by | BIDEN, BLOG, GOVERNMENT
The Jones Act, as you know, requires that all cargo shipped between U.S. ports be carried by U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-owned ships. It makes any business involving shipping between Puerto Rico and the mainland impossible, thereby currently impeding the recovery effort from Hurricane Ian. Ships with supplies and fuel are ready to aid the people of Puerto Rico — if only they could dock there.
The Jones Act puts an unnecessary burden on our U.S territories; exempting Puerto Rico from this provision would provide disaster relief. Repealing the Jones Act permanently would actually give Puerto Rico a much-needed burst of commerce and lower the cost of living. As it is now, the Jones Act limits international competition for imports and creates higher taxes on basic necessities such as energy and food.
At the very least, President Biden should provide a temporary waiver of the Jones Act but the right thing to do in the long run would be to retire it completely.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, COVID, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT
How can Biden get away with saying the pandemic is over, at the very same time his attorney wrote the legal opinion that debt forgiveness was constitutional because of the COVID State of Emergency? He is trying to play both sides.
On 60 Minutes this past Sunday, President Biden declared that “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid.” He furthered this assertion by reiterating “the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
Since Biden says it’s over, then it’s time for the enduring COVID State of Emergency to be over. But that poses a problem for him. With that, any additional COVID funding should also cease. He needs to declare the pandemic over right before midterms to show that he and the Democrats have been successful in something since he took office. But he is simultaneously hanging on to the enduring COVID State of Emergency and using that to justify his unconstitutional student loan forgiveness scheme.
Biden is a criminal liar and simply cannot have it both ways.
by | ARTICLES, BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY
What is happening, as demonstrated by the Census, is that the government largess is taking some people out of poverty, but it is having an even greater and more dangerously perverse effect. It’s making people overall worse economically and preventing them from moving up to the middle class while expanding the lower levels and destroying a generation of minorities. Biden is the poster child for the very people he’s supposed to be helping and he’s made it worse for them. This article in the WSJ, “How Welfare Left Americans Poorer” explains the terrible and true cost of transfer payments. I have reproduced it below.
The Census Bureau released its 2021 income report Tuesday, and the political spin is that unprecedented pandemic transfer payments lifted millions out of poverty. It’s more accurate to say that most Americans are worse off than before the pandemic owing in part to . . . unprecedented transfer payments.
Lifting government lockdowns last year should have caused millions of Americans to return to work and raised average incomes. That didn’t happen. Real median pre-tax household income fell $402 last year to $70,784 and was $2,024 lower than in 2019. The total number of workers didn’t budge between 2020 and 2021.
Millions of Americans whose hours were cut during lockdowns did return to full-time work, but many laid-off Americans stayed home. The number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 11.1 million last year, but their real median earnings declined 4.1%.
Rising prices (see nearby) may have reduced the incentive to work as the purchasing power of paychecks declined. But the Census report also underscores the outsize effects of the March 2021 $1.9 trillion spending bill, which helped drive the “supplemental” poverty measure (which accounts for transfer payments) to a record low even though the official poverty rate didn’t improve.
The $300 a week unemployment benefit boost finally lapsed last September, but transfer payments on the whole grew last year. These included the $3,600 child tax credit; $1,400 payments for each adult and child; food stamps averaging about $230 a person a month; expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies, and more.
The ACA subsidy enhancement, in particular, has enabled pre-Medicare age Americans to retire early. Adding up all of last year’s government largesse, a lower-income family with two young children would have received nearly $24,000 in “free” cash, which doesn’t even include the cost of government health coverage.
We’ve written about how a March 2020 law restricts states from ending Medicaid for people no longer financially eligible as long as the national pandemic emergency is in effect. The same law suspended food stamp work requirements and raised benefits. When leisure pays as much as work, fewer work.
Democrats highlight the Census Bureau’s finding that 1.1 million fewer Americans were without health insurance last year than in 2020. But the bigger story was the shift from private to government health coverage. The number of people with private plans fell by 1.5 million while enrollment in Medicaid increased by 3.2 million and Medicare by 1.7 million.
This underscores warnings that Medicaid and ACA subsidy expansions might induce small employers to drop coverage, especially as they have to pay more to attract workers. Medicaid spending has increased by about a third during the pandemic and amounted to $33,000 last year for each new Medicaid enrollee.
Government had to support struggling Americans when government shut down the economy in 2020. But Democrats used Covid to expand the welfare state long after the crisis has passed. Americans are paying for it via inflation that has eroded their incomes.
Real median post-tax income including transfer payments declined last year by 1% for all households, 2.9% for those without children and 4.2% for seniors. Most Americans are worse off than they would have been had that $1.9 trillion bill never passed.
