Bummer Beyond Belief

After last night

Featured image President Biden gave his long-awaited [?] State of the Union address last night. The White House has posted the text here. A few observations. • The spectacle of Biden speaking in front of Vice President Harris and Speaker Pelosi was chilling. We are not a serious country. • How silly and small did they look by contrast with President Zelensky and every Ukrainian official we have heard from over the »

Bidenflation, year one

Featured image As the United States government measures such things, inflation hit a 40-year high of 7.5 percent over the past year. Reuters reports the story here. The Biden administration has achieved remarkable results in its first year in office. For the average family, that works out to increased costs of something like $276 per month. Whatever the shortcomings of the government’s measurement of inflation, the particulars defy roughly everything said about »

Quotations from Kamala

Featured image I still have my copy of Quotations From Chairman LBJ, the little red book compiled by Jack Shepherd and Christopher Wren that was published by Simon and Schuster in 1968. It leads with this epigraph from Chairman LBJ: “Don’t spit in the soup. We’ve all got to eat.” I seriously doubt that a mainstream commercial publisher will serve up anything comparable to mock Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in the »

What’s the matter with West Virginia?

Featured image The answer is nothing, or at least nothing that the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” bill is likely to fix. That’s the thrust of this excellent column by Charles Lane. He finds, as Joe Manchin must have, that there’s not much in that legislation for the Mountaineer State — certainly not enough to overcome Manchin’s policy-based objections to BBB, especially its inflationary impact. Lane writes: It’s quite clear what’s in BBB »

The Manchin ministration

Featured image Senator Manchin may have done the Democrats a favor by holding up the Bummer Beyond Belief. That was the conclusion of the Wall Street Journal editors last week in “Taking Manchin seriously,” before Manchin unloaded on the bill yesterday: More than a few Republicans wouldn’t mind if Democrats marched into these fixed bayonets because it would likely mean a bigger GOP electoral victory next year. But we’re more worried about »

The Manchin manifestation

Featured image FOX News has posted the video of Bret Baeir’s FOX News Sunday interview with Senator Manchin this morning on YouTube. I have embedded it below. Senator Manchin made news with his announcement that he is opposed to the Bummer Beyond Belief bill that is the repository of the Democrats’ socialist hopes and utopian dreams. His making the announcement on FOX News — making big news on FOX News — just »

The Joe Manchin experience [UPDATED by PAUL]

Featured image Referring to our hope for the defeat of the Democrats’ Bummer Beyond Belief bill, I wrote earlier this year that if you’re relying on Joe Manchin, you’re in a bad spot. As the Senate has adjourned for the year, I want to acknowledge that I was wrong. Manchin stood fast. Manchin didn’t cave. Manchin was the man. If he caves in 2022, I won’t be surprised, but I thought he »

Deep meaning of supply chain, cont’d

Featured image Harvard Professor Robert Barro is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard. He is a prominent member of the economics profession. AEI has posted his December 4 Project Syndicate column “Big-state inflation.” In the column he addresses the attribution of responsibility for our current inflation to “supply chain” issues. Professor Barro does not entirely discount the contribution of these issues as a contributing factor. Focusing on the contribution of »

Get ready, bal

Featured image Last night President Biden delivered “Remarks at a Holiday Celebration for the Democratic National Committee.” This passage reflects Biden’s pep talk on inflation: I proposed a way to deal with this [tornado damage] in the biggest investment we’ve ever proposed in our country’s history. I worry about the next town that’s destroyed, the next family that loses a home, the next person who drowns in a once-in-a-century flood. These are »

From WIN to DIN

Featured image When President Ford undertook to combat inflation in 1974, he announced a campaign to “Whip Inflation Now.” The administration even produced a WIN button and a theme song by Meredith Wilson to support the campaign. Wilson’s song went like this: Win! Win! Win! We’ll win together, Win together, That’s, the true American way, today. Who needs inflation? Not this nation. Who’s going to pass it by? You are, and so »

Biden pitches Middle America

Featured image The minders in the daycare operation at the White House sent their ward out on the road yesterday to sell his money-is-no-object-for-socialism plan in Kansas City yesterday. The White House has posted the text of his remarks here. Something tells me that President Biden’s “social infrastructure” inside the White House is lacking. The verbal road went on forever, or seemed to. Putting the mangled numbers to one side, I found »

Kevin McCarthy speaks

Featured image The slight Democratic majority in the House of Representatives was poised to pass the current iteration of the Bummer Beyond Belief spending blowout last night when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took the floor at 8:38 p.m. (Eastern). McCarthy turned in the longest speech in House history — 8 hours and 32 minutes — to delay the vote until a few minutes after 5:00 a.m. this morning. He has just »