Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #646
10/28/2022, 10/29/2022, 10/30/2022
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1) Why You Can’t Trust The Media – Especially Not The Rolling Stone
CTUP co-founder Steve Moore penned a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about a fact-free and possibly defamatory hit piece against him published in Rolling Stone. The magazine implied that Moore is a “deadbeat” because he had not paid his federal income taxes owed in 2014. It was blatantly false and even when the Rolling Stone editors were caught red-handed in their lie – see the refund check from the IRS showing Moore’s OVER-payment of taxes for that year – they refused to retract the false story.
The media whines about why a record few Americans trust anything they say. This is a useful case study of why the media commands so little respect: they don’t let the truth interfere with a good story.
2) Central Banks Around The World Are Fueling Global Inflation
Joe Biden keeps saying that our 8 to 9 percent inflation. Isn’t his fault because runaway prices are a “global phenomenon.” That’s not exactly true because there is no inflation in Japan (3%), for example, and there at five major industrial countries that have inflation rates LOWER than ours – including France, Korea, India, and Australia.
But it is true that nearly all of the major central banks around the world have flooded their economies with money hot off the printing presses. Notice the similarity in the three charts below. The U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England have all massively ramped up their balance sheets by purchasing assets, which pumps inflationary money into the economy.
Why did they do it? To accommodate some $20 trillion of public spending and borrowing over the past two and a half years – an unprecedented expansion of government.
In short, central banks have been partners in crime with the politicians in the global debt and inflation crisis.
As economist Dan Mitchell puts it:” The European Central Bank made the same mistake as the Fed. It panicked at the start of the pandemic and then never fixed its mistake."
He’s right. Worse, they continue to facilitate even more public spending and debt at a time when governments should be reversing course and paying down their enormous liabilities. Biden in just his first two years in office has ADDED $1 trillion in new debt spending with $4 trillion more baked into the cake through 2030.
To get back to a high-growth, low-inflation economy, the U.S. and other nations must 1) cut trillions of dollars and Euros of government spending and 2) Central Banks must start to drain their balance sheets, which will pull inflationary money out of the economy. This has to happen NOW or we are at risk of 1970s-style stagflation where savings, wealth, and incomes got crushed under the steamroller of big government.
Here's a trick question. Which state had the best performance (or least BAD performance) on test scores last year? The answer: the Catholic schools. And it’s no rich white kids who attend Catholic schools. Here’s a great analysis by education expert Kathleen Porter-Magee:
In the fall of 2020, after we had learned more about curbing superspreader events and as it became clear that children were the least vulnerable to the virus, more than 92% of Catholic schools across the country re-opened for in-person learning, compared with 43% of traditional public schools and 34% of charters.
This week’s NAEP data show how important reopening was for learning. Today, the divergence between Catholic schools and public ones is so great that if all U.S. Catholic schools were a state, their 1.6 million students would rank first in the nation across the NAEP reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.
Catholic-school students now boast the nation’s highest scale scores on all four NAEP tests. The average score among fourth-graders in Catholic schools was 233, 17 points higher than the national public-school average, or about 1½ grade levels ahead. In eighth-grade reading, the average score for Catholic school students was 279, 20 points higher than the national public-school average, or about two grade levels ahead.
The tragedy of this story is there are thousands of empty seats in high-performing Catholic schools. How can anyone who cares about education oppose school choice?
A new Hoover Institution report indicates that corporate relocations out of the golden state are continuing and increasing. Here’s a chart we put together summarizing the data:
The authors further note that their data “does not take into account California businesses that are retaining their headquarters in California but who are making large facility investments in other states, such as Apple and Wells Fargo, who are building large campuses in Texas and Florida.”
