The Wall Street Journal asked a question last Friday regarding President Joe Biden (D) and the weekend G-7 meeting.
What would you like to see come out of the G-7 summit?
I would have liked Biden to repeat former President Donald Trump’s (R) offer of a completely tariff-free trade regime among the seven.
But he didn’t make the offer. Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democrats are all about higher taxes, not lower.
The House Problem Solvers Caucus, with 29 Progressive-Democrats and 29 Republicans, are proposing their own “infrastructure” bill—to the tune of $1.25 trillion dollars, more than double the Senate Republicans’ original proposal of some $570 billion (and which, in their own abject meekness, they exploded into a nearly trillion dollar supplication).
The Republicans in this “problem solver” gang are engaged in their own surrender to the spending and taxing Party.
Of course President Joe Biden (D) and his Congressional Party leadership aren’t negotiating in good faith—they don’t need to. They can hold out for everything in their original demand because they know they’ll get it.
It’s a distinct possibility, and it would be IMNSHO a good thing. William McGurn had some thoughts on this, citing a recent mayoral election in McAllen, TX, in which a Republican was elected for the first time ever. McGurn also noted that, in the 2020 Presidential election, nearby Zapata County voted Republican for the first time in 100 years when the county picked Warren G Harding. McGurn suggested that these might be the harbinger of a Latino migration from the (Progressive-)Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
Then McGurn offered some statistics from a National Republican Senatorial Committee survey of Latino likely voters in battleground states. Even accounting for the obvious potential of bias in the survey, the numbers are suggestive.
Asked to choose between two possibilities—Some people say free-market capitalism is the best form of government because it gives people the freedom to work and achieve and Other people say that socialism is the best form of government because it is more fair and equitable to working class people, 63% of respondents opted for the former, and only 17% went for the latter.
Other outcomes of the survey:
Even given the strong potential for bias in the survey, one aspect of its importance, McGurn noted, is that it was conducted during campaign season when then-candidate Biden was overtly pretending to be politically moderate.
President Joe Biden (D) has killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, is blocking oil production from Federal lands, killed oil production in northern Alaska, is working to kill fracking altogether, is working to kill American oil (and natural gas) production, and has given the go ahead to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In sum, he’s actively working to kill American energy independence.
All of that is driving up American citizens’ energy costs, and that is reflected in the market’s anticipation of spiking oil costs. Here are a couple of graphs illustrating that. They illustrate the expectation that oil will soon cost $100/barrel, after several years of $50-$65/barrel. The first presents the spike since the start of the year in the number of West Texas Intermediate $100/barrel futures contracts against a current $70 price.
This graph reflects the price of a $100/barrel call option on WTI for delivery in December this year and next.
The expectation of actual market pricing of $100 is rising, also, sharply enough to drive up the price of the option.
This is what expert traders (some of whom are trading on the trends themselves and not on underlying oil prices, to be sure) are seeing as the future price of oil for our citizens. Even if oil settles out at its current price of $70 or just a little higher (and the anticipations turn out to be overstated), this current price represents a sharp increase over the last several years, when Government wasn’t moving so zealously to restrict our nation’s oil supply.
This is what Biden has wrought for our nation’s energy supply and cost of energy.
Recall Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promise to send “unpleasant” signals to the US because President Joe Biden hasn’t yet kowtowed sufficiently to him—Washington was not showing a readiness to discuss all issues at a bilateral summit next month [now this month] is how The Jerusalem Post dryly put it at the end of May.
The comments by Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, came a day after US President Joe Biden said that he would press Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect human rights when the two leaders meet in June.
Having embarrassed Biden—and our nation—quietly with the Colonial Pipeline/Nord Stream 2 fiasco, Putin now is bent on embarrassing Biden—and us—more publicly.
JBS Meats was the recent target of a “ransomware” attack that caused JBS to shut down some servers and interrupt meat production in Australia and the US.
Now, a couple of Cox Media Group television stations, one in Florida, the other in Pennsylvania, have been hit by a cyber attack, forcing them both off the air. Cox expects to have them back on the air “soon.”
I expect more signaling in the coming days. And I worry, given what Biden gave away in the aftermath of Colonial, what he’ll give away in response to these signals behind closed doors in Geneva when he meets with Putin in a week.