Archive for the ‘Inflation’ Category
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021
The New Regressive Dark Ages
Arrogance, wealth, and received authority are always the super-spreaders and force-multipliers of false knowledge, and none more so than in the present age.
Once upon a time long ago, we agreed there were certain immutable laws of human nature. These laws were based on facts, reality, and data.
In other words, we accepted common sense about the way the world worked according to logical and even “scientific” principles. That assumption defined us as “enlightened” rather than Dark Age reductionists and ideological- or myth-driven zealots.
Not now. “Progressives,” especially the media, are most often regressive, anti-Enlightenment, and intolerant people, who start with a deductive premise and then make the evidence conform to it—or else.
Regressives
For example, we used to believe that if the government printed more money without commensurate sudden rises in population or economic output, inflation followed. And money cheapened in value all the more so if the government simultaneously both incentivized labor non-participation through over generous entitlements, and promised or enacted higher taxes and more regulations. The latter inevitably would discourage production as demand from a stimulated economy rose.
In 100 days, we’ve either done all of those things or, at least sent messages to producers that we shall do so shortly. Why then are we surprised that monthly consumer prices are spiking after nearly 20 years of very low inflation? Why are our essentials such as lumber, gasoline, housing, appliances, and food skyrocketing? Is the current idea that there is no science of economics? Or is inflation good by “spreading the wealth” through decreasing the value of money for those who have too much of it?
Deterrence is also an ancient law. Humans make instant cost-benefit analyses and act accordingly—from nation states that weigh the advisability of war to potential criminals who gauge the chances of their arrest and punishment.
Posted in American History, Bankruptcy, Big Business, Big Government, Bill Gates, Border Security, Cancel Culture, Censoring, Center For Disease Control, China, Coronavirus, Deep State, Democrats, Donald Trump, Dr Fauci, Economy, Election 2020, FBI, FBI Director, Foreign Policy, Globalists, Globalization, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Hillary Clinton, Inflation, Israel, Israeli Prime Minister, Joe Biden, John Brennan, Kamala Harris, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Marxism, Media, Middle East, National Defense, NPR - National Public Radio, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Open Borders, Palestine, Police/law enforcement, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Regulations, Resistance, Social Justice, Socialism, Transparency, Victor Davis Hanson, White Nationalists, White Privilege, Wokeness | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2021
VIDEO – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.
Victor Davis Hanson on Impeachment and the ‘Cancer’ of Woke Ideology | American Thought Leaders
ARTICLE – BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON THE WORLD GOES ON WHILE AMERICA SLEEPS
February 11, 2021
The Democratically controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president.
The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors.
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican House members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other.
Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs — and yet will not be removed from House committees.
So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues.
The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state and the political left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now-citizen Donald Trump.
Apparently they fear that one day he will rise from the infernal regions to wreak his revenge.
Meanwhile, life in America goes on.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Anti-Capitalists, Big Business, Big Government, Black Lives Matter, Cancel Culture, China, Cloward-Piven, Congress, Conservatism, Corruption/Crime, Critical Race Theory, Cultural Marxism, Deep State, Democracy, Democrats, Diversity, Donald Trump, Election, Election 2020, Elitism, Foreign Policy, France, Free Speech, George Soros, Germany, Globalists, Globalization, GOP, Government Waste and Fraud, Great Reset, Identity Politics, Indoctrination of students, Inflation, Interest Rates, International Affairs, Iran, Joe Biden, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Marxism, Media, Middle East, National Debt, National Defense, Nationalism, Nazism, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Correctness, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Protestors, Radical Left, Resistance, Russia, Social Justice, Socialism, Sovereignty, Spending, Taxation, Taxes, Totalitarian, Transparency, Victor Davis Hanson, Videos, Violent Protestors, White Privilege, Wokeness, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020
The Biden Tax Hike Would Be Severe
If the Democrats sweep in November, make sure your lawyer and financial advisers are standing by.
By Philip DeMuth Mr. DeMuth is author of “The Overtaxed Investor: Slash You Tax Bill and Be a Tax Alpha Dog”
July 14, 2020
Complain if you must, but we live in a Golden Age of Taxes—the lowest rates we may see for decades. President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered rates, widened brackets and simplified preparation. Gazing toward the heavens, one can almost see the smiling face of Ronald Reagan beaming down. Yet like all Golden Ages, this one will end, and we already know the date: Dec. 31, 2025. Barring a miracle, that is when the tax cuts expire and President Obama’s American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 becomes the law of the land once more.
To see what a good deal we have now, let’s look at the numbers. A married couple filing jointly shows $78,000 of ordinary income, their current marginal rate is 12%. When the Trump tax cuts expire, their marginal rate will more than double, to 25%.
If you receive $30,000 from Social Security and have $36,000 of other income, you will be taxed at a marginal rate of 46%, even while supposedly being in the 25% tax bracket (because of the nutty way Social Security is taxed). In some cases, your tax rate can go as high as 56%. More people will experience rising tax rates throughout retirement—first gradually, following the accelerated required minimum distributions from their retirement accounts, and then suddenly, when the first spouse dies and the survivor has to file as a single taxpayer.
The Trump tax reform doubled standard deductions, such that far fewer taxpayers still bother to itemize. It also protects estates, with an $11.58 million exclusion from taxes. People can plan to give money to whomever they want when they die, instead of playing accounting games to confound the taxman. These deductions and exemptions will be cut in half when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires.
Remember the Alternative Minimum Tax, which made you do your taxes twice, under two completely different tax regimes, and then pay whichever was greater? That annual ritual has all but disappeared. Better sharpen your pencils, though, because it’s coming back in 2026 for seven million filers. Meantime, the qualified business income deduction, which lets eligible small-business owners deduct up to 20% of their income, is going away.
All this may seem a long way off. But if Joe Biden is elected and the Democrats take three more seats in the Senate, some of these changes could happen as soon as next year.
(more…)
Posted in Democrats, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Inflation, IRS, Joe Biden, Liberalism, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Socialism, Taxation, Taxes, Transparency | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2015
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Hillary Clinton Flunks Economics
She says we’re better off with Democrats in the White House. Is that so?
There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.
On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.
We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.
And yet Hillary Clinton said on Oct. 13 in the first Democratic presidential debate, “The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House,” and she offers variations on that line when campaigning.
Whose economy is she talking about? The middle class has shrunk under the Obama administration. According to government figures and industry analyses, median-income households have lost nearly $1,300 after inflation, while the prices of food, health care and college tuition have risen almost twice as fast as inflation.
Those struggling to find work are increasingly out of luck: Labor-force participation for working-age Americans has fallen to 62.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a level last seen in the Jimmy Carter-era recession. Millions have given up looking for work, and millions have fallen into poverty as a result.
Posted in Big Business, Big Government, Carly Fiorina, Democrats, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Economy, Election 2016, GOP, Inflation, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Politics, Small Business, Taxation, Taxes, Women Candidates | No Comments »
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Two Miserable Decades
Don’t worry, it was even worse in the 1970s. Or was it?
Jonathan V. Last
September 30, 2013, Vol. 19, No. 04
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Everyday life wasn’t much better than economic life. Terrorism first came into vogue in the 1970s. Sometimes it was a thuggish hijacking, with criminals commandeering an airplane and demanding passage to Cuba. Sometimes it was deadly, like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nobody much remembers it today, but in March 1977 Muslim radicals with machine guns and machetes marched into the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, just five blocks north of the White House, and took 100 workers hostage. They herded the hostages onto the roof, where one was killed and two others were shot over the course of a standoff that lasted two days. Simultaneously, affiliated terrorists took over D.C. city hall, where future mayor Marion Barry was shot and a radio reporter was shot and killed.
The B’nai B’rith incident was soon lost in the wash of small-scale attacks and bombings from Islamic extremists, Black Power radicals, and student leftists that punctuated life in the ’70s—none of which seems to have left much of an impact. One prelude to the ’70s did have lasting consequences. During the “long, hot summers” of 1964-68, 329 “important” riots took place in 257 U.S. cities, according to Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s authoritative America in Black and White, with a toll of some 300 dead, 8,000 injured, and 60,000 arrested. The riots in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, Newark, and, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., were only the most famous. These eruptions helped drive the middle class out of urban cores in the ’70s, sending cities into decline and making the new underclass permanent.
Violent crime was almost nonexistent in the 1950s, but by 1973 it was rampant,
Happy times are all alike, nestled in the comfortable batting of peace, growth, and stability. Every unhappy time is unhappy in its own way.
America has been blessed because, since the end of the Great Depression, our nation has experienced only two periods of deep discontent that lasted a decade or more. The first was the 1970s. We are living through the second today. Which was worse?
The popular mind often misremembers the past. For instance, these days the 1950s are held out as a time deserving special scorn. Stories set in the Eisenhower era are often shot through with contempt for the racism, sexism, hypocrisy, and dissatisfaction of American life. But this is revisionism; by many measures—wages, unemployment, home sales, marital stability, births, savings rates, upward mobility—the ’50s were an idyll.
What’s more, the happy times of the 1950s stretched into the 1960s. So long that “The ’60s” as we remember them—Woodstock, long hair, free love—didn’t really get underway until 1967 and continued well into the 1970s. That’s one of the central insights of David Frum’s wonderful book about the ’70s, How We Got Here. His other insight is that whatever people want to believe about the ’50s and ’60s, the stretch from 1967 to 1979 was a rarely mitigated disaster.
Many people remember the headlines from the 1970s: the shooting war in Vietnam and the quiet but existential threat of the larger Cold War; a president nearly impeached; oil shocks that forced people to stand in line for gasoline. But the problems in America were both broader and deeper.
The economics of the 1970s, for example, were brutal. In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since the mid-1950s. (The postwar average has been about 5 percent.) By 1975 unemployment had more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. While people were working less, so was their money, as inflation ate into the value of the dollar. In the 1960s, the inflation rate rose above 2 percent only twice—until 1968. At which point it began steadily increasing, reaching 11 percent in 1974, 9.1 percent in 1975, and 11.3 percent in 1979. To understand the effect this financial terror had on the national psyche, consider how often inflation fears have recurred during the last 30 years—even though inflation hasn’t topped 6 percent since 1982. (more…)
Posted in Abortion, American History, Carter, Economy, Education, Entitlements, Inflation, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, President Ronald Reagan, Radical Left, Social Issues, Terrorism, U.S. Presidents, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
Posted in Banking, Economy, England, EU ( European Union), Europe, Federal Reserve, Housing Market, Inflation, Interest Rates, Pensions, Spending, Stimulus, Videos, Wall Street | No Comments »
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012
Advice for a New President
The counsel that Reagan received in November 1980 is still relevant today.
Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from a Nov. 16, 1980 memo to President-elect Ronald Reagan from his Coordinating Committee on Economic Policy. Its title: “Economic Strategy for the Reagan Administration.” The memo describes an era similar to our own in its economic problems and public anxiety, laying out a strategy to address them. The complete memo can be read at OpinionJournal.com. A related editorial appears nearby.
Sharp change in present economic policy is an absolute necessity. The problems of inflation and slow growth, of falling standards of living and declining productivity, of high government spending but an inadequate flow of funds for defense, of an almost endless litany of economic ills, large and small, are severe, they are not intractable. Having been produced by government policy, they can be redressed by a change in policy.
The Task Force reports that you commissioned during the campaign are now available. They contain an impressive array of concrete recommendations for action. More than that, the able people who served on the Task Forces are available to provide further detail and backup information to you or your designees. We all want to help and you can count on enthusiastic and conscientious effort.
Your Coordinating Committee has reviewed the Task Force reports. With due allowance for some differences in view about particulars and relative importance, we have found that they offer a substantial base for action by you and the team you assemble. We focus here on guiding principles, on priorities and linkages among policy areas, and on the problem of getting action.
You have identified in the campaign the key issues and lines of policy necessary to restore hope and confidence in a better economic future:
• Reestablish stability in the purchasing power of the dollar.
• Achieve a widely-shared prosperity through real growth in jobs, investment, and productivity.
• Devote the resources needed for a strong defense, and accomplish the goal of releasing the creative forces of entrepreneurship, management, and labor by:
• Restraining government spending.
• Reducing the burden of taxation and regulation.
• Conducting monetary policy in a steady manner, directed toward eliminating inflation.
This amounts to emphasis on fundamentals for the full four years, as the key to a flourishing economy.
Guiding Principles
The essence of good policy is good strategy. Some strategic principles can guide your new administration as it charts its course.
• Timing and preparation are critical aspects of strategy. The fertile moment may come suddenly and evaporate as quickly. The administration that is well prepared is ready to act when the time is ripe. The transition period and the early months of the new administration are a particularly fertile period. The opportunity to set the tone for your Administration must be seized by putting the fundamental policies into place immediately and decisively.
Getty Images/Time Life PicturesRonald Reagan (center) meets with advisers, including George Shultz and Milton Friedman to his left, Sept. 1, 1981. (more…)
Posted in American History, Economy, GOP, Government Regulation, Inflation, President Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Taxation, Taxes | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
The Fed Votes No Confidence
The prolonged—’emergency’—near-zero interest rate policy is harming the economy.
By CHARLES SCHWAB Mr. Schwab is founder and chairman of the Charles Schwab Corporation
We’re now in the 37th month of central government manipulation of the free-market system through the Federal Reserve’s near-zero interest rate policy. Is it working?
Business and consumer loan demand remains modest in part because there’s no hurry to borrow at today’s super-low rates when the Fed says rates will stay low for years to come. Why take the risk of borrowing today when low-cost money will be there tomorrow?
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers last week that fiscal policy should first “do no harm.” The same can be said of monetary policy. The Fed’s prolonged, “emergency” near-zero interest rate policy is now harming our economy.
The Fed policy has resulted in a huge infusion of capital into the system, creating a massive rise in liquidity but negligible movement of that money. It is sitting there, in banks all across America, unused. The multiplier effect that normally comes with a boost in liquidity remains at rock bottom. Sufficient capital is in the system to spur growth—it simply isn’t being put to work fast enough.
Average American savers and investors in or near retirement are being forced by the Fed’s zero-rate policy to take greater investment risks. To get even modest interest or earnings on their savings, they move out of safer assets such as money markets, short-term bonds or CDs and into riskier assets such as stocks. Either that or they tie up their assets in longer-term bonds that will backfire on them if inflation returns. They’re also dramatically scaling back their consumer spending and living more modestly, thus taking money out of the economy that would otherwise support growth. (more…)
Posted in Banking, Economy, Federal Reserve, Housing Market, Inflation, Interest Rates, Obama Administraiton and Policy | No Comments »
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
Individuals should be free to decide what to produce and consume, and their decisions should be made within a predictable policy framework based on the rule of law.
As this election year begins, a lot of people are wondering what we can do to restore America’s prosperity and create more jobs. Republican presidential candidates are offering their ideas, and at his State of the Union message on Tuesday President Obama presented his. I believe the fundamental answer is simple: Government policies must adhere more closely to the principles of economic freedom upon which the country was founded.
At their most basic level, these principles are that families, individuals and entrepreneurs must be free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell, and how to help others. Their decisions are to be made within a predictable government policy framework based on the rule of law, with strong incentives derived from the market system, and with a clearly limited role for government.
Getty ImagesRonald Reagan: He and advisers such as George Shultz shunned the idea of stimulus and agreed on ?the need for a long-term point of view.? (more…)
Posted in American History, Big Government, Carter, Conservatism, Democrats, Economy, Federal Reserve, George W. Bush, GOP, Government Regulation, Inflation, Interest Rates, Keynesian Theory of Economics, Liberalism, Milton Freidman, President Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Spending, Taxation, Taxes, Thomas Sowell | No Comments »
Monday, November 7th, 2011
Inflation hits lower-income people especially hard. So why is the president ignoring rising food prices?
Barack Obama spends much of his time these days running for re-election, campaigning as a populist, bashing millionaires and extolling the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although “populist” means different things to different people, the Oxford American dictionary says it describes a politician who seeks to represent the interests of ordinary people. So how does the president measure up as a true populist? Not well.
Food prices are an important component of the living expenses of ordinary people, especially the elderly or families struggling to make ends meet. Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast that food prices will rise by 3.5%-4.5% this year, the sharpest year-to-year increase since 1978. (That year, by the way, was prelude to 1979-80 double-digit inflation, when prices at one point in 1980 were soaring at nearly 15% annually.)
Commodity futures prices for animal feed staples like corn and soybeans are riding high. Oil and gold blipped upward again last week after a hiatus that followed the end of the QE2 monetary stimulus. Overall, dollar inflation is approaching an uncomfortable 4% annually.
So what else is happening? The economy picked up a little steam in the third quarter, growing at an annual rate of 2.5% on the strength of higher consumer spending and business investment. But personal disposable income, inflation adjusted, dropped 1.7%, the first decline since the 2009 recession. The personal savings rate fell back to the recession level, a meager 4.1% of personal income. Why should anyone save, when money-market accounts yield only a skimpy half a percentage point?
What we have here looks like the early stages of stagflation. (more…)
Posted in Agriculture, American History, Democrats, Economy, Election 2012, Inflation, Interest Rates, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Populism, Progressive Movement, Small Business, Spending, Taxation, Taxes, Wall Street | No Comments »
