The UW Board of Regents mess produced some clear winners and losers against a chaotic backdrop of flip-flopping votes and a feeble governor.
The Regents astonishingly voted on Saturday, 9-8, to thumb their noses at $800 million in funding for the University of Wisconsin, a new engineering building, other needed capital projects, raises for 34,000 employees and support for guaranteed admission for top-ranked Wisconsin high school students… all because they didn’t want to freeze DEI and shift some DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) folks to work with all students. The horrors!
Then, on Wednesday, in a sudden about-face, three Regents – Amy Bogost, Karen Walsh and Jennifer Staton, all Evers’ appointees – switched their votes, passing the compromise plan, which was crafted by Republicans in the state Legislature (namely Speaker Robin Vos) and UW System President Jay Rothman.
Let’s start with the losers.
Tony Evers
Wisconsin’s governor has never looked weaker. First, he became the object of mockery for appropriating the name of a dead baseball legend. Now, he swings at the Regents’ ball and whiffs. Evers never got on the right side of the compromise plan. He made the crucial mistake of coming out loud and clear in support of the Regents’ Saturday vote to kill the plan.
That means the supposed education governor just gave Republicans a pile of ads, reminding people who and what he was willing to sacrifice at the altar of DEI. Caught apparently flat-footed when his own appointed Regents started to flip, Evers issued not one, but two, word salad press releases (Britt was working hard that night) that gaslit Republicans in the Legislature.
If you sorted through all of the obfuscating nastiness, it became clear the governor was still on the wrong side of it all, disagreeing with a plan that even some of his OWN APPOINTEES eventually embraced.
It’s unclear what Evers was doing behind the scenes, but he’s never been more flat-footed in his public response. Seriously, governor, you really wanted to position AGAINST 34,000 working and middle-class state workers getting raises during an era of inflation and AGAINST top Wisconsin kids being guaranteed a seat in state schools??
And don’t get us started on that engineering building…
Either narrative is bad for Evers. Either he was trying to whip votes to kill the plan behind the scenes, and he failed to do so (we were told by a well-placed source that two of the “no vote” Regents were believed to be initially for the plan until they took a five-minute break on Saturday and came back against it….) Or, he didn’t try to exercise any influence, rendering him a bit player on an important debate. It’s hard to imagine a Tommy Thompson-style governor losing this one.
Jill Underly
Underly never got on the right side of this either. First, she missed the Saturday vote. It later turned out she was on a European vacation. The Regents’ meetings were by Zoom. She couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe to dial in? Then, bizarrely, on Wednesday, she arrogantly asked the entire state to wait for an answer until she could come back to vote. Again, she couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe that had working Internet.
Her office wouldn’t say which country she was visiting, claiming she had inconsistent internet. Again, they don’t have working Internet in Europe? What? The ridiculousness of it all was exposed when Regent Amy Bogost dialed in from… Thailand.
Was the Underly caper a last-ditch effort by Evers to scrounge up another vote to kill the plan? Or was it just an attempt by her to look like she wasn’t eschewing an important vote by lollygagging around Europe? We will never know.
DEI
Those bureaucrats with their six-figure salaries are going to still be getting their six-figure salaries, and some of them just have to help all students. The horrors! But the fact is that the ideology of division in the name of inclusion took a big hit.
We obviously support helping more underrepresented folks of all backgrounds, including racial minorities, get into the UW System and succeed there and in the workforce. However, this plan will help do that more than some DEI administrator with a corner office. The difference is how you get there. Expanding school choice, strengthening families, a strong economy, lowering the costs of higher education – these are all things that will help boost more people into college.
Shifting the UW more toward workforce development will help them succeed in the workforce and get something for all that debt. In other words, there are practical ways to boost underrepresented folks without acronym-filled titles that no one can fully define.
DEI was exposed as, in some cases, window dressing. Workforce development won the arm wrestle.
Political Appointees Decrying Politics
Regents John W. Miller and Dana Wachs get the hypocrisy prize. Both had the nerve to whine about the fact the situation was so politicized when both are … political appointees of Evers.
In fact, Miller is one of the state’s largest Democratic political donors and Wachs is a former…politician. So spare us your lectures on politics, guys. Miller actually accused the Legislature of bringing forth the plan to make a political statement in a statement that bashed the Legislature.
While some of the Regents’ opposition seemed heartfelt, these guys seemed like they were just trying to score against the GOP, at the expense of the state’s universities. Both are Tony Evers’ donors and appointees by the way. But they hate politics! Spare us.
Crazy Democratic Legislators
Crazy Democratic legislators rushed over each other to gloat and applaud their organizing efforts and initial success at getting Regents to reject $800 million to help students. One even called the plan “racist” (5,200 of the staff members initially denied raises are people of color, by the way).
In the end, they were left standing alone in the rain, shrieking to a party that had already moved on.
Mixed
The Regents Who Flipped
Unlike Evers and Underly, the Flipping Three eventually got on the right side of it all, but why didn’t they figure it out on Saturday? The explanations of Amy Bogost and Karen Walsh – something about needing more time to deliberate or understand the topic – were silly. Why are Regents taking votes if they don’t feel they’ve been properly briefed on them? The third Regent, a student, switched and voted for the plan after trashing Robin Vos in over-the-top tones.
Winners
Robin Vos
Masterful play, Speaker Vos. The Assembly Speaker out-maneuvered Evers and managed to get a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI. No small feat.
We repeat. Robin Vos got a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI.
He didn’t blink. They did. Vos doesn’t get enough credit for his master chess-playing among some corners of the right. It’s about time he did.
Vos managed to say he wasn’t eliminating DEI while eliminating DEI… he just did it over time by freezing DEI, including vacancies. So it will happen by attrition.
Some would have preferred if he took a sledgehammer to the bureaucracy and administrative bloat instead of a scalpel, but the fact is he has to deal with a divided government.
The Regents Who Got it Right the First Time
The Regents who got it right the first time, including some Evers’ appointees, deserve kudos.
They are three Scott Walker appointees among them: Bob Atwell, Mike Jones, and Cris Peterson. Perhaps more notable – because it takes more courage to buck your own side’s governor – Evers’ appointees Ashok Rai, Kyle Weatherly, Héctor Colón, and Jim Kreuser, as well as Wisconsin Technical College System Board President Mark Tyler, were supporters of the plan.
The Chancellors
Three chancellors, including Mark Mone at UWM, argued for the compromise plan saying it was needed for the future health of their institutions. In so doing, they showed pragmatic leadership, putting the needs of students and their campuses before ideology. Good job.
Jay Rothman
Along with Vos, he helped engineer this deal and he took a lot of unfair heat over it. The guy isn’t a radical flame-thrower, and that’s a good thing. He arguably got more than he gave. People need to give Rothman a break (he didn’t say what the Daily Cardinal said he said a couple weeks ago, either).
The Students
High-performing Wisconsin high school students will likely now be guaranteed acceptance into UW schools, which have increasingly turned to out-of-state and out-of-country students as cash cows to plug their budget holes.
Students will get a new engineering building and $32 million will go to help prepare them for the workforce. These things will help students of all races.
UW Staff
The 34,000 state workers were the hackeysack in this game among politicians and their appointees. And that sucks. However, in the end, they’re getting the raise. Many are NOT highly paid, and they’ve had years of meager and sometimes no raises.
UW Student Journalists
Student journalists at the Daily Cardinal and Badger Herald did a great job keeping the public informed in their news coverage. They had some of the most thorough coverage.
UW Donors
As reported by the Biztimes, UW donors applied pressure to get the deal done. As quoted in the article, “A lot of donors are going to take their money elsewhere if this isn’t turned around. I know a number of them. They said, ‘well, then we’re going to have to go somewhere else, because that’s an indication that they don’t want the building or want our money.’ It’s a big problem. A very big problem.”
Too many Republicans these days have lost their economic bearings. Look no further than a GOP Senate bill that would enact a carbon tariff—i.e., a new tax. In the name of punishing China, the legislation would punish American consumers and businesses.
The Foreign Pollution Fee Act, sponsored by Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, could well have been written by the Sierra Club and AFL-CIO. Among the carbon tariff’s biggest advocates is Donald Trump’s former trade adviser Robert Lighthizer, who favors tariffs in principle. So it’s worth deconstructing the misleading arguments that Mr. Cassidy and others are making for climate protectionism.
The bill would impose tariffs on 16 categories of goods produced in countries with higher CO2 emissions than the U.S. They include steel, aluminum, critical minerals, solar panels, wind turbines, crude oil, gasoline, petrochemicals, plastics, paper and lithium-ion batteries. Companies could lobby to have products added to the list, and you can bet they will.
Tariffs would be based on a foreign good’s relative “carbon intensity,” as calculated by a new National Laboratory Advisory Board on Global Pollution Challenges. The bill would expand the administrative state by creating a new bureaucracy with sweeping powers that would be hard for future Congresses to rein in.
U.S. production of most goods on the tariff list doesn’t come close to meeting domestic demand. Yet tariffs could be reduced only in limited circumstances—namely, for national security needs or if U.S. companies produce less than 5% of domestic demand. That means importing businesses won’t have an alternative to paying the tariffs, which would be filtered through supply chains and passed to consumers.
Though the U.S. is a net petroleum exporter, many refineries were built to process heavier foreign grades of crude and can’t easily switch to lighter shale blends. That means Americans would pay higher gasoline prices no matter how much domestic oil production increases.
Mr. Cassidy claims in a recent article in Foreign Affairs that “the fee is not a domestic carbon price,” by which he apparently means it isn’t imposed directly on U.S. companies and consumers. But he knows—or at least should know—that it will be absorbed by American businesses, workers and consumers, as all tariffs are.
The Louisiana Senator is also selling the bill with a misdirection worthy of Al Gore. He argues that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other foreign governments have ignored international norms and agreements regarding environmental protection and pollute the world without consequence,” and the bill would hold these “polluters” accountable.
In Foreign Affairs he conflates hazardous air pollutants such as sulfates with carbon emissions, as the climate lobby also does. As a physician, Mr. Cassidy knows the difference. Particulates harm public health. Carbon emissions are ubiquitous, and if he really thinks they’re dangerous pollutants he should be honest and try to eliminate his state’s oil industry.
Yet the bill defines “pollution” as “greenhouse gas emissions.” This is a gift to Democrats who have been trying to codify the Supreme Court’s misconceived Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruling that let the Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. This is the Administration’s legal justification for its back-door ban on gas-powered cars.
A carbon border tax would almost certainly prompt retaliatory duties from foreign governments, as Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs have done. These would also harm U.S. consumers. The bill also wouldn’t shield U.S. businesses from carbon tariffs that Europe might impose because the U.S hasn’t enacted a domestic carbon-pricing scheme.
The bill’s unstated purpose is to protect American businesses from foreign competition as they face rising energy costs at home owing to the government’s force-fed green-energy transition. Mr. Cassidy says China’s lax environmental standards have rendered U.S. manufacturers less globally competitive and destroyed American jobs.
He’s right that rising energy prices could discourage U.S. manufacturing investment and undercut Washington’s industrial policy. But layering a carbon tax on top of sundry green-energy subsidies would raise U.S. manufacturers’ costs and create a Rube Goldberg contraption of economic distortions.
The Senate’s leading wind producer, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, is praising the Cassidy-Graham bill, which he says “creates the negotiating space to try to come with a bipartisan agreement.” Senate Democrats last Congress introduced two carbon tariff bills, which have the added virtue for progressives of raising revenue they can spend.
Some of the GOP’s strongest supporters of free trade and markets have recently retired, and the party’s protectionist wing is on the rise. But the GOP won’t be worth a dime’s worth of economic difference from Democrats if it embraces an idea that expands the administrative state, raises taxes, and increases prices amid damaging inflation.
We begin with an entry from Great Business Decisions in Rock Music History: Today in 1961, EMI Records decided it wasn’t interested in signing the Beatles to a contract.
The number one single over here today in 1961:
Today in 1966, a friend of Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Tara Browne, was killed when his Lotus Elan crashed into a parked truck. John Lennon used Browne’s death as motivation for “A Day in the Life”:
The number one album today in 1971 was Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Going On”:
Today in 1963, Carroll James of WWDC radio in Washington broadcast a Beatles song:
James, whose station played the song once an hour, got the 45 from his girlfriend, a flight attendant. Capitol Records considered going to court, but chose to release the 45 early instead.
(This blog has reported for years that James was the first U.S. DJ to play a Beatles song. It turns out that’s not correct — WLS radio in Chicago played “Please Please Me” in February 1963.)
Today in 1969, 50 million people watched NBC-TV’s “Tonight” because of a wedding:
The number one British single today in 1965 wasn’t just one song:
Today in 1970, five Creedence Clearwater Revival singles were certified gold, along with the albums “Cosmo’s Factory,” “Willy and the Poor Boys,” “Green River,” “Bayou Country” and “Creedence Clearwater Revival”:
In 1955, Ed Cole unleashed the Small Block V8 on the world and instantly turned General Motors’ ho-hum entry-level brand into a performance powerhouse. Throughout the following decades, his compact, 4.4-inch on-center bore spaced 90-degree pushrod V8 transformed badges like Bel Air, Camaro, Chevelle, and Corvette into some of the world’s fastest and most desirable cars. But no matter how lust-worthy these burbling, swaggering slices of American shock-and-awe became, Cole and his successors were sure to keep the company’s core mission of mass affordability front and center. As recently as 2017, one could walk into the local Chevrolet showroom and come face to face with six different cars powered by the decedents of Cole’s game-changing bent-eight. Most importantly, even after 62 years of progress, safety mandates, and inflation, all six eight-cylinder sleds still landed between “instant approval with proof of some regular income” and “something just about anyone could realistically aspire to own.”
Back in ’17, the Small Block Club was accessible from just $36,905. That humble sum secured a manual transmission, 455-horse 6.2L LT1-powered Sixth-Gen Camaro 1SS that was fresh off a Car of the Year title. Those who wanted to add all of the trimmings, like heated/cooled seats and wireless phone charging, to the mix could upgrade to a 2SS for $41,905. In the underappreciated masterpiece that was the Ausie-imported – and confusingly named – SS, 2017 also marked the last time you could get a new eight-cylinder sedan from Chevy; it came fully loaded for $46,625. At the same time, the award-winning base C7 Corvette Stingray carried an MSRP of just $55,450. If you thought some extra “juice” was worth squeezing your wallet a little, there were three options still on the table, starting with the 650 HP, $61,140 Camaro ZL1. On top of that were two varieties of widebody Corvette that you could get your hands on without having to cut a check over $80,000.
Looking back at that performance-per-dollar paints a bleak picture of our Bowtie buying power just seven short years later. The SS sedan, and Australian auto-manufacturing itself, is already a distant memory. As of this week, the Camaro has been re-retired, and the mid-engine replacement for 66 years of original recipe Corvette development, once heralded as the deal of the century, has seen $10,000 in price creep over its first four years on sale, putting its basement floor almost 26% above of its Stingray predecessor’s 2017 starting point.
Not only is Chevy’s once-proud blue-collar performance corral down to just three flavors of Corvette, where it previously served up more attainable sedan and 2+2 Pony Cars, but the two-door leftovers have had their economics of ownership significantly altered. Not only has the base Corvette left the previous model in the dust financially, but it now acts as the entry point for all V8 goodness. That makes the cheapest V8-powered Chevy 89% more expensive than it was in 2017. The Stingray also stands as the only option under the ceiling set by the previous Z06. Elsewhere, the new E-Ray trim replaces the once-popular Grand Sport in the middle of the Corvette pack. At $106,495, it starts a whopping $41,045, or 62.7%, higher than the first-year C7 GS was asking. Then there’s the Z06 that acts as top dog in ’24, as it did in 2017. A side-by-side comparison reveals the new car to be 40.59% more expensive, with its ballooning bottom line now totaling $111,695 before buyers check a single option box!
Looking ahead, the C8 Corvette family is expecting two more models to join the fold. The imminent twin-turbo ZR1 is set to take the Crossed Flags to new heights, but to do this, it’ll have to leave traditional ‘Vette customers out to dry. With the Z06 as a starting point and 850+ horses on board, we won’t flinch if the 2025 ZR1 starts at $200,000 or more. After that, the only other murmurings about future Corvettes revolve around a halo model called “Zora” that is set to join the ZR1 and E-Ray powertrains in unholy matrimony to the tune of four-digit horsepower. With the ZR1 already poised to cross the $200k barrier, what could Chevy have in mind for its AWD HyperVette? $250,000? $300,000? We aren’t sure, but in a world where Ford feels comfortable slapping a $300k price tag on a Mustang that isn’t half as technically impressive, there’s no telling where this thing could land!
As exciting as the prospect of a 1,000+ HP Corvette is to us as long-time fans of the Crossed Flags, Chevrolet’s C8 pricing strategy is equally disheartening to us as prospective owners. Despite our ingenious suggestion, it appears as if the sizable sub-Stingray space that the Camaro was forced to vacate AND the $37,000 gap between the Base ‘Vette and the E-Ray are going to continue getting the cold shoulder from the parent company. With the 1LT Stingray now swimming in $70,000 waters and nothing in the pipeline aimed at long-time customers who can’t spend more than $1,000 per month on what usually amounts to a weekend toy, Ed Cole’s “performance for all” blueprint just might have reached its expiration date.
And not just at Chevrolet. Chrysler is discontinuing the Dodge Challenger, whose Hemi V8-powered R/T stickers just below $40,000. That leaves just the Ford Mustang GT, which starts around $42,000 for a 5.0-liter V8 and six-speed manual transmission.
A choice of one beats a choice of none, but it’s not that much better.
The dark reality of Bidenomics is 16.7% inflation under President Biden’s watch. When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Inflation has stayed above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target for 34 consecutive months since March 2021.
According to the Labor Department, average hourly earnings for all employees dropped 3.1% to $11.07 in November from $11.42 in January 2021 when Biden assumed office. Despite nominal salary increases at their fastest pace in years, American workers are now worse off than when Biden took office.
In short, the prices have increased by 16.7% under Biden’s watch, while real wages have declined by 3.1%, meaning Americans have taken a 3.1% pay cut under Biden’s watch. To put it differently, they now need 19.8% more income than they had in January 2021 to maintain their standard of living.
Inflation acts as a tax on Americans. Due to entrenched inflation without corresponding real wage growth, most Americans (60%) live paycheck to paycheck, cutting expenses to make ends meet. Further, as we showed recently, the fight to slay inflation comes with side effects worse than the disease.
Therefore, it is no surprise that inflation and food prices emerged as Americans’ top economic issues in a recent TIPP Poll.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the government on Tuesday showed a 3.1% year-over-year price increase from November 2022 to November 2023.
The CPI rate had declined steadily from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 to 3.0% in June 2023 for 12 consecutive months. In July, it broke that run and increased to 3.2%, and further increased for the second month in August to 3.7% and remained at 3.7% in September. In October, it returned to 3.2%, and in November dropped again slightly to 3.1%.
After adjusting for seasonality, the CPI increased by 0.1% between October 2023 and November 2023. In the same period, Food prices rose by 0.2%, Energy prices declined by 2.3%, and All items except food and energy (Core) increased by 0.3%
We developed the TIPP CPI, a metric that uses February 2021, the month after President Biden’s inauguration, as its base. All TIPP CPI measures are anchored to the base month of February 2021, making it exclusive to the economy under President Biden’s watch.
We use the relevant data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to calculate the TIPP CPI, but we adjust the period to Biden’s tenure. CPIs are like index numbers that show how prices affect people’s lives, similar to how the Dow Jones Industrial Average reflects the stock market.
When discussing the TIPP CPI and the BLS CPI, we convert the index numbers into percentage changes to better understand and compare them.
Bidenflation, measured by the TIPP CPI using the same underlying data, stayed steady at 16.7% in November. It was 17.0% in October and September and 16.7% in August.
By the middle of 2022, significant inflation had already taken hold. In November 2022, CPI inflation stood at 7.1 percent. The official BLS CPI year-over-year increases will compare prices to already inflated bases in the coming months, so these statistics might mask the full impact.
The following four charts present details about the new metric.
The annual CPI increase reported by BLS is 3.1% for November 2023. Compare this to the TIPP CPI of 16.7%, a 13.6-point difference. Prices have increased by 16.7% since President Biden took office. On an annualized basis, TIPP CPI is 5.9%.
Food prices increased by 19.8% under Biden compared to only 2.9% as per BLS CPI, a difference of 16.9 points.
TIPP CPI data show that Energy prices increased by 29.9%. But, according to the BLS CPI, energy prices improved by 5.4%. The difference between the two is a whopping 35.3 points.
The Core CPI is the price increase for all items, excluding food and energy. The Core TIPP CPI is 15.1% compared to 4.0% BLS CPI in the year-over-year measure, an 11.1-point difference.
Further, gasoline prices have increased by 34.2% since President Biden took office, whereas the BLS CPI shows that gasoline prices have improved by 8.9%, a difference of 43.1 points.
TIPP CPI finds that Used car prices have risen by 24.0% during President Biden’s term. Meanwhile, the BLS CPI reports that the prices have dropped 3.8%, a difference of 27.7 points.
Inflation for air tickets under President Biden is 30.4% compared to the BLS CPI’s finding of an improvement of 12.1%, a difference of 42.5 points.
The latest TIPP Poll, completed earlier this month, shows nine in ten (85%) survey respondents are concerned about inflation. Since January 2022, inflation concerns have stayed above 85%. The “very concerned” share has been over 50% for twenty-two months.
Nearly six in ten (59%) say their wages have not kept up with inflation. Only 18% say their income has kept pace with inflation.
This statistic hovered in the low twenties for most of the last year. The positive change between January and March has petered out since May. Notice the steady descent from March 2023. It dropped to 18% in December, with a three-month average of 19.3%.
Nominal wages represent the amount of money one earns without considering changes in the cost of living. On the other hand, real wages consider inflation and measure the purchasing power of wages. Real wages provide a more accurate reflection of what is affordable with the income earned by factoring in the changes in the cost of living.
Real weekly wages measured year-over-year dropped for 26 of the 34 months of the Biden presidency from Feb 2021 to November 2023. It broke the 26-month negative run in June and has recorded positive readings for six months. However, it is only 0.53% in November.
As a result of inflation, Americans are cutting back on household spending.
They are cutting back on entertainment (82%), eating out (81%), purchasing big-ticket items (79%), holiday/vacation travel (76%), and memberships/subscriptions (72%).
Two-thirds (67%) are cutting back on even good causes such as charity giving. Over one-half (58%) of households spend less on groceries. The high gasoline prices forced 58% to cut back on local driving.
While Americans look forward to Christmas festivities, nearly two-thirds (63%) are concerned about Christmas expenses.
The worries are reflected in spending intentions. Compared to recent years, two people plan to spend less for every person who plans to spend more. Forty-two percent are likely to spend less, while only 20% will spend more.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 