vaccine reduces the number of new infections and the need for social distancing.

And

Labor market conditions continue to improve. As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its pre-pandemic size in 2022[.]
The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its pre-pandemic level in 2024[.]

All that without the $1.9 trillion mess currently being rammed through Congress by Progressive-Democrats.

Why, then, do we need the additional $1.9 trillion national debt stimulus? We don’t. Progressive-Democrats do, or rather they want the money, so they can continue to virtue-signal. Those new trillions that Progressive-Democrats are insisting they’re going to jam down our throats, and rip from our children’s and grandchildren’s wallets (not that I mix metaphors or anything), in a strictly partisan fashion will be, in the longer run, nothing but destructive of all things economic.

There is urgency: to stop the train wreck that is this new $1.9 trillion package of froo-froo.

Costs

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer pooh-poohed the idea that the People’s Republic of China might actually invade the Republic of China and reclaim the island of Taiwan.

A decision by Beijing to invade Taiwan would create a major geopolitical crisis for China. Its extensive global trade and investments would be disrupted, creating economic problems. An invasion would result in an occupation. The people of Taiwan have lived in freedom and under the rule of law—they are not about to put on Chinese handcuffs and live in a communist society.

Houlihan made an all-too-common mistake that political and military analysts make in assessing an enemy nation’s motives and goals. Here, he assumed that the PRC cares about costs of regaining and reoccupying the island of Taiwan, just because we would have those concerns. In the end, if the PRC succeeds, it will have destroyed the Republic of China (without the US’ and others’ support, the “people of Taiwan” won’t be capable of resisting PRC handcuffs for any length of time) and regained the island.

And humiliated us, driving us from the western Pacific, opening up the Republic of Korea and Japan—hated enemies—to tacit, if not explicit, control, and putting Southeast Asia, which it has failed repeatedly in invading, under its thumb.

And gained control of the South China Sea shipping lanes, further strangling the RoK and Japan, and inflicting sufficient economic damage on us as to be able to control, in large part, our behavior.

Those may well be goals, in PRC eyes, worth spending a bit of political and economic capital to attain.

The PRC certainly is building, as fast as it can, a military capability designed for the purpose. The PRC also has the stated goal of replacing, in the near-to-medium term, us as the sole world power.