Fed chairman Jerome Powell yesterday after announcing a one-quarter rise in the federal funds rate target to a range of 4.5% to 4.75%:
"It is our job to restore price stability and achieve 2 percent inflation for the benefit of the American public."
Just to make sure we are straight on this: That means no climate policies and no Phillips Curve nonsense, right?
The Fed funds rate is now its highest rate in 10 years. For too long the near-zero interest rate policy by the Fed pumped cheap money into the inflation bubble. Now we pay the price.
New York had 768,000 more jobs than Florida pre-COVID, not surprising given the disproportionate number of retirees in Florida. Employment in both states tanked to almost the same level.
But thanks in part to much more severe and longer-lasting lockdowns in NY, the Empire State today is still 267,000 jobs short of pre-COVID level. Florida today has 503,000 MORE jobs than pre-COVID level.
The icing on the cake: Florida now has more jobs than New York for the first time EVER.
High taxes, combined with draconian and ineffective lockdown policies drove people, businesses, and jobs out of the Empire State into the Sunshine State.
3) House Voted To End COVID Emergency – But Almost All Democrats Vote With Biden To Keep Fake “Emergency” Going
How pathetic is this:
Just 11 House Democrats voted with all Republicans yesterday to terminate the COVID national emergency that ended a year and a half ago.
How short is that list? It's just 5 percent of House Democrats. All the rest fell right behind the Biden announcement of a May 11 end date.
Next up will be the Senate, where Kansas Senator Roger Marshall will force a vote yet again. It passed three times last year, but Democrats may be more hesitant to vote yes without the Nancy Pelosi backstop.
It is a privileged resolution that cannot be filibustered. Unless 10 of the 12 Senate Democrats who voted yes last time flip-flop, Biden will have to use his first-ever veto if he wants to keep his fake COVID emergency going until May.
To repeat: the “emergency” allows Biden to spend tens of billions of dollars on health and welfare programs without congressional approval. And these are the same people who call Trump a “danger to democracy.”
4) "Inflation Reduction Act" EV Subsidy Price Tag Quadruples
Liberals rely on government subsidies to get people to buy products that would otherwise flop in free and open markets. A perfect example is electric vehicles and their component parts.
Most recently, President Biden’s pork-filled spending package included tax credits to encourage companies to manufacture EV batteries in the United States.
Axios reports that these credits reduce production costs of batteries by a third – but that the lost revenue from “those tax credits may be four times higher than Congress' budget experts anticipated.”
Axios headlined this soaking of taxpayers as a great success before revising it to more neutral language:
The Congressional Budget Office projected the tax revenues lost to these credit loopholes at $30,6 billion over 10 years. Others put the figure at $136 billion over the same period – and probably more as it fails to include Tesla’s recently announced multi-billion dollar investment.
Imagine how fast the economy would grow if we got rid of these special interest write-offs in the tax code and just went with the 17% Forbes flat tax. But then how could Congress buy and sell tax favors?
5) DeSantis Forces College Board To Revise Critical Race Theory Course
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ objections to the new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies for high schoolers “incomprehensible.” She said DeSantis wants to “block…the study of Black Americans.”
Shameful. This takes race-baiting to a new low.
The College Board that prepared the curriculum apparently agrees with DeSantis. It has just stripped away many of the topics DeSantis objected to. Are they racists too?
The College Board hasn’t released the curriculum publicly, but leaks reveal that the curriculum’s history of slavery and the Civil War remains intact. What the board eliminated is Critical Race Theory, unalloyed praise of the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, and something called “Black Queer Studies.”
What is that? According to its authors, it’s “the concept of queer color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies towards racial analysis.”
This is leftwing gobbledygook that has nothing to do with American history. How many in the media have alerted Americans to what is really being taught and WHY DeSantis tossed all this in the garbage bin. All this lunacy is going on when we have a four-alarm crisis in public schools with reading and math scores at their lowest level in decades.
