1) Where’s the Growth, Prosperity, and Opportunity?
Several of the editors of the Hotline attended last night’s GOP debate in Milwaukee.
While we thought all the candidates comported themselves well, we were disturbed that the tone was too glum.
Ron DeSantis’s first message was “America is in decline.” Others said, “This isn’t morning in America.” The words “growth,” and “prosperity” were entirely missing. Where is the “shining city on the hill” narrative?
The path to victory isn’t to say we’re doomed. It is to say America can do much better than this Biden-era malaise we find ourselves in now.
A return to Reagan-Trump style prosperity will solve what is ailing us. We reprint a chart we recently used, showing that with 3% growth, our debt-to-GDP ratio begins to fall rapidly.
Since growth is the answer, why aren’t Republicans taking about it?
Back in April CTUP published our landmark study “Putting Politics Over Pensions,” which graded the major money managers on how often they supported radical ESG shareholder resolutions through the proxy voting process. We made the case that when money managers like BlackRock, State Street, UBS, and JP Morgan support ESG resolutions – such as requiring firms to divest in oil and gas holdings — they violate their fiduciary duty to their clients.
The study got widespread attention in the media, including a full-length editorial in the WSJ.
Since the study was released, many of the major money management firms with retirement funds holding trillions of dollars of stocks, have begun renouncing ESG resolutions. BlackRock, which was once the greatest supporter of radical climate change and racial quota resolutions, has even now boasted of their change of heart.
Data released this week by the world’s largest ($9.4 trillion) asset management company: “BlackRock’s support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues fell sharply for the second year in a row as it refused to back resolutions it deemed too didactic or pointless."
This past year it voted for only 7% of ESG resolutions compared to a yes vote on nearly half the resolutions in 2021 and 22% last year.
BlackRock said its support had fallen “because so many shareholder proposals were overreaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant.” But it also admitted that the “bad publicity” from studies like ours was causing clients to remove money from BlackRock accounts.
In other words, our research is helping direct trillions of dollars of proxy voting away from “woke” initiatives that put shareholder value and mom and pop’s pensions at risk.
This is good news for America and great news for investors.
There are some worrisome indicators: Lionsgate movie studios in Los Angeles and Atlanta-based Morris Brown College say they are reinstating mask mandates, social distancing, and contact tracing. We’ve noted before that nearly 100 colleges are requiring masks this fall.
There is a revival of pandemic-era headlines about new wave and new variants.
But there’s a lot of fear-mongering going on here. Circulating variants continue to be very mild, making even the slight uptick in hospital census deceptive. Massachusetts reports that 70 percent of its "COVID hospitalizations" are incidental.
And various tracking data suggests the mini-wave may have already peaked.
But another round of lockdowns and mandates can't be completely ruled out – especially if we have a harsh respiratory season this winter. Why? Because the people who imposed these catastrophic policies have still not admitted they were wrong:
That's why we at the Hotline will continue to hammer away at the catastrophe of lockdowns until the lessons are truly learned.
4) Biden Admin. ADMITS Its Auto Regulations Harm Consumers
Biden's fuel economy regs that functionally mandate a transition to electric vehicles are an economic disaster that increases the cost of buying a new car. But you probably assumed the Department of Transportation would cook the books enough to claim these regulations would somehow save consumers money. They didn't even bother this time.
Kudos to Michael Buschbacher and James Conde for finding this gem buried deep in the regulations:
That gig is up. Reality has finally made it impossible to churn out such self-aggrandizing propaganda with a straight face. But we didn’t actually expect bureaucrats to say the quiet part out loud.
We read the Transportation Department’s newly proposed fuel economy regulations so you don’t have to. Buried deep on page 56,342 of volume 88 of the Federal Register, the agency makes this concession about its latest proposed rules: “Net benefits for passenger cars remain negative across alternatives.” In plain English, this means that mandating ever-more-stringent fuel economy for passenger cars will harm society.
New York City engineered a crime decline miracle in the 90s. Rudy Giuliani and his police chief Bernard Kerik used the pure power of policing, including aggressive gun confiscations and "stop and frisk," to slash the city's murder rate from over 2,000 a year to under 300.
The city started to suffer a steady corrosion of this legacy under Bill DeBlasio, who took over as mayor in 2021 and hemmed in policing power with intrusive regulations insensitive to the realities of urban crime. Then, in 2020, that corrosion was turbocharged when the country's "racial reckoning" powered a horde of anti-police activists into city government.
