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Another Ross Rant and much of what he says I have already said as well.
Meanwhile, Biden is proving worse than even I envisaged. It is a war against "racial inequality" and will prove a big disaster as did Johnson's "War of Poverty" which created more poverty, more dependence, the break up of black families and their connection to their churches as well as poor education.
Government cannot do what the private sector has proven it can time and again. Democrats love to spend money because it buys votes and elections, gives them power to control more lives and they are seldom held accountable because the number of "doles" grows and only a small number become the "tab stuckee's." It is akin to the difference between union worker numbers versus management numbers.
When it hits the fan, as it surely will, then the "doles" will get it in the neck as they always do.
One final thought. It has become clever to say publicly "I take full responsibility." First, it means nothing. Second it allows the sinner to get off the hook. Third, it proves there never is a price to pay.
In recent confirmation hearings this phrase has been overworked when a screw up is uncovered or an inappropriate former twitter comment, made by a job applicant, is uncovered.
If you challenge what I have just written, please cite me an instance when retribution has been imposed.
I take full responsibility for my comment.
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Watch the ten year and oil prices. Oil is $57. Both are now moving up. Look for food prices to move up as soy and corn remain at much higher prices and gas prices raise transport costs.. New home construction costs are up as lumber prices are up substantially. These are all core costs for households. And we still have not had the release of all of that pent up savings which will happen in June when the vaccines are widespread. While the Fed, and many others, still say there will be no inflation, I believe with these base commodities up so much, and the flood of spending about to come in June and onward, it is hard to see how there will not be some level of inflation that could go above 2% by late in the year. The yield curve will give us a warning.
Railcar loadings are now above where they were in February 2020 before the shutdown. Energy prices are going to rise. In Germany they started to shift to renewables years ago and are now at around 65% renewables. Energy prices in Germany are now up to over 2 times what they had been, and they had to go back to using some coal plants to supplement power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow. Welcome to the results of renewables for energy. Poor people will just not be able to pay for power I guess, so they will devise a new federal program to pay their power bills. And so the cycle goes around. We are not far from economically viable batteries to store power generated by sun and wind, but it will be possibly decades before this is widely installed and viable to make a real difference in how power is generated. Similar to electric cars, it will take 15-20 years to make the change over.
Reality is, more than 50% of the unemployed are receiving more in enhanced unemployment than they were earning, and that was at $300 not the $400 Biden wants to pay, plus they get food stamps, and no eviction for not paying rent. Plus they got $1200 per person, then $600, and now maybe another $1400=$3200 bonus. Plus if they are married with 2 kids they got an added $2200 under CARES, total $5400, and will now get another $4,000 (1400 per adult and I think $600 per kid) . Total for a married guy with 2 kids-$9,400, plus he is making more per week by not working. That is more money than most of these people ever had. And they wonder why some companies can’t find workers and unemployment is so high still. Plus their kid gets a free laptop, and their college grad kid gets his student debt paid off by the taxpayers. And now they plan to add another $3600 per child, $7200 per family of four, permanently. With $15 minimum wages that is $31,200 per year. The average income in places like Lumberton NC is $13.82 or $28,000. What a message to workers- why work- the rich guys will pay more taxes, and the government will pass it on to you for not working.
Consumer balance sheets on average are the strongest they have been in decades. Savings are the highest in decades. There is no crisis of hunger or homelessness other than all the drug addicts in CA, OR and WA living in the street who get taken care of by their respective cities. Somehow those people seem to be eating real food. The whole basis for the $1.9 trillion is needed to alleviate all the “suffering” is bogus, and is just part of the new economic policy that if you throw trillions at the problem, and redistribute wealth, and pay $15 per hour, unemployment will go back down, and poverty and hunger will be eliminated. Keep that in your mind, as the underlying basis for all the spending and economic steps the White House and Dems take. They firmly believe that government spending and programs are what is needed, not deregulation and strong support for the private sector to create the jobs. Same policies as FDR after the 29 crash.
They hate Trump so much that they ignore what the situation was in February 2020 when we had 3.5% unemployment by doing the opposite of what they are doing now. They also believe that the “worries about over spending are overstated”. They also believe “that concerns that the benefits of deficit financed fiscal support will be washed away by higher interest rates doesn’t apply.” These are quotes from policy documents I have read. That is the basis for all of the spending programs you see. Government transfer payments to individuals in 2020 were $1 trillion greater than all wages paid to individuals. Just for perspective.
If they would force the teachers to go back to work, and force NY, CA and IL to reopen, we would not need much of a stimulus. By the time any of this money actually gets into people’s pockets it will be late March or April, or later, and by then vaccines will be widespread, and the cases and hospitalizations will be far lower. They have not even spent the last $1 trillion from the last two packages. Almost none of the money for schools has been spent yet. By raising the excess unemployment to $400, and giving all that cash to low income workers, they will keep unemployment high. It is totally counterproductive to all the stimulus, as is $15 per hour. The whole thing makes no sense. I have the memo that explains the administration justifications for the stimulus program. It essentially says, “we are not sure what will happen so better to go too big than too small”.
They also know inside the White House that the allocation to states and cities is way more than needed by maybe $400 billion. There is no need for the allocation to schools since there are tens of billions unspent from the last bill. Bottom line is the belief that throwing money at the problem is the answer to everything. Their answer is spend instead of force the teachers back to work and force CA, NY and IL to reopen, and lower the excess $300 unemployment. The White House believes the Fed is out of ammunition and that is why they think now it has to be fiscal stimulus. They believe inflation will remain low, as will rates for a long time. I think it is not so clear. 2022 is going to be a bad year in the stock market if all of this goes through.
I listened to Biden push for his $1.9 trillion package. I had trouble listening to the BS. He essentially said what I told you in my last letter. The whole push is to get unemployment down as fast as possible no matter the long term consequences, and having the government instead of private enterprise create these millions of new “green jobs”. He said under Obama they tried $800 billion, and it did not do the job, so now we have to double down. The definition of an idiot is doing the same thing over again after it was a disaster the first time. They did not yet spend most of the funds from the last $900 billion, nor billions from the first CARES program, so what are they going to do with $1.9 trillion of new wasteful money. This is a potential fiscal disaster, and we need to hope Manchin stops the worst of it. The only real answer is more people getting vaccinated, lift the shutdowns, and teachers going back to work, and problem solved.
Biden made it sound like we are in a major recession, but that is just not true. I can see the political appeal of the story that we are going to just hand you another $1400 per family member, more food stamps, rent money, higher minimum wages, dismissal of your student loan, and other goodies. Who will say no to that package of free money other than those of us who are paying the bill, and who understand what an economic disaster is being created. It is a huge political winner for the Dems for 2022. That is all this is. It is all up to Manchin now. Even Larry Sommers, former Treasury Secy, said it is too big, and going to create big problems in the future.
In addition to all of that waste of money here are the added programs yet to come to spend your money. $2 Trillion for infrastructure with 40% to be spent in black areas whether or not there are $800 billion of projects that make sense, or would be ready to build in less than ten years. The rest is the same old “shovel ready” program from Obama that totally failed. A tax credit of $15,000 to minority families to buy a home. What about poor whites or Asians. Build 1.5 million affordable homes. Who is going to be the developers and where is this land for what cost. They once had Section 8, and that did not work out too well. Grants to 1 million minority businesses. What about struggling white owned hotels and restaurants. A $10 billion VC fund for minority businesses.
Who are they going to hire with the ability to underwrite these ideas and monitor them. Seems like a massive corruption scheme. Forgive student loans for $10,000 or maybe more. Just a few hundred Billion here. What about all those who already paid off their loans like responsible borrowers. Tuition free college. A few tens of billions more forever. Build high tech labs in minority communities. Who is going to build these, and who with any real ability is going to run them when they could earn many times as much in real high tech private firms. $50 billion for investing in apprenticeships. I guess we will pay companies to hire people which they already do with their own money.
Here is the real killer,. Force all lenders, even non-banks to make loans they otherwise do not want to make to minority borrowers-this is a repeat of subprime programs all over again. It will also require banks to open branches in low income communities and make more loans they cannot justify. $100 billion new loans by the government in black communities. Who underwrites these and how do they prevent mass corruption. Now if you lost count of how much of your tax money just went down the drain, so did I. It is trillions. But not to worry, they will just raise your taxes to redistribute your money to others who did not earn it. It can be your new charity. Some in the White House team have said expect there to be a 10%-20% drop in the stock market in the next 12-18 months, but they feel it makes no difference to the economy. They are just focused on jobs, so they are dismissing that as not a problem. Let that sink in.
Wisconsin now is collecting its tax collections at a level that is back to pre-March, 2020 levels. So there is no need for any federal funds for them. Moody’s has just lowered its estimate of the states’ shortfall of funds collected, and the need to $224 billion. I don’t have the numbers, but I will bet if CA, NY and IL would reopen and reopen schools so people could get back to work, the gap would decline dramatically, meaning no need for the $1.9 trillion package to have any money for states and cities.
According to the WSJ there is still $1 trillion of unspent funds from the first two $4 trillion Covid programs. Can we first spend what we have in the bank before we take on more debt. What they need is massive pension reform, not more subsidies.. The real issue is places like NY that has 2 million less population than FL, but twice the budget. Waste is enormous. If it were not for the grossly excessive government worker and teacher pensions, there would be surpluses in most cities and states. Back to the teachers again as the real problem. In the end they will lower the threshold for the extra $100 and maybe lower the $1400, and they may lower the money to states and cities. However, expect them to come back later this year for more money if they do that.
There is now a growing consensus including the economists who advise the White House, to major investors, that the stock market will drop 10%-20% in 2021 as a result of the bubble created by zero rates and massive fiscal spending. I agree this could happen so keep your eye on the ten year and any shift in Fedspeak. If the ten year gets close to 2%, that will be the trigger, or if Powell shifts his words about rates. That will be the time to be a seller of much of your stock portfolio. Bonds will also be dropping at that time as rates rise. Stay out of bonds. They can only lose from here. In the meantime the SPX is likely to go above 4000, and possibly could reach 4400, although that is a real reach.
. So now the games with Games Stock and the others are over, and it is very likely some hedge funds made a fortune on the way down as well as on the way up. Don’t whine for the hedgies. Next week the political circus begins in Congress when they rake Robinhood over the coals, and whine all about the poor individual investors who they will claim “got screwed”. Well the individual investor took his shot and some made a lot of profit, and some lost a lot. That is what happens in the stock market when you gamble. We need to hope there is no new regulation coming out of this. There is none required. Now they are playing with Bitcoin, and they tried silver. It has become just a game for many of these kids.
The good news is none of the market makers or funds went out of business, and the market is back to itself now. That should show that the current regulatory structure worked. Robinhood never could have anticipated the massive volume, and even Schwab had delays in executing trades. Everyone needs to move on after the politicians and press get done with their misinformation circus. These things happen periodically in the market, and at least this time there was no disaster as we have seen in the past. The focus now will be on pay for order flow which is how you get zero commissions. Big trading houses pay Schwab and Robinhood to place their orders through them, and they take a tiny spread to make their profit. The customer pays that spread, but the execution price is supposedly better than if they paid a commission and the originating broker executed. The claim is, in the end the customer is slightly better off. I do not know the numbers on this to know, but if they stop pay for orders commissions will come back. One way or the other the customer has to pay for the system to function to execute orders.
Those of you who have been on the Rant for years are aware I have railed against the teachers unions for years. They are the worst thing that has happened to America. They are directly responsible for the poor schools, and the failures of minorities to get a good education, and the opportunity to get ahead. It all began with Albert Shanker in NYC decades ago, and we all knew then it would lead to bad outcomes. Biden just pulled the rug from under the kids when the head of the CDC said teachers did not need to be vaccinated to go back to school, and then his press person said the head of CDC was speaking as an individual, not as the head of the CDC when she said it in a CDC official news conference.
So we are now left to wonder when are we to know when an agency head is speaking officially and truth, or when is he speaking for himself. That was a terrible mistake by Biden as it took away the entire negotiating position of the mayors and governors. The Dems used to scream about dark money for Republicans, but the real dark money was the tens of millions from the teachers unions and the volunteers they rolled out for campaigns. Biden just made it clear the teachers unions run education in America now, and parents and mayors have no say. That is a massive disaster for kids, especially minority kids. DeVos did all she could to give minority parents the right to choose, but what we really need is for Republican governors, and hopefully the next president, to create a program where every kid from a family with incomes under $75,000 can have a free school voucher, and there should be a program to fund charter schools. I am even OK for funding of Catholic schools which goes against my belief that religion and government must be separate. It is the only hope we have to lift poor kids out of poverty, and to make a real dent in crime.
They should be suing the teachers unions for damages to kids, and tell them go to work or be fired. Parents who say they understand the fears of teachers are irresponsible parents. If store clerks and cops and medical workers can go to work without vaccine shots, so can teachers. As you might guess, my rage on this is unlimited, and Biden cut the rug out from the kids. Parents need to remember this in 2022. How many more kids need to commit suicide, or have serious mental health issues before Biden pushed the teachers go back to work.
Biden’s foreign policy continues to send the signals that he is weak, and will eventually roll over for Iran despite saying the sanctions will remain for now. These are the same sanctions Biden said were so bad when Trump imposed them. He now stopped helping the Saudis battle Iranian proxies in Yemen so Iran can try to finally set up another proxy army to attack Saudis. Stop arms sales to Saudis and UAE violating the Abraham Agreements, further sending the message to Iran that he will not resist their move to dominate the Mideast.
A new report says that Iran could now be in a position to have a bomb in months. Biden has not talked to Netanyahu, and pointedly did not even mention Israel when he spoke about the Middle East last week. What do you think Iran read into that. Obama II. Ignore Israel. Signing the renewal of the START treaty for 5 years was a terrible strategic mistake as now Russia has no reason to agree to anything on short and medium range missiles and no reason to push for China to sign on. When Blinken asked China to negotiate a similar nuke treaty last week they told him to get lost. Trump was using the renewal of START to get Russia to try to get China to the table. That is now gone. A major strategic blunder. In two weeks the foreign policy team is off to a great start. And now the head of our nuclear forces says we need to plan that we really could be in a nuclear war with Russia or China. And we have Biden and his previously failed Obama foreign policy team in charge.
I have shifted from thinking Haley will be the Republican nominee. I now think it is more likely to be Pompeo with Haley or Tim Scott as VP. When asked last week if he was running, Pompeo just smiled and said he was deciding what to do next. If he runs he will have Trump’s full backing. Trump will not run. He has too many legal and financial problems to deal with. And he will be 78. Pompeo is the perfect, very smart and well educated person with the perfect resume to be president.
Biden DOJ dropped the case against Yale for discrimination in admissions against Asians. They wasted no time in confirming that diversity admissions are here to stay until the Harvard Asian case is decided by SCOTUS. If you are a white heterosexual male you now go to the bottom of the list for school admission and jobs.
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The current impeachment trial reaffirms and exposes much of what I have alluded to in my memos. Democrats, liberals, progressives and their radical brothers and sisters are an unhappy, paranoid, psychotic lot, who covet power, know better than anyone else, have weaponized politics, and are control freaks. Worst of all, they are hypocrites, a danger to organized society that understands without law and order there can be no democracy.
They have gained the upper hand through intimidation and created an environment where the opposition is deemed the enemy and thus, ineffective in restoring and maintaining order because matters have reached a state where Republicans are both incapable of and repelled by what it takes to regain control.
The attack on Congress was more the result of radical penetration of a protest of frustrated citizens (deplorables) than anything Trump did by way of incitement. There is no doubt Trump's belief in the theft of the election has currency. Even a writer for Time Magazine validated what occurred as factual in an article whose message inferred 'in order to save our nation it had to be destroyed' and, as the articles below indicate, Trump's own behaviour, unorthodox and narcissistic ways provided the grist for his demonization.
I acknowledge, I was born a pessimist and cynic and thus, can only conclude the probability of America ever being a statute restored to it's upright position, after being brought down by the counter culture crowd, is highly unlikely. Why? Because it will take a civil war to right the ship and that is a price radicals will never tolerate.
This is the message I glean form Trump's second impeachment, the persistent efforts to shred the BiIl of Rights, the desire to turn capitalism into socialism and all the other subtle Trojan Horse attacks America has endured over the decades which are all aimed at destroying the greatest republic on earth.
The woke mob now utterly rules The New York Times
By Post Editorial Board
Will The New York Times discipline Nikole Hannah-Jones for blaring the personal information of another publication’s reporter across the internet? If not, it’s final confirmation that the inmates are running the asylum.
Hannah-Jones’ “doxxing” of The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium was the latest act in a theater of the absurd that included the forced departure — despite the clear wishes of the people who supposedly run the paper — of star science reporter Donald McNeil Jr., taken down by the paper’s woke mob.
Executive Editor Dean Baquet had already disciplined McNeil for his use of the N-word on a Times-run student trip to Peru in 2019. McNeil says a student asked “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used” the word. For context, McNeil asked, using the word itself, “if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title.” Baquet determined McNeil’s intent was not malign, and accordingly gave him a wrist-slap.
But staffers who thought that insufficient leaked word to the Daily Beast, which duly blared the “injustice” last week. Some 150 Times staffers then signed a letter demanding that McNeil pay a harsher price.
And Hannah-Jones, founder of the paper’s ahistorical 1619 Project, reportedly threatened Baquet, who’s also black, that she’d do her own investigation of what happened if he didn’t reverse course. The executive editor caved, axing a writer who’d joined the Times in 1976 and last year won the John Chancellor Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn wrote the staff, adding the paper had a “red line” on such words.
That statement led Sibarium to ask Hannah-Jones about her own use of the N-word on social media. “She responded by posting this reporter’s inquiry, including his cell phone number, on Twitter,” he wrote.
It took her 47 hours to delete it after Sibarium complained — and she knew she’d published his number because she responded to a cheering fan who mentioned it. She then scrubbed her Twitter account entirely.
Anyone at the Times who isn’t a woke warrior is at risk now, and top management will rewrite its rules to fit. Consideration of intent — along with all the old ethical rules, like not putting other journalists at risk — are out the window.
And:
Who’s a Threat to ‘Our Democracy’?
When progressives single out threats to ‘our democracy,’ what they mean is their democracy.
Daniel Henninger Feb. 10, 2021 6:13 pm ET
Early voting in Minneapolis, Nov. 2, 2020.
Photo: NurPhoto via Getty Images
Presenting their case for conviction at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the House managers repeatedly invoked Mr. Trump’s threat to “our democracy.” However remote the chance of conviction, Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot is passing into the judgment of history, which likely will be severe. After a lifetime of playing with fire, Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 got too close to the flames, which will engulf his legacy.
But for Democrats, obloquy on even this historic scale is not enough for anyone who, as they say, “threatens our democracy.”
I’ve become fascinated with this phrase—“our democracy.” What exactly does it mean?
Not long ago, hardly anyone used the apocalyptic notion of a threat to “our democracy” as a political argument. Suddenly, it emerged among progressives as a routine term of political art. The word “our” implies another of progressivism’s modern virtues, inclusion. But that, as they themselves would say, is a false narrative.
When progressives refer to “our democracy,” what they mean is their democracy. To be a member of their democracy, one has to share their beliefs. If you’re not in, you’re out. And if you’re out, they may come after you for being a threat to democracy. Other than carbon emissions, what could be worse?
In the Washington Post recently, Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat, wrote a piece titled, “Our democracy faced a near-death experience.” Four paragraphs in, Ms. Abrams places Republicans outside democracy: “Our democratic system faces extraordinary threats today because of sustained attacks from Republican leaders who throw up roadblocks to voting and, among the worst actors, stoke the flames of white supremacy and hyper-nationalism to cling to power.”
Is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, a member of our democracy, or not?
On Nov. 3, more than 300,000 Georgians cast votes in the state’s 14th Congressional District. Of these, Ms. Greene received 229,827 votes. One month later, 230 representatives, including every Democrat present, voted to strip Rep. Greene of her seats on the chamber’s committees. It was an act without precedent. In effect and result, House Democrats eviscerated the November election by imposing de minimis representation on the people of Georgia’s 14th District for two years.
This is an astonishing and destructive event. Republicans now say they may do the same when they regain House control, perhaps by stripping committee assignments from Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for her anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that U.S. support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby.”
Rep. Greene’s voters on Election Day may or may not have fully understood her paranoid political views (the one about lasers fired from space igniting California’s wildfires was new to me).
Rep. Omar’s constituents in Minnesota’s Fifth District certainly knew her views in a re-election campaign aggressively contested by black Republican Lacy Johnson. Out of nearly 400,000 votes cast, Ms. Omar won with more than 64%.
So be it, until the 2022 midterms. But how does voting to demote the election in a Georgia congressional district, no matter how freakish its representative’s views, square with “our democracy”?
Within days of that House vote, an inevitable corollary event arrived, with a New York Times columnist suggesting that in light of “our [that word again] national reality crisis,” some academics were urging the creation of a federal “reality czar,” whose office would identify and presumably correct false thinking.
It may be an exaggeration, but only a small one, to suggest that its proponents want a federal office of reality because they think that virtually all the 74 million Trump voters in 2020 were steeped in QAnon-like falsity. What an extraordinary juncture in U.S. politics. If you believe that everything your opponents think is false, and that everything you believe is the “truth” (apologies again for the oh so slight exaggeration), this surely is a form of insanity.
Joe Biden won the election. But why should 46.9% of U.S. voters submit to “reality” as defined by the 51.3% who won?
For centuries, extremism across the political spectrum has been the stuff of satire or dystopian fictions about thought-control systems, such as Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” in which geniuses rule the idiots. One wag has suggested the reality-czar progressives have been reading George Orwell’s “1984”—as a how-to manual.
A more cynical interpretation is it’s just another weapon to win elections: Make the post-Trump threat so cartoonishly large that no “serious person” can vote with the marching-moron Republicans.
Cynicism notwithstanding, Americans are living through a kind of informational dystopia. Some of it came from Donald Trump, who fed the postelection anxiety through Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. But that alone can’t account for the mass psychosis among progressives now about those who dissent from being shaped by their templates for “our democracy.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a whack job who ended up in Congress. More disturbing are the many once-liberal intellectuals, journalists and upper-middle-class urbanites who are becoming utterly alienated from normal—yes, normal—people throughout the country.
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