The Federal Reserve and the Biden administration seem to have a very casual attitude toward inflation. When inflation started to draw some attention, the Federal Reserve’s official line was that it was transitory.
Standard and Poor, Fitch Ratings, and Moody’s Investors Service are the “Big Three” credit scoring agencies that assign grades to the creditworthiness of governments. That matters because governments with good grades get to borrow money more cheaply than governments with low grades do. Governments that manage their fiscal policies well get the best credit scores and the lowest interest rates for the money they borrow.
The following are remarks I delivered to a Neighbors Together Oakland rally on Collaborative Ideas to Improve Public Safety
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Oakland’s elected officials have been making bad plans, ignoring citizens’ wishes for a long time. In the 1950s and ’60s, “urban renewal” destroyed vibrant West Oakland neighborhoods and a thriving black business district. In 2020, City Hall passed a homeless Encampment Management Policy that ignored Oaklanders’ wishes.
State and local governments in the western United States (the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction[1]) are bound by the appellate court’s 2018 homelessness decision in Martin v City of Boise,
[A]s long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.
The U.S. strategic petroleum reserve is down to forty-six days of consumption, a forty-year low. This is not surprising, given that the Biden administration has used some three hundred million barrels from the reserve to flood the market to keep crude oil prices low, a political imperative with his re-election in sight.
Governor Gavin Newsom wants to add a 28th Constitutional Amendment loaded with gun restrictions. The state legislature has the governor’s back. SJR-7 would “call a constitutional convention under Article V of the Constitution of the United States for the purpose of proposing a constitutional amendment relating to firearms,” but there’s more in the pipeline.
President Biden told us over a year ago that “the pandemic is over.” While the virus is still mutating, the worst is clearly behind us. Recent data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control’s COVID data tracker estimates that COVID-19 causes less than 1 percent of new deaths.
The following is the final post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
In this fifth and final post examining Akhil Amar’s NR essay arguing that Thomas Jefferson should be castigated rather than celebrated, I look at Amar’s parting shots and discuss what drove Amar to write his essay.
In April 2020, the size of the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding as measured against the country’s GDP spiked up to 135% in the wake of government-mandated pandemic lockdowns. That’s the highest the U.S. national debt-to-GDP ratio has ever been, breaking the previous record of 121% set in the World War II era.
On 2023’s Labor Day, President Biden boasted of cutting the U.S. government’s budget deficit at a speech in Philadelphia.
