We wish all our readers a Prosperous New Year. 

In this special end of the year edition of the Hotline, we deviate from the normal protocol and provide you with our list of the nine dumbest things the government did 2022.  We’d love to hear your ideas of the biggest boneheaded plays of the year.   Here’s to better times in 2023. 

1) Average Family lost $4,000 to $5,000 in Real Take Home Pay

Even with the COVID pandemic finally over (mostly) and a return to business as usual, instead of a year of prosperity and growth, we got the opposite. Our senior fellow E.J. Antoni was the first to run the numbers on how inflation ravaged family incomes.  The U.S. economic engine stalled out into a mild recession in the first half of the year, the inflation rate went above 9% this past summer.  For the year the CPI finished above 7%, which translated into the biggest annual rise in prices in some four decades.  With wages only up 5% this meant that family incomes fell by more than $4,000 in purchasing power. 

Then there was the stock market selloff that flattened Americans’ savings and wealth.  Some $12 trillion of wealth was vaporized in 2022. A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report found that the typical 401k retirement plan lost more than $30,000.  Adjusting for inflation,  The Nasdaq fell by 35%, the S&P by nearly 25% and the Dow Jones by 9%.  CTUP calculated that the average 401k plan lost more than $30,000 after inflation. 

3) Republicans Vote for a Near-$2 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill. 

Biden spent and borrowed $4.1 trillion in his first two years in office, but even with the nation’s finances in shambles and even with Republicans promising that they would get control of Uncle Sam’s record red ink, Senate Repubs. joined hands with Biden to pass yet another gargantuan year-end spending bill filled with pork, and beefy increases for nearly every federal agency.  Both parties share the blame for this oinker.  If there were ever an argument for term limits, this was it.
 
Shame, shame, shame – especially on Republicans who claim to be against big government, but voted for it.

Calif. Gov Gavin Newsom issued a new regulation requiring all new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2035.  Polls show by wide margins Americans don’t want to be forced to buy electric cars and only 6% of all new car sales are EVs.  But California governor Gavin Newsom and the Sacramento politicians weren’t listening.  They are going to require EVERYONE to buy an EV over the next dozen years. Then two weeks after Newsom approved the regulation, power outages stranded cars all over the state.  It’s only going to get worse, left coasters. 

Even if you filled Yankee Stadium with IRS agents that wouldn’t be enough seats for all the new hires the tax revenue collectors Congress wants to hire over the next decade.  These auditors, agents, and snoopers will be examining even financial transactions as little as $600. And it it’s not just rich people who are going to be audited and investigated.  But while Congress wants to double the size of the IRS, they also have spent the last two years adding new loopholes, carve outs, special interest favors as they add hundreds of new pages of tax complexity to the tax code.  With a simple, flat, fair and comprehensible tax code, the IRS could lay off half of its auditors.

6) Biden Begs Saudi Arabia and OPEC to Increase Oil Production

This was a national humiliation. Biden says no to drilling here at home, kills pipelines, and took hundreds of thousands of oil and gas lands off limits.  America’s natural gas exports have slowed to a trickle as Europe gets more hooked on gas from Russia – which only supplies more money for Putin’s war machine. Gas prices spiked to as high as $5.00 a gallon earlier this year (up from $2.59 a gallon under Trump) and home heating costs have tripled in many counties.  Biden then blames “big oil” for driving up prices.  It’s an anti-fossil fuel American energy policy that only our enemies like China, Iran and Russia could love.   Then he goes to the Saudi oil sheiks and pleads with them to produce more. 

7) Pete Buttigieg Is Put in Charge of Ending Supply Chain Problems

It wasn’t just energy shortages that caused gridlock, ships at our ports that couldn’t get unloaded for weeks, and empty shelves across America in 2022.  We ran out of baby formula, eggs, Tylenol, tampons, semiconductors for phones, prescription meds, and fertilizer for farmers to grow our food.  Even toilet paper was sold out.  It was like we were the old Soviet Union.  Hardly anyone ever heard of the term “supply chain” problems before Biden was president. Worse, the Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who was in charge of this logistics problem, and a man who took family leave in 2021 at the start of the crisis, proved entirely incompetent for the task at hand.

8) Government Pays People NOT to Work

Our new CTUP study found that many states are paying families more than $75,000 in annualized welfare benefits in 2022. Why are there still three to four million fewer Americans working than before Covid even with millions of job openings?  One reason is that in more than 20 states a family of four can get benefits that exceed the pay of a construction worker, a mechanic, a security guard or a factory worker.  Paying people NOT to work is a dumb government policy that is bad for businesses, taxpayers, and families. 

9) COVID restrictions and mandates still won’t go away in major blue cities and states. 

Nearly three years after COVID hit these shores and with now conclusive evidence that lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates don’t work and cause more problems than they solve, they’ve lingered and even are making a comeback in many states and cities.  The government and the CDC’s campaign of fear won’t go away as Americans seek a return to normalcy.  And America is one of the very last countries in the world to ban unvaccinated foreign travelers, banning literally billions people from visiting our country

Let’s hope 2023 leads to at least a semblance of sanity from our politicians.

10) We Will Drink to This!

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