July 31, 2020
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Will the virus ever allow the U.S. economy to fully reopen again?
The U.S. economy contracted a record-setting, inflation-adjusted,
annualized 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 as tens of millions of
Americans waited out the Chinese coronavirus in their homes, not venturing out
much except for work and needed supplies, according to the latest data from the
Bureau of Economic Analysis. The second quarter comprises of April, May and
June, when 25 million jobs were lost by April and then 8.8 million came back in
May and June as states slowly began reopening. It was by far the worst quarter
in American history including the Great Depression, and gives you an idea of
what a catastrophe the pandemic has been to the U.S. economy. And that’s with
the $3.3 trillion of deficit-spending Congress has pumped into the economy
since the beginning of the year — and counting as Congress considers phase four
legislation — to cover payroll protection for small businesses, expanded
unemployment benefits, checks to every household, plus payments to critical
industries, larger businesses and state and local governments. When you ignore
what the government did via the massive spending — government spending is
calculated as a part of GDP — the hit to the private sector and the American
people came in at a whopping 39.1 percent. Consider that. Closing the economy
for a few months almost cut the private sector in half.
Cartoon: Mayors Gone Wild
Democrat mayors like the riots.
Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s suburban outreach exposes their racism not his
President Trump’s recent repeal of the Obama-Biden era Housing and Urban
Development quota and promise to keep suburban crime under control is drawing a
flurry of outrage from the mainstream media. The Guardian warned Trump is
stoking “racial fears with an appeal to white suburban voters”, the New York
Times accused Trump of, “playing on racist fears of terrorized suburbs to court
white voters”, and MSNBC determined Trump is locked in a “racist pitch for the
suburbs.” Ironically, the way the mainstream media insists on covering Trump’s
appeal to suburban voters rests on flawed assumptions that are themselves
steeped in racism. Despite what the mainstream media would like voters to
believe, President Trump’s removal of forced federal housing quotas and focus
on crime reduction are not exclusively of interest to white Americans. First,
let’s revisit the HUD rule in question that President Trump is taking so much
flack for rolling back. The HUD rule’s intent is not to ban discrimination in
the suburbs, but to penalize communities for failing to meet federal race
quotas.
Meese, DeMint, Wolf, Poindexter lead letter urging ending China investment of retirement funds
A group letter urging divestment of private pensions from Chinese
state-owned companies was sent to U.S. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia today with
signators headlined by former Attorney General Ed Meese, former U.S. Senator
Jim DeMint, former Congressman Frank Wolf, former Reagan National Security
Advisor Vice Admiral John Poindexter, retired Lt. General Steven Kwast and more
than 230 others. “The investment of private retirement funds into Chinese
companies that do not comply with basic transparency standards, and in many cases
rely upon child- and slave-labor, is incompatible with fundamental American
values and must be discontinued,” the letter states. The letter urges Secretary
Scalia to amend a proposed Financial Factors in Selecting Plan Investments rule
to explicitly disallow any private retirement funds from investing in
non-transparent assets which are not subject to the rigorous independent
auditing requirements faced by U.S. public companies.
Will the virus ever allow the U.S. economy to fully reopen again?
By Robert Romano
The U.S. economy contracted a record-setting, inflation-adjusted, annualized 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis as tens of millions of Americans waited out the Chinese coronavirus in their homes, not venturing out much except for work and needed supplies.
The second quarter comprises of April, May and June, when in Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey 25 million jobs were lost by April and then 8.8 million came back in May and June as states slowly began reopening.
It was by far the worst quarter in American history including the Great Depression, and gives you an idea of what a catastrophe the pandemic has been to the U.S. economy.
And that’s with the $3.3 trillion of deficit-spending Congress has pumped into the economy since the beginning of the year — and counting as Congress considers phase four legislation — to cover payroll protection for small businesses, expanded unemployment benefits, checks to every household, plus payments to critical industries, larger businesses and state and local governments.
When you ignore what the government did via the massive spending — government spending is calculated as a part of GDP — the hit to the private sector and the American people came in at a whopping 39.1 percent.
Consider that. Closing the economy for a few months cut the private sector almost in half.
Personal consumption was down 34.6 percent. That includes an 11.3 percent drop in goods consumption and a 43.5 percent drop in services consumption.
Gross private domestic investment was down 49.0 percent.
That was offset by a 17 percent increase in federal government consumption expenditures.
All of that is the equivalent of an asteroid hitting the economy.
Now, some good news. The summertime spike in new daily COVID-19 cases appears to have stabilized nationwide, including in Texas, Florida, Arizona and California, which had seen a wave of new cases as those states began reopening before changing course and making adjustments to reopening strategies.
Additionally, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that, even with states still continuing reopening, daily cases will be dropping through August and September, until the cold and flu season begins again in the fall.
That gives the American people something of a reprieve for the rest of summer.
But there’s bad news too. The pace of economic recovery has appeared to slow down in recent weeks amid further volatility in labor markets, where on a continuing basis those on continuing unemployment claims from the Department of Labor has stabilized at about 17 million Americans the past four weeks after dropping significantly from its high-water mark of 22.8 million on May 9.
The states that contributed the most to continued claims the week of July 18 were California, which saw unemployment rise 464,000, and Texas, which saw it rise 111,000, which have significantly slowed down the national pace of reopening. Pennsylvania added 85,000 and Michigan added 54,000.
But because those job losses are coming later in the month, they may not be accounted for in the July monthly report that comes out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics next week.
The clear predictor here is the number of daily new cases per state, and state actions to shut down their economies again. Meaning, as the virus abates the rest of the summer somewhat, you might expect a bit more reopening, and the third quarter should show a significant bounce back economically.
But once we head into September, October and November with the cold and flu season, as cases rise again, so too will the job losses likely begin mounting again. Everything could begin shutting down again.
That is why Americans, in order to safely return to work, and for children to safely return to schools, we need confidence. If it’s not a vaccine, then we’ll be needing treatments and cures — if not hydroxychloroquine that the President has touted, then something else — to supplement Americans’ immune systems as a stopgap.
But so far the federal government is not recommending anything be taken preventively. According to the Food and Drug Administration website, “there are no proven treatments for COVID-19 and no vaccine.”
Here’s the rub. Everyone’s sitting around waiting for a safe and effective vaccine as a predicate for reopening. The phase three clinical trials for the Moderna vaccine, mRNA-1273, began on July 27. A July 28 New England Journal of Medicine study found that in non-human primates, “mRNA-1273 induced robust SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing activity, rapid protection in the upper and lower airways, and no pathologic changes in the lung.” So that could be good.
But what if the vaccine doesn’t work for humans? After all, there’s never been an effective vaccine for a coronavirus in human history, including SARS.
The longer we remain without a stopgap, the less confidence the American people will have, and likely the worse the economy will do going forward, especially as we head into the cold and flu seasons. Looking back at the ten recessions that have occurred since 1948, it took on average 16 months after reaching a labor market bottom to recover.
But in the Great Recession, which from peak employment in Nov. 2007 to the bottom in Dec. 2009, saw 8.3 million jobs lost and the U.S. economy did not get them back until in Sept. 2014. It took almost five years just to get back the jobs lost. In the current case, up to 25 million jobs have been lost when the labor market bottomed in April, and about 8 million or so have been recovered. How quickly will we recover this time?
If we’re still having this conversation about the lack of effective vaccines and treatments in December and in 2021, we’ll have a choice to make. Either, we take our chances knowing there is nothing that can be done to stop the virus short of dramatic upheaval to our way of life, devastating school closures and leaving everything shut down, with millions of jobs lost, or the economy — and our country — may never recover.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: http://dailytorch.com/2020/07/will-the-virus-ever-allow-the-u-s-economy-to-fully-reopen-again/
Cartoon: Mayors Gone Wild
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
Mainstream Media Coverage of Trump’s Suburban Outreach Exposes Their Racism Not His
By Manzanita Miller
President Trump’s recent repeal of the Obama-Biden era Housing and Urban Development quota and promise to keep suburban crime under control is drawing a flurry of outrage from the mainstream media. The Guardian warned Trump is stoking “racial fears with an appeal to white suburban voters”, the New York Times accused Trump of, “playing on racist fears of terrorized suburbs to court white voters”, and MSNBC determined Trump is locked in a “racist pitch for the suburbs.”
Ironically, the way the mainstream media insists on covering Trump’s appeal to suburban voters rests on flawed assumptions that are themselves steeped in racism. Despite what the mainstream media would like voters to believe, President Trump’s removal of forced federal housing quotas and focus on crime reduction are not exclusively of interest to white Americans. First, let’s revisit the HUD rule in question that President Trump is taking so much flack for rolling back. The HUD rule’s intent is not to ban discrimination in the suburbs, but to penalize communities for failing to meet federal race quotas.
Under the rule, the federal government is empowered to penalize local communities and towns for failing to meet racial quotas, even when there is no proof of segregation. Because the rule defines segregation as simply a “high concentration of persons of a particular race” or “religion” – see 78 Fed. Reg. 43709, 43730 – it makes the unfounded assumption that clustered communities are overtly discriminatory. Not only does the rule fail to recognize that communities form and morph over time based on the choices of individuals, but it is unconstitutional.
Hans Bader, a former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pointed out in 2015 when team Obama-Biden forced through the changes, that concentration of a group itself is not proof of discrimination. He also noted that the new HUD interpretation undermines the 1964 Civil Rights Act and ignores the Supreme Court ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013) that states “racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
Second, as many critics of Trump’s recent attention to the suburbs have pointed out, the suburbs are diversifying. More Black and Hispanic middle-class families are moving into suburban areas as upward mobility allows them to do so. It is within the realm of reason that at least some of these Black and Hispanics suburbanites might, conceivably, have an interest in crime reduction in their communities. The assumption that discussions on lowering crime are somehow racist is not only absurd but racist. The reality is that lowering crime is extremely important to minorities. The Pew Research Center found that Black Americans express more concern about crime, with three-quarters of Blacks compared to 46% of whites stating violent crime is a very big problem. Pew also found that Black Americans are more likely to see crime as a serious problem in their own communities, as opposed to broadly. In a Pew survey from 2018 survey, 38% of Black Americans versus vs. 17% of whites said crime is an issue locally.
What’s more, Market Research Foundation pointed out last month that Trump’s tough-on-crime stance in the wake of this spring’s riots and looting actually raised his approval rating with Hispanic and Black Americans. YouGov polling from May before the chaos ensued showed President Trump’s approval rating at 39% among Hispanics, and 12% among Blacks. Later polling taken as the riots escalated showed his approval rating with Hispanics rose to 42% and with African Americans rose to 18%.
The idea that an anti-crime message in the diversifying suburbs is racist is as absurd at it is unsettling. Trump is making a play for the suburbs with an anti-crime pitch, and rolling back an unconstitutional Obama-Biden era law that strips local communities of their rights. The relentless spin-masters in the mainstream media are exposing their own covert racism when claiming President Trump’s anti-crime message to the suburbs is somehow racist. This may come as a surprise to them, but Hispanic and Black Americans living in suburban areas may also take an interest in lower crime and local empowerment.
Manzanita Miller is an associate analyst with the Market Research Foundation.
To view online: https://marketresearchfoundation.org/2020/07/30/mainstream-media-coverage-of-trumps-suburban-outreach-exposes-their-racism-not-his/
Meese, DeMint, Wolf, Poindexter lead letter urging ending China investment of retirement funds
July 30, 2020, Fairfax, Va.—A group letter urging divestment of private pensions from Chinese state-owned companies was sent to U.S. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia today with signators headlined by former Attorney General Ed Meese, former U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, former Congressman Frank Wolf, former Reagan National Security Advisor Vice Admiral John Poindexter, retired Lt. General Steven Kwast and more than 230 others.
“The investment of private retirement funds into Chinese companies that do not comply with basic transparency standards, and in many cases rely upon child- and slave-labor, is incompatible with fundamental American values and must be discontinued,” the letter states.
The diverse group includes religious leaders like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association to business leaders like Capital Management CEO and President Keith Sirois and USA Radio Network CEO Fred Weinberg as well as China critics Dr. Xiaoxu Sean Lin, the Executive Director of the Global Alliance Against Communist Propaganda and Dr. Jianli Yang, founder of Citizen Power Initiatives for China.
The letter urges Secretary Scalia to amend a proposed Financial Factors in Selecting Plan Investments rule to explicitly disallow any private retirement funds from investing in non-transparent assets which are not subject to the rigorous independent auditing requirements faced by U.S. public companies.
Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government and a former Labor Transition team member for President Trump, previously sent another letter directly to Secretary Scalia on July 9 arguing for ending private retirement investments in China writing:
“I want to assure you that I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment and decision on excluding risky Chinese assets from the federal employees 401(K) Thrift Savings Plan. Your statement that stopping the inclusion of Chinese assets was necessary because it, ‘would place millions of federal employees, retirees, and service-members in the untenable position of choosing between forgoing any investment in international equities or placing billions of dollars in retirement savings in risky companies that pose a threat to U.S. national security’ is exactly on point.
“The obvious question is if these assets are too risky for inclusion in the federal TSP, why would they be allowed to be included in private 401(K) investments where the same argument directly applies? The answer is that they are not, and under ERISA it is the Labor Department’s job to protect private sector retirement specific investments or pensions from choices that are unsuitably risky.”
The letter itself points to the repugnant practice of making unwitting private U.S. retirees investors in Chinese companies which use child- and slave-labor, “effectively making individual 401(k) owners or pensioners parties to and profiteers from the exploitation of the victims of such cruel abuse.”
The comment period for the Labor Department regulation ends today, and Americans for Limited Government implores that it reflect the fiduciary concerns about the security of investments in Chinese assets by disallowing them under the provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2020/07/meese-demint-wolf-poindexter-lead-letter-urging-ending-china-investment-of-retirement-funds/
