Bernie Marcus – one of America’s all-time entrepreneurial icons and cofounder of Home Depot has died. He was brilliant, patriotic, kind, and joyful. He was also an incredibly generous and impactful philanthropist. Among hundreds of other educational and charitable endeavors, he was a supporter of Unleash Prosperity from the very start.
Rest in peace.
1) If Only Journalists Voted It Would Be a Landslide
We don't know who will win tonight, but we sure know who the media is rooting for.
2) Over Last Year, 370,000 Fewer Working Americans
That's a deeply disturbing headline you're not going to see just about anywhere else.
We reported on Friday that the latest jobs report showed no gains in private jobs in the survey of business hiring. But the smaller survey of households was much worse. It counted 368,000 fewer Americans working.
A year ago there were 370,000 more people working than today. Is this an economy on the mend?
There are two explanations for this troubling trend. One is that business hiring is slowing down – as we reported last week. The other is that baby boomers are retiring at a pace of thousands each day, and there aren't enough young people entering the workforce to replace them.
The media falsely reported that the bad jobs report on Friday was entirely due to storms and strikes. Wrong. People are still counted as employed in the household survey even if they didn't work due to a temporary stoppage, like a strike or a weather event.
America needs more jobs AND more workers, and Biden's policies are subtracting both.
Lina Khan, the radical chair of the Federal Trade Commission, saw her term expire last month, but will stay on until a new president makes an appointment.
The House Oversight Committee has issued a searing 56-page report on her tenure.
Among the highlights of the Oversight Committee Report:
Chair Lina Khan has betrayed the Commission's independent mission by abusing her authority, trampling on the due process rights of regulated parties, upending the rule of law, and violating ethics standards.
The FTC has turned on American companies and turned to European authorities to achieve the Commission's ends.
Chair Khan has orchestrated wholesale changes in FTC rulemaking practices and policies--enabling extreme Commission overreach at the expense of consumers, regulated businesses, and the public in general.
Chair Khan has sidelined career FTC staff, triggered an exodus of critical employees, and overseen a collapse of morale at the agency. An official survey that as recently as 2020 put the FTC as second on the list of "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government," saw it drop to 22nd place under her leadership.
4) Biden's Green Energy Subsidies Are Making China Great Again
The left-wing site Politico was surprisingly honest with this headline:
Biden is desperately trying to lure solar panel production from China to the United States with lavish subsidies. But the companies that are taking the cash and hanging a shingle are... Chinese.
When Biden and congressional Democrats passed the IRA, they hoped it would unleash a "Made-in-America" clean energy revolution. The law lavishes subsidies on companies to build factories that make solar components, in an effort to revitalize the country's manufacturing base and wrest control of clean energy supply chains away from China.
Only now, Chinese companies are coming to America.
Trina could net almost $1.8 billion in American tax subsidies over the next seven years if it gets the Texas factory fully running by the beginning of 2025, according to analysts at the consultancy BloombergNEF.
It is hardly alone. Eight companies linked to China have spent more than $1.2 billion to build 23.6 gigawatts of module capacity since the IRA passed, according to interviews with manufacturers and a review of Energy Department figures by POLITICO's E&E News. About 14.5 gigawatts is already online, accounting for nearly a third of U.S. panel-making capacity. A further 7 gigawatts is under construction.
What in the world are we doing? Making China Great Again?
5) Victor Davis Hanson's Warning To Us About Democracy
Today is Election Day. We thought it appropriate to bring you thoughts on the current crisis in our democracy from Victor Davis Hanson, a noted classics scholar and a member of our Unleash Prosperity board of economic advisors:
Writing in the New Criterion magazine, Hanson warns:
"America may be still a constitutional republic in name, but recently it has operated more as an unchecked Athenian-style democracy."
Hanson believes that the greatest threat to our system "may well be the efforts of Washington bureaucrats and agencies to destroy some 236 years of constitutional checks and balances and the political customs that have evolved along with them. Historically, one way that Athenian demagogues framed their efforts to obtain absolute power was to frighten the populace into thinking that a would-be dictator was on the horizon unless the people were properly empowered through ostracism and the popular courts to neuter him."
