1) The White House Is Mystified That Americans Are So Angry
To listen to Joe Biden's press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday, you’d think these are the days of wine and roses and that Americans’ economic anxieties are a figment of our imaginations. Jean-Pierre insists that the economy is “better than it has been historically” and that Biden inherited “an economic disaster” from Trump (sic).
Reality check: prices are now officially up by just shy of 20% in less than three years.
Bloomberg (which is hardly conservative) reports “It now requires $119.27 to buy the same goods and services a family could afford with $100 before the pandemic. Since early 2020, prices have risen about as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the health emergency.” Groceries are up 25%, used-car pries are up 35%, and rents roughly 20%. Mortgage interest rates are 8% and car loan rates are even higher.
And savings aren’t any better off either. Federal Reserve data show that, after adjusting for inflation, the level of bank deposits and other liquid assets were lower in June than they were in March 2020 for the vast majority of households.
Less income, rising prices, and rising household debt – and yes that will trigger a lot of anxiety.
Is it any wonder that polls show that in 2024 battleground states, voters have more trust in Donald Trump than Biden on the economy – and by a whopping 22 points?
2) Another Reality Check: Biden’s Record on Covid MUCH Worse Than Trump’s
Speaking of our favorite White House flak KJP, yesterday she also repeated the lie that Biden solved the COVID crisis that was thrown into his lap by the “incompetent previous” administration.
But this is another false narrative that we will hear a lot of over the coming months as the campaign season heats up. Actually, the official statistics tell an amazing story that has been mysteriously under-reported.
The bottom line: More people died from COVID under Biden than under Trump, even though the most dangerous and deadliest variant hit when Trump was president, and even though when Biden entered office, Trump handed his administration the vaccine that was developed in nine months thanks to Operation Warp Speed.
So the strain of the virus was less deadly AND we had a vaccine available under Biden and we STILL had more deaths. We’d call that “incompetence,” Ms. Jean-Perre.
3) Connecticut Rejects Gas Car Ban While Neighbor New Jersey Adopts It
Republicans held firm in a blue state and Democratic Governor Ned Lamont backed down and withdrew his proposal to adopt the new California car standards, which phase in EV mandates even more quickly than Biden's national standards and include a total ban on all new internal combustion vehicles by 2035.
If Connecticut can get this right, what excuse does a state like Virginia have?
Or, how do you explain neighboring New Jersey? The governor recently announced that the Garden State will ban gas-powered cars by 2035. And, how is this for Orwellian double-speak? The government is claiming this move will “preserve consumer choice.” Reminds us of the line from Henry Ford about the Model T: “You can buy it in any color you want as long as it’s black.”
5) Video of the Day: Disagreement in Pursuit of Truth Is a Virtue
We don't always agree with our friends at Heritage and, but this is a fascinating discussion between Kevin Roberts and Jordan Peterson on recovering civil discourse in America and listening to the other side’s arguments.
Jordan Peterson: Do you really have to engage in contentious disagreement at the academic level if you're a thinker? Why can't everyone just get along? …
Kevin Roberts: Well, the intellectual combat is essential at the university level… and in American institutions, especially since the 1940s and accelerating in the 70s, there's basically the absence of that. In fact, the opposite of that. So that if you go in and you say that I want to do intellectual combat, you're committing some grave sin inside the American academy.
Kevin Roberts: The think tank at its at its height, I would argue, is one where, of course, it's going to have a particular set of positions that it's taking publicly, but the process of arriving at those positions internally is one where there is, as I like to call it here at the Heritage Foundation, creative conflict.
