Unleash Prosperity Hotline #930

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #930
01/08/2024
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1) Sick of Trillion Dollar Deficits? Then Biden Must Go

New House Speaker Mike Johnson has negotiated the shrewdest budget deal he could get with Joe Biden in the White House and Chucky Schumer reigning over the Senate. Johnson was outnumbered and outgunned, but he managed to get some modest cuts in spending. Congratulations. Anyone who thinks he or anyone in the GOP could have gotten much better is living in la la land.

Don’t worry. We aren’t going to break out in a heavenly choir singing Hallelujah. But it’s a smart compromise given the lousy hand House Republicans are dealing with a splintered four-seat majority that can’t get to 218 votes on ANYTHING.

We think this compromise package achieves three big objectives:

First, it avoids a government shutdown trainwreck that voters are in no mood for and wouldn’t have a happy ending. As we’ve mentioned before, Republicans have been blamed for 10 of the last 11 shutdowns.

Second, it does shave almost $100 billion from the bloated Biden budget request and cuts $20 billion in IRS funding. These are small victories, but out of an obese $6 trillion budget, every dollar matters.

Third, it keeps the debate in the 2024 election season focused on the fiscal catastrophe named Joe Biden.

Biden has nearly single-handedly added $6 trillion to the debt in just three years. This wasn’t a bipartisan spending spree. It was all the unholy trinity of Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer. His plan for the future is for the debt to top $50 trillion over the next decade. That’s not a solution, but the act of a psychopathic big spender. To solve the problem he wants bone-crushing taxes that will sink the economy.

This latest budget deal is an urgent reminder that the only smart solution for America is to get rid of the Biden Democrats.

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2) Blue States Just Can’t Stop Taxing

The most recent Census data provides even further evidence that “soak the rich” tax policies are causing a blue states Meltdown. The three highest-tax states – California, New York, and Illinois – all lost the most population last year. Just a coincidence?

Democrats in blue state America say yes and have vowed to get out of the ditch by digging their financial holes deeper.

Vermont Democrats have just proposed yet another tax rate hike that would raise their highest rate to more than 8%. They’d move to having the 5th highest rates in the country. Pretty soon Ben and Jerry will be the only rich people left in the state.

Meanwhile, Maryland Democrats are pushing a “millionaire tax” ($750,000 in income and above), a capital gains tax rate higher than the regular income tax rate, and a new corporate tax.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/26/maryland-budget-tax-reform/

California just effectively raised its top income tax rate to the highest in the USA – from 13.3% to 14.4% by uncapping the state's 1.1% payroll tax. They must be so proud.

Washington, once an importer of talent and brainpower because of its no income tax status, just adopted a 7.5% capital gains tax and now Senate Democrats want a 1% annual tax on financial intangible assets.

Meanwhile, in 2023, eight red states — Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia — enacted policies to reduce personal or corporate income tax rates. Oklahoma is set to cut rates this year to as low as 2%. Several of these states now have flat taxes, not multiple-tier “progressive” rates. Every state on this list is a red state except Connecticut.

These new taxes will only make the yawning gap between red states and blue states wider. If you live in a red state: More blue staters are coming.

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3) Anti-Growth Pessimism May Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Doom-saying climate change fanatics, rabble-rousers on race issues, and pandemic lockdown advocates are prevailing in many public debates and may be playing a role in our national malaise.

A perfect example of late was when the COP28 climate change summit ended last month with a pronouncement by the organizers that the only way to save the planet is through a policy of “de-growth.” In other words, everyone apparently needs to get poorer.

John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter for the Financial Times, has fed language from millions of books and articles into data analyzers. He concludes:

“Over the past 60 years the west has begun to shift away from the culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion… The frequency of terms related to progress, improvement and the future has dropped by about 25 per cent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common.”

His conclusion is worth repeating: “The pre-industrial world was one of mass conflict, exploitation and suffering. If we are to avoid backsliding, advocates for innovation, growth and abundance must defeat the doomers.”

That is our mission at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and why we publish the HOTLINE.

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4) Speaking of Doomsaying: We Have the Latest Strain of COVID Fear Mongering

The latest JN.1 COVID variant is driving a wave of new infections, and the media is attempting yet another fear-hype cycle. Some liberal jurisdictions are even bringing back mask mandates.

The hype is being driven by wastewater metrics (the not quite exact science of counting viral copies in samples taken from sewer systems), but the experience of the Netherlands in recent weeks showed that a record wastewater reading may be a non-event:

https://twitter.com/Hold2LLC/status/1742624607947940015/

Here's the bottom line: this wave is the smallest winter wave yet from a hospitalization standpoint (even where wastewater readings are at all-time highs) which means the infections are overwhelmingly mild, and based on seasonal timing we are likely at or near the peak:

Moreover, because hospital numbers include anyone who happens to test positive for COVID, even if it has nothing to do with why they are there, the actual disease burden is much lower.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer of the largest safety-net hospital in LA County, Los Angeles General Medical Center, has once again dispelled dooming from his own health department:

We are continuing to NOT see COVID pneumonia. We are NOT seeing patients getting admitted to the ICU with pneumonia, we are NOT seeing patients get intubated because of COVID.

There certainly is community COVID spreading. COVID is a winter virus. There's also community other viruses spreading, because these respiratory viruses happen in the winter months. COVID is not going away. It is endemic. It is one of many now endemic viruses, which in my mind does not distinguish itself from other viruses. Frankly, I'm kinda more afraid of influenza than I am of COVID at this point.

And if you look at the numbers that we've seen in our hospital, they are below this year the level they were last year at the same time, considerably so, and with milder disease even than we were seeing last year, which was milder than the year before that, which was much milder than that horrible 2020 winter... So everybody just relax.

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5) Headline of the Day

Congratulations Gavin Newsom: your state has managed to package every ding bat, left-wing idea in one policy directive: illegal immigrants get free health care plus sex change operations. Where else but California:

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6) Soak the Rich Chicago-Style

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