Fact-Checking 3 Biden Claims on Gas Prices thumbnail

Fact-Checking 3 Biden Claims on Gas Prices

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By Fred Lucas

President Joe Biden has insisted that rising gas prices are not a result of his administration’s policies.

This week, he announced the United States would ban oil imports from Russia because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Biden also has suggested that U.S. oil companies are responsible in part for the higher prices due to insufficient domestic production.

Here’s a look at three major claims about gas prices from the president:

1. ‘9,000 Permits to Drill’

When he announced the ban on Russian oil imports, Biden said the rise in gas prices in previous months was not the fault of his administration’s policies. 

Biden said that only 10% of production takes place on federal lands, and the oil companies have “millions of acres leased” from the federal government.

“They have 9,000 permits to drill now. They could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year,” the president said. “They have 9,000 to drill onshore that are already approved. So, let me be clear. Let me be clear: They are not using them for production now. That’s their decision.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, there were 9,173 approved permits at the end of 2021.

But it’s not that simple, said Katie Tubb, senior policy analyst for energy and the environment at The Heritage Foundation.

“The 9,000 leases [statistic] is incredibly misleading and shows the administration doesn’t understand their own processes for managing energy production on federal lands and waters,” Tubb told The Daily Signal in an email. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation)

“Bidding for and winning a lease on federal lands and waters is the beginning of a long process to actually produce energy. After leasing, there’s exploration, environmental reviews, permitting, drilling a well, and putting in infrastructure … to actually access oil/natural gas.”

That can take years because of litigation and environmental reviews, according to the Western Energy Alliance, which is defending 2,200 leases for development from lawsuits brought by environmental groups. The federal government also conducts an analysis mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Some leases won’t be developed if the company determines the quantities of oil and natural gas are insufficient.

Further, relying on the 9,000 leases line is “misdirection” from the White House, according to The Wall Street Journal editorial board. That’s because it’s not enough to simply have permits. 

It takes about 140 days for the federal government to approve a drilling permit, according to the newspaper. Additionally, the Journal said, regulations have made it tough for companies to get permits to contract rigs for operating on federal lands.

Also, the Department of Interior’s five-year leasing program for the Gulf of Mexico expires in June, and the Biden administration hasn’t proposed a new plan, according to the Journal. 

In the past week, the Biden administration proposed new climate standards that would regulate conventional trucks and declined to appeal a federal court decision that vacated the only leases it sold last year on federal lands or waters.

2. Keystone ‘Nothing to Do’ With Oil Supply

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was dismissive of questions regarding the Keystone XL pipeline, which Biden canceled on his first day in office.

“The Keystone was not an oil field. It’s a pipeline,” Psaki said this week. “Also, the oil is continuing to flow in, just through other means. So, it actually would have nothing to do with the current supply imbalance.”

The pipeline transporting oil from Canada into the United States would not immediately boost supply. But as a futures market, oil prices are based in part on anticipated supply.

Boosting the long-term outlook would likely affect prices, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, an app that directs motorists to the best gasoline deals, told Politico.

“The president should immediately rescind his policies to block the Keystone XL pipeline, and let the market decide,” De Haan said, adding:

He should also cease anti-oil-and-gas stances and let markets decide. That won’t help much now, but in the long run, it will reverse his damaging decisions. And the nation should support growing our energy independence, to help offset future situations like this.

Also, in the long term, the Keystone XL pipeline—stretching from Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska—would carry about 830,00 barrels of oil per day into the United States from an ally. 

That would easily supplant the 800,000 barrels per day the United States imported from Russia during 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Future expectations get factored into commodity prices and futures, Tubb said.

“Approving the pipeline now would be good longer-term policy, and would also send a strong signal to markets (investors, financiers, energy companies) that energy production and infrastructure are welcome,” Tubb said, noting:

We saw just this week how powerful those signals can be. The price per barrel of oil increased following Biden’s ban on Russian imports, then fell when the political ramifications were more muted than feared (and the EU didn’t join in the ban) and when the UAE mildly broke ranks and encouraged OPEC to consider increasing production.

3. ‘Putin’s Price Hike’

The Labor Department’s new numbers, released Thursday, show consumer prices rose 0.8% over the past month and almost 8% over the past year. Gas is a big part of that, and Biden said it’s the fault of Putin.

“Today’s inflation report is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases, and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike,” Biden said. “A large contributor to inflation this month was an increase in gas and energy prices as markets reacted to Putin’s aggressive actions.”

The national average price for regular unleaded gas is $4.31 per gallon, according to AAA. That’s up from $3.47 a month ago before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A year ago, when Biden had been president for less than two months, the national average price was $2.81.  

Putin is clearly a factor, but inflation and rising gas prices have been a problem for some time, Tubb said.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is certainly impacting oil markets and creating a lot of uncertainty about future supply/scarcity that are impacting price, but to stop there is misleading,” she said, adding:

President Biden has consistently told energy companies to increase supply today, but don’t make any long-term investments. What company wants to risk millions to billions of dollars in employees, equipment, infrastructure if they’re not going to get a return?

Although Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called for more energy output, Tubb noted the various federal agencies targeting the oil industry with regulations, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Labor Department, and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency.

Amos Hochstein, an energy adviser at the State Department, said the “conflict has made it clear to us that we should double down and triple down on the transition [to green energy], and to make it broader, bigger, and faster.”

Biden noted in remarks this week: “Loosening environmental regulations or pulling back clean energy investment won’t—let me explain—won’t—will not lower energy prices for families.”

He added: “Transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes and use less energy, that will—that will help.”

However, the Energy Information Administration finds no scenario under which global demand for oil and natural gas would not increase through at least 2050.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Goldwater Defeats Massive Tax Hike in Arizona

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By Editorial Staff

The Goldwater Institute won a major court victory today [March 11, 2022], defeating the largest tax hike in Arizona’s history. The decision by a Maricopa County judge bars the enforcement of Proposition 208, a measure that would have massively increased income taxes, led to staggering job loss, and turned Arizona from one of the lowest-taxed states in the country to one of the highest.

Fueled by a campaign of class-warfare and false information—and funded by unions and out-of-state special interests—Proposition 208 sought to double the income taxes imposed on small-business owners and individuals making over $250,000 a year. The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit challenging the initiative for violating the state Constitution’s restrictions on spending and taxation, making the case on behalf of taxpayers, small business owners, and legislators. Last summer, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the Goldwater Institute and sent the case back to the trial judge to find out whether Proposition 208’s spending will violate that limitation. In a decision today, the judge agreed that Proposition 208 violated the Constitution.

“Today’s decision puts a nail in the coffin of the unconstitutional, job-killing Proposition 208, and it cements Arizona’s position as the national leader in lower taxes and building a stronger economy,” said Victor Riches, President, and CEO of the Goldwater Institute.

The Goldwater Institute’s victory in court follows a major legislative victory in 2021, in which the Institute enacted a plan to dramatically reduce income taxes and simplify the state’s tax code, making Arizona one of the lowest tax states in the country. This historic reform restored Arizona’s competitive advantage as a low-tax state and provided a boost for small business owners still struggling to recover from the government’s response to the COVID pandemic.

*****

This article was published by the In Defense of Liberty blog, a product of the Goldwater Institute, and is reproduced with permission.

Republicans Help Democrats Pass $1.5T Excessive Omnibus Spending Bill — See The Florida RINO List thumbnail

Republicans Help Democrats Pass $1.5T Excessive Omnibus Spending Bill — See The Florida RINO List

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By Royal A. Brown III

This 3,000 page bill was passed by Congress.  The House passed it in the middle of the night with less than 24 hours for House Members to read – the Senate rushed it thru as well adding hundreds of earmarks to pass pet projects.

Unfortunately 8 Florida Republicans in the House voted with all the Democrats to approve it – shame on them. 

They are as follows:

District     Name 

02            Neal Dunn

04            John Rutherford

15             Scott Franklin

16            Vern Buchanan

17            Greg Steube

18            Brian Mast

26            Carlos Gimenez

27            Marla Salaquez

Both Florida Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott were among 31 of 50 Senate Republicans who voted NO – please thank them.

Shame on the 19 Republicans who voted Yes along with all Democrats.

Heritage Action: Congress Passes an Omnibus

With government funding slated to run out this past Friday, the House and Senate scrambled to pass a bill to keep the lights on and avoid a shutdown of Congress’s own making.. We have been warning conservatives for months that an omnibus appropriations bill was likely and would be bad – unfortunately, we were right.

Written out of view of Americans and the rest of Congress, an exclusive group of leaders from both parties dumped a bill almost 3,000 pages long and costing an eye-popping $1.5 trillion taxpayer dollars on the House floor with less than 24 hours for members to read the bill before the vote.

Heritage Action key voted against the legislation, urging lawmakers to vote no.

The bill failed to rescind Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine mandates that have ousted our service members and fired our healthcare workers, advanced Biden’s climate policies, and included over $4 billion dollars worth of earmarks so lawmakers could bring their pet projects to fruition in their home states. Unrelated to government funding, the bill also jammed a version of the Violence Against Women Act which threatens American values such as our Second Amendment rights and fails to protect women from predators who may identify as a woman and gain access to facilities and programs alongside battered women. The bill even gives the Left exactly what they want by dramatically increasing the IRS’s budget to almost $13 billion, the same agency that under the last Democrat president targeted conservative Americans.

Oh yeah, and with energy prices at record highs, the omnibus even pushed an earmark tackling racism in our energy system. You can’t make this stuff up.

Lots of Republican members who voted yes will point to the national security funding, but the way Speaker Pelosi wrote the rules for this vote ensured that a vote for the national security provisions was also a vote for the whole bill. Read our key vote to see how she did this.

It’s never been more clear to Americans that Washington is out of touch and not representing hard working Americans. This trillion dollars plus spending package comes at a time when Americans are reeling from Biden’s failed economic policies that have stuck us with record inflation and gas that tops well over $4 a gallon.

Even though this bill passed, many conservative senators and representatives heard your voice and stood up for you. More than half of GOP senators stood with you!

Be sure to thank them!

Check the links below to see how your elected officials voted.

Click here to see how your Representative voted

Click here to see how your Senator voted

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

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China’s Big Bear Market – A Silent Scream

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By Neland Nobel

We have written previously about investors having a “risk-off” year as various markets have to deal with inflation, the central bank’s response to inflation, overvaluation, overindebtedness, supply chain issues, and now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So far this year, it indeed has turned out to be a “risk-off” event as we predicted.  It has been made even worse by the Russian incursion.

Our focus has mainly been on the U.S. but when viewed with a wider angle lens, the picture is beginning to look international.  

As readers might be aware, financial terminology is not always exact or descriptive. But normal usage is a drop of 10-20% is considered a “correction”, while anything over that is considered a “bear market.” Conversely, a rise of 20% or more is considered a “bull market.”

We are not sure that a person who loses 19% in a “correction”, feels that much better than someone who loses 21% in a “bear market”, but that is the terminology generally used. We also think that there are internal market differences between corrections and bear or bull markets, that go well beyond simply percentage changes. But we will leave those technicalities for another day.

As we write, the broad US market as defined by the S&P 500 has suffered losses of about 15% and we expect a bounce fairly soon. After this bounce, then we will find out if losses will be more severe and protracted. 

However, that is not the full story. Almost half of the companies inside the S&P have fallen much more, many upwards of 50%. In short, there has been a bear market in many individual issues.

The broad index of technology, the QQQ, or the 100 largest companies in the NASDAQ has lost 22%, putting that index in bear territory. The Russell 2000, which is supposed to track smaller capitalization companies, has also dropped just a hair beyond 20% as well.

So, it is a mixed bag in terms of official labels. Larger cap indices are in “correction”, while the NASDAQ and smaller cap indices are now slightly into bear territory.

Even worse carnage has been seen in foreign markets. The German DAX is down around 29%.  The French CAC is down about 22%, Spain down a similar amount, and Japan is down almost 20%.

Among the most important, is that of China.

China is important not just because it has the second (some say first) largest economy. It is also important because many world leaders like the Chinese model of government/corporate unity.

Some call it state-sponsored capitalism. In China, you have a blend of state-owned enterprises, with “private” corporations that have government leaders on the board. Members of the People’s Liberation Army sit on the boards of most large Chinese corporations. Many US business leaders increasingly like the model, or at least they behave as if they do.

As an important aside, the term “state-sponsored capitalism” or “crony capitalism” is not helpful because it is both misleading and confusing.Free enterprise is supposed to be free.  Other than setting basic legal ground rules, the government should not participate in free enterprise. If the government does, it obviously isn’t free, because the law is a compulsion.  It is more properly called fascism.

It has never really been defined when a so-called “mixed economy” reaches the borderline of fascism. How much government meddling is permitted before you cross the line?

At any rate, what happens in China is important because their economic model competes with ours, and they are simply the second biggest kid on the block.

What we see in China certainly qualifies as a bear market and a big one at that. This has also come with considerable real estate troubles, including the bankruptcy of the giant Evergrande real estate conglomerate. The largest debtor in the world has defaulted on more than $300 billion in loans.

The Dow Jones China 88 is now down over 33%. Note that while U.S. stocks began their decline in early January of this year, China rolled over in February of 2021, more than a year ago.

The Invesco China Fund, a prominent US-managed mutual fund of Chinese shares is down a whopping 45%.

Alibaba Group, the Chinese clone of Amazon is down 73%. Tencent, the largest cap of all tradable Chinese companies is now down 55%.

This kind of severe damage has garnered little press, in part because President Xi is trying to cover things up for his third term, and in part, because our press and our elites are sympathetic to Chinese fascism. In fact, many of our biggest corporations, media companies, and sports organizations; are invested heavily in China. They turn a blind eye to the fascistic system as well as the genocide against ethnic and religious minorities. Now they are turning a blind eye to significant losses.

It would seem ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) U.S. corporations don’t care about the “social” and the “governance”, as long as slave labor is profitable. And, if taking care of shareholders now plays second fiddle to other “stakeholders”, those investor losses are secondary as well.

But many Chinese and Western investors are now suffering in silence because no one wants to say what is obvious out loud: China is in a bear market.  The theory that “they”, usually meaning the Chinese government, won’t let large losses occur, has been debunked.  It may be more accurate to say these larges losses have occurred because the government plays such a large role in Chinese corporate life.

This kind of damage in equity markets rarely occurs unless there are severe underlying economic difficulties. With so much debt being held by state-owned banks that can hide the losses, it is hard to know for sure. If true in this case, the bear market in China is quite significant. And the fact that bear markets exist in many other powerhouse nations such as Germany, is equally significant.

Historically, the truly big and dangerous business cycles are worldwide in nature. The “risk-off” year seems now to be going global and that will create additional difficulties for those of us in the U.S.  Bear markets in most of the large economies of the world will not be without consequences.

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Weapons Of Financial Destruction And The New World Disorder

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By David C. Hendrickson

Biden didn’t have to take a blowtorch to the financial system in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But he has done so.

The comprehensive sanctions the United States and the West have imposed on Russia take us into an entirely new world. The sanctions are multidimensional but most important is the “freezing” of Russian foreign exchange reserves, what President Biden called Putin’s $630 billion war fund in his State of the Union. This action means that all previous economic contracts between Russia and the West are invalid. Biden’s figure was probably overstated by half, but the precise figure doesn’t matter. It’s the principle that counts.

The effective nullification of contracts is the Big Enchilada, an H-Bomb rather than an A-Bomb, a 50-megaton Weapon of Financial Destruction (WFD). Without bothering to announce it, the United States and its allies have thrown a wrench into the gears of important sectors of the world economy. They are badly underestimating the fallout. Remarkably, they did this against the backdrop of a worldwide crisis in supply chains. That is about to get a lot worse.

Among the cascading dominos: 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports are now cut off. Russia’s exports of fertilizers—18 percent of the potash market, 20 percent of ammonia exports—are off market. Energy prices have exploded. A suddenly bipartisan United States has imposed a (mostly symbolic) ban on Russian oil imports. The Biden administration has insisted that it doesn’t want to diminish world oil and gas supplies but, grosso modo, the effect of its sanctions points strongly in that direction.

No one knows what Russia’s reaction to the sanctions will be, though there are straws in the wind. If the Russian trust fund can be expropriated at will, what does it even mean for Russian companies to sell goods for cash? In the emerging standoff, there is much debate about what the West is willing to buy, little attention to the terms on which Russians are willing to sell if they are willing to sell at all. They are in a position to impose staggering costs on the West in retaliation. Odds are they will do some of that, maybe a lot of that. However, much of the dysfunction, like chaos in commodity markets stemming from defaults, is just embedded in the situation created by the West’s use of WFD.

When 5 percent of OPEC’s production was withdrawn from world markets in 1973 and 1974, it led to a quadrupling of oil prices. Removing 30 percent of tradable grain and 20 percent of fertilizer would have similar effects. We do not know how many hundreds of millions of people will be priced out of the market for grains in the aftermath of the recent WFD use. Perhaps one of the sanctions-crazed liberal humanitarians can tell us.

In a fit of righteous anger, Western governments chose these steps. They will come to regret having done so. They did it with little to no attention to the likely consequences. Officials are now salivating about the terrific damage they have inflicted on the Russian economy, but these WFD will almost certainly prove to be the mother of all self-inflicted wounds. Almost certainly, too, they will not dislodge Putin from Ukraine or from power.

Other peoples will suffer the most, but basically, we did this to ourselves. The Biden Administration did not have to take a blowtorch to the financial system in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But it has done so. And now it has no diplomatic path back from the precipice.

We need a clear-eyed assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the looming struggle. That conflict pits not only Russia against the West, but also Russia and China against the West. Putin, it seems certain, told Xi what he intended to do. In the long statement the two leaders issued before the war, they pledged to have each other’s back. The implied deal is that China will help Russia through its present financial disaster, compensated by pricing arrangements advantageous to China on energy, metals, and foodstuffs over the long term. China may bend before the threat of U.S. sanctions, but it will not abandon Russia. Note well, too, that China is not harmed by the re-deployment of U.S. forces and expenditures toward Europe.

Russia and China are now permanent allies. The simplest way of understanding why they are permanent allies is that the United States made each singly, and both together, permanent enemies. Both powers reached the conclusion that the United States was “agreement-incapable.” The U.S. formula, by using all its power to ensure that they couldn’t have any other friends, forced them into the deepest partnership.

The rights and wrongs of that Western policy, birthed in all essential aspects by neoconservative thought in the 1980s and 1990s, we may leave for another time. The struggle the hawks and the neocons prophesied—and in my view are directly responsible for precipitating—is upon us. How fares “liberal hegemony,” the “rule-based order,” in this approaching bipolarization of the world’s financial and economic system?

Any assessment must take place against the backdrop of two vital trends. One is the complete abandonment of fiscal responsibility by the U.S. government, too dreary to describe in detail. The second is the magical floatation of U.S. financial markets in the years preceding 2022, abetted by a Federal Reserve prepared to do anything to backstop them. Its bond purchases, under the name of quantitative easing, went way beyond anything central banks had done previously. And boy did the markets respond. Unheard-of valuations, based on fabulous earnings twenty-years-hence, became the norm in many frothy sectors, beyond anything seen in 1929 or 1999. Based on the historic ratios assessing valuation over time, the market was in the top one percent of every measure known to dry-eyed prognosticators. Recent declines, about 10 percent as of March 4, come from a very high perch, the all-time highs registered in early January 2022.

The Fed’s magic dust was based on interest rate suppression, made for the previous world economic order. It’s not going to work in the new one, in which every country faces a real bad case of stagflation—runaway inflation, followed by big job losses—that looks worse to me (though not as yet to the markets) than what went down in the 1970s.

The world economy changed in profound ways under the auspices of the “Washington System” of the last 30 years. What had been a Western Unit within the global economy—the trilateral ties among the United States, Western Europe, and Japan—became a Global Unit that incorporated the entire world. During this time, both Europe and the United States lost a lot of the manufacturing capacity that had previously put them at the top of the rankings. That was “off-shored.” China became the center of world manufacturing. As Americans discovered in 2020, there were tons of indispensable things that China made. In many sectors, like pharmaceuticals, it achieved market dominance, producing 60 to 80 percent of the goods.

Russia is a sort of China writ small in terms of its productive capacity. Everybody repeats, mindlessly, that it’s a nothing in world GDP rankings, but that does not alter the fact that it produces things that are desperately needed and whose absence from world markets would have seismic consequences. That makes today’s sanctions totally different from those of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union existed as an autarchic island, entire of itself. As Larry Summers observed to Fareed Zakaria, this interdependence makes Russia far more vulnerable than it once was to Western sanctions. Right, Larry: It also makes us much more vulnerable to the blowback.

Dollar hegemony came about in the first instance because of American economic strength, but then stuck around for a host of reasons. The use of the dollar within the Cold War trilateral bloc made easy its extension to the rest of the world. But then a strange thing happened. The policies on which it had been created in the first place were repudiated. In the old days, the United States was the safest place to park your assets. Now, transacting anything in dollars makes your assets subject to expropriation according to the decree of the U.S government.

The aggressive geopolitical exploitation of dollar hegemony really got underway in the 21st century, with the second decade much more ambitious than the first. Each year brought a new escalation. Biden’s February 2022 seizure of the $7 billion in assets held by Afghanistan’s central bank—shocking to anyone versed in international law—proved to be an important harbinger of how far the authorities were prepared to go.

How does this emerging contest look from the vantage point of the Global South? The West’s lineup of allies is impressive and includes states with large economies, in Europe, Japan, and some smaller states in Asia. From the vantage point of Latin America, Africa, the Greater Middle East, India, ASEAN, how does it look? If you were sitting in those places, which bloc would you choose, if you had to choose? What can each side do for you, how can they get after you and punish you? In other words, what are their carrots and sticks?

It is in that vast hinterland that the fate of the Western-led “international liberal order” will be decided. It is being challenged by a China bloc, of which Russia is a part. In this contest, a disturbing reversal of the Cold War pattern, China wields a lot of carrots, whereas the United States has a lot of sticks. Like the Communists of old, the U.S.A. hopes to win converts by coercion.

In the economic architecture of the last decades, other countries needed U.S. dollars, in which their debts were often denominated, but they needed precious few U.S. goods. The gap between what Americans owned and what they owed widened precipitously, especially in the past ten years. The American economy intensified its standing as an empire of consumption, floating on the high tide of electronic wealth. Less and less was its financial prowess production-based, anchored in the ability to make things. (The exception of course, is state-subsidized armaments. America can make a lot of those.)

At the same time as the United States was allowing its industrial and manufacturing base to rust away, it exploited dollar hegemony for geopolitical ends. For every sin in the world, there was a sanction. These were to be employed, in theory, just to hurt the bad guys, not ordinary people. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. It never works out that way.

China, by contrast, developed an extraordinary capacity to build the things that poorer states need. It can supply the goods they have to have. This disparity didn’t seem to matter to the markets in the past, but it is going to matter a lot.

The unsettling conclusion is that everything we learned about the workings of the international economy must be reassessed, given that so many of its basic underpinnings have been overturned. Don’t think of trade in the dreamy way that economists talk about it, with everyone exchanging goods and services in Benthamite bliss at the joys of utility maximization. No, it won’t be like that.

Instead, batten down the hatches for neo-mercantilism on steroids. At some of its most salient junctures, exchange between the blocs will be like two rival gangs of Mafiosi making a guns-for-drugs swap—disagreeable, but necessary—and coming to the transaction in a remote warehouse with lots of armed back-ups just in case. “Let me see the merchandise. Don’t try to pull a fast one.”

The WFD have been released and will likely prove radioactive for years. In Washington, there is no thought of going back, however. Everybody wants to go forward. Good luck to the rest of us.

David C. Hendrickson is president of the John Quincy Adams Society and professor emeritus of political science at Colorado College.

*****

This article was published in The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

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Biden Worse Than The Worst Five U.S. Presidents Combined

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By Dr. Rich Swier

In January 2021 just hours into his presidency Biden signed directives banning the Keystone XL pipeline, implemented a sixty-day hiatus for new drilling leases on federal lands, and recommitted the United States to the terms of the Paris Agreement for reducing carbon emissions. After these Biden policy decisions many warned about the impacts of them on ordinary Americans.

Thomas Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance warned,

“President Biden’s ban on oil and natural gas production on lands owned by all Americans will result in higher energy prices, job losses, and reduced economic growth.” –

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon stated,

“It’s much better for us to be selling energy to our friends than it is to be buying it from our enemies. It’s just a matter of really making sure that we put America first, that we make sure that American leadership and innovation [are] something we showcase and celebrate.”

On March 12th, 2022, just 13 months into the Biden presidency, at a ‘Save America’ Rally in Florence, South Carolina, President Donald J. Trump said,

“You could take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together they would not have done the damage the Joe Biden has done is just 13 months.”

On March 10th, 2022 Katie Pavlich wrote:

Inflation hit another high in February, marking the worst numbers since 1982 for American consumers. The new number, measured by the Consumer Price Index, sits at 7.9 percent. Inflation, which is a tax on the poor and middle class, is expected to keep rising as President Joe Biden and Democrats call for more government spending.

Spencer Brown wrote:

Earlier this week, President Biden called rising fuel costs “Putin’s price hike,” a cute but meaningless phrase that is just more of Biden trying to blame a scapegoat rather than keep his promise that the buck stops with him.

On March 10th, 2022 PBS News Hour reported:

Propelled by surging costs for gas, food and housing, consumer inflation jumped 7.9 percent over the past year, the sharpest spike since 1982 and likely only a harbinger of even higher prices to come.

The increase reported Thursday by the Labor Department reflected the 12 months ending in February and didn’t include most of the oil and gas price increases that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Since then, average gas prices nationally have jumped about 62 cents a gallon to $4.32, according to AAA.

WATCH: Biden’s Fossil Fuels Blockade.

Recently, decals of a finger-pointing President Biden, with the words “I did that!” in big, bold print, have been appearing on fuel pumps across the country — including New York City — as gasoline prices skyrocket.

So, how did Biden reply to what is so obvious to each and every American?

Biden: “I’m sick of this stuff! The American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money. Simply. Not. True.” pic.twitter.com/e0XAeeqv7f

— Jewish Patriot 🚛 (@MAGAJew2) March 11, 2022

“Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of Putin,” Biden says.

Except inflation has been soaring above 5% since last May. pic.twitter.com/DfU1969ZT5

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 11, 2022

Biden’s Inflation

American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy, Milton Friedman said,

“Inflation is an old, old disease. We’ve had thousands of years of experience of it. There is nothing simpler than stopping an inflation—from the technical point of view.

The only cure for inflation is to reduce the rate at which total spending is growing. There is no way of slowing down inflation that will not involve a transitory increase in unemployment, and a transitory reduction in the rate of growth of output. But these costs will be far less than the costs that will be incurred by permitting the disease of inflation to rage unchecked.”

Watch:

Milton Friedman explains who is really responsible for inflation:

The Bottom Line

During a March 12th, 2022 “Save America” rally in Florence, South Carolina President Donald J. Trump said:

“You can take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together they would not have done the damage that Joe Biden has done in just thirteen months.”

Biden and his administration are focused on fixing the blame rather than fixing the massive inflation every American is feeling today.

WATCH: You cannot have an American president that has an America-last policy.

America is now facing a quadruple threat to our domestic and national security: Russia, Iran, China and the Biden administration.

The only way to fix the problem is to get the worst president in the history of the United States out of office.

In the interim legal American voters need to give control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate back to conservative politicians.

Not to do so in November 2022 will see this Bidenflation turn into a Biden disaster with dire consequences both domestically and globally.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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A Sunday Read: Monetary Lessons from Weimar Germany thumbnail

A Sunday Read: Monetary Lessons from Weimar Germany

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By Samuel Gregg

As night follows day, any significant outbreak of inflation in Western economies eventually involves an invocation of the hyperinflation experienced by Germany 100 years ago. Since mid-2021, people ranging from tech billionaires to bitcoin enthusiasts have been asking: are we headed for a Weimar hyperinflation moment?

It is not that German hyperinflation was the most severe in history. The inflation apocalypse that engulfed Zimbabwe in 2007 was considerably worse. The German case, however, attracts attention for two reasons. First, it occurred in a modern developed economy. Second, the hyperinflation experience severely damaged the Weimar Republic’s credibility in many Germans’ eyes, thereby contributing to Hitler’s rise to power.

History, Cicero reminds us, is the magistra vitae. It provides us with a repository of experiences from which we can learn and then apply the lessons to our present dilemmas. The parallels between the unraveling of Germany’s financial system in the early-1920s and today’s inflation outbreaks are far from exact. But understanding what happened in Germany does provide us with insights into our current inflationary challenges.

From World War to Monetary Chaos

Few economic events have been as closely analyzed as the decline in the value of the German mark that began accelerating in 1921, before stabilizing in mid-1922, and then falling at a light-speed pace from November 1922 onwards. In December 1921, a loaf of bread cost 4 marks. A year later, the price was 163 marks. By November 1923, it was 201,000,000,000 marks. Like many of Germany’s post-1918 challenges, some of the roots of the problem are traceable to World War I.

Among the many choices confronting Imperial Germany in 1914 was how to pay for the war. In August 1914, the Reichsbank delinked Germany’s currency from the gold standard by formally suspending the convertibility on demand of paper money into gold for the war’s duration. The Papiermark consequently became the only currency in circulation. A law was also passed permitting the Reichsbank to purchase short-term treasury bills and commercial bills of exchange, thereby allowing the Reichsbank to act as a lender of last resort and print new paper money to meet the government’s financial needs.

This move was accompanied by Berlin borrowing large amounts of capital. It struggled to do so abroad, and thus resorted to selling long-term interest-bearing bonds to Germans domestically. The effect was to keep tax increases relatively low but also to create a growing debt burden.

The political calculation behind these decisions was that the German Army would win the war by swiftly conquering France before turning east to defeat Russia. The expectation was that the war’s losers would pay Germany’s wartime debts via massive reparations and territorial concessions. A transition back to the gold standard at the end of a victorious war was also fully anticipated by both government and the people. This confidence helped keep inflation somewhat manageable between 1914 and 1918. In August 1914, the U.S. dollar-mark exchange rate was 4.19 marks to the dollar. In November 1918, it was 7.4 to 1. Given how many Papiermarks had been issued since 1914, this was not a terrible number.

But, as we all know, Germany’s strategic gamble failed. The defeated Germany which emerged after four years of brutal war found itself saddled with domestic war debts of 154 billion goldmarks and wondering how to pay them. Six months later, German negotiators at Versailles were informed that Germany had to pay reparations at levels far beyond most Germans’ wildest imaginations. Almost immediately, the mark’s value began wobbling. In January 1919, it was 8.9 marks to the dollar. The mark rate slid to 13.5 following specification of the Allies’ reparations demands. By December 31, 1919, it was 49 to 1.

Two other factors complicated matters. First, the Allies insisted that reparation payments be made in foreign currencies. They were determined not to let Germany inflate its way out of reparations. Germany consequently had to buy foreign currencies with a mark whose value continued to fall. The only way to keep doing this was to print more marks, thereby further devaluing the currency.

Second, the Weimar government—a coalition of Social Democrats, liberals, and the Catholic Center party—was struggling to establish order in a country that was starving, stricken with high unemployment, and being torn apart by labor unrest and violent agitation by Communists and proto-Nazis. The government’s response was to adopt a “pay-whatever-it-takes” strategy to fund the huge wage increases that Germany’s powerful unions demanded for their members, and to keep paying for welfare programs that had grown as a result of needing to pay pensions to wounded veterans, war-widows, and their families.

Germany’s leaders were fully aware of the inflationary consequences of these decisions. They also knew that any return to monetary stability involved measures like cutting government spending to pay down debt, as well as eventually getting the mark back on the gold standard.

Few, however, in the German government believed that the fledgling democracy could withstand the social explosion that would follow implementation of such policies. The resulting acceleration in unemployment alone, they worried, would deliver Germany into the hands of Marxists or extreme nationalists. From this standpoint, inflation was, as the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau told a group of American bankers on June 23, 1922, a “political necessity” if chaos and dictatorship were to be avoided. The very next day, Rathenau, a Jewish-German industrialist who had effectively run much of the German economy during the war, was assassinated by two extreme right-wingers.

Foreign observers were not blind to the dilemmas facing Germany. As Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Sir Robert Horne, later noted: “The difficulty was that they were in a vicious circle. Germany said she could not stop the emission of paper money and repay her foreign obligations unless she was able to raise a foreign loan, and she could not raise a foreign loan until she could pay her obligations.” The printing press, many German officials believed, was the only way to square the circle. This policy happened to coincide with the firm conviction of the Reichsbank’s president, Rudolf Havenstein, that the central bank’s responsibility was to satisfy the rising demand for money as prices increased as a result of the mark’s declining value. Again, that meant printing money.

The price for this was hyperinflation in what was still the world’s second-biggest economy. After Rathenau’s assassination, the mark to dollar rate was 493. One year later in June 1923, it was 109,966. On November 15, 1923, it reached 2.5 trillion.

Even worse, hyperinflation fueled the very disorder that Berlin had sought to avoid. Savers were wiped out, while borrowers had their debts liquidated. That generated tremendous resentment among creditors towards debtors. In rural areas, farmers hoarded their produce in anticipation of a more stable means of exchange being established. The result was hunger in cities and escalating urban-rural tensions.

Then there were the everyday scenes of disarray. Tourists observed German women rushing to stores with wheelbarrows carrying their husbands’ pay-packets to buy necessities before the prices increased again in a few hours’ time. This need to spend money quickly before it lost more value only accelerated monetary velocity throughout the economy. That in turn generated ever-faster price increases.

One group which suffered terribly was the highly-educated segment of the German middle-class. The Bildungsbürgertum, as it was called, consisted of professionals like civil servants, doctors, lawyers, architects, academics, and scientists. Overwhelmingly drawn from the Protestant upper-middle class, it was deeply patriotic as a rule. Many of their sons—men like the ordo-liberal economists Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken who would save the German economy from oblivion in 1948—served as front-line officers during the war.

The same patriotism had led them to purchase a disproportionately high number of war bonds. As hyperinflation took hold, the anticipated redeemable value of these bonds collapsed, alongside the purchasing power of professional salaries. The Bildungsbürgertum subsequently found themselves selling treasured family heirlooms to pay electricity bills. Such experiences inflicted deep psychological wounds that would come back to haunt the Republic.

Breaking the Spell

By mid-1923, Germany’s leaders recognized that, absent a return to monetary stability, complete social breakdown loomed. Political radicals, they feared, would capitalize on this to overthrow the Republic. Communist uprisings in Saxony and an attempted radical-right putsch in Bavaria, led by an Austrian-born agitator named Adolf Hitler, underscored the reality of this threat.

The decision to act was bolstered by two developments. One was the appointment of the conservative-liberal Gustav Stresemann, as chancellor and foreign minister of a coalition government in August 1923. An economist by training but with broad intellectual interests, Stresemann was respected by groups ranging from moderate Social Democrats to center-right monarchists. He was also determined to curb inflation drastically. Stresemann was helped by America and Britain’s decision to revisit reparations within the context of the monetary disaster unfolding throughout Germany. America also brought pressure on France by effectively telling the French government that Washington would not relent on demanding full repayment of France’s wartime debts to America until Paris adopted more flexibility vis-à-vis German reparations.

This gave Stresemann’s government the space it needed to break the inflation spell. That included sidelining the Reichsbank president by appointing a currency commissioner, Hjalmar Schacht (later Hitler’s economics minister between 1934 and 1937), who promptly turned off the printing presses. Major government spending cuts were also implemented. One and a half million civil servants lost their jobs and deep reductions were made in social spending.

Hyperinflation destroyed the middle class’s savings while the cure had rendered their war-bonds valueless. The social humiliation which they endured throughout 1923 also left a mark.

These measures were accompanied by a root-and-branch currency reform. Such reforms are always a risky exercise. The outcome is by no means guaranteed, and some people—in this case, middle-class war-bond holders—end up having their wealth dramatically reduced through no fault of their own. This type of step is generally taken only when governments believe they have no choice, and every alternative is worse. Stresemann’s government, however, decided to make the leap.

An interim currency, the Rentenmark, backed by Germany’s conservative financial establishment, was introduced on November 16, 1923, to replace the worthless Papiermark. That process involved cutting 12 zeros off prices. The subsequent prices quoted in Rentenmark remained stable. On August 24, 1924, the Reichsmark was introduced to replace the Rentenmark and then linked to gold. The new currency rate was 4.20 Reichsmarks to the dollar. Finally, the nightmare was over.

Consequences and Lessons

Overcoming hyperinflation was not a cost-free exercise. Unemployment was already high in late-1923, and the anti-inflationary measures produced more joblessness. That drove some working-class Germans towards the Communists, and others towards ethno-fascism. Some of the worst anti-Semitic incidents of 1924 occurred in Berlin’s working-class suburbs, as unemployed Germans vented their anger by looting Jewish-owned businesses and beating up Jewish shopkeepers.

But the most damaging consequence was middle-class Germany’s disenchantment with Weimar democracy. Hyperinflation destroyed the middle class’s savings while the cure had rendered their war-bonds valueless. The social humiliation which they endured throughout 1923 also left a mark, especially upon the Bildungsbürgertum. From this point on, the democracy-supporting parties could not secure a majority of seats in the Reichstag. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, middle-class Germans had little to fall back on by way of savings. That only made them more susceptible to National Socialism.

The sheer scale of Weimar hyperinflation, the background of a global war, and the naked political violence of the time make the particularities of the German case significantly different from contemporary inflationary conditions. Nonetheless, the Weimar experience does provide us with some important lessons.

Weimar teaches us that many political leaders will only tackle inflation when they believe they have no other choice. Even then, they often have to be pushed to do so.

The first is that once the inflation genie escapes from the bottle, it is extremely difficult to put it back in. Given the right circumstances, inflation can accelerate very quickly. Once underway, the dynamics that drive inflation are hard to dislodge. Moreover, there is no painless way of reversing them.

Second, Weimar’s inflation catastrophe illustrates that governments can inflate their way out of trouble for a while. For German politicians, printing money was a means to try and diminish the reparations that almost all Germans viewed as unjust. It also allowed the government to placate trade unions, put more people on the public payroll to reduce unemployment, and expand a welfare state that was already large by 1922 standards. As a political strategy, it worked, but only for a while. Eventually, a monetary Armageddon engulfed the country.

Third, Weimar teaches us that many political leaders will only tackle inflation when they believe they have no other choice. Even then, they often have to be pushed to do so. Germany confronted bleak options between 1919 and 1923. Nonetheless, Berlin consistently prioritized many other things above monetary stability. It only acted when inflation was creating such extreme political and economic disorder that not acting became unthinkable.

That is perhaps Weimar hyperinflation’s most poignant lesson for us today. Yes, legislators and central bankers must consider the trade-offs associated with different choices. This means that doing what needs to be done vis-à-vis inflation is not easy, even at the best of times. The immediate costs of reestablishing financial stability may seem too steep to many politicians. It requires, after all, people with courage of the potentially career-ending variety. Looking at today’s public square, I don’t see many such individuals in public office or on the horizon. We probably aren’t heading for Weimar, but monetary mediocrity may well be heading for us.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

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John Kerry: Putin’s Useful Climate Idiot

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By Rupert Darwall

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks the end of the West’s Era of Illusions. It was an era in which Western elites were obsessed with solving climate change because the climate crisis was far more dangerous than issues of war and peace and the stability of the international system. They even convinced themselves that climate change causes war, so climate change policy could double as national security policy; and, for many years, the annual round of kumbaya UN climate talks was the apogee of international relations.

In a BBC World Service interview, presidential climate envoy John Kerry expressed concern about the amount of greenhouse gas being emitted from the war in Ukraine. Kerry was just getting warmed up with a string of platitudes that show him as a deluded climate relic, unable to come to terms with the reality that Putin has imposed on the world. “Equally importantly,” Kerry complained, “you’re going to lose people’s focus,” as if the first invasion of a sovereign European country since the Second World War is an annoying distraction. Hopefully, Kerry continued, Putin would realize that Russia’s land is thawing, and the people of Russia are at risk.

Kerry concluded with an expression of pure self-deception, saying he hopes Putin “will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.” Stay on track? Russia has never hidden its intention to avoid cutting its emissions. Russia’s second Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted in November 2020 under the Paris climate agreement, is to limit its 2030 emissions to “no more than 70% of 1990 levels.” The document is careful to avoid pledging to cut or reduce emissions. The 1990 baseline year was the last one before the collapse of the highly inefficient and heavily polluting centrally planned Soviet economy. Thus, the 70% limit actually enables Russia to increase its emissions by 34% – and that’s before taking account of any changes in forestry and land use that would allow Russia to claim credit for negative emissions.

Despite Kerry’s claim about the thawing of their frozen north, Russians’ indifference to climate change predates Putin’s rise to power. During the preparation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first assessment report in 1990, Soviet scientists argued that warming might be beneficial at northern latitudes. Yuri Izrael, the Soviet academician, and chair of the IPCC’s working group examining potential impacts of global warming emphasized the doubt and uncertainty of climate change and disputed claims that it would be harmful.

At a 2005 conference on avoiding dangerous climate change organized by Britain during its G-8 presidency, Putin’s former economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, challenged the premise of the conference. “Anyone who is frightened about the prospect of global warming is welcome to come and live in Siberia,” Illarionov told a journalist.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that Russian climate scientists have a better understanding of climate science and the likely impact of rising levels of carbon dioxide on global temperatures than their colleagues in the West. In testimony to Congress in 2016, John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compared 102 climate-model simulations against observed global temperature of the mid-troposphere from satellites and balloons (the troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, up to a height of around 33,000 feet). On average, the models warmed the atmosphere at a rate two-and-a-half times faster than what happened in the real world. The only model that produced simulations close to observations was the Russian INM-CM4 climate model. Small wonder Russians are disinclined to believe there’s a climate crisis.

When it comes to the science of climate change, there can be few people quite as gullible and simple-minded as John Kerry. “I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of science or physics can be tough – chemistry. But this is not tough,” Kerry told an audience of school children in Indonesia in 2014, when he was secretary of state. “This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this.” The science was “absolutely certain,” Kerry claimed. “Let me give you an example. When an apple separates from a tree, it falls to the ground.” Contrast Kerry’s simplistic analogy with this statement in the IPCC’s third assessment report: “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible,” the IPCC said in 2001, before it became deeply politicized as it is now.

There is, however, one area where Kerry and Putin are likely to find themselves in full agreement. Two years ago, at a business conference in Moscow, the Russian president denounced fracking as “barbaric,” claiming that fracking technologies “destroy the environment.” A January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian activities in U.S. elections noted that RT, the Russian state-owned news channel, ran anti-fracking programming that highlighted the alleged environmental and public health harms of the practice. “This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s [the Russian state-owned energy company] profitability,” the assessment concluded.

In June 2014, Kerry’s predecessor as secretary of state complained about the impact of Russian money on financing “astroturf” environmental campaigns. “We were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia,” Hillary Clinton said.

Putin understands the importance of energy as an essential component of American strategic power. John Kerry does not. That is why, to borrow from Lenin, Kerry acts as Putin’s useful climate idiot. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine plunges the world into its gravest emergency since the Cuban missile crisis sixty years ago. It puts into perspective the folly of those, like Kerry, who confuse imaginary crises with real ones.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.

VIDEO: Stop Russian Gold? Sure! Create Global Economic Disaster thumbnail

VIDEO: Stop Russian Gold? Sure! Create Global Economic Disaster

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By Graham Ledger

The war in Ukraine is helping drive the price of oil through the roof, but the economic problems in the United States were created way before Putin’s personal, psychotic “manifest destiny” began to unfold. The Federal Reserve has painted the U.S. economy into a corner.

And now, Washington, D.C. wants to throw gasoline on the financial and fiscal fire by proffering the STOP RUSSIAN GOLD ACT. Insanity!

In this edition of the Ledger Report, Graham speaks with Peter Schiff about the economic mess, Barry Nussbaum about the Russian mess, and Michael Cutler about the mess at the border.

Please subscribe free to The Ledger Report by clicking here: www.GrahamLedger.com

©The Ledger Report. All rights reserved.

25 Republican Governors Call on Biden to Prioritize U.S. Oil and Gas Production thumbnail

25 Republican Governors Call on Biden to Prioritize U.S. Oil and Gas Production

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By Bethany Blankley

From oil rich North Dakota, U.S. senators introduce energy independence legislation

North Dakota can produce enough crude oil to offset dependence on Russian imports, but the Biden administration is prohibiting it from doing so, the state’s governor and U.S. senators argue.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and 24 Republican governors have called on President Joe Biden to prioritize U.S. oil and gas production and restore American energy independence. They did so as crude oil hit $120 a barrel and is expected to surpass $200 a barrel, causing gas prices, and everything that depends on gasoline for transport, to skyrocket.

The market went into a correction on Monday, after the U.S. already entered into a 40-year inflationary high. Both are expected to push the U.S. toward a volatile recession.

This was totally avoidable, Burgum said.

“From the unsecured southern border to the underutilized oil fields of North Dakota, President Biden’s misguided policies continue to put U.S. citizens at risk and hold America back,” he said.

“The Biden administration has again failed to meet its obligation to hold a federal oil lease sale, [which] is further proof that this administration isn’t serious about U.S. energy security. The President needs to reverse his anti-oil policies and unleash American energy production to protect U.S. consumers and return our nation to a position where we can sell energy to our friends and allies instead of importing it from adversaries like Russia.”

The Biden administration argues that its restrictions on oil and gas production are necessary to combat climate change and that there are enough untapped permits for drilling on federal land that the industry could increase production if it wanted to.

North Dakota produces more than 1.13 million barrels of crude a day and 2,990,340 MCF (thousand cubic feet) of natural gas a day.

Crude oil production from North Dakota alone would easily offset the imports from Russia, the governor argues.

In Biden’s first year in office, he halted and restricted oil and gas leases on federal lands, stopped construction of the Keystone Pipeline, and redirected U.S. policy to import more oil from Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia (OPEC+) instead of bolstering American oil and gas exploration and production.

While U.S. production on federal lands was stifled in 2021, the U.S. imported 8.47 million barrels per day of crude oil and refined products, of which 672,000 barrels per day (8%) came from Russia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency. The U.S. also imported 6.10 million barrels per day of crude oil, of which 199,000 barrels per day (3%) came from Russia.

The U.S. has been importing about 473,000 barrels per day of refined products from Russia, Andrew Lipow of Houston-based Lipow Oil Associates LLC, told The Center Square in an email. Of this, 354,000 barrels a day is unfished oils, which means they need to be upgraded in refineries in the U.S. – mostly on the Gulf Coast, because the Russian refineries aren’t unable to upgrade them.

The U.S. also imports 697,000 barrels a day of gasoline blendstocks, of which 50,000 barrels a day (7%) came from Russia, Lipow said. This mainly goes to states on the East Coast.

The U.S. also imports 287,000 barrels a day of distillate, of which 23,000 barrels a day (8%) come from Russia. This also mainly goes to states on the East Coast, he said.

The 25 governors in their joint statement to Biden called on him “to reverse his policies and restore America’s energy independence for our citizens as well as our allies abroad.

“By removing his bans on new oil and gas development on federal lands, building the Keystone XL pipeline, and reinstating regulatory reforms to streamline energy permitting, we can protect our national energy security and sell to our friends rather than buy from our enemies – specifically Russia.”

Governors from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming signed the letter.

North Dakota’s two Republican U.S. senators, John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, along with seven other cosponsors, also introduced the American Energy Independence from Russia Act in the U.S. Senate.

The bill would require the Biden administration to submit an energy independence plan to Congress within 30 days that provides an energy security evaluation and risk assessment, and plans to leverage America’s oil and gas resources.

It would authorize the construction and operation of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Biden shut down when he entered office, and remove regulatory hurdles to increase liquefied natural gas exports.

It also would prohibit any presidential moratoria on new federal leases and require the U.S. Department of Interior to hold a minimum of four oil and natural gas lease sales in fiscal year 2022 in each state that has federal land available for leasing. It also would prohibit the U.S. Energy Department Secretary from drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve until the Secretary of the Interior issues a plan to increase oil and gas production on federal lands and waters.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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Deadly Incompetence

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Incompetence destroys.

Weakness kills.

The disastrous debacle in Afghanistan signaled to Vladimir Putin that  the time to strike is while Joe Biden is in charge.

Just yesterday, Biden blinked and declined Poland’s offer of fighter jets, leaving Ukraine struggling to defend its skies as equipment runs short.

Biden continually tells Putin what America will not do.  Mister President, it is not wise to inform the criminals that the police will not be coming.  Particularly if it is likely they won’t.

How can we expect a President to stand up to Putin if he lacks the courage to even stand up to the Green-Left and unleash America’s energy might?

Look at this clueless tweet from the @POTUS:

Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices.

But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices.

It will mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as a weapon.

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 9, 2022

“Tyrants like Putin” includes Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and the mad Mullahs in Iran.  Yet it is they whom Biden is asking to step up energy production.

Anyone who believes that purchasing gas and oil from tyrants rather than Americans will lower the temperature of the Globe does not understand energy, the climate, or freedom.

Have you seen White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s outrageous press briefings and her latest misinformation video?

Psaki keeps citing unused energy leases as evidence that all is well on the American energy front.  This is nonsense.

We posted a very detailed point by point debunking of Psaki’s energy leases political talking points by Kathleen Sgamma to CFACT.org.  Read it and arm yourself with energy facts.  As Sgamma clearly explains, the 9,000 leases figure is meaningless, “if permits aren’t approved (4,500 outstanding) & with myriad other delays the administration puts in the way of American producers.”

By the way, is Jen Psaki aware that the wind, solar and electric cars the Left so loves, are dependent on rare earths, metals and manufacturing from China and Russia?

The Greens, with China’s and Russia’s active funding and assistance, are blocking American mining as well!

Unleash American energy.  We won’t stop tyrants with daydreams of wind, solar and electric cars.

Pray for Ukraine.

For nature and people too.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Organized Confusion

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By Ken Veit

Sometimes the average person wonders whether what passes for Government is really just organized confusion. Consider the current situation involving Russia, Ukraine, and U.S. energy policy.

The stated positions of the United States are:

  1. Climate change is an existential threat. Fossil fuels must be eliminated, and the energy industry shrunk.
  2. Russia is bad for invading Ukraine and must be sanctioned.
  3. MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia, is a murderer and our relationship must be cooled.
  4. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and must be kept in check.
  5. Venezuela is controlled by an evil dictator. The US strongly supports regime change.
  6. Inflation is out of control and must be brought down, especially the price of energy.

Whether one agrees or not, those are clear policy positions. How are they being implemented?

With respect to Russia, we are sanctioning more and more, and urging our allies to do the same. China and Iran are ignoring us, and Germany, in its obsession with climate change, has gotten itself into a position of almost total dependence on Russia for energy.

To keep energy prices from spiking more than they already have, Biden is turning to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela to pump more in order to offset the losses from sanctioning Russia. China, however, is allowed to keep buying Russian oil, which helps keep Russia afloat economically.

Why the Saudis would want to do Biden any favors is a mystery. Ditto for Venezuela, since their economy is kept afloat by Russian subsidies. Iran would love to pump more oil,  just as soon as Biden lifts the sanctions so they can go back to being the #1 state sponsor of terrorism.

Are there no better solutions? Actually, yes. The U.S. has the capacity to greatly expand oil and gas production and to export it to Europe, thus reducing Europe’s dependence on Russia.

So what is the problem? Answer: Biden. He is 100%+ committed to policy #1, above. He has banned drilling on Federal lands. He is making it virtually impossible to build pipelines outside of Texas. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, even though it had been given multiple environmental clearances by the Army Corps of Engineers. Regulations have been piled on regulations, primarily intended to hinder output growth. He has nominated to the Federal Reserve, as the person in charge of regulating banks, a woman who has publicly written that banks should be prevented from making loans to the energy industry.

Incredibly, he has tried to blame the greedy energy industry for charging too much and for refusing to increase output, even as his policies have made keeping output down the only prudent thing for energy executives to do. It is difficult to imagine that he does not realize that oil and gas prices are set by world markets, not by greedy executives.

To reverse positions now would infuriate his woke base. Instead, he goes begging our enemies to help him by taking steps that would go in the wrong direction if you are a climate change warrior. He seems to think it better to let countries that are his enemies reap the revenues and jobs than let American companies earn profits and American workers have high-paying energy jobs. Either way, he comes out looking like a hypocrite, but the election year calculus is such that the Democrats can’t afford to alienate the Progressive wing of their party.

His position is akin to that of Mitch McConnell. The Republicans can’t afford to alienate the Trumpkins, so they act as though they believe that Trump really won the last election. Biden’s preferred solution to the inflation problem is to increase subsidies to the lower rung of the economy, even though the cause of inflation is the excess liquidity resulting from excess Government spending. Is no one in touch with reality?

The media confidently predicts that Putin will lose his gamble in Ukraine. I am not so sure. We have a hard time understanding the ruthless. At the moment he is on his back legs. The Ukrainians are not caving. He did not expect Germany to defy him at all. He obviously saw Biden as a weakling. He expected more support from China than he is getting. He may be a cornered bully, but a ruthless one with few options and a stockpile of nuclear weapons is not to be written off. His domestic political capital is eroding rapidly. If he looks into the abyss and does not like what he sees, he may throw the dice regardless of how outrageous it seems to us. Historically, war has frequently been the only option left to tyrants who are flailing.

In the face of so much uncertainty and confusion, is it any wonder that financial markets are roiling?

Catastrophe in Progress: The Biden Presidency thumbnail

Catastrophe in Progress: The Biden Presidency

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By Mark Wallace

Almost all of America’s past presidents have had blunders occur on their watch.  For Jimmy Carter, it was skyrocketing inflation and the Iran hostage situation.  (Few people recall that when the “students” took over the United States Embassy in Tehran, it was the second seizure, not the first — yet Carter had done nothing to either reinforce the Embassy with Marines or else evacuate everyone).  For Bill Clinton, it was “I didn’t inhale” and Monica Lewinsky (“I did not have sex with that woman”).  Even the great Ronald Reagan, after he had been shot by John Hinckley, Jr., told Nancy “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

 The Biden Administration, however, is in a class by itself.  In the mere space of less than 15 months, it has already outdone all the others by a huge margin.  It’s been one mindless blunder after another, not merely on one front (foreign policy, for example) but on all of them.  Let’s look at the sorry record on this.

Failure to Defend the Border

The Biden Administration has allowed two million illegals to cross our southern border.  Many of them have been surreptitiously flown at no charge to cities and towns across the United States, with planes landing in the middle of the night so the locals won’t know what’s happening.  Your taxes are paying for this.  If an illegal wants to fly a commercial on his or her own dime, he or she can use his arrest warrant as a form of identification.  Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.  The Mexican Drug Cartels are having a field day smuggling illegal drugs across the border along with trafficking human beings.  It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Sinaloa Cartel has given Joe Biden its “Most Friendly and Helpful Gringo Award” for 2021-2022.

Afghanistan

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you are going to withdraw both military personnel and civilians from a war-torn area, the civilians should go first.  Quite obviously, the military can stand by to protect the civilians if matters go awry.  If the military is withdrawn first, the civilians are left defenseless.  Yet the Biden Administration, in a mind-boggling display of incompetence, chose to evacuate the military first, with the result that hundreds of Americans are still stranded behind enemy lines.

Compounding this blunder, the Biden Administration left about $70 billion worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan for the Taliban to use as it sees fit.  When the question is asked who benefited the most from Biden’s first year in office, the answer is clear:  the Taliban. Joe Biden has met all the requisite tests to qualify as the Taliban’s “Man of the Year.”

Bidenflation

Under Biden, consumer price inflation is now the worst in almost half a century.  We are now back to Jimmy Carter’s levels of inflation.  Enough said.

Destruction of the Oil and Gas Industry

When Biden was sworn in, the United States was energy independent and a net exporter of oil and natural gas for the first time in around 70 years.  At the instigation of fanatical Watermelon Greens (green on the outside, red on the inside), Biden set about to destroy America’s energy independence and its oil and gas industry by canceling oil and gas leases and by promulgating oppressive regulations expressly designed to cripple the industry.  Before too long, (1) America was no longer energy independent, and (2) prices at the gasoline pump began rising.  The Greenies, sadists that they are, rubbed their hands in glee as Joe Sixpack found it more and more expensive to fill up his SUV.  Let Joe Sixpack suffer, they argued — he should be riding public transportation anyway.

The Ukraine Invasion

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was no surprise attack.  It was known for months that he was massing troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine.  The dolts running the Biden Administration had a golden opportunity to move Javelins, Stingers, maybe even fighter jets into Ukraine while Russia was standing pat.  If the armament transfer had been robust enough, Putin may have thought twice about trying to invade.  Instead, little or nothing was done until the war began.

The foregoing are largely instances of incompetence and poor planning.  More sinister are the Biden Administration’s efforts to quell free speech and deprive Americans of their First and Second Amendment rights.  An example in point is the targeting of parents of schoolchildren by the U.S. Department of Justice.  If you show up at a school board meeting to protest the mask requirements for your children or the tyrannical vaccine mandates (a clear and especially vicious form of child abuse — let the prosecutions begin after the Republicans re-take Congress and the White House), you may find yourself being investigated.  Additionally, there is the persecution of peaceful January 6 protestors and the issuance of a get-out-of-jail-free card to jackbooted thugs wearing a uniform and a badge who murdered January 6 protestors in cold blood.  Note that this too can be remedied after the voters send the Democrats packing — there is no statute of limitations for murder.

We can go on and on, but you get the point.  Joe Biden has shown by his actions and his Administration’s actions that he is far and away the worst President in our country’s history — and he still has almost another three years to wreak yet more havoc.

But there is hope.  If Republicans retake the House in November 2022, there would be nothing stopping the House from impeaching both Biden and Harris, thereby putting a Republican Speaker of the House in the White House if a two-thirds majority to convict can be assembled in the Senate.  Yeah, it’s a long shot, but if things get even worse between now and 2023 (which seems assured, given the way Biden is running the country), it’s not totally impossible.

Inflation Soars To Another Four-Decade High thumbnail

Inflation Soars To Another Four-Decade High

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By The Daily Caller

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 0.8% in February, bringing the key inflation indicator’s year-over-year increase to 7.9%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported.

The CPI reached another four-decade high throughout February, with prices increasing nearly 8% on a year-over-year basis, the BLS reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal projected the index to have grown just 7.8%.

The core price index, which measures inflation of goods less food and energy, increased 0.5% in February, the BLS reported. Food prices reportedly grew 7.9% on a year-over-year basis as of February, the BLS reported, and energy prices soared 25.6%.

Economists projected inflation would ease in the spring, when the Federal Reserve begins its interest rate hikes, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has threatened higher prices, especially in energy, wheat and precious metals, the WSJ reported.

“We thought that inflation would come down, especially due to the untangling of the global supply chain, but we don’t know how what’s happening in Ukraine will re-tangle that,” Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economics LLC, told the WSJ.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell expects the central bank to raise rates by one-quarter of a percentage point after its March 15-16 meeting, according to the WSJ.

“I do think it’s going to be appropriate for us to proceed along the lines we had in mind before the Ukraine invasion happened,” Powell said, the WSJ reported. “In this very sensitive time at the moment, it’s important for us to be careful in the way we conduct policy simply because things are so uncertain and we don’t want to add to that uncertainty.”

COLUMN BY

HARRY WILMERDING

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Toilet Paper Prices Soar As Companies Shrink The Item Itself

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Gas Prices Hit All-Time High As White House Turns To Dictators For Help thumbnail

Gas Prices Hit All-Time High As White House Turns To Dictators For Help

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By Thomas Catenacci

The average price of gasoline surged to the highest level ever recorded in the U.S. on Monday as the White House scrambled to negotiate increased global oil production.

The nationwide average price at the pump hit $4.104 per gallon, the highest level in U.S. history, according to energy analytics firm GasBuddy which tracks gasoline costs. The previous record was set in 2008, prior to the Great Recession and housing crisis.

In addition, the price of diesel fuel reached $4.63 per gallon on Monday, and it is set to break its record within two weeks, GasBuddy data showed. The 49.1-cents per gallon spike over the last seven days represented the largest one-week spike since Hurricane Katrina upended domestic supplies in 2005. (RELATED: Stock Market Sinks, Oil Tops $130 As West Considers Russian Energy Sanctions)

“Americans have never seen gasoline prices this high, nor have we seen the pace of increases so fast and furious,” Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, said in a statement. “That combination makes this situation all the more remarkable and intense, with crippling sanctions on Russia curbing their flow of oil, leading to the massive spike in the price of all fuels: gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and more.”

“It’s a dire situation and won’t improve any time soon. The high prices are likely to stick around for not days or weeks, like they did in 2008, but months. GasBuddy now expects the yearly national average to rise to its highest ever recorded,” De Haan said.

Meanwhile, the White House has mulled reversing years of foreign policy and turning to Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for more oil production.

The administration is also under significant pressure from dozens of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to ban Russian oil imports. But President Joe Biden has thus far avoided such a measure, explaining that it would primarily harm American consumers.

“It’s shocking, actually, because we have the ability, in the United States, to completely fulfill all the Russian oil imports that are coming into the United States with domestic production,” Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum told Fox Business on Monday. “North Dakota alone, we’re operating at 400,000 barrels per day below what we were prior to the pandemic. That can easily be turned back on again.”

“The idea that we are talking with authoritarian regimes, Venezuela and Iran, to try to increase production … it’s absolutely absurd,” Burgum said.

*****

This article was published by Daily Caller and is reprinted with permission.

Stocks in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain Plunge Below Year 2000 Levels: Buy-and-Hold Horror Shows thumbnail

Stocks in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain Plunge Below Year 2000 Levels: Buy-and-Hold Horror Shows

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By Wolf Richter

Food for thought in light of the biggest stock market bubble in the US ever.

Major European stock indices plunged below their bubble highs from over two decades ago. This is not to say that they plunged that much this week, but that they had finally risen past their prior bubble highs from over two decades ago, powered by money printing, and then they plunged.

German stocks. The most widely cited German stock market index, the DAX, is a total return index that includes dividends and is therefore not comparable to a price index such as the S&P 500 Index, which does not include dividends. But the less-often cited DAX Kursindex (DAXK) is a price index, does not include dividends, and is comparable to the S&P 500 Index and most other major stock indices. So that’s what we’ll use here.

The DAXK plunged by 4.4% on Friday, and by 10.1% for the week, to 5,517. Since the all-time closing record of 6,873 on January 5, 2021, it plunged 19.7%. But wait… that all-time closing high was up only 10% from the bubble high in March 2000 – yup, that bubble that imploded 22 years ago. And on Friday, the index closed 11% below the bubble high of March 2000. Note the gigantic volatility investors went through over these 22 years to end up below where they’d started.

UK stocks. The UK FTSE 100 price index dropped 3.5% on Friday and 6.7% for the week, to 6,987. The index is now down 10% from its all-time high in May 2018. But wait… The Friday close is down just a tad from the close on December 31, 1999, which had been the bubble high 22 years ago, and now the index is back at it:

French stocks. The CAC 40 price index plunged 5.0% on Friday and 10.2% for the week, to 6,062, and is down 18% from its all-time high on January 2021. But wait… yup, the index has now dropped 12% below its bubble high back in September 2000. And note the horrendous volatility that investors had to endure to go nowhere:….

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. America’s Energy-Liar-In-Chief thumbnail

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. America’s Energy-Liar-In-Chief

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By Dr. Rich Swier

“It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It’s simply not true!” – Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

There are lies and then there are damn lies. It appears that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is a damn liar. In fact he is America’s Energy-Liar-In-Chief.

Biden’s strategy is to reach zero-emissions. In order to do this Biden and his administration’s vision is to eliminate all internal combustion engine driven vehicles and aircraft and mandate Americans buy only all electric vehicles (EVs).

From Covid mandates to energy mandates, where will this end, in 2024?

How do we know that Biden is lying? Simple, just listen to Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s Secretary of Transportation and Michael S. Regan, Biden’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency:

EPA Administrator Michael Regan: “We’re pressing the accelerator to reach a zero-emissions future sooner than most people thought.” pic.twitter.com/YFiSn10JgV

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 8, 2022

Buttigieg says you don’t have to worry about gas prices if you buy an electric vehicle…someone should remind him how out of touch he sounds pic.twitter.com/tiJVkl7wB3

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 7, 2022

Biden’s No U.S. Energy Strategy

Biden doesn’t want to take responsibility for the dramatic rise in gasoline and diesel prices since his election. Why? Because Americans are feeling the pain at the pump. Each and every time people fill up their tanks they know that Biden did that.

So what is Biden’s solution to stop the rise in prices at the pump? Drill baby drill? Nope! It’s zero-emissions!

But wait, Biden has another brilliant solution: reach out to “petrodictatorships” around the world, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. How does being dependent upon petrodictators sound to you?

Even some Democrats are saying enough is enough.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, argued,

The U.S. should “not be trading in one tyrant for another to meet America’s energy needs.”

“We need to blow a hole in the Russian economy. We need to lower gas prices for American consumers. Everything should be on the table. But I don’t support strengthening one dictator to hurt another. And I don’t think you’ll see us do that.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NY) lashed out at the Biden administration for turning to Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro stating:

“Nicolás Maduro is a cancer to our hemisphere and we should not breathe new life into his reign of torture and murder,” Menendez said in a statement. As such, I would strongly oppose any action that fills the pockets of regime oligarchs with oil profits while Maduro continues to deprive Venezuelans of basic human rights, freedoms, and even food.”

A March 8th, 2022 Patriot Alerts article observed:

Biden came into office with the promise that he would restore America’s standing in the world. Instead, he has single-handedly squandered America’s energy independence, its ability to rein in regional aggressors like Russia, and has unraveled the gains in Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern diplomacy that were achieved under President Trump.

The Bottom Line

Biden and his administration doesn’t care about skyrocketing gas prices because he wants to drive internal combustion engines out of existence anyway.

It’s part of the Green New Deal plan. The suffering he will cause by going “zero-emissions” is of little consequence to Biden, Regan and Buttigieg. For you see they won’t experience it but we the people already are!

We the people are experiencing it each and every day as we drive by our gas stations and see the prices steadily rising. We see it when we fill up our cars, SUVs, trucks, lawnmowers, etc.

America’s economy and its power comes from oil. By eliminating oil and its derivatives Biden is slowly but surely destroying  our economy, our futures and our nation.

On March 4th,2022 James Howard Kuntsler wrote:

Whoever is behind “Joe Biden” has done all they can to derail American Life, and the feckless leadership of Euroland has also seemed avid to trash its future. There is a welling movement, in America, at least, to resist all that, to sweep these degenerates out of power, and make a concerted course correction in the direction of sanity, rectitude, liberty, and generosity of spirit toward each other. An awful lot of trouble has already been set in motion by the idiots running things. There is a difficult slog ahead. Is your head screwed on? Where will you stand?

We ask you the same question: Where will you stand?

America’s power lies in its ability to provide power to the engines of our current and future economic growth.

Starving America of power, makes America powerless. Starving our citizens of cheap and reliable power is a direct threat to our fiscal and national security.

To be powerful America needs powerful sources of energy. Nuclear, oil (for gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels) and natural gas are the best and most accessible means to energy independence.

American Energy independence translates into life, liberty and the pursuit of our collective happiness.

Without cheap and reliable power sources the lights in that city on the hill will most certainly go out – for everyone.

Powerup America.

RELATED TWEET:

“President Biden, stop begging dictators to produce the energy that we need…don’t go to Russia, don’t go to Iran, don’t go to Venezuela when the answer is right beneath our feet. It’s time for President Biden to say yes to American energy..” – @SteveScalise calls on Biden pic.twitter.com/4STcCYpnuM

— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) March 8, 2022

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Victory! Arizona Supreme Court Strikes Down Pinal County’s Illegal Tax thumbnail

Victory! Arizona Supreme Court Strikes Down Pinal County’s Illegal Tax

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By Timothy Sandefur & Matt Beienburg

The Goldwater Institute won a victory for taxpayers this morning when the Arizona Supreme Court struck down Pinal County’s illegal transportation excise tax. Goldwater represented a group of taxpayers and business owners in challenging the tax, which, among other things, only applied to purchases of less than $10,000, with the consequence that the tax burden fell primarily on lower- and middle-income taxpayers, as opposed to the wealthy.

That bizarre tax structure came about when county officials tried to neutralize political opposition to the tax by ensuring that it wouldn’t apply if people bought expensive items such as luxury cars or farm equipment. But subdividing the tax in that way violates Arizona law, which creates a carefully designed set of tax categories, and doesn’t allow counties to create their own.

Pinal County claimed it could subdivide the tax in this way because the law lets counties set a “variable rate” in a tax, and that it was simply setting the “rate” of some sales at zero. But the state Supreme Court today rejected that argument. “The term ‘variable’ means ‘something subject to change,’” it declared. “But in this case, Pinal County’s two-tiered tax rate structure—which establishes a positive tax rate and a tax rate of zero percent—sets fixed tax rates that never vary and are never subject to change.”

The legislature intended state taxes to be uniform—not to allow each of the state’s 15 counties to set their own rules. To allow that would make Arizona inhospitable for business because it would transform the state into a crazy quilt of different tax rules in each locality. That’s why the Arizona Department of Revenue—in an unusual move—sided with taxpayers in this case, agreeing that Pinal County broke the law when it created its two-tier tax system.

Today’s long-anticipated decision is the Goldwater Institute’s seventh win before the Arizona Supreme Court. And it marks a victory for taxpayers not just in Pinal County but throughout Arizona. In tough economic times—with inflation and fuel costs rising—the last thing Arizona needs is for public officials to create more and more complicated tax rules that take more of people’s earnings away and drive away job-creating industry.

What’s next? After the final judgment is issued in the case, Arizona retailers should be entitled to refund the taxes they were illegally forced to pay. Business owners should consult their attorneys and accountants for information on how that process works.

*****

This article was published at the In The Defense of Liberty blog, a production of the Goldwater Institute, and is reproduced with permission.

Congress Demands Answers From CCP-Friendly HSBC Bank thumbnail

Congress Demands Answers From CCP-Friendly HSBC Bank

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By Philip Lenczycki

  • Following the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, former CEO of HSBC Asia, Peter Tung-shun Wong, supported the National Security Law, which Secretary of State Blinken said: “systematically undermined Hong Kong’s democratic institutions.”
  • Wong is a member of a core Chinese Communist Party organization that oversees one of the nation’s most influential propaganda and intelligence agencies, the United Front Work Department. 
  • A Feb. 28 letter from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China to HSBC asks for the bank to unfreeze the accounts of Americans targeted in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s protests.

Congress is demanding answers from a multinational British investment bank after American citizens’ accounts were frozen for running afoul of the Chinese Communist Party during the Hong Kong protests.

Signed by a bipartisan group of 13 senators and congressmen, the bicameral Feb. 28 letter also pressed HSBC on whether or not its actions were “consistent with HSBC’s stated policies and the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”

The letter noted Apple Daily executives, publisher Jimmy Lai, his aide Mark Simon, and CEO Cheung Kim-hung also had their accounts targeted by HSBC.

“What shocked me most about the HSBC freezing of my Hong Kong account was how I was banned by HSBC US, still am, from sending wires and how HSBC staff in U.S. at my branch knew much more of my situation with HSBC HK than was rational,” Mark Simon told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“It wasn’t just my checking accounts that were frozen, it was business accounts,” he said. “I missed payments and payrolls.”

The National Security Law followed Hong Kong’s 2019-2020 protests which opposed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) violations of the principle of “one country, two systems.” Among other things, the “one country, two systems” framework assured the special administrative region its own legal system.

Marking its anniversary in 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on July 16 that the National Security Law had “systematically undermined Hong Kong’s democratic institutions.” (RELATED: Congress Urges Amazon CEO To Aid Tortured Chinese Whistleblower)

A protestor was shot in November 2019 by Hong Kong police. [YouTube/Screenshot/ViceNews]

In June 2020, Peter Tung-shun Wong, former CEO of HSBC Asia, signed a petition supporting the National Security Law. The petition read: “Anti-Hong Kong Independence, Anti-Subversion, Anti-Terrorism, Anti-Intervention.”

Wong is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a Communist Party organization that has been described as “the peak United Front forum, bringing together CCP officials and Chinese elites” by a June 2020 Australian Strategic Policy Institute report.

The CECC letter stated the National Security Law had “put almost the entirety of the city’s opposition figures behind bars and denied bail to most” before rewriting “electoral rules to allow only ‘patriots’ fully vetted by the national security police to run in future elections.”

Blinken also described the legislation as having “delayed elections, disqualified elected lawmakers from office, and forced officials to take loyalty oaths to keep their jobs,” according to his July 2021 remarks.

In October 2021, hundreds of politicians in Hong Kong were compelled to swear loyalty oaths to the CCP. Communist Party officials later concluded 49 of the politicians had made insincere loyalty oaths and consequently faced prosecution, according to a Bloomberg report. (RELATED: China Officially Votes To Revoke Hong Kong’s Autonomy On National Security Affairs)

Hong Kong protestors created barriers and lit fires in October 2019 during the protests. [YouTube/Screenshot/TheNewYorkTimes]

The CECC letter claimed that HSBC closed the “corporate account used to raise funds” for a non-profit which “provided legal, medical, food, and education assistance to protestors.”

The “former pro-democracy legislator” Ted Hui and his family members, as well as Pastor Ray Chan and his church, had their bank accounts frozen by HSBC, according to the letter from Congress.

Asking HSBC to “reverse all actions taken” against “the accounts of American citizens or legal permanent residents,” the CECC letter also urged HSBC to “answer directly” if its actions had in any way contributed to the erosion of “freedom of assembly, speech, press, or independent rule of law” or undermined participation in “democratic outcomes.”

The HSBC and the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond for comment. (RELATED: Pro Democracy Activist And Media Tycoon Jimmy Lai Reportedly Charged Under Hong Kong’s National Security Law)

*****

This article was published by Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

TONE DEAF: Rep. Jayapal, Gas Prices Will Go Up ‘No Matter What We Do’ thumbnail

TONE DEAF: Rep. Jayapal, Gas Prices Will Go Up ‘No Matter What We Do’

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By Discover The Networks

Saturday on MSNBC’s Cross Connection, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair and radical leftist Rep. Pramila Jayapal put forth the false argument that we have to transition away from fossil fuels to be “free of the ability of dictators to blackmail us over oil and gas.”

Jayapal said, “[I]f we ever want to be truly free of the ability of dictators to blackmail us over oil and gas, we should be investing right here at home in renewable energy technologies. We should be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels so that this situation that we’re in does not happen again, in terms of feeling like we can’t stop Russian oil and gas imports because it’s going to drive up prices here at home.”

Jayapal neglected to mention the fact that we could achieve self-sufficiency and stop importing Russian oil and gas anytime we wanted if we opened up our own domestic production, which over 70% of Americans want. But the Biden administration doesn’t want that because their true agenda is the bankruptcy of the fossil fuel industry, and the embrace of their Big-Government Green Reset.

“By the way, no matter what we do, prices of gas are going to go up,” Jayapal added. “So, any Republicans who try to say that it’s drill, baby, drill, and that solves the problem, it’s wrong. That is not the case. We are going to see gas prices rise, but it is in service to trying to quell a dictator.”

This is a blatant lie. Gas prices do not go up “no matter what we do,” and the fact that they are going up has nothing to do with the Ukraine crisis. The Democrats want Americans to believe that suffering the economic burdens this administration has willfully imposed upon them is a patriotic duty in the service of defending a fellow liberal democracy from tyranny.

The truth is that it is in the service of Democrats’ lust for power.

Pramila Jayapal

21 Known Connections

In an August 9, 2015 editorial lamenting the “centuries of racism” that have plagued America, Jayapal wrote: “As a country, we still have not recognized or acknowledged what we have wrought and continue to inflict on black people. The bigger results are how black kids as young as two are being disciplined differently in their daycares and pre-k classes. That black people are routinely denied jobs that white people get with the same set of experiences and skills. That black people … continue to die at the hands of police, in domestic violence, on the streets. That black mothers must tell their children as young as seven or eight that they have to be careful about what pants or hoodies they wear or to not assert their rights if stopped. That this country supports an institutionalized form of racism called the criminal justice system that makes profit … on jailing black and brown people.” She also suggested that as recompense for historical wrongs, the U.S. government should pay “reparations for slavery” to black people.

To learn more about Pramila Jayapal, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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