Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

8.5% of Bidenflation

April 13, 2022

US business, US politics, Wisconsin politics

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,

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Presty the DJ for April 13

April 13, 2022

Music

You might think the number one British single today in 1967 is …

The number one single today in 1974:

Today in 1980, Grease was no longer the word: The musical closed in New York, after 3,883 performances.

(more…)

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The “S” stood for “Scam”

April 12, 2022

History, US politics

Today in 1945:

There is a myth about Harry S. Truman as the last common-man president. Jeff Jacoby punctures that myth:

When the Washington Post reported in 2007 that Bill Clinton had pocketed nearly $40 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House six years earlier, I wrote a column regretting that yet another former chief executive had proved so eager “to leverage the prestige of the presidency for big bucks.”

Well, not every former chief executive. While Clinton followed in the footsteps of George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford, one president had been different. Citing historian David McCullough, I noted that Harry Truman had left the White House in such straitened circumstances that he and his wife Bess needed a bank loan to pay their bills.

Nonetheless, Truman insisted he would not cash in on his name and influence. As McCullough recounted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Truman’s only intention “was to do nothing — accept no position, lend his name to no organization or transaction — that would exploit or commercialize the prestige and dignity of the office of the President.”

Moved by Truman’s seeming financial distress, Congress eventually passed the Former Presidents Act, which provides former presidents with a lavish pension, furnished offices, and lucrative staff and travel allowances.

There’s just one thing wrong with that oft-repeated narrative about Truman’s economic desperation. According to law professor and journalist Paul Campos, it is completely false. In a bombshell article in New York Magazine, Campos shows that Truman lied shamelessly and repeatedly about the state of his finances in order to guilt-trip Congress into passing the Former Presidents Act, which would provide him with taxpayer-funded benefits for which he had no need.

Campos’s findings are jaw-dropping. The story of Truman’s post-presidential penury has long been taken as undoubted fact, and his self-denying refusal to trade on his public legacy for private gain doubtless contributed to his dramatic rebound in public esteem. Truman left the White House with the lowest approval rating in modern presidential history; today he is ranked among the best presidents ever.

But Campos brings the receipts. With the cooperation of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, he spent months examining the 33rd president’s financial records, many of which became available only with the 2011 release of Bess Truman’s personal papers.

“Harry Truman was a very rich man on the day he left the White House,” writes Campos, “and he became a good deal richer in the five and a half years between that day and the passage of the FPA.”

The evidence for those jolting assertions comes from none other than Truman himself. In a will drafted in his own hand and kept with Bess Truman’s papers, Truman estimated that his net worth at the end of his presidency was $650,000 — a sum comprising $250,000 in savings bonds, $150,000 in cash, and land worth an estimated $250,000. Adjusted for inflation, $650,000 in 1953 is the equivalent of $6.6 million in 2021.

Far from being one step from the poorhouse on his return to private life, Campos writes, Truman’s own private calculations show that his income was among the top 1 percent of American households. Which, in hindsight, makes sense: As president, he received one of the most generous salaries in America — in 1949, presidential pay was raised to $100,000 annually, an amount worth more than $1.1 million today.

Congress also authorized a $50,000 annual presidential expense account, on which Truman could draw at will, no questions asked. Truman stashed the money in “the little safe in the White House,” he acknowledged in the financial statement he wrote in 1953, then transferred it to a safety deposit box at the Columbia National Bank in Kansas City.

“The cash in the box . . . came out of the [yearly] $50,000 expense account that was not accountable for taxes,” Truman noted in his draft will.

Over the next five years, Truman lobbied hard for a federal pension for former presidents, even going on TV to complain that “the United States government turns its chief executives out to grass. They’re just allowed to starve.” Yet during those five years, Truman’s net worth soared. According to an accounting he made of his assets in January 1959, his wealth had climbed to $1.04 million ($9.7 million in 2021 dollars).

Why Truman would have cried poor mouth so insistently is something perhaps only psychologists can explain. But clearly, the popular origin story of the Former Presidents Act is due for a revision. Truman wasn’t in dire straits, that was just a self-created myth. Once again we are reminded that politicians’ claims should always be regarded skeptically.

And reminded as well that truth has a way of revealing itself.

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The idiots in my line of work

April 12, 2022

media, US politics

Stephen L. Miller:

Everything wrong with journalism and our media was on display last week at the University of Chicago, where the Atlantic held what they threatened would be an annual conference on “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.”

The roster at the conference included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who has yet to follow up on anonymous accusations against Donald Trump that he published two years ago. According to the Atlantic, Trump called soldiers who died at Normandy “suckers and losers.” After the story was challenged, Goldberg promised more reporting and sourcing, yet nothing else was ever released.

Also appearing at the conference was Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, who was confronted by students during a question and answer session on her prior dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, a story that Twitter subsequently blocked. Applebaum said she still isn’t interested in the laptop, despite recent polling that shows 52 percent of the country believes it is an important story that the media attempted to suppress on the eve of a national election.

The press’s treatment of the Hunter Biden revelations was itself a massive disinformation campaign, even as White House press secretary and future MSNBC host Jen Psaki labeled it Russian disinformation. Yet Psaki has still not addressed this — and don’t expect anyone at the Atlantic to confront her about it anytime soon.

Also appearing at the conference, on a panel alongside the Dispatch’s Stephen Hayes, was the one and only Brian Stelter from CNN, who was confronted by another sharp student on several stories his network had either gotten wrong or pushed into an agenda narrative. The student cited the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax as one example. Another was CNN’s settled lawsuit with Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann, and another was the network’s addiction to fabulist anti-Trump lawyer Michael Avenatti. Stelter refused to address any of these stories, instead pivoting to recently deceased Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, who was killed in action in Ukraine.

The next day saw a discussion with Dispatch editor Jonah Goldberg, who also waved away the Hunter Biden laptop story, which he later stated on Twitter that he did not believe “on it’s face.” Goldberg’s flippant attitude and smug gatekeeping was a perfect example of how so many pundits and thinkers are now more interested in hearing what each other have to say and bathing in self-satisfied pontifications rather than in serving their audiences.

But the ultimate irony is that former President Barack Obama was a special guest, appearing onstage alongside Jeffrey Goldberg. Breitbart reporter Charlie Spiering later summed up his comments on Twitter: “At Atlantic forum, Obama defines ‘disinformation’ as ‘a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.’”

That’s true and it should have been a rare moment of self-introspection for the former president. Among Obama’s own disinformation campaigns were blaming the Benghazi terror attacks on a video and Politifact’s lie of the year that “if you like your plan you can keep your healthcare plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Yet no one from the Atlantic, CNN, or the Dispatch saw the deep irony in appearing alongside Obama at a conference about the dangers of disinformation.

The media’s full-fledged embrace of Obama as a sage old rock star is everything that’s wrong with journalism today. And while mainstream reporters might be expected to nod along with him as they have for years, the depressing part is that they are now joined by former conservatives.

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Accompanied by a stock market collapse later today

April 12, 2022

US politics

The Washington Times:

The White House is preparing for “extraordinarily elevated” inflation numbers in Tuesday’s Labor Department report on consumer prices, a critical measure of rising costs.

Already on Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was blaming the increase on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, which raised the price of gas and energy.

“Because of the actions we’ve taken to address the Putin price hike, we are in a better place than we were last month. But we expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated, due to Putin’s price hike,” Ms. Psaki said.

The average price of a gallon of gas on Monday is $4.11, according to data from the automobile group AAA. That represents a decrease from last month when gas averaged $4.33 per gallon. However, it is still 50 cents per gallon higher than in late February.

And if you think gas prices are high now, wait until Memorial Day weekend.

The Consumer Price Index report due out Tuesday will be the first measure of inflation released since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24.

Wall Street analysts expect the release will show 8.4% inflation over the past year. That would be the highest inflation rate since December 1981.

The inflation rate for the year ending in February showed a 7.9% inflation rate.

Ms. Psaki called on Congress to pass several Biden administration proposals she said will reduce costs for Americans. Those proposals take aim at the costs of prescription drugs, child care, and college.

“I will say that any time there’s heightened monthly data or inflation reporting or numbers, it is a reminder to us, our allies on the Hill, and hopefully to many of the American people that we need to do more to reduce costs for the American people,” Ms. Psaki said.

How about a mass resignation?

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Presty the DJ for April 12

April 12, 2022

Music

Today in 1966, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean crashed his Corvette into a parked truck in Los Angeles, suffering permanent injuries.

The number one single today in 1969:

Today in 1975, David Bowie announced, “I’ve rocked my roll. It’s a boring dead end, there will be no more rock ‘n’ roll records from me.”

(more…)

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Let them walk

April 11, 2022

US politics

Jason De Sena Trennert:

If you can afford a Tesla, you probably find it hard to imagine that there are some 3.5 billion people on Earth who have no reasonably reliable access to electricity. Even less obvious may be the way rich countries’ pursuit of carbon neutrality at almost any cost limits economic opportunities for the world’s poor and poses serious geopolitical risks to the West.

Anyone on an investment committee has likely spent untold amounts of time discussing ways to mitigate the impact of climate change, but they’ve likely never heard anyone state one simple and incontrovertible fact: The widespread exploration and production of fossil fuels that started in Titusville, Pa., not quite 170 years ago, has done more to benefit the lives of ordinary people than any other technological advance in history.

Before fossil fuels, people relied on burning biomass, such as timber or manure, which was a far dirtier and much less efficient source of energy. Fossil fuels let people heat their homes in the winter, reducing the risk of death from exposure. Fossil-fuel-based fertilizers greatly increased crop yields, reducing starvation and malnutrition. Before the advent of the automobile, the ability for many people to venture far from their hometown was an unfathomable dream. Oil- and coal-burning transportation opened up access to education, commerce, professional opportunities, and vital services such as medicine. There has been, and remains, a strong correlation between the use of fossil fuels and life expectancy.

Limiting the availability of fossil fuels in the name of climate activism would cut off many of the world’s poor from these benefits. Climate activists worry about a potential “existential crisis” decades down the road, but poor people, really poor people, face an existential crisis every day. Even for those who aren’t among humanity’s most unfortunate, rising energy prices force serious economic trade-offs. Purposely eschewing America and Europe’s own natural resources increases costs to consumers, raises the cost of doing business, and limits economic growth. Viewed with this in mind, the debate over emissions seems like an upper-class problem.

If Chinese belligerence and increasing authoritarianism over the past two years have taught us anything, it is that no amount of trade and international cooperation will instill what are generally considered to be Western values in other civilizations who have no real desire to adopt them. Trusting China to do anything other than what is directly in its own best interests, especially when it comes to the trade-offs between economic development and climate issues, would seem to be in direct conflict with history and common sense—and it poses serious geopolitical risks to the international democratic order. The war in Ukraine has emphasized how leaving European and American fossil fuels in the ground can put the West at the will of dictators, increasing the risk of atrocities, war or even the use of weapons of mass destruction. An easing of regulations on drilling in the U.S. and easier regulations on liquefied natural gas exports to flood the global market with oil and natural gas would do far more than any sanctions to stop Vladimir Putin’s barbarism.

The climate-change solutions the West is pursuing also pose a danger to the environment. The lodestar of the environmental movement today appears to be electric vehicles. One would be hard-pressed to find a product more dependent on resources from extractive materials. An electric car requires almost four times as much copper as an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. The widely accepted goal of having 30% of the world’s vehicle sales be electric by 2030 would require enormous investments in mining industries that are decidedly not eco-friendly.

Sadly, environmentalism has grown into a secular religion in which reasonable debate is regarded as heresy. But if politicians and voters can approach climate change with an open mind, they’ll see that economic growth is likely to solve the issue without heavy-handed government intervention. History has shown that free markets produce incredible leaps in human ingenuity. The greater access the world has to all sorts of energy sources, the faster humanity will discover new technologies that are more environmentally friendly. Rationing fossil fuels would only retard the process of decreasing carbon emissions and cost lives in the process.