1) Break Up Big Tech and at Least $3 Trillion of Share-Holder Value Goes Down the Drain
We don’t like the left-leaning politics of the tech companies, but we LOVE how much money they are making for American shareholders. As the chart below shows, eight firms - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, and Nvidia - now make up 30% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, up from 22% at the start of the year. Is the fact that they are making money for 150 million American shareholders a reason to break them up as “monopolies?”
Then there is Apple. According to Maverick Equity Research, Apple's market capitalization surpasses not only the Russel 2000 index (comprising US small-cap stocks) but also exceeds the combined market capitalization of the 100 largest publicly traded companies in France, the UK, India, Germany, and Canada.
Now you know why the Brits and the Europeans want to attack the dominant U.S. high-tech companies with lawsuits, tariffs, antitrust complaints, and so on.
But why are Lina Khan and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission – and too many Republicans in Congress – trying to aid and abet our foreign rivals with spurious and antitrust allegations? Tech prices are falling, they aren’t rising.
The U.S. electric power system is headed for “potentially catastrophic consequences” as America’s dispatchable power plants are retiring “far too quickly” and in quantities that “threaten our ability to keep the lights on.” That was the chilling conclusion of a hearing last week before the House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security.
Wake up, America! This is not a fake crisis, but a real one totally manufactured by the radical climate change agenda of the Biden Administration.
We at the Hotline have been sounding this alarm from the first days of the Biden administration. Now, two commissioners of FERC, which oversees the electric grid system, are amplifying that message. It isn’t just California that is facing brownouts and blackouts.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: according to FERC member Mark Christie: the grid system is expected to lose 40 GW of generation capacity by 2030 through early retirements of generating units…Around 90% of this retiring capacity is from coal and gas. Under the left’s master plan, reliable and cheap generating capacity from gas and coal plants are to be replaced with “intermittent generation from solar and wind."
This almost ensures intermittent shutdowns of the grid system starting as soon as this Summer.
A second FERC Commissioner, James P. Danly, warned that the Biden administration has allowed a “warped distortion of price signals” in the electric power market because of its single-focused goal of “driving fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”
As a reminder: more than 75% of our power comes from oil, gas, and coal. But don’t worry: we still have wood, matches, and candles.
Fossil fuels—petroleum, natural gas, and coal—accounted for about 79% of total U.S. primary energy production in 2021.
We’ll say it again. As a matter of health and safety: Get a generator that isn’t hooked up to the grid system folks. Seriously.
Failures of Globalization Shatter Long-Held Beliefs About the Economy
Here is the key paragraph of the piece:
“The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall came down more than 30 years ago – the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade, and maximum efficiency look to be running off the rails.”
Huh? If Covid was a lesson about anything it is that government power and control of private resources ran the global economy off the rails. The global inflation problem and supply chain disruptions of the last several years weren’t due to a failure of free enterprise, but rather runaway government spending and borrowing in almost every advanced country in the world, as fiscal sensibility was replaced with “Modern Monetary Theory.” The Times ridicules the notion of the “invincibility of free market capitalism,” but what ended the Covid crisis and saved millions of lives worldwide was in large part Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. That was the greatest life-saving example in modern history of the virtues of getting government and politicians out of the way: a total DEREGULATION.
Within the United States and internationally, the national governments and state governments that took the harshest steps in controlling their economies have been the ones with by far the slowest recoveries.
The left has fretted for years about global inequality, and yet free trade has done more to lift billions of people out of poverty than all the income redistribution programs in history.
Finally, the Times moans that reliance on free enterprise has done nothing to slow climate change. But what has spending more than $1 trillion worldwide done to save the planet? Last year despite the deluge of money, the 34 industrial conferences, the solemn pledges by political leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the attacks on fossil fuels, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere hit an all-time high.
4) Oops, Biden Did It Again – Lying About the Economy That Is
In his recent Wall Street Journal column crowing about his handling of the economy, Biden claimed “real income for the bottom half of earners is up by 3.4% since I took office.”
That seemed completely at odds with every statistic we had seen over the past two years.
Our CTUP senior fellow in economics, EJ Antoni, did some fact-checking and here is what he found:
According to Biden’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics, under Biden, the bottom 25% of income earners have seen their real incomes have fallen 2.3% while the second income quartile has fallen 3.9%. That means the two groups that make up the bottom half of earners have both seen their real incomes decrease, not increase. So where did the Biden economists get their numbers? You’d have to ask them, but no one in the media is likely to do that.
Our friends at PragerU have just released a video narrated by Alfredo Ortiz, the director of Job Creators Network, on the virtues of starting a small business. This is the ultimate act of altruism – as small businessmen and women support more than 60% of all American workers. Without the employer, there is no employee – and there is no paycheck.
We urge you to watch it and have your kids watch it too.
