1) If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears – An Actual Balanced Budget
No there is nothing wrong with your computer screen.
And yes, it really can be done. If they can split the atom. If they can put a man on the moon. If one man can eat 52 hotdogs in three minutes, then…yes, the budget can be balanced so that federal expenditures match revenues.
Hats off to House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington for proving all the critics wrong and laying out the gutsy plan for balance in 10 years. And he does it without one penny of tax increases and even makes the Trump tax cuts permanent.
It’s not that hard. Cut useless and wasteful spending. Get rid of the Green New Deal $300 billion slush fund. Constrain runaway Medicare and Medicaid spending. Work requirements for all welfare programs. Eliminate hundreds of redundant low-priority programs. Grow the economy at 3% to get more revenues.
Now the House Repubs have to band together, pass this bill, and get this ball into the Senate. Then it’s your move, Chuck Schumer.
2) Biden’s Re-regulation Policies Hurt The Poor The Most
We’re proud to announce that two of our CTUP senior fellows in economics – Casey Mulligan and EJ Antoni – will be testifying before the House Oversight Committee this afternoon on the issue of the Inflation Acceleration Act.
Spoiler alert: that law didn’t reduce inflation, but it did damage to the economy. One finding in Casey’s testimony needs to be highlighted. It shows that Biden’s regulatory thrust has acted as a de facto regressive tax that hurt poor families more than any other income group.
“Did the economic regulations have any benefits?” Casey asks. “Certainly—to large banks, trial lawyers, major health-insurance companies, big tech companies, and foreign drug manufacturers that profit when consumers must buy their expensive products because affordable alternatives are not available.”
3) CA Gov. Newsom To Sign Radical Climate “Disclosure” Bill
Gas prices are back up to $6 a gallon in many cities in California – which is well more than $1 a gallon higher than the national average. This is one of the many prices Californians pay for the radical anti-fossil fuel policies of this state and its governor Gavin Newsom
Newsom’s latest scheme is to require all businesses in the state with annual revenues of $1 billion or more to monitor and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration has been trying to do this nationwide at the SEC, but fortunately, that initiative has been stalled.
Newsom says this will affect 5,300 businesses, but in reality, this reg will impose onerous costs on the hundreds of thousands of small company suppliers to these targeted businesses.
The agenda here is far more sinister than just paperwork.
“These carbon disclosures are a simple but intensely powerful driver of decarbonization,” the bill's lead sponsor State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said.
By gaining “full visibility” into corporate carbon emissions, investors and consumers will gain “tools and incentives to turbocharge their decarbonization efforts... This legislation will support those companies doing their part to tackle the climate crisis and create accountability for those that aren’t.”
Sounds to us like a carbon shakedown. We’re worried that this climate craziness will spill over into other blue states.
Rob Reiner, the noted Hollywood actor and director, serves a very useful public purpose because he often says out loud what other progressives think but won’t dare utter.
Last weekend saw a classic Reinerism. He tweeted:
The responses were quite scathing, with a favorite being “Better make sure there’s no second party candidate either, just to be safe. For Democracy.”
Our friends at Issues & Insights say Reiner is far from alone in his desperate desire to smother opposing points of view, I.e. kill democracy in order to save it. They’ve compiled a list of the following headlines from just the last few weeks:
“The GOP’s impeachment push is an attack on democracy”
“Elon Musk Is a Threat to Democracy”
“Trump’s Threat to Democracy Is Now Systemic”
“Threats to democracy: Climate misinformation and gendered disinformation”
“The Supreme Court’s ‘Major Questions Doctrine’ Is a Threat to Democracy”
“Housing Crisis a Threat to Democracy”
“Doug Jones: Third party presidential bids ‘threat to democracy”
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats conducted a poll asking Americans if “The use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” The survey found that only 3.9 percent of Republicans “strongly agree” with that statement, with another 5.6 percent saying they “agree.”
Completely unremarked in coverage of the polls was that 16.1 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement, with almost one in 10 saying they “strongly agree.” The difference between the 9.5 percent of Republicans who say force is justified to protect democracy is dwarfed by the 16.1% of Democrats who say force is justified to keep a former president from returning to office.
As Issues & Insights notes: “Now ask yourself, which side is a threat to democracy?” We would also add, and which side gets almost no scrutiny about the dangerous views of its most extreme members?
