Our fiscal hero of the year – the competition was not tough – is Rand Paul of Kentucky. He pointed out the other day in a Senate floor statement that if Congress would simply return to the pre-pandemic level of government spending, we would have a balanced budget.
We didn’t believe his arithmetic, so we ran the numbers. Sure enough, if Congress did what he suggests, we wouldn’t have a $1.2 trillion deficit this year, but rather a $200 billion SURPLUS. Green, not red ink. Even if we adjusted the 2019 budget for inflation we would still be saving almost $1 trillion.
This might seem inconceivable that Congress would return to pre-pandemic spending levels, but this would only be following the historical precedent. When a crisis is over, we CUT the budget and run SURPLUSES. That was true after the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars One and Two, the Great Depression, and the Cold War.
Instead, the imbeciles on Capitol Hill – in BOTH parties – have just completed the biggest budget bender in modern times.
3) Pension “Reform” Another Big Burden On Small Biz
The new omnibus bill makes the biggest federal changes to retirement savings since the 1980s.
Good news and bad. The Good: It does relax requirements for workers to access their money and reduces the excise taxes on those who don't follow the federal formula.
The bad: it forces employers in ALL states to do what many blue states already require: employers must automatically enroll new workers in their 401k plans. Even an employer with as few as 11 employees will be shouldering the administrative burden.
Will this ultimately put, still more over, our economy under the ESG-investing umbrella?
4) How Sad: Toyota Will Keep Producing Cars Americans Want … But American Car Companies Won’t
We’ve reported before how shameful and dumb it is that the big American auto companies are going green, and they are soon stopping production of gas-fueled cars as they shift to all Electric Vehicles.
HELLO!! Only about six percent of the cars sold in America today are EVs and polls show about half of Americans don’t want them. But Ford and GM are listening to the Sierra Club and not their customers. This is going to flop, much like when Ford tried to get Americans to buy the Edsel. (For youngsters, that was the 1950s car that nobody wanted.)
But at least someone gets it. Akio Toyoda, the president and grandson of the founder of the giant Japanese car company, is going to buck the trend.
“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority. That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly,” he told reporters.
"I believe we need to be realistic about when society will be able to fully adopt Battery Electric Vehicles…. And frankly, EVs are not the only way to achieve the world's carbon neutrality goals."
Sad that the Japanese understand American car buyers better than the execs in Detroit. So much for “buying American.”
5) Good News: In Los Angeles County Doctors Fight Back Against Return Of Mask Mandates
The infamous non-doctor health czar of Los Angeles County, Barbara Ferrer, continues to threaten a mask mandate come January for nearly 10 million residents.
Recall that when she did the same this past summer, the top doctors at the county's largest hospital (Los Angeles County-USC) refuted her doom and helped prevent the mandate from coming back.
They are back, and this chart and the accompanying clip say it all:
"Which winter doesn't belong with the other winters? What's going on in winter 2022? This is the week last winter things really took off and for the first three days this week the trend continues downward, which is the third straight week that would be true, and this is countywide."
He went on to note that the hospital's official COVID count – the only thing HHS and CDC report – is still 85 to 90% of people who are in the hospital for an unrelated reason who just happen to test positive.
