President Joe Biden wants to increase government spending by a lot, but will that spending grow the economy by a lot?

A surprising source says it won’t. None other than President Joe Biden himself makes that claim in the economic assumptions of his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2022.

Here’s the economic growth President Biden expects to buy with all the new spending loaded into his first budget proposal:

On June 24, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky extended the national eviction moratorium for tenants unable to pay rent through the end of July. First enacted last September, the moratorium hoped to prevent further Covid-19 spread by helping tenants avoid traveling to find new housing or becoming homeless.

Humans are an inherently tribal species. People have always lived and worked in groups. In primitive times, they recognized those in their group as allies and cooperated with them. Those outside their group were viewed with hostility. Strangers were potential predators and potential prey. Better to take their stuff when the opportunity presents itself than run the risk of having them take yours.

Those tribal instincts from primitive times remain, and institutions have evolved to channel those tribal impulses in less violent directions. Sports offers an example where people can compete with each other without endangering social cooperation. Those who are not competing directly can become fans of their favorite teams, feeling a tribal association with others who wear their team logos.

Few countries have imposed more frequent and more stringent lockdown measures to combat Covid-19 than Australia. Their efforts have been so restrictive that the British Medical Journal likened them to a “health dictatorship.”

Other’s are less critical. A Forbes article published in March suggests, even while US cases were in steep decline, “there is still much we can learn from their [Australia’s] response.” Dr. Anthony Fauci specifically praised Australia for its “containment and management of emerging variants.”

These compliments may have been premature.

The U.S. Supreme Court has again upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this time on the grounds that the plaintiff states lack standing to make the case, not on its constitutional merits or practical worthiness. That calls for some review of the way the ACA actually functioned. 

In California, the ACA created eligibility issues and the Covered California website, like its federal counterpart, was totally dysfunctional. Enrollees wound up terminated from their plans and owing money to the government. State health bosses blamed the problems on computers and escaped accountability. All told, as health journalist Emily Bazar reported, the system led to “widespread consumer misery.” Nobody in any state was pining for something like that. 

Visual Capitalist has created an interactive visualization of the publicly-held portion of the U.S. government’s public debt. It covers 150 years, combining historic data from 1900 through 2020 with CBO projections for the next 30 years. You’ll need to follow the link above to take advantage of the interactivity, but here’s the big picture they created:

A recent GoBankingRates survey found that over 50% of Americans want student-loan forgiveness for everyone with any student-loan debt. Considering Democratic lawmakers are hoping President Joe Biden will keep his promise to cancel $50,000 in student debt per person, this data could certainly be used for leverage. But while the number of Americans who now want to see all higher ed-related debt simply erased from the books is growing, it doesn’t mean that we should follow along.

Pandemic and lockdown-related unemployment coupled with a slow economic growth following the low reopening of most states have, indeed, made it difficult for countless Americans to pay off their debt. It is thus natural to see U.S. residents wanting to help those in difficult situations. However, blanket loan forgiveness isn’t a response to hardship. It isn’t even a response to the broken American higher education system. Instead, loan forgiveness will only remove our attention from the errors of subsidized higher education.

Despite politicians’ best efforts, there’s simply no bottomless pit of money anywhere. Taxpayers, and even the Federal Reserve, will eventually run dry. 

Thanks to Joe Biden, a unanimous U.S. Senate, and 415-14 vote in the House, we have a new federal holiday: Juneteenth.  The holiday celebrates the day that the Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that the town’s slaves were free pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation.  Various groups on the Right are urging Americans to embrace the new holiday.  For example:  Kay C. James at the Heritage Foundation, Zuri Davis at Reason, and Dan McLaughlin at National Review.  What could be wrong with celebrating freedom for those who were in bondage?  Absolutely nothing.  But celebrating the freedom of individuals to chart their own course and to enjoy equal rights under a color-blind Constitution is alien to the new holiday.  Juneteenth became a holiday to focus Americans on so-called “systematic racism” and to use past injustices to encourage a progressive agenda. James, Davis, and McLaughlin are merely useful idiots for Leftists.  They ignore the real purposes behind the holiday to our detriment.

We will probably never know how many votes Keiko Fujimori obtained in one of Peru’s most polarized presidential elections in recent history and whether her rival, Pedro Castillo, who seems close to being declared the winner by the country’s electoral body, would have obtained the most votes in the absence of irregularities that are the object of intense dispute. 

The third-time pro-business candidate, and daughter of jailed former strongman Alberto Fujimori, is running behind Pedro Castillo, the dark-horse candidate who admires Latin America’s socialist autocrats and was placed at the head of the ticket by the leader of a Marxist-Leninist organization who could not run himself for legal reasons, by a razor-thin margin in a vote count that has turned into high drama since the June 6 election.  

As ABC News reports, California has selected the first 15 winners of a $50,000 grand prize as part of the state’s “Vax for the Win” program. The lottery is part of Gov. Newsom’s $116.5 million effort to persuade people to get vaccinated. Ten Californians who got at least one vaccination split a $15 million pot and vaccinated Californians will be automatically entered for chances to win $50,000. The first winners have yet to be identified, and some Californians have a problem with the lottery approach.

Professor Uri Gneezy of UC San Diego thinks the lottery sends the wrong message, that the vaccination might be risky. He would prefer gift cards for those getting vaccinated, which would promote spending at local businesses, “especially given the money comes from California’s taxpayers.” Professor Gneezy has a point, but the messaging problem has another side.