Category: folly

Biden Blames Business

Inflation’s up, and President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., thinks he knows why.

Economist Bruce Yandle, famed for his “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation, reports in Reason that the aging president blamed “the country’s three largest meatpackers” for contributing to July’s CPI rate of 5.4 percent, and the fuel industry for its part in August’s 5.3 percent annualized rate.

Profiteering!

I’ve always wondered how anyone can get away with this tired old accusation. Businesspeople aim to profit at all times and in every place. Profit is why they go into business. Are they making too much inflation-adjusted profit during an inflationary period but not when inflation is low? Seems unlikely.

But Biden’s looking into it! “There’s lots of evidence that gas prices should be going down,” the prez claimed, “but they haven’t.”

What evidence? Biden presented none.

After throwing so much money into the economy to “stimulate” it after the big hit commerce has taken from state-perpetrated lockdowns, what could we expect but rising prices? “Inflation is always and everywhere,” a great economist has said, “a monetary phenomenon.”

Bruce Yandle is on that same page. Referring to Mr. Biden’s bizarre blame game, Yandle suggested that maybe — just maybe — Biden “should look inside the halls of the West Wing.”

Specifically at all the spending, like the current “$3.5 trillion spending package.” The puppet masters pulling Biden’s strings must, Yandle asserts, “be aware that calling for more spending to calm inflation is like pouring gasoline on an already smoldering fire.”

The real problem is “too much printing-press money” backing deficit spending.

Blaming excess profits? A distraction.

A big lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags debt, inflation, responsibility, spending

deficits and debt folly national politics & policies

Catastrophic! Calamity! The Debt

Post author By Editor
Post date September 28, 2021
2 Comments on Catastrophic! Calamity! The Debt

“Once again, the stability of the U.S. financial system is at risk,” warned CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper, “thanks to political brinksmanship in Congress.

“If lawmakers do not act, the federal government will shut down this week. And, next month, the Treasury secretary says, the U.S. will not be able to pay its bills … which … could be catastrophic for the U.S. economy.”

Incredulous, Tapper further bemoaned, “that has not convinced a single Republican lawmaker to get on board to raise the debt ceiling.”

But he made the mistake of inviting retiring U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R‑Penn.) on the Sunday program.*

“[O]n combining the debt ceiling increase or suspension with the continuing operations of the government,” Toomey declared his vote is NO.

“And there is no calamity that’s going to happen, Jake.”

Toomey explained that “after Republicans vote no, Chuck Schumer is going to do what he could have done months ago, what he could have done weeks ago, what he could do tomorrow, and that is, he will amend the budget resolution so that Democrats can pass the debt ceiling all by themselves.”

Noting that Democrats were “in the midst of an absolutely unprecedented, very damaging spending spree on a scale that we have never seen,” Toomey emphatically refused to “authorize the borrowing to help pay for it.”

Over the weekend, a Washington Post editorial attacked Republicans for being “unwilling to lift a finger to avoid financial calamity,” while excusing Democrats.

“For their part,” The Post justified, “Democrats … want the same political cover they gave Republicans during Mr. Trump’s presidency by raising the debt limit in a bipartisan fashion.”

The nation’s newspaper of record in full-throated advocacy of political cover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sen. Toomey has been a stalwart term limits supporter in Congress. He leaves having kept a pledge to serve only six years in the House, left the Congress for six years before winning a Senate seat and now stepping down after two terms in the U.S. Senate.

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Tags budget, Pat Toomey, Senate, spending

folly general freedom media and media people

Where We Are Now

Two young people, a high school girl and a college man, have two very different COVID stories, but both reveal where we are right now in the pandemic.

“Abby Chenoweth was a healthy 16-year-old,” writes Emily Walker for MSN. “The Titusville teen took virtual school classes and wore a face mask when she left the house. Her mom said she didn’t have pre-existing conditions, and she didn’t go out often.”

The report goes on to focus on her horrific COVID case, and readers’ hearts go out to her. But that opening paragraph is bald-faced lie.

Or at least a “white lie.” You decide.

You see, Abby Chenoweth is obese. She is obviously so in the photos provided by her mother. And not merely a “little bit” overweight.

Our hearts break all the same, but her obesity is a “pre-existing condition.” We knew early on that COVID can be devastating for the overweight.

The article does not once mention her corpulence. Were it not for the photos, readers wouldn’t have a clue. They would read Abby’s mother’s mask apologia at the end as an earnest and honest plea.

Next to Ms. Chenoweth’s harrowing story, and the see-through propaganda made out of it, 22-year-old Logan Hollar’s story is comic. The title delivers the punch line: “Rutgers student says he’s being stopped from taking virtual classes because he’s not vaccinated,” Karen Price Mueller’s piece summarizes.

“I believe in science, I believe in vaccines,” cautions Mr. Hollar’s stepfather, “but I am highly confident that COVID-19 and variants do not travel through computer monitors by taking online classes.”

Do the professors and administrators at Rutgers know that?

COVID craziness seems more infectious than COVID itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo Credit: crazy person

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Tags covid, hysteria, pandemic, panic, vaccine

folly international affairs

Done to the Dogs

It shouldn’t have happened.

Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.

An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”

We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.

This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.

It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.

The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.

This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.

But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct.

And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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shelter dog

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folly ideological culture

Peak Absurdity

We have gone on beyond nonsense. Theodore Geisel — Dr. Seuss — whimsically drew and rhymed his way into our hearts. But owners of his copyrights and trademarks have announced that they will no longer keep in print a handful of Seussiana, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra!

“These books portray people,” says a press release from “Seussville,” “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

The objection appears to be that caricatures of Chinese and Africans and others are based on stereotypes and, therefore, “hurtful.”

After retrieving your rolled eyes from deep within their sockets, recognize that cartoons and caricatures rely upon stereotypes. Which is why I still own copies of the first two books on the list and will not hesitate to read them and show the pictures to any child of any race or ethnicity who might be interested.

While the woke guardians of the Seuss brand have every right to cease publication — just as eBay, the trading platform, possesses the right to prohibit sale of used copies — this is historic. The woke social justice crowd have pushed their mania past absurdity.

Not, alas, a funny, Seussian absurdity.

His very liberal voice, favoring individuality, diversity and just being nice, was utterly at odds with the implied calumny from the corporation that bears his pen name.

But I do hear chanting in the background: “boil that dust speck!” (A great line from Horton Hears a Who.) Seuss developed his case against intolerance and mob mania in a number of works, most of them not deprecated by his heirs, thankfully.

Kids who read them possess the tools to understand the whys of woke nonsense.

Pity that the adults in charge do not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags cancel culture, censorship, Dr. Seuss, free speech

education and schooling folly

Not Fired for Teaching

The headline states that a “USC Professor Who Used Chinese Word That Sounds Like English Slur” was “ ‘Not Dismissed Nor Suspended.’ ”

Sure. The professor was “only” removed from the course he was teaching.

Greg Patton, who teaches business communication at the University of Southern California, had been telling students about “filler words,” which for native English speakers is stuff like “uh, uh, uh.” We apparently don’t all grope for words in exactly the same way. If one grew up speaking Mandarin, one tends to say “nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.”

No sooner had the example been provided than a contingent of the perpetually aggrieved lurched into action.

Their failure to simply talk to Professor Patton, and the overkill of their response — including a letter claiming that his utterance “offended all of the Black members of our Class.… Our mental health has been affected.…” — suggests the disingenuousness of that response.

A USC dean issued an abject public apology.

Patton also, regrettably, apologized.

Fortunately, many of Patton’s students, and others, rose to his defense, including Chinese class members who noted that Patton’s “use of ‘nei ge’ [was] an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate … illustration of the use of pauses.”

If only the professor had been a mind reader and expert military strategist, he might have avoided this land mine. But training in proactive appeasement of bullies is not the solution here.

What’s needed is a determination to stop appeasing bullies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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