RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/jerome_powell_and_the_coming_inflation.html

Usually, the Federal Reserve acts as a counterweight when Congress and U.S. presidents follow inflationary policies. We haven’t had an incompetent Federal Reserve chairman since Arthur Burns and G. William Miller produced simultaneous inflation and recession, an economic malady known as “stagflation.” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell may not be as bad as Burns and Miller, but he does seem to be making one economic mistake after another.

Like Miller, Powell is that rare exception: a Fed chair without a background in economics. Being an American today is a bit like riding on a bus driven by someone who lacks a CDL.  It might work out okay, but some white knuckles on the curves are well justified.

Powell’s First Mistake – Raising Interest Rates under Trump

Powell’s first mistake occurred when he raised interest rates during President Trump’s successful economic boom that occurred without inflation. President Trump’s economic advisor Peter Navarro indicated that this might have cost Trump the election (at about the 10-minute mark):

Everybody knows me and Mnuchin weren’t exactly bosom buddies. Whenever I wanted to put a little dig in Steve all I had to do was remind the boss [President Trump] that it was Mnuchin that appointed Jay Powell who the boss thought was the worst Fed Chair in modern history who cost us the election because that SOB raised interest rates well before he should have.

Powell’s increase in interest rates was not needed because President Trump’s supply-side economics was simultaneously increasing Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply, and thereby producing economic growth with little change in price level.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-end-outdoor-mask-edicts-11619383852?mod=opinion_major_pos6

When fighting a crisis like Covid-19, health officials can never take for granted the public’s willingness to comply. The measures imposed—social distancing, wearing masks—require sacrifice. As conditions improve, policy makers must show they’re willing to ease restrictions as swiftly as they imposed them, and a critical early test will be on wearing masks outside.

Wearing masks and restricting large gatherings were essential to controlling the pandemic’s worst peaks. But infection levels are dropping and vaccination rates rising. This is the time to revisit rules on masking and distancing in low-risk outdoor settings like parks and sports venues. Easing these rules would move more activity outdoors, which reduces viral transmission.

In states such as Texas and New Hampshire, governors have lifted restraints on the size of outdoor gatherings and the need for masks. Connecticut, Rhode Island and others have announced plans to relax outdoor requirements in May. But the policy process in Washington is moving too slowly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance still prescribes social limits while outside. Many governors are reluctant to step out ahead of the agency. About half of states still require people to wear face coverings in all public settings.

The virus won’t be eliminated. Some 40,000 Americans are hospitalized and some 55,000 cases are diagnosed each day. But more than 80% of Americans over 65 are protected by a vaccine, and infection rates are declining rapidly in most states—including Michigan, this month’s worst-hit. Vaccines are available to anyone over 16 in every state. Soon the problem will be a surplus of doses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-corporations-use-the-chinese-model-11619476547?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The opposition of market capitalism to state-oriented socialism and communism was the basic conflict in 20th-century political economy. But like many an economic and political theory, this durable model for delineating the possibilities—free markets vs. a “command economy”—cannot survive today’s Chinese state.

Capitalism and communism, opposed in ideology, turn out to be compatible in the real world. And perhaps the conceptual opposition is also collapsing in the West, as capitalism goes woke and sneaker commercials become indistinguishable from AOC campaign materials except by their production values.

“Leftism” as we know it crystallized in the 19th century largely under the aegis of Marxism, which described capitalism as an exploitative and murderous ideology that lionized greed. Leftists’ solution, as expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto,” was government control of the economy under the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

But the dictators turned out to be people rather than an abstract historical force, so it wasn’t a solution to human greed after all. Turning over all manufacturing and agriculture and trade to the party simply meant concentrating all the wealth and power in a few hands. It made the Soviet government, for example, a new oligarchy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/27/anyone-remember-bidens-unity-pledge-he-sure-doesnt/

Those foolish enough to believe that President Joe Biden would usher in a new era of peace and harmony in America must be sorely disappointed by how his administration has performed so far. If anything, people are more polarized than ever, and by constantly appeasing the far left of his party, Biden is only making matters worse.

This week, the polling firm TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence launched a new “TIPP Unity Index” to track just how divided the nation is.

The finding is that a mere 33% say the country is united, while 61% think it’s divided. In other words, the only thing Americans agree on right now is that they don’t agree on much. At the extremes, 35% say the country is “very divided,” while only 15% believe it’s “very united.”

That translates into an initial TIPP Unity Index rating of 37.8, the report says. Anything below 50 signals disunity.

“The United States requires greater unity now more than ever,” writes Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica, “and our current leaders’ actions must transcend mere words and genuinely reflect the spirit.” (The TIPP poll has been the most accurate on presidential races for the past five elections.)

This new unity index will be a perfect way to measure whether Biden does anything to bring us together on his watch.

So far, he’s failed completely.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/25/the-new-antiracism-is-the-old-racism/

What will be the future of the mass hysteria spawned last summer? No one knows. 

But its destination, if unchecked, will be ethnic tensions and sectarian strife at best akin to those in Brazil and India—or at worst Lebanon, Syria, and Rwanda. 

Until just a few years ago, racial differences, according to polls, were more or less receding. Intermarriage between racial groups is at historic highs. 

But by 2014-2015, with the birth of Black Lives Matter, its courting by the Obama Administration, and the emergence of the electronic social media mob and cancel culture, such progress seems to have ended. We have ceased seeing race as increasingly incidental, rather than essential to who we are. 

The benchmarks of the Black Lives Matter and affiliated woke movements are overt racism, systemic untruth, and the hypocritical privilege of their elite architects.  

We are now well beyond the race-based set-asides of the last 50 years, predicated on the evolving concepts of proportional representation and disparate impact. These multitrillion-dollar endowed Great Society principles eventually mandated that admissions and hiring reflect the proportional ethnic and racial makeup of the population. 

All that is now ossified and considered not enough. In its place is a damnation of all things “white” with a new definition of diversity as simply all those, without any other affinities, who claim to be bound proudly together by being nonwhite.

Antiracist Racism

Indeed, it is startling how abruptly our frenzied elites have renounced assimilation (a word now banned by the Biden Administration in matters related to immigration). Integration is also passé‚ at least for those not rich.

Ironies abound. Recently, in the state of Washington, something called the African American Reach and Teach Health Ministry (AARTH) adjudicated vaccination appointments on the basis of race only. I suppose if a 75-year-old indigent white widow showed up, she would be turned away on the basis of her “unearned privilege”—or the organizers say could be put on a “standby list”?

Black intellectuals now use the stereotypical language of the old Jim Crow segregationists. Some vie in an apparent contest to see which woke trailblazer can be crowned the most overt racist antiracist. 

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/04/26/andrew_cuomo_made_225000_and_is_top-paid_governor_ever_774227.html

With a $225,000 salary, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the country’s highest paid governor.

That’s as he collects $4 million for writing a book during the Covid-19 pandemic about his graceful leadership during the pandemic — allegedly with the help of his staff, possibly violating labor laws against using public resources for personal gain.

And it’s as he is fighting sexual harassment allegations and scandal from misleading the public about how many people died from Covid in nursing homes.

But the $225,000 is not even his top pay.

In 2018, The New York State Commission on Legislative, Judicial, & Executive Compensation gave the legislature and the governor pay raises.

At the time, state lawmakers made $79,500 and Cuomo made $179,000.

Cuomo’s salary was increased to $200,000 in 2019, $225,000 in 2020 and $250,000 in 2021. But in November 2020, he deferred his latest raise, keeping his salary at $225,000, still the highest in the nation.

When awarding the raises for lawmakers, the commission in 2018 stipulated that the raise would limit outside income to no more than 15 percent of their legislative salary.