The Walt Disney Co. needs Florida more than Florida needs Walt Disney. That’s the latest chapter in this tale of a CEO who followed his woke staff like a lemming off the cliff of cultural politics. Disney employees demanded that Mickey Mouse oppose Florida’s misdescribed “don’t say gay” bill. Now state lawmakers are reacting by putting down a few glue traps.
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The Florida Legislature voted this week to abolish the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which in effect lets Disney World run its own private government. Created by the Legislature in 1967, the district covers about 40 square miles and features two water parks and four theme parks, including the Magic Kingdom. Disney essentially controls land use, environmental protection, fire service, utilities, more than 100 miles of roads, and more. …
The Journal cites a source who knows Disney’s finances and says the district saves the company tens of millions of dollars a year. Without it, services like fixing potholes could revert to county government.
Disney largely funds the Reedy Creek district, which had about $150 million in revenue last year. It also carries close to $1 billion in debt. The mayor of Orange County warned Thursday that if the district goes, then upkeep will “fall to the county’s budgets,” putting “an undue burden on the rest of the taxpayers.” The headaches look large enough that it’s difficult not to wonder about the bill’s effective date. It dissolves the Reedy Creek district on June 1, 2023—time for Disney and Mr. DeSantis to make up.
Are Florida Republicans engaged in unfair political retaliation? “As a matter of first principle,” Mr. DeSantis said last month, “I don’t support special privileges in law, just because a company is powerful.” Live by the corporate carve-out, die by the corporate carve-out. As a matter of political realism, the Reedy Creek district is a perk the state gave Disney. The mystery is why Disney thought it could push around state lawmakers without any pushback.
One answer is that previous corporate political signaling came with little cost and media hosannas. Recall when Major League Baseball pulled its All-Star Game out of Atlanta, as a punishment for Georgia’s new voting law. “Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said. The voting law “does not match Delta’s values,” fretted CEO Ed Bastian.
Did they read the bill? Or did they trust President Biden, who called it “Jim Crow 2.0”? Voting absentee in Georgia is still easier than in New York or Delaware.
The political frenzy in Florida began with a similar dynamic. Early versions of the state’s controversial bill were broader, but here’s the key line in the law that passed: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate.” That language belies the claim that kids with gay siblings or two moms couldn’t talk openly about their families.
At first CEO Bob Chapek told employees that Disney would take no position. “As we have seen time and again, corporate statements do very little to change outcomes or minds,” he wrote. “Instead, they are often weaponized by one side or the other to further divide and inflame.” But inspired by an earlier tweet from former CEO Bob Iger, Disney employees went into open rebellion. Soon Mr. Chapek was groveling to his underlings and calling Florida’s bill a “challenge to basic human rights.”
Perhaps he thought this would be a free way to mollify his staff, but Mr. Chapek misjudged the political moment. Republican voters who have watched companies side with the progressive agenda and silence employees who disagree are fed up. Mr. Chapek was right the first time: Disney’s political foray didn’t stop the Florida law. But it made a lot of people mad, including Disney customers and state lawmakers.
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There’s a warning here to other companies, especially Big Tech and Wall Street, which are mainly based in liberal states but conduct business everywhere. If they try to impose their cultural values, they risk losing Republican allies on the policy issues that matter most to their bottom lines, such as regulation, trade, taxation, antitrust and labor law. Polls show rising GOP hostility to big business, and that is likely to be reflected when Republicans take power.
If good tax policy can’t pass Congress because Republican voters are furious about cultural imperialism from the C-suite, that’s bad for the country. It’s also bad for business. The Disney lesson for CEOs is to stay out of these divisive cultural fights. The lesson for political partisans in the workplace is that their bosses run the office, but they don’t run the country.
If there’s any good to come from the Walt Disney Company’s opposition to Florida’s new parental rights law, it may be in helping to expose the misleading promises of the “corporate social responsibility” movement. …
Disney’s intervention into Florida politics highlights again the problems that arise when businesses stray from their central purpose of creating long-term value for shareholders. This column has been criticizing the 2019 decision by the Business Roundtable to rewrite its principles. All but a handful of the CEOs of large corporations that comprise the group’s membership agreed that year that a corporation should not simply focus on serving shareholders but instead commit to serving a larger universe of vaguely defined “stakeholders.”
The Business Roundtable’s rewrite was a mistake because serving the long-term interests of shareholders necessarily requires executives to treat non-owners fairly—to attract and retain a talented workforce, to provide good value for consumers, to deal reasonably with suppliers, and to respect the laws and customs wherever a business operates. On the other hand, “stakeholders” are often activists pursuing political agendas that they couldn’t persuade voters to approve and for which they won’t have to pay. There’s no good reason to elevate their gripes above the interests of others. Milton Friedman, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in economics, explained more than half a century ago the flaws in such declarations:
What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.
This brings us to Disney and its CEO Bob Chapek, who seems to have decided that some “stakeholders” should drive corporate activism while other “stakeholders” should be ignored. Mr. Chapek’s signature appears on the Roundtable’s current version of its policy:
Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation
Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment and economic opportunity for al
Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications and other services that underpin economic growth.
While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.
The statement continues and specifically includes the following pledge:
Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.
Time will tell how sustainable Disney’s business is over the long term. But how supportive and respectful is a company that presumes to tell the community of Florida parents that they must accept state-sponsored instruction in gender identity for six-year-olds?
In March, after the parental rights bill had passed Florida’s duly-elected state senate, Mr. Chapek issued a statement on behalf of Disney suggesting it was a “challenge to basic human rights.”
This column must have missed the section of the Constitution guaranteeing government employees the right to give sexuality lectures in kindergarten classrooms.
Voters and shareholders beware, Mr. Chapek also announced that he will be using Disney resources to promote his corporate social agenda nationwide:
Starting immediately, we are increasing our support for advocacy groups to combat similar legislation in other states.
Does he not even wish to learn what the “stakeholders” in those other states want for their children? Apparently not, and this should not come as a surprise given the lack of respect he’s extending to his stakeholders in Florida.
Also, how do Disney shareholders benefit from Mr. Chapek’s foray into cultural politics? Some may want to sell their stakes and instead buy shares in a business where the CEO demonstrates corporate responsibility—to the owners.
For what it’s worth, Disney’s stock price dropped 2.78 percent Friday.
Twitter Inc. is in discussions to sell itself to Elon Musk and could finalize a deal as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said, a dramatic turn of events just 10 days after the billionaire unveiled his $43 billion bid for the social-media company.
The two sides met Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal and were making progress, though still had issues to hash out, the people said. There are no guarantee they will reach a deal.
Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made April 14 without saying how he would pay for it, and put in place a so-called poison pill to block him from increasing his stake. But after the Tesla Inc.TSLA -0.37% chief disclosed that he has $46.5 billion in financing and the stock market swooned, Twitter changed its posture and opened the door to negotiations, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Sunday.
Mr. Musk has said from the beginning that his $54.20-a-share offer is his “best and final,” and he reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor again in recent days that he won’t budge on price, some of the people said. The conversations between the two sides were expected to focus on issues including what Mr. Musk would pay should an agreed deal fall apart before being consummated.
Twitter is slated to report first-quarter earnings Thursday and had been expected to weigh in on the bid then, if not sooner.
The potential turnabout on Twitter’s part comes after Mr. Musk met privately Friday with several shareholders of the company to extol the virtues of his proposal while repeating that the board has a “yes-or-no” decision to make, according to people familiar with the matter. He also pledged to solve the free-speech issues he sees as plaguing the platform and the country more broadly, whether his bid succeeds or not, they said.
Mr. Musk made his pitch to select shareholders in a series of video calls, with a focus on actively managed funds, the people said, in hopes that they could sway the company’s decision.
Mr. Musk said he sees no way Twitter management can get the stock to his offer price on its own, given the issues in the business and a persistent inability to correct them. It couldn’t be learned if he detailed specific steps he would take, though he has tweeted about wanting to reduce the platform’s reliance on advertising, as well as to make simpler changes such as allowing longer tweets.
Some shareholders rallied behind him following the meetings. Lauri Brunner, who manages Thrivent Asset Management LLC’s large-cap growth fund, sees Mr. Musk as a skilled operator. “He has an established track record at Tesla,” she said. “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.” Minneapolis-based Thrivent has a roughly 0.4% stake in Twitter worth $160 million and is also a Tesla shareholder.
Mr. Musk already has said he is considering taking his bid directly to shareholders by launching a tender offer. Even if he was to get significant shareholder support in a tender offer—which is far from guaranteed—he would still need a way around the company’s poison pill, a legal maneuver it employed that effectively blocks him from building his stake to 15% or more.
One oft-employed tactic to push a bid, seeking to gain control of the target’s board, is out of reach for now. Twitter’s directors have staggered terms, meaning a dissident shareholder would need multiple years to gain control rather than a single shareholder vote. Twitter tried last year to phase out the staggered board terms given that they are frowned upon by the corporate-governance community, but not enough shareholders voted on the measure. The company is attempting to do so again at this year’s annual meeting set for May 25. Only two directors are up for re-election, and it is too late for Mr. Musk to nominate his own.
Twitter’s shares have been trading below his offer price since he made the bid April 14, typically a sign that shareholders are skeptical a deal will happen, though they did close up roughly 4% Friday at $48.93, the day after he unveiled financing for the deal. Mr. Musk has indicated that if the current bid fails, he could sell his stake, which totals more than 9%.
The financing included more than $25 billion in debt coming from nearly every global blue-chip investment bank aside from the two advising Twitter. The remainder was $21 billion in equity Mr. Musk would provide himself, likely by selling existing stakes in his other businesses such as Tesla. The speed at which the financing came together and the market selloff in recent days—which makes the all-cash offer look relatively more attractive—likely contributed to Twitter’s greater willingness to entertain Mr. Musk’s proposal.
Twitter’s board should engage with Mr. Musk since its stock has “gone nowhere” since the company went public eight years ago, Jeff Gramm, a portfolio manager with Bandera Partners LLC, a New York hedge fund with about $385 million under management, said earlier. The firm last bought Twitter shares in February and owns about 950,000 overall, which accounts for about 11% of its portfolio.
Mr. Gramm said Twitter’s board can’t walk away from Mr. Musk’s offer without providing an alternative that gives real value to shareholders. “I’m not sure what that can be at this stage besides finding a higher bid,” he said.
This will give Twitter employees a new attack of the vapors this morning.
Elon Musk is speaking to investors who could partner with him on a bid for Twitter, sources close to the matter told The Post.
A new plan that includes partners could be announced within days, those sources said.
One possibility, the sources said: teaming with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners, which was planning to co-invest with him in 2018 when he was considering taking Tesla private.
Silver Lake’s Co-CEO Egon Durban is a Twitter board member and led Musk’s deal team during the 2018 failed effort to take Tesla private, sources said. Silver Lake declined to comment.
Whether Musk would present Twitter with an entirely new offer — perhaps raising his current bid — or whether new partners would simply go in on a purchase with him isn’t clear. A Musk spokesperson declined to comment.
But that pill may not stop other entities or people from acquiring their own shares of up to 15% of the company. Those owners could partner with Musk to force a sale, make changes in the executive ranks or push for other overhauls of the company.
Twitter hasn’t yet filed its shareholder rights plan with the SEC, though it announced the poison pill in a statement. The SEC filing will give more details on whether it prevents like-minded investors from teaming to buy a greater than 15% stake.
“This is not over,” a source close to the situation said.
Musk has announced he presently owns 9.1% of Twitter. He offered Thursday to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. Shares last traded at $45.08 each, as there is skepticism that he will succeed with his current take-it-or-leave-it proposal.
Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said on Thursday that, as one of the major shareholders in Twitter, he rejected the proposed takeover bid.
Meanwhile, Twitter may have options besides just saying no.
Private-equity firm Thoma Bravo told Twitter it is studying the possibility of making a rival offer for the company, Bloomberg and Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources familiar. This comes after The Post reported exclusively Thursday that Thoma Bravo was considering a Twitter bid.
Most have now heard of Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, and a lot of people in the liberal media are freaking out that he would (gasp) restore free speech on the platform, which confirms that its current purpose is to suppress and censor information it does not want you to know.
It is worth knowing who owns Twitter and who it is that determines who and what can be heard, who it is that determines what is “disinformation” that dare not be uttered in the public square.
Twitter is not a bunch of tech hippies in Silicon Valley serving your best interests – it is the richest and most powerful Wall Street oligarchs deciding what you can know.
To wit:
Twitter is how the mainstream media, corporations, politicians, and governments communicate with the general public – less than one million tune in to CNN, but tens of millions see their tweets on smartphones
It seems odd that our most important national conversations are limited to 280 characters, but that is why I don’t tweet.
In 2020, Twitter cancelled thousands of voices that its owners did not want us to hear – it suppressed information that contradicted media narratives on covid, the riots in our cities, political campaigns, and the elections themselves.
Twitter’s most blatant act of partisan activism occurred in October, when it shut down the New York Post account and prohibited any discussions of the Hunter Biden laptop unless they concurred it was Russian disinformation.
When the media later admitted the authenticity of the laptop and its contents, a survey of Biden voters (half of whom had not heard of it) showed that 15% of them would have voted differently had they known it was real. Mission accomplished.
Its stock price rose from $25 in February of 2020 to $75 in February of 2021– censorship was very profitable for Twitter’s Wall Street owners, and they lobbied the administration they installed to make their truth-arbiter status a permanent fixture of the regulatory state.
Since then, facts have escaped its firewall through alternative media and its central narrative themes of 2020 were discredited; Twitter stock fell to $34 in February of 2022. Free speech is bad for business on Wall Street.
Facebook followed Twitter’s censorship lead (or vice versa, who knows?) in 2020, and its stock price surged from $156 to $376 and it too lobbied its new administration for regulations that would secure its truth-arbiter status.
Zuckerberg took things a step farther – in addition to silencing undesirable (to him) views, he invested half a billion dollars into the private management of 2020 voting itself through his 503c foundation the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
The distribution of CTCL funds was finally disclosed in 2021 in its IRS Form 900 filing, and its allocations to states and cities debunks its claim of noble neutrality.
Georgia and North Carolina are two southern states of similar population and demographic make-up. Zuckerberg “invested” $7 million in NC and $45 million in Georgia – $9 per vote cast. Mission accomplished.
As 18 states began looking into the propriety and legality of Zuckerberg’s drop-boxes and ballot harvesting operations, alienated subscribers left FB and the stock price tumbled to under $200 in February of this year. Transparency is also bad for business on Wall Street.
Elon Musk is not known to be a partisan one way or another; his only statement on the matter in recent years is, “I am not a conservative” and he is registered as an independent. Presidential job approval among independents has dropped 49 pts in the last year and is currently 26% and leaking oil.
The blue-check media’s talking points this week are quite remarkable – free speech and transparency are existential threats to democracy, they tell us. Musk must be stopped, they feverishly plead.
We should be mindful of who “they” are – the six giant corporations who own 90% of the media outlets, the Wall Street oligarchs who own Twitter and Facebook, and the office holders who dutifully read their scripts
If that is what democracy has come to, then bring on the free speech and transparency that threaten it – that would be a good thing. The owners of Twitter will probably not sell it to Musk, but major acquisitions take all sorts of twists and turns so time will tell.
I do know, however, what other media figures think Musk’s influence on Twitter will be. They think it will be bad — very bad, bad! How none of them see what a self-own this is is beyond me. After spending the last six years practically turgid with joy as other unaccountable billionaires tweaked the speech landscape in their favor, they’re suddenly howling over the mere rumor that a less censorious fat cat might get to sit in one of the big chairs. O the inhumanity!
A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be upset at the prospect of wealthy individuals controlling speech. As more than one person has pointed out, this is a bizarre thing to be worrying about all of the sudden, since it’s been the absolute reality in America for a while. …
Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage:
We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.
That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the pages of… the Washington Post! A newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos complaining about rich people controlling “channels of communication” just might be the never-released punchline of Monty Python’s classic “Funniest Joke in the World” skit.
Many detractors went the Pao route, suddenly getting religion about concentrated wealth having control over the public discourse. In a world that had not yet gone completely nuts, that is probably where the outrage campaign would have ended, since the oligarchical control issue could at least be a legitimate one, if printed in a newspaper not owned by Jeff Bezos.
However, they didn’t stop there. Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they’re terrified he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a less-censored world:
I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Even thatperson would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.
Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted” content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.
My blue-checked friends in media worked very hard to create this thriving intellectual paradise, so of course they’re devastated to imagine that a single rich person could even try to walk in and upend the project. Couldn’t Musk just leave Twitter in the hands of responsible, speech-protecting shareholders like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal? …
Even though it hasn’t happened yet, why wait to start comparing Musk’s Twitter takeover to the Fourth Reich? Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis of CUNY certainly thinks it isn’t too soon:
Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.
The most incredible reaction in my mind came not from a journalist per se, but former labor secretary Robert Reich. His Guardian piece, “Elon Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense,” is a marvel of pretzel-logic, an example of what can happen to a smart person who thinks he’s in Plato’s cave when he’s actually up his own backside. The opening reads:
The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies.
Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was.
Reich goes on to argue… well, he doesn’t actually argue, he just makes a series of statements that don’t logically follow one another, before dismounting into a remarkable conclusion:
Musk says he wants to “free” the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now… dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.
That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.
Reich starts by talking about how Vladimir Putin is cracking down using overt censorship, progresses to talking about how making the Internet less “accountable” is bad, then ends by saying Musk is like Putin, and Trump, and every evildoer on earth, again before Musk has even done anything at all. He may be trying to say that Musk could use algorithms to silently push reality in the direction he favors, but this is the exact opposite of Vladimir Putin passing laws outlawing certain kinds of speech. Any attempt to argue that dictators are also speech libertarians is automatically ridiculous.
More to the point, where has all this outrage about private control over speech been previously? I don’t remember people like Reich and Jarvis, or Parker Molloy, or Scott Dworkin, or Timothy O’Brien at Bloomberg (“Elon Musk’s Twitter Investment Could Be Bad News for Free Speech”), bemoaning the vast power over speech held by people like Sergei Brin, Larry Page, or even Jack Dorsey once upon a time. That’s because the Bluenoses in media and a handful of hand-wringers on the Hill successfully paper-trained all those other Silicon Valley heavyweights, convincing them to join on with their great speech-squelching project.
It’s become increasingly clear over the last six years that these people want it both ways. They don’t want to break up the surveillance capitalism model, or come up with a transparent, consistent, legalistic, fair framework for dealing with troublesome online speech. No, they actually want tech companies to remain giant black-box monopolies with opaque moderation systems, so they can direct the speech-policing power of those companies to desired political ends.
When someone like Reich says, “Billionaires like Musk have shown time and again they consider themselves above the law. And to a large extent, they are,” he’s talking about an authoritarian framework that already exists in the speech world, just with different billionaires at the helm. What’s got him cheesed off isn’t the concept of privatized civil liberties — we’re already there — but the idea that one particular billionaire might not be on board with the kinds of arbitrary corporate decisions Reich likes, like removing Trump (“necessary to protect American democracy,” he says).
When I first started to cover the content-moderation phenomenon back in 2018, I was repeatedly told by colleagues that I was worrying over trivialities, that there couldn’t possibly be any negative fallout to coordinated backroom deals to de-platform the likes of Alex Jones, or to the Senate demanding Facebook, Twitter, and Google start zapping more “Russian disinformation” accounts. Even when I pointed out that it wasn’t just right-wingers and Russians vanishing, but also Palestinian activists and police brutality sites and a growing number of small independent news outlets, most of my colleagues didn’t care. Because they were so sure they’d never be targeted, the credentialed media were mostly all for the most aggressive possible conception of “content moderation.”
It was beyond obvious that self-described progressives would eventually regret hounding people like Mark Zuckerberg to start getting into the editorial business, and that pushing Silicon Valley to take a bigger interest in controlling speech was flirting with disaster. Of course they would someday wake up to find these companies owned by people less sympathetic to their niche political snobbery, and be horrified, and wish they’d never urged virtually unregulated tech oligopolies to start meddling in the speech soup.
Now, here we are. To all those people who are flipping out and shuddering over the possibilities (CNBC: “If he owns the whole place…? The Orange man is probably going to be back!”), remember that you didn’t mind when other unaccountable tycoons started down this road. You cheered it on, in fact, and backlash from someone with different political opinions and real money was 100% predictable. This is the system you asked for. Buy the ticket, take the ride, you goofs!
I read a Facebook comment (which now I can’t find) that said he didn’t care what Musk’s politics are or how he would run Twitter if his bid is successful; the reaction from lefties was worth it. Collateral damage or creative destruction, if you will. That’s how I feel.
Tuesday started exactly as badly for Joe Biden as the White House knew it would. The Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning announced that consumer prices rose 1.2 percent in March and were up 8.5 percent over a year earlier. That is the fastest rise in forty years.
The numbers reveal the problem with the administration’s effort to blame inflation on Russia. “Putin’s price hike” is only part of the story. Prices for all items except for food and energy rose by 6.5 percent year on year. And even the more complicated story that the administration sometimes tells — one that cites Covid disruption and Chinese lockdowns as adding to rising prices for consumer goods — ignores the most awkward fact of all for this administration: the inflation problem is significantly worse in the United States than it is in other advanced economies.
Why is this the case? Recent research by economists at the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco comes to a pretty clear conclusion: “Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about three percentage points by the end of 2021.”
Meanwhile, the president denies the existence of any trade offs when it comes to government spending and price rises. “The American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money. Simply not true,” he claimed in a speech at a recent retreat for House Democrats. This is not a throwaway line by a geriatric president but the statement of a delusion held across the Democratic establishment. (Thank God for Joe Manchin.)
The economic news keeps getting worse and the administration does very little to suggest it has a handle on the situation. Around the same time as the inflation figures broke this morning, Ron Klain was retweeting snarky jokes about turkey shortages at Thanksgiving. A small thing, but not the work of a man aware that he is on the frontline of a major crisis.
The hard truth for the White House is that there may only be so much the Biden administration can do about the problem. Today Biden will announce that he is waiving EPA regulations on ethanol to allow the sale of higher ethanol blend gas this summer, a small but welcome tweak. The most important thing within Biden’s control is the avoidance of further harm: don’t splash the cash on all manner of progressive policies that risk making things worse. And yet the Democratic feeding frenzy is only limited by votes in the Senate, rather than any sense of sensible economic stewardship. But even if Biden sees the error of his ways, the mess that he helped get America into may not be one that he can get America out of.
That unappealing job falls to Fed Chair Jay Powell. Reining in rapid inflation without tipping the economy into recession is, historically speaking, not something that many Fed chairs have managed to pull off. All the options the American economy now faces risk making people poorer. Just as there are costs to overheating the economy with taxpayers’ money, so too are there costs to fixing that problem. That’s one reason why stoking price rises is such an unforgivable offense. And, come November, why Biden may pay a deservedly high political price for this mistake.
An award-winning newspaper did a story about U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s coming to town. When asked whether government spending, specifically infrastructure bills, should be taking place given current inflation:
Baldwin said current inflation — reported at 8.5 percent Tuesday morning — is the result of “the stimulative effect that was experienced by the various resources that went to families to help cope with job loss or temporary income displacement … people had resources through that and tax cuts, etc., and the supplies were in very short supply because of supply chains and other things. So you saw that, and then of course with Russia’s immoral invasion of Ukraine, the shock effect of perceived shortness of petroleum shot up the gas prices, and so we have to also look at the possibility of price gouging, since there wasn’t a real shortage; it was the shock effect of a perceived future shortage. But those two, I think, account for the inflation we’re seeing much more than the infrastructure bill.”
If you can discern an answer in all that, maybe you should be a political speech writer,
Thursday marks Opening Day of the 2022 Major League Baseball season …
… weather permitting …
… which means it’s open season for hot takes about how to fix what ails the National Pastime—disputes between labor and management, declining attendance and TV viewership, increasingly dull on-field product, etc.
The New York Times Wednesday probably won the MLB preseason hate-clicks derby by publishing a Matthew Walther op-ed under the headline, “Baseball Is Dying. The Government Should Take It Over.” It’s at least semi-satirical, so not worth getting exercised over (beyond the basic responses of “No it isn’t,” and “No it shouldn’t”), but both the essay and the spectacle of an ambivalent Opening Day are timely reminders that much of what plagues the sport is not solvable by government, it emanates from government.
It’s weird that baseball would still require rescuing, given that Congress as recently as 2018 passed the Save America’s Pastime Act (see how semi-satire works?). That law, which probably never could have been passed as a standalone bill, was actually crammed into a must-pass omnibus spending whatever, and as such is a fine example of what happens when you mix government with baseball.
Sold both by gullible congresscritters and arms-twisted Minor League Baseball (MiLB) owners as the last, best hope for maintaining small-town professional ball, the act in fact was something closer to the opposite: a way for bottomless-pocketed Major League Baseball (MLB)—which pays for, and dictates terms to, the captive feeder leagues—to use the threat of franchise-contraction for a federal exemption from labor laws, so that minor leaguers could continue being paid as low as $1,100 a month for their seasonal work.
Within seven months of the act’s passage, MLB started leaking out the names of MiLB franchises that would be euthanized anyway. By December 2020, the deed was done—40 of the original 160 teams were summarily severed. As I wrote in a feature on the topic last year, “Local governments were suddenly on the hook for a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of investment in event spaces that no longer held events.”
Hmmm, why would local governments invest in professional sporting facilities? Let’s hit the refresh button on one of the worst recurring examples of mixing public sector activity with a private sector business: Stadium welfare.
Giving out subsidies and tax breaks for sports business owners is self-evidently terrible enough, as have concluded virtually every non-corrupted economist who has ever studied the issue. (The eminent domain used for these projects, too, constitute abuse egregious enough to inspire Ry Cooder albums.) But let’s not sleep on how such a culture of welfare dependency has been bad for the recipients, and especially to fans of the allegedly boosted sport.
By acclamation, the single most spectacular facility to watch a football game is SoFi Stadium, home to both the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, and host to the most recent Super Bowl. Unlike virtually every other National Football League facility constructed over the past three decades, SoFi was built without government subsidies.
In baseball, the handsomest stadium I’ve ever set foot in is Oracle Park, home to the San Francisco Giants. Opened in 2000, it was the first ballpark built without public money since the 1960s. Why, it’s almost as if people who spend their own money on a thing take extra care to make it real purty!
Self-funders are also incentivized to stay put, rather than jilting the local fan base. “When governments become landlords,” I wrote last year, “sports businesses, no matter how deep their pockets, start acting like tenants: always eyeing the exits for a potentially better deal. If you build it, they will leave.”
Baseball doesn’t need to be nationalized, it needs to be privatized—no more subsidies, no more finger-wagging congressional hearings, no more State of the Union address moralizing, no more unique-to-this-one-sport carve outs from federal law. It’s time for these welfare queens to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and compete for audience share as if their bottom lines depended on that as much as it does on the ribbon-cutting innumeracy of dull-witted politicians.
When asked about high oil prices, alleged President Biden callously said, “Can’t do much right now… Russia is responsible.”
Failure is not just a condition. Failure, Inc. is the name of a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate Democrat Party.
As if assigning something a Twitter hashtag makes it real, “Putin’s price increase” is just the latest in childishly stupid narratives emanating from Democrat cake holes in response to the crippling rise in energy costs.
Let us not forget, no matter how hard the media tries to memory hole it, Biden’s energy policy is working exactly as planned.
Biden:
Said at a campaign rally in February of 2020, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.”
Said there would be “no more coal plants.“
Suggested in December of 2019 that if coal miners lose their job due to his policies they should “learn to code.”
Said of fossil fuel company executives, “we should put them in jail”.
Endorsed a carbon tax on the American people, which will force households to pay much higher gasoline, heating, and cooling bills.
Endorsed a fracking ban.
On his first day in office, revoked the Keystone XL pipeline construction permits, throwing hundreds of people out of work and killing a natural gas boom that was underway.
The left is claiming that “Biden approved more drilling permits in his first year than Trump did in his.”
Numerically, this is true – but let us look at the reality.
While President Trump inherited an Obama era permitting process intentionally designed to issue as few permits as grudgingly possible, Biden inherited a streamlined one that cut permitting time drastically. As a result of an Executive Order issued by President Trump, in 2016, the Bureau of Land Management shifted to all-electronic filing. Permit approval times dropped from approximately 200 days to 120 days and then to just 63 days, enabling the Trump administration cut in half long backlogs oil and gas permits, clearing nearly 500 permits that had been pending for 3 years or longer.
President Trump, responding to Biden’s “end fossil fuel” comment said, “Oh, that’s a big statement. He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”
The reality is that the Democrats are maintaining plausible deniability as they are trying to destroy the cheapest and greatest concentration of energy man has ever discovered, hydrocarbons, by fighting a bureaucratic war against the industry.
Paid liar and spokeshole, Jen Psaki now claims there are 9,000 federal leases outstanding that the oil companies are not utilizing. Energy Information Agency does show over 9,000 leases issued, but that notwithstanding, the reality is that Biden has appointed and installed climate zealots and absolute antagonists in leadership at Federal Reserve, the EPA and Department of Energy and Interior.
The EPA, FERC, the SEC and the Federal Reserve are all also actively working against new oil and gas production, particularly the EPA and FERC. Woke corporations and funds are leaning on ESG scores to prevent funding of the oil and gas industry as a whole.
Larry Kudlow quotes oil entrepreneur, Cecil O’Brate, CEO of American Warrior Oil, as saying:
“President Biden, on day one of his presidency, made it his top priority to cripple American oil and gas producers. His administration has axed progress on the Keystone Pipeline, shut down leases on federal lands, encouraged woke Wall Street to divest from fossil fuels, and installed absolute antagonists in leadership at Federal Reserve, the EPA and Department of Interior.”
Earlier in Biden’s term, an offshore lease auction was held, but is result was challenged in court and the Biden administration has just sat on their hands and let the challenge go unanswered. This allows them to say they aren’t withholding new leases while effectively withholding new leases.
Obama could not prevent the oil boom because it happened on private lands, so one would assume that could happen again, without federal lands. But let us not forget that private development is subject to federal opposition from any or all of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, NEPA, or other federal statutes that would block drilling, which is happening.
Biden’s bureaucracy is doing just that.
Just a few short weeks ago the Biden administration halted new drilling in a legal fight over climate costs. The Times pointed out that the Interior Department is pausing new federal oil and gas leases and that no new onshore federal leases have been issued under Biden.
Steven Moore, writing in the WSJ before the 2020 election, predicted it all:
“The truth is, if a Democrat is elected in 2020, they would ban nuclear energy, gas powered cars, plastic straws, plastic bags, coal power plants, fracking, offshore drilling, pipeline building, exporting fossil fuels, and more.”
Predictions are that gasoline at the pump could get to the ten to thirteen dollar a gallon level before this is over.
“Putin’s price increase” my ass.
Biden and his radical Democrats own this human caused disaster, one hundred and ten percent.
Wait! There’s more!
Psaki and the Psakicats are singing the “Oil companies just need to produce” song.
Let me tell you why the number of leases and drilling permits don’t really matter, and this is from someone with over two decades in management in the oil services industry (providing equipment and services to “Big Oil”).
It is extremely costly to drill a well (and that is only one step, and not even the first one) and bring it to production. To get an onshore well from bare earth to production costs tens of millions of dollars. To do the same offshore, we are talking hundreds of millions of investment in money and time.
Who is going to invest in bringing more production on line when the leader of a government hostile to the industry, one that directly and indirectly regulates the industry, says he is going to “end fossil fuel”?
Oil companies could see trillions of sunk investment evaporate with the stroke of a pen.
It isn’t difficult to understand:
Would you go out and buy a car if you knew it was possible you would never be allowed to drive it?
Would you buy a house if you were told by the state you could never live in it?
It really is that simple.It has never been about what is possible, it is about what will be ALLOWED.
[Thursday] this column noted the Washington Post story about White House economists who were refusing to endorse the Biden message tying inflation to corporate consolidation. Now a former Obama Treasury official is taking the president to task for blaming inflation on corporate supply chains. Eventually Mr. Biden will have to stop blaming business and acknowledge his own role and the role of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in fueling the worst inflation in four decades.
The headline over a new op-ed in the New York Times reads: “Biden Keeps Blaming the Supply Chain for Inflation. That’s Dishonest.” Steven Rattner, counselor to the Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, says that the Biden supply-chain excuse is “both simplistic and misleading” and adds:
… supply issues are by no means the root cause of our inflation. Blaming inflation on supply lines is like complaining about your sweater keeping you too warm after you’ve added several logs to the fireplace.
The bulk of our supply problems are the product of an overstimulated economy, not the cause of it. Sure, there have been some Covid-related challenges, such as health-related worker shortages in factories and among transportation workers. But most of our supply problems have been homegrown: Americans have resumed spending freely, and along the way, they have been creating shortages.. All that consumption has resulted from vast amounts of government rescue aid (including three rounds of stimulus checks) and substantial underspending by consumers during the lockdown phase of the Covid crisis…
It’s a classic economic case of “too much money chasing too few goods,” resulting in both higher prices and, given the extreme surge in demand, shortages.
Mr. Rattner is not coming late to the anti-inflation party. For more than a year, he’s been warning about the problems likely to result from the Biden agenda. And in his new Times op-ed, the former Obama Treasury official offers useful advice for Team Biden:
For its part, the White House needs to be more honest as it rolls out initiatives…the high prices of meat and hearing aids, both of which Mr. Biden has vowed to address, are not at the heart of the current problem…
The Biden administration needs to shift its approach. In particular, with the economy steaming along, it should make deficit reduction as important as its other initiatives… But here again, Mr. Biden has been disingenuous. His Build Back Better plan claims to be deficit neutral, but that assertion is made credible only by using the fuzziest math.
If the White House and its allies among congressional Democrats need further persuasion that it’s time to restrain federal spending, perhaps they’ll heed a new warning from one of America’s foremost government-friendly economists. Bloomberg’s Mike Dorning reports:
Several of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats are spearheading a proposal to suspend the federal 18-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax until next year and others are drafting a bill to lower insulin prices. Democrats are also considering pulling out popular pieces of President Joe Biden’s stalled economic agenda addressing prescription drug and child care costs.
“None of these ideas so far will help to a meaningful degree, and could do some harm because they could juice up demand at a time supply is constrained by the pandemic and worsen inflation,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics.
Other than the sensible idea of cutting the gas tax, the rest of the agenda sounds like still more spending. And when you’ve lost Mark Zandi…
Sadly, the president now seems focused on crafting an empathetic message on inflation rather than reforming the federal policies that inflame it. The Journal’s Catherine Lucey and Andrew Restuccia report from Washington:
President Biden is shifting his message on inflation to show he understands Americans’ economic woes, in the midst of mounting public frustration over rising prices and after pleas from worried Democrats to change his tune.
In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has made personal appeals in his speeches to families facing higher prices for food, gasoline and cars. Addressing county officials this week he said: “I grew up in a family where the price at the pump was felt in the kitchen. Everybody knew. Everybody felt it. I understand.” In Virginia last week, he said: “I know food prices are up, and we’re working to bring them down.”
If he really means that last part, Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1 would be a great time to discuss how he’s going to restrain federal spending and reduce the U.S. tax and regulatory burden on U.S. business. It’s time to encourage the production of more goods and services to soak up all those dollars looking for something to buy.
Super Bowl LVI on Sunday significantly changed after Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. was lost for the game due to a knee injury after his leg was caught on the SoFi Stadium artificial turf. Beckham, who had two catches for 52 yards and a touchdown on three targets, was dominating the league championship game before the injury.
Not only was Beckham unable to play for the rest of Super Bowl LVI, but he has to worry about his future after suffering what is expected to be another torn ACL to the same knee he injured last season while on the Browns, according to CBS Sports NFL insider Jason Las Canfora. Beckham’s injury caused NFL players, current and former, to eliminate the use of field turf at stadiums.
Of course, the $5 billion SoFi Stadium is one of them.
There’s a lot of support for natural grass fields, but what is the “Flip The Turf” campaign? Half of the league’s teams play on artificial turf, which is why players are pushing for change. There are statistics in the campaign to back up why fields should switch from turf to grass.
In the petition, turf fields have:
28% more non-contact lower body injuries.
32% more non-contact knee injuries and 69% more non-contact foot and ankle injuries occurred on turf.
Turf can get up to 60 degrees hotter than natural grass, increasing the rate at which toxic gases are released and ingested.
There are also environmental issues behind the campaign:
Currently, turf can’t be recycled in the US, leading to an estimated 330 million pounds of landfill waste each year, and microplastics in our water and irrigation systems.
On average, one turf field requires over 440,000 pounds of petroleum derivatives. The production of which emits carbon, creates fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming.
Unlike grass, turf does not cool the environment. It does not filter air and water pollutants. It does not fix carbon dioxide or release oxygen. Turf has zero climate benefits.
Players are pushing for change. perhaps Super Bowl LVI may be the breaking point.
(For NFL players accustomed to gas-hogging sports cars and SUVs and flying in private jets to be raising environmental issues is a little hypocritical, but be that as it may ….)
Beckham’s first knee injury happened on artificial turf, at, of all places, Cincinnati. Paul Brown Stadium had grass when it opened, but converted to turf, as did the Houston Texans’ stadium. Conversely, the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium started with turf and then converted to grass.
This is, remember, the much-improved turf (supposedly) from the bad old days of carpet of 1/4-inch blades, essentially green-painted asphalt at Camp Randall Stadium and every other college stadium I marched in in five years in the UW Marching Band. But NFL players, all of whom are too young to remember the old turf, seem unimpressed with the new turf.
Lambeau Field has a hybrid surface of grass with plastic blades to keep the grass in place. (The Packers also use grow lights to keep the grass growing as late in the season as possible.) That would seem to be the ultimate grass surface, and the company that sells it, GrassMaster, also equips many soccer pitches in Europe, but at only one other NFL stadium, in Philadelphia.
The Arizona Cardinals’ stadium and the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium have grass fields that slide out fo the stadium during the week to get sun and rain, then slide back in for game day. The Raiders’ stadium has a turf surface underneath, and that was what the Badgers played on for the Las Vegas Bowl in December.
The problem with replacing turf with grass is that the team ends up losing its practice field, since most college teams with turf practice in their stadium, such as UW. (The original turf went in in the late 1960s, and I believe the old football practice fields are either parking lots or buildings.) That should make one skeptical that colleges will be replacing turf with grass anytime soon.
Whether NFL teams replace turf with grass is a more interesting question. In the NFC North Minnesota and Detroit have indoor stadiums, and so putting grass in would be complicated. (Grass was put in temporarily in the Pontiac Silverdome for the 1994 World Cup and in the Louisiana Superdome as an experiment or a Packers’ preseason game back in the Brett Favre era.)
This will be interesting to watch if expensive NFL players continue to get hurt on turf fields.
Inflation is officially no longer transitory. The Consumer Price Index has hit its highest rate in four decades, running at 7.5 percent year-over-year. The energy index rose 27 percent over the last year, and the food index increased 7 percent. The higher prices are affecting Americans with every purchase they make, and undercutting their wages. Inflation is even challenging Covid as voters’ number one issue of concern. And the President’s response? Deflection.
In an effort to skirt responsibility for the inflation he once said was both not happening and only transitory, President Biden and his Democratic supporters are crying “Collusion!” It’s “big poultry” or “big grocers” or “big oil” that have spontaneously colluded to raise prices on their consumers, motivated purely by greed. And like many policy proposals from the left these days, the Democrats have turned for a solution to a 20th-century relic—specifically, antitrust and price controls.
It’s true that four major companies dominate the meatpacking industry for beef, pork, and poultry, but don’t be fooled into thinking these companies are colluding with each other to raise prices. A much simpler answer than conspiracy and collusion can be found—all of the inputs to their product have risen in cost, from fertilizer and feed to gasoline and labor. When the cost of a product’s inputs increases, so too does the price of the final product.
On the fuel front, the increase in price can be explained by a mismatch of supply and demand. Demand plummeted during Covid lockdowns, supply was diminished, and now with demand for oil surging again worldwide, supply is slow to catch up. The administration’s signaling that it wants to phase out fossil fuels doesn’t encourage new investment in production either.
It’s worth noting that when the price of fuel rises, so does the price of just about everything else. Why is this? Because we are still an economy dependent on fossil fuels to power not only the transport of our goods but also the production of those goods.
Antitrust action to break up the large corporations that provide fuel and food will not lead to lower prices for consumers. These corporations are able to offer lower prices precisely because of their consolidation. As they consolidate and grow larger, they achieve economies of scale by lowering the average cost of each unit they produce. Likewise, increasing the regulatory oversight on corporations increases the cost of doing business, a cost that invariably gets passed on to consumers.
Similarly, price controls would be a devastating blow to consumers. When the price of a good is set artificially low, shortages follow. That’s because if a producer cannot make a decent return on their product, they’ll stop producing it. And why wouldn’t they? That’s not greed motivating their actions; that’s the bottom line. No producer is going to lose money on each unit sold and stay in business.
So if it isn’t corporate greed that’s driving inflation, what is?
Inflation has two primary culprits—supply disruptions and reckless monetary policy. Supply-side inflation is the result of bottlenecks slowing the delivery of goods and services. Demand-side inflation derives from expansionary monetary policy, pursued by the Federal Reserve.
An obvious but often unacknowledged contributor to our supply chain woes is the government’s response to the pandemic. When businesses were forced to close, supply was decimated. Many businesses never came back. A Federal Reserve study estimates that roughly 200,000 more businesses closed in the first year of the pandemic alone. That number is about one third higher than normal market exit. These closures obviously disrupted the equilibrium between supply and demand. Those who did hang on did so in part by selling off inventory and laying off workers. That means when demand surged once the more draconian government restrictions were lifted, supply had to play catch up.
And once employers were looking to restaff, they learned that, surprisingly, there were fewer people willing to work. There are currently 10.9 million job openings in the US with a labor participation rate of 62.2%. This labor shortage is driven, in part, by federal and state unemployment benefits, on top of other forms of transfer payments like the child tax credit, rental assistance, and direct payments from Presidents Trump and Biden. All of these subsidies create a disincentive to work.
Many who oppose the Biden administration often decry his multi-trillion-dollar spending bills. While it’s true that those government dollars are less productive than private dollars and rather than stimulate long-term economic growth, they simply boost short-term consumption, they aren’t what’s driving inflation. The type of persistent inflation we’re witnessing today is, as Milton Friedman famously said, “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Government subsidies and stimulus spending might goose demand — and when supply is limited that’s certainly a problem — but to thwart long-term inflation, we must turn our attention to the Fed’s monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve is charged with promoting maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long term interest rates and uses monetary policy to achieve these ends. The Fed can boost employment, at least temporarily, by increasing the growth rate of money. It can reduce inflation by reducing the growth rate of money. To ensure that long term interest rates are not too high, it must prevent money growth from outpacing money demand by too wide a margin on average over time.
It’s a careful line to walk for the Fed. Over the last few months, supply constraints and a rise in nominal spending has left too many dollars chasing too few goods. For context, the money supply has increased by an eyewatering 40 percent over the past two years as a result of the Fed’s expansionary monetary policy. High inflation is the natural consequence.
The Fed could bring down inflation by cutting the growth rate of money. It can accomplish this by raising the interest it pays banks on reserve balances or drastically reducing the size of its balance sheet to hit a higher federal funds rate target. But politicians are concerned the Fed will take away the “punch bowl” (so to speak) too rapidly, thus slowing economic growth and triggering a recession. This is certainly possible. And it’s what we saw with Paul Volcker’s scrupulous Fed in the 1980s. The short-term downturn hurt, no doubt, but inflation was thwarted and economic growth rebounded.
One could argue, however, that the growth the Fed’s expansionary monetary policies are promoting now is inequitable and further widens the divide between the top and bottom earners in this country. That’s because the Fed’s asset purchases pump up the stock market at the expense of low-income savers who do not invest in the stock market.
When interest rates are near zero, putting money into a savings account yields virtually no return, incentivizing investment in the stock market. That’s part of the reason corporations have seen such large gains in their value over the course of the pandemic. It’s government action distorting the market, not corporate collusion, that is leading to the wealth creation so many Democrats decry. The President might not be willing to acknowledge this economic reality for political reasons, but even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell does, indicating the economy no longer needs stimulus and that the Fed should therefore begin to taper its asset purchases and raise interest rates to slow inflation.
And because inflation eats away at workers’ wages by making every item they buy with those wages more expensive, reining in this monetary policy would reduce inflation and benefit, not harm, the poorest among us.
Are the threat of antitrust action and the flirtation with price controls cheap throwaway lines recycled from the 20th century meant solely to get the administration through the next news cycle? Or are they serious proposals emerging from the increasingly radical progressive flank of the Democratic Party? For the sake of the economy and your grocery bills, let’s hope it’s the former. If the administration really wants to tackle inflation, it needs the Fed to rein in its reckless monetary policy.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 