RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/12/biden-mocks-ancient-wisdom/

Human nature stays the same across time and space. That is why there used to be predictable political, economic, and social behavior that all countries understood.

The supply of money governs inflation. Print it without either greater productivity or more goods and services, and the currency cheapens. Yet America apparently rejects that primordial truism.

The United States has borrowed about $29 trillion in debt—about 130 percent of its annual gross domestic product. The government will run up a $2.3 trillion annual budget deficit in 2021—after a $3.1 trillion deficit the year before.

The Biden Administration still wants to borrow more—another $2 trillion in new social programs and “infrastructure.”

In the crazy last 100 days, the price of everything from lumber, food, and gas to cars and houses has soared. Yet many interest rates are still stuck at or below three percent.

Jobs are plentiful; workers are not. Is that a surprise when government cash handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay cut to go back to work?

After being freed from 13 months of quarantine, Americans are splurging. But meeting their huge pent-up demand is causing shortages.

Producers fear the Biden Administration’s loose talk of impending higher income, capital gains, estate, and user taxes, along with more regulations and cutbacks in energy development.

Are the old laws really obsolete, warning not to print money, while expanding government debt, keeping interest rates almost at zero, and discouraging employment, production, and thrift? That dangerous formula used to ensure inflation, followed by ruinous stagflation.

After the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody, many big cities slashed their police budgets. Mayors damned or defunded their departments. In terror of being fired or ruined for any use of force, patrol officers slowed down response times to inner-city violence,

The result?

In almost every major city—Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis, Washington—violent crimes and homicides have grown by double digits over the previous year. 

State and local governments believed that they were exempt from primeval laws of deterrence that warned when criminals assumed they would not be caught and punished, then they committed more crimes. 

The same dangers of ignoring unchanging human nature apply to foreign policy. 

Aggressive opponents such as Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and the West Bank expect that the new Biden Administration will ignore their brinkmanship. They assume it will cut American defenses. And Biden certainly sounds to them more critical of the prior Trump foreign policy than of America’s enemies. So why not take previously unwarranted risks? 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/biden-is-off-to-a-disastrous-start/

A border crisis, inflation, a distorted job market, a pipeline fiasco . . . yet Biden’s in denial either about the existence of these problems or his role in fixing them.

P residents aren’t supreme beings imbued with the power to dictate economic conditions, pandemics, or international events. We give them far too much credit and blame for the vagaries of the world.

That said, there are some things that presidents do have power to influence. The location of MLB’s All-Star Game, for instance, is not Joe Biden’s bailiwick. This particular economic recovery is. The COVID downturn wasn’t an organic event precipitated by unforeseeable underlying economic factors. It was an event created by state lockdowns, coupled with widespread consumer fear. So, with lockdowns easing and vaccines entering arms, a vibrant economic bounce-back should be a slam dunk for the president.

Instead, Biden couldn’t resist the opportunity to stuff expensive, technocratic, completely unrelated agenda items into his “rescue” packages. And disincentivizing work and investments, threatening to raise taxes and spike energy prices, and pumping trillions into the economy tends to dampen growth.

Economists expected the country to add about 1 million jobs in April, but we came up 800,000 jobs short. March’s gains were also revised down another 140,000. Leftists pundits and wonks, as is their wont when Democrats hold power, were “perplexed” by the bad numbers. And Biden is simply in denial. “There’s been a lot of discussion since Friday’s report that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work,” Biden explained. “We don’t see much evidence of that.”

There are 7.5 million jobs available in the United States, but only 270,000 were filled. And Americans are getting $300-a-week bonus checks to stay home. As Bank of America economist Joseph Song noted, even those making $32,000 a year would get a raise by going on unemployment. That seems like evidence.

“I want to put today’s job report in perspective,” Biden also explained. “Quite frankly we’re moving more rapidly than I thought we would.” So, Biden expected a bigger-than-800,000 miss on jobs? That’s quite the admission. Does anyone believe this? Former President Obama, who presided over the slowest economic recovery in history, also played this game. His Council of Economic Advisers once predicted his 2009 stimulus bill would create 4.6 percent growth by 2012. It came nowhere close, of course, yet the media kept recalibrating the definition of success. They’re doing it again.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/biden-has-emboldened-israels-enemies/

This week, well over 1,000 rockets have been launched into Israel by Palestinian terrorists operating out of Gaza. The rockets have been aimed at schools, at Israeli civilians in the highly populated Tel Aviv area, and — in a major escalation — at Ben Gurion Airport, which connects Israel with the outside world.

Due to the incredible performance of its Iron Dome missile-defense system, Israel has been able to minimize its casualties. But because no system is perfect, and with Hamas and Islamic Jihad launching hundreds of missiles simultaneously, some have managed to slip through, doing damage to property and killing several Israelis, including a father and daughter in the city of Lod and a five-year-old boy in Sderot.

Understandably, Israel has responded with air strikes targeting terrorists in Gaza and their infrastructure. Israelis go to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties. They have notified Gazans of impending attacks and have employed the practice of “roof knocking,” whereby they drop nonexplosive devices on buildings to alert residents that it is about to be targeted by an air strike so they have time to vacate. 

The terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad routinely fire and store rockets in civilian areas. This tactic has naturally put more Palestinians in harm’s way. Indeed, this is part of the strategy, as civilian casualties in Gaza help the groups to gain support among the international community, and on the American left.

The latest wave of rocket attacks came after escalating Palestinian riots in Jerusalem, which related to two separate issues, both of which have been completely distorted by the media.

One involves a legal dispute over several properties in Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian tenants with expired leases (or no leases at all) have been living. Israel’s lower court has ruled that Jewish owners had valid title to these properties, in which Jews lived prior to being driven out by Jordan during the 1948 war. The dispute, which is set to go before Israel’s supreme court, was one trigger for recent rioting by Palestinians.