1) Depressing Headline Of The Year (And It Just Started!)
We have over the years been agnostic on Mitch McConnell as Republican Senate leader. He has delivered a solidly conservative Supreme Court and put many fine judges on the bench. And we’ve avoided engaging in attacks against McConnell from some of our friends on the right. But this victory celebration of an unconscionable “bipartisan” spending bill signed into law by Joe Biden is unforgivable. Can he really be this politically tone deaf? Does he not understand that Republican voters, activists, and donors are rightly enraged over the $1.8 trillion, 4,100-page Omnibusted Bill?
This is like celebrating the sinking of the Titanic.
2) A Bad Couple Of Decades For Stocks – But Still Way Outperform Returns On Social Security
Take a look at the nominal and the real (inflation-adjusted) of the S&P 500, Dow 30, and Nasdaq Composite since 2000. We've updated this through the November 30, 2022 close.
The nominal returns have been high, but when accounting for inflation/purchasing power, the returns have been mediocre at best. On average the stocks have yielded roughly a 50% real return, but on an annualized basis that’s less than 2% over 22 years. (This chart doesn’t account for dividends, so the returns with dividend reinvestment are higher.)
This compares with a historical rate of real return on stocks above 6%.
But even with these historically lower-than-average returns, if workers had been permitted to simply invest their social security taxes in a private 401k savings account, a 65-year-old retiring today would receive more than twice the monthly benefit that Social Security promises to pay. Social Security is robbing Americans of their wealth and private markets ALWAYS outperform government.
Here's a cheerful chart to kick off 2023 from our friend Dan Clifton at Strategas.
The Tax Foundation reports:
On January 1, 2023, thirty-eight states have noteworthy tax changes taking effect. Most of these changes represent net tax reductions, the result of an unprecedented wave of rate reductions and other tax cuts in the past two years as states respond to burgeoning revenues, greater tax competition in an era of enhanced mobility.
This is our weekly winner of the “You Can’t Make this S&!@ Up” prize.
The [New York public works] department aims to switch all 6,000 vehicles in its fleet from gas to electric as part of the state’s goal to reduce emissions by 2040. But city officials say they haven’t found electric garbage trucks that are powerful enough to plow snow.
The department has ordered seven electric rear loader garbage trucks, custom-made by Mack and costing more than $523,000 each, with delivery slated for the spring. Used for curbside trash collection, the department’s current rear loader truck fleet runs on diesel and is outfitted with plows to clear streets during snow season.
But officials say previous electric trucks tested by sanitation have not lasted longer than four hours plowing snow before running out of power, and the new electric trucks will be used for trash collection but not plowing snow.
Our question is how is purchasing garbage trucks that don’t pick up the garbage a “green” initiative?
The media has hyped overcrowded hospitals. Wrong. Here are the year-end figures versus one year ago and two years ago. The most remarkable column is the last one – the number of staffed beds has shrunk by 112,000.
If you follow the top green line in this chart, you can see that while some of this is a short-term (possibly reporting) effect around the holidays, most of it is not.
