1) Fed's $8 Trillion Balance Sheet Expanding Again
Our co-founder Arthur Laffer notes that the Fed has increased its balance sheet (thus pouring money into the economy) to the tune of $400 billion in the weeks since the Silicon Valley Bank failure. This has offset much of the quantitative tightening (QT) that had begun at the Fed over the last year. We’re sure that Jerome Powell says this intervention is “transitory.”
This is hardly the way to get back to the Fed target of 2 percent inflation.
A recent CTUP study by Casey Mulligan and Steve Moore finds that American outpost of oil and gas would have been roughly two billion barrels higher from 2021-23 had Biden stuck with the Trump pro-America energy policies. Over the past two years, American oil production would have been on average more than two million barrels higher per day.
OPEC’s recently announced cutbacks in production of 1.6 million barrels a day, would have had little impact on world oil prices because U.S. drillers would have made up the difference. Instead, oil is now headed to $4 a gallon in many states - at least $1 a gallon higher than would be the case under Trump. Call it Biden’s climate change tax.
3) North Carolina’s Newest Republican Rips the Democrats Who Forced Her to Switch to the GOP
Yesterday, we highlighted that Rep. Tricia Cotham, the chair of the NC House Education Committee, and a former teacher of the year, was switching parties. That gives Republicans a supermajority in both houses of the legislature and the ability to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes. Universal school choice is now on the short list of legislative agenda items.
Rep. Cotham had some choice words for why she is fleeing the Democrats and their reactionary opposition to school choice:
“One size fits all in education is wrong… [Democrats] didn’t want to talk about children. They had talking points from adults and adult organizations.”
She said that because of her support for school choice she was “shunned and called a traitor.” Liberal groups even contacted her children in an attempt to bully them and intimidate her.
A lot has changed since Democrat Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law - a bill in 1996 that included strict work requirements to qualify for benefits. Now Democrats are almost universally against workfare. Today less than half of welfare recipients are working.
But in Wisconsin - a quintessential purple state these days - the work-for-welfare issue was put on the ballot in Tuesday’s election. Here was the result:
Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically murdered this week 55 years ago in Memphis, Tennessee.
John Merline of Issues & Insights makes a compelling case that his dream of a colorblind society has been turned on its head.
In his 1963 speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, King dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
In recent years, the radical forces behind critical race theory, and the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement have tried to shred his vision of a society that strives to be color-blind. The Biden Administration has caved to woke members of its coalition and has mandated that every federal department implement “equity” plans that ensure quotas and heightened racial division.
Merline writes: “None of this is what Martin Luther King Jr. lived or died for. But it’s a pot of gold for grifters, race hustlers, status seekers, political hacks, and just plain mean people.”
