Tag Archives: economics

Biden’s Duplicity Confirmed

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Recall that President Joe Biden (D) proudly announced that he’d reached an agreement on a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Then, a short couple of hours later, he belligerently announced that he’d not sign that agreed bill unless it were accompanied by a reconciliation bill that contained all the rest of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s wants and demands, regardless of whether those had anything to do with infrastructure. Then, two days later, he called king’s x and said he really didn’t mean what he’d said in that two hours later announcement.

Leave aside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) parallel announcements that the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill would never see the light of day in her House until the Senate first passed that reconciliation bill and sent it over to the Pelosi House.

Now we have confirmation of Biden’s duplicity.

In a late-night announcement Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Budget Committee had reached an agreement to allot $3.5 trillion for a spending package that would complete President Biden’s infrastructure plan.
“The Budget Committee has come to an agreement,” Schumer told reporters following a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers.
“You add that to that the $600 billion in a bipartisan plan and you get to $4.1 trillion, which is very, very close to what President Biden has asked us for,” Schumer said. “Every major program that President Biden has asked us for is funded in a robust way.”

This is bipartisanship Progressive-Democratic style. Do it their way. Full stop. Notice the implementation of Progressive-Democrat bipartisanship: Schumer told reporters following a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers. No Republicans present.

The Senators who self-identify as Republicans will demonstrate their level of fitness for their Senate office by whether they vote for that “bipartisan” infrastructure bill after all this. If they do, they will show that they need to be replaced in the Senate.

More Federal Intrusion

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Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D, NY) and Senators Ron Wyden (D, OR) and Cory Booker (D, NJ) will soon unveil their plot to legalize marijuana at the Federal level. Among other steps in the initial stages of their plot is this:

establish dedicated funding streams for women- and minority-owned marijuana businesses.

Leave aside the destructive nature of marijuana. There are two other aspects of this particular step that are especially destructive. One is the sexist and racist nature of their “funding streams,” explicitly and deliberately favoring particular groups of government-approved Americans while simultaneously, and necessarily, excluding other groups of Americans, those of whom government disapproves. The contempt these Progressive-Democrats have for average Americans is obvious in the Senators’ decision to include this rank discrimination in the face of repeated court strike-downs of Progressive-Democrat moves to provide farm debt relief to favored races while deliberately excluding disfavored races.

The other utterly destructive aspect of this marijuana plot is the wolf in sheep’s clothing of those funding streams. With those Federal dollars will come Federal demands to control the recipients.  This is the Progressive-Democrats’ push for control.

A Thought on Inflation

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The press is making much of this; here, for instance, is OAN:

US consumer prices rose by the most in 13 years in June amid supply constraints and a continued rebound in the costs of travel-related services from pandemic-depressed levels as the economic recovery gathered momentum.
The consumer price index increased 0.9% last month, the largest gain since June 2008, after advancing 0.6% in May, the Labor Department said on Tuesday.
In the 12 months through June, the CPI jumped 5.4%. That was the largest gain since August 2008 and followed a 5.0% increase in the 12 months through May. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI accelerated 0.9% after increasing 0.7% in May.
The so-called core CPI surged 4.5% on a year-on-year basis….

Of course, that compares this year with last—and last year, 2020, was a coarse aberration, consisting as it did of a non-economic environment: a Government-ordered nearly complete shutdown of our nation’s economy. Inflation-related data from that year—nearly all economic data from that year—are entirely suspect, not because they’re inaccurate, but because they flow from an entirely non-economic cause, that government reaction to the Wuhan Virus situation.

A better comparison, then, is 2021 with 2019, the last year before the Government closure of our economy [emphasis added].

$1 in 2019 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1.05 today, an increase of $0.05 over 2 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.61% per year between 2019 and today [26 Jun 2021], producing a cumulative price increase of 5.30%.

That’s in line with the Fed’s goal of 2% inflation.

There are some instructive city by city inflation rates, measured from 2019 to 2021, at the link, too. None of those rates are near the 2020-2021 rate, either; they’re all in line with the Fed’s inflation goal.

Another comparison with 2019 is this one:

Compared with two years ago, overall prices rose 3% in June.

2020’s data should be entered into the statistics books with a big, bold asterisk. That year’s data are suitable only for research into government interventions in an economy and for comparison with other years of government-originated closures.

Of course, there are other factors, still rippling through the inflation from 2020, that can extend this year-on-year period of apparent inflation into something to be taken seriously. One is that as we do come out from under Government’s Wuhan Virus reaction, and folks get back out and about and back to work and to buying stuff, demand is picking up rapidly. Demand increases always will outpace production increases, too, as decisions to buy or not to buy are relatively instantaneous, while production lags the decision, and then ramping up production takes time.

Another factor is the lack of folks returning to work with the lifting—in most States—of State government restrictions on movement and business operations. That’s driven in large part (not solely) by folks making the entirely rational, from their perspective, decision to make more money from the Federal government’s handouts than they can by going to work.

Another factor, also labor related, is the mismatch between job qualification requirements and the location of folks satisfying those requirements.

Still another factor, this one Wuhan Virus related, is the interruption of supply chains, as businesses learn empirically the fragility of just-in-time supply based on foreign sources, and those businesses set about reorienting their supply chains.

Those disruptions will take some time to resolve themselves.

Space Tourism

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Richard Branson flew on his Virgin Galactic ride to the edge of space Sunday morning. In its article about the then-impending flight, The Wall Street Journal asked it readers

Are you ready for space tourism?

To which I answer: You bet I am, but not just up-and-backs to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. I’m ready for rides to Mars, to Venus, to the larger moons of Jupiter. I want to see some sights and to walk on other planets.

Student Debt Problems

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Students who borrowed (lots of) money to get degrees from “elite” schools—or from any school, come to that—now feel financially hobbled for life.

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.

The universities share a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems. These schools should—and the reluctant should be required to—publish the mean and median salaries for each of the first five years of employment for each of the majors the schools offer. The schools also should be the ones making the loans to their students or underwriting private lenders’ loans to their students.

The Federal government shares a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems, also. The government should stop throwing money at the schools; that just encourages them to increase their tuition price to absorb the Federal dollars—at the immediate and direct expense to the students. Indeed, the Federal government should stop shipping money to the schools at all except for narrowly defined basic research projects, and those exceptions should be rare.

However, color me unsympathetic to the student borrowers’ plight; they bear the greatest responsibility for their situation. No one made them borrow such outlandish amounts. Even when I was in school the wage, etc, data were available; I just had to get off the couch to go get them. Today, it’s not even necessary to get off the couch: the pupils just have to bestir themselves enough to engage in some key clicks on their computerized device.

I’m especially unsympathetic to the students’ blame-shifting.

Matt Black graduated from Columbia in 2015 with an MFA in film and $233,000 in federal loans. …
Mr Black, a 36-year-old writer and producer in Los Angeles, said he grew up in a lower middle-class family in Oklahoma. He earns $60,000 in a good year and less than half that in dry stretches. The faculty at Columbia was stellar, he said, but he blamed the school for his “calamitous financial situation.”

Black needs to get a mirror and consult it. He was no child newly graduated from high school, blindly accepting the putative guidance counselor’s advice when he decided to take those loans. He was a grown adult man looking at graduate schools (he did shop around, looking at more than just Columbia, didn’t he?). No one made him take “the school’s” unvarnished word; no one made him not check for himself whether borrowing so much against a future salary he so easily could have learned was a good idea. No one made him take the loans. Indeed, no one made him decide to go to such an expensive school for his film MFA.