Sleepy Joe Biden played chicken with the debt ceiling legislation, waited until today to sign the bill hastily passed in the middle of the night yesterday

 Story.

The US House passed the $2.5 trillion increase to the debt ceiling in the dead of night with just one, unneeded, Republican vote

The bill, which lawmakers passed 221-209, with one Republican voting yes, raises the federal debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion to increase the limit to close to $31 trillion.

More. 

Adam Kinzinger was the lone Republican vote in the House:

Representative Adam Kinzinger was the only Republican lawmaker who voted with Democrats in the House to raise the debt ceiling, staving off a potentially disastrous federal default.

Last week, Kinzinger was also the only Republican to back the Democrats over the plan struck by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) allowing Senate Democrats to lift the ceiling through a simple majority vote.

The Illinois congressman, one of 10 Republicans to vote for the second impeachment of ex-President Donald Trump after the Capitol insurrection and one of only two GOP lawmakers on the January 6 committee investigating the riots that day, will not be standing for re-election in the 2022 midterms.

US Senate Democrats passed a $2.5 trillion increase to the debt ceiling 50-49 this afternoon without a single Republican vote after 14 Republicans voted to allow a one time simple majority arrangement

Seems like there's not much wiggle room between a $2.5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling and a proposed Democrat reconciliation spending bill now coming in at $1.75 trillion.

 Story.

 

 

$2.2 trillion Build Back Butter bill Democrats insisted would cost nothing CBO estimates would cost $367 billion over ten years

 

 

 

 

 

 

So-called Democrat moderates in the House voted for it anyway, 220-213, undermining Republican claims their votes could be peeled away once the infrastructure bill had been passed separately.

Between the $250 billion cost of the infrastructure bill and the $367 billion cost of the Build Back Better bill, the optimistic CBO estimated combined ten year costs will dig a $617 billion hole in addition to the $6.8 TRILLION in fiscal year deficits for 2020 and 2021 spent since the onset of the pandemic to alleviate it.

The pandemic spending orgy, which was bipartisan, makes this all seem like a kerfuffle about relatively little.

Already pared back from $3.5 trillion or more in spending, the BBB faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The wild spending dreams of progressives may have been dashed, but anyone who pretends any of this makes any sense is crazy.

The country is currently holding at $28.9 TRILLION in debt, and is set to explode higher pending the raising of the debt ceiling. 

From the story: 

The final outcome wasn't much in doubt after centrist Democrats' deficit concerns largely melted away.

The vote came hours after the Congressional Budget Office issued its official cost estimate of the sweeping legislation, which moderate Democrats eagerly awaited to ease their concerns over the fiscal impact. The Biden administration and Democratic backers of the bill have insisted it would pay for itself and not add to federal deficits.

The nonpartisan CBO, the official scorekeeper, offered a cost estimate with a little wiggle room. It said the measure would increase deficits by $367 billion over 10 years — but that doesn't count additional revenue that could come from increased IRS tax enforcement.

How much new revenue that effort would yield has been hotly debated. The White House has said increased enforcement, aided by an additional $80 billion in IRS funding, would produce $480 billion in new revenue over a decade. The CBO took a more cautious view, saying the effort might produce $207 billion.

Republicans voted for the Biden infrastructure bill despite the CBO's estimate it would add $250 billion+ to the national debt over 10 years

 Is $25 billion a year a big deal?

We're already paying $500 billion+ EVERY YEAR in interest expense on the debt.

Nobody cares.

 

 

It's going to be fun to watch all the lemmings sign consent forms for "mandated" vaccines and COVID-19 tests

This is the Obamacare mandate travesty all over again. Once you sign the consent form, you can't say you were forced even though you were.

When you buy health insurance, you enter into a contract, but if you are forced into such a contract by a government mandate, it is no contract. It is invalid. You did not enter into it freely. That's the ancient understanding.

 

But that you did enter into the contract, albeit under duress, means it is too late. Your signature is on the document.

No one has successfully tried the traditional definition of contract before the Supreme Court to invalidate the Obamacare mandate. The court does not respect the old understanding of contract.

I doubt these mandates will be stopped either.

You do not live in a free country.

And the Ann Coulters and redsteezes of the world see no problem with that.

Resistance may cost you something much more significant than a few bucks on your tax return this time.

The horror: Share paying no income taxes spikes from 44% in 2019 to 61% in 2020

 Stereotypical story here.

No one ever talks about how little Americans make.

In 2019, you'll be happy to know, 61% of individual wage earners in the US made less than $45,000. 

44% made less than $30k.

I'd like to see our legislators live on $30k, since so many of the people they claim to represent must. Maybe they'd be less inclined to rob us blind year in and year out with their trillion$ in spending.

Congressional salaries, incidentally, put the 435 members of the US House in the top 3.5% of individual wage earners.

IT'S WHY THEY RUN.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's something horribly wrong with a Rube Goldberg tax code which allows:

the rich to avoid taking "ordinary income" and pay little or zero tax on their fabulous capital returns;

more than the bottom half also to pay little to nothing (don't forget that they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes);

and the people in-between to get squeezed to death.

Given that deficits no longer matter, why do taxes continue to matter? Just end them. We borrow the money anyway.

smdh

"two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July"

Pure gobbledygook.

The limit, a facet of American politics for over a century, prevents the Treasury from issuing new bonds to fund government activities once a certain debt level is reached. That level reached $22 trillion in August 2019 and was suspended until Saturday. 

The new debt limit will include Washington’s additional borrowing since summer 2019. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that the new cap will likely come in just north of $28.5 trillion.

More gobbledygook.

The government's bookkeeping shenanigans here are always amazing, but especially now given the orgy of spending during the pandemic, and the reporting is nearly as bad.

The debt ceiling was "set" at $22 trillion in August 2019, but it wasn't "reached" until April 2021.

Add in the ever present "intragovernmental" borrowings and the total debt is now $28.46 trillion at the end of July. Intragovernmental holdings is code for raiding the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds. It's one of the weird things about how bureaucrats think that the extent to which they must raid those funds plus the "normal" public debt becomes the sum they'll use to set the new "public" portion, the debt ceiling, when Congress gets around to it.

They all should be in jail. Instead we are.

LOL, Ben Stein, cheerleader for "corporations are people", has decided that America has only just now become a fascist state

Now, in the year 2021, the iron curtain has come down hard. With Big Internet Tech and the White House now admittedly colluding to identify and suppress dissidents, even completely nonviolent dissidents, we no longer have a Constitution.

There is just one big corporate–government–IngSoc superstate running everything. Goodbye, America. The GOP, with 50 senators, does nothing. The state legislatures, by far a majority GOP, and the spineless Supreme Court do nothing. And so goodbye to the greatest experiment in the history of the world.

More.

Gee, what's the problem, Ben?

“Liberals don’t understand that corporations are people,” columnist Ben Stein wrote back in 1974. “They are the people who work for the corporation, buy its products, and own its stock. There is no mechanical person who is benefited if corporations make a good profit. Real people benefit, just as real people lose when corporations lose money.” True enough. But it is also true that corporations have as much of a vested interest in the political system (if not more) . . ..

Here.

The corporation in America was the creation of the King of England. Virginia was but one example of thirteen. The damn things rebelled. Samuel Johnson tried to explain it to us, but it, shall we say, kinda went over our heads, and where it didn't was met with what they would come to call a generous demonstration of disapprobation.

And so, what goes around comes around. Or as Reverend Wright would put it, "America's chickens . . . have come home . . . to roost!"

Taxation No Tyranny

 

 

Mark Levin is so pathetic: He can characterize what went on in America's streets last year as an insurrection when millions rioted . . .

. . . and yet he still insists on the principle of non-violence from the people to put it down. We should just sit there and take it, watch our cities, businesses and homes burn down while the government does NOTHING.

I don't expect normie conservatism EVER to advocate watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and their mobs.

This is because normie conservatism is really just Republicanism. Its roots do not go back further than Lincoln and his "project" for racial equality, which was in truth nothing but a demagogue's ploy to keep from losing a war. And because of this it has disarmed itself for every other political conflict except for the cause of racial equality. For THAT they will gladly destroy the country and see it destroyed, but otherwise won't lift a finger when BLM and Antifa come knocking.

This is why Republicanism failed to stop the income tax and women's suffrage, Social Security and the welfare state, abortion and gay marriage, and a whole host of other things large and small they said they were against over the years but on which they eventually caved, and then eventually championed. It's the reason "conservatism" has failed, because Republicans aren't conservatives. They are, according to their own lights, simply better versions of Democrats.

For this reason Republicanism can never be about the American Founding, protest to the contrary as it may, boast otherwise as it may. Lincoln destroyed the Founding and redefined the country, by force of arms!, and Republicans are stuck with it, and we with them, unless someone can recover the original spirit of liberty. And Democrats exist to never let them forget it, to make them live by their new principles which only tie their hands and guarantee their ongoing defeat.

Meanwhile, don't look for the Founding spirit from Noon to 3 let alone from 6 to 9. Instead look for more of the same game played by Rush Limbaugh, the "they're the real racists" game.

Race, race, race. Black unemployment was never lower than under Trump.  Hunter Biden said the n-word and the fag-word and gets away with it. Blah, blah, blah, as your kid can't find a decent job to start his own life.

 

The on-going housing bubble

I checked the value of my home on Zillow today.

It's nuts.

After 13 years the estimated price is up 6.5% per annum.

On the other hand, the house I previously owned and sold is up only 0.8% per annum over the same period.

Two entirely different houses, two entirely different locations, two completely different histories. What seems like a bubble living in my current house wouldn't seem like one living in my old one.

The best way I've found to think about this is to ask, How much of a house will my income buy? For bubble purposes nationally, even though housing is a regional and local matter, use median household income and median sales price.

Here's the chart of that data as currently available.

In 2020 the Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS) averaged a new high of almost $337k. We don't yet have the median household income figure for 2020, but it's likely to be bad news, skewing the graph lower again as less income buys a smaller share of increasingly expensive housing.

As you can plainly see, the trend for the percentage of a house purchased by an income has been all downhill since the end of Reagan Bull in 2000. The percentage really fell a lot during the housing bubble which peaked in 2005-06, helping precipitate GFC1. Incomes fell a lot after the Great Financial Crisis because people lost their jobs by the millions and never got them back and so less income purchased less house. Housing prices bottomed in 2012 and then rebounded slowly. Incomes did not, however, and what you made just kept buying less in the low range of 19%. 

That all sucked. Obama really sucked. Sucked historically bad. Record-setting bad. 

You'll notice things really improved in 2019, however. That's because median household income shot up $5k to over $68k (Trump tax cuts), and the median sales price of a house actually fell $5k to $320k. Your higher income bought more of a slightly cheaper house, not as much as the good old days, but more.

Unfortunately in 2020 median sales price shot up almost $17k while millions upon millions lost their jobs. The feds enacted foreclosure forbearance so that 2.3 million homes whose owners lost their jobs never came onto the market. But desperate people who wanted out of cities snarfed up inventory. Demand far exceeded supply, so prices went up. 

But even at 21.5% in 2019 housing was nowhere near affordable like it was from 1987-2001. It was a nice, hopeful moment, while it lasted.

I'm guessing it's going to be quite a while, though, before we ever see even that again. 

In January 2021 just 47.4% of the civilian population had full-time jobs, compared with 2020's average of 47.3%

Biden reportedly said in response to the employment situation summary today:

"At that rate it's going to take ten years to get back to full employment. That's not hyperbole that's a fact."

The fact is employment has never recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and Biden is as little likely to fix that as were Obama and Trump.

The Reagan era tax reforms hollowed out the labor economy. 

Before Reagan, high marginal tax rates on ordinary income steered that income into capital investment, gains from which received preferential tax treatment if held long enough. The investment grew the economy, providing good jobs for Americans and tax revenues for government at all levels. The arrangement distrusted rich people to do the right thing with their money, but rewarded them if they did.

Reagan libertarianism changed all that.

We were sold the idea that lower taxes on high ordinary incomes would still result in capital investment because we could trust people to do the right thing with their own money.

Guess what? Libertarian trust of human nature turned out to be as false as liberal trust of human nature. 

Under the influence of libertarian free trade dogma and growing globalization, that investment went abroad where there was far cheaper labor, lower taxes and less regulation. Profits soared for the few, bringing the number of billionaires from less than fifty in the 1980s to nearly 800 today. Meanwhile the good jobs gradually disappeared and income inequality soared.

Ordinary people today cannot afford cars, educations, health care, and houses as a result.

Add in cheap labor competition from immigration at a clip of 1 million a year and you can understand how Trump was so popular, however incompetent and narcissistic he was.

Trump may be gone, but the people remain screwed by these problems and by the time serving politicians and 2.8 million federal bureaucrats working for pensions who stand in the way.

Returning to the status quo ante might fix it, but it would take a generation to start feeling it. And who among us has the vision and the cojones to pull it off?

Certainly not the women and snowflakes who cry crocodile tears of fear on the House floor. Certainly not the sailors on board the Chafee who are in a panic because the cooks are infected with COVID.

The country is rotting from the inside out. All it will take to bring it down is . . . a series of unfortunate events.

Berman and Milanovic show increased "intersection between the top decile of capital-income recipients and labor-income earners" since Reagan 1986 tax reform has led to higher income inequality

Regrettably the study does not mention another factor, how free-trade, particularly with China and East Asia generally, helped drive wages in the US at the bottom ever lower. The Reagan era produced a perfect storm of screwed for the bottom half in America.

Here:

Where does homoploutia come from? The data do not allow us to determine that with certainty, but they allow to investigate what is consistent with individual hypotheses. There is strong evidence that increased wage-stretching that began around 1980 is associated with the rising homoploutia (the other alternatives that do not perform as well are rising inequality of capital incomes and rising capital share).

The link between higher inequality of labor incomes and homoploutia might have occurred in two ways. The first is that many high-earning individuals saved a large share of their wages, invested it, and after some years began receiving large capital incomes. The second is that many capital-rich people decided, perhaps because of changed social norms, or because top jobs became more lucrative as marginal tax rates were reduced, not to treat university education as “luxury consumption” but rather to use it to secure good jobs. It could be, of course, that both mechanisms were at work.