1) Biden Cabinet Member in a Mad Dash To Spend and Borrow Billions as Fast as She Can
We find this headline about Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's mad dash to spend every last dollar she can get her hands on before she's booted out of office in January infuriating:
They're so eager to shovel money out to their cronies that they are even working on a weekend - something that is unheard of in government!
Raimondo told Politico: "I'd like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave." She's referring to the $50 billion corporate welfare provisions for the microchip industry tucked inside Biden's budget-busting bills.
Has anyone informed Ms. Raimondo that the federal government is $36.5 trillion in debt? She reminds us of the kind of person who takes the bars of soap and shampoo bottles from her hotel rooms when she checks out.
We hope the first thing Elon Musk does to reduce waste in Washington is claw back as much of this money as he can.
For some good news: Biden's big ticket proposed bank regs - including the Fed's steep increase in capital requirements - are on ice until next year when the Trump administration can kill them permanently. We've pointed out at Unleash Prosperity that these rules will hamper lending, but will do nothing to ensure the safety and the soundness of the banking system.
Unfortunately, Fed Vice Chair Michael Barr, a big advocate of these rules, is telling Congress: "As Chair Powell said, we serve fixed terms of office, and I intend to serve my fixed term of office."
As we pointed out earlier this week: Trump has the absolute statutory and constitutional power to designate his own chairman and vice chairman of the Fed and should do so immediately. He also has a very good constitutional argument that he can fire Fed members. If HE can't, then who can?
Here's one of the final readings on the U.S. economy under Biden. Both credit card debt and delinquencies rose in 2024. You can see that the credit card debt started to surge after Biden came into office and has stayed elevated ever since.
The explanation here is pretty straightforward: incomes for about half of Americans fell behind the rate of inflation and so to keep up their normal buying habits, middle and low-income families had to borrow more.
Yet, the left's false narrative is that Biden is leaving behind a healthy economy. Uh-huh.
4) Have Californians FINALLY Been Mugged (Literally and Figuratively) By Reality
It only took two weeks but most (not all) of the election returns are in from the Golden State. We have mostly good news to report.
Voters rejected a measure that would have raised the state's minimum wage from $16 an hour to $18. It’s the first time a minimum wage increase has lost at the ballot box in any state since 1996. Maybe the voters saw the catastrophe of the fast food industry leaving the state because of high minimum wage laws there.
Exit polls this month found voters were worried about businesses raising prices to offset higher labor costs. Voters also feared California’s stubbornly high unemployment rate would get worse. In the last two years, 96.5% of all new jobs created in California have been government jobs.
Crime is out of control because of lax penalties and pro-criminal prosecutors. Statewide, 69% of voters approved Proposition 36, which imposes harsher penalties for repeat shoplifters and large-scale drug dealers.
In Los Angeles, notorious progressive prosecutor George Gascón lost by 20 points to a tough-on-crime challenger who delivered a message to police in his victory speech: “Your hands aren’t tied anymore.” In Alameda County, centered on Oakland and Berkeley, a prosecutor installed with the support of George Soros lost a recall effort in a landslide.
Now to keep the wealthy from sprinting out of California, what's needed next is a ballot initiative to impose a 5% flat income tax as our co-founder Arthur Laffer has urged for years. The current top rate is nearly 14%, making California virtually the highest tax jurisdiction on the globe.
Just In case you're doubtful about whether Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be able to find massive waste and bureaucracy in the federal government, get a load of this organizational chart for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS).
The Soviet Union couldn't have come up with a bigger and more incomprehensible bureaucracy than this.
Good luck to Dr. Oz on taming this bureaucracy. He may need to call in Elon and Vivek – with chainsaws.
Here's what's scary. This is just page one of the CMS org chart that goes on for another 79 pages:
