Biden administration causes the problems they claim to be trying to solve

 

The charade continues.  As usual, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse sums it up so even non-financial wonks can follow:

At a certain point in the economics of the great pretending cycle, one must wonder what circles they live in.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced another quarter-point interest rate hike and simultaneously noted the banking crisis will likely lead to tighter credit and borrowing for businesses on Main Street…. thereby further reducing the U.S. economic output.  Yet here we are again, and not a single economic or financial pundit is even talking about the origin of the inflation the Fed action is pretending to address, the spike in energy prices.

At the core of the Biden policy issue that creates inflation, is the energy policy that has driven oil, gas, home heating, electricity and manufacturing/farming costs through the roof.  The blocking of energy resource development/production is the top issue leading to massive increases in consumer prices overall.  The Biden energy policy is entirely ignored by a federal reserve attempting to shrink inflation.

Follow the bouncing ball of consequence.

Biden restricts energy development [Main St Suffers].  Prices skyrocket [Main St Suffers]. The fed raises interest rates in an effort to reduce the economic activity to meet the lowered production of energy resource development [Main St Suffers].  The result of the interest rate hike creates liquidity issues for banks holding treasury securities [Main St Suffers].  The banks then reduce credit lines, reduce lending and tighten borrowing to match their lowered liquidity [Main St Suffers].

The Fed then notes further increases in rates may pause as they await the outcome of restricted banking credit and lending from the rate hikes previously installed.  Nowhere in any of this is anyone talking about the nucleus of the issue – the stupid energy policy.  The great pretending continues in the West, while smiling panda lunches with Vladimir Putin. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Mis-named "renewable" energy sources

 

At American Greatness, Edward Ring published a good article on mis-named “renewable” energy sources, and it will surely be useful in those unavoidable debates with your relatives and friends who are true believers in the climate change / environmental protection rackets. The piece includes an excellent graph/chart.  Mr. Ring begins:

Today in America, there are obvious disconnects between observable reality and the narratives we get from the corporate special interests controlling the news we consume, along with politicians who are supposedly elected to represent us.

This is nothing new. Elites have defined America’s destiny throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t any freer or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

What may be different today, however, is the misanthropic folly of America’s current energy policies. America’s ruling elites are not only imposing these policies on everyone living here, they are attempting to impose them everywhere on earth. 

By now it should be beyond serious debate that “renewable” energy cannot possibly scale adequately to replace fossil fuels. Worse still, renewable energy systems are even less sustainable than fossil fuels and cause more environmental destruction. Renewables also fail to offer significant reductions in carbon emissions, and in some cases actually cause more carbon emissions.

Why these facts are dismissed by America’s elites is a story of corruption, collusion, megalomania, greed, cowardice, intellectual negligence, and delusional mass psychosis. Modern political theory offers solace to cynics who believe all democracies are actually just “managed” shams by suggesting pluralism and representative government are nonetheless at least approximated if there is competition among the powerful elites running a nation. But what if there is no inter-elite competition in the realm of ideas? What happens when every one of these elites believes the same things? When it comes to “renewables” and “net zero by 2050,” that’s what we have in America today. . . .

Read the full article here.

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America First economics in a nutshell

A F Branco cartoon

Conservative Treehouse / Sundance's "I Am a MAGA Republican, and Donald Trump is My Weapon" is a good explanation of America First economic policy -- and it is reader-friendly.  Sundance begins: 

At a national level there is a unique policy priority that almost every politician, on both sides, will avoid discussing.  At a national level a single policy priority determines all other national policy issues.  That policy is the national economic policy.

The national economic policy of a presidential candidate determines all other national policies that flow from the presidential candidate.  The national economic policy impacts the obvious policies like energy and trade, and also determines the lesser obvious policies like regulation and even foreign policy.

It is specifically because a candidate’s national economic outlook impacts all other issues, that most national politicians never talk about it. 

It would be impossible to support Main Street USA, a popular talking point, and still support the Paris climate treaty, the transpacific trade partnership (TPP) or the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

To avoid the contradictions most democrat and republican politicians avoid discussing their national economic policy; it is an unspoken rule within the billionaire club and donor game; an economic code of omerta amid most political candidates.

President Trump broke the rule, and even went so far as to campaign on an America-First economic policy agenda.  . . .

The full article is here, and it concludes with an analogy to a technician who can get rid of all those destructive raccoons in your basement.  Makes it fun and accessible.

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Daniel Greenfield on Deliberate Destruction

 

Daniel Greenfield explains in detail why our downward spiral is the result of deliberate destruction:

Our Economic Misery Isn’t An Accident, It’s The Plan

Americans can’t afford to buy a used car or even gas because the Left doesn’t want them to drive. They can’t buy homes because the Left wants to destroy the suburbs and force everyone to live in megacities. They have trouble buying meat because the Left wants them to eat soy.

The same is true for the whole exercise in planned economic misery that we’re experiencing.

. . .

There are predictions that gas will hit $6 a gallon nationwide by the summer because the Biden administration has worked hard to raise energy prices and create artificial shortages. Biden’s people just got through once again sabotaging oil and gas leases because they want higher energy prices. $6 a gallon is not the result of political inattentiveness, that is the plan.

Inflation isn’t an unintentional accident either. . . .[I]nflation is doing what it’s meant to do, wiping out savings, and triggering retaliatory interest rate hikes to “cool down” the economy. The middle class ends up poorer and more vulnerable, government dependency rises and social mobility falls. Socialism starts looking better every day. That’s how it worked in the twentieth century and still works today.

. . .

If Americans don’t understand that our misery isn’t an accident or incompetence, but part of a plan then the downward cycle will continue to play out with increasingly worse outcomes.

Until the Left finally gets what it wants. And then the rest of us won’t have anything left.

Much more at the link here.

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Dr. Thomas Sowell retires

art credit: Benjamin T Brixey

One of my favorite columnists, Dr. Thomas Sowell, is retiring. His farewell column is here. And here are a few take-aways from it:

Most people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things like cable television, microwave ovens and air-conditioning. Most Americans did not have such things, as late as the 1980s. People whom the intelligentsia continue to call the “have-nots” today have things that the “haves” did not have, just a generation ago.

In some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the years. Politics, and especially citizens’ trust in their government, has gone way downhill.

. . .

Years of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Dr. Sowell is also a prolific author of books; he has made esoteric or downright boring subjects (such as economics) accessible and interesting. Check out some of them here. Most will be available at your local library. But his regular columns will be much missed.

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