K. Lloyd Billingsley • Friday, September 30, 2022 •
“While Dr. Fauci has been a government bureaucrat for more than 55 years, his household net worth skyrocketed during the pandemic,” OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski told Fox News. “Fauci’s soaring net worth was based on career-end salary spiking, lucrative cash prizes awarded by non-profit organizations around the world and an ever-larger investment portfolio.”
Dr. Fauci and his wife Christine Grady, head of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, saw their net worth expand from $7.5 million in 2019 to $12.6 million at the end of 2021. That marks an increase of $5 million, from investment gains, awards, compensation, and royalties. OpenTheBooks had to file four lawsuits to gain the information.
K. Lloyd Billingsley • Thursday, September 29, 2022 •
Railroad workers recently agreed to a contract that raises wages 24 percent over five years, with an average immediate payout of $11,000 and an extra paid day off. That is good news for workers struggling with inflation, but Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell doesn’t think so.
“You had said that Americans and business need to feel some economic pain as we go forward,” Fox Business reporter Edward Lawrence asked Powell in a September 21 press conference. “How long from here should Americans be prepared for economic pain?”
Alvaro Vargas Llosa • Wednesday, September 28, 2022 •
The recently released inflation figures for August should give pause to those who keep touting isolated pieces of data to claim that things are improving and that the Fed will no longer need to raise interest rates to stem the inflationary price trend. The CPI came in at 8.3% for August (and the 16% trimmed-mean CPI, which removes short-term fluctuations, came in at 7.2%, the highest figure since they started publishing it).
If you consider how far the Federal funds rate is from those figures, at currently 2.5%, you get an idea of how much higher the monetary authorities will have to go before they begin to tame the beast. Even that will not be enough, because as history shows inflation takes a while to subside in people’s psychology even after the right policies and decisions are adopted.
A Residential “Right to Build” Amendment to the State Constitution Is Needed
Lawrence J. McQuillan • Tuesday, September 27, 2022 •
The housing crisis in California is well documented (see, for example, my report How to Restore the California Dream). Perhaps nowhere is the crisis worse than in San Francisco. Two recent incidents reveal how political gamesmanship in San Francisco deepens the crisis by making it impossible to build housing quickly and affordably.
Brookfield Properties wants to build 2,930 residential units at San Francisco’s Stonestown Galleria mall. After years of community input, Brookfield submitted its proposal to the city’s planning department in December 2021.
Fiscal Policy in the Wake of Rising Rates
Craig Eyermann • Monday, September 26, 2022 •
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is a think tank focusing on fiscal challenges to America’s future. To that end, the Foundation invites experts from across the political spectrum to contribute their insights about the challenges the U.S. faces from its fiscal policies. Specifically, they’ve asked them to answer two questions:
- What is the impact of inflation and rising interest rates on our nation’s fiscal outlook?
- How should fiscal policy be used in this period of high inflation?
Caleb S. Fuller • Friday, September 23, 2022 •
A student of mine asks about annual, mandatory car inspections. In Pennsylvania, they’re required.
In states like Kentucky or Indiana (my home state), they’re not. To my eye, the distribution of cars looks roughly the same. Yes, you’re more likely, in Indiana, to see an outlier that looks something like this:

K. Lloyd Billingsley • Thursday, September 22, 2022 •
On September 12, the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s famous “moonshot” speech, Joe Biden proclaimed that “beating cancer is something we can do together and that’s why I’m here today.” Those gathered at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, like many across the country, may have been unaware that this was a repeat performance.
“The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease,” President Richard Nixon proclaimed in his 1971 State of the Union address. “Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.” On December 23, 1971, President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, which gave the National Cancer Institute unique autonomy at the National Institutes of Health, with special budgetary authority.
What’s wrong with it?
Craig Eyermann • Wednesday, September 21, 2022 •
President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation scheme is a very bad fiscal policy. But now, it may soon be at risk of collapse. The President himself put it in jeopardy, thanks in no small part to his 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday, September 18, 2022.
William F. Shughart II • Tuesday, September 20, 2022 •
Jack Rakove’s WSJ podcast (“James Madison’s Critique of the Senate Still Holds,” Sept. 16, 2022) is right on the history of the so-called Great Compromise, but wrong in arguing that representation by the states qua states in Congress’s upper chamber is a constitutional flaw.
It can be shown, as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock do in The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, that a bicameral legislature whose members vote by simple majority rule is equivalent to requiring a supermajority (two-thirds or three-quarters) for passing bills in a unicameral legislature, but only if the seats in the House and Senate are apportioned on different representational bases. In other words, it is harder for special-interest groups (Madison’s “factions”) to get legislation enacted when they must “buy” majorities in two chambers of unequal size elected from distinctive constituencies than if representatives and senators are beholden essentially to the same electorates, which would be true when seats in both chambers are apportioned based on population.
K. Lloyd Billingsley • Thursday, September 15, 2022 •
“Disgraced former Public Works czar Mohammed Nuru will serve seven years in prison after pleading guilty to a federal fraud charge,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “closing one chapter in a corruption scandal that ensnared senior officials and business heavyweights, and shattered the public’s trust in city government.”
As we noted in January, Nuru was a favorite of Willie Brown and worked for his mayoral campaigns. In 2000, Brown hired Nuru as Department of Public Works deputy director of operations, and soon staff complaints rolled in about Nuru flaunting city rules and misusing public funds. In 2011, Nuru took over as DPW boss, and excrement began piling up on San Francisco streets.