Since Biden is in the game of bailing out loans to his voters and financial supporters, we predict the next multi-billion-dollar federal bailout will be state unemployment insurance funds. Our CTUP ace economic researcher, E.J. Antoni (also of the Heritage Foundation) notes that six states have outstanding balances with the Treasury’s UI trust fund.
Guess what. Every one of them is a deep blue state. And everyone provided many months of extra Covid unemployment benefits last year.
California still owes over $17 billion to the Treasury and is still borrowing each month, although it is also sporadically making repayments. It is amazing that even with unemployment rates so low even in these blue states, four of them still borrowed from the Treasury this month to pay UI claims.
So the red states paid back their loans, the big blue states haven’t. What to do? Does any of this sound familiar?
Some of your CTUP editors had on our summer reading list the Walter Isaacson Biography of Benjamin Franklin. One can't read it and not come away believing that Franklin was one of the greatest of our Founding Fathers and that few wiser men have ever lived.
We couldn't help noticing that at a very young age, Franklin wrote a short list that he called his "Plan for Future Conduct" to be successful in life. The first on the list could hardly be more timely today:
"1. it is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe."
3) The Critics Were Wrong – Ending Airplane Mask Mandates Has Been A Success
It was back in April that the Biden's administration's airplane mask mandate was struck down by the courts as illegal.
No US airlines chose to keep the mask mandate in place. The mask mandate crowd yelped in protest. But in the subsequent four months, there have been virtually no documented airplane-linked COVID outbreaks. Better yet, the number of incidents of unruly passengers has quickly plunged back to normal as the chart below shows.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued what amounted to a mea culpa on Friday when she called it “a mistake” when the state closed down schools in favor of remote learning as COVID hit in 2020.
“We’re going to peel back every dynamic and let’s look at not just in the workplace but what happened to women when the decisions were made to have all the kids go home and learn remotely,” Hochul said in a speech to a women’s symposium in Albany. “Wow. Wow, what a mistake that was. What a mistake that was.”
“Women couldn’t go to their jobs. They lost their jobs. One child in a classroom tests positive, the whole class goes home for a week and a half. It was chaos, nothing short of chaos, and it just seems to have not ended.”
It’s nice she is finally acknowledging what everyone knows to be true about the disaster of school closures, but she conveniently neglects to mention how it all happened.
The school lockdowns she now decries were ordered under the…Cuomo-Hochul administration.
Cuomo ordered schools shut down in March, 2020 and they stayed closed for many months at the behest of the teacher's unions. We don’t recall Hochul speaking up then against this horrid policy. She and Cuomo ignored all of the science which confirmed that school lockdowns were unnecessary and harmful.
We mentioned last week that the Brits are looking at 80% increases in electric utility bills this fall because of their unworkable green energy policies. The Sun newspaper In the UK just published what this means for the cost of using common household appliances - from hairdryers to TVs to the stove to washers and dryers.
Maybe all this pain is all part of the plan. Perhaps the left just wants to abolish electricity in order to save the planet. See the chart below -- and note that the pound and the dollar are closer to parity right now.
And remember thanks to Biden, America is racing right behind Britain and Germany back to the economic Stone Ages.
