The left obsesses about income inequality. We don't. We want everyone to be better off. Period. But guess who made the poor and middle class worse off and the rich better off? Biden.
A new study by Economist Zach Mazlish of the University of Oxford finds that households suffered a 1.7% median annualized decline in post-tax real income during Biden's term, far more negative than previously reported. But under Trump real median income surged by 2.1% per year.
According to Mazlish: "Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden's term. In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020."
The Bloomberg editors have some digs at Trump, but also this recognition of reality:
Under President Joe Biden, federal agencies have issued new rules at a historic pace. These proposals were presumably well-intentioned, and some were worthy of support, but their sheer volume -- 284 economically significant rules through August -- has imposed a serious burden and spurred fed-up businesses to bring a slew of lawsuits, many of them successful. (Voters share the outrage: There's a reason the death of an Instagram-famous squirrel at the hands of state regulators became a cause célèbre in the campaign's final days.)...
Disclosures should be clear and fraud should be punished. With those guardrails intact, investors should be free to make their own choices and companies free to innovate. By and large, regulators needn't insert themselves into negotiations between sophisticated investors...
Dialing back federal regulation after a period of overzealous meddling isn't the worst idea in the world.
Semafor, a Beltway establishment website, has reported that media outlets "spent months publishing and airing neutral to overwhelmingly negative news coverage of (Trump)... a majority of American voters largely ignored the implicit and explicit warnings of that coverage – if they saw it at all – and voted Trump into office."
Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of the news website Axios, was even more blunt:
"The verdict is not debatable: Half the country thinks traditional media is biased and often useless," he said.
VandeHei sees Elon Musk as a replacement voice for conventional and heavily biased media: "Elon Musk is now arguably the most powerful civilian in the history of the country...His real power comes from X. People thought he was an idiot when he bought X because it cost a lot of money. He.. has the most powerful platform on the right, and politics is downstream from information, and there's just a whole new information ecosystem out there."
4) New Property Tax Revolt Recreates Spirit of Prop 13
We predicted it on these pages many months ago. The sleeper issue of 2024 was citizen rage over rising property taxes. We may have been right. Voters in eight states passed property tax cuts last week.
These were red and blue states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, Virginia, and Wyoming. Colorado's legislature also agreed to cut property taxes as part of a deal to withdraw two more stringent cuts.
The famous 1978 Proposition 13 in California chopped property taxes by 30%. Many states followed in the years that followed.
Property taxes also were a key factor in several candidates' winning. Vermont's leftist Lieutenant Governor went down to defeat in the most pro-Kamala (64%) state in the country. A big reason was that the former Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin endorsed his opponent, John Rodgers, because he supported property tax cuts.
Nationwide, taxes have gone up by 6.9% from 2022 to now – the largest increase in five years.
Look for this issue to further heat up in other states next year as voters demand greater accountability for the taxes they pay.
