We’ve demonstrated multiple times on these pages that Joe Biden is the most fiscally reckless president in American history - and no other president comes close.
We were flabbergasted when we saw a report from the leftwing group, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (which never saw a tax increase it didn't like and has endorsed several of Biden's multi-trillion dollar spending bills), put out a release claiming Trump is responsible for twice as much of the federal debt as Biden.
This remarkable claim is apparently due to the supposed high price tag of the Trump tax cut. This is even though federal revenues are at their historically high water mark and corporate taxes have nearly doubled.
We agree that Trump spent too much money.
But this chart shows Biden's buffet table of additional spending from the Trump baseline when he left office. Trump didn't cut $20 trillion in taxes.
2) Democrats in California Say No Power to the People
We support the voter initiative process as a check and balance against arrogant legislatures that lose touch with voters. There are 26 states that allow this voter override of rogue state legislatures and no state needs it more than California. It was the famous Proposition 13 property tax revolt that saved California in the late 1970s.
All that may be in jeopardy given last week's ruling by the California Supreme Court throwing a measure called the Taxpayer Protection Act off the ballot. It would have made it more difficult to hike the state's already sky-high taxes.
Sponsored by the Business Roundtable, it would have required that most regulatory fees and charges be approved by the Legislature and voters. It also required voters to approve tax increases passed by the Legislature, and it required cities to win two-thirds voter approval before passing special taxes.
Governor Gavin Newsom sued the state claiming that such changes to the state Constitution could only be placed on the ballot by the Legislature. The court agreed even though Justice Goodwin Liu (the author of the majority opinion) noted that courts generally wait to address a measure's constitutionality until "after an election, in order to avoid disrupting the electoral process and the exercise of the franchise."
Perhaps the break from long-standing precedent is explained simply by the fact the court is now stacked with "woke" progressive jurists.
Any business that was on the edge of deciding whether to move from California to a more friendly business climate may have just gotten all the information they needed to call a relocation specialist.
It has been a historic week for Argentina. A country known for its high inflation has just experienced its first week without price increases in food and beverages in three decades, according to private consulting firm Econométrica.
In other words: for each of the past 30 years, food and beverage prices have done nothing but increase, until the third week of June 2024, where they remained the same as the previous one.
The director of the consulting firm, Ramiro Castiñeira, shared graphs on social media displaying the downward trend of food inflation during the last months, until finally reaching 0%:
Teachers unions continue to publicly insist that their demands for ever greater spending on public schools are to help "the children." Privately, they tell many of their own members who are skeptical of the evidence that more spending boosts outcomes that at least they continue to raise teacher pay and benefits for "the adults" in the system.
But now, there are signs that the ability of unions to extract more taxpayer resources for the system isn't doing enough to keep their own members happy.
A new report from the American Enterprise Institute notes that nearly half of all teachers plan to quit, due to school climate and safety. Around 40 percent of teachers say they now face physical violence from students. Higher wages alone won't address the disciplinary and hidebound union contracts that make it difficult to retain teachers.
Robert Pondiscio, a former 5th-grade public school teacher who testified before Congress last week, warned that "higher pay does not make a hard job easier to perform. It lifts no burden off a teacher's shoulders, nor does it add hours to a teacher's day."
Rather, what would make the job of teachers easier and more fulfilling would be greater school choice that would tie teacher pay to improving student performance.
"Most importantly," Pondiscio writes that more school choice would not only improve the lot of teachers, but it would also be "giving disadvantaged kids the opportunity to learn in the kinds of safe and orderly schools that well-off kids and their parents take for granted."
That should be the real goal of public education, not the search for ever-bigger bureaucratic budgets.
5) Courts Swat Down Biden's Latest Student Loan Bailout
Biden's student loan bailouts are one of the most blatant and expensive attempts to buy votes ("graft") in American history. He has now rolled out three separate attempts to dump hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans onto taxpayers.
The courts keep ruling no and Biden keeps ignoring them. The cost of these "forgiveness" plans ranges from $400 to $550 billion – but we suspect those are both lowball estimates because colleges can endlessly raise tuition under this plan and make taxpayers pick up the tab.
Two Obama-appointed federal district court judges adopted injunctions yesterday enjoining the halving of payments from 10% of income to 5%, and prohibiting any more loans from being discharged while litigation moves forward.
Good news, except that the Biden Education Department has already proposed yet another wholesale student loan discharge under the Higher Education Act.
When it comes to spending other people's money to buy votes, these Biden people just won't stop.
