Tag Archives: politics

Lies of the Progressive-Democratic Party Politicians

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and President Joe Biden (D) tout the just passed (I ass-u-me; I’m writing this on Sunday morning) Build Reduced Back Act as not raising taxes on Americans with incomes less than $400k per year. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) agrees with that by her relative silence on the matter.

However, their very own Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation demonstrates the lie of that claim.

Just the News aggregated those data:

Federal taxes will increase by $1.9 billion on those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 and by $10.8 billion on those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2023.
Overall average tax rates would increase from 20.3% to 20.6% in 2023 alone, according to the analysis.

A three-tenths of a percentage point increase might seem like chump change to those politicians, but they need to explain that increase to the large fraction—majority?—of Americans who already live paycheck to paycheck and now will have that “chump change” taken out of their pockets in addition to the taxes they already pay, along with the rising costs of the food, energy, and housing with which they’re already confronted.

Jobs

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Some statistics indicate a strong and growing jobs situation in our economy. Other statistics…not so much.

A couple of the latter, for instance.

The labor force participation rate has dropped for the second month in a row in the face of burgeoning inflation and wage growth that isn’t keeping up, so that real wages—what your money actually can buy in the grocery store and gas station and for your home in the form of electricity—are shrinking drastically.

According to BLS—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the labor force participation rate, the per cent of Americans able to work and who actually are working or looking for work, stood at 62.1% in July. That’s down from June’s 62.2%, which itself was down from May’s 62.3%, and all of which are down from the nearby peak of March’s 62.4%. Folks seem to be giving up on finding work that will pay them enough to keep up with the Biden administration’s inflation, which stood at 9.1% year-on-year in June, up from May’s 8.6%.

The other statistic is this one [scroll to MULTIPLE JOBHOLDERS, near the bottom of the table, and keep in mind that the data presented are in the thousands], which seems reflective of the actual state of our economy and stands in opposition to the…optimistic…talk coming out of the White House. Of those folks participating in the labor force,

part-time jobs and multiple jobholders increased by 384,000 and 92,000, respectively….

This is the cost of President Joe Biden’s (D) war on our oil-, natural gas-, and coal-energy industry, given that energy is at the core of everything we do, and that oil and natural gas also are key to our materials industries, from fertilizer (see food price inflation) to automobile, including battery car, production to clothing, and on and on. This also is the cost of Biden’s explosion of regulation, which drives up the cost of simply operating a business to produce any of that stuff, and his insistence that the key to driving down inflation is to throw money at it (see his current $739 billion Build Reduced Back bill debated and passed in the Senate over the weekend).

Bias and Gun Trafficking

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Dan Frosch and Zusha Elinson had a piece on illegal gun trafficking in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal in which they decried the degree of illegal trafficking, especially across State borders. In the graph below, they particularly called out five States as being particularly egregious sources of this interstate trafficking.

Sadly, their article exposes more about the press’ bias in reporting on guns and (by their implication from their trafficking emphasis) on gun control.

No doubt gun-trafficking is a serious problem.

However, some context is informative, also; it took me about 10 grueling seconds to conduct the Bing search that turned up this context from the year following Frosch and Elinson’s graph.

  • 5,000 guns trafficked out of Texas against 1.6 million guns sold in Texas in 2021.
  • 6,000 guns trafficked out of Georgia against 496 thousand guns sold in Georgia in 2021.
  • 4,800 guns trafficked out of Arizona against 480 thousand guns sold in Arizona in 2021.
  • 4,700 guns trafficked out of Virginia against 620 thousand guns sold in Virginia in 2021.
  • 4,300 guns trafficked out of Florida against 1.4 million guns sold in Florida in 2021.

It’s interesting that Frosch and Elinson chose to elide this context-providing information.

On Governor Newsom’s Plan to Produce Insulin

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Regarding that idea, a letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section offered this after suggesting that Newsom’s effort would have the salutary outcome of demonstrating the foolishness of such a move:

Targeted subsidies for at-risk populations cost a fraction of the investment needed to bring “affordable” medications to the people….

That’s true enough, could Government actually do that and, further, keep it limited to the truly at-risk. However, actual competition in the market is free, and that brings down costs for everyone. Additionally, that competition allows far better and more accurate identification of those remaining few at-risk who still can’t afford their meds and would be legitimate targets of largesse. That also would facilitate more effective use of sources of largesse, beginning in order with family and friends first, followed by church and local charity, local community, county, then state governments, with the Feds last on the list, rather than the default source.

Bragging about Getting al-Zawahiri

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It’s good that we got him. It’s unclear that we can do this sort of thing routinely. General Frank McKenzie, Central Command commander during President Joe Biden’s (D) panicky running away from Afghanistan, had this:

Let’s remember, this is one strike in a year[.]

Indeed. Successfully burning al-Zawahiri in his city apartment makes us one-for-two in over-the-horizon drone strikes into Afghanistan. The other was in the immediate aftermath of that cut-and-run, when we successfully burned a civilian and a bunch of kids with a drone strike on a car.

However, with an n of 2, we can’t tell whether the first, failed, strike is illustrative of the true trend, or the second, successful, strike is illustrative of the true trend—or even whether the true trend is closer to that mediocre 50-ish per cent success rate.

Nor is two strikes a year apart a very useful pace.