Category Archives: Economics

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 20, 2022:  

No matter who does the polling or how the questions are posed, Americans are increasingly fed up with the performance of Joe Biden. The latest three polls show his performance dropping from dismal to disastrous in the eyes of American voters.

The results of CNBC’s All-America Survey released on Monday reveal that Biden’s economic and overall job-performance numbers “dipped to the lowest levels of his presidency,” said the survey authors. His economic approval numbers dropped five points since April, lower than even Barack Obama’s worst levels.

More than half told the pollster that they expect the economy, already in trouble, to get worse over the next year, while six out of 10 expect the economy to be in recession by then.

Biden’s overall job-performance numbers now show a disapproval/approval rating of 57/36, the lowest since CNBC has been tracking them.

CNN’s poll, conducted by SSRS and with results also released on Monday, reported that 62 percent disapprove of Biden’s overall performance, with just 38 percent approving — a favorability rating of -24. Among Democrats, Biden’s approval rating continues to drop as well: In April, they gave him an 86-percent approval rating. It’s now down to 73 percent. And when it comes to managing the economy, Democrats’ support of their man has also dropped, from 71 percent this spring to 62 percent.

Among people of color, the disaster is even worse. Biden’s overall performance among Black adults has dropped six points in two months, while among Hispanic adults it has dropped by nine points. CNN summarized the continuing disaster:

Just 38 percent of Democrats now say things are going well in the country, down from 61 percent this spring. Likewise, there’s been a steep drop among people of color, from 41 percent saying things were going well in the spring to 27 percent now.

The CNN poll also asked its audience about Biden’s (and Vice President Kamala Harris’) “personal favorability”: “A year and a half ago, just before their inauguration, 59% held a favorable opinion of Biden and 51% had a favorable view of Kamala Harris. Now, those figures stand at 36% and 32% respectively.”

The results of a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday confirmed the results from CNBC and CNN: Biden’s approval rating fell to 36 percent, “the lowest rating of his 19 months in the White House … [while] 59% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance.” That’s a three-point drop from another Reuters poll taken last week.

Biden is also underwater in 44 out of the 50 states, according to Morning Consult. That’s up from 40 just three months ago. Especially damaging is that, in so-called battleground states — states where Biden allegedly won enough votes to tip the election in 2020 — he is greatly underwater: Arizona (-20 net approval rating), Georgia (-13), Pennsylvania (-19), Ohio (-23), and Wisconsin (-18). Excluding Ohio, the president supposedly won all of those states in the 2020 election.

America’s middle class — the target of the Biden administration’s attack — is suffering. Two thirds report spending less on entertainment, while three out of five are driving less and more than half have cut back on their travel plans this summer.

What’s worse is that these polls were taken before the latest inflation numbers were announced (above nine percent), and before Biden’s obsequious trip to Saudi Arabia (which The Wall Street Journal called “worse than an embarrassment”).

Pollsters tracking the rolling disaster are likely to report even lower approval numbers for Biden in the future as the impact of his anti-middle-class policies takes firmer hold over the intended victims.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 12, 2022:  

Editors at Issues & Insights, an unashamedly pro-free market research firm, wrote on Monday that it’s common knowledge that people “leave areas known for authoritarian tyranny, stagnation, stultification, crime, and excessive regulation in order to find the opposite somewhere else: economic freedom, dynamism, social diversity, and good [read: limited] government.”

I & I’s editorial board reviewed the latest data from U-Haul, the Census Bureau, and economist Mark Perry’s work at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and concluded that “the mass exodus of more than a million Americans moving largely from Blue States to Red States expresses [their] dissatisfaction with high taxes, rampant crime, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, excessive state government regulations, a politically stifling ‘woke’ culture, and the lack of economic opportunity and freedom.”

Readers are increasingly familiar with the U-Haul Growth Index, which revealed last week that Texas overtook Florida in the largest net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks for the year 2021. Tennessee ranked third, South Carolina ranked fourth, and Arizona rounded out the top five.

On the other hand, the demand for U-Haul trucks leaving California was so great that many of the franchisees ran out of equipment. That kept the former “Golden State” at the bottom of the U-Haul Growth Index, with Illinois not far behind in 49th position.

U-Haul’s vice president for the Dallas Fort-Worth area, Matt Merrill, reported:

We see a lot of growth coming from the East and West Coast. A lot of people moving here from California [and] New York. We also see a lot of people coming in from the Chicago markets.

 

I think that’s a lot due to the job growth — a lot of opportunity here. The cost of living here is much lower than those areas. Texas is open for business.

While U-Haul measures equipment flow, the Census Bureau counts people flow. Last year Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia enjoyed astonishing numeric growth of nearly 800,000, while New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Louisiana shrank by a similar amount.

Statistical economist Mark Perry, however, drilled down into the question of “why?” Why did they leave? What did they find when they got there?

Perry examined which political party controlled the states most- and least-favored. He reviewed the business climate in each state. He looked at individual and corporate income-tax burdens, each state’s fiscal health, energy and housing costs, the economic performance and outlook, and the labor market.

He noted the importance of “right-to-work” laws versus forced-unionism laws and found that “all ten of the top inbound states in 2021 are Right-to-Work states, while eight of the top ten outbound states are forced-unionism states.”

He looked at which political party controlled the states and learned that Republicans control the legislatures in nine of the top 10 “inbound” states and eight of them have Republican governors. But for the “outbound” states, he learned that Democrats control the legislatures in seven out of the top 10 “outbound” states and eight out of 10 of those states had Democrat governors.

Therefore, concluded Perry:

Just based on political party control at the state level, millions of Americans are moving away from blue-controlled states to red states.

He looked at each state’s tax burden and discovered a similar disparity: The average tax burden for the top ten inbound states was 7.7 percent, while the average for outbound states was 9.9 percent.

When looking specifically at income-tax rates, he found that the average top individual income-tax rate in the top 10 inbound states was 3.8 percent, compared to a top tax rate among the top 10 outbound states to be more than double, at 8 percent. He noted that four of the top 10 inbound states — Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Nevada — have no state income tax at all.

On the other hand, California sports the nation’s highest top marginal tax rate at 13.3 percent, with Hawaii and New Jersey not far behind, at 11 percent and 10.75 percent, respectively.

He looked at Forbes magazine’s rating of the best states for doing business and learned that its average ranking for the top 10 inbound states was eight out of 50, whereas its average ranking for the top 10 outbound states was 33 out of 50.

When considering each state’s economic performance and outlook, Perry saw the same thing: The average ranking among the top 10 inbound states — on a scale of one (best) to 50 (worst) — was a 10, while for the top 10 outbound states, it was a 39.

Perry concluded:

There is empirical evidence that Americans and businesses “vote with their feet” when they relocate from one state to another, and the evidence suggests that Americans are moving from blue states that are more economically stagnant, fiscally unhealthy states with higher tax burdens and unfriendly business climates with higher energy and housing costs and fewer economic and job opportunities, to fiscally sound red states that are more economically vibrant, dynamic and business-friendly, with lower tax and regulatory burdens, lower energy, and housing costs and more economic and job opportunities.

There are significant political implications for the mass migration away from blue states to red states as well. It “portends major shifts in America’s voting clout,” wrote I&I’s editorial board. “Red States will get redder while Blue States get bluer.” It expanded:

Because of the Red States’ population growth, their relative clout in future elections should be bigger. They’ll have more seats in the House of Representatives and, assuming it’s a trend across most states, it might turn Congress slightly more to the right of the political spectrum.

The opinion video produced by The New York Times and posted on Thursday reveals not only what Democrats do when they have all the power (see California), but what politicians in general do when given the opportunity: they mess things up. The greater the power, the greater the mess (see California).

The Times’ video journalist Johnny Harris teamed up with the Times’ lead writer on business and economics Binyamin Appelbaum to create the 14-minute-long video available on YouTube.

Harris focused on California where the mess is the greatest. The Democrats running the state follow the general Democratic Party platform which informs its progressive constituency that its three core values are “affordable housing,” “economic equality,” and “educational opportunity.”

But when focusing in on how California actually looks, Harris discovered that “liberal hypocrisy is fueling … inequality” in the state. In a written report supplementing the video the writers said:

In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states.

 

It is in blue states [like California] where affordable housing is often hardest to find, [where] there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and [where] economic inequality is increasing most quickly….

 

Blue states are where the housing crisis is located.

 

Blue states are where the disparities in education funding are the most dramatic.

 

Blue states are the places where tens of thousands of homeless people are living on the streets.

 

Blue states are the places where economic inequality is increasing most quickly in this country.

They point out that nine of the 15 most expensive metropolitan areas in the country are located in California (for instance the median price of a house in San Diego is $830,000, more than twice the national median).

The report exposes the bottomless hypocrisy of liberals who claim one thing and behave in another. Take Palo Alto, for example. The Democrat-controlled city council voted unanimously to rezone a 2½ acre site to allow construction of a high-rise housing development. The liberal community was outraged and voted it down, 85-15. Not in my neighborhood!

As Applebaum wrote, “I think people [there] aren’t living their values. There’s an aspect of greed here.”

Of course. Human beings seek their own best interests first, ideology be damned.

The report missed several opportunities to inform its readers. It’s not just Democrat hypocrites who are ruining blue states like California. Republicans have a long and tawdry record of ruining things as well, just more slowly.

That’s why limits must be placed on all politicians, not just in blue states. They must apply to all politicians everywhere or liberty is threatened and eventually lost.

As the author of Federalist 51 (either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, writing under the name “Publius”) noted:

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices [as separation of powers] should be necessary to control the abuses of government.

 

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

But, as Lord Acton said, men are not angels: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

That is the message that is missing from the Times’ opinion video.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, November 19, 2021:  

It is increasingly clear that Joe Biden’s nomination of a hard-core communist to the office of comptroller of the currency is too much even for far-left Democrat senators on the Senate Banking Committee. According to Politico, at least seven Democrat senators are having second thoughts after hearing her testimony on Thursday.

That testimony got feisty. Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) asked nominee Saule Omarova about her membership in a communist organization while she was growing up in the Soviet Union: “It’s commonly referred to as ‘Young Communists.’ Were you a member?”

When Omarova replied, “everybody in that country was a member,” Kennedy then asked pointedly if he should refer to her as “comrade” rather than “professor.” The chairman of the committee, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), took umbrage and interrupted Kennedy. Kennedy shot back: “You’re not the witness, she is!”

Omarova answered Kennedy, “I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology.”

But everything in her background proves that she is, especially her plans to put every personal and private checking account for every American into the Federal Reserve so they can be monitored and managed.

She wants to create a “National Investment Authority” [NIA] that would direct private and government funds to support businesses that mesh with her totalitarian green agenda, and starve and bankrupt those that don’t.

The Wall Street Journal noted that in a recent paper she authored, “she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumers’ bank deposits, effectively ending [private] banking as we know it. [The NIA would] become the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources … [just as] Venezuela and China are doing.” 

President Biden’s choice for banking regulator is a Marxist academic who wants to destroy the American banking and energy sectors and implement socialism in the United States, proving once again that this White House is beholden to the radical left elements of the Democrat party.

Norbert Michel, who heads up the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, said that Omarova would make every effort to “federalize” the private banking sector in America, adding:

[The Comptroller of the Currency] has enormous discretion to direct banking activity through examination and enforcement actions, including types of customers banks lend [money] to….

 

It is clear that her policies would turn all private banks into state-run institutions.

Earlier Michel wrote, “It is true that the free enterprise system [is] not perfect, but the fact remains that there are countless examples of Omarova’s preferred approach making millions of people miserable.”

Naturally, the White House stands foursquare behind the communist that Biden has nominated to “federalize” America’s banking system:

Saule Omarova is eminently qualified and was nominated for this role given her strong track record on regulation and strong academic credentials [she is a professor at far-left Cornell University].

 

The White House strongly supports this historic nomination.

At least seven Democrats have their doubts after hearing her testimony, including Senators Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Krysten Simena (D-Ariz.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.). Each of them has constituencies that would be severely hurt, if not totally destroyed, if Omarova is confirmed and has her way.