In case you haven’t heard yet: Brandon Johnson has narrowly won the mayoral runoff in Chicago. Recall that Johnson's occupation is an organizer for the teacher unions. The unions spent several million dollars on the race. They got their man.
The Windy City’s municipal government will now officially be a fully owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union. (Can you imagine what the union contracts are going to look like?) This is a city where zero children can read or write at proficiency level in roughly two dozen schools.
Sadly, Chicago was once known as “the city that works.” Now it looks more and more that because of the rise of the progressive left, blue cities are just not savable. We hope we are wrong.
The dollar has depreciated in value – that’s the very definition of inflation – due to the Biden $6 trillion spending and borrowing spree. But it is still historically strong relative to the two major competing currencies - the euro and the yen as Laffer and Associates data shows.
Now we hear talk of a monetary alliance among China Russia, India, Argentina, and Brazil - among others.
This is from Business Insider:
Really? Would anyone want to have their lifetime savings linked to the yuan, the ruble, or the peso?
The dollar’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves indeed fell below 59 percent in the final quarter of last year. This extended a two-decade decline, when the percentage was just over 70 percent - according to the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves data.
When the next global turmoil hits, there will be a rush to buy dollars – not the yuan or euros.
Why? We’ve said it before, the U.S. dollar is the least rotten apple in the cart.
3) North Carolina Democrat Is Run Out of Party Over Her Support for School Choice
Chicago isn’t the only place in America where the Democratic Party is a puppet of the teacher unions.
Last week Democratic Rep. Tricia Cotham (who worked for 10 years in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools as a social studies teacher and then an assistant principal) tweeted out her support for the school choice bill signed into law by Florida Governor DeSantis.
That – and her strong support for expanded educational freedom in North Carolina – has infuriated her Democrat colleagues.
Her vote – if all the Republicans stay United – would make a supermajority to override an expected veto by the Dem governor of a school choice bill speeding ahead in Raleigh.
So Cotham’s Democratic colleagues told her that she wouldn't be welcome in the party anymore if she voted for school choice. And so it is expected that Cotham will switch parties. Rep. Cecil Brockman, a moderate Democrat, explained why: "I think she just wanted to do what's best for her district, and when you're constantly talked about and trashed — especially the way that we have been over the past few weeks — I think this is what happens.”
We are getting very close to school choice victory in the Tar Heel State.
4) Yellen Admits the Inflation Reduction Act Was Really a Front for the Green New Deal
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen inadvertently let the cat out of the bag, by saying that the real “core” agenda was to promote green energy pork. Fighting inflation was a political smoke screen.
We’re scratching our heads trying to understand how pouring out another $300 billion or so in climate change spending was ever going to bring down inflation. She regards this great green energy hoax as a policy triumph.
Someone should tell her that oil is now back up above $80 a barrel – which in many states is the equivalent to $4 for a gallon of gas at the pump. With every passing day, Janet Yellen – who had high hopes to be the one sane adult in the Biden Cabinet – proves to be a deeper disappointment.
Nigel Lawson, who served Margaret Thatcher as her Treasury Secretary, has died at the age of 91. Charles Moore, who Thatcher selected as her authorized biographer, says “Lawson was in many ways the economic architect of Thatcherism”.
One of your HOTLINE editors was in Britain in 1988 on the day Lawson released his budget, which abolished all tax rates above 40%, and cut the basic rate to its lowest level in half a century.
The Daily Telegraph remembers: “Coming just two years after Big Bang (financial deregulation), the defeat of militant trade unionism and a wave of privatizations, his dramatic, jaw-dropping tax reductions….transformed our competitiveness and reputation overseas, helped unleash an entrepreneurial revolution and turned the UK into a magnet for foreign direct investment.”
The Lawson budget was “a vindication of the Laffer Curve. The top 10% of earners had been paying 35 percent of the total income tax taken. Under Lawson’s lower rate that share rose to 48 percent.
Lawson left office in 1989, one year before Thatcher did, with his reputation secure. But he refused to “retire.” He founded the Global Policy Warming Foundation to refute the most outrageous claims of the climate change movement.
