Our compatriot and star investor Scott Grannis sent us this chart from his investment blog in response to our item last week on the American growth deficit.
This chart shows it best. We have been under trend now in economic growth since 2008 – or for 14 years. What is scary is that the slower 2.2% growth rate over this period has slowed to about 1.5% under Biden and is expected to stay in this slumping rate for the next decade.
Grannis calculates that if we had stayed on the 1984-2004 growth path, the average American would be about 22% richer today – or at least $15,000 more income per median income family.
We at CTUP were screaming this from the rafters after about day one of COVID. And now almost three years in, the CDC has released mortality data for 2020, 2021, and most of 2022 confirming we and others were right. Children were NEVER at risk of dying from COVID. NEVER. Hard stop. Congrats to our Covid expert Phil Kerpen for getting this 100% correct.
The idea that children were at risk was a science fiction that teacher unions manufactured so they wouldn’t have to… well, go to work and teach, but still, get a paycheck.
Please look closely at this chart. Older Americans over the age of 65 were clearly at great risk of COVID during the first and second wave. More than 85% of the COVID deaths were those over the age of 65 and the vast majority of those deaths were of seniors over the age of 75. But out of nearly a million deaths, only 733 were between the ages of 1 and 17.
Even those microscopic numbers are likely overstated. There has been no serious effort in the US to correct for over-ascertainment, which is a significant issue for younger age groups.
A new study from the UK found that 75% of "COVID deaths" in ages 0 to 19 during the Omicron wave were incidental. And almost all of the kids had other health problems:
Two takeaways from this. First, the next time we have a pandemic, avoid panic, PROTECT THE VULNERABLE as much as possible, and let all other Americans get on with their lives and businesses.
Second, COVID taught us that the unions are all about the money and couldn’t give two hoots about the wellbeing of our children.
The House Republican majority is investigating the extent to which the government colluded with Big Tech companies to suppress information that questioned lockdowns and the real story of COVID.
All over the world, scandals are popping up on just how far governments wanted to shut down COVID debate. In Britain, three bodies, including a mysterious Ministry of Defense unit, engaged in the surveillance and monitoring of citizens and media outlets who criticized lockdowns.
Laura Dodsworth, the author of the anti-lockdown book “State Of Fear,” concludes “on one hand the government spied upon and censored free speech. And on the other hand, it deliberately frightened the population to be compliant.”
In Germany, the leaked “Panic Papers” have revealed that top government officials asked modelers to develop scary scenarios to force compliance with lockdowns.
Republicans are right: We need a full audit of the extent to which the National Institute of Health and the CDC worked to discredit and muzzle critics of the government’s tragically flawed COVID strategies.
4) Who’s Responsible For The Enormous National Debt?
Democrats in Congress are saying Trump is the culprit.
Biden made the same charge last week:
Biden in a speech at the White House:
“One quarter” of today’s $31.4 trillion federal debt “was accumulated in the four years of my predecessor,” Donald Trump.”
Trump was a big spender for sure. The debt rose from $19.9 trillion to roughly $27 trillion when he left office. So Trump added more than $7 trillion to the debt.
But wait: some $3 trillion of that spending was Covid relief money that virtually every Democrat in Congress voted FOR. It’s hard to blame the pandemic on Trump.
Now compare that record with Biden. In just two years Joe has amassed $4.2 trillion more debt bringing the national debt to $31.3 trillion. And most of that spending came without a single Republican vote. More than half of the spending was appropriated AFTER Covid was over. We should be running a surplus now, not a trillion and a half-dollar deficit.
A bigger lie is that Biden “LOWERED the deficit by $1.4 trillion.” They get this phony number by subtracting the gargantuan $2.8 trillion of borrowing by Biden in 2022 from the $1.4 trillion he borrowed in 2022.
So who is responsible for the explosion of the debt? Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden – and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
The real question is: who, If anyone, will stop it?
“We're seeing this revolving door catch, release, repeat system that's really playing out all across the country. We have to stop passing laws that protect the guilty.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams on the crime spree in the Big Apple.
