1) Is The Mission Of The Federal Reserve To Combat Climate Change?
Fed chairman Jerome Powell has been adamant of late that the bank's job is to fight inflation – not climate change. He recently declared: "Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals."
But not so fast. Why is the Fed planning to conduct a “pilot climate scenario analysis exercise” involving the six largest US banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo?
We are told that the climate cops want major banks to adopt a plan to handle "climate change-related shocks."
This would assess how banks account for the financial risks associated will hurricanes, droughts, and floods in case their real estate loans and mortgages are underwater – literally and figuratively. The Fed wants this done by August.
Of course, banks should do risk analysis for all types of physical and financial contingencies. But the notion that because of climate change these risks are RISING is flat-out wrong.
The figure below shows that for the last century deaths from natural disasters have declined dramatically. That's also true of financial losses. As an advanced economy, we are much better equipped to protect against floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters – which, by the way, are no more common today than 50 or 100 years ago.
It makes us very nervous when we hear statements like this:
“The Fed has narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks — to ensure that banks understand and manage their material risks, including the financial risks from climate change,” according to the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, Michael Barr, in a statement last week.
2) Why We Need To Simplify Or Abolish The Income Tax
For the record:
We are in favor of a Steve Forbes flat tax, a Herman Cain 9-9-9 tax, a national sales tax, or anything that would radically simplify our godawful and incomprehensible IRS tax system.
The Fair Tax would abolish the income tax, the corporate tax, the capital gains tax, the dividend tax, the payroll tax, AND the death tax and replace it with a 23% national sales tax. There are political perils to the Fair Tax, as some of our friends have pointed out, but Imagine an American economy untethered from all of these taxes. We are talking about an economic sonic boom.
Consider this: When the 16th Amendment was adopted in 1913, the tax was just seven percent and the income tax was so short and concise that the New York Times published the entire text of the law in its news pages.
Now look at it, 75,000 pages of laws and incomprehensible regulations:
As our co-founder Steve Forbes has noted, If we were to simply make the tax code flat and simple, rather than doubling the size of the IRS, we could cut it in half. And if we had a fair tax we could cut the IRS by about 90 percent!
Another weekend of bedlam, rioting, and arson in a major American city.
This time the lawlessness broke out in Atlanta. The rioting and violence began Saturday night as Antifa activists shattered windows, torched a police car, and vandalized businesses after a climate activist was killed in a shootout with police. Six people have been arrested on charges of domestic terrorism and some of the young idealists were carrying explosives. (These are the same people who favor gun control.)
The media has paid scant attention to the violence. Why?
These left-wing radicals are largely from well-to-do families, and many are the very face of “white privilege.” This was a rich kid's temper tantrum. Rebels without a cause.
During Saturday’s rally, masked militants dressed head to toe in black marched in the streets, shouting: “If you build it, we will burn it.” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said some of the six arrested “were found with explosives on them. You heard that correctly, explosives.”
The unrest has spread to Boston, Lansing, Michigan, and – yet again – Portland.
Earlier this week, we highlighted in the HOTLINE the double standard between how those arrested at or near the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, have been held without bail compared to the Antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors who burned down several buildings in Washington D.C. after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
The stunning failure of the national media to fully report the violence in Atlanta and other cities is yet another reason why only a third of the public tells pollsters they have “a great deal of trust” in what the media reports.
We don't praise lockdown artist extraordinaire Phil Murphy often, but the New Jersey governor got one right by eliminating the state's antiquated post-prohibition cap on liquor licenses to no more than one per 3000 residents.
In his state of the state address, Murphy said his plan would produce 10,000 jobs or more annually and generate $10 billion in new economic activity.
That's probably overly optimistic, but eliminating ancient regulations that limit economic activity can only be a good thing. We encourage other governors to follow Murphy’s lead and end liquor licensing requirements that drive up prices.
