by | ARTICLES, BIDEN, BLOG, SOCIAL SECURITY
President Biden is cutting Social Security by 23% for every single recipient across the board. This is the inevitable effect of his continued demand that there will be no entitlement reform. This should terrify absolutely everyone. Within the next 8-10 years, when the Social Security trust fund is depleted, Social Security recipients will look at their bank account and see that their benefits have been slashed. This is a mathematical fact.
President Biden is lying to each and every last one of us, by denying the inevitability of his idiotic refusal to make any meaningful changes to fix Social Security. Currently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates that of the over 46 million Americans receiving Social Security retirement benefits… 21% of married couples and 45% of single persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. That number is only going to continue rising as life expectancy rises and more people begin to rely on social security. You should be angry; President Biden’s actions will cause significant harm to every American.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, LAW, POTUS, SOCIAL SECURITY
In a now-deleted Tweet written a week before midterms, President Biden tried to take credit for the Social Security increases that recipients will receive in 2023. The White House twitter account gleefully announced that “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership.”
The problem is that Social Security increases are based on a formula known as COLA, or cost-of-living adjustment, which measures inflation and the Consumer Price Index. The CPI was up 8.7% in the year-over-year comparison and therefore, seniors will receive an 8.7% adjustment.
It’s worth it to note that this increase is actually the largest since 1981, not just 10 years, because inflation is the worst it has been in four decades. One could argue that indeed it is his leadership (via his atrocious economic policies, mind you) that is the basis for the escalation in prices. But COLA increases and decreases have been tied to the CPI since the 1970s. That’s the law, not the President.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, HYPOCRISY
Biden told one of the biggest whoppers of his presidency during a speech today when he went after oil and gas companies and accused them of “war profiteering” after companies posted record profits. But what he purposefully left out was the fact that his own war on energy has directly contributed to the situation. Don’t forget that Biden once vowed to “end fossil fuels”.
It is laughable that Biden chastised Exxon, Shell, and other companies, saying “They have a responsibility to act in the interest of their consumers, their community and their country, to invest in America by increasing production and refining capacity” when one of his very first acts of his presidency was to cancel the permit on the Keystone pipeline so that it came to a screeching halt.
One week after taking office, he delivered on his campaign promises to ban “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters” by signing an Executive Order doing just that.
Emboldened by Biden’s alternative energy push, three Democrats submitted the “Fossil Free Finance Act” to Congress in September 2021, which would have ordered “the Fed to take unprecedented steps meant to steer financial support away from oil, gas, coal and companies by unraveling banks who refuse to comply.”
Likewise, Biden pushed for Sarah Bloom Raskin to be named to the Federal Reserve Board until she withdrew her nomination in March 2022. Raskin’s vision was that financial regulators move toward policies that will “allocate capital and align portfolios toward sustainable investments that do not depend on carbon and fossil fuels.”
If there is any actual “war profiteering,” it’s the war on fossil fuels Biden and the Democrats have been waging, causing oil and gas companies to change their investment strategies since they have been stymied by this administration since day one.
Even worse, Biden continued his war by threatening to impose a new tax on excess earnings if companies don’t start investing and lowering prices, saying, “if they don’t, they’re going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions.” But such a tax, should it come to fruition, would actually discourage investment in new production, thereby exacerbating the very problem that Biden himself has manufactured!
After two years of demonizing the oil and gas industry and choking off new growth, Biden now wants to blame them for higher energy prices. But who in their right mind would invest in such an odious (and now economically risky) environment? This is exactly what Biden wanted, except now it is threatening the Democrats’ standings in the upcoming midterm elections.
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.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, HYPOCRISY, TAXES
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is a scam, and the very name insults the American populace. Our President, Joe Biden, was quoted saying, “Yesterday, I spoke with both Senator Schumer and Manchin and offered my support for a historic agreement to fight inflation and lower costs for American families. It’s called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” Inflation is quickly approaching 10% the last time we’ve seen it this high was over 40 years ago, in the 1980s. The bitter irony is that the Biden administration knows what causes inflation, yet virtually nothing in the new law will make matters better.
The claim is that the bill is “fighting inflation” because it reduces the deficit by $300 billion over ten years, which is 1% of GDP. But the deficit reduction doesn’t start until the fourth year, so for the next three years it makes inflation worse!
And let’s look at the numbers. How could a $300 billion reduction in the deficit over ten years be a massive step forward in fighting inflation when the law passed last year increased the deficit by an estimated $1.7 trillion in one year? Utter nonsense.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is a spending bill, first and foremost, and a repackaging of the American Rescue Plan of 2021. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, they could not disguise the stench; trash is funny like that. The main push in the bill is to encourage investment in renewable energies and allow Medicare to negotiate Rx drug prices. God forbid we cut the deficit by meaningful reductions in spending.
Regardless of your feelings on energy consumption, it is undisputed that green energy is more expensive than traditional forms, evidenced by the fact that we pump billions every year into the industry via subsidies to keep it afloat. We know that the inflation we are experiencing is due to a surplus of money in the economy and demand exceeding supply. Yet, this administration’s solution is to put further pressure on supply via taxes and thereby disincentivizing production. Furthermore, increasing corporate tax rates will put additional pressure on supply; none of Biden’s plans make any sense.
The Democrats claim that the bill will reduce the deficit by roughly $300 billion spread over ten years is meaningless. With government spending approaching $7 trillion in 2021 (with a $3 trillion deficit), and the two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth (recession) we’re experiencing, the light at the end of the tunnel just got a lot further away.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, FREEDOM
Let’s concede the claim that man-made climate change is real and poses significant harm to humanity as a whole. That statement is then used as a rallying cry to inflict irrevocable damage on today’s generation, both the rich and the poor. So often in American society, we see a problem, and the immediate reaction of our politicians is to invoke a top-down approach to “fix it,” which often does more harm than good. Frederich Hayek said it best, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
The Biden Administration and the Democratic party have started a never-ending push to wage war on Climate Change and reduce our carbon footprint. Well, how’s it going you may ask? Per one model, eliminating all U.S. emissions would reduce global temperature by less than 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Our current administration would offer you up, today’s citizens, in hopes of saving some future person that has yet to exist in their futile war. They throw us in the fire, yet the Earth grows hotter still; their reprehensible actions are all for naught.
The EPA says, “the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.” The Biden Administration then takes that statement and runs with it. Even with theoretical efficiency in their crusade, the costs of their policies would be staggering. The economy would, in aggregate, lose $7.7 trillion of gross domestic product (GDP) through 2040, which is $87,000 per family of four. What then should we do, you may ask? Well, the best shot we have going forward is a market-based approach. The government should reduce red tape surrounding proven superior energy sources, like fusion energy, reduce unrealistic mandates, and allow people to innovate as they do best. In short, this administration needs to cease and desist their self-proclaimed climate war; the cost paid in American lives is too steep.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, COVID, ECONOMY, POTUS
As Biden’s presidency continues, it’s become increasingly apparent that he is wholly . unconcerned about the economic wellbeing of our citizens. But what’s less apparent to most people is that he’s taking his cues straight from China’s president, Xi Jinping.
Over the last year, Xi has been targeting wealthy Chinese billionaires, such as Alibaba, for being too successful or not being as aligned with his Communist platform. Using tactics such as increasing regulation or restricting their abilities to do certain things, the value of many successful Chinese companies declined rapidly. Xi claimed that the billionaire businessmen were getting out of control and too powerful, and it was worth it to him to tank their companies to show that communism and being a good citizen was more important than their good fortune or the economic well-being of all individuals.
Biden is doing the same thing. What Xi did unilaterally, Biden needs to get passed in Congress. He is going after the billionaires even if it screws the little guy too. This is why he has consistently pushed to raise corporate rates, implement a global minimum tax, double GILTI taxes, and raise individual rates (which impacts millions of small businesses, by the way). Now this “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” proposal is just another scheme to punish wealthy Americans to fund absurd government programs. Nevermind that it is purposefully misnamed — it affects more than just billionaires and taxes more than just income — in an effort to sell the idea to legislators and the general public.
Xi took down the economically successful men and women in his country to bolster communism and Joe Biden is following his playbook. He’s happy to punish the wealthy in order to make them more responsible citizens. Biden has repeatedly stated that his goal is a more equitable economy by ensuring corporations and high-income earners pay their fair share (though they are already paying far more than their fair share). Xi would certainly approve.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, POTUS, TAXES
The concept of an American President (Biden) going after people making a lot of money displays an absolute lack of familiarity with how people get wealthy. As a CPA, I can attest to the fact that the most common way people accumulate massive wealth is either by a huge amount of hard work (creating a successful business) or selling an asset (an invention, real estate, etc).
Many people who file tax returns with large amounts of income, such as selling a business for $10 million, will have a multi-million capital gains amount. It’s not that the higher income earners have some sort of capital gains loophole, but it’s really that the wealthy have done something well to attain the American Dream. And when they do strike it rich through their effort, part of their wealth is treated as a capital gain and it gives those earners a chance to keep a large part of it. Knowing that there is a low capital gains rate is an extra incentive to work hard and be successful.
Many of my clients are wealthy, and I have experienced time and again that they will come to me and ask the question: if they are successful, can they keep the majority of their money?” This is because they know that the government wants to take more from the highest income earners who have proven their success, while at the same time, the government is quite happy to let them lose on their own on their particular endeavor.
Most in the top echelon get there from a one-time income-producing significant event. To punish such success by imposing a massively high capital gains tax only serves to drive a deeper wedge between the have- and have-nots in an attempt to level the economic playing field. Biden would do well to maintain the lower the capital gains rate and restore a sense of trust with those who work hard, contribute to the economy, and attain the American Dream.
