Washington’s Biggest End-of-Year Spending Spree Ever?

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #673
12/12/2022
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1) Washington’s Biggest End-Of-Year Spending Spree Ever?
Are Republicans in Congress really going to sign on to this “bipartisan” fiscal disaster? According to Matt Dickerson, the budget expert at Heritage: It’s a real possibility. His numbers show that the lame-duck spending package may wind up spending more than Biden’s Inflationary American Rescue Plan Act. Here is his breakdown:

Oh, and this doesn’t include pension bailouts, tax extenders, more COVID money and other odds and ends that could bring the total to more than $2 trillion.

If this Christmas Tree of funding passes Congress, you can’t just blame it on Biden.

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2) Washington’s Most Incompetent Agency Wants A $10 Billion Raise
Milton Friedman used to muse that Washington agencies could always find an excuse for needing more money. “If the program was a failure,” he said, “it was because the budget was too small. And if the program was a success we needed to reward it with even more money.”

We were reminded of this when we learned that Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wants $22.4 billion next year – nearly double its normal budget – so the agency can “more nimbly respond to public health crises.”

Rochelle Rochelle Rochelle! Many words come to mind to describe the job that the CDC has done to combat COVID. “Nimble” is the last one that comes to mind.

Over the last two-and-a-half years we’ve exposed on these pages the sheer incompetence of the CDC. This was an agency that was totally asleep at the switch in how to deal with the pandemic (which is why we have a CDC in the first place). The “woke” agency was preoccupied with issues like gun violence, racial injustice, and climate change, all of which are at best on the outer periphery of the CDC mission. The CDC brass still seems barely familiar with their own COVID and influenza datasets.

Almost every decision the CDC – and their cadre of public health experts like Anthony Fauci – made when COVID hit these shores was catastrophically wrong. They were the lead advocates for business lockdowns, school and church closures, and they were the naysayers who insisted it would take three years for a vaccine. (Trump got it done with Operation Warp Speed in nine months).

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Republicans would be fools to give a penny of additional funding for the CDC – an agency whose performance would indicate it needs to be dramatically reformed, shrunk, or shuttered.

Meanwhile, the CDC is still up to its old tricks. Its budget request includes more money to study “gun violence” and how to reduce ”racial and ethnic disparities in public health.”

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3) Treasury Warns About Stimulus Fraud If They Don't Get More Funding

As if to prove Milton Friedman’s truism about Washington's budgeting mentioned above, how is this for extortion?

As we’ve reported previously, the fraud and waste in COVID “stimulus” programs are in the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars. So now Secretary Yellen wants Congress to let her use some of the tens of billions of dollars of still-unspent CARES Act funding to investigate fraud in this and other Biden spending bills.

As Bloomberg puts it: Yellen is seeking “authorization to use money from earlier pandemic programs like the CARES Act to support the implementation of ARPA programs."

Let’s see if we’ve got this straight: Congress is supposed to approve more taxpayer money so they can investigate all the fraud that the Biden administration never did anything about in the first place.

No! No! No! One of the top priorities for the new Republican House in 2023 must be to claw back every dime of unspent dollars from Covid bills. As for rooting out fraud: that’s the job of congressional investigation committees.

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4) Carolina’s Public Pension Fund To Cancel Black Rock’s “Wacktivism”

First Florida - now North Carolina is canceling ESG activism. The Tar Heel State’s State Treasurer, Dale Folwell, who manages the ninth-largest public pension system in the country at $111.4 billion says he will remove about $2 billion in assets from BlackRock's stewardship, Folwell has called on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to resign.

Folwell says BlackRock has “been at the forefront of using its market power to coerce the world’s companies to transition to carbon ‘net-zero’ by 2050.” But as we noted last week, pension fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility to get the highest return for pensioners. Black Rock has divested from oil and gas companies, like Exxon, which have had the highest returns of major industries this past year.

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As we noted last week, Larry Fink of BlackRock has always claimed that his ESG investing yields higher returns, even though this year the returns are way down. We’d love to see other State Treasurers follow Florida and North Carolina’s lead on this one.

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5) Chart Of The Day: Dollar Is Falling
We’ve reported on the strength of the dollar on international trading floors over the first nine months of this year.

We’ve noted that strong dollar demand is a lead indicator that inflation will fall. And right on cue, the CPI has crept downward from its 9% high in the late Summer. In September the dollar hit a 20-year high relative to other major currencies.

But since September then the dollar has abruptly reversed course. After hitting a 20-year high this fall, the dollar is now down more than 8% from its September peak. That’s the swiftest fall in a decade.

A weakened dollar means imports rise in price, which means that the Fed’s job of getting to the 2% inflation target from 6 to 7% will be all the harder.

We are not out of the woods yet on inflation.

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6) Bidenflation Strikes Again

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