Bullion surged to an all-time high of $3,045.24 earlier in the session, marking its 15th record peak this year.
More.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Violent attacks on Tesla keep law enforcement busy nationwide, but especially in the leftist Pacific Northwest
Violent attacks on Tesla dealerships spike as Musk takes prominent role in Trump White House
... Musk critics have organized dozens of peaceful demonstrations at Tesla dealerships and factories across North America and Europe. Some Tesla owners, including a U.S. senator who feuded with Musk, have vowed to sell their vehicles.
But the attacks are keeping law enforcement busy. ...
A number of the most prominent incidents have been reported in left-leaning cities in the Pacific Northwest, like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, where anti-Trump and anti-Musk sentiment runs high. ...
J. D. Vance is fixated on cheaper foreign labor as the cause of American industrial decline when it was the tax preference given to ordinary income over long term capital investment which made it attractive
". . . cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits
innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American
firms got addicted to . . ."
The indispensable contribution driving investment back home to the United States will have to be penalizing foreign investment's income and rewarding long term domestic investment's income through the tax code, which also means dramatically raising ordinary income tax rates. In other words, returning to the status quo ante-Reagan.
The reason is we have learned that rich people don't know what's best to do with their own money any more than the rest of us do. The rich have not done what's best for the country. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong about that. They took one look at the quick and easy money and immediately started looking to maximize it elsewhere. The tax code used to force them to do the right thing, which was keep it here and invest at home if they wanted to get richer. And that is what made all of us richer, with jobs with which we could afford to marry, buy houses and cars, raise children and send them to college.
People who got rich through Reagan's low ordinary income tax rates fell for the cheap labor abroad to get even richer, but now here they and we sit together beholden to countries abroad who are hostile toward us.
The chart below shows how domestic investment dominated foreign throughout the post-war until the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Investment abroad did not overtake domestic until 1993, at 105% of private fixed investment, after the Reagan tax cuts had taken full effect. Foreign as a percentage of domestic investment is double that and more today. For every four dollars invested at home in 2024, eight were invested abroad.
It took decades to screw this up, and it will take decades to fix it. But as sure as I'm sitting here neither J. D. Vance nor Donald Trump nor any other politician out there has any clue about this.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland rules Elon Musk violated the Constitution in dismantling USAID
The ruling is significant because the dopes in the Republican Party just rammed through a continuing spending resolution which fully funds the now severely diminished USAID.
The money must be spent as allocated by Congress.
Judge rules DOGE’s USAID dismantling likely violates the Constitution
WASHINGTON (AP) — The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development by billionaire Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution, a
federal judge ruled Tuesday as he indefinitely blocked DOGE from making
further cuts to the agency. ...
In one of the first DOGE lawsuits against Musk himself, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland rejected the Trump administration’s position that Musk is merely President Donald Trump’s adviser.
Musk’s public statements and social media posts demonstrate that he has “firm control over DOGE,” the judge found pointing to an online post where Musk said he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.” ...
The judge said it’s likely that USAID is no longer capable of performing some of its statutorily required functions. ...
Chuang said DOGE’s and Musk’s fast-moving destruction of USAID likely harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their “constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress.” ...
Kremlin Karoline shockingly spouts Russian propaganda, says Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station is on the Ukraine-Russia border
The official White House spokesperson is conceding that the lands taken in Russia's invasion of Ukraine are Russia.
This is a lie, a big lie, an utter disgrace.
Mad King Ludwig flies into a rage all because a judge told him Nay Nay
Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.
Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.
"He who is the real tyrant," said Plato,
"whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise
the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the
vilest of mankind."
"He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy,
and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to
inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear
and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he
resembles."
The US depression in road travel from COVID-19 ended in 2024 and lasted five years
The 3.257 trillion miles of 2019 was exceeded in 2024 by 5 billion miles, on an average annual basis.
The depression in road travel from the Great Financial Crisis lasted eight years, from 2007 to 2015.
Previous to that we had similar, but smaller contractions in US road travel, from 1979 to 1982, three years, and from 1973 to 1975, two years, precipitated by the oil trade shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur War respectively.
You are now free to move about the country.
Vehicles in the US are now 12.6 years old on average, up two months from 2023, 1.1% are EVs
May 22, 2024:
Average age of vehicles hits new record in 2024
... The US vehicle fleet surged to 286 million vehicles in operation (VIO) in January ...
... 3.2 million EVs in operation in January ...
Monday, March 17, 2025
Atlanta Fed GDP Now Model predicts -2.1% real GDP for 1Q2025 in today's update
Here.
This is the 10th of 19 estimates scheduled through the end of April for 1Q.
This is the 4th negative estimate.
This is brutal: A list of Senate Democrats who were all for last week's failed filibuster after they were against it
In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.
The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).
In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.
The 2017 letter
to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats
who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.
The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.
But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.
🤷
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Multiple job holders hit what only looks like a new high in Feb 2025 at 9 million not seasonally adjusted
But as a percent of civilian population, the 3.3% current level still doesn't come close to the 1996 peak at 4.2%.
IRS turmoil into thrown
... two IRS employees who spoke to CNN said that some of the actions taken by DOGE inside IRS appear to be aimed at finding ways to use the agency’s protected data to find undocumented immigrants. ...
The United States consumed 20.25 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, 3.88 million of which come from Canada and 3.38 million from Alberta lol
What could possibly go wrong?
... Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and Alberta is
the country’s biggest producer. Some 97% of the country’s 4 million bpd
of oil exports went to the U.S. in 2023 with several European nations
and Hong Kong taking the remainder, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Alberta supplied 87% of the oil exported from Canada to the U.S. in 2023. ...
[Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith said Canada is looking at three different pipeline proposals to its West Coast, at least one pipeline into the Northwest Territories, one into Manitoba, one to the Hudson Bay, and one into Eastern Canada.
“Those are conversations we were not having three months ago,” [provincial energy minister Brian] Jean said of the pipelines. ...
More.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Friday, March 14, 2025
LOL, 8 Senate Democrats were Yea before they were Nay: 9 Senate Democrats and 1 Independent broke their own filibuster to advance the House Republican continuing spending resolution to a floor vote against which 8 of them then voted as it passed on a simple majority
8 Democrats: "See, we voted against it!"
The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.
Senate passes GOP funding bill to avert a government shutdown
The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The vote was 54-46, with two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10 Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a Democratic filibuster.
The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats, announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final passage of the legislation.
The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.
The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.
Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.
Rand Paul voted Nay Nay!
Nay Nay is good.
Federal outlays in fiscal 2025 will be almost 200% higher than the 1982 outlays adjusted forward to today's dollars
I've heard the Drain the Swamp bullshit since Reagan's Grace Commission in 1982, when federal outlays were $745 billion.
That's the equivalent of ~$2.5 trillion today, yet actual outlays will be $7.3 trillion in fiscal 2025.
DOGE can't possibly close that gap.
It's not called Leviathan for nothing.
Only one thing can fix it.
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