RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/30/biden-deserves-zero-credit-for-booming-economy-covid-gains/

In his speech to Congress this week, President Joe Biden heartily patted himself on the back for everything good that is happening right now.

He described a country in crisis when he took office and said that “After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for a take off.”

The day after Biden’s speech, the Commerce Department reported GDP growth for the first three months of this year was 6.4%. New COVID cases are on the decline, and vaccines are plentiful.

So, it looks like Biden’s right, doesn’t it?

Except he doesn’t deserve any credit for any of those things.

Take the GDP number. Far from being in a Great Depression-scale crisis, the economy had been rapidly recovering from the government-mandated (and scientifically unjustified) lockdowns – with GDP leaping 33.4% in the third quarter of last year and another 4.3% in the fourth quarter.

When Biden took office, Q1 of this year was nearly a third over, and he didn’t sign his “American Rescue Plan” into law until mid-March, just two weeks before the quarter ended. So, even though checks started rolling out to people, that rescue plan was too late to have a significant impact on overall growth.

As a matter of fact, the GDPNow forecast for Q1 – which is a running estimate of the economy based on available data as they are released – was much higher before Biden signed his rescue plan than where it ended up. (See the chart below.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-post-pandemic-boom-11619736069?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden can hardly be blamed for trumpeting the U.S. economic resurgence in his address to Congress. But his claim that “America’s house was on fire” when he entered office? It was already extinguished, as Thursday’s first-quarter GDP report showed.

Real GDP rose 6.4% in the period as vaccines rolled out, state lockdowns eased and Americans spent December stimulus payments. Incredibly, real GDP was a mere 0.87% below the 2019 fourth-quarter business cycle peak and probably would have surpassed it if not for supply-chain problems and disincentives to work. Consumer spending contributed 7.02 percentage-points to growth—about 70% of that for goods, but spending on services also increased, especially on recreation, food and accommodation.

Housing chipped in 0.49 percentage-points as the surge in home building and renovations continued. Business investment added 1.29 percentage-points, mostly from software and IT equipment, despite a global semiconductor shortage and transportation bottlenecks that have snarled manufacturing. Net exports and reduced inventories subtracted 3.51 points.

What’s amazing is that U.S. output is nearly what it was in the fourth-quarter of 2019 even with payrolls being about 5% smaller. Businesses and workers have become more productive during the pandemic. Aggregate employee compensation is 2.9% higher than in 2019’s fourth quarter as businesses have increased pay to reward and attract workers. Total personal income in the first quarter was up a whopping 16.7% from the pre-Covid peak. Much of this is pent-up savings—the personal savings rate was a near record 21%—that will turn into more consumer spending as people resume travel and leisure activities.

Mr. Biden wants to take credit for rescuing an economy in flames, but Democrats in Washington have been dousing dead embers. The economy was poised to accelerate as vaccines rolled out no matter who was President.

https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/biden-erased-decades-of-historic?token=eyJ1c2

As President Biden wrapped up a 65-minute joint address to Congress to mark his administration’s first 100 days, what was shared in the lead-up to his speech sowed discord over the entire affair:

Jim Acosta
Biden to refer to Jan 6 insurrection as “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” in speech tonight.

Sure enough, the President delivered on this. Opening his address, Biden stated, “I took the oath of office — lifted my hand off our family Bible — and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Yes, the January 6th siege on the U.S. Capitol building, often alluded to as an “insurrection,” was an embarrassing day for our country. But to suggest that it was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” is disingenuous at best. At worst, it’s a malicious attempt to whitewash the history of attacks carried out both by and on the government that have had much more catastrophic results.

Apart from the September 11th terrorist attacks that targeted the country’s financial system, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the defenders of our democracy when a hijacked American Airlines flight 77 flew into the Pentagon. Were it not for the heroes who resisted against the hijackers of United flight 93, Al Qaeda’s attempt to fly a commercial airline into the White House or U.S. Capitol building would have come to fruition. Despite being a horrific tragedy, 9/11 has been dismissed by some as being explicitly a “foreign attack,” not one from within.

So, let’s explore attacks on our democracy from within.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-ugly-reaction-to-tim-scotts-speech-is-telling/

Tim Scott gave a competent Republican response to Joe Biden’s mendacious speech last night. And boy, the contrived, hyperbolic outrage and derision we saw from liberal talking heads was something to behold.

Some of it was just farcical. Take MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace’s contention that the speech, in which Scott praised the Trump administration vaccines, was “delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter.” Operation Warp Speed, she claimed, “didn’t do anything to get a needle in the arms, so a lot of disinformation.” Well, it did help boost the life-saving innovation that flows through those needles – not to mention a million needles into arms every day by the time Joe Biden got his shot.

But Scott’s most controversial statement, allegedly, was to contend that, “America is not a racist country.” All the usual suspects took to social media to mock the senator for simultaneously saying the nation wasn’t racist and pointing out that he had personally experienced bigotry. Of course America is a racist nation, they wailed, before getting “Uncle Tim” trending on Twitter to try and prove it. The Left’s demeaning of any African American who strays from leftist orthodoxy is one of the ugliest acceptable smears in our political discourse.

Scott’s two claims are wholly compatible. Bad actors and ugly ideas exist among people of all nations, and always will, and yet that does not necessarily mean the nation itself is fundamentally, legally, culturally, or systemically racist. We can always do better, but by world standards, the United States is likely the least racist place.

https://www.city-journal.org/whats-normal-in-america

A few days ago, 216 employees of Simon and Schuster, along with several thousand people from outside the trade publishing house, sent a petition to top executives of the company demanding that they stop publishing anyone who had anything to do with the Trump administration. Their rationale for making such a demand was that Trump’s presidency was a dangerous historical aberration. According to the Wall Street Journal, the letter insists that Simon and Schuster not treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history.” 

Before I sat down to write this essay, I had to ask myself several questions. Will the opinions I express jeopardize my position at the liberal university where I teach? Will they endanger my relationship with my liberal publisher? Will they roil my relations with my neighbors in the ultra-progressive New Jersey suburb where I live? 

That I had to ask is not “normal.” 

For a long time, dictators, from the European tyrants of the 1930s to the military leaders of the Latin American juntas, skillfully used the violent excesses of dissenters to seize and preserve power. Now so-called liberal “resistance” to “fascism” justifies its attacks on freedom of speech by citing the threat posed by a former American president. Susan Sontag famously enraged the New Left by calling Communism “fascism with a human face.” The current woke movement has all the trappings of fascism with an anti-fascist face.