Aug 26, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Woke Retailers Seek Congressional Smash and Grab on your Credit Card
By Rick Manning
Woke retailers like Home Depot, Kroger, and Walmart are asking Congress to pass their own special smash and grab worth billions of dollars by mandating changes to how credit cards are processed.
Joining forces with far-left Democratic Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, retailers are seeking changes in federal law threatening rewards programs that many consumers use to take some of the sting off of the high cost of everything from food and gas to furniture and travel.
All with the stale promise that they will return some of their federal government mandated booty to consumers. Yeah, right.
The real question for Republican lawmakers is why would they even consider mandating changes to the law to benefit retailers who have firmly financially attached themselves to the very Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police Marxist movement that advocated defunding the police and not prosecuting property crimes. The very changes which have fueled the crime wave engulfing many of our nation’s largest cities.
Changing law to put billions more into the pockets of these retailers so they can continue to spend that money supporting the fundamental transformation that is being crammed down America’s throats is not just stupid, it is suicidal.
Collectively, the trade group representing large retailers, the Retail Industry Leaders Association supported the mini-green new deal legislation that masqueraded as the Inflation Reduction Act writing, “The deal struck to combat climate change strikes the right balance of goals and incentives to ensure we make measurable strides without hammering private industry with job-killing mandates.”
Note to GOP Senators who voted against the bill, these ‘incentives’ are the very life blood of the left’s attempt to reduce America into an energy dependent corpse ending any hope of the return of domestic energy security at the altar of the false promise of renewables. But for those who now come to GOP Senate offices asking for them to support Dick Durbin’s credit card cash grab, support for the mini-green new deal was par for the course.
But retail giants not only act collectively to spend taxpayer dollars on green incentives to feather their own nests, but also are engaged individually in funding socialist activism under the guise of social justice activism, as well as subjecting their employees to extremist Critical Race Theory training.
Earlier this year, Home Depot was exposed as shaming employees in its Canadian branch to extremist white privilege literature and training even going so far as attacking Christmas celebrations as being something called “Christian privilege.” While Home Depot announced that the training documents were not authorized by corporate headquarters, they both failed to denounce their racist intent and there is no evidence that anyone was held accountable for their branch-wide inclusion as training materials. As the left often says, silence is complicity, and Home Depot’s failure to denounce and fire employees responsible equals acceptance of the content.
Walmart is not only giving $100 million over five years to racial and justice groups as part of their reaction to the George Floyd riots, they have embraced Critical Race Theory training for their employees. Christopher Rufo tweeted, “@Walmart … denounces the United States as a "white supremacy system" and teaches white hourly-wage workers that they are guilty of "white supremacy thinking" and "internalized racial superiority."
The grocery store chain, Kroger has been dubbed, “America’s Wokest Corporation” as they subject employees down to the level of the person who unloads trucks to a toxic combination of cutting edge gender bending indoctrination programs to dedicating $5 million for “diversity, equity and inclusion” whatever that means. Kroger even took away vacation days and increased individual insurance costs for employees who chose not to be vaccinated.
Kroger has also been caught pandering to social justice twitter warriors complaints demanding that drink cozies emblazoned with the messages, “Give me liberty or Give me death” and “Arms Change, Rights Don’t” in reference to the Second Amendment, were being offered in their stores. Both retailers duly bowed to those who hate America and our individual rights by removing the products.
The list of woke corporations is long and getting longer. The question is will Republicans in the Senate join with their misguided colleague Roger Marshall from Kansas in supporting legislation that merely replenishes the dollars they are spending on destroying America.
The saying is, “go woke and go broke” but by attempting to get billions by having Congress tweak the law governing credit cards, the corporate socialists in big retailer think they’ve found a way to fund the left and put a little cash into their pockets on the side.
The Senate GOP needs to just say no, at this obscene credit card smash and grab scheme.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/woke-retailers-seek-congressional-smash-and-grab-on-your-credit-card/
Cartoon: Panderer and Thief
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/cartoon-panderer-and-thief/
National debt will hit $100 trillion by 2036 at current growth rate
By Robert Romano
Since 1980, when the national debt was $907 billion and just 31.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the debt has grown by an average of 9 percent a year, to its current level of more than $30.7 trillion — 124 percent of GDP — according to the latest data by the U.S. Treasury and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The problem is that nominal GDP — that is, before adjusting for inflation — has only grown by a little more than 5.3 percent annually since 1980, such that the debt has been growing much, much faster than the economy ever could, even with inflation.
As a result, if the debt keeps growing at the average, annual 9 percent pace, while the economy continues nominally growing on average at 5.3 percent a year, the national debt will more than triple to $103 trillion by 2036, or a whopping 201 percent debt to GDP ratio.
That would put the U.S. in territory of Japan (236 percent), Venezuela (233 percent) and Sudan (200 percent), the countries with the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world presently. (To be fair, those countries’ debts will likely be even higher come 2036, too.)
In the meantime, talking heads on television and suits in Washington, D.C. comfort themselves — and a disbelieving American public — that the numbers do not matter, or at least, are not as large as you think they are because of the $30.7 trillion, $6.67 trillion is held by the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, or what is known as intergovernmental holdings.
We owe it to ourselves — or so the rationale goes — and so the trust funds’ treasuries shouldn’t be counted against the GDP when tabulating the debt to GDP ratio. By this logic, the publicly held debt at $24.1 trillion today is not 124 percent of GDP, it’s 97 percent of GDP. You know, happy talk.
A recent Congressional Budget Office publication underscores this analysis, stating, “By the end of 2022, federal debt held by the public is projected to equal 98 percent of GDP.” The office carries that estimate forward: “In CBO’s projections, debt as a percentage of GDP begins to rise in 2024, surpasses its historical high in 2031 (when it reaches 107 percent), and continues to climb thereafter, rising to 185 percent of GDP in 2052.”
Now, a lot of that depends on whether the trust remain solvent or not. For example, as of now, the Social Security trustees project that the Old-Age & Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will be depleted of its treasuries by 2034. And Medicare's Hospital Insurance trust fund will run out of money in 2028.
When the trust funds go negative, that will mean instead of cashing in treasuries in order to pay out Social Security and Medicare benefits, the money will simply be taken from the Treasury’s general fund, thereby initiating treasuries auctions and adding that money to the publicly held debt in the end anyway.
For that reason alone, Americans for Limited Government has counted the intergovernmental holdings towards the debt to GDP ratio for more than a decade. We believe total debt is what ultimately matters, under the assumption that Congress will likely not vote to decrease Social Security and Medicare benefits even when — or especially when — the trust funds run out of treasuries.
Anyone realistically considering the alternative scenario, that Congress and a sitting president would actually repudiate and cut promised entitlement benefits, should look no further than Dan Rostenkowski being chased by little old ladies from a townhall meeting after proposing increasing taxes to pay for catastrophic health coverage under Medicare in 1989.
Such a plan might not be politically sustainable, and so the more likely outcome is Congress will simply allow benefits to continue to be paid out from the general fund.
In 2021 alone, entitlement or so-called mandatory spending — that is, spending that occurs because outlays are mandated by law rather than being voted upon annually by Congress via appropriations like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, interest on the debt, etc. — accounted for $5.1 trillion out of $6.8 trillion of spending, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. That’s more than 75 percent of federal spending, a large jump from its usual levels of about two-thirds of spending or so.
Fortunately, with Covid spending coming to an end, so too are the benefits that were handed out during the Covid recession, including the one-time checks to families. Now, OMB projects mandatory spending will decrease to $4.1 trillion this year. We’ll see how that holds up after the massive green subsidies and other tax expenditures in President Joe Biden’s budget reconciliation bill that will spend $300 billion over 10 years.
Even before Covid in 2020 — where the government borrowed and printed more than $6 trillion to combat the pandemic and keep the economy afloat amid the lockdowns — in 2019, this particular metric of when the debt might hit $100 trillion was already at 2037. Back then the average annual growth rate of the debt was about 8 percent.
The reason the debt keeps exploding like this is primarily due to recessions, especially since the inflation of the 1970s, when simultaneously, revenues slow down because of the economic contraction and the federal government counter cyclically spends more moneys. Double digit increases the growth rate of the debt occur in the mid-1970s, the first half of the 1980s, the early 1990s, during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and during the Covid recession of 2020 and in 2021.
In other words, even though the debt does not growth at 8 or 9 percent every year, the ALG analysis anticipates recessions will ultimately occur on a cyclical basis, even if government budget offices do not. And when they’re particularly severe, and as soon as the unemployment rate starts rising, even as mandatory spending starts picking up again all by itself, you can bet that Congress will be looking for yet another stimulus as surely as sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day.
What it all leads to is anyone’s guess. As the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, U.S. dollar denominated assets like treasuries are in high demand, particularly in recessions when equities sink, which usually keeps interest rates low. Even today, because of high demand for treasuries, the 10-year treasuries interest rate sits at a three-year high of about 3 percent, well below the 8.5 percent consumer inflation rate.
If we have a shallow recession now, inflation might take off again real quick, running the risk of the economy rapidly overheating again.
But there are other intervening factors. Ultimately, much will depend on the verdict the American people render in November. If Democrats can break the midterm jinx, expect a lot more spending and debt. Or if Republicans, say, take back the House in November, and there is mixed government, expect spending to be more subdued because the parties could not agree on the nation’s spending priorities, similar to how budget sequestration tamed discretionary spending in the Obama years after Republicans retook the House in 2010.
Either way, once recessions are factored in, even temporary bouts of fiscal austerity appear unlikely to turn back the overwhelming tide of debt that’s headed our way as the rest of the Baby Boomer retire, a sea of red ink as far the eye can see.
In fact, the only solution ever devised by governments (besides raising taxes to obscene levels) is to tacitly default on those obligations is inflation, thereby reducing the cost of the past obligations, the so-called hidden tax. So, expect more inflation, I’d say. Either way, you’ll pay for it.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/national-debt-will-hit-100-trillion-by-2036-at-current-growth-rate/