Democrats & Biden’s Inflation Numbers: Thanks to the liberal, progressive policies of the Democrats here is a partial list of price increases for every American family:
42.9% airline fares
33.1% utility gas
30.5% eggs
18.2% gasoline
17.2% chicken
15.7% coffee
15.2% milk
14.7% bread
10.1% furniture
9.2% vegetables
8.2% all items
8.2% fruit
8.1% ham
7.6% women apparel
7.2% used cars
6.7% rent
3.7% men apparel
January 6th Committee Adjourns: The one-sided, Soviet style political theater, as orchestrated by their hired PR coordinator, has come to an end.
No cross examination, no defense allowed to present, no dissenting members on the Committee…just a biased process that use selected “testimony” to make a partisan political point.
This committee was nothing more than a partisan panel desperately trying to score political points.
Now the rest of America can get back to dealing with inflation, pushing back on the soft on crime policies, defend parent’s rights over their children’s education and health for a start.
Fighting Liberal Progressive Policies: Glenn Youngkin –“Children don’t belong to the State. they belong to families.”
Why Vote – You Decide: Every single House Democrat voted to create an army of 87,000 IRS agents, and then voted against a measure to prevent these new agents from going after middle-class Americans. We could sure use those funds and bodies on the border?!?
Polling: Here is a pretty slick service worth checking out for political junkies.
From their own description: The Polling Monitor’s system is straightforward. We use each polling entities’ historical performance to determine how to interpret new polls they release. Our comprehensive database contains the results of each pollsters’ surveys over the past three election cycles in 2022 battleground states. Our analysis compares a pollster’s final pre-election polls in all Presidential, Senate and Gubernatorial contests in those elections to the ACTUAL election result to determine how accurate each pollster has been in each state where they have surveyed. Our database provides readers with the ability to see what the results of a new poll would be if we “adjust” those results by the historic performance of the pollster.
Using the historic performance of pollsters to assess 2022 surveys indicates that various races are tighter than the public polls indicate. For example, recent surveys in Pennsylvania and Arizona showing solid Democrat leads are, when adjusted by the pollsters’ track records, much tighter. In Pennsylvania, USA Today/Suffolk’s latest poll shows Republican Mehmet Oz down by 6 points. But over the last three cycles in Pennsylvania, USA Today/Suffolk’s polls have overweighed Democrat candidates on average by 5.8 points. Adjusting for that historic bias suggests a very tight contest. Similarly in Arizona, CBS News/YouGov has Democrat Mark Kelly up by 3 points over Republican Blake Masters. But in Arizona, CBS News/YouGov has overweighed Democrats by an average of 4.2 points since 2016, also suggesting a much closer contest.
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
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Inflation is busting bank accounts across America. Cash-strapped voters vent frustrations
Americans across the country sound off on the day-to-day woes of rising inflation.
Americans in several states across the country shared how surging inflation has affected their lives.
“It’s outrageous,” Alfred, from Oklahoma City, told Fox News. “It’s getting crazy.”
“How expensive just going to the food market is,” he continued. “It’s almost doubled from the last couple of years, especially with the large size family that I have.”
But Cassidy, also from Oklahoma said: “I’m doing okay.”
“2020 was a real dip. In 2021, it was kind of coming back, so it feels like it’s sort of returning to normal,” Cassidy continued. “Not exactly, but closer than what it was.”
Overall inflation hit 9.1% in June — a 40-year high — before easing slightly, according to the Department of Labor. Economists expect a Thursday report to show that September’s core inflation, which excludes food and energy, hit another 40-year high at 6.5%, a Bloomberg survey found.
“I was doing really good, and now we’re not,” Cara from Bellingham, Washington told Fox News. “We make decent money, but it doesn’t make a difference.”
Tim, in Nashville, echoed her sentiments.
“Everything I like to buy cost more money, he said. “I don’t like it. Gas, food, vacation.”
Biden’s Inflation Quickly Makes Americans Poorer
The sailor’s lament “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink” is reminiscent of how most Americans must feel today about their cost of living.
For instance, there are plenty of homes and apartments across the country, but good luck finding one that’s affordable—inflation and interest rate hikes under President Joe Biden have made that all but impossible.
Those two factors have made the average worker in America $4,200 poorer on an annual basis.
White House officials are quick to cite the recent rapid increase in nominal wages, but they somehow always leave out the fact that prices have risen even faster than wages, so that the average American’s larger paycheck actually buys less than it did before. The decline in real (adjusted for inflation) wages amounts to $3,000 per year.
In other words, the average worker in America has the equivalent of $3,000 less annually than he or she did in January 2021, when Biden became president.
That decreased purchasing power represents the amount of money the federal government has confiscated through the hidden tax of inflation. Americans are demonstrably poorer because of it, and the government is using it to pay for trillions of dollars in deficits.
At one point, this inflation was totally ignored by Washington. The Biden administration and the Federal Reserve each insisted inflation was “transitory,” while they focused on issues such as diversity. But now, the reality is so apparent that not even the ruling class in the nation’s capital can ignore it. In a belated attempt to fight inflation, the Fed has been pushing up interest rates.
This election is your best last hope to curb power-hungry Democrats’ extremism
President Joe Biden has already done tremendous damage to the United States, both at home and abroad. With just a narrow 50-50 control of the Senate, he has erased the southern border, causing a flood of illegal immigration. He has poured trillions into the economy, causing historically high inflation rates. And he has done everything in his power to make domestic fossil fuel energy more expensive, sending the price of gasoline to new highs.
As bad as Biden’s first two years have been for America’s workers, however, if the Democrats are able to get two more Senate seats this November, the following two years will be far, far worse.
With 52 instead of 50 in the Senate, Democrats will be able to ignore Sens. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) refusals to end the filibuster. Democrats will claim they are only making a narrow exception (once for voting reform, once for abortion), but this is just silly. Once the filibuster has been broken for any legislative issue, it will be broken for every legislative issue deemed too important for Republicans to hold up in the Senate.
The Democrats’ voting reforms will federalize election law, effectively banning all state voter identification requirements nationwide while also legalizing ballot harvesting. On abortion, not only will Democrats legalize all abortions right up until the second before birth, but they will also repeal the Hyde amendment, thus forcing pro-life taxpayers to pay for abortions.
Dems under water on top two voter issues heading into midterms
With inflation and violent crime worrying Americans, polling indicates Americans trust Republicans on crime and the economy — and the GOP is taking advantage.
One month out from the midterm elections, voters have made clear that crime and the economy are the two most important issues to them, according to recent polling — and they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle both top issues.
The economy, particularly inflation, has consistently ranked as the number one priority for voters. A new Monmouth University poll, for example, found that 82% of Americans ranked inflation as an extremely or very important issue.
The latest NPR/Marist poll likewise showed inflation continued to rank as the top issue voters say they’ll be thinking about while casting their ballots.
It’s easy to see why. Overall inflation for consumers reached its highest levels in four decades earlier this year and continues to make the two most basic and essential costs of living — food and shelter — exceedingly high for working people.
Republicans ready to hold IRS accountable
Total Democrat control of Washington has been a disaster for the country. Each crisis we are now facing has come about by a deliberate policy decision by those who today control the administration and Congress.
If you are a part of the 74 percent of Americans who believe this country is now on the wrong track thanks to the decisions made by Democrats over the past two years: please hold on. Relief is on the way. Republicans are united behind a strong agenda that will make Washington accountable to taxpayers again. It includes top ticket items like crime control, inflation relief, abundant energy, securing the border, and reining in government abuse of power and corruption.
he media is trying to spin that top Democrat “accomplishments” over the past two years — like student loan bailouts, gun control, and Green New Deal regulations — as positive. The fact is that these policies have degraded Americans’ liberties, crushed the economy and contributed to the bloated federal government. They also remain highly unpopular to pretty much everyone not living on America’s two left coasts.
Also take for example Democrats’ recent legislation which will — on top of spending billions more when inflation is out-of-control — supersize the IRS by adding around 87,000 agents. That’s enough agents to fill two acres of Kansas cropland. We don’t need acres of agents.
The new global virus is runaway government spending and debt
“Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”
The U.S. is in the same dangerous place that the Brits are in as the world economy teeters on the verge of a sharp and painful economic collapse. President Joe Biden has spent and borrowed $4.1 trillion since he came into office roughly 20 months ago. No president in modern times and maybe ever has been as fiscally reckless as Biden. (Alas, Republicans voted for much of this spending too, and don’t forget that in the last days of the Trump administration, Congress added another trillion dollars of spending.) Our government in the U.S. at all levels is still spending almost 40% of our GDP. This is close to the level of socialist European nations like France.
Incidentally, in the U.S., there is no revenue problem whatsoever. Taxes as a share of our economy are, according to the Congressional Budget Office, at a near-record high. In the current course, tax receipts are expected to continue to rise.
The virus that threatens the world today in almost every nation is runaway government spending and debt. It is the match that has lit the forest fire of runaway inflation. It doesn’t matter how much Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell raises interest rates (which he must do to tame inflation) — the stagflation of high inflation and slow growth won’t end until politicians start taking a chainsaw to their out-of-control budgets.
Government spending has not stimulated anything except more government and less private enterprise. The public sector has to go on a SlimFast diet — and for a long, long time to drain the excess spending out of the global economy.
Virginia’s Youngkin defends trans youth policies: Kids ‘don’t belong to the state’
‘We’re empowering parents here to be engaged in these most important decisions,’ Youngkin said.
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin joined CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday and defended new policies in the state that will require public school students to use bathrooms and join sports teams based on their biological sex, not gender identity.
“Let me begin with these basic principles, which is first, parents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives. And oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their lives. We needed to fix a wrong. The previous administration had had a policy that excluded parents and in fact, particularly didn’t require the involvement of parents. And let’s be clear, parents have this right and children don’t belong to the state, they belong to families,” Youngkin told Tapper during CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Youngkin’s administration rewrote the state’s policies on transgender youths at public schools in September, requiring students to use bathrooms, locker rooms and join sports teams based on their sex at birth, not their gender identity. The policy updates also include forbidding students from changing their names and preferred pronouns at public schools without the consent of their parents.
Race-baiting, CRT Still High on Teachers Unions’ To-do List
If you think teachers’ unions were discouraged to learn that nearly two-thirds of American adults hold an unfavorable view of Critical Race Theory (CRT) or that their own outspoken advocacy of the curriculum has proved to be political Kryptonite, you’re either overestimating their concern for what anyone else believes or underestimating their determination to turn schools into liberal indoctrination centers.
CRT, which teaches white students they are guilty of racism solely because of their skin color while assuring Blacks they are the victims of institutional racism that permeates every facet of American life, caused a national firestorm starting in 2020, when millions of students were banned from the classroom and forced to learn from home because of COVID concerns. Perhaps the sole silver lining of the COVID school shutdowns is that it gave parents an unprecedented opportunity to hear firsthand what their children were being taught.
However, with schools now largely reopened and the complicit mainstream media eager to sweep the ugly controversy under the rug, CRT gets few headlines these days.
But don’t kid yourself into thinking unions have seen the light or thrown in the towel on spreading hate.
Christians, Muslims team up against sexually explicit materials in Michigan school libraries
LGBT book proponents “call us religious extremists,” but they “have to have some mental derangement … to support this kind of stuff,” one Muslim resident said.
Muslims and Christians are coming together in Dearborn, Michigan, to protest LGBT books in the city’s public school libraries.
Hundreds of residents having come to a school board meeting Monday to protest the books became so contentious that officials suspended the meeting until Thursday – after weeks of religious leaders telling them to take action.
Attendees were largely upset over having each of their public comments limited to three minutes, resulting in loud boos.
“We can’t have Bibles. We can’t have Qurans. But we can have smut,” Stephanie Butler, a Christian helping lead the effort against LGBT books, said at the meeting. “God is here to protect us. I can say now my heart is full seeing the community come together in the name of protecting our children.”
Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, one of Michigan’s top Muslim leaders, said during his sermon Friday. “Some of those books are completely inappropriate for our children to read. Some of those books promote pornography. Some of them promote homosexuality. We don’t need this.”
America’s energy chaos is Biden’s fault. As we pay at the pump, will Democrats pay in midterms?
Biden’s war on American energy has him begging foreign countries for oil instead of drilling here.
Our nation is once again in a perpetual state of energy dependence. Twice now, the president of the United States has pleaded with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to come to the rescue of the American economy, and twice he has been snubbed. The most recent instance only confirms what everyone has known for nearly two years — the emperor has no clothes.
This week OPEC and its plus one Russia (OPEC+) announced they would curb production by 2 million barrels per day. This happened despite the Biden administration’s quid pro quo scheme to purchase OPEC barrels to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in exchange for a guarantee to not lower production. According to Goldman Sachs, we are likely to see oil prices return to $110 per barrel, and gasoline prices will likely return to $5-$6 a gallon nationally.
It’s understandable to see this announcement as a betrayal by OPEC, but the real betrayal is the Biden administration’s actions in weakening America’s energy independence and dominance. America should never be put in a position where our energy policy is dictated by foreign nations. Under our leadership in 2019, the U.S. achieved energy security when we became a net energy exporter for the first time in 67 years.
Tulsi Gabbard leaving ‘elitist’ Democratic Party, blasts ‘cowardly wokeness’
Former Democratic House member and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard announced she was leaving the party Tuesday — blasting it as an “an elitist cabal” driven by “cowardly wokeness” and trading in “anti-white racism.”
“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms that are enshrined in our Constitution,” Gabbard, 41, said in a searing video posted on Twitter.
Gabbard, who gave up her House seat representing Hawaii to run for president in 2020, condemned the progressive party for being “hostile to people of faith and spirituality” while demonizing the police and protecting criminals “at the expense of law-abiding Americans.”
Social Security COLA Set to Rise in 2023
Consumer prices have spiked this year, meaning a higher Social Security cost-of-living adjustment of 8.7% for 2023.
Social Security benefits will increase by 8.7% next year in response to high inflation, according to the federal government. That will be the largest cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) since 1981. That is also higher than the COLA for 2022, which was already a high 5.9%.
According to Social Security, benefits will increase on average by more than $140 per month starting with payments being sent on Dec. 30. The estimated average monthly Social Security benefit payable in January 2023 will increase from $1,657 in 2022 to $1,801 for an individual. The average monthly benefit for a couple who are both receiving benefits will rise $240, from $2,753 to $2,993. And the maximum Social Security benefit for a worker retiring at full retirement age will increase from $3,345 per month to $3,636, an additional $291.
Also, more of workers’ income will be subject to the Social Security tax in 2023. There will be an added $291 Social Security tax applied to the first $160,200 of earnings, up $13,200 from $147,000 in 2022.
And based on the increase in average wages, the earnings limit for workers who are younger than full retirement age (67 for people born after 1960 will increase to $21,240. The earnings limit for people reaching full retirement age in 2023 will increase to $56,520.
COLAs are calculated using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (similar to, but not exactly the same as, the urban dwellers’ consumer price index used in inflation reporting). If prices don’t increase and even fall, the COLA is zero. That happened in 2010 and 2011, as the economy struggled to recover from the Great Recession, and again in 2016, when plummeting oil prices swept away any chance of a COLA for that year.
How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began—and Why It Persists
The widely-accepted “history” of America’s Gilded Age was grossly inaccurate, but it told a compelling story that many fell for hook, line, and sinker.
Capitalism Worked, but We Were Told It Didn’t.
We study history to learn from it. If we can discover what worked and what didn’t work, we can use this knowledge wisely to create a better future. Studying the triumph of American industry, for example, is important because it is the story of how the United States became the world’s leading economic power. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
The years when this happened, from 1865 to the early 1900s, saw the U.S. encourage entrepreneurs indirectly by limiting government. Slavery was abolished and so was the income tax. Federal spending was slashed and federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s. In other words, the federal government created more freedom and a stable marketplace in which entrepreneurs could operate.
To some extent, during the late 1800s—a period historians call the “Gilded Age”—American politicians learned from the past. They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed. Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development. The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government. And when politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs, high income taxes, anti-trust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war—the results again often hindered American economic progress. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
Why is it, then, that for so many years, most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson? They have made no distinction between political entrepreneurs, who tried to succeed through federal aid, and market entrepreneurs, who avoided subsidies and sought to create better products at lower prices. Instead, most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were “robber barons.” They did not enrich the U.S. with their investments; instead, they bilked the public and corrupted political and economic life in America. Therefore, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the country from these greedy businessmen.
