If you haven’t noticed, the value of the dollar is soaring against almost every competing currency – including the yen, the euro, the franc, and the pound. We view this as a mostly positive development. The strengthening of the dollar lowers the price of imports and should help bring down inflation over time.
Why is it happening? Arthur Laffer explains that the U.S. is the “tallest midget right now,” meaning that Europe, Japan, and Britain are in worse shape than we are. Also, Fed tightening – and its signaling more tightening – means a stronger dollar.
Another factor, alas, is the whole world is ruled by a confederacy of dunces, who are peddling anti-free market/income redistribution/green policies. These are all wealth-destruction machines. This is causing global capital flows to high-tail it toward a safe haven – and that’s still the dollar.
What started as a $6 trillion Build Back Better grab bag of every crackpot left-wing idea has shrunken dramatically. The tax hikes are out. The Green New Deal spending is gone. The government takeover of nursery schools is off the table as is welfare for illegal immigrants, as well as unions and trial lawyers.
One doleful House Democrat put it this way:
So what's left? A two-year extension of supersized Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies paid for by raiding Medicare prescription drug spending via price controls.
National Review explains:
If Manchin ever wanted to get serious about fixing the problems with Obamacare, as he previously claimed he did, the answer would be to work on ways to remove regulations so that individuals could find affordable options more tailored to their individual health-care needs. Instead, he is supporting patching over its underlying problems by throwing more money at the program when inflation is at a 40-year high. In the process, by offering this deal, he is relying on the sort of budget gimmickry he previously denounced and embracing innovation-killing federal price controls.
Democrats are now left with drug price controls (which delay the race for the cure for killer diseases) and a raid on Medicare to bail out Obamacare’s financial losses. The last time they tried that ploy was in 2010 and Democrats got wiped out in the election in that November’s elections.
In another Manchin blow to Biden's big government socialism agenda, the West Virginia senator says he’s skeptical of America joining a global tax cartel with a minimum tax rate of 15% on corporations.
Since no Republicans in the Senate support this anti-America policy, Manchin holds de facto veto power. We agree entirely with his reasoning:
“The rest of the countries won’t follow (it) and we’ll put all of our international companies in jeopardy, which harms the American economy. So we took that off the table,” he says. Hold that thought, Senator. This is just a sneaky backdoor way for Europeans and other foreign countries to raise taxes on American tech companies like Amazon, Google, Airbnb, Qualcomm, and others.
Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, says the real problem the White House has isn’t Manchin but the treaty itself: “Congress will not ratify an O.E.C.D. deal that cedes our constitutional authority to set tax rules or fails to protect key U.S. tax incentives.” This is an assault on American sovereignty and a move toward global government.
What we’re seeing in front of us right now is deglobalization. You’re going to see nation-states look internally and make sure they have the ability to support themselves.
Take Germany for example. Germany’s strategy up to this point was to outsource their military to the US, their financial management to the EU, their energy supply to Russia, and their end market to China. This was the complete globalization of an economy. You can see at this point, I think they’re in extreme trouble.
