Tag Archives: Issues & Insights

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Posted on by

On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the impact the Biden administration has had on the pocketbooks of Americans. It’s not a pretty picture.

The article notes:

In one of the most memorable presidential debate moments, Ronald Reagan asked voters if they were better off in 1980 than they were when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. The obvious answer was, for most, a resounding “no.” Whoever runs against the Democratic nominee next year needs to bring back that question, because it’s a certainty that in the fall of 2024, we’ll still be worse off than we were in pre-pandemic 2020.

And for that, we can thank, or rather blame, Joe Biden.

In a poll taken earlier this year, 41% of Americans said they were financially worse off than they were two years earlier when Biden took office, the highest number in “ABC News/Washington Post polls dating back 37 years.” Only 16% said they were better off, the lowest number since 2009, when only 8% said their financial situations were better.

At roughly the same time in Donald Trump’s term, only 13% said they were worse off than when he became president while a quarter said their finances had improved.

An America struggling under Biden is not a new development. In a survey conducted in the spring of 2022, 52% said they were worse off than a year earlier; 39% said they expected to be worse off in one year than they were when they were asked the question in June.

Last year’s New York Times|Momentive Poll further discovered that “The number of people who expect periods of widespread unemployment or depression to occur in the next five years has risen to 71%, another new high,” while 41% said “now is a bad time to make large purchases.” This was “up from 36% in April and slightly” exceeded “the 39% that number reached in April 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic.” 

A few months after those poll results were released, the Heritage Foundation published an analysis that determined the average American had lost $4,200 in annual income since Biden stumbled into the Oval Office.

It’s where we are, folks. I will make a calculated guess that most Americans want the economy to improve. Unfortunately, under the Biden administration, the economy will not improve. When the economy tanks in the next month of two, the Democrats will blame the Republicans for not raising the debt ceiling. That’s how Washington works. A recession is coming. The only way the Democrats can avoid being blamed is if the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling–then the Democrats can blame the Republicans. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling will not be the cause of the recession, but Americans who watch the mainstream media will not know that. Hang on to your hats–the next two years is going to be rough, and if a Democrat is elected to the White House in 2024, the next six years are going to be very rough.

Remembering The Yugo

Posted on by

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article titled, “EVs Are The Yugo Of The 21st Century.” I think they are on to something.

The article reports:

Way back in the mid-1980s, communist Yugoslavia exported the Yugo, a compact car that sold for around $4,000. It was so poorly made that bumping into a pole at 5 mph could total it.

Fast forward to today, and a new class of cars has a similar problem. A minor accident can cause a total loss, even if the car’s been driven only a few miles. The only difference is that these cars aren’t cheap imports from some godforsaken socialist state. These are state-of-art electric vehicles that come with an average sticker price of $55,000.

Why are insurance companies totaling low-mileage EVs that have been in a fender bender? For the same reason you could total a new Yugo when backing out of a parking spot. The cost of repair is exorbitant.

As Reuters reported recently, “For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents,” which means the only viable option is to replace the battery, which represents about half the cost of the car.

The article notes:

A replacement battery for a $44,000 Tesla Model 3 can cost up to $20,000.

One expert told Reuters that Tesla’s Model Y has “zero repairability” because its battery is built into the structure of the car.

The article concludes:

EV advocates say not to worry. Car makers, they say, are designing batteries to be more modular and replaceable. They promise that repair costs will eventually come down, and all will be well.

Maybe so, but that’s why force-feeding this technology is so reckless.

In a normal market, carmakers would work out such kinks before mass producing a vehicle, much less converting their entire fleets over to a new and relatively untested technology. If they couldn’t resolve problems of affordability, reliability, and repairability to consumers’ satisfaction, automakers would scrap the effort and move on to something else.

But our elites think they know better. And they want new cars to be 100% electric within a decade. So, carmakers feel like they have little choice but to plow ahead.

Which brings up another way that today’s EVs are like the Yugos of yesteryear.

One auto critic said of the Yugo that it “had the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint.”

That was probably literally true in the case of the Yugo. But it is essentially the situation with EVs today. Consumers aren’t banging on dealership doors demanding EVs. Ford reported last week that its e-car division is losing billions of dollars a year.

Car companies are pouring money into electric cars only because the government is holding a gun to their heads, saying build EVs or die.

About the same time the Yugo came out, the first Hyundai arrived in America. My husband and I bought the first Hyundai that arrived in New England. Hyundai was made in a free country under the free market; Yugo was made in a communist country where free enterprise was not the way things were done. Hyundai is still going strong. My husband actually drives a Hyundai today. Where is the Yugo?

Changing The Numbers By Redefining The Terms

Posted on by

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article explaining how the Biden administration can claim to have cut the number of illegal border crossings simply by changing the definition of the words.

The article reports:

The Biden administration’s bulletin board, also known as the Washington Post, featured an article last week headlined: “Biden takes heat for border measures, but illegal crossings are down.”

Various other news outlets echoed this theme, using terms such as “plunged” and “plummeted,” to describe what is, in fact, a record-high number of illegal crossings in both January and February.

How did the administration pull off this “plunge”?

Basically, by narrowing the focus and by redefining what counts as an illegal border crossing.

This is the new way to do things:

“The Biden administration has started using its port parole program shell game to feign ‘lawfulness’ and distract from the true numbers of illegal aliens entering the U.S. each month,” reports the Daily Signal.

Joe Biden started this parole program for Venezuelans, and in January expanded it to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. People from those nations can get into the country – without a visa – if they show up at a port of entry and agree to some minimal rules under a supposed two-year parole.

“The administration has directed would-be illegal aliens of numerous nationalities to use the CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry, where they will be paroled into the country,” the Daily Signal explains.

The Customs and Border Patrol reports that illegal crossings by people from those four countries fell from 84,190 in December to 2,050 during February.”

Well, no kidding. Why cross illegally when you can tap an app and get into the country without having to follow the rules to enter legally?

“The administration calls this process a ‘lawful pathway,’ but mass paroling tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens through the ports make neither the process, nor the aliens using it, lawful,” notes the Daily Signal.

There is no way the number of people crossing our border every day can be assimilated. They won’t be able to grasp the concept of America quickly enough to become good citizens. The Biden administration’s border policies are truly a threat to the survival of America as we know it.

My Head Is Spinning!

Posted on by

The Covid pandemic has brought us a lot of information and a lot of censorship of information. Oddly enough, a lot of the information that was censored is now being reported as true. Currently the difference between a conspiracy theory and a major news story is a few months.

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights reported the following:

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, QAnon racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The article notes how the lab leak theory was treated in the past:

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.” CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

The article concludes:

One of the articles that Google is right now targeting is our Feb. 23 editorial applauding Congress for investigating COVID vaccines (Congress To Probe COVID Vaccines — And It’s About Time).

Apparently, merely calling for a congressional investigation “promotes harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” according to Google’s thought police.

So, let’s review.

The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true. The supposed guardians of credible information turn out to be some of the biggest peddlers of actual disinformation. And groups that are supposedly targeting disinformation are really just out to defund conservatives.  

In all this confusion, one thing is perfectly clear. If you want to know what will be labeled as disinformation tomorrow, just look at whatever is on the left’s agenda today.

The mainstream media is simply pointing out the need for Americans to find alternative sources for their news.

The Consequences Of An Open Border

Posted on by

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a consequence of our open southern border that is not widely reported.

The article reports:

In a data dump Friday, the Biden administration announced that more than a quarter million people crossed the border illegally in December – the highest ever recorded. The timing of this release was designed to bury the news, not that it mattered, since the mainstream media have ignored the growing border crisis with fierce determination. 

But that’s not the worst of it. Border deaths also reached all-time highs. That news is so bad, the “most transparent administration in history” tried to keep it hidden altogether, coughing it up only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. When that data did come out … crickets.

This silence is particularly galling, given that the left was screaming bloody murder about border deaths during the Trump administration.

The publicly released news showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 251,487 illegal crossers in December. That’s a 7% increase from November, a 40% increase from the year before, and a 240% increase from December 2020.

But that’s only part of the story.

The article continues:

A better description is an invasion, one aided and abetted by the Biden administration, the Democratic party, and the legacy media that has covered it up.

It’s also a deadly one to the migrants themselves.

Over the last fiscal year, 880 immigrants died trying to get into the U.S. That is the highest number of deaths since data became available, according to numbers obtained by the Epoch Times through a FOIA request. 

The second-largest number of migrant deaths occurred the year before, when 566 perished.

By comparison, in fiscal 2020, there were 247 border deaths — a record low.

If the media weren’t so corrupt, they would have been all over this story.

For one thing, they’d demand to know why “the most transparent” administration decided to stop releasing the number of border deaths, which had previously been part of the CPB’s reporting.

Then, they’d want to know why all those Democrats — including Biden — who were screaching about every border death during the Trump administration have been silent now.

This is another example of the mainstream media and its biased reporting. Thank goodness for reporters and watchdogs who know how to use FOIA requests.

Reporting On The American Economy

Posted on by

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about inflation and the state of the American economy.

The article includes the following:

Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign for president, updated Harry Truman’s useful definitions of two key economic terms.

“It’s a recession,” Truman had intoned, “when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose yours.”

To which The Gipper appended, entertainingly: “And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

The article notes:

These articulations sprang to mind in pondering the variations of inflation measurements advanced by economists to determine whether price growth is “easing,” as the counterfeit chief executive would have one believe.

Should the focus be the “headline” Consumer Price Index? The one the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative basket of consumer goods and services” (listed on the chart below)? Should the guide be a CPI subset referred to as “core inflation,” which excises “more volatile” food and energy prices? And how about the latest craze: “super core inflation?”

According to Fortune magazine, super core “does not have an established definition” but “refers to price measures that exclude sectors that economists feel distort the broader inflation figure.”  Economists like Paul Krugman (yeah, we know; kind of like discussing “military intelligence”) surmise that super core leaves out not just food and energy but also housing.

The article concludes:

Yet both the spending and the inflationary outcome – a dragon that had been largely slain since the Reagan Administration – are now revived for one reason: provide another set of tools of power and oppression.

The spending is to get citizenry and businesses alike hooked on federal largess. Inflation is another means of weakening the populace and private institutions as their labor and investment yields less and, in yet another spiral, they get all the more dependent on Uncle Sam and its cohort of crony capitalists.

The cynical, midterms-oriented pause in the upward price of fuel, occasioned by further manipulation of energy markets in the form of petroleum reserve releases, is only a stall in this brutal power play.

No matter the Fed’s efforts to run twice as fast – and come up with new fictions when it comes to measuring the real price of the dollar – there is no way for the central bankers even to stay in the same place when Jerome Powell’s exertions are swept under by a continued flood of Inflation Reduction Act and Omnibus(t) largess and excess.

Meanwhile, this correspondent will continue to define inflation as what it is: the loss of his dwindling dollars’ buying power. And relief, again paraphrasing The Great Communicator, as the prospect of another loss of power: Joe Biden’s.

Hang unto your hats. Unless Congress develops a spine to stop the spending, the future looks a little shaky.

When The Facts And The Statements Just Don’t Agree

Posted on by

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a recent statement by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. I am amazed when politicians make false statements that can be so easily checked. So in case you missed it, here is the statement and the actual facts.

The article reports:

For more than a year, Democrats have dismissed inflation, pointed the finger of blame at everyone but themselves, or tried to make it sound like we should be grateful because inflation “always happens” when the economy recovers.

Way back in June 2021, President Joe Biden said higher prices “were expected and are expected to be temporary” because, you see, “you can’t flip the global economics light back and not expect this to happen.”

The public never bought into this, but kudos to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for sticking with the Big Lie. In that Oct. 18 interview, Pelosi says that Democrats need to focus on the fact that Biden “brought unemployment [down], cut it in half,” to explain why prices went up.

Pelosi’s been making this claim for a while. Back in February, she said: “The fact that people have jobs always contributes to an increase in inflation, and that’s a good thing.”

Is she right? Does inflation go up when unemployment goes down? Look at the four charts below and see for yourself. These show inflation rates during four sustained and strong drops in the unemployment rate over the past 40 years.

The article includes five charts:

How many voters who automatically vote for Democrats are aware of this information?

That Was Then; This Is Now

Posted on by

On Sunday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the current idea that denying the results of an election is a danger to our democracy. First of all, we are a republic–not a democracy. Secondly, the people who do not believe that the 2020 election was honest are not a danger to our republic–questioning elections is not a new thing.

The article includes the following video:

There seems to be a bit of a double standard here.

The article concludes:

While YouTube took no action against any of those individual comments when they were made, it decided to demonetize this video. Because it apparently doesn’t like videos that make Democrats look bad. As Taibbi (Matt Taibbi who writes in Substack), who by the way is no conservative, writes:

The decision to assemble these materials in one place, inviting audiences to consider their meaning, apparently crosses a line. Now we know: you can deny election results on a platform like YouTube as much as you want, you can even promise disruption, but drawing attention to such behavior angers the algorithm. It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the double-standard in content moderation.

Limiting free speech is always more dangerous to our republic than questioning an election will ever be.

The Democrats Claim A Successful Two Years Of The Biden Presidency

Posted on by

On Friday, Issues & Insights posted an article listing the accomplishments of the Biden administration that Democrats are planning to highlight in the mid-term elections.

The article includes the list:

So, will they try to run on their record of “accomplishment”? Brent Budowsky, a columnist for The Hill, says they should. In a piece headlined: “A closing message for Democrats to win,” he says they just need to ask voters: “Do you want to build on, or reverse, the achievements of Biden and the Democratic Congress?”

What achievements? Budowsky lists them. Democrats, he says:

    • lowered prescription drug costs,
    • created tens of millions of high-wage jobs,
    • made “dramatic” improvements in veterans’ health care,
    • “important” progress to combat gun violence, and
    • “historic” progress climate change,
    • strengthened the Violence Against Women Act,
    • passed the American Rescue Plan,
    • expanded Child Care Tax Credit,
    • and got a bipartisan infrastructure law passed.

Wow. The article explains how each of these so-called accomplishment has not only had a negative impact on the majority of Americans, most of them have not actually been accomplished.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is an illustration of how media consultants can spin failure so that it sounds like success.

I Think We Can File This In The ‘Fiction’ Section

Posted on by

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about some recent comments by former President Obama. The former President claimed that Americans are better off because Joe Biden is President. Actually, I don’t think that is true.

The article reports:

When he wasn’t admiring his White House portrait, Barack Obama managed to say a nice thing about President Joe Biden. He must have been joking, though, because what he said defies reality.

“Joe, it is now America’s good fortune to have you as president,” Obama said. “The country is better off than when you took office. We should all be deeply grateful for that.”

Our “good fortune”? Let’s review just how much “better off” we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Here are the highlights. Please follow the link to the article to read the details:

COVID deaths

Inflation

Real earnings

Financial stress

Economic optimism

Unity

Stock market

Crime

Direction of the country

The article concludes:

Finally, there’s the fact that a majority of Americans now favor impeaching Biden. A new Rasmussen survey finds that 52% of likely voters want him impeached. Even among Democrats, almost a third (32%) want him impeached.

Ask yourself, are you “deeply grateful” for how things have turned out under Biden? If not, what are you going to do about it?

It might be a really good idea to keep these items in mind when you vote in November.

Equal Justice For All

Posted on by

For years, most Americans have been content to let the government run the country. We have not paid close attention to what that government is doing, and we have not paid close enough attention to political races and candidates. We have assumed that the people in power to some degree had our best interests at heart. We have assumed that our justice system truly embraced the idea of equal justice for all. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and many Americans are waking up to a country with a justice system they no longer recognize.

On Wednesday, Issues & Insights reported the results of The Golden/TIPP Poll (TIPP is also Issues & Insights’ polling partner) which asked the question, “Generally speaking, do you agree or disagree with the statement: “There is a two-tiered system of justice in America depending on your political affiliation and ideology?”

The article reports:

The results of the poll, which had a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, were lopsided: 63% agreed either “strongly” (28%) or “somewhat” (35%) that America is moving toward a two-tiered system of justice. Just 17% said they either disagreed “somewhat” (11%) or “strongly” (6%). (Numbers may not add up perfectly due to rounding of the data).

This is a chart showing their results:

The article includes the following chart:

The article notes:

One need only look to President Joe Biden’s widely criticized “Soul of the Nation” speech last week, in which he suggested that the millions of people who voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.“

His harsh remarks, many commentators on both the left and right agreed, were out of bounds, and certain to further widen the growing cultural, social and political differences that have led to some bitter disputes and even violence.

The discrepant treatment of Jan. 6 rioters and the BLM and Antifa rioters is another factor.

Jan. 6 invaders of the Capitol building have been held for over a year and in some cases allegedly seriously mistreated. Some of the estimated 903 people charged with crimes received harsh sentences for their behavior.

Not so BLM and Antifa, who were lauded by the left, including some elected officials, for trashing dozens of cities around the country during the long summer of 2020.

Those riots caused over $2 billion in damage across the nation and led to an estimated 30 deaths or more, yet few were held to account for the violence.

The difference in treatment within the media, both news and opinion outlets and social media, is even more glaring.

In recent weeks, new revelations have emerged about how the White House and FBI have manipulated social media into silencing critics in the center and on the right.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is fascinating.

The Plan

Posted on by

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the Biden administration’s plan to fight inflation.

The article reports:

“Today the Democratic House takes a strong step to bring down crucial kitchen table costs of the pump and grocery store and across the board.”

That’s the transcript of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor before all but five of her fellow Democrats voted for the “Lower Food and Fuel Costs Act” last week.

Pelosi’s garbled syntax aside, the only thing this bill would lower is the public’s trust in anything Democrats say these days. Despite its title, this bill would expand government but do nothing – repeat, nothing – to lower prices today, tomorrow, or any time in the future.

Among the Democrats’ brilliant inflation-fighting ideas is to create a new meat police to harass the meat industry. Another is to expand a subsidy program for farmers that has already proved ineffective in keeping food prices from skyrocketing. Finally, it would expand the use of ethanol – a plan that even President Joe Biden admits will fail to lower fuel prices.

…The bill also claims to lower food costs by encouraging farmers to adopt “precision farming” techniques that would lower their reliance on fertilizer, the cost of which has also spiked.

Here’s how Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee describe this: “Expanding access to precision agriculture has the potential to reduce fertilizer use and lower costs while also providing resource benefits including clean water and reduced carbon use. It is also a priority to help deal with the water shortages facing growers in much of the Western United States.”

But this program has been around for 26 years and Washington has dumped more than $25 billion into these subsidies. What effect has all this largesse had on food price inflation today? Go to your nearby grocery store for the answer.

The article concludes:

Biden doesn’t believe this will make any difference either. The Washington Post reported recently that while talking up E-15 as a money saver in public, “privately, Biden dismissed the policy as ineffective” and “worried … that it exaggerated ethanol’s ability to cut gas prices and could harm his climate goals.”

There’s also the inconvenient truth that encouraging farmers to turn more corn into fuel will leave less corn for food, pushing up grocery prices. So even if consumers did see gasoline prices fall, they’d pay for it in higher food prices

The Democrats’ bill does have one thing in its favor. It makes it clear that the only way to change the direction of economic policy coming out of Washington is to change the leadership in Washington.

I am praying for an honest mid-term election.

From Recovery To Shortages

Posted on by

Issues & Insights posted an article today about what almost eighteen months of the Biden administration has done to the American economy.

The article reports:

It’s taken President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats all of 16 months to turn the land of plenty into one plagued by empty shelves and rationing. Well, Biden did promise to “transform” America, but how many voters knew that this is what he had in mind?

The latest in the growing list of shortages is the chronic and dangerous scarcity of baby formula that is causing new parents to scramble to find supplies and stores to ration how much customers can buy. The latest industry data show that 40% of America’s baby formula supplies are out of stock, up from 29% in March and 11% last fall.

This is a potentially deadly situation if parents can’t get the food they need for their babies or try to make their own formula. As CNN reports, “Specialized formula is even harder to locate amid the widespread shortage. Parents are driving to neighboring states to try their luck, and many are pleading for help on social media, imploring strangers to share or even barter any extra supply they may have.”

One industry observer said that “supply chain issues, product recalls and historic inflation” are driving the baby formula crisis. As it turns out, Biden is at least partially responsible for all of those.

His spending spree fueled the price spiral, his “rescue” plan exacerbated labor shortages and supply chain problems, and, as Just the News reports, “gross incompetence by federal officials on Biden’s watch … inflamed a baby formula shortage now panicking parents nationwide.”

A whistleblower had alerted the Food and Drug Administration last October about contamination problems at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan. But Biden officials didn’t get around to recalling the formula until late February, when the industry was already under pressure from Biden-fueled labor shortages and price hikes.

The article also mentions other shortages:

  • “New York Hospitals Battle Supply Shortages”
  • “Over Half of Consumers Report Grocery and Food Shortages”
  • “Fertilizer shortage could cause food shortages in Michigan”
  • “Inflation, shortages could delay Georgia road projects”
  • “Cold Stone Creamery continues to deal with shortages”
  • “April auto sales fall on shortages; Honda at 3-day supply”
  • “California officials warn of summer power shortages, blackouts”
  • “Labor and Materials Shortages Prompt New Approaches to Building and Design”
  • “Worker shortages hamper U.S. private payrolls, services sector in April”
  • “Trucker shortage causing supply chain disruptions”
  • “Diesel fuel is in short supply as prices surge”

This is either gross incompetence of an intentional destruction of the fabric of
America. Either way, it needs to be slowed down by the mid-term elections. Hopefully that will happen.

Analyzing The Data

Posted on by

Issues & Insights recently posted an article comparing how the blue and red states and cities have handled the COVID pandemic. We need to learn from the mistakes made.

The article reports:

…Those that hewed to the Red State model of lower taxes, less regulation, and respect for the rule of law thrived – while those that followed the “woke” blue-state model, built on socialist top-down control, forced equality, and divisive racial identity politics, suffered.

One of the new studies, by Phil Kerpen of The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranked states by how they performed in three major areas during the pandemic: economics, education, and mortality.

That study, for good reason, has garnered much attention. It shows that red states, in general, beat blue states hands down during the pandemic, largely due to the latter’s dedication to damaging COVID lockdowns.

“Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states,” said Moore, a co-founder of the Committee To Unleash Prosperity.

New Jersey was the worst-performing state, while neighboring blue-state giant New York was next, ranked 49th. Also flunking out were California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

“They had high age-adjusted death rates, they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” according to the study.

So who did best? Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota – and Florida.

Meanwhile, a second study from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that there has been massive population movement away from large blue-state cities toward red-state cities.

The article concludes:

As for New York, its leaders seem to think crime-ridden streets and more government spending will do the trick. Sorry, but New York’s losing its wealthiest citizens after years of misrule.

Far-left Democrats have an iron lock on government in Albany, so tax cuts and a crackdown on crime seems highly unlikely. In the meantime, one key group is leaving the state and city of New York in droves: Millionaires.

“New York’s share of the nation’s total millionaire earner population dropped to 9.9%, down from 12.7% as of 2010, the year after the state enacted a supposedly temporary and ultimately permanent higher rate on millionaire earners,” noted E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy think tank.

Good riddance you say? Millionaires pay 40% of taxes in New York. So losing so many to Florida, Texas and other red states is a disaster. All New York will suffer.

Truth is, America is being re-made, moving van by moving van, family by family, as the states’ demographic profiles and political leanings undergo dramatic shifts. It all points to a possible shift in political power toward conservative-leaning red states and away from once-dominant blue states. But how big that shift is remains to be seen.

As we’ve said before, the red-state model works. It has proved itself in good times and bad. Americans, you do have a choice: Red pill, or blue pill. Which is it going to be?

Our government was designed to give individual states the power to experiment with ideas to see what worked and what did not. The idea was that less successful states would copy what the successful states did. Unfortunately in our highly politically-charged atmosphere of today, blue states are not interested in learning from red states. Hopefully they will change their ways as their populations relocate.

The Sky Is Falling…Maybe

Posted on by

On April 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about the latest alarm about climate change.

The article reports:

We’ve heard so many declarations that our “last chance” to avoid global warming has arrived that we’ve lost count of the number of times the world has ended. But the sirens continue to wail, the latest from a United Nations grandee who says humanity has to act “now or never” to avoid overheating its host planet. Pardon us while we yawn.

According to Jim Skea, a European academic who co-chairs the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping Earth’s temperatures in check “will be impossible,” he said, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

Skea’s comment arrived wrapped up in Working Group III’s just-released report on global warming mitigation, part of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. The media, which loves to breathlessly report the demise of the world caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, says the 1.5-degree limit “is recognized as a crucial global target because beyond this level, so-called tipping points become more likely. These are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.”

OK, then. But let’s back up a moment. Or maybe 13 years. That’s when Prince Charles said, with a deep, trust-me earnestness, that our world had only “100 months to act” before we had done so much damage that the effects of global warming would become irreversible.

Then last year, about 150 months after his previous doomsday prediction, the prince said that the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow was “quite literally … the last chance saloon” to stop the scourge of warming.

None of the people who continually yell that the sky is falling are willing to note that there was an extended period of global warming during the Middle Ages. During that time crops flourished, and people survived. It should also be noted that plant fossils have been found under the Greenland ice cap. At some point, green things grew in Greenland. The earth’s climate is continually changing. Man’s impact on that change, if at all, is minimal. I support clean air and clean water. I don’t support authoritative governments trying to steal the wealth of successful democratic countries and give it to poorer countries ruled by tyrants.

Asking Valid Questions

Posted on by

There are some valid questions that need to be asked about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Hopefully these questions will be asked in a respectful way and answers will be given in a respectful way. I may be overly optimistic on this, but hope springs eternal. On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article reminding us of the decorum (or lack thereof) of the Democrats in two recent hearings for potential Supreme Court Justices.

The article notes that the Democrats standards for nominees by Republican Presidents probably do not apply here:

…They also, no doubt, have jettisoned previous standards for Supreme Court nominees, including the ones put forth by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, such as that a nominee who can’t get 60 votes in the Senate shouldn’t be approved, nor can anyone “with a deep-seated ideology” because they wouldn’t have “a neutral legal mind.”

The article quotes a few questions asked of Justice Kavanaugh:

  • Who or what is Lowenbrau? A classmate? A secret party place? Is it related to the ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ or a type of ‘boofing’?
  • I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
  • Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors, or committed any physical or verbal harassment or assault of a sexual nature?
  • Have you ever passed out from drinking?
  • What do you consider to be too many beers?
  • Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before?
  • Do you believe Anita Hill?
  • Do you agree that it is possible for men to both be friends with some women, and treat other women badly?
  • Do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?”

What the Democrats have done to Republican President’s Supreme Court nominees in recent years is disgraceful. It would be a good idea for the Republicans not to follow that model and simply ask appropriate questions. I doubt the Republicans will get answers, but they can ask. It is bad enough that we have an ultra-liberal Supreme Court nominee chosen by a quota system, but hopefully she will answer questions honestly during her hearing.

 

 

Some Perspective On Gasoline Prices

Posted on by

Issues & Insights recently posted an article about some of the behind the scenes aspects of the rapidly rising gas prices.

The article notes:

That gasoline prices are becoming unaffordable to many Americans is becoming old news. What got us here, though, is a story unheard by much of the public. It starts and ends with green politics.

As gasoline reaches prices that made it a luxury good during President Joe Biden’s year in office, the White House is considering asking the Saudis to produce more oil. At the same time, the administration apparently wants more oil from Venezuela, which is languishing under a dictatorship that’s squarely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iran, a member in good standing with the axis of evil.

“Joe Biden is frantically searching the globe to see if anyone but Texas might have some spare oil,” says a tweet from Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA officer and Oregon Democrat, that sums up well the comical blundering as well as the corrupt decision-making of the current White House.

The article concludes:

But green politics won’t allow the U.S. to take advantage of its bounty of crude and natural gas. Oddly, though, the environmentalists who hold energy policy hostage when Democrats are in power have no problem with this country importing oil from nations where the drilling and transportation processes are dirtier than they are in the U.S., and the regimes are not democratically elected.

This is the California model. Officials and activists’ rush to create an all-renewables electricity grid has forced the state to import energy from producers in Arizona, Baja California, Colorado, Mexico, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah that rely on natural gas, nuclear energy, and coal, three sources that California wants to eliminate from its portfolio. But this is acceptable, because it’s happening somewhere else, outside the view sheds of the wealthy enclaves on the coast.

It’s the same with the mining of the natural resources that are needed to build batteries for electric cars, cell phones, and other modern conveniences. The political left is happy to use these items as long as the extraction for material used in their manufacture is done away from their myopic gazes in countries where environmental protections hardly exist.

Yes, this not-in-my-back yard attitude is hypocritical, but worse than that, it produces poor public policy. We hope some day a majority of voters consistently figures this out in election after election.

Green energy destroyed the Spanish economy and did not lower carbon emissions (article here). Let’s not do that in America.

The Tax On Everything

Posted on by

Inflation is a tax on everyone on everything. It has a negative impact on the economy and on the mood of the voters. It reared its head after the Biden administration made some key decisions (limiting drilling in America, shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, reckless spending, etc.). Issues & Insights posted an article today explaining that the inflation we are seeing now was not only predictable, it was predicted.

The article reports:

We’re not big fans of economist Larry Summers, but in this case, he should be in line for a Nobel Prize for predicting exactly what is happening with inflation today … and who is to blame for it.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation climbed at an annual rate of 6.2%, the biggest such jump in three decades.

And that’s despite repeated predictions from other “experts” that the spike in prices earlier this year was “transitory.” Even now, they are flummoxed. As the Washington Post put it Wednesday, inflation is “lasting longer than policymakers at the Fed and White House anticipated.”

But no one, we repeat, no one, should be surprised by the latest turn of events.

Go back and listen to what Summers was saying at the start of the year, and it’s eerily prescient.

Summers publicly and repeatedly warned that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan —which was Biden’s first big “achievement” that passed without a single Republican vote — would spark an inflationary spiral.

The article includes the following graph:

The article concludes:

But Summers had the most to lose by so publicly sticking his neck out. He’s a die-hard liberal who’d served in the Obama administration. He knew that raising a stink threatened the new president’s big-spending agenda. And, unintentionally or not, he called the lie on Biden’s claim that “leading economists” all agreed on the need for another massive COVID stimulus.

Now that Summers’ prediction is coming true, will any of his detractors apologize? Will any admit that Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending spree — which is now being followed by a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and, quite possibly, a multi-trillion dollar welfare expansion — was a colossal mistake? Will they acknowledge that Biden is principally to blame for the inflationary spiral the economy appears to have entered?

Don’t count on it. Biden is running around the country claiming that still more deficit-financed spending will somehow cut prices. Everyone else is busy looking for other scapegoats. Anything so as not to hold Biden, or themselves, accountable for the damage being done.

Unfortunately inflation will probably be with us until we can either change Congress or change the administration.

 

Does Lying To Congress Matter?

Posted on by

Issues & Insights posted an article today that asks a very valid question, “Report Shows Fauci Lied To Congress — So Why Does He Still Have A Job?” That is a good question.

The article reports:

COVID-19 czar Anthony Fauci has steadfastly denied that he helped fund gain-of-function research at China’s now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology. In recent testimony before Congress, he repeatedly denied ever doing so. But a new 900-page trove of information acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that’s not true.

It’s a huge story. Unfortunately, the mainstream media have essentially ignored it. New York Times? The Washington “Democracy Dies In Darkness” Post? CNN? Sorry, couldn’t be bothered, even though a 2015 study clearly referred to such research taking place.

It took an aggressive, left-leaning online investigative reporting site, The Intercept, to do the Big Media’s work for it by digging up the FOIA material. The mountain of papers are damning, showing clearly that a nonprofit company, EcoHealth Group, channeled federal grants from the National Institute of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“The (U.S.) bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” the Intercept reported.

“Alter bat coronaviruses” is the key phrase here, since it indicates gain-of-function experimentation, which even the Obama administration had tightly restricted.

Scientists with expertise in both viral research and government grant mechanisms call the latest evidence a smoking gun. A thread of tweets by Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard E. Enbright provides further scientific insight into what was going on.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” Enbright wrote.

Broad Institute molecular biologist Alina Chan told The Intercept that the documents also make the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 virus even more likely.

So why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? Because their darling Dr. Fauci might be partly responsible for a virus that has seriously damaged the economy of America and may have made a stolen election possible. It’s somewhat like a mother finding out that her son has robbed a bank. Obviously there must be some mistake.

The Past Six Month In Charts

Posted on by

Issues & Insights posted an article today about President Biden’s first six months in office. The article included eight charts to illustrate what the first six months has brought us.

Here are the charts:

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

The article concludes:

It is true that Biden has been in office for only six months. It’s also true things could turn around. But we don’t see that happening unless Biden changes course.

We have no doubt that Biden was very much hoping one day to tell the public how he killed COVID and saved the economy (just as he once bragged that “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” while he and President Barack Obama where in the White House).

The way things are going right now, Biden might one day have to admit that “the economy is dead, but COVID is alive.”

Has America Become A Banana Republic?

Posted on by

In Friday Issues & Insights posted an article titled, “Biden’s Banana Republic.” That seems a rather harsh charge until you begin to look at some of the things that have happened in the past weeks.

The article notes some of the things the Democrats have recently done that are moving America into the direction of a banana republic:

    • How the Democrats want to turn the economy into one that’s “operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class.”
    • The Democrats’ retribution-filled, Reichstag-fire response to the breach of the U.S. Capitol by a group made up mostly of odd characters and some everyday Americans who got overheated and were shocked by their own behavior, all of them apparently unarmed.
    • How a summer of real riots was tacitly, and at times, overtly supported by Biden’s party.
    • The second impeachment of Trump that is not an attempt to seek justice but a campaign to prevent him from running again for president and marginalizing his supporters.
    • The lies about the promise of unity.
    • Phony charges against political opponents designed to dehumanize them. See: “Biden accused Trump of being a mass murderer, of killing hundreds of thousands of coronavirus patients because he ‘did nothing’ to fight the virus.”
    • Government by executive command rather than through proper legislative channels.
    • Shutting down politically unfavorable businesses. See: Biden’s Keystone XL pipeline decision.
    • The leader of a national government deciding alone what the property role of that government is. See: “Biden Proclaims ‘Racial Equity’ as Goal ‘Of the Whole of Government.’ ”

Elections have consequences. It’s time to make sure our 2022 congressional election is an honest election and to remove those politicians who are a threat to our freedoms from office.

The Wrong Solution

Posted on by

The coronavirus has devastated America’s economy. Small businesses have closed while certain large businesses have prospered–Amazon, WalMart, Loews, etc. Many restaurants are holding on by a thread. So how do you undo the damage? There seems to be some disagreement on the answer to that question.

Issues & Insights posted an article today about the stimulus package proposed by the Democrats. Simply put, the proposed package is nothing more than a bunch of goodies unrelated to the coronavirus. The package represents a wish list of spending the Democrats have wanted for years. The Republican attempts at reaching a compromise have been rebuffed.

The article reports:

In rejecting compromise, Biden gave Congress a green light to totally ignore Republican input by passing a stimulus package through reconciliation, not the normal budget process. That will require a simple majority of 51 senators, not a supermajority of 60, to pass.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer confirmed this Tuesday, saying: “Joe Biden is totally on board with using reconciliation” to pass the bill.

So, just as with Obamacare, the fix is in on the Democrats’ all-or-nothing bill, loaded with goodies for far-left interest groups, teachers unions and Blue State governors.

But a few points need to be made here, not just about this bill, but about stimulus in general.

First, the economy is already recovering. It grew 33.4% in the third quarter and 4% in the fourth, following 2020’s disastrous 31.4% second quarter plunge. Unemployment peaked a 14.8% last April, but fell to 6.7% in December, far better than any official forecasts.

We’ve already committed $4 trillion in spending on COVID-19 over the past 10 months, but still have an estimated $1 trillion left unspent. Add another $1.9 trillion, and you see that COVID-19 adds to our already massive pile of federal debt, which, at $28 trillion, amounts to well over $200,000 per family.

Such reckless stimulus spending will impoverish the next generation. Yet, the fact is, the pandemic didn’t shut down the economy. Politicians did. Now they’re preening over their own generosity while piling up more debt that you, your kids, your grandkids and your great-grandkids will be paying off for decades to come.

Worse still, much of the Democrats’ “stimulus” bill will actually damage the economy.

The damage to the economy will be in the form of lost jobs due to the increase in the minimum wage. The Democrat plan will also extend unemployment benefits, which historically decreases the incentive for Americans to look for work.

The article also notes:

Helping fiscally troubled states is a huge mistake. Most are Blue States that have spent and taxed their way into trouble, and now want to use the pandemic as a cover for a bailout. It was bad policies by elected officials and bad decisions by voters that got these states into trouble, not the Chinese virus. Bailing out profligate states only encourages more of the same behavior.

And, sure, increased spending on schools sounds great, but that money won’t go to students. It will line greedy teachers unions’ pockets. Meanwhile, education standards and test scores will continue to slide as schools remain closed.

Instead of indiscriminately spending more money on bogus stimulus with checks for all, and irrelevant spending on Democrats’ far-left wish lists, we should target aid to the truly desperate and needy in our economy, those who were blindsided by some states’ destructive lockdowns and are now jobless.

So how do we grow our economy? First of all, we open up the country. Secondly, we do what President Trump did–cut taxes, decrease regulation, follow the rule of law, and protect property rights. Those things will get us back on track.

 

Unnoticed In The Mix

Posted on by

On Friday Issues & Insights posted an article about an executive order signed by President Biden that was pretty much overlooked, but will have enormous impact.

The article reports:

In the flurry of President Joe Biden’s executive orders was one that was almost entirely overlooked but could easily end up having the biggest impact.

The order also seems harmless enough, going by the seemingly innocent title “Modernizing Regulatory Review.” Except this order isn’t about modernizing regulations. It’s about unleashing the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.

Biden’s order – which didn’t get released to the press until late in the evening of his first day – aims to effectively toss the cost-benefit analysis that for many decades has served as at least a modest brake on the ambitions of regulators. In the past, regulations where the cost of compliance far exceeded the benefits could be stymied by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Essentially this means that there will be no cost controls on the new regulations President Biden is unleashing on the country.

The article contrasts this to what the Trump administration accomplished in the area of regulation:

One of Trump’s biggest – unsung – achievements in the White House was his effort to rein in the regulatory state. A lifelong businessman, Trump understood – in a way lifelong politicians cannot – the avalanche of regulations that fall on a business and the enormous costs they impose. One of his very first actions was the two-for-one order.

CEI’s Crews says that Trump actually exceeded that goal, with agencies getting rid of 4.3 rules for every new one.

The Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers calculated that the deregulatory measures taken over the past four years saved households an average of $3,100 a year. And while there’s some debate over the extent of the benefits from Trump’s efforts, the undeniable fact is that he slowed the regulatory current.

Even so, the regulatory state today imposes $1.9 trillion in costs, according to CEI. That is an enormous hidden tax on families. In fact, if our regulatory state were a country, it would be bigger than Canada’s entire economy. The idea that we are getting more than $1.9 trillion in health and safety benefits from these rules is laughable.

Unfortunately, with this one executive order, Biden shows that he’s intent on giving regulators carte blanche to impose massive new rules on businesses and households, on virtually anything and everything they do, regardless of costs. There’s little else Biden has done so far that will have as wide-ranging an impact.

This is definitely a time to hold on to your wallet.

The Californication Of America

Posted on by

Issues & Insights posted an article today about what to expect from the Biden administration.

The article notes:

Joe Biden promised Georgians a $2,000 check if they elected his party’s Senate candidates in the state’s runoff elections, and his bribery worked, with Democrats winning both, handing them control of the White House and Congress again.

But while Biden made the election all about battling COVID-19 and “healing the nation,” that is not what the far left that controls the Democratic Party cares about. It has bigger plans — namely, to turn the nation into a California-style one-party state.

By all rights, the 2020 elections should be a warning to extremists on the left. Biden eked out a victory with extremely narrow – and often questionable – victories in a handful of states after promising voters only that he would be a non-Trumpian nice guy.

Meanwhile, Democrats lost ground in the House, with the edge in their majority dropping from 36 seats to 10. And with the two Georgia wins, Democrats managed only a tie in the Senate, which is now split 50-50. (With Biden in the White House, Democrats can control the Senate because Kamala Harris will serve as the tie-breaking vote.)

The article reports:

Biden keeps talking about the need to “heal” the nation, which seems to fit the precarious position his party is in at the moment. Even if he believes that, his party doesn’t. And Democrats have been clear about the priorities they will pursue should they get control of the White House and Congress again.

No, we’re not talking about things like huge tax hikes or Obamacare, which is what they imposed the last two times they controlled both branches.

The stated goal today is to ensure a permanent Democratic majority so they can finally get their far-left agenda enacted.

In other words, they want to replicate what Democrats have already achieved in California.

This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy. This is what Democratic leaders have already stated as their plans or have already approved in the House.

For example, the very first thing Democrats did in the House this year, after seeing their lead shrink dramatically, was to approve a set of rules designed to neutralize Republicans as much as possible. Among others is a rule that will allow the House to pass massive new spending bills – a la the Green New Deal – without having to show how they’d be paid for. There’s a reason that socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is celebrating these new rules.

Please follow the link above to the article to read the rest of this. It is chilling. As far as healing the nation and bringing us together, the Democrats idea of unity is to simply shut down the opposition. Facebook and Twitter are already cooperating with that effort. I have a note of caution for the Democrats preaching unity–you can’t build unity on lies and fraud–it will fall apart.

The Predicted Dark Winter

Posted on by

Issues & Insights posted an article today about recent statements from Joe Biden that the country is facing a dark winter.

The article notes:

“Before the surge in COVID cases we predicted, many predicted, and the deaths rise that we’ve seen in December … we head into a very dark winter ahead,” he said.

He also lamented the “grim” jobs report, which showed “an economy that is stalling.” Employment grew by only 245,000 in November, “well below the 440,000 expected by economists and a sharp drop from the 610,000 reported in October,” CNBC reported.

“We remain in the midst of one of the worst economic and job crises in modern history,” said the man who as vice president oversaw one of the weakest economic recoveries in U.S. history.

Apparently it never occurred to Biden and his handlers that government intervention, not the virus, caused 2020’s downturn. Nor have they even begun to understand that Democrats’ economic policies, filled with steep, punitive taxes, and impossible-to-jump regulatory hurdles, are a slow-motion march of the economic lockdowns that almost instantly paralyzed the economy this year.

A lack of optimism in a Biden economy is not ours alone.

“Wall Street investors largely believe a Joe Biden presidency could mean lower stock-market returns,” says another CNBC report, this one highlighting the network’s survey of “more than 100 chief investment officers and portfolio managers.”

“Two-thirds said the first four years of Biden will be worse for stocks than Trump’s term,” according to the results. 

The article explains why the stock market is important to all Americans:

Should we care about stock performance? Of course we should. Wall Street and Main Street USA meet at a large and busy intersection. More than half of the country – 55% – owns stock. That’s down from the two-thirds that owned stock in 2002. But still more than enough for stock performance to count.

The concerns cited by the CIOs and managers should be alarming even to those who aren’t shareholders. If Biden is able to reverse the Trump tax cut (and increase taxes by several trillion), as well as unwind the administration’s critical regulatory relief, the economy that was recovering strongly from the lethargic Obama years during Trump’s first three years will stagnate, likely even decline.

The article also notes the Biden policies that will have a negative impact on economic growth:

  • Biden’s New Green Deal Lite.
  • A government-run banking system that would “would undermine private banks, moving the U.S. closer to the socialist ideal of a nationalized financial sector.”
  • The possibility Biden will close the economy to the extent that he can, even though 2020’s lockdowns punished the economy and did nothing to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The article concludes:

We’ve said before but it needs to be said again (and again): ”Every major policy Biden campaigned on is anti-growth. … Biden boasts of an FDR-scale agenda without realizing that it was Franklin Roosevelt’s reckless interventions that extended and deepened the Great Depression.”

A dark winter. A dark spring. Darkness until the Democrats are stripped of their political power to choke the economy. Bidenomics are not a promise but a threat.

A Republican Congress can mitigate the damage somewhat, but if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are successful in implementing their economic policies, there will be a dark winter.