1) How About Announcing the World's Largest-Ever Garage Sale?
Here's an idea for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy - the co-chairs of DOGE: sell unused or underused assets to the highest bidder.
This could raise trillions of dollars and would transfer assets to higher values-added uses - which will raise additional tax revenues in the future.
The chart below (based on 2023 and calculated by the Federal Reserve) estimates that federal assets -not including land and minerals - have a market value of more than $8 trillion. Sell buildings, loan notes, furniture, unused land, computers, slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, vehicles, planes, and the like. This would raise tens of billions of dollars overnight.
Throw in the mineral and energy resources and you have an additional $50 trillion or so.
Last week, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers issued a dire warning that Trump tariffs are "more inflationary by far than what Biden did in 2021."
We are NOT fans of tariffs because protectionist policies typically make countries poorer.
But the evidence that tariffs are inflationary is spotty at best.
Everyone knows that the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariffs in 1930 plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression - as chronicled in the Jude Wanniski classic book "The Way the World Works."
But they did NOT cause inflation. Investment expert Michael Lebowitz puts those inflation claims to the test and shows that prices actually FELL after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed - as this chart shows:
Monetary expert Judy Shelton - who should be the next chair of the Federal Reserve - tells us: "the simplistic assessments that 'tariffs cause inflation' (including from Janet Yellen) are laughably static with no regard for consumer behavior and substitution patterns."
Trump raised tariffs in his first term, but where was the inflation? There wasn't any.
The graph below shows that US import prices fell from 2018 until the price surge due to the pandemic in late 2020.
Milton Friedman said it best: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Anti-growth policies like taxes and tariffs make nations poorer, but they are only inflationary if the Fed expands the money supply at the same time the economy stalls out. That's what happened in 2021 and 2022, and a major reason the Left lost this year.
3) Newsom Is Going Over the Cliff In An Electric Vehicle
California is facing a multi-billion dollar deficit, but Governor Gavin Newsom says he will use state money to substitute for a $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit that Donald Trump vows to kill.
"We will intervene," he vows. "Doubling down on our commitment to clean air and green jobs in California."
So let's do the math here. There are roughly 1.8 million cars sold each year in California. Let's say half of them are EVs - as new car buyers take advantage of the subsidies. This means California's budget would swell by another $5 billion - which could double the state's existing annual deficit.
And to top it off - Newsom is planning to exclude Tesla from his new subsidies, for no apparent reason, except that Elon Musk supports President Trump.
4) Trump Approval Rating Surges and Biden's Hits Rock Bottom
Donald Trump has some thanks to give based on two polls conducted since his election on November 5.
An Emerson College poll gives him a 54% favorable rating, the highest in the eight years Emerson has polled him. Some 59% of white voters view him favorably, along with 53% of Hispanic and 28% of black voters.
Outgoing President Biden has a 36% approval rating, his lowest ever in the Emerson poll.
A CBS News/YouGov survey also gives Trump's handling of the transition period high marks with 59% approving. A surprising one out of seven Democrats say they are "excited" or "optimistic" about what Trump will do as president.
Presidential approval ratings float up and down. But it's important that Biden leaves office unpopular and largely discredited. His economic, fiscal, energy, and inflation policies did great damage to our country. His one contribution that will hopefully be recorded in the history books is that he single-handedly forever discredited Modern Monetary Theory.
Last night President Trump made it official that our friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is his nominee to run the National Institutes of Health. We wrote a paeon to Jay when this possibility was first reported, and noted we were impressed by his incredible ability to remain cheerful and respectful even while subject to vicious smears and even outright censorship.
Perhaps the greatest justice in this appointment is that when Dr. Jay is confirmed by the Senate, the man disparaged by Francis Collins as a "fringe epidemiologist" who needed a "devastating takedown" (for proposing focused protection of the vulnerable) will replace Francis Collins atop the NIH.
