1) Biden’s Glide Path To A $40 Or $50 Trillion National Debt
This is Headline of the Day from New York Times:
First, it's a lie that even hit our debt limit. That doesn't happen for at least four or five months. So stop fearmongering.
Second, yes, the Biden spending binge that has added $4 trillion to the national debt absolutely should be raising “economic fears.” It’s almost as if we have a gang of people who escaped from the looney asylum running our nation’s fiscal policy - like a scene out of a Batman movie.
But the NYTimes doesn’t mean that the $31 trillion debt is the crisis. They mean that we finally have a gang of fiscally-sane people in the House who won't raise the debt ceiling without a plan with a runway to a balanced budget.
In the Democrats’ and the media’s financial fantasy land, the people who are trying to stop the spending and borrowing binge - those people - are the villains in this story. And the people who ran the debt into the stratosphere are our level-headed saviors.
It gets worse, House Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn and many of his colleagues now want to abolish the debt ceiling altogether. They want Uncle Sam to have an unlimited credit card forever. Get rid of any speed bumps. We’ll be good. We promise.
As we’ve said before, the House Republicans cannot blink in this Mexican standoff.
We like Kevin Hassett’s idea of $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of raising the debt ceiling.
Remember, the debt is headed to 200% of our annual GDP (and then to infinity) if we do nothing.
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s 42-year-old Labor Party prime minister, has announced she will resign. Hallelujah!
Ardern was the militant queen of lockdowns as the core of her hopeless “zero COVID” policy.
Anyone testing positive were isolated in a government facility. Ardern also turned the country into a “hermit kingdom” with more than 15,000 New Zealanders trapped abroad and exiled for two years. As was the case evert else in the world, none of these draconian policies worked. She finally had to abandon the strategy as COVID spread.
She had other crazy policies, including a mad 20-year plan for government power in New Zealand to be shared 50-50 with the Maori native population, which is at most 16 percent of the nation's people.
Believe it or not, last year Harvard invited this nutcase to give the commencement address. She was a media superstar.The Financial Times once fawningly proclaimed: “Arise, Saint Jacinda!” and proclaimed over her authoritarian methods during the pandemic as “daring.”
When asked how she would like New Zealanders to remember her leadership, she said “as someone who always tried to be kind.”
Beijing has announced the nation’s GDP increased by 3.0% in 2022. This is just a far cry from the official target of 5.5%, according to the World Bank.
We have here another country that decapitated its economy with the “zero Covid scheme.
The bigger problem for China is its declining population.
Last year China recorded a population DECLINE of 850,000 to 1.41 billion people, and this year it seems likely that India became the most populous nation.
It’s hard to be the world’s economic superpower - as China hopes to be someday - when the population is shrinking. A lot of this is due to several decades of the Chinese brutal one-child policy. This has created an upside-down population pyramid.
Gordon Chang, a noted China analyst, reports that the country "this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease....Today, the country has a population more than four times larger than America’s. By 2100, the U.S. will probably have more people than China.”
4) More Evidence Of The Damage Done By Covid School Closings
School closures were the most catastrophic policy error of the pandemic, with nearly no benefit (CDC published estimates show over 90 percent of kids have antibodies from an infection) and enormous educational, developmental, and social harms. We predicted this early and while we would have preferred to have been proven wrong, we were sadly proven right.
A new Stanford study looking at the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found "eighth-grade math fell for every state, with a national average decline of eight NAEP scale score points” or enough to wipe out all the gains made since 2000. So much for “no child left behind,” and other slogans that were going to fix our public schools.
We will continue to pay for the lockdowns for years to come. “Students on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income” depending on where they went to school and the states are estimated “to face a gross domestic product that is 0.6 to 2.9 percent lower each year for the remainder of the twenty-first century.”
There’s one way to turn this experience into a positive, and that is to use the manifest failure of public school bureaucrats and unions to demand alternatives. This year, Iowa and Texas may follow Arizona's lead and enact scholarship programs that let all families attend the schools of their choice with more, we hope, to follow.
5) Yes, The Elitists At Davos Are Acting Like "Extraterrestrials"
The Davos World Economic Forum started out decades with the professed goal of making capitalism more socially responsible. Sadly, it has now degenerated into a platform solely for ideas that are either crackpot or dangerous.
During COVID, it was a leading supporter of every crippling lockdown of society. Last year, it proposed slashing ownership of private vehicles around the world. That was followed up by a scheme to have people eat insects instead of red meat.
This year’s Davos meeting, the first held in person in three years, is even wackier. United Nations chief António Guterres used his time to slam fossil fuels companies for having a “business model (that) is inconsistent with human survival.”
John Kerry, who flew into Davos along with dozens of others on private jets, hailed his fellow attendees as “extraterrestrial” in their undying devotion to saving the Earth.
Al Gore, Kerry’s old pal in the Senate, followed him with a patented rant warning the world would soon race a catastrophe of “boiling oceans”, “rain bombs” and climate refugees.
Richard Edelman, CEO of the global communications firm Edelman, lamented that “right-wing groups have done a really good job of disenfranchising” liberal NGO’s like Davos." They’ve challenged the funding sources. They’ve associated you with Bill Gates and George Soros. They’ve said that you’re world people, as opposed to actually what you are, which is local." Sounds like the critics have got it just about right.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger told the audience that “disinformation” is the “most existential” problem the world is facing today. He urged social media platforms “to do an unpopular and brave thing … to differentiate and elevate pre-approved trustworthy sources of information consistently.” Other panelists
Wait! Let's get this straight: The New York Times is complaining about disinformation.
Jill Abramson, who used to work for Sulzberger as the editor of the New York Times, wasn’t impressed. She tweeted that the close alliance between the New York Times and Davos was a “corrupt circle-jerk” between media and business.
