Many Beacon readers will be aware that the current rate of inflation, measured by the government’s Consumer Price Index, is 6.2%, measured from October 2020 to October 2021. Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Board of Governors, says this inflation is transitory. Yet he also says we could be seeing high inflation rates into next summer.

Federal Reserve officials either are deliberately downplaying the current inflationary environment, or have a poor understanding of the forces behind it. In an earlier Beacon post, I linked to this article in which John Williams, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, forecast that he expected inflation to be 3% in 2021, falling to 2% in 2022. How can the experts who engineer our monetary policy be so wrong?

House Democrats want to double federal tobacco taxes to help pay for President Joe Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. While increases would add an estimated $96 billion to revenues, Democrats have failed to explain how the tax hikes wouldn’t be a direct attack against the very group of Americans that presidential candidate Joe Biden swore not to harm. 

Notwithstanding, supporters of the bill are busy promoting more altruistic reasons for the proposal, explaining that the higher taxes would cut Americans’ cigarette smoking. Despite supporters’ best efforts, however, the reality is that increasing taxes on tobacco wouldn’t help people live healthier lives. Instead, it would go directly against the Food and Drug Administration’s own strategy for harm-reduction by treating all tobacco products as one and the same, while helping to grow, not “tame,” the robust U.S. illicit cigarette trade.

My fellow blogger Craig Eyermann did a good job of discussing some shortcomings of Biden’s expenditure plan, so I won’t enter into that debate. Rather, I want to consider the claim that the plan pays for itself. This article quotes President Biden as saying about the plan’s cost, “We pay for everything we spend. It’s going to be zero. Zero.”

How can a plan that proposes to spend trillions of dollars cost nothing? The Orwellian answer from the president is that the plan includes tax increases claimed to match its expenditures.

To further confuse things, in that same article the president says “It’s reducing taxes, not increasing taxes.” Let’s set aside the obvious question about how increases in spending and cuts in taxes can, on net, cost nothing. Any expenditure entails a cost.

The non-profit White Coat Waste Project charges that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded a lab experiment in Tunisia that drugged beagles and locked their heads in mesh cages filled with sand flies. White Coat Waste also claimed that some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so their barking would not disturb the attending scientists. 

Rep. Nancy Mace fired off a letter to the National Institutes of Health, calling the corcectomies “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” Mace is a South Carolina Republican but a number of Democrats signed on. Such bipartisan support has been missing in the wake of other NIH misconduct.

My local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, recently featured an article on the increasing levels of racial integration in many of Florida’s residential neighborhoods. It focused on recent trends showing that historically Black neighborhoods are becoming increasingly multiracial.

The spin the article gives on this trend is that “residents and real estate experts say some Black residents are being priced out of their homes.” The article goes on to say “Black community leaders and real estate agents say Black homeowners and renters are leaving areas like Dunbar for economic reasons.”

Have you gone shopping lately? Have you begun noticing empty shelves in the places you shop?

To many, that will sound like a replay of the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Except today’s empty shelves aren’t because Americans are panic buying things like toilet paper or cleaning supplies. That’s so 2020. No, the cause of today’s empty shelves is very different.

Many readers will be aware that President Biden has proposed new taxes on the rich to help fund his expenditure plans. As this article explains, a big part of his tax proposal is to tax the unrealized capital gains of people who have assets exceeding $1 billion, which is about 700 people.

Despite objections from both Democrats and Republicans, two things that can help promote the proposal are that (1) it would only tax a very few people, and (2) the rich are not all that popular, as a group, among most Americans. Working against the proposal is that “money talks” and the people who would be subject to those new taxes have money.

The Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSF) report will not ring a bell with many Americans. The current version, issued by the Biden White House in March, may create some to some confusion as to what national security is all about.

“The simple truth is, America cannot afford to be absent anNay longer on the world stage,” claims Joe Biden. In the wake of Afghanistan, Syria, and alliances such as NATO, the simple truth is that American remains a major presence on the world stage. Much of the report focuses on challenges from within the United States. These challenges come from “corruption, inequality, polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law,” and also “nationalist and nativist trends” that leave us “less prosperous and less safe.”

The U.S. government rang up another $669 billion in the national debt from January 20, 2021 through the end of its 2021 fiscal year. That’s how much extra money the federal government has had to borrow to support its excessive spending during President Joe Biden’s tenure in office.

Much of that additional debt is because of new spending President Biden approved. Political Calculations describes how the national debt has grown and who’s willing to loan money to the Biden-Harris administration:

When Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States on 20 January 2021, the U.S. national debt had reached $27.8 trillion. Through the end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year on 30 September 2021, the total public debt outstanding increased to $28.4 trillion.

Many readers of The Beacon will know that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has issued an executive order prohibiting governments in Florida from mandating that people wear masks. Meanwhile, many local government officials, including my local school board and superintendent, have defied that order and issued mask mandates.

In response, the governor and state commissioner of education have said they will withhold the salaries of those local officials who issue mask mandates. This article explains that even though the local school board has weakened its mask mandates, the governor and commissioner still find the board in violation of the governor’s order and are withholding the salaries of board members.