Tag: economy

This Is A Tale Of Two Americas, And Those At The Bottom Of The Economic Food Chain Are Being Hit Extremely Hard

If you have plenty of money and you are able to shield yourself from what is happening to the tens of millions of people that are wallowing in poverty, life in America is still good in 2024.  Stock prices have been hovering near record highs, and companies that cater to the rich and famous have been raking in the cash.  But for most of the rest of the country, things are not going so well.  Homelessness has been rising at the fastest rate we have ever seen, crime is out of control all over the nation, and large companies are laying off workers at a very frightening pace.

If you live in the version of America that is still living the high life, good for you.

But if you live in the version of America that the rest of us live in, conditions are rapidly deteriorating.

Earlier today, I came across an article in the San Francisco Standard that detailed what life is like in Oakland, California these days…

A Prius hanging out of a dumpster. Stripped-down cars. Burning trash cans. These are some of the East Oakland sights set to a new catchphrase that’s blowing up on social media: “Oakland, California, … donde la vida no vale nada.”

Even cops, government officials, firefighters and kids are repeating the catchphrase on social media and on the streets of the Town.

That catchphrase was created by a man named Gregorio Ramon.

He has posted hundreds of videos on social media that document what is happening to the city where he has his home…

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The Sindex: Cigarette Prices Outpacing Inflation

Inflation stressing you out? Making you wish you had just a touch of nicotine in your system? Unfortunately, that’ll cost a lot. While prices economywide have risen 3.1 percent in the last year, cigarette prices have jumped 8 percent. On top of federal and state taxes that often make up half the price of a pack, tobacco companies tend to raise their prices faster than inflation to make up for declining sales volume. These and the rest of the numbers in the Reason Sindex use data from November 2023.

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How Progressive Policies Are Designed For Civilizational Suicide

We all understand, in the timeless words of the poet Robert Burns, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Most Americans are accustomed to assessing the various failed initiatives of our country’s leaders as well-intended actions that turned out badly. The Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the COVID pandemic overreaction, all in hindsight, can be viewed as simply the unfolding of human stupidity in the contingency of time.

In accordance, it is understandable that many are inclined to believe that our country’s current serious problems are, once again, merely the failed result of well-intentioned policies.

But what if, we ask, seemingly fumbled programs were intended to be the initial throes of civilizational suicide? What if apparent missteps were actually directed at the purposeful destruction of a prosperous, free, safe, and secure society?

As we examine the policies pushed by the Biden administration progressives regarding climate, national security, crime, and the border, we can rationally conclude that they are being purposely implemented to render our society unsuccessful, not successful, in its traditional aims, causing what could be the ultimate destruction of a thriving, liberal enlightenment society.

Let us begin with escalating climate mandates, now reaching gas stoves and tires, seeking the total elimination of fossil fuels. Because our mainstream media, more out of reflexive conformity than malevolence, constantly amplify climate alarmism, most Americans believe climate programs are designed in good faith to protect us from planetary disasters. Climate subsidies are aimed, they are led to believe, at increasing prosperity through good “green” jobs in emerging “green” industries, all part of the supposedly improved “Bidenomics” economy, however counterintuitive many think them to be.

When Biden, immediately upon assuming office, stopped issuing new drilling leases, canceled the Keystone Pipeline, and issued EPA regulations effectively shutting down multiple power plants in the near future, was he, however idealistically, trying to wean our country off of fossil fuels in favor of clean, “renewable” energy? If so, what could be wrong with that?

If the administration had calculated that lost energy from stifling fossil fuel sources could actually be replaced, these initiatives, even if overly optimistic, could be viewed as well-intended.

However, within the climate camp, it has been well known that fossil fuels, which power 82% of world energy needs, cannot conceivably be replaced by renewable energy to any substantial degree. So, as these policies take effect over the coming years, our hospitals and medical centers, relying on petroleum-based plastic furniture, fixtures, and equipment, energy-dependent stainless-steel implements, and high-power physical plants, will be hit hard. Health care costs will soar, while treatment will decrease to emerging society levels. Our food costs, already rising dramatically, will skyrocket as petroleum fertilizer, now tripling yields, becomes economically impractical. Housing costs, dependent on fuel-powered equipment and concrete and steel needing massive energy inputs to manufacture, will put homeownership out of reach for all but the rich and reduce housing to cramped, third-world levels. And, of course, transportation will become an expensive luxury for both people and products.

But isn’t this all meant well? For trusting, uncritical moderates and traditional liberals, yes. For the progressives pulling the strings, no.

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California Senate Hopeful Barbara Lee Wants $50 Per Hour Minimum Wage

Minimum wage advocates are often asked why, if they think prosperity can be achieved by setting a floor on what people are allowed to charge for their labor, they don’t just hike it until everybody is wealthy? A candidate for the U.S. Senate has now risen to that challenge, proposing to set wages as high as $50 per hour. That could be a pathway to making everybody wealthy—if only the minimum wage made sense as policy, which it doesn’t.

This week, the four leading candidates for the U.S. Senate seat opened by the overdue departure of Dianne Feinstein met for a televised debate. Under California’s open primary system, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee, Republican Steve Garvey, and all other candidates for the seat will go against each other March 5, with the two top vote-getters facing off in November.

Unsurprisingly for California and the year 2024, the spotlight was on bad ideas.

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Biden’s Bizarre ‘Shrinkflation’ Nonsense

When President Joe Biden was running for office in 2020, he explicitly promised that putting him in the White House would mean that “you’ll actually see your standard of living go up and your costs go down.”

That, uh, hasn’t happened.

We don’t need to relitigate the entire economic history of the Biden administration in this space, but here’s a quick recap: Inflation surged to a 40-year high, peaking above 9 percent in June 2022. Prices are now rising less quickly, but inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. (It was 3.4 percent for the 12 months ending in December. We’ll get January’s numbers on Tuesday morning.) Biden’s policies—specifically, the $2 trillion spending package he signed in March 2021—certainly contributed to that inflationary spiral. Economists will continue to debate how much of a factor it was, but voters tend to operate on a more facile level of rewarding presidents for good economic times and punishing them for bad economic times. And rightly or only semi-rightly, Biden’s name is attached to this bout with inflation.

You might expect the president, now that he’s in the middle of a re-election campaign, to try to avoid anything to do with that topic. Don’t remind voters of how rough the past few years have been, focus on the future, talk about the positive signals coming from the economy, and above all else don’t make yourself look like an old man yelling at a cloud.

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‘Not Normal’: Over One Million Jobs Reported In 2023 Didn’t Actually Exist

The federal government in 2023 overestimated the number of jobs in the U.S. economy by an average of 105,000 per month in initial reports, equating to a cumulative monthly difference of 1.3 million, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The cumulative number of jobs reported each month was 1,255,000 less than previously thought, with new seasonal and census data affecting total employment estimates, according to data from the BLS calculated by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The huge downward revisions are in spite of a 115,000 upward revision in December, the only month that saw an upward revision to the employment level in 2023.

The biggest revision was for March, which was revised down by a total of 266,000 jobs, followed by January at 234,000 and April at 205,000, according to the BLS. The lowest downward revision was in November, with only 2,000, followed by 11,000 in October.

“Revisions are a normal part of the reporting process, but large changes, or adjustments that consistently move in the same direction, are not normal,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Instead, they’re indicative of something problematic with the BLS’ methodology. That can happen when market conditions change drastically enough to be outside of the assumptions used in their models.”

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The Bankruptcy of Bidenomics

President Joe Biden spent much of his third year in the White House trying to brag about what he’d done for the American economy.

In February, speaking to a chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Maryland, he declared, “For the past two years, we’ve been carrying out my economic plan that grows the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.” Biden then recited a laundry list of economic indicators. The unemployment rate was 3.4 percent. Gas prices had dropped by $1.60 per gallon. In his first two years in office, he said, “we created 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.” Inflation was down from its peak, and take-home pay was up. “We’ve got more to do, but I’m telling you, the Biden economic plan is working because of you all,” he said, pausing for applause. “And I really mean it.”

This was typical of Biden’s prepared public remarks. In at least a dozen speeches and statements in 2022 and 2023, the president referred to either “my economic plan” or “the Biden economic plan,” crediting himself and his administration with the state of the economy. “My economic plan is showing results,” he said in a prepared statement in November 2022. “My economic plan is working,” he said in July 2023.

In summer 2023, Biden finally gave that plan a name. Or rather, he adopted the name his critics had already used to describe his policies: Bidenomics.

The term had begun as a derisive label for the president’s economic foibles. An unsigned July 2022 editorial in The Wall Street Journal bore the headline “Bidenomics 101.” It took issue with Biden’s public demand that “companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump” bring down their prices—a sort of Nixonian jawboning where you respond to inflation by trying to bully companies into keeping prices low. The president, the editorial charged, “doesn’t appear to know anything about how the private economy works.”

Nearly a year later, in a speech in Chicago, Biden set out to claim Bidenomics as his own. The president framed his approach as “a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”

Rather than “trickle-down economics” that helped only the already well-off, Biden said, he was pursuing an economic agenda that rejected the “belief that we should shrink public investment in infrastructure and public education.” He touted his record,crediting three major laws he’d signed—the American Rescue Plan (ARP), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—with helping to set the U.S. economy on a better track. “Guess what?” he said. “Bidenomics is working.”

Biden’s speeches were defensive in tone, and for a reason: Voters have consistently reported broad unhappiness with the economy. Surveys find low support for Biden’s handling of economic policy across nearly every demographic, including the younger voters and minorities who are typically Democratic stalwarts. The president’s embrace of Bidenomics was an attempt to convert skeptics into believers by arguing, more or less, that the economy was actually pretty great and that this was because of him and his policies.

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Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds

A growing number of Americans are ending up homeless as soaring rents in recent years squeeze their budgets.

According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015. That marks the largest single-year increase in the country’s unhoused population on record, Harvard researchers said. 

Homelessness, long a problem in states such as California and Washington, has also increased in historically more affordable parts of the U.S.. Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas have seen the largest growths in their unsheltered populations due to rising local housing costs. 

That alarming jump in people struggling to keep a roof over their head came amid blistering inflation in 2021 and 2022 and as surging rental prices across the U.S. outpaced worker wage gains. Although a range of factors can cause homelessness, high rents and the expiration of pandemic relief last year contributed to the spike in housing insecurity, the researchers found. 

“In the first years of the pandemic, renter protections, income supports and housing assistance helped stave off a considerable rise in homelessness. However, many of these protections ended in 2022, at a time when rents were rising rapidly and increasing numbers of migrants were prohibited from working. As a result, the number of people experiencing homelessness jumped by nearly 71,000 in just one year,” according to the report.

Rent in the U.S. has steadily climbed since 2001. In analyzing Census and real estate data, the Harvard researchers found that half of all U.S. households across income levels spent between 30% and 50% of their monthly pay on housing in 2022, defining them as “cost-burdened.” Some 12 million tenants were severely cost-burdened that year, meaning they spent more than half their monthly pay on rent and utilities, up 14% from pre-pandemic levels.

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Pirate Streaming Sites Cost Hollywood $30 Billion Annually

“[P]iracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file-sharing costs the US economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs,” reports the far-left Bloomberg.

That estimate comes from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. “The global impact,” the report adds, “is about $71 billion annually.”

“Ever since taking on Netflix Inc. at its own game, old Hollywood has struggled to turn a profit in streaming, with the likes of Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ losing billions of dollars each year[.]” This has Wall Street living with the fear that streaming services will never match the massive income generated by cable TV. And that’s because they won’t.

“But the age of streaming has been a boon for some unintended winners,” Bloomberg found. Primarily “pirates that use software to rip a film or television show in seconds from legitimate online video platforms and host the titles on their own[.]” These “illegitimate services … rake in about $2 billion annually from ads and subscriptions.”

Because these pirate sites don’t share the burden of the costs associated with producing the movies and TV shows they stream for their subscribers, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) believes their profit margins reach as high as 90 percent.

The MPA says there are about 130 illicit streaming sites earning five to ten dollars a month from each of two million subscribers.

“Some of these pirate websites have gotten more daily visits than some of the top 10 legitimate sites,” Karyn Temple, the MPA’s general counsel, told Bloomberg. “That really shows how prolific they are.”

Within two years, starting with 2022, the cumulative losses will climb to $113 billion.

The article gives some of the two million illicit subscribers the benefit of the doubt. The pirate sites are sophisticated enough to look legitimate, so people might not know it’s illegal. Still, there is a full-court legal press to put a stop to this. Millions of unvetted illegal aliens flooding over the border? Hollywood doesn’t care. But don’t you dare not pay full price for Squid Game.

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California’s Attack on Gig Work Predictably Drove Workers Out of Jobs

California’s attempt at forcing gig workers to become traditional employees backfired by driving many of those workers out of their jobs.

In the wake of a new law (Assembly Bill 5) that was intended to reclassify many independent contractors as regular employees, self-employment in California fell by 10.5 percent and overall employment tumbled by 4.4 percent, according to a study released Thursday by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank housed at George Mason University. In professions where self-employment was more common, the effects were more dramatic, and in some fields employment declined by as much as 28 percent after A.B. 5’s implementation.

Meanwhile, researchers Liya Palagashvili, Paola A. Suarez, Christopher M. Kaiser, and Vitor Melo reported finding no increase in the number of employees classified as full employees. In professions where there was an uptick in traditional employees receiving W-2 wages and benefits, those increases were not large enough to cancel out the number of self-employed workers who left jobs.

“These results suggest that AB5 did not simply alter the composition of the workforce as intended by lawmakers,” the four researchers wrote. “Instead, our findings suggest that AB5 was associated with a significant decline in self-employment and overall employment in California.”

That could have significant implications for the Department of Labor’s (DOL) recently announced attempt at duplicating California’s policy across the rest of the country.

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