Personal Economics 101

I rarely comment on politics, but some issues should be commented on, as it affects the state of the Union.  Jan 6 is worse than 9/11. Vaccines stop the virus cold. CRT is a hoax. What CNN and MSNBC in 2021 wanted to believe.  The Biden presidency has produced an uninterrupted string of disasters: the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, the Texas border crisis, inflation, an explosion of gun violence and murders setting records in Democrat-run cities, failure to produce an adequate federal response to the delta and omicron waves of COVID-19. Again, Jan. 6 was a riot, involving assaults on Washington and Capitol cops and the disruption of a formal congressional procedure to validate the electoral vote victory of Joe Biden. But was Jan. 6 really the planned coup, the terrorism, the sedition, the armed insurrection, the attempt to overthrow the U.S. government? Was Jan. 6 really comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, during each of which 3,000 Americans went to their deaths in an hour'...

It looks like Democratic-led campaigns against new voter laws are beginning to lose their appeal. Even some liberals are now questioning their tactics. I keep hearing that Republicans are trying to "suppress the vote," yet in reading the proposed new laws and those already passed, I find no evidence of this. In some cases, voting has been made easier.  I have to conclude that Democrats want wide-open voting, with no requirements for ID, or any checks to prevent fraud similar to their open borders policy. Yet 72% of Americans in a recent poll support voter ID requirements. To say that requiring a voter ID is racist or discriminatory is to say that minorities are not capable of getting or having an ID. That sounds racist and is, of course, a lie. The campaign against Georgia's new law’s specific provisions has been just as dishonest, as well as in West Virginia and Texas. Democrats leaned heavily on false claims about a provision barring food and drink handouts to people v...

By Gary D. Halbert Halbert Wealth Management I ran across a very good column in The Wall Street Journal last week which debunks the widespread myth of an “income inequality” crisis in the US. The article is written by Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator and former Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee for several years and John Early, a former Commissioner at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their column challenges the widespread belief that we have an income inequality crisis in America and discredits how the US Census Bureau massages and analyzes the data it collects on US citizens. Based on their facts and analysis, we not only don’t have an income inequality crisis in this country but, more importantly, the income gap is actually shrinking. This news may be hard to contemplate since liberals and the mainstream media have been pounding this income inequality crisis into our heads for many years. As Gramm and Early point out, it all comes down to a few assumptions on how we calcula...

https://youtu.be/sPrbGU0Wyh4

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Cheers Oil Futures Price Plunge, Then Deletes Tweet : “You absolutely love to see it,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, responding to a tweet on the unprecedented crude oil price drop resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Sixty percent of Democrats blame Trump for the coronavirus: Poll : A majority of Democrats blame President Trump for the nationwide outbreak of the coronavirus , according to a new poll. A total of 60% of Democrats reported that Trump is more to blame than China and the World Health Organization for the pandemic, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey. Seventy-one percent of Republicans said they do not blame Trump. NYC Mayor Shocked To Hear Newly Released “Empty The Jails” Inmates Commit New Crimes :  The “empty the jails” initiative has really been picking up steam in cities around the country. This is particularly true of New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio authorized the release of ...

Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century. Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do. Instead, journalists during White House briefings fixate on two agendas. One is to goad the president into saying something sloppy, by repeatedly suggesting that in reacting to the virus, he was in error, that he is cruel and heartless, or that he is dangerous. That gotcha obsession explains why the media can call Trump a xenophobe and racist for issuing a travel ban against China—contrary to the earlier advice of WHO, the Centers for Disease Control...

Excerpts from an editorial by Nick Searcy, actor, director and writer: The most overused quote in 21st Century conservative columns and speeches has got to be this one, and the reason it is so overused is that we have not addressed it to this day. As the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” We have let the Hollywood Left define the culture for at least the last 50 years. We had already conceded academia to the leftists, and as a result of their long march through the institutions, we have an army of socialist youth that rally to socialist superstars like Bernie Sanders and AOC because of their sheer ignorance of the death cult that is socialism. But now, we have been given an opening... We ceded academia to the Left 70 or so years ago, and they have been running up the score in our school systems and universities ever since. You can see the consequences of that at any Bernie Sanders rally. We now have a vast number of historically ignoran...

Was 2017 really the "worst year ever," as some would have us believe? In his analysis of recent data on homicide, war, poverty, pollution and more, psychologist Steven Pinker finds that we're doing better now in every one of them when compared with 30 years ago. But progress isn't inevitable, and it doesn't mean everything gets better for everyone all the time, Pinker says. Instead, progress is problem-solving, and we should look at things like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. "We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one," he says. "But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."

Most Americans Do Not Trust the News Media A poll by MSN.com. While not statistically valid (the sample was not selected according to survey principles), it is interested that 65 percent out of more than 600,000 responses say the mainstream news reports false or misleading information.  Asked differently, How much do you trust the news media? 58% out of 250,000 people said not much or not at all.