RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18902/national-debt

For as long as there have been politics there have been deals.

Of course, it is illegal to trade one’s vote for cash, but those with the power to dispense patronage, projects, and promotions have a unique advantage in seeking the support of those whose endorsements can tip the balance for any given issue.

Whether it was the drafting of the Constitution, confronting the infamous slave trade, Tammany Hall’s “favored sons” or directing federal funds for a bridge, this kind of give-and-get has long been woven into the cynical side of politics.

It is unprecedented, however, when the stakes have become so high that these kinds of backroom deals can disrupt an election or even plunge a nation into an unrecoverable cycle of debt and economic despair.

That is why the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” that has come out of the Senate “sausage machine,” courtesy of its current majority leader, Sen. Charles Schumer, and his surprising enabler, Sen. Joe Manchin, needs to be closely examined. With its $700 billion price tag, it has the potential to seriously harm our nation’s economic future.

One of its elements requires a particularly hefty dose of sunlight. This massive spending plan will allow John Podesta, a Biden adviser, former Clinton aide, and longtime Democratic political strategist, to administer some $370 billion in energy programs of his selective choosing.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/14/by-2-to-1-voters-call-biden-maga-remarks-divisive-ii-tipp-poll/

President Biden’s recent comments about Trump supporters espousing “semi-fascism” and accusing the former president’s followers of representing “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” shocked many Americans. Now, despite White House denials of ill intent, a majority of voters call Biden’s remarks divisive, September’s I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

During his campaign for the presidency and even in his inauguration speech in 2021, Biden vowed to “unify” the country after years of often-bitter political division. Voters warmed to the idea that he could bring Americans together after years of angry ideological debates, polls showed.

But the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows Americans no longer believe that Biden is a uniter, but a divider.

The online poll of 1,277 adults taken from Sept. 7-9 showed that 62% of Americans believed Biden’s comments about Trump and his MAGA followers “increases division in the country.” Just 29% disagreed. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democrats — at 73% — were more likely to say that Biden’s MAGA comments increased division than either Republicans (50%) or independents (57%). Blacks and Hispanics (70%) exceeded white respondents (58%) in seeing the comments as divisive.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3641386-as-economic-woes-continue-biden-will-struggle-to-make-midterms-a-referendum-on-trump/

As President Biden travels the country touting his economic successes and excoriating former President Trump, we prepare for the next debacle courtesy of this president: Biden’s stagflation.

We’ve had Biden’s inflation, Biden’s recession and Biden’s natural gas shortage. Now we have renewed inflation and the very real possibility of a double-dip recession.

Tuesday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashed hopes that inflation was cooling. While prices did not budge in July, they rose by 0.1 percent in August, despite a significant swoon in energy costs (gasoline prices declined nearly 11 percent in just one month) and a sharp increase in the value of the dollar. Both of those trends helped stem the rise in prices, but not as much as expected.

Over the past 12 months, the consumer price index (CPI) rose 8.3 percent overall; analysts were expecting 8.1 percent. While the top-line rate of increase has dropped from the four-decade high of 9.1 percent reached in June, the rate of decline is alarmingly slow. Core inflation, absent food and energy, came in at 6.3 percent, up from 5.9 percent in July, and also worse than expected.

Positives other than falling gasoline prices, like some improvement in supply chains, declining commodity prices and lower used car prices also pumped up the “inflation is cooling” story.

The Federal Reserve is now expected to push rates up more rapidly, and for longer, than previously expected. Almost immediately, markets priced in a 20 percent chance of a 100 basis-point hike next week; prior to the latest CPI report, those odds were set at zero.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/12/green-globalism-is-the-ultimate-expression-of-white-supremacy/

There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.

Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.

But are these white leaders on the Left supremacists? Yes, they are, because the American Left, and the globalist green agenda it is cramming down our throats, has only one logical ultimate goal: To conquer the world. It’s pretty hard to be more “supremacist” than that.

Recognizing this reality relies on fairly simple logic:

If life on Earth will come to an end unless all nations achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050, but so far the only nations attempting to achieve this goal are white Western nations, then to save the earth, those nations that are not complying must be forced to comply. In the short run, for example, this means preventing emerging nations from acquiring the investment and technical support to develop an energy economy based on fossil fuel. But within a decade or two, with another generation of Westerners reaching adulthood firmly convinced the world will come to an end if “net zero” is not achieved, the green agenda will be a marketable justification for world war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-jews-now-supreme-court-free-exercise-yeshiva-university-lgbtq-student-club-judaism-pride-emergency-petition-11663016097?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

In mid-1960s Brooklyn, my dad was stopped at a traffic light when my brothers and I noticed a group of odd-looking men on the street corner, all with long beards, dark coats and hats. “Who are they?” we asked, pointing.

My father said something along the lines of “they are like us.” We didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. What he meant was that their strong religious beliefs made them look strange to society—and as Catholics we did too, even if our views weren’t manifested in our clothing.

More than 60 years later, these words come back to me as Yeshiva University was granted an 11th-hour reprieve Friday by the Supreme Count. The school had filed an emergency petition with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sept. 2, hoping to stay a Manhattan judge’s order that the university grant official recognition to the Yeshiva University Pride Alliance in accord with New York City’s Human Rights Law. The school had decided an official LGBTQ student club wouldn’t be consistent with Torah values at the heart of its identity.

Yeshiva University isn’t just any Jewish school. It is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy, committed to the idea that Jews can be at once fully Orthodox and fully engaged with the world. Arguably it is the sweet spot between Haredi Judaism, which tends to keep the outside world at bay, and Reform Judaism, whose embrace of modernity can over time erode Jewish distinctiveness.

New York says Yeshiva doesn’t qualify for a religious exemption. The argument seems to be that because it is incorporated as an educational institution—its motto is Torah Umadda, roughly, Torah plus secular knowledge—it can’t claim to be a religious institution and therefore has no right to an exemption.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/13/who-will-save-americans-from-a-weaponized-irs/

Our American republic did quite well for nearly a century without the IRS or its forerunner, the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue. Today, federal “revenooers” are the greatest threat to freedom in a country where liberty is already being lost at an alarming rate.

The IRS is more than a mere revenue collector for the federal government. It has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes, and those who might not be so enthusiastic about paying income taxes, or simply have a financial hardship that limits their ability to pay.

Administrations all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s have used the IRS to target their opponents. Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, said his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

And of course most of us recall the IRS sitting on and rejecting applications for tax-exempt status for groups that were trying to organize against the policies of Barack Obama, essentially barring their existence.

Now it’s Joe Biden “turn” to unleash the pain. His misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act created, as we noted earlier, “​​a small army of IRS shock troops who will abet the progressive-socialist political complex’s consolidation of raw political power while wrecking families, individuals, and small businesses.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/09/11/is-the-great-reset-kaput-n1628618

Writing in The Epoch Times, CEO of GnS Economics Tuomas Malinen forecasts the imminent collapse of the European economy. Focusing on the ill-advised sanctions against Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and the shutting down of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, he reports that “[m]any households and corporations are seeing their energy prices multiply by 10, or more, across the continent.” In the face of a massive spike in energy prices, skyrocketing inflation, the raising of interest rates, the crushing effect on asset markets and the European banking sector, and the explosion of a full-blown debt crisis, Malinen predicts the unraveling of the Eurozone and the possible collapse of the global financial system. The ripple effect would be unstoppable.

If Malinen is right—and his credentials are impeccable—what might the prospects be, in the midst of such carnage, for the Great Reset project, which envisions the corporate seizure of global governance and top-down management of economic affairs? Would the ensuing chaos render the Reset moot since the conditions for a social and economic revolution would be far too unstable for a coherent restructuring of society? Might we finally see the end of the nefarious Klaus Schwab, whose toxic dreams—corporate hegemony, the abolition of private property, and the eclipse of  democratic accountability while civil society becomes little more than window dressing—would have turned to rubble?

As Richard Morrison writes in National Review Capital, “The global regulatory cartel that technocrats such as Schwab envision—a system of supranational policymaking that insulates politicians and CEOs from the demands and expectations of their most important constituents—is exactly the course of action that will end…the amazing growth, health, education and prosperity” that the free-market system has created. Such is the policy that Klaus and his Davos minions would pursue, which the current imbroglio might well put paid to. There would be scarce maneuvering room to set the Schwabian program in place.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/want-know-where-us-inflation-110000417.html

The Federal Reserve’s attempt to get a clean read on post-pandemic inflation has focused attention on gauges that elevate housing costs, which is why what happens to rental inflation will factor heavily into the future of monetary policy.

The good news is rental inflation may be close to topping out after advancing almost 6% in the 12 months through July. The bad news is it will take a while to settle back down to anything resembling pre-coronavirus norms.

And that means Fed officials will maintain high interest rates for some time.

“If you’re the Fed and you’re trying to push down on inflation, you have to sort of hammer the labor market a little bit, in the sense that that’s what is going to help push shelter inflation down,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights in Pasadena, California. Most other prices, meanwhile, are “out of their control,” he said.

A monthly Labor Department report on consumer prices due out Tuesday is expected to show so-called core inflation, a widely tracked measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose by another 0.3% in August after a similar increase in July.

While that would mark a slowdown versus the past year, it would still be elevated compared with the years before the pandemic. Nor is it likely to sway the Fed from delivering a third straight 75 basis-point rate hike when it meets Sept. 20-21.

“I expect to see sizable increases in this component of inflation for a while as the recent rise in new rentals makes its way into aggregate price measures,” Fed Governor Chris Waller said on Friday. “Sometime early next year, though, I expect to see the upward pressure on inflation from these forces to ease.”

Outsize Share

Rents have always been important in measures of inflation, due to their outsize share in most household budgets: They comprise a little over 30% of the headline consumer price index, and about 40% of the core index.

But during the pandemic, as inflation has surged, other, smaller components — like used vehicles — recorded such unprecedented price increases that they, too, have become major drivers of those measures.

So, in an attempt to get a better handle on underlying inflation, policy makers have increasingly turned to such measures as “trimmed-mean” and “median” indexes to get a sense of how “broad-based” inflationary pressures really are.