That background confirms Druckenmiller as someone who gained both understanding and experience in handling very large sums of money in the real world. As such, he has a clear understanding of the impact the proposed $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” spending bill will have on Americans if it passes.

He has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill to warn politicians about the astronomically large spending bill. He warns they will guarantee “dire consequences” that harms low and middle-class Americans if they pass it. On July 23, 2021, he spoke with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on that topic, telling her what he’s been telling lawmakers.

What Druckenmiller Fears from Biden’s Infrastructure Bill

Here is the video of the segment:

To be sure, many people will focus on Druckenmiller’s comments describing how Darth Vader would destroy the U.S. economy by unleashing inflation through excessive spending. But he describes the real risk he sees from the infrastructure bill’s excessive spending near the end of the clip:

It’s going to cause a financial crisis. It’s going to cause inflation and nothing is going to hurt the poor more than that. And by the way, if it does, every dollar we’re spending now, that in my opinion we don’t desperately need, is not going to be available in a future crisis, whether it’s another pandemic or economic decline that’s hurting the poor or middle class.

That’s the consequence of the Biden-Harris administration’s unsustainable fiscal path. Achieving true fiscal sustainability requires treating the national debt like an emergency reservoir. Now that the crisis is past, spending growth needs to be restrained and the economy needs to grow to replenish the reservoir. Doing so will make it possible to weather the next crisis much more easily.

If there is one thing to be learned from history, it is that there is always a next crisis.

The post “Dire Consequences” for Most Americans from $3.5T Infrastructure Bill appeared first on The Beacon.

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:

The high economic growth projected for 2021 and 2022 is primarily the result of ending pandemic lockdowns. Simply lifting the jackboot of these government mandates from the necks of businesses and individuals will do wonders for growing the economy.

Rising Spending and Sluggish Growth

After such a healthy start, President Biden believes his heightened spending will not boost the economy into heightened growth. He projects two percent real economic growth or less in every year from 2023 through the rest of the next decade.

Brad Polombo explains the meaning of President Biden’s budgetary admission, drawing on a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

The progressive argument in favor of government spending is supposed to be that it will help stimulate economic growth. But the White House’s own projections essentially concede that their big-spending plans won’t lead to high growth over the long run.

As reported by the Journal, Biden’s budget projects that growth will surge to 5.2 percent in 2021 and 4.3 percent in 2022. Those numbers are strong. But then, by the White House’s own admission, growth will fall to 2.2 percent in 2023 and slump to around 1.9 percent for the rest of the decade. These levels are bleak, not the roaring revival Biden has promised.

“The White House is essentially conceding that all of its unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus really is living for today with little regard for the future,” the Journal’s editorial board writes. “It implicitly concedes that the growth it spurs now will have to be paid back later in the form of higher taxes or tighter monetary policy, which might reduce growth. This is the definition of a ‘sugar high.’”

The editors’ phrase “which might reduce growth” should be rewritten as “which will reduce growth”, but that’s a different topic for a different day.

The post Biden Spending a “Sugar High” Bust for Growing Economy appeared first on The Beacon.

That wasn’t a mistake. The timing is part of a well-established practice by politicians called a Friday news dump. If they know the news is bad for them, they dump it on Friday, when they know the public is not going to pay much attention to it. If they think the news is really bad, they dump it on the Friday before an extended holiday weekend.

In the case of President Biden’s first budget, they must think it’s awful. Since it was already months behind schedule, there was no real urgency to release it now. After all, what difference would it make if they waited until the next Tuesday? But they made sure they released it on the Friday before a three-day holiday weekend.

How bad is it?

In terms of spending, it is perhaps one of the worst budgets ever proposed during peacetime. The Biden-Harris administration is proposing to permanently increase the U.S. government’s spending per capita by a very large margin. The chart below shows how much when compared with Uncle Sam’s spending during the last 100 years.

Before the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, the U.S. government averaged spending an inflation-adjusted amount of about $13,000 per American per year. The Biden-Harris administration proposes to permanently increase that by 28% to 36% even after emergency pandemic spending ends, from a low of $16,607 in 2023 up to a high of $17,707 in 2030. All these figures are expressed in terms of constant 2020 U.S. dollars.

Covering the cost of all this additional spending can only be done in two ways, by raising taxes and borrowing. The Biden-Harris budget proposes to use both of these methods. But that’s a different story for a different day.

For now, just consider how long you could sustain spending 28% to 36% more than you do today before you would run into serious financial trouble.

The post The Biden Budget: Pandemic Spending That Never Ends appeared first on The Beacon.

For those who are concerned about getting the virus from unvaccinated people, get vaccinated! Unvaccinated people pose a very small threat to those who have been vaccinated. Sure, the threat’s not zero, but any time you are around other people, you could catch a cold, or the flu, or Ebola, from them. You could get hit by their cars or knocked down if they bumped into you on the sidewalk. The risk to the vaccinated from being around the unvaccinated is small compared to other risks of being in places where other people are present.

I’m not discussing whether people should get vaccinated (I think they should, and I have been) or whether they should be required to be vaccinated (I don’t think they should; their health care decisions should not be mandated to them). The fact is that vaccination is not mandatory, and what I’m considering here is whether vaccine passports should be required

The simple answer is no: people can protect themselves from unvaccinated individuals by getting vaccinated themselves. The only reason to mandate passports is to coerce those who don’t want the vaccine into getting it. That’s a violation of their individual liberty.

That’s the why. The how is more complicated. Some issues are discussed here. What constitutes vaccination? If someone gets the Russian vaccine or the Chinese vaccine, does that count? Some proposals would allow a negative COVID test or a positive antibody test to count.

What form would the passport take? Some have suggested a smartphone app, or perhaps a paper passport with a QR code. Could they be forged? Could one person game the system by using someone else’s passport?

Another issue is that people in disadvantaged groups might lack access to a smartphone, or even lack access to the vaccine. Much has been made of the fact that minorities are disproportionately vaccinated.

How would a passport requirement be enforced? Would Wal-Mart greeters be trained to inspect and certify those who want to enter their stores? We’ve already seen the confrontations that have resulted from mask mandates. Airlines could probably handle this easily. They already require substantial documentation. Restaurants? Not so much.

Imagine the burden on restaurants if they were prohibited from serving those without passports. “Whoops. I have a passport but I forgot my phone, but here I am with my party of six.” I suppose the restaurant would have to say “We can serve five of you, but the one without the phone will have to wait outside.”

All of this is fairly hypothetical at the moment. The Biden administration has said they have no plans for a national COVID passport, and some states like Florida have said such passports are absolutely out of the question. But the Biden administration has opened the possibility that the private sector could issue COVID passports, and other states might require their own.

There are too many unspecified parameters to determine how such a passport system could be implemented. Another wild card, though, is that the European Union might require COVID passports to enter, meaning that Americans who want to travel there might need one.

There are many problems with the idea of COVID passports. First, because a vaccine is not required, they would compromise people’s liberty by pressuring them into getting one. Second, despite promises that such a system would not compromise individuals’ medical and other records, the necessity of linking the vaccine information with one’s individual identity always opens this risk. Third, if required by the government, this overreach would extend the power of the government to collect personal information and track individual behavior. As long as the vaccine is not mandatory (which is how it should be), nobody should be required to disclose whether they have had it.

The post Vaccine Passports: Why? How? appeared first on The Beacon.

Julie Su is the latest beneficiary of the president’s very low standards for public service. Politico‘s Eleanor Mueller and Katy Murphy report:

President Joe Biden has offered Julie Su, who heads California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, the role of deputy Labor secretary, and she has accepted, two people familiar with the decision told POLITICO.

But the reporters note that Julie Su faces a huge political problem:

Su is likely to face questions in her confirmation hearing about her role in an explosive unemployment fraud story plaguing California; she estimated during a press call last week that the state’s unemployment department, which she oversees, had issued at least $11 billion in fraudulent payments last year. Two state audits released last week about the Employment Development Department pointed to a series of “missteps” last spring that opened the door to fraud, including a decision to shut off a stop-payment safeguard in an effort to speed payments.

As secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which runs California’s pandemic unemployment insurance program, Su is directly responsible for the EDD’s “missteps.”

Worse, although she acknowledged ownership of the agency’s problems in April 2020, she failed to take adequate action to correct them. Her demonstrated failure of leadership made a multi-million dollar problem of waste and fraud a hundred times worse, exploding it into a multi-billion dollar problem.

Despite this dubious track record, Su will soon be elevated to be U.S. Deputy Labor Secretary. It seems proven waste and incompetence is little barrier for a bureaucrat’s career advancement in the Biden administration.

The post Waste and Incompetence Little Barrier for Bureaucrat’s Promotion appeared first on The Beacon.