Personal Economics 101

Buried in the Budget Reconciliation Is the End of Right-to-Work, Independent Contractors; Climate Change Among the various major provisions of the PRO Act is effective nationalization of California's AB5 law that passed in 2019. This law makes hiring independent contractors much more difficult and specifies that contractors must be reclassified by businesses that hire them as employees, unless they meet specific and rigorous standards allowing them to stay independent. Read full article... Biden on Energy Crisis: Begging Others to Save Him From Himself It is on the costs of energy where Biden’s failures are most starkly visible. On his very first day in office, Biden scrapped the Keystone XL pipeline, killing 11,000 jobs in the process and making good on his campaign promise to be hostile to the fossil fuel industry. Continuing his assault on natural resource development, Biden suspended oil and natural gas leases in Alaska. Former President Donald Trump had propelled America to en...

See also: The State of Health Care at the end of 2020  

It seems things have gotten a bit upside down. I have been confused about the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life... so hate filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost it's collective mind!  Somehow it's un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.  Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.  It was cool for Joe Biden to 'blackmail' the president of Ukraine, but it's an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.  People who never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves. People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took huge loans for their degrees.  Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you'd better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated...

A sampling of policies from the Biden campaign and/or Democratic Party platform (as stated either in writing or by Party members): End cash bail  Abolish death penalty  End solitary confinement  Give government healthcare to illegals  Expand welfare for new immigrants  Expand asylum for all new illegals End border detention End all travel bans, including from jihadist regions  Amnesty for all illegals  Rejoin Paris climate accord  Eliminate all carbon emissions by 2030  Free public housing for all former inmates  Require federal reserve to end racial inequity  Universal government healthcare Zero-emissions transport nationwide  Appoint social justice prosecutors  Implement “restorative justice”  End mandatory minimums  Incentives prison closure  Penalize “absentee homeowners” to clear way for affordable housing  Dual language instruction in public schools Outlaw charter schools that earn a profit  ...

The Motley Fool -- At issue is the $600 weekly supplement to state unemployment checks, enacted by the CARES Act. In many states, that extra $600 doubles or even triples unemployment payouts. Consider Alabama, which previously had a maximum weekly unemployment benefit of $275. The additional $600 increases that maximum to $875, which would be an income increase to anyone who was formerly making less than $45,000 a year. Even in Massachusetts, where benefits are the highest in the country, the extra $600 equates to a "raise" of 73%. A big unemployment benefit versus a smaller paycheck? That's not an easy choice to make in normal times, when there isn't a contagious virus lurking outside your home. Certainly, remaining unemployed does satisfy some immediate needs. On the simplest level, you don't have to go outside and you can still pay your bills. But there are longer-term benefits -- for you, your employer, and the economy -- associated with making the tough cho...

Chronology: Trump Was On Top Of Coronavirus While Biden Mocked : No media or Nancy Pelosi false narratives or phony Joe Biden campaign ad can change the truth about the real chronology of the coronavirus. The FDA Graveyard: Absurd Bureaucratic strictures are hindering the efforts to fight Covid-19 Americans are dying daily because of FDA regulations that have repeatedly delayed testing for the Covid-19 virus and impeded the manufacture and deployment of masks and other protective equipment. Pelosi Says Congress Will NOT Reopen In April, Warns Trump Not To Restart Economy : Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told Politico Friday that she is considering keeping the House of Representatives out of session longer than the April 20th return-from-recess date, and may not bring Congress back until well into May — and she’s warned President Donald Trump to keep the country under lockdown even longer. Not everyone is getting a $1,200 coronavirus stimulus check : Not everyone qualifies fo...

Little of the Democratic Party's wish list made in into the COVID-10 Relief Bill. That's a relief in itself. But we will hear of these again, I'm sure. The devil in is in the details, and Democrats will in the future try to sneak progressive and undemocratic issues into bills that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.  On Friday, the House passed the massive $2 trillion-plus coronavirus relief package  (click the link to read the entire bill) which the Senate had passed on Wednesday. There is way too much in this bill which is just pork, though the main features are certainly needed. There’s a lot in those 880 pages, and much of it is problematic: The bill is neither targeted and temporary, nor directed exclusively at the coronavirus—as scholars at The Heritage Foundation and its president, Kay C. James, have explained. Before the bill made it through the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., temporarily derailed it by insisting that any relief bill i...

We're being told on a daily basis by Democratic candidates how bad things are, how the middle class is disappearing, how capitalism has failed, and we should embrace socialism.  But that is not what's really happening.  From the Washington Times : 2019 was a very good year, despite a dysfunctional Congress. A few weeks ago, a friend said she had noticed that clothing was getting less and less expensive and, in fact, many items seemed to be getting less expensive... In the United States, there are more jobs than workers. Wages for all groups are rising faster than prices. What is particularly remarkable — and a very good sign — is that wages for the lowest income and least skilled are rising faster than other groups... Medical advances are accelerating, with people not only surviving from many ailments that would have killed them a few years ago, but living relatively normal lives after serious cancers, heart operations and accidents. Recovering quicker and bette...

Pelosi cautions 2020 Dems over liberal proposals: 'You must win the Electoral College' Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a stern warning to the 2020 Democratic primary field that progressive policies that might fire up the party’s liberal wing could prove damaging in the general election. Sanders' immigration plan: Halt deportations, abolish ICE, welcome 50K 'climate migrants,' give welfare to all Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Thursday released a sweeping immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, "break up" existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to illegal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration. Britain's Free Health Care: Waiting List Grows to 4.4 Million The NHS waiting list has hit another record high with almost 4.4million people now waiting for routine treatment. For a third month running the figure has...

The sub-head on this reads: Bernie Sanders Unveils His $16 Trillion Green New Deal.  I don't normally cover politics, but when candidates start promoting plans that have dire economic consequences, I think we should all pay attention. I'll list some of his proposals and why they are not tenable. But first, let's look the progress that has been made and what plentiful energy has done for our Gross Domestic Product and overall well-being. The following two charts show this. Now that this is out of the way, let's look at Bernie's plan:  No more fossil fuels. “Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at latest.”  I don't know what decarbonization actually means, since it's really not a word. I assume it means no use of carbon-based fuels. Also, most studies show that 100 percent renewable for electricity and transportation is not technically feasible in 10 ...

One take, from Barron's Daily Review (via email newsletter):  Every three months, America's chief executives are forced to face investors and analysts, and sometimes their comments get more attention than they probably bargained for. Welcome to earnings season. The latest edition of talking-point-gone-wrong came this morning from  UnitedHealth Group . The health insurer actually had strong earnings to discuss during its conference call, but that all took a backseat once CEO  David Wichmann  decided to address the brewing debate over Medicare for All:  The wholesale disruption of American health care being discussed in some of these proposals would surely jeopardize the relationship people have with their doctors, destabilize the nation's health system, and limit the ability of clinicians to practice medicine at their best. And the inherent cost burden would surely have a severe impact on the economy and jobs, all without fundamentally...

From the Hillsdale College publication Imprimis , " A Short History of American Medical Care. "  Excerpts:  "In 1930, Americans spent $2.8 billion on health care—$23 per person and 3.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In 2015 we spent about $3 trillion—$9,536 per person and 15 percent of GDP. Adjusted for inflation, this means that per capita medical costs in the United States have risen by a factor of 30 in 90 years." "....So it is clear that there is something terribly wrong with how health care is financed in our country. And a consensus on how to fix the problem—how to provide Americans the best medicine money can buy for the least amount of money that will buy it—has proved elusive. But the history of American medical care, considered in the light of some simple but ineluctable economic laws, can help point the way. For it turns out that the engines of medical inflation were deeply, and innocently, inserted into the health care system just as th...