It is gut wrenching to read these stories. It has become painfully clear the bureaucrats in Washington not only don’t care about small business owners, they despise them...because it would be easier to put their boot on everyone if all gas stations were run by Amazon and every Chinese food restaurant was owned by McDonalds. For all the degrees these fools in DC have, they understand much less about the economy than a small business owner. I would take every one in this article in a Presidential cabinet over the over educated frauds there now.
Lenin called small businessmen and women Kulaks and "bloodsuckers" and slaughtered them by the thousands. If the Communists take control and they are taking control of the Democrat Party, slaughter will be, if history is any guide, a common occurrence.
Before Biden we were exporting oil and for the first time in decades, we were oil independent. After watching this video, tell me why any sane person would vote Democrat:
I agree. In Biden’s 50+ years in politics, nobody has ever said, “wow, that Joe Biden is sharp... he’s a genius. He is one of the most intelligent and articulate politicians we’ve ever had in DC.”
The Secretary of Defense under George W. and at the beginning of the Obama regime, a guy named Robert Gates, said "That Biden Has Been Wrong On Nearly Every Major Foreign Policy Question."
Biden is an idiot and the Dems knew he was not only an idiot but a senile idiot and they elected him anyway. Just goes to show you how much regard they have for the welfare of this country and the free world.
And look what it bought them and the rest of us, disaster! Got to love those patriotic Democrats/Communists. They will even elect an idiot as long as they gain power, power to destroy this country.
“In 2021, the United States exported about 8.63 million barrels per day (b/d) and imported about 8.47 million b/d of petroleum,1 making the United States an annual total petroleum net exporter for the second year in a row”
Politics will not let him reopen the pipeline. Politics before country. If he were to reopen the construction of the pipeline, he would be hammered by both sides of the aisle from the left because they are global warming fanatics and from the right because he closed the pipeline in the first place.
Biden would rather crawl on his knees to the Saudi dictator, a man he promised he would never talk to, than open the pipeline.
He is truly a lying, incompetent moron. Senile moron.
Pres. Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for its sweet crude, used in plants to produce gasoline. From 2017 to 2022, 12 plants were closed, which reduced supply, pushing the price of gasoline up! And Pres. Biden had nothing to do with it!
Did it take that long for the DNC to get your talking points back to you?
Again nice try. Trump was president for most of the years when the plants were closed, yet gasoline prices were one-half what they are under the senile imbecile. Coincidence? I think not.
Nancy Pelosi called the peaceful conservative demonstrators, the Tea Party rallies, NAZIs. But she didn't say a word against the Capture Wall Street thugs nor a word about BLM and ANTIFA Communist rioters.
No complaints about illegals spreading a plethora of diseases as the Dems disperse them all over the US. I wonder how many are sent to Delaware, Biden's home state?
At least D.C. is finally starting to feel the effects from Texas busing illegals to D.C. Of course the D.C. officials are complaining that it's "not fair" and that illegals are being "tricked" into boarding those buses. But I think it's past time for D.C. to suffer what the border states are suffering.
It has been true for at least as long as I have been alive that Democrats have regarded business experience as a negative in a political candidate. To them, the entire private sector is evil; only academia and government are good.
EXACTLY. This is why in blue states, small businesses were shut down during the plandemic, but Home Depot, Amazon et al continued operating as if nothing were wrong. Destroying capitalism IS THEIR GOAL.
But it isn't an automatic unless everybody participates. As a small business owner the thing I see that could take the power away from government and give us a chance is how people make their buying choices. If everyone would avoid frequenting the big, national corporate stores and make their purchases from locals, the local economies could develop some separation from the currents of the overall economy. I'm not suggesting that we small businesses aren't affected by the overall price increases, but that keeping money local in more forms than just wages paid to employees makes it easier to re scale the local economy and make the numbers work. If most of the profits made by a business are going back in to the National economy, it gives communities less influence over the financial health of the community as a whole. If people could understand the benefits that come from paying a couple of dollars more for some of their purchases in order to keep the money local, we could take back control of our economies in the macro.
It would also go a long way for people to understand that when a small business raises prices, it's not to make more profit, it's just simply to stay afloat.
I try. I do not shop on Amazon and have not been in a Walmart for years. Lowe's most recently lost my business. My issue with buying local is that so much of it is made in China.
Hi. You do a lot better 'n me. Who do You buy books from? Or do You?
And I'm not sure how to avoid buying from China. And even if it doesn't say China, there's often Chinese parts in it. Mostly I just don't buy things, but I've got Apple products, unfortunately.
I spend a whole lot of money on books per year so I’m really motivated to get the lowest price possible. I am not really a book browser but tend to be looking for very specific obscure titles that used bookstores tend to not have in stock. That has been leading me to buy far too many books on Amazon which I wasn’t feeling great about. About 6 months ago a common sense reader recommended thrift books.com. I’ve really had great luck finding the books I’m looking for at a good price. It’s a mix of new and used titles and they seem to be an ethical business as far as I can tell. Since I started ordering from thrift books I have bought almost zero books from Amazon.
I email my local bookstore and ask them if they have the book I’m looking for and if they don’t they order it. I can’t say I never shop at B&N or Amazon but I go to the local guy first.
For books I go to bookstores usually. And I agree about labeling being problematic. Pet food is a real.problem. All of the ingredients come from overseas. I cook for my Yorkie but we have a 120 lb. Lab and it is not possible for him. I too have quit buying.
We have a lab mix and a border collie mix. We were buying Ark naturals tarter control chews. They’re now over a dollar each so I bought a big bag of carrots at Sams Club and they love them. Probably better for them overall.
We still have some but our Half-Priced Books just went under. I have been in the islands in Washington state recently and was pleasantly surprised at all of the small, privately owned bookshops. And coffee shops.
I stopped buying paper books, unfortunately. Or only if I can't get them on Kindle. Just so much easier to take notes with 'em. Not that I refer *back* to them much. But *in principle* it's easier. <cough>
Don't sweat the pet food, IMO. You're doin a lot better 'n most.
I love Ebooks. It’s like an entire library in your phone and ipad. Also the library has ebooks now of pretty much everything and no driving there to return them. Audiobooks too.
Then that comes down to the choice of the merchant. I, personally would not buy from the merchant that sells the Chinese product unless, of course, all other choices have left the market for that particular item. I do practice what I preach and I won't sell what I won't buy. The advantage we have is that we build a lot of Corvettes and Camaros so U.S. made parts are plentiful.
If you are calling this Fascism then I'll assume you're a Leftist. You guys love that word, don't you. As long as you are seeing it as Leftist Fascism then you're being honest. This whole set of problems started with Woodrow Wilson, you know, the father of the progressive movement. This was all designed by him and his racist cabinet that had 13 former Klan members on staff. The ignorance of the voting public has allowed it, but the uselessness and lack of motivation it has created among the leftist constituency will be their undoing. It's coming time for a Great American Reset, and the Libertarian mindset that the founders built this great country on will be back in vogue, you'll see.
I love Substack. In an earlier post on another site I was called a "right-ist" because I didn't think that pregnancy crisis centers should have to state up front that they don't do abortions because they aren't dishonest, just merely of a different mindset (that abortions aren't even an option), and here I am a leftist because I recognize that the proper definition of fascism is government by and for big business (corporations) and that definition has accurately fit the relationship between US government and US and global corporations for decades (with the US population seen as a resource or an obstacle in turns), through both "conservative" and '"liberal" administrations. You people need to stop trying to label others and just listen for a while.
So be effective in communicating, If you know what the modern vernacular is going to translate what you say to be, get out in front of it and clarify in your post. For instance, you talked about "liberal" administrations... The word "liberal" has been hijacked by the left, the fact is, they are not liberal, but it sounds better than "pro government, anti people"... The actual Liberals were the founders and their ilk. They are Leftists, plain and simple. To choose the word "Fascist" when you know how it's used today, is asking for a certain set of assumptions to be made. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying if your way of communicating is individual, then let those you are communicating with in on the secret.
The people in Washington DC live in a bubble. They have no idea what it’s like out in the country, and they don’t care. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that Biden or Harris, or anyone in his cabinet can relate to any of us. The proof is in his clueless press secretary who has no shame and comes out every day with a pack of lies. Biden, plagiarist in chief, lies every single day. So does his wife. All of these people hate us. Their policies prove just how much they hate us. As I look over other Democrats who may want to be President in the future, there is not one who cares about the middle class. Not one of them has a policy that would actually benefit the citizens. They are beholden to the elites, the donors, the coastal states, and that’s it. If your party reveres people like the jackal, George Soros, nothing good will ever happen. I hate all of them.
It’s funny…as a kid the D’s were the party of the little guy and the R’s were the party of the three martini lunch crowd. Now it’s flipped. Blacks and Hispanics are migrating to the R side. Ds represent the coastal elites with their fancy college degrees.
When I was a child the Democrats represented the average Joe. Republicans were WASPS, country club types who did their best to keep immigrant kids out of the Ivy League schools.
It's all flipped. The Republican Party is becoming the blue collar party. People don't understand Trump's appeal but there it is. He speaks like a blue collar guy and understands the working middle class. Elites will never understand this.
I, too, am old enough to remember when the Democrats were (theoretically) on the side of the working class. My parents were lifelong Democrats. I grew up hanging out at the union hall while my dad was doing his duties there. I'm not sure my dad ever questioned the fact that FDR and his ilk were wealthy men using people like my family to gain political power.
Personally, I think the shift started sooner than most imagine. I think it started with LBJ's Great Society, bribing minorities (and keeping them poor), while recruiting the wealthy who wanted to appear compassionate. At the same time, the Long March through the Institutions had begun, ensuring that more and more of the most educated would come out of college on the side of the Left.
Yes , they made a college education/indoctrination necessary to be seen as a person of worth. And they invented the. “—- Studies” majors to fill kids’ heads with disdain for everything American.
Now all these graduates are running/ruining our country.
"Theoretically" is more substantive than parenthetical. Dems have NEVER been on the side of the working class, they have used the working class simply to gain power, as you stated. I knew that way back in the early 80's when my college roommates were ribbing me about being a conservative and I would ask them to name one policy Dems put in place that actually met the SUPPOSED intent. Of course they couldn't, but they all "felt" like the Dems had their back.
Sometimes I think we should do like the planet Vulcan did and outlaw emotion. :-)
My parents voted for Reagan (as did many people who, like them, were historically Democrats). They went back to voting for Ds after his tenure; at least my dad did. No telling what my mom did in the privacy of the voting booth.
I think it's been pretty well established, although effectively suppressed by historians that LBJ was a racist. There are plenty of quotes that should make wokesters apoplectic. One of my favorites is what he is quoted by Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan as saying to two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
"I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years".
That's one of the reasons I believe that the outcome of the Welfare State was an intended consequence rather than an unintended one. LBJ wanted minorities dependent on the government and especially dependent on Democrats.
LBJ was my grandfather’s first cousin. Grandpa used to tell all of us that if “that scalawag” ever showed up at our door, he would take a switch to him.
Very astute Celia. I suggest you track down the late Robert Wenzel's blog posts on EconomicPolicyJournal regarding "LBJ's grandkids", which was his sardonic reference to the social results of policies that started with LBJ. The ideological grounding for those policies certainly predates LBJ, but he was the primary activator for their execution.
Speaking of execution, I was 10 when Kennedy was assassinated and remember my dad saying that everything was going to change. Even to us kids it felt like something shifted.
I wasn't really very aware of politics in 1960, but I remember my mother's reaction to Kennedy's election: "I hope nobody shoots him, because then that (pause) Johnson will be president."
Until they came to a realization that the working class is not necessary in a world in which you can "rent" subjugated masses from places like China, Mexico, Vietnam and elsewhere world over.
They "fought for the little guy" by creating an economic monstrosity in which entire industries became so consolidated that entire markets are controlled by a few enormous entities so if there is a mishap in a baby formula factory that controls a large chink of the supply the whole thing falls apart. You know that feeling when you receive the at home COVID test from the US Govt with a quality control paper in the package in Chinese.
They further "fought for the little guy" by deciding that it was smart to place all of our eggs in the China basket so that even the most obscure shit has to be made there so that if a fuckin' ship gets stranded we are all fucked.
Complete and absolute dependency.
As a result of their famous "fight for the little guy" the big guys are bigger than ever, and Amazon will swallow all these little guys.
In my part of the world the shift started with Reagan.
When I was a child the Republicans were the ones who would keep the rising middle class, (of immigrant stock), out of their neighborhoods, out of their children's schools and certainly not in their country clubs. They hired immigrants and blacks to be their domestics but not to be their equals. It was palpable.
I didn't know ANY Republicans until I was in my late 20's.
Did you know that the original intent of the minimum wage law, as proposed by Democrats, was to keep the "uppity xxgro" out of good jobs? It was about suppression, not support.
Well, maybe. I grew up in NYC. My grandparents and parents were immigrants (legal). If they had issues they could go to their local Democrat and get help. It created generational loyalty.
Create a problem then offer the solution - the time worn strategy for Dems.
Most people don't know that Obama was at the origin of the 2008 meltdown. As a community organizer in the 90's in Chicago, he started a class action lawsuit against banks for not loaning to minorities. The Clinton admin strong-armed the banks to loan to unqualified applicants. This begat the mortgage derivates market which was meant to mitigate the risk of "subprime" loans, and instead networked the risk so every bank (and it was almost every bank in the US) became infected. This infection resulted in the inability of the market to value those assets, putting banks in violation of the capital requirements (since an asset that couldn't be valued was excluded from capital). This lead to a freeze on loans, since banks can only lend out what their capital can support.
So, unknowingly for sure, Obama created a problem and then became POTUS based on it.
Oh, by the way, 49% of the parties in the class action lawsuit who were "unfairly" denied loans defaulted. Gee, who could have predicted that?!?!
Obama was not the origin of the 2008 meltdown. Sure, he contributed to unqualified lending. But the center of our modern meltdowns is the central bank - i.e. Federal Reserve.
The pre-Fed era generally did not feature economy-wide meltdowns. When bank panics occurred in the 19th century (outside of the prior central banks, the first and second), you will find state-level fractional reserve banking and unjustified legal protections of that practice. But even with that, the greatest period of wealth creation in this country followed the Civil War and continued until the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act.
I've done quite a bit of reading on this, and the economic structure that allowed the meltdown to occur is as you stated. But the trigger event is most definitely the agreement between banks and the Clinton administration in response to the Obama class action lawsuit.
Without that agreement, sub-prime loans never emerge, no risk mitigation is needed and mortgage derivatives are never developed, loan defaults don't occur, bank capital does not get hammered, and the credit market doesn't freeze.
I don't know a lot, granted. But my understanding is that the *big* problems started happening in '95, when The Fed decided they were smart enough they could actually *control the economy.* That's how dumb they were. And if anything untoward popped up, they had all the tools to *fix* it all up. No problemo. AFAIK, they just didn't know when to *stop* fixing things.
The rest, as they say, is history. Actually, that's about all I know about it, FWIW.
I think the Dems were always more the party of union bosses than the party of working people. Today it's mostly teachers and other government workers who are union members.
I don't know today's statistics but a few years ago, 1 in 8 delegates to the Democrat/Socialist National Convention were members of the teacher's union. The teachers' unions serve the teachers and don't give a damn about the quality of teaching nor the benefit of the students. The democrats take huge donations from big business while all the time railing against them. unions themselves are big business. Look at the salaries of the unions' hierarchies.
Third parties split the vote and usher in the party you don't want.
Better to vote in America First candidates and increase their numbers in the House and the Senate. Better to vote in a Republican president (it's going to be either Trump or DeSantis) who can start to clean things up.
Trump did a great job, was unduly vilified and castigated and should be honored for that. But as an elder statesman. The inescapable fact is that he would be in his 80s if elected. That's simply unacceptable.
Trump also would be ineligible to be re-elected in 2028. I'd want a reliable conservative (like DeSantis *seems* to be) in for (hopefully) two terms to have any shot at turning this ship around. So even if I trusted Trump to follow through with good policies, he would be finished in 2028 and we need more continuity of leadership than that.
Ah but if DeSantis runs there will be DeSantis derangement syndrome. Count on it.
The Democrats are masterful at lies. Have you seen Newsom's ad about CA vs. FL? It's hilarious. I live in Florida. The ad is a complete 180 on the truth.
I don't doubt they will go after DeSantis. But DeSantis doesn't have a lifetime of bad behavior as a NYC playboy to draw upon. And the media has already used up all the public's goodwill.
They will lie about DeSantis. But I don't think it will give them the traction that Trump did.
I really don't want Trump to run, primarily because of the TDS hangover. In addition, I believe Trump would select the same type of cabinet and administrators who hurt him terribly during his POTUS tenure.
Trump certainly has his flaws but if he could restrain his need to be a headline 24/7 he could withstand TDS. The problem is that the “swamp” is so pervasive that he’ll need to have an effective cabinet on day 1, no more idiots like Jeff Sessions or back stabbers like “Mad Dog” Mattis, Rex Tillerson or John Kelly who have their own agendas. On day one he’ll need to purge the heads and aligned flunkies at the JustUs Department and all of the Intelligence agencies who conspired to create and perpetuate the Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes before they can organize again. Just as important, he needs to de-classify the “secrets" the swamp creatures have hid behind for decades so Americans can fully appreciate the extent of their duplicity . Once he has a solid America First team in place, he should refrain from engaging in personal attacks and instead caricature his critics with humor, a la Reagan. Hiring a good team of joke writers would be worth every penny he has to spend. God knows there’s plenty of material to work with.
I understand the reticence in supporting Trump again but despite all the TDS and the unprecedented assaults he had to endure as president, even his critics have to marvel at what he achieved. There’s no doubt he made mistakes during his first term but that’s what rookies do. Whatever else Trump is, he ain’t no dummy. And if elected again, he wouldn’t be a rookie.
I agree with you. One of Trump's short comings is his loyalty. Jeff Sessions was the very first Republican Senator to endorse him. Sessions had an illustrious record as a prosecutor in Alabama so it wasn't a bad pick on paper. Sessions is an honorable man with a strict code of personal ethics. When he gave his word about recusing himself it hamstrung him. He was also too timid. Rex Tillerson was not a politician and was in over his head. Pompeo was an excellent replacement.
Unfortunately Trump is not going to be able to ape Reagan and Reagan's charming ability to use humor to calm the situation and bring it back into perspective.
With all of Trump's personality quirks I would go down on my knees in gratitude if we could get him back into the White House now.
"Once he has a solid America First team in place, he should refrain from engaging in personal attacks and instead caricature his critics with humor, a la Reagan."
I'm sorry to say he simply isn't capable of that. Plus past 70, health is tenuous. Biden is, of course, a textbook case of how fast cognitive decline can hit (although he was never more than mediocre, at best). Trump will be in his eighties if he were to win in '24. We can't afford to take that risk. The world is too dangerous and the enemies to America too numerous, here and abroad, to not have a vigorous, healthy leader. Trump should have cleaned out the Aegean Stable at Justice when he had the chance. Now we need a leader who will do so.
Trump should hire you as an advisor; you are correct on all counts. Easiest decision to make: dump Jared and Ivanka as advisors. Jared did a good job on the Abraham accords, but that's it. His advice, along with others, to Trump during the early stages of the pandemic, IMO, killed any chance he had at overcoming the rigged election. (I know, easy to say in retrospect.)
Trump should also figure out how to get McConnell and McCarthy out of their lead roles in the Senate and House. They are swamp creatures.
I think the overall theme would be "forget short term popularity - work to become recognized by history as the second administration to save the union (the first being Lincoln)".
Normally I would try to convince my friends or kids to have a softer, more understanding mindset about what might be fueling the government, elites, and elite media’s treatment of what’s going on but when Joe Biden and his clan make their coy references to a “fundamental transition “ going on I have to admit that this is ALL deliberate !
Over the past 6 months I reconnected with an old friend and his family. Our daughters have been friends since kindergarten. We hadn’t seen each other much since Covid descended on us because his wife, who I am also friends with, is immune compromised and they felt unsafe around me because my I am a frontline healthcare worker and my husband is a first responder. Lately we have been spending time together again. This friend is a long time DNC campaign strategist and has gradually worked his way up in the DNC organization. He is in weekly contact with White House level staff. I believe my husband and I are some of the few regular middle/working class people they ever hang out with. They live a very luxurious life funded largely by inherited family wealth. They both drive Tesla’s, work from their laptops in a giant solar panel topped house, own multiple vacation homes, etc. They intermittently giggle about how nice it is that the high gas prices don’t really matter to them. Our lifestyles are extremely different. My husband and I work tons of overtime in incredibly stressful jobs to be able to meet our financial obligations, rarely ever go on vacation, etc. We only have one child because we can’t afford to properly care for more children. Two months ago they led me into a conversation in hopes, I guess, of finding out what a regular middle class mom thinks of how things are going since the Biden team rolled into the White House. I said “do you really want to know what I think ?” They said yes. I chose to not hold back. I told them, from every direction, how the Democratic Party’s latest policies have affected my family and other families like mine. There are no words to describe how completely out of touch these DNC elitist types are. They dismissed my concerns and blew off everything I said at lightening speed. It was just stunning. Then came all kinds of super condescending remarks about how I “just don’t understand the big picture, blah blah blah “. I said “well then, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this all shakes out at the midterms”. The DNC can ignore hard working middle income families like mine at their own peril.
I think you give the Washington crowd a bit too much credit. It's not that they don't KNOW what's going on outside of their enclave, it's that they don't CARE what's happening to regular citizens. That is, until election time comes, then all of a sudden our issues matter. If we could get some solid and permanent campaign finance reform instituted, that took the control of politicians out of the hands of the corporations and the wealthiest of people, we might find our way back to "by the people, for the people". If all campaign funding was controlled by government and all "donations" were put in to a "pool" that was shared with all candidates, then powerful people wouldn't be able to subversively buy influence from candidates. At that point, anyone taking money from outside parties would not be able to hide it from the voters. This, in turn, would discourage those who run for office strictly for personal gain.
Pardon the leap, but have you lost your ever lovin mind? The problem, as we have already stated, is career politicians. Joe Manchin cares Nothing for the middle class, the only reason he ever went against other Demoncrats was for political expediency in his own district. That guy is corporate owned, just look in to where his financing comes from and how he votes in lock step with it. This is the kind of wilful ignorance that has gotten us to the place we are today. Giving a career politician credit for doing something that was only designed to further their career is just contributing to the delinquency.
Where have all the workers gone? In my town there are signs everywhere saying, Help Wanted. Chic-fil-A is offering $19/hr for full timers. Construction has ground to fits and starts as people can get workers only unreliably and unpredictably. Restaurants are open only 4 days a week. What are people doing if not working? With high prices for everything you would think everyone would be working a lot, even a second job.
That's what I wonder, too. At first, I thought it was the rent moratorium--people who don't have to pay rent can get away with working less. But even now, people don't seem to want to work, despite the fact that wages have increased radically, even in this economically depressed corner of our state.
I fear that more people realized, during the pandemic, that they can get by just as well on welfare.
Many people may still be living off savings from the pandemic 'relief' money. They may have also rearranged their life at lower costs, ie moving away from cities, refinancing houses, etc. So, there is some buffer here, and that's part of why inflation has be so stubborn. Learning to game the safety net systems could be part of this too. The era of low interest rates has also taught people to be comfortable with large amounts of debt. Need some cash? Refi your house and pay off those credit cards! The proliferation of "buy now, pay later" (which every time I see this on things like $2000 dryer, I cringe thinking about how people are essentially tricked into buying stuff they just can't afford), etc. This era is over, for now, but it may take time for people adjust as they need to figure out servicing this debt is actually hurting them.
The work from home culture also has its downsides as people are experiencing burn out. People feel unseen at work, both literally and figuratively. Bosses dump things on people they have hardly, if ever, met face to face. Yes, those people get to work from home, but if you put in long hours and don't feel recognized for the work, how much does that really matter? Worker loyalty has collapsed.
A big part of the problem in some fields is that the worker training process was disrupted. Airline pilots is an obvious one, but other things such as some trades or things like life guards, that need certification are experiencing shortages because for 1-2 years, there was no, or very little, certification process going on and many of those jobs were shut down for part of that time. People that might have done that work moved on to other things.
So, I'm not completely sure that the problem is as simple as people don't want to work. I think a big part of this is simply that there is a disconnect between the jobs that need to be filled and what workers are willing AND capable of doing.
Large employers let huge numbers of people go during COVID. For example, the airlines laid off thousands of people and now are short-staffed.
You may be onto something with the "life rearranging" due to COVID. We certainly rearranged our lives. We sold our house in a large city for a ridiculous amount of money and bought one for 1/3 the price in a smaller town which gave us a nice financial cushion but I kept working because I LOVE my job. Many others in the same boat probably have enough money to not work for several years if they did the same thing we did.
Celia...we do not hear much, these days, but the Gov of Penn. is trying to get together a $2000.00 payment for those under the $80,0000/yr income level. This $2000, comes from a Fed. Bill and must be paid before 2024(?). Likely other States do the same. How much more?
Many, i believe, are starting their own business and many are going under the table...
Same here in Montana, job vacancies everywhere. Construction workers in high demand but contractors are busy or unavailable. Massive delays and backlogs either from supplies or workers unavailable. I have no idea how people can survive inflation prices without working.
Pumping all that money into the economy when there was a labor shortage inflated wages. In turn that inflated prices and now we're in a nightmare scenario where only a serious recession can affect price growth.
NC my friends and I have this conversation all the time. Where is everyone?! I'm not sure but maybe going deeply into debt? Everyone must have a $$ data plan to spend 16 hours a day on social media right? Have you noticed that pretty much every online purchase you make now, even for a $25 shirt has a 3rd party "payment plan" option? And I am now seeing commercials where one character asks if the other is going to so and so's wedding in ________. "No I can't afford it." answers the other. Then the announcer reveals that you can get a loan to do anything you want. (can't help thinking of loan sharks here) and then the previously wise character that admitted she can't afford it says she's gonna take that loan and triumphantly declares "I'm outta here!" It is the absolute height of irresponsible behavior that wouldn't have been available to past generations but here we are. I wonder what the national credit card debt looks like collectively .
Jesus Christ. I just saw something on CNBC about the popularity of BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) services with Millennials and Zoomers. Makes me wonder if we're in for a nasty 2008 shock all over again.
The "payment plan" thing is because millennials and Get Z aren't using credit cards the way older people do. So, marketers have brought in the "pay over time" option which is basically the same as a credit card except there is usually no interest added which, to me at least, is slightly better.
It must be no interest for a couple months and then get smacked with a crazy high interest rate. Otherwise these companies are performing a charity that they also spend $$ marketing.
I have a credit card that offers 3% back on purchases at Amazon OR the ability to split any purchase into multiple payments "interest free." If I choose the latter, the bank keeps the 3% I would otherwise have gotten. That still beats 18% a month that some cards charge.
Listen to the DEMOCRAT selected Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Energy and know that this is all INTENTIONAL. There is a war on the middle class and on freedom. They don't want you driving, they don't want you to be able to afford fuel to drive or heat your homes, yet there are no realistic alternatives being offered. Keep voting for the democrats and this is what you will continue to get. Small business are and will continue to shut down. Think about this next election before you re-elect your local democratic congressperson or senator "he/she is not part of the problem..." If they are democrats they ARE part of the problem.
Absolutely! And PeteB or Energy Sec Granholm obviously don’t know that the electricity needed to charge the EV batteries needs to be generated - from a grid that’s hanging by a thread. Let alone all of the reality associated with the cost of materials of the EV Nirvana he spews.
For such elite geniuses, their peddling of fool’s gold “answers” is tragic, shameful, or both.
I really don’t know much about EV’s so I hope I explain this correctly.
Some friends of ours had out of town guests that drove a Tesla. I walked over one afternoon to see it bc I had never seen the interior of one. Very cool. The owner was using our friends garage for charging. He had had it charging all night and still didn’t get a full charge!! The owner explained that to get a quicker charge at home, you need a 240V plug since most plugs at home are 120V. The charging stations around town are not convenient to where we live plus they’re sporadic 😳
You do have it right, 240volts will charge a large battery essentially twice as fast as 120volts. That’s because what limits the amount of Energy you can move with your wiring is how much CURRENT (Amps) is being sent through the wires. That electrical Energy = Volts x Amps.
The EV battery needs a certain amount of energy to get fully charged. So if you supply it at 240volts, you can pass that maximum amount of current (Amps) in about 1/2 the time as it takes if it’s only using 120volts.
For extra credit:
You have circuit breakers (like the old fuses) that are generally limited to pass 15Amps unless the wiring is more heavy duty than standard house wiring.
You almost certainly do have 240volt power supplied to your house. That’s the voltage across the 2 columns of circuit breakers in the breaker panel. It’s just that any given socket in your house is only hooked up one one side of those circuit breakers except that you likely do have a couple of 240volt sockets, typically dedicated for electric stove, electric clothes dryer, or your central air conditioner. They have a very different plug than the “120volt plug” in your wall sockets. (All this is USA description: Brits differ).
I bristle at the claims that “most of the Democrats are actually moderate”. No, Sorry! IF someone is moderate and don’t agree with 9th month abortions, then voting for the Dems’ repeated stamp for it means they either agree with it, or they don’t have the integrity to stand their ground.
Either way, running our government is no place for them. And voting for these folks makes the voters only slightly less culpable- maybe just ignorant.
I’m in trouble with my retired pals’ breakfast group because right after the 2020 election, I told them “We’ll, let’s just hope that Biden breaks enough stuff fast enough that there’s no question about who broke it”. Since then they blame me for this exponentially exploding disaster.
(Don’t get me wrong: Trump lost me with the mega Sore Loser routine, but he didn’t do THIS).
Trump never had me to begin with. But his administration did some really great things and their leadership was vastly superior to what we have now.
Also, TDS is real and he never deserved that. The way he was relentlessly demonized for years had no ethical core; it was nothing but revenge for him stealing Hillary's dream.
Many Trump administration officials who resigned early in his presidency suggested in their resignations that trying to do any good as part of his administration was hopeless. The Left celebrated their declarations as evidence of Trump's awfulness.
But that wasn't what they meant.
What they meant was that it had taken them only a short while to become sure that the overwhelming institutional effort to undermine his presidency was insurmountable. Between the Democrats' constant efforts to undo the election result via impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or other means and the many institutions (FBI, et al) working to thwart Trump's every act as president, smart administration staff realized that they would at best be martyrs for their causes, not successful agents of change.
It is fair to argue that Democrats stole the 2016 election in that they never allowed the duly-elected president to exercise his office.
It is the same in the UK. Gas prices (due to tax) are much higher. The oil refineries around the world are running close to capacity, particularly for diesel. Russian refinery capacity has been taken out of the equation. The price of oil has fallen in the last few weeks but it is only now working its way through to the pumps. Because people are driving less, they are using less gas and thus the independents (not supermarket chains) are getting squeezed even more.
The supply chain crisis is worldwide and small business owners worldwide are getting squeezed. Because of globalization (which was a deflationary force), people are affected by lockdowns and factory closures in far flung parts of world (such as China). It can be about getting that little part to finish production (something factories in the UK experienced last year).
The price of hen and duck food keeps going up (something which poultry farmers need in order to produce hens and eggs) for example. I keep hens and ducks -- the cost is now 38.5% higher than last year.
The big worry is hyper-inflation or stagflation in a way which has not been a worry since the early 1990s and the rise of the internet etc. I would suggest that people read Sowell's Basic Economics if they have not already done so.
I am actually a novelist -- historical romance, over 30 of them for Harlequin (who are now owned by Harper Collins). I was the first person to write a Roman set historical romance published by a major publisher and I helped revive the Viking time period. My books have been published around the world (better travelled than I am!) and I am apparently quite popular in France. My agent is currently shopping around a historical fiction about the woman who founded Bundles for Britian (a book of my heart) and my fingers remain crossed for it. In the meantime, I am writing another Viking as they do sell well around the world. Because I am in commercial publishing, I know all about the Culture Wars first hand (had to learn).
My mother said I'd never get a job majoring in econ (she wanted math like her) but it has proven surprisingly useful.
This is me being a Procrastination Princess rather than actually do my word count.
They are sometimes called 'bodice rippers', found in the romance section. They are escapist reads.
One of my personal favourites is The Warrior's Viking Bride. The blurb on the back reads: A Viking maiden destined for the battlefield…
…in bed with her captor!
As a female warrior, Dagmar Kolbeinndottar knows she’s not meant for marriage and a family. Until she’s kidnapped by Celtic warlord Aedan mac Connall, who has been tasked with returning Dagmar to her estranged father. Fighting her father’s orders to marry, Dagmar declares she will take no one but her abductor, expecting Aedan to refuse…but he’s intent on making her his bride!
“Everyone loves Styles’ Vikings!” — RT Book Reviews on Sold to the Viking Warrior
“Styles pens another winning Viking historical… An exciting, engaging story” — RT Book Reviews on Taming His Viking Woman
Harlequin does the titles and the back cover blurbs -- there is a dark art to it.
Glad Econ came in handy. Don't envy Your situation with the Woke industry tho. As far as word count, You're probably pretty well up there compared to most, with over 30 of 'em, right?
Natalie Wales Latham is fabulous. After the war, she founds Common Cause (1947) -- a short lived but influential moderate anti-communist group, along with Dorothy Thompson and Albert Schlesinger Jr among others .Almost completely forgotten but with v sound principles. It ends after her 3rd husband dies. The principles were 1. Personal worth -- the state is made for man, not man for the state. Every individual is precious in their own right. 2 Freedom -- the ancient and implacable foe of totalitarianism 3. Equality -- although with differing gifts, all should be equal under the law and in the moral order. 4. The Rule of Law-- the guardian of freedom 5. Individual opportunity -- to allow each person to develop to the fullness of their stature if that is their inclination and 6. Public morality -- the standard and gauge of decency and the basis for mutual trust without which society itself must fall into decay and dissolution and finally 7 Individual responsibility-- the final test of human liberty.
I'm in Northumberland. It is about 70F. Yesterday it was about 97 F. We are much cooler than the South. Scotland is cooler still.
Hose pipe bans were common when I first moved over in the early 1990s -- not in Northumberland as we have Kielder but in the South East.
The real problem is that people are not used to the heat and the dryness. The amount of littering in the UK surprised me when I first came over (having grown up in CA) and glass, used cigarette butts (not stubbed out properly) are known fire dangers.
Also various councils went for cheaper methods of re tarmacking roads as there wasn't going to prolonged periods of heat...with predictable results.
It is all about being sensible. Sometimes though it does make me wonder how the British gained an empire in hot countries...as fair skin does burn.
Like in Orwell’s Burmese Days when they got prickly heat while in India. Glad it cooled down by you. Going to read Sowell, too. I’ve read some of his other books but not Basic Econ.
The current regime despises the independence and autonomy of small businesses. Obamacare forced consolidation in medical providers, driving most independent practitioners into large health”care” conglomerates, because they are easier to control. The globalists undermining our national sovereignty would like to have the same control over every aspect of commerce. Much easier to control and manipulate. Compulsory participation in the globalist agenda is the goal. So many other facets to this: control the movements of the population by making travel expensive. Control indoctrination in public education by forcing a racist, repressive curriculum. Control individual achievement by eliminating meritocracy, advanced placement, gifted and talented programs, and overlay every subject with the mantle of imaginary racism. Ensure equity, rather than equal opportunity. That’s how a society gets pushed into the cattle chute of communism.
All very well planned for decades. Sadly the elites want complete control of our body’s and souls….and they wont stop at this point until they achieve it. Throwing us into socialism (more like communism it appears at this point) is their main goal. Flooding the states with migrants is the key to so much of this. It should be obvious to most at this point tearing down the US is the ultimate goal. It’s not like the WEF hasnt been telling us thats what theyre doing for 10 yrs now. They want complete control.
I used to think comments like yours were over-wrought. No more. It is hard for people to see that the world is being up-ended on purpose and we all are just pawns, with no idea how to prevent it.
It isn't only in the USA: it seems to be a pervasive movement inimicable to western civilization. In Europe, its worst manifestation is in Germany, where I'm living. Same insane green policies that will ruin the economy, the same COVID paranoia, prices going through the roof. I was never one for conspiracy theories, but I find that I'm gradually getting to a point where I sometimes ask myself if there's a nefarious plan behind all this. The increasing polarisation of society and the unwillingness to engage in civil discourse and agree to disagree aren't helping. At least there seems to be a growing pushback movement against the insanity in the USA.
IMO, it's a real *loose* conspiracy of overlapping goals. The Marxists wanna tear down Democracy and Capitalism. The youth just wanna tear down everything, because they're stupid and lame. The One-Worlders wanna destroy Nationalism. The CRTers wanna tear down whites. The Trans Activists wanna tear down WOMEN (as opposed to "people who menstruate").
You gotta ask: Who benefits the most outta a this? The Elites, right?
Those are interesting articles. But it's not all based on the pandemic and the response. A lotta this groupthink has been in the works for years, as well as preventing *any* dissenting voices from being heard.
That's just the M.O. of the Woke. Yeah, it was amplified by the medical bureaucracy during the pandemic, no doubt about it.
New America First R, not old RINO R. Very important.
We have had and still do to some extent have a Uniparty.
The NEW Rs stepping up like JD Vance, Kari Lake, and others who have seen what the past two years has done and are aware where this country is headed if they don't actively try to stop it are the future leaders we need. DeSantis too.
Kari Lake for example is running for Governor of Arizona but up against OLD RINO BIG money and see what BIG money in politics can do....Gavin Newsom recall is a great example. Enough people wanted him gone and he didn't get recalled, because of BIG money and corruption. We have our work cut out for us to fix this country. We need to all pay attention and act like our lives depend on it. Because they do.
Edit: And not fall for "Their" tactics of FEAR to willingly give away our RIGHTS, FREEDOMS, and LIBERTIES.
I am one of those people who refused to wear a mask. Call me selfish all you want. I didn't fall for their fake hysteria. I was standing up for my RIGHT to breath freely. We can't willingly give away our RIGHTS! It's WRONG!
They don't give a RATS ASS about our health. And I can list dozens of examples to prove that statement, but I won't go down the rabbit hole because I assume this crowd gets it. You are the only one that cares about your HEALTH. Trust me. I do realize that I am fortunate to live in a Red state where it is easier to stand my ground on my RIGHTS, but this is something we all must do. Now is the time to stand up and be okay with saying the unpopular thing or going against the crowd. If the crowd was all walking into a pit of hell, would you follow them?
Did you know he's been quite busy playing polo out there in CA? The most expensive sport anyone can participate in. The costs are astronomical. Didn't see him flaunting that at the UN thing.
This is PART of what it costs to maintain this hobby:
"For a club to keep the ponies in good condition and ensure excellent performance on the field, horse owners must cover the membership costs. Bear in mind that on average, the cost of putting together a tier 1 polo team during a 16-week Winter season can cost anywhere from $1-3 million." bet he doesn't want his audience at the UN to be aware of the cost of his hobbies.
What total and complete hypocrisy to get up and preach against Americans and dog our lifestyle. I hold nothing against people enjoying their money and their life anyway they choose but sit down and shut up about others. It is NONE of his business and he certainly does not walk the walk.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the stimulus checks were a disaster. They went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. The unemployment bonuses went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
In the last five years, we have finally risen to the top end of the working poor class. But we were floating in cash in 2020. I had an "essential" job, so I was working (at higher wages, as a result of the risk). My husband was only unemployed for three months before his factory got back to work, but during his stint on unemployment, he was making MORE (due to the bonus) than he was when he was working.
If we were doing so much better financially during the pandemic, I can only imagine how things must have been for those making more than we do.
And now we are all paying the price with the resulting inflation. You can't print money without causing inflation. The stimulus checks raised a niggling worry in the back of my head, because I know this. The people in charge ought to have known this.
They did know it. It’s been crystal clear since the COVID lockdowns that the goal is to destroy the middle class- those most likely to resist the ruling elite. Destroy small business, paint successful whites as evil racists, vilify the police. Encourage lawlessness, then claim that local police cannot keep order. The goal is to get the middle class to accept a national police force.
Destroy the public schools that middle class people rely on. Kill the energy sector, and reduce the mobility of the middle class. We are being big herded into a corner from which they hope we cannot escape.
They can't even account for a significant portion of the stimulus money. Massive fraud, waste and abuse. Our government is a joke. But, cruelly, the joke's on us.
California revealed early this year that state prison inmates collected $20 billion in fraudulent stimulus checks. Then the dim-bulb governor announced that 2021 state tax collections had yielded a $97 billion surplus -- but nobody in Sacramento suggested that maybe the right thing to do would be to return $20 billion collected fraudulently to the feds.
I know two very well off people who received big checks for their business. Which they didn’t need. One had decided to retire and used the money to buy a million dollar plus home.
The other did try to return the money, but they were so disorganized and unprepared they told him to keep it. He absolutely does not need the money.
This infuriates me. My husband and I worked hard our entire lives and saved for our retirement as best we could. It sucks to be us (and so many like us).
We got the stimulus checks, didn't need them. Socked them away and used them to pay our taxes to the federal gubmint. (I always underpay cuz I ain't wanting the gubmint to have a free loan of my money throughout the year)
Yes. We got too. So did everybody. I’m talking about the ‘business rescue money’ or whatever they called it. Thousands of dollars. Not 1200.00.
Government passed out thousands willy- nilly. Much fraud and scamming. And cases like the two I referenced. No way of tracking. OUR money. Taxpayer’s money. Not ‘the Government’s’. Makes me so mad.
One-a the things they did was give money to businesses so they could keep their employees paid during the pandemic. Even if they didn't lay anyone off.
Except that people would have been better off if they were on unemployment, thanks to the unemployment bonuses. I have a friend who is a waitress, and she was in that position. No tips because of no sit-down customers.
Again, I forget. I think we're looking at hundreds of millions of unemployment bonus dollars going to people that were ineligible. But that doesn't count the bazillion people, who got it legally, that made more off-a that than if they worked. Like You "said."
They shouldn't have existed at all. The reality of the government's imposed lockdowns should have been felt right as they happened so that people could judge them accordingly.
Instead, we'll have problems that peak a decade later, creating more than enough cover for media to blame anything but the root cause.
Not that I begrudge fast food workers a decent wage but I thought it was inevitable that the push for $15 wage increase would raise prices. That was even before the stimulus checks. When wages go up prices go up and soon it’s all a wash.
"The more I think about it, the more I realize that the stimulus checks were a disaster. They went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. The unemployment bonuses went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances."
This is true. I read but forgot: I can't recall if we're talkin hundreds of millions or many billions. Probably latter.
Also, the Central Bank, The Fed, went crazy on overkill. They didn't open the siphon. They dropped the ocean on the problem. Stock market didn't stay down for long, IIRC.
From what little I know, The Fed serves a useful function. A buffer when financial disaster strikes. What they did with QE1 (Quantitative Easing) at the start of the Great Recession was great. When they went on to QE2 and QE3, they started pushing us, I believe, step-by-step on the road to the disaster we're lookin at now.
It’s despicable that our leadership, so-called, dodges and deflects responsibility for the economic crisis that is largely of their making.
The President in his first month halted all new oil and gas exploration on federal land including the massive Alaskan field, cancelled a major pipeline from Canada that would have offset Russian fuel imports, and sat on new drilling permits. Prices began rising, and rather than reverse course, he doubled down.
Now, cornered, he blames the Russians, the oil companies, and even the gas stations for record high gasoline and diesel. The Transportation Secretary, so-called, recommends we all buy electric vehicles. Never mind that only 434,879 EVs were sold last year in the U.S., 3% of all cars sold, mostly by Tesla—a company that the Biden regime’s DOJ has targeted for criminal investigation amidst Elon Musk’s criticisms of Green New Deal. Biden didn’t even invite Tesla to his EV summit.
Our leadership is controlled by anti-business socialists who don’t mind that small businesses are being squeezed to death. It just creates more dependency that justifies federal spending programs.
I agree 100% with your last statement that "our leadership is controlled by anti-business socialists". People who have worked in a small business or in a manufacturing environment have a very different perspective than most of our federal bureaucrats -- educated in Ivy League schools, careers in government or law, etc. They don't understand the different world in which most Americans live.
All of this is interesting, but it doesn’t deal with the cause of inflation. Climate Change Alarmism is destroying our economy.
You would think we would have had a debate on whether CAGW is a serious threat before we implemented policies that assume that it is. Unfortunately, we haven’t. Instead we use dishonest language like Climate Change (as if the climate has ever not changed) to express our fears.
Assuming that CO2 is a problem (large assumption) the fact of the matter is that nothing the US does about reducing our production of CO2 matters because (a) the atmosphere is well-mixed globally, and (b) increased coal and gas usage in China and India are more than offsetting any reduction by us. Net zero is a pointless exercise unless your point is the destruction of the US economy.
I saw a wonderful documentary series, "Voyage of the Continents." I recommend it to anyone who thinks climate and conditions have never changed.
There is also an excellent documentary about the history of Australia. It has undergone massive climate change over the eons and even into relatively recent times.
No kidding. I sit here on a steamy summer morning, looking out at the skyline of New York and muse that it was once covered with an ice sheet up to the height of the Empire State Building. Just wait til we start back on that cycle......
When I was a child in a NYC public school we were terrified about the coming Ice Age. Our teachers reminded us NYC was once under 2 miles of glacier. The granite boulders the glaciers had pushed ahead of them were visible in all the parks. This new Ice Age would extend down through Virginia.
As a result the new climate change alarmists have no power over me. The climate is always changing and always has. There was a time when the Sahara was a tropical rain forest. There was a time when the atmosphere had 16 times more carbon dioxide than now. (Core samples taken from the ice in Greenland). Somehow life thrived.
Humans have to adapt to climate. It has always been that way. Look at the ruined cities off the coastlines, a victim of the melting ice after the last Ice Age. No one wants to accept that climate CHANGES, no matter what we do.
Apparently this inordinate heat wave the northern hemisphere is experiencing is being caused by solar flares. They have had to reposition the geosynchronous satellites to prevent the flares from frying them. Saw a newspaper from 1921, when they were going through the same thing. It may have also happened during the Dust Bowl.
Watch the WEF crowd jump on this and try to move their agenda forward.
The Colorado plateau used to be a huge inland sea. Amazing the changes that occurred naturally - but politicians think they can control nature to ‘save the planet’
Debate about the climate has been deliberately stifled. It has been a broad-based effort. Major media outlets (LA Times, Meet the Press, etc.) have declared as a matter of policy they will not report anything that does not support the alarmist agenda, even factual reports about legitimate research. Most social media will deplatform anyone who departs from the climate "consensus." Realist scientists find it very difficult to get research articles published. Speaking up for real science gets your dissertation rejected, gets you denied tenure, gets you ostracized and disinvited from professional conferences, or outright gets you fired. These tactics have been so successful they are being adopted by the left for all their causes.
As anyone outside the Left knows, left-wing people define "conversations" about issues as "we talk, you bend over". As far as the Left is concerned, we have already had the entire "debate" about climate change, and they won it.
I was so pleased to see the shoutout to A.K. Stickle Variety!!
I have been loving that store for years. And wondering how it managed to stay in business. I would cheerfully buy out their entire inventory to KEEP them in business, but there's only so much room for New York State dishtowels and Etch-a-Sketches in my home.
As someone who owned a small business during the last recession (2007-2010), I will say that Biden's COVID-related interventions—specifically his small business loans at low interest rates—seemed a lot more small-business-friendly than Obama's too-big-to-fail bailouts. Obama turned out to be such a mediocre POTUS.
But I don't have a clue what can be done about the current inflationary tide.
And I keep dreaming about wheelbarrows full of worthless paper currency and the Weimar Republic.
They shouldn’t call it Putin’s Price Hike they should call it Greta’s Gas Gouge because this is the result of decades of emotionally-driven imbeciles with minds like children engaging in “environmentalism”. I’ve been saying for a long time that these people are evil and a net detriment to society and now everyone can finally see it.
Up next, now that the fanciful useless cocksuckers from the farmers market have taken over the government, we can have environmentally friendly organic food production mandates which will result in mass starvation. Fucking simpletons.
At least when the ammonia restrictions kick in requiring farmers to use animal waste as fertilizer we will be able to use the nickname Joe Buydung, which is fun.
Yes that will be the next excuse to scam the election. Actually, I have no problem with solicited absentee voting. It's the unsolicited kind... sending out massive numbers of ballots almost randomly, then making sure to count every single vote for a Democrat no matter how incorrectly filled out the ballots are. They've made a joke and mockery of the U.S. electoral process and caused irreparable damage to our democracy.
I work in a foreign country and have observed the difference in election laws first hand. Everyone has a voter card with their photo, and system tracks the use (no multiple votes from one person). Election Day is a Sunday, and even though this country is probably more religious than the U.S., folks go to church and then to the polls on election day. There is almost no absentee voting, has to be verified and validated to allow a person to submit an absentee ballot. There is also no early voting - Election Day is it.
When I lived in Phoenix, we had voter I.D. cards. It was no big deal, just another card you carried in your wallet and displayed on Election Day. The problem is Covid-19 or Wuhan Virus or whatever you call it. They used it as an excuse to steal the election, purely and simply.
This began with "You didn't build that." Our leaders ,most of whom have never owned or worked in a real business ,especially a small one where the owners and their families pour their savings and souls into their dreams , pretty much never take any responsibility for their actions and decisions. Let's hope voters now hold them accountable since the notion of personal accountability is not in their lexicon.
I have thought about this often. There are many small businesses in my area and some are my favorite small restaurants. They can't keep printing new menus as their costs go up. Everyone here that I know is aware these businesses are not gouging anyone. Their costs, just as our costs, are going up.
My electricity is supplied by a cooperative. They have raised their fuel adjustment price 3 times since the beginning of the year. The increases have been modest, from $4-6 per so many kilowatts, but they are still increases and with inflation increasing, there will be more. I have adjusted the thermostat higher and have become adjusted to a warmer house.
My grocery shopping has changed. It has become necessities and only real food. Certainly healthier. Many items have become reduced in volume and size by shrinkflation. The 5 lb. bag of cat food I used to purchase is now 3.5 lbs and costs $2/bag more. Glad to get it though because a few months ago the shelves were completely bare.
Now that I am retired I am watching my trips closely. I am trying to make it through the month on one tank of gas. Fortunately I live in a neighborhood where most of the stores I want to go to are within 2 miles of home.
I lived through Jimmy Carter's inflation and it was awful but I was young and working. Not all that difficult to pick up a part time job in addition to my full time job. Now I am retired.
The real worry is the way the Biden administration is destabilizing the country. Inflation, crime, massive illegal immigration, stupid energy and foreign policies that harm the country still spending money hand over fist (Ukraine, anyone).
What happens when several million new immigrants, half of whom speak no English and are not familiar with modern Western civilization, can't get any work, (including the many who have criminal backgrounds), decide to take their piece of the American pie? Looting, home invasion, hold-ups, muggings? It's going to make it look like the Antifa/BLM riots of 2020 were just an outing in the park.
Just as this administration is trying to disarm lawful citizens. Fun times.
And trucks - big, nice 4 wheel drive trucks - are stolen at an alarming rate in and around San Antonio. My younf friend had a Ford stolen at a Spurs gsme and 14 were stolen in a two block radius that night. His truck was trashed with $72,000 in damage but the insurance company refused to total it. They are used to drive through brush and fences because the transporters know the authorities will not chase them off-road. A report surfaced yesterday that "aggressive Border Patrol.policies" contributed to the Uvalde school shooting fiasco because the school had been locked down dozens of times between February and May because of high speed chases resulting in bailouts and thus no one took the shooter lockdown seriously. In essence Border Patrol is being blamed for the invasion. And it is an invasion.
Here locally, the town has really gone out of it's way to show support to the CBP, most of the citizens around here feel the CBP is getting scape-goated by the MSM and the federal gubmint. After the split reins fiasco last year we even had a "Split Reins" trail event to show support to the CBP.
I cross the border daily (work in Mexico), and have noticed over the last year or so the agents at the border crossing seem to be fairly depressed, and the older agents just want to get to their retirement. Very few new agents, whether designed or not.
They did before the housing crash in 2007. We had hundreds of central American men here. They would congregate in the Home Depot parking lots and be picked up by contractors as day labor. On Saturdays they crowded to these little bodegas that had a couple of bags of chips but were primarily in business to transfer money. I seem to recall reading an article at the time that all this transfer money was like foreign aid to Mexico and other countries. Mexico was receiving billions from these illegals working in the USA.
When the economy crashed all those men disappeared. I assume they returned home. This time when the economy crashes they are not going to return home. It's not going to be pretty.
How many of the illegal immigrants are sending money back home to help pay off the debt owed to the criminal organization that helped them gain entry into the states? Families take out loans and mortgages to get a family member to the US from the loan shark division of the criminal organization that moves people across the borders. There is so much that is not benign in the trafficking of illegal immigrants and the open border policy funds the worst of the worst.
The number of minors who are discovered with people other than their parents is troubling, particularly considering that I suspect fewer are identified as such than are actually coming across. The "child friendly" illegal immigration policies make this problem worse, incentivizing the use of children as "grease" on the wheels of illegal immigration; those same children can then be trafficked. It makes me ill.
Many get both. When we lived in Topeka, my friend across the street had an illegal boyfriend. She got welfare benefits for herself and their children (from which he benefited, of course). Meanwhile, he had a good job in a restaurant kitchen, paid under the table, so no taxes and no effect on their welfare benefits.
At one point, he developed extreme jealousy (he couldn't cope if she even said hello to another man), and he threatened to kidnap the children and take them to Mexico to live with his mother. She was terrified of losing her kids. I reported him to ICE, including his threats...and they simply didn't give a damn.
Long ago, in another life, I met a couple living in NYC who were doing much the same thing. She was on welfare for her and her child. He did something under the table. They were not married. If they were to get married she would lose her welfare benefits.
I read the Ford Foundation was giving the illegals $500/month. Soros is heavily involved and other NGO's may be as well. Can you get welfare benefits if you are not a citizen?
I have seen so many people talking about how inflation is bad, but that it and the tight labor market creates the opportunity for those in low wage occupations to demand raises.
With zero comprehension among most that this is the very definition of the inflationary spiral.
All western governments need to be replaced with people that get it, Biden and Trudeau have caused this.
It is gut wrenching to read these stories. It has become painfully clear the bureaucrats in Washington not only don’t care about small business owners, they despise them...because it would be easier to put their boot on everyone if all gas stations were run by Amazon and every Chinese food restaurant was owned by McDonalds. For all the degrees these fools in DC have, they understand much less about the economy than a small business owner. I would take every one in this article in a Presidential cabinet over the over educated frauds there now.
Lenin called small businessmen and women Kulaks and "bloodsuckers" and slaughtered them by the thousands. If the Communists take control and they are taking control of the Democrat Party, slaughter will be, if history is any guide, a common occurrence.
Before Biden we were exporting oil and for the first time in decades, we were oil independent. After watching this video, tell me why any sane person would vote Democrat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2db59JuqxU
Two things:
1. Joe Biden has always been a lying, idiot. (After all he is a politician.}
2. Now he is not only a lying idiot he is a senile, lying, not too bright, politician.
I agree. In Biden’s 50+ years in politics, nobody has ever said, “wow, that Joe Biden is sharp... he’s a genius. He is one of the most intelligent and articulate politicians we’ve ever had in DC.”
The Secretary of Defense under George W. and at the beginning of the Obama regime, a guy named Robert Gates, said "That Biden Has Been Wrong On Nearly Every Major Foreign Policy Question."
Biden is an idiot and the Dems knew he was not only an idiot but a senile idiot and they elected him anyway. Just goes to show you how much regard they have for the welfare of this country and the free world.
And look what it bought them and the rest of us, disaster! Got to love those patriotic Democrats/Communists. They will even elect an idiot as long as they gain power, power to destroy this country.
You hit the nail on the head.
What sort of people would install a senile imbecile in the most important office in our nation and arguably the world?
Answer - Democrats who hate America.
He sure as shit believes he's the smartest guy in the room (after his crackhead son).
“In 2021, the United States exported about 8.63 million barrels per day (b/d) and imported about 8.47 million b/d of petroleum,1 making the United States an annual total petroleum net exporter for the second year in a row”
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20was%20a,row%20since%20at%20least%201949.
So why did numb nuts tap into the strategic petroleum reserve?
Politics will not let him reopen the pipeline. Politics before country. If he were to reopen the construction of the pipeline, he would be hammered by both sides of the aisle from the left because they are global warming fanatics and from the right because he closed the pipeline in the first place.
Biden would rather crawl on his knees to the Saudi dictator, a man he promised he would never talk to, than open the pipeline.
He is truly a lying, incompetent moron. Senile moron.
LonesomePolecat, and what would we do with this oil from the pipeline?
Pres. Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for its sweet crude, used in plants to produce gasoline. From 2017 to 2022, 12 plants were closed, which reduced supply, pushing the price of gasoline up! And Pres. Biden had nothing to do with it!
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_cap1_dcu_nus_a.htm
Did it take that long for the DNC to get your talking points back to you?
Again nice try. Trump was president for most of the years when the plants were closed, yet gasoline prices were one-half what they are under the senile imbecile. Coincidence? I think not.
Impea foh six!
It happened in 2020 - thousands of small businesses burned and looted, with Democrat politicians' tacit approval.
Nancy Pelosi called the peaceful conservative demonstrators, the Tea Party rallies, NAZIs. But she didn't say a word against the Capture Wall Street thugs nor a word about BLM and ANTIFA Communist rioters.
And no complaints from Democrats about protesters and rioters spreading Covid.
No complaints about illegals spreading a plethora of diseases as the Dems disperse them all over the US. I wonder how many are sent to Delaware, Biden's home state?
At least D.C. is finally starting to feel the effects from Texas busing illegals to D.C. Of course the D.C. officials are complaining that it's "not fair" and that illegals are being "tricked" into boarding those buses. But I think it's past time for D.C. to suffer what the border states are suffering.
I couldn't agree more. Except, I think we, I live in Texas, should be shipping them to Delaware, Biden's home state.
Now NYC Mayor Adams is press conferencing the same narrative. As Michael Scott would say "How the turntables have turned"
I would say encouragement Terry.
It has been true for at least as long as I have been alive that Democrats have regarded business experience as a negative in a political candidate. To them, the entire private sector is evil; only academia and government are good.
Yet government produces NOTHING. It pays for everything it does with money taken from productive people. How can it be viewed as a positive force?
EXACTLY. This is why in blue states, small businesses were shut down during the plandemic, but Home Depot, Amazon et al continued operating as if nothing were wrong. Destroying capitalism IS THEIR GOAL.
If you agree, check out my Substack for more ramblings like this; I think you’ll like it.
https://gordoncomstock.substack.com
Make no mistake, folks. This is the point of socialist policies.
But it isn't an automatic unless everybody participates. As a small business owner the thing I see that could take the power away from government and give us a chance is how people make their buying choices. If everyone would avoid frequenting the big, national corporate stores and make their purchases from locals, the local economies could develop some separation from the currents of the overall economy. I'm not suggesting that we small businesses aren't affected by the overall price increases, but that keeping money local in more forms than just wages paid to employees makes it easier to re scale the local economy and make the numbers work. If most of the profits made by a business are going back in to the National economy, it gives communities less influence over the financial health of the community as a whole. If people could understand the benefits that come from paying a couple of dollars more for some of their purchases in order to keep the money local, we could take back control of our economies in the macro.
It would also go a long way for people to understand that when a small business raises prices, it's not to make more profit, it's just simply to stay afloat.
I try. I do not shop on Amazon and have not been in a Walmart for years. Lowe's most recently lost my business. My issue with buying local is that so much of it is made in China.
Hi. You do a lot better 'n me. Who do You buy books from? Or do You?
And I'm not sure how to avoid buying from China. And even if it doesn't say China, there's often Chinese parts in it. Mostly I just don't buy things, but I've got Apple products, unfortunately.
I spend a whole lot of money on books per year so I’m really motivated to get the lowest price possible. I am not really a book browser but tend to be looking for very specific obscure titles that used bookstores tend to not have in stock. That has been leading me to buy far too many books on Amazon which I wasn’t feeling great about. About 6 months ago a common sense reader recommended thrift books.com. I’ve really had great luck finding the books I’m looking for at a good price. It’s a mix of new and used titles and they seem to be an ethical business as far as I can tell. Since I started ordering from thrift books I have bought almost zero books from Amazon.
I have a friend and his wife who go to estate/yard sales specifically for books. It started as a hobby but has turned into a lucrative business.
Same here. Been Amazon-free for 3 months now and holding.
I email my local bookstore and ask them if they have the book I’m looking for and if they don’t they order it. I can’t say I never shop at B&N or Amazon but I go to the local guy first.
For books I go to bookstores usually. And I agree about labeling being problematic. Pet food is a real.problem. All of the ingredients come from overseas. I cook for my Yorkie but we have a 120 lb. Lab and it is not possible for him. I too have quit buying.
We have a lab mix and a border collie mix. We were buying Ark naturals tarter control chews. They’re now over a dollar each so I bought a big bag of carrots at Sams Club and they love them. Probably better for them overall.
bully stix at Costco. started at 12 bucks for 12. now 35 for 12.. who knew a bulls penis would be so valuable after the bull was dead
My Yorkie gets green beans for snacks. I have had no issues with her since I took her off processed pet foods and treats.
We don't have a bookstore in our small town anymore. Even if we did, I could not afford to buy books new, even if a bookstore had the books I want.
We still have some but our Half-Priced Books just went under. I have been in the islands in Washington state recently and was pleasantly surprised at all of the small, privately owned bookshops. And coffee shops.
I stopped buying paper books, unfortunately. Or only if I can't get them on Kindle. Just so much easier to take notes with 'em. Not that I refer *back* to them much. But *in principle* it's easier. <cough>
Don't sweat the pet food, IMO. You're doin a lot better 'n most.
I love Ebooks. It’s like an entire library in your phone and ipad. Also the library has ebooks now of pretty much everything and no driving there to return them. Audiobooks too.
I still.prefer paper. I spend too much time looking at screens already.
Then that comes down to the choice of the merchant. I, personally would not buy from the merchant that sells the Chinese product unless, of course, all other choices have left the market for that particular item. I do practice what I preach and I won't sell what I won't buy. The advantage we have is that we build a lot of Corvettes and Camaros so U.S. made parts are plentiful.
This isn't socialism. It's something much worse.
State Sponsored Capitalism, with a side of State run Media
"State sponsored capitalism" is fascism, and, yes, that's what it is. The state run media is a symptom of fascism.
If you are calling this Fascism then I'll assume you're a Leftist. You guys love that word, don't you. As long as you are seeing it as Leftist Fascism then you're being honest. This whole set of problems started with Woodrow Wilson, you know, the father of the progressive movement. This was all designed by him and his racist cabinet that had 13 former Klan members on staff. The ignorance of the voting public has allowed it, but the uselessness and lack of motivation it has created among the leftist constituency will be their undoing. It's coming time for a Great American Reset, and the Libertarian mindset that the founders built this great country on will be back in vogue, you'll see.
I love Substack. In an earlier post on another site I was called a "right-ist" because I didn't think that pregnancy crisis centers should have to state up front that they don't do abortions because they aren't dishonest, just merely of a different mindset (that abortions aren't even an option), and here I am a leftist because I recognize that the proper definition of fascism is government by and for big business (corporations) and that definition has accurately fit the relationship between US government and US and global corporations for decades (with the US population seen as a resource or an obstacle in turns), through both "conservative" and '"liberal" administrations. You people need to stop trying to label others and just listen for a while.
So be effective in communicating, If you know what the modern vernacular is going to translate what you say to be, get out in front of it and clarify in your post. For instance, you talked about "liberal" administrations... The word "liberal" has been hijacked by the left, the fact is, they are not liberal, but it sounds better than "pro government, anti people"... The actual Liberals were the founders and their ilk. They are Leftists, plain and simple. To choose the word "Fascist" when you know how it's used today, is asking for a certain set of assumptions to be made. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying if your way of communicating is individual, then let those you are communicating with in on the secret.
The people in Washington DC live in a bubble. They have no idea what it’s like out in the country, and they don’t care. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that Biden or Harris, or anyone in his cabinet can relate to any of us. The proof is in his clueless press secretary who has no shame and comes out every day with a pack of lies. Biden, plagiarist in chief, lies every single day. So does his wife. All of these people hate us. Their policies prove just how much they hate us. As I look over other Democrats who may want to be President in the future, there is not one who cares about the middle class. Not one of them has a policy that would actually benefit the citizens. They are beholden to the elites, the donors, the coastal states, and that’s it. If your party reveres people like the jackal, George Soros, nothing good will ever happen. I hate all of them.
It’s funny…as a kid the D’s were the party of the little guy and the R’s were the party of the three martini lunch crowd. Now it’s flipped. Blacks and Hispanics are migrating to the R side. Ds represent the coastal elites with their fancy college degrees.
When I was a child the Democrats represented the average Joe. Republicans were WASPS, country club types who did their best to keep immigrant kids out of the Ivy League schools.
It's all flipped. The Republican Party is becoming the blue collar party. People don't understand Trump's appeal but there it is. He speaks like a blue collar guy and understands the working middle class. Elites will never understand this.
I, too, am old enough to remember when the Democrats were (theoretically) on the side of the working class. My parents were lifelong Democrats. I grew up hanging out at the union hall while my dad was doing his duties there. I'm not sure my dad ever questioned the fact that FDR and his ilk were wealthy men using people like my family to gain political power.
Personally, I think the shift started sooner than most imagine. I think it started with LBJ's Great Society, bribing minorities (and keeping them poor), while recruiting the wealthy who wanted to appear compassionate. At the same time, the Long March through the Institutions had begun, ensuring that more and more of the most educated would come out of college on the side of the Left.
Yes , they made a college education/indoctrination necessary to be seen as a person of worth. And they invented the. “—- Studies” majors to fill kids’ heads with disdain for everything American.
Now all these graduates are running/ruining our country.
"Theoretically" is more substantive than parenthetical. Dems have NEVER been on the side of the working class, they have used the working class simply to gain power, as you stated. I knew that way back in the early 80's when my college roommates were ribbing me about being a conservative and I would ask them to name one policy Dems put in place that actually met the SUPPOSED intent. Of course they couldn't, but they all "felt" like the Dems had their back.
Sometimes I think we should do like the planet Vulcan did and outlaw emotion. :-)
I second that emotion
My parents voted for Reagan (as did many people who, like them, were historically Democrats). They went back to voting for Ds after his tenure; at least my dad did. No telling what my mom did in the privacy of the voting booth.
I think it's been pretty well established, although effectively suppressed by historians that LBJ was a racist. There are plenty of quotes that should make wokesters apoplectic. One of my favorites is what he is quoted by Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan as saying to two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
"I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years".
That's one of the reasons I believe that the outcome of the Welfare State was an intended consequence rather than an unintended one. LBJ wanted minorities dependent on the government and especially dependent on Democrats.
LBJ was my grandfather’s first cousin. Grandpa used to tell all of us that if “that scalawag” ever showed up at our door, he would take a switch to him.
It's ok for Democrats to be racists.
As long as they have their Black lives matter sign in the front yard right?
Very astute Celia. I suggest you track down the late Robert Wenzel's blog posts on EconomicPolicyJournal regarding "LBJ's grandkids", which was his sardonic reference to the social results of policies that started with LBJ. The ideological grounding for those policies certainly predates LBJ, but he was the primary activator for their execution.
Speaking of execution, I was 10 when Kennedy was assassinated and remember my dad saying that everything was going to change. Even to us kids it felt like something shifted.
I wasn't really very aware of politics in 1960, but I remember my mother's reaction to Kennedy's election: "I hope nobody shoots him, because then that (pause) Johnson will be president."
Our present day politics cannot be understood without an analysis of the 60s.
A slow-growing but highly virulent cancer that is now showing up in every public space.
Yikes. I had to track your comment all the way up the thread to figure out what you were referring to.
Until they came to a realization that the working class is not necessary in a world in which you can "rent" subjugated masses from places like China, Mexico, Vietnam and elsewhere world over.
They "fought for the little guy" by creating an economic monstrosity in which entire industries became so consolidated that entire markets are controlled by a few enormous entities so if there is a mishap in a baby formula factory that controls a large chink of the supply the whole thing falls apart. You know that feeling when you receive the at home COVID test from the US Govt with a quality control paper in the package in Chinese.
They further "fought for the little guy" by deciding that it was smart to place all of our eggs in the China basket so that even the most obscure shit has to be made there so that if a fuckin' ship gets stranded we are all fucked.
Complete and absolute dependency.
As a result of their famous "fight for the little guy" the big guys are bigger than ever, and Amazon will swallow all these little guys.
In my part of the world the shift started with Reagan.
When I was a child the Republicans were the ones who would keep the rising middle class, (of immigrant stock), out of their neighborhoods, out of their children's schools and certainly not in their country clubs. They hired immigrants and blacks to be their domestics but not to be their equals. It was palpable.
I didn't know ANY Republicans until I was in my late 20's.
Did you know that the original intent of the minimum wage law, as proposed by Democrats, was to keep the "uppity xxgro" out of good jobs? It was about suppression, not support.
Yup. That was FDR, right?
You've said elsewhere that you grew up in NYC. The rest of the country was very different.
I’m from New England and can remember when all the states except Massachusetts and Rode Island were red
NY had a Republican governor and a Republican senator (Javits) but they would be moderate Democrats by current standards.
Dems were never the party of the little guy. They used "the little guy" to enrich themselves and their cronies.
Well, maybe. I grew up in NYC. My grandparents and parents were immigrants (legal). If they had issues they could go to their local Democrat and get help. It created generational loyalty.
Create a problem then offer the solution - the time worn strategy for Dems.
Most people don't know that Obama was at the origin of the 2008 meltdown. As a community organizer in the 90's in Chicago, he started a class action lawsuit against banks for not loaning to minorities. The Clinton admin strong-armed the banks to loan to unqualified applicants. This begat the mortgage derivates market which was meant to mitigate the risk of "subprime" loans, and instead networked the risk so every bank (and it was almost every bank in the US) became infected. This infection resulted in the inability of the market to value those assets, putting banks in violation of the capital requirements (since an asset that couldn't be valued was excluded from capital). This lead to a freeze on loans, since banks can only lend out what their capital can support.
So, unknowingly for sure, Obama created a problem and then became POTUS based on it.
Oh, by the way, 49% of the parties in the class action lawsuit who were "unfairly" denied loans defaulted. Gee, who could have predicted that?!?!
“Create a problem then offer the solution”
Kind of like the protection racket.
Obama was not the origin of the 2008 meltdown. Sure, he contributed to unqualified lending. But the center of our modern meltdowns is the central bank - i.e. Federal Reserve.
The pre-Fed era generally did not feature economy-wide meltdowns. When bank panics occurred in the 19th century (outside of the prior central banks, the first and second), you will find state-level fractional reserve banking and unjustified legal protections of that practice. But even with that, the greatest period of wealth creation in this country followed the Civil War and continued until the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act.
See Mises.org to start your education.
I've done quite a bit of reading on this, and the economic structure that allowed the meltdown to occur is as you stated. But the trigger event is most definitely the agreement between banks and the Clinton administration in response to the Obama class action lawsuit.
Without that agreement, sub-prime loans never emerge, no risk mitigation is needed and mortgage derivatives are never developed, loan defaults don't occur, bank capital does not get hammered, and the credit market doesn't freeze.
I don't know a lot, granted. But my understanding is that the *big* problems started happening in '95, when The Fed decided they were smart enough they could actually *control the economy.* That's how dumb they were. And if anything untoward popped up, they had all the tools to *fix* it all up. No problemo. AFAIK, they just didn't know when to *stop* fixing things.
The rest, as they say, is history. Actually, that's about all I know about it, FWIW.
Tammany Hall was corrupt on a massive scale. But they weren't stupid.
Mob bosses have always done that.
They are called limousine liberals.
I think the Dems were always more the party of union bosses than the party of working people. Today it's mostly teachers and other government workers who are union members.
I don't know today's statistics but a few years ago, 1 in 8 delegates to the Democrat/Socialist National Convention were members of the teacher's union. The teachers' unions serve the teachers and don't give a damn about the quality of teaching nor the benefit of the students. The democrats take huge donations from big business while all the time railing against them. unions themselves are big business. Look at the salaries of the unions' hierarchies.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/union-leaders-ceo-salaries-union-leaders-earn-more/
We still have a lot of dross to clean out of the Republican Party. I’m still of the mind we need “The Patriots Party” to form up and step up.
Third parties split the vote and usher in the party you don't want.
Better to vote in America First candidates and increase their numbers in the House and the Senate. Better to vote in a Republican president (it's going to be either Trump or DeSantis) who can start to clean things up.
DeSantis, I hope. Trump would be a disaster, if only because TDS has occluded too many people's ability to see clearly.
Trump did a great job, was unduly vilified and castigated and should be honored for that. But as an elder statesman. The inescapable fact is that he would be in his 80s if elected. That's simply unacceptable.
DeSantis 24.
100%
Trump also would be ineligible to be re-elected in 2028. I'd want a reliable conservative (like DeSantis *seems* to be) in for (hopefully) two terms to have any shot at turning this ship around. So even if I trusted Trump to follow through with good policies, he would be finished in 2028 and we need more continuity of leadership than that.
It seems Mr. Trump has decided to run, regardless of our doubts.
Ah but if DeSantis runs there will be DeSantis derangement syndrome. Count on it.
The Democrats are masterful at lies. Have you seen Newsom's ad about CA vs. FL? It's hilarious. I live in Florida. The ad is a complete 180 on the truth.
I don't doubt they will go after DeSantis. But DeSantis doesn't have a lifetime of bad behavior as a NYC playboy to draw upon. And the media has already used up all the public's goodwill.
They will lie about DeSantis. But I don't think it will give them the traction that Trump did.
It sounds like he is speaking to young children in a condescending voice too.
I really don't want Trump to run, primarily because of the TDS hangover. In addition, I believe Trump would select the same type of cabinet and administrators who hurt him terribly during his POTUS tenure.
Trump certainly has his flaws but if he could restrain his need to be a headline 24/7 he could withstand TDS. The problem is that the “swamp” is so pervasive that he’ll need to have an effective cabinet on day 1, no more idiots like Jeff Sessions or back stabbers like “Mad Dog” Mattis, Rex Tillerson or John Kelly who have their own agendas. On day one he’ll need to purge the heads and aligned flunkies at the JustUs Department and all of the Intelligence agencies who conspired to create and perpetuate the Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes before they can organize again. Just as important, he needs to de-classify the “secrets" the swamp creatures have hid behind for decades so Americans can fully appreciate the extent of their duplicity . Once he has a solid America First team in place, he should refrain from engaging in personal attacks and instead caricature his critics with humor, a la Reagan. Hiring a good team of joke writers would be worth every penny he has to spend. God knows there’s plenty of material to work with.
I understand the reticence in supporting Trump again but despite all the TDS and the unprecedented assaults he had to endure as president, even his critics have to marvel at what he achieved. There’s no doubt he made mistakes during his first term but that’s what rookies do. Whatever else Trump is, he ain’t no dummy. And if elected again, he wouldn’t be a rookie.
I agree with you. One of Trump's short comings is his loyalty. Jeff Sessions was the very first Republican Senator to endorse him. Sessions had an illustrious record as a prosecutor in Alabama so it wasn't a bad pick on paper. Sessions is an honorable man with a strict code of personal ethics. When he gave his word about recusing himself it hamstrung him. He was also too timid. Rex Tillerson was not a politician and was in over his head. Pompeo was an excellent replacement.
Unfortunately Trump is not going to be able to ape Reagan and Reagan's charming ability to use humor to calm the situation and bring it back into perspective.
With all of Trump's personality quirks I would go down on my knees in gratitude if we could get him back into the White House now.
"Once he has a solid America First team in place, he should refrain from engaging in personal attacks and instead caricature his critics with humor, a la Reagan."
I'm sorry to say he simply isn't capable of that. Plus past 70, health is tenuous. Biden is, of course, a textbook case of how fast cognitive decline can hit (although he was never more than mediocre, at best). Trump will be in his eighties if he were to win in '24. We can't afford to take that risk. The world is too dangerous and the enemies to America too numerous, here and abroad, to not have a vigorous, healthy leader. Trump should have cleaned out the Aegean Stable at Justice when he had the chance. Now we need a leader who will do so.
Trump should hire you as an advisor; you are correct on all counts. Easiest decision to make: dump Jared and Ivanka as advisors. Jared did a good job on the Abraham accords, but that's it. His advice, along with others, to Trump during the early stages of the pandemic, IMO, killed any chance he had at overcoming the rigged election. (I know, easy to say in retrospect.)
Trump should also figure out how to get McConnell and McCarthy out of their lead roles in the Senate and House. They are swamp creatures.
I think the overall theme would be "forget short term popularity - work to become recognized by history as the second administration to save the union (the first being Lincoln)".
I'm of the same mind. But I'm keeping an open mind at least until '24. I don't think it's too early to *think* about it tho.
Nothing flipped. Democrats lie as they have always lied, and until recently you believed them.
Normally I would try to convince my friends or kids to have a softer, more understanding mindset about what might be fueling the government, elites, and elite media’s treatment of what’s going on but when Joe Biden and his clan make their coy references to a “fundamental transition “ going on I have to admit that this is ALL deliberate !
We want our Country back !
Over the past 6 months I reconnected with an old friend and his family. Our daughters have been friends since kindergarten. We hadn’t seen each other much since Covid descended on us because his wife, who I am also friends with, is immune compromised and they felt unsafe around me because my I am a frontline healthcare worker and my husband is a first responder. Lately we have been spending time together again. This friend is a long time DNC campaign strategist and has gradually worked his way up in the DNC organization. He is in weekly contact with White House level staff. I believe my husband and I are some of the few regular middle/working class people they ever hang out with. They live a very luxurious life funded largely by inherited family wealth. They both drive Tesla’s, work from their laptops in a giant solar panel topped house, own multiple vacation homes, etc. They intermittently giggle about how nice it is that the high gas prices don’t really matter to them. Our lifestyles are extremely different. My husband and I work tons of overtime in incredibly stressful jobs to be able to meet our financial obligations, rarely ever go on vacation, etc. We only have one child because we can’t afford to properly care for more children. Two months ago they led me into a conversation in hopes, I guess, of finding out what a regular middle class mom thinks of how things are going since the Biden team rolled into the White House. I said “do you really want to know what I think ?” They said yes. I chose to not hold back. I told them, from every direction, how the Democratic Party’s latest policies have affected my family and other families like mine. There are no words to describe how completely out of touch these DNC elitist types are. They dismissed my concerns and blew off everything I said at lightening speed. It was just stunning. Then came all kinds of super condescending remarks about how I “just don’t understand the big picture, blah blah blah “. I said “well then, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this all shakes out at the midterms”. The DNC can ignore hard working middle income families like mine at their own peril.
They will think that until the big picture involves the people taking their government back. Ask the eastern European elites about that one...
I think you give the Washington crowd a bit too much credit. It's not that they don't KNOW what's going on outside of their enclave, it's that they don't CARE what's happening to regular citizens. That is, until election time comes, then all of a sudden our issues matter. If we could get some solid and permanent campaign finance reform instituted, that took the control of politicians out of the hands of the corporations and the wealthiest of people, we might find our way back to "by the people, for the people". If all campaign funding was controlled by government and all "donations" were put in to a "pool" that was shared with all candidates, then powerful people wouldn't be able to subversively buy influence from candidates. At that point, anyone taking money from outside parties would not be able to hide it from the voters. This, in turn, would discourage those who run for office strictly for personal gain.
Except Joe Manchin - he seems to care about the middle class. That guy for President.
Pardon the leap, but have you lost your ever lovin mind? The problem, as we have already stated, is career politicians. Joe Manchin cares Nothing for the middle class, the only reason he ever went against other Demoncrats was for political expediency in his own district. That guy is corporate owned, just look in to where his financing comes from and how he votes in lock step with it. This is the kind of wilful ignorance that has gotten us to the place we are today. Giving a career politician credit for doing something that was only designed to further their career is just contributing to the delinquency.
Yeah you’re right, I’m sorry. I meant to say Trump. Oops.
Where have all the workers gone? In my town there are signs everywhere saying, Help Wanted. Chic-fil-A is offering $19/hr for full timers. Construction has ground to fits and starts as people can get workers only unreliably and unpredictably. Restaurants are open only 4 days a week. What are people doing if not working? With high prices for everything you would think everyone would be working a lot, even a second job.
That's what I wonder, too. At first, I thought it was the rent moratorium--people who don't have to pay rent can get away with working less. But even now, people don't seem to want to work, despite the fact that wages have increased radically, even in this economically depressed corner of our state.
I fear that more people realized, during the pandemic, that they can get by just as well on welfare.
Time to make work before welfare required again. Obama got rid of that
There is an anti-work movement afoot. Really.
Many people may still be living off savings from the pandemic 'relief' money. They may have also rearranged their life at lower costs, ie moving away from cities, refinancing houses, etc. So, there is some buffer here, and that's part of why inflation has be so stubborn. Learning to game the safety net systems could be part of this too. The era of low interest rates has also taught people to be comfortable with large amounts of debt. Need some cash? Refi your house and pay off those credit cards! The proliferation of "buy now, pay later" (which every time I see this on things like $2000 dryer, I cringe thinking about how people are essentially tricked into buying stuff they just can't afford), etc. This era is over, for now, but it may take time for people adjust as they need to figure out servicing this debt is actually hurting them.
The work from home culture also has its downsides as people are experiencing burn out. People feel unseen at work, both literally and figuratively. Bosses dump things on people they have hardly, if ever, met face to face. Yes, those people get to work from home, but if you put in long hours and don't feel recognized for the work, how much does that really matter? Worker loyalty has collapsed.
A big part of the problem in some fields is that the worker training process was disrupted. Airline pilots is an obvious one, but other things such as some trades or things like life guards, that need certification are experiencing shortages because for 1-2 years, there was no, or very little, certification process going on and many of those jobs were shut down for part of that time. People that might have done that work moved on to other things.
So, I'm not completely sure that the problem is as simple as people don't want to work. I think a big part of this is simply that there is a disconnect between the jobs that need to be filled and what workers are willing AND capable of doing.
Large employers let huge numbers of people go during COVID. For example, the airlines laid off thousands of people and now are short-staffed.
You may be onto something with the "life rearranging" due to COVID. We certainly rearranged our lives. We sold our house in a large city for a ridiculous amount of money and bought one for 1/3 the price in a smaller town which gave us a nice financial cushion but I kept working because I LOVE my job. Many others in the same boat probably have enough money to not work for several years if they did the same thing we did.
The media has been glorifying people quitting and not working with the talks of the "Great Resignation".
Celia...we do not hear much, these days, but the Gov of Penn. is trying to get together a $2000.00 payment for those under the $80,0000/yr income level. This $2000, comes from a Fed. Bill and must be paid before 2024(?). Likely other States do the same. How much more?
Many, i believe, are starting their own business and many are going under the table...
Same here in Montana, job vacancies everywhere. Construction workers in high demand but contractors are busy or unavailable. Massive delays and backlogs either from supplies or workers unavailable. I have no idea how people can survive inflation prices without working.
Labor force participation. It's a full point lower than before the pandemic.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Pumping all that money into the economy when there was a labor shortage inflated wages. In turn that inflated prices and now we're in a nightmare scenario where only a serious recession can affect price growth.
It’s the old addition by subtraction gag
NC my friends and I have this conversation all the time. Where is everyone?! I'm not sure but maybe going deeply into debt? Everyone must have a $$ data plan to spend 16 hours a day on social media right? Have you noticed that pretty much every online purchase you make now, even for a $25 shirt has a 3rd party "payment plan" option? And I am now seeing commercials where one character asks if the other is going to so and so's wedding in ________. "No I can't afford it." answers the other. Then the announcer reveals that you can get a loan to do anything you want. (can't help thinking of loan sharks here) and then the previously wise character that admitted she can't afford it says she's gonna take that loan and triumphantly declares "I'm outta here!" It is the absolute height of irresponsible behavior that wouldn't have been available to past generations but here we are. I wonder what the national credit card debt looks like collectively .
Jesus Christ. I just saw something on CNBC about the popularity of BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) services with Millennials and Zoomers. Makes me wonder if we're in for a nasty 2008 shock all over again.
I'm thinking more of a 1929 shock.
Just came across this article. Thought I'd drop it here if anyone is interested. It's about BPNL stuff being added to credit reports.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/consumers-concerned-about-bnpl-included-in-credit-reports?dicbo=v1-3b00e7438c08e61937635b2cef0a4d9d-00e17b74303517cbe6bf08cea931e9f870-heztanjrmzrdkllfg4ydmljugvsgcllcmu3tcllggq2dkmztgu4tqmtcg4
I really wonder!
The "payment plan" thing is because millennials and Get Z aren't using credit cards the way older people do. So, marketers have brought in the "pay over time" option which is basically the same as a credit card except there is usually no interest added which, to me at least, is slightly better.
It must be no interest for a couple months and then get smacked with a crazy high interest rate. Otherwise these companies are performing a charity that they also spend $$ marketing.
I have a credit card that offers 3% back on purchases at Amazon OR the ability to split any purchase into multiple payments "interest free." If I choose the latter, the bank keeps the 3% I would otherwise have gotten. That still beats 18% a month that some cards charge.
Listen to the DEMOCRAT selected Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Energy and know that this is all INTENTIONAL. There is a war on the middle class and on freedom. They don't want you driving, they don't want you to be able to afford fuel to drive or heat your homes, yet there are no realistic alternatives being offered. Keep voting for the democrats and this is what you will continue to get. Small business are and will continue to shut down. Think about this next election before you re-elect your local democratic congressperson or senator "he/she is not part of the problem..." If they are democrats they ARE part of the problem.
Absolutely! And PeteB or Energy Sec Granholm obviously don’t know that the electricity needed to charge the EV batteries needs to be generated - from a grid that’s hanging by a thread. Let alone all of the reality associated with the cost of materials of the EV Nirvana he spews.
For such elite geniuses, their peddling of fool’s gold “answers” is tragic, shameful, or both.
Great post. Have you ever asked a "green" friend where electricity for EV's come from? It's a fun exercise.
It comes from the wall, right?
Exactly!! :)
I really don’t know much about EV’s so I hope I explain this correctly.
Some friends of ours had out of town guests that drove a Tesla. I walked over one afternoon to see it bc I had never seen the interior of one. Very cool. The owner was using our friends garage for charging. He had had it charging all night and still didn’t get a full charge!! The owner explained that to get a quicker charge at home, you need a 240V plug since most plugs at home are 120V. The charging stations around town are not convenient to where we live plus they’re sporadic 😳
You do have it right, 240volts will charge a large battery essentially twice as fast as 120volts. That’s because what limits the amount of Energy you can move with your wiring is how much CURRENT (Amps) is being sent through the wires. That electrical Energy = Volts x Amps.
The EV battery needs a certain amount of energy to get fully charged. So if you supply it at 240volts, you can pass that maximum amount of current (Amps) in about 1/2 the time as it takes if it’s only using 120volts.
For extra credit:
You have circuit breakers (like the old fuses) that are generally limited to pass 15Amps unless the wiring is more heavy duty than standard house wiring.
You almost certainly do have 240volt power supplied to your house. That’s the voltage across the 2 columns of circuit breakers in the breaker panel. It’s just that any given socket in your house is only hooked up one one side of those circuit breakers except that you likely do have a couple of 240volt sockets, typically dedicated for electric stove, electric clothes dryer, or your central air conditioner. They have a very different plug than the “120volt plug” in your wall sockets. (All this is USA description: Brits differ).
Quiz at 11:00 🤓
Haha. Not sure how well I will do on this quiz. You can go ahead and fail me now 😀
They remind me of toddler's logic.
I couldn’t agree more, Blue State Rebel.
I bristle at the claims that “most of the Democrats are actually moderate”. No, Sorry! IF someone is moderate and don’t agree with 9th month abortions, then voting for the Dems’ repeated stamp for it means they either agree with it, or they don’t have the integrity to stand their ground.
Either way, running our government is no place for them. And voting for these folks makes the voters only slightly less culpable- maybe just ignorant.
I’m in trouble with my retired pals’ breakfast group because right after the 2020 election, I told them “We’ll, let’s just hope that Biden breaks enough stuff fast enough that there’s no question about who broke it”. Since then they blame me for this exponentially exploding disaster.
(Don’t get me wrong: Trump lost me with the mega Sore Loser routine, but he didn’t do THIS).
Trump never had me to begin with. But his administration did some really great things and their leadership was vastly superior to what we have now.
Also, TDS is real and he never deserved that. The way he was relentlessly demonized for years had no ethical core; it was nothing but revenge for him stealing Hillary's dream.
Many Trump administration officials who resigned early in his presidency suggested in their resignations that trying to do any good as part of his administration was hopeless. The Left celebrated their declarations as evidence of Trump's awfulness.
But that wasn't what they meant.
What they meant was that it had taken them only a short while to become sure that the overwhelming institutional effort to undermine his presidency was insurmountable. Between the Democrats' constant efforts to undo the election result via impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or other means and the many institutions (FBI, et al) working to thwart Trump's every act as president, smart administration staff realized that they would at best be martyrs for their causes, not successful agents of change.
It is fair to argue that Democrats stole the 2016 election in that they never allowed the duly-elected president to exercise his office.
The more you’re home and on social media the worse you get and the more you shop online. I swear that’s why San Francisco is the way it is now.
Wonder why flying is getting so miserable? They don’t want you doing that either. They are despicable!!
You're absolutely right!!
Comedian Dennis Miller got it right when he co-hosted Monday Night Football: “Democrats and Republicans, now there’s a couple of 2-12 Ball Clubs”
It is the same in the UK. Gas prices (due to tax) are much higher. The oil refineries around the world are running close to capacity, particularly for diesel. Russian refinery capacity has been taken out of the equation. The price of oil has fallen in the last few weeks but it is only now working its way through to the pumps. Because people are driving less, they are using less gas and thus the independents (not supermarket chains) are getting squeezed even more.
The supply chain crisis is worldwide and small business owners worldwide are getting squeezed. Because of globalization (which was a deflationary force), people are affected by lockdowns and factory closures in far flung parts of world (such as China). It can be about getting that little part to finish production (something factories in the UK experienced last year).
The price of hen and duck food keeps going up (something which poultry farmers need in order to produce hens and eggs) for example. I keep hens and ducks -- the cost is now 38.5% higher than last year.
The big worry is hyper-inflation or stagflation in a way which has not been a worry since the early 1990s and the rise of the internet etc. I would suggest that people read Sowell's Basic Economics if they have not already done so.
Our leaders need to read it
Good advice, Ma'am. Been meaning to read that one. Take care.
It is as good as any basic primer on economics. My degree was in econ and I thought it well written in a way which was accessible.
You? Econ? What do You *do* for a living? Or have You mentioned and I forgot? Probably.
I am actually a novelist -- historical romance, over 30 of them for Harlequin (who are now owned by Harper Collins). I was the first person to write a Roman set historical romance published by a major publisher and I helped revive the Viking time period. My books have been published around the world (better travelled than I am!) and I am apparently quite popular in France. My agent is currently shopping around a historical fiction about the woman who founded Bundles for Britian (a book of my heart) and my fingers remain crossed for it. In the meantime, I am writing another Viking as they do sell well around the world. Because I am in commercial publishing, I know all about the Culture Wars first hand (had to learn).
My mother said I'd never get a job majoring in econ (she wanted math like her) but it has proven surprisingly useful.
This is me being a Procrastination Princess rather than actually do my word count.
Hi there. I am avid reader, but have never read "historical romance". Which is your most popular book or series?
They are sometimes called 'bodice rippers', found in the romance section. They are escapist reads.
One of my personal favourites is The Warrior's Viking Bride. The blurb on the back reads: A Viking maiden destined for the battlefield…
…in bed with her captor!
As a female warrior, Dagmar Kolbeinndottar knows she’s not meant for marriage and a family. Until she’s kidnapped by Celtic warlord Aedan mac Connall, who has been tasked with returning Dagmar to her estranged father. Fighting her father’s orders to marry, Dagmar declares she will take no one but her abductor, expecting Aedan to refuse…but he’s intent on making her his bride!
“Everyone loves Styles’ Vikings!” — RT Book Reviews on Sold to the Viking Warrior
“Styles pens another winning Viking historical… An exciting, engaging story” — RT Book Reviews on Taming His Viking Woman
Harlequin does the titles and the back cover blurbs -- there is a dark art to it.
Ah. I just read a little on it, but sounds like an interesting book. https://fdr4freedoms.org/wp-content/themes/fdf4fdr/DownloadablePDFs/IV_StatesmanandCommanderinChief/06_BundlesforBritain.pdf Never would-a heard of Natalie Wales Latham but for You!
Glad Econ came in handy. Don't envy Your situation with the Woke industry tho. As far as word count, You're probably pretty well up there compared to most, with over 30 of 'em, right?
As allus, TYTY Ma'am.
Natalie Wales Latham is fabulous. After the war, she founds Common Cause (1947) -- a short lived but influential moderate anti-communist group, along with Dorothy Thompson and Albert Schlesinger Jr among others .Almost completely forgotten but with v sound principles. It ends after her 3rd husband dies. The principles were 1. Personal worth -- the state is made for man, not man for the state. Every individual is precious in their own right. 2 Freedom -- the ancient and implacable foe of totalitarianism 3. Equality -- although with differing gifts, all should be equal under the law and in the moral order. 4. The Rule of Law-- the guardian of freedom 5. Individual opportunity -- to allow each person to develop to the fullness of their stature if that is their inclination and 6. Public morality -- the standard and gauge of decency and the basis for mutual trust without which society itself must fall into decay and dissolution and finally 7 Individual responsibility-- the final test of human liberty.
It is what led me to reading Bari.
Hi Michelle, how are you handling the heat wave?
I'm in Northumberland. It is about 70F. Yesterday it was about 97 F. We are much cooler than the South. Scotland is cooler still.
Hose pipe bans were common when I first moved over in the early 1990s -- not in Northumberland as we have Kielder but in the South East.
The real problem is that people are not used to the heat and the dryness. The amount of littering in the UK surprised me when I first came over (having grown up in CA) and glass, used cigarette butts (not stubbed out properly) are known fire dangers.
Also various councils went for cheaper methods of re tarmacking roads as there wasn't going to prolonged periods of heat...with predictable results.
It is all about being sensible. Sometimes though it does make me wonder how the British gained an empire in hot countries...as fair skin does burn.
Like in Orwell’s Burmese Days when they got prickly heat while in India. Glad it cooled down by you. Going to read Sowell, too. I’ve read some of his other books but not Basic Econ.
Michelle it’s so informative to hear what’s happening in other places. Thanks!
The current regime despises the independence and autonomy of small businesses. Obamacare forced consolidation in medical providers, driving most independent practitioners into large health”care” conglomerates, because they are easier to control. The globalists undermining our national sovereignty would like to have the same control over every aspect of commerce. Much easier to control and manipulate. Compulsory participation in the globalist agenda is the goal. So many other facets to this: control the movements of the population by making travel expensive. Control indoctrination in public education by forcing a racist, repressive curriculum. Control individual achievement by eliminating meritocracy, advanced placement, gifted and talented programs, and overlay every subject with the mantle of imaginary racism. Ensure equity, rather than equal opportunity. That’s how a society gets pushed into the cattle chute of communism.
Sums it up well Lady.
All very well planned for decades. Sadly the elites want complete control of our body’s and souls….and they wont stop at this point until they achieve it. Throwing us into socialism (more like communism it appears at this point) is their main goal. Flooding the states with migrants is the key to so much of this. It should be obvious to most at this point tearing down the US is the ultimate goal. It’s not like the WEF hasnt been telling us thats what theyre doing for 10 yrs now. They want complete control.
I used to think comments like yours were over-wrought. No more. It is hard for people to see that the world is being up-ended on purpose and we all are just pawns, with no idea how to prevent it.
So what do we do?
It isn't only in the USA: it seems to be a pervasive movement inimicable to western civilization. In Europe, its worst manifestation is in Germany, where I'm living. Same insane green policies that will ruin the economy, the same COVID paranoia, prices going through the roof. I was never one for conspiracy theories, but I find that I'm gradually getting to a point where I sometimes ask myself if there's a nefarious plan behind all this. The increasing polarisation of society and the unwillingness to engage in civil discourse and agree to disagree aren't helping. At least there seems to be a growing pushback movement against the insanity in the USA.
IMO, it's a real *loose* conspiracy of overlapping goals. The Marxists wanna tear down Democracy and Capitalism. The youth just wanna tear down everything, because they're stupid and lame. The One-Worlders wanna destroy Nationalism. The CRTers wanna tear down whites. The Trans Activists wanna tear down WOMEN (as opposed to "people who menstruate").
You gotta ask: Who benefits the most outta a this? The Elites, right?
There is nothing "loose" about this conspiracy to destroy the WEST.
They always have to tell you what they are going to do before they do it and they have done just that, in SPADES.
https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/a-mostly-peaceful-depopulation
https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9062939/
Those are interesting articles. But it's not all based on the pandemic and the response. A lotta this groupthink has been in the works for years, as well as preventing *any* dissenting voices from being heard.
That's just the M.O. of the Woke. Yeah, it was amplified by the medical bureaucracy during the pandemic, no doubt about it.
jt...the one that is attacked the most, no question, should become the leader from this intended tear down, the undaunted-one El Trumpty! thanks
You never give up, do Ya Sir Jim. Haha...
Exactly. Solution?
Vote R. Not perfect, but a whole lot better than D.
That is so true. We MUST get these corrupt Democrats out of office while we still have a country left.
We must vote America First candidates.
New America First R, not old RINO R. Very important.
We have had and still do to some extent have a Uniparty.
The NEW Rs stepping up like JD Vance, Kari Lake, and others who have seen what the past two years has done and are aware where this country is headed if they don't actively try to stop it are the future leaders we need. DeSantis too.
Kari Lake for example is running for Governor of Arizona but up against OLD RINO BIG money and see what BIG money in politics can do....Gavin Newsom recall is a great example. Enough people wanted him gone and he didn't get recalled, because of BIG money and corruption. We have our work cut out for us to fix this country. We need to all pay attention and act like our lives depend on it. Because they do.
Edit: And not fall for "Their" tactics of FEAR to willingly give away our RIGHTS, FREEDOMS, and LIBERTIES.
I am one of those people who refused to wear a mask. Call me selfish all you want. I didn't fall for their fake hysteria. I was standing up for my RIGHT to breath freely. We can't willingly give away our RIGHTS! It's WRONG!
They don't give a RATS ASS about our health. And I can list dozens of examples to prove that statement, but I won't go down the rabbit hole because I assume this crowd gets it. You are the only one that cares about your HEALTH. Trust me. I do realize that I am fortunate to live in a Red state where it is easier to stand my ground on my RIGHTS, but this is something we all must do. Now is the time to stand up and be okay with saying the unpopular thing or going against the crowd. If the crowd was all walking into a pit of hell, would you follow them?
Did you know he's been quite busy playing polo out there in CA? The most expensive sport anyone can participate in. The costs are astronomical. Didn't see him flaunting that at the UN thing.
This is PART of what it costs to maintain this hobby:
"For a club to keep the ponies in good condition and ensure excellent performance on the field, horse owners must cover the membership costs. Bear in mind that on average, the cost of putting together a tier 1 polo team during a 16-week Winter season can cost anywhere from $1-3 million." bet he doesn't want his audience at the UN to be aware of the cost of his hobbies.
https://www.eonline.com/news/1335061/meghan-markle-supports-prince-harry-at-polo-game-in-california
What total and complete hypocrisy to get up and preach against Americans and dog our lifestyle. I hold nothing against people enjoying their money and their life anyway they choose but sit down and shut up about others. It is NONE of his business and he certainly does not walk the walk.
They hate America and Americans.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the stimulus checks were a disaster. They went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. The unemployment bonuses went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
In the last five years, we have finally risen to the top end of the working poor class. But we were floating in cash in 2020. I had an "essential" job, so I was working (at higher wages, as a result of the risk). My husband was only unemployed for three months before his factory got back to work, but during his stint on unemployment, he was making MORE (due to the bonus) than he was when he was working.
If we were doing so much better financially during the pandemic, I can only imagine how things must have been for those making more than we do.
And now we are all paying the price with the resulting inflation. You can't print money without causing inflation. The stimulus checks raised a niggling worry in the back of my head, because I know this. The people in charge ought to have known this.
They were/are buying votes Celia, that is all they care about, staying in power.
They did know it. It’s been crystal clear since the COVID lockdowns that the goal is to destroy the middle class- those most likely to resist the ruling elite. Destroy small business, paint successful whites as evil racists, vilify the police. Encourage lawlessness, then claim that local police cannot keep order. The goal is to get the middle class to accept a national police force.
Destroy the public schools that middle class people rely on. Kill the energy sector, and reduce the mobility of the middle class. We are being big herded into a corner from which they hope we cannot escape.
Yikes. Truth.
They can't even account for a significant portion of the stimulus money. Massive fraud, waste and abuse. Our government is a joke. But, cruelly, the joke's on us.
Yup. Next door in Blue Illinois, they are now estimating that the stimulus fraud is in the millions.
California revealed early this year that state prison inmates collected $20 billion in fraudulent stimulus checks. Then the dim-bulb governor announced that 2021 state tax collections had yielded a $97 billion surplus -- but nobody in Sacramento suggested that maybe the right thing to do would be to return $20 billion collected fraudulently to the feds.
MD...Penn. Gov. still has $2000.00 cks. for all under $80,000.00.
Seems, this is part of a Fed Bill. Other states might have as well. N.Y. and Calif. did receive much more than other states from the fed.
I wonder how much of that stimulus fraud went into the stock market.
I know two very well off people who received big checks for their business. Which they didn’t need. One had decided to retire and used the money to buy a million dollar plus home.
The other did try to return the money, but they were so disorganized and unprepared they told him to keep it. He absolutely does not need the money.
This infuriates me. My husband and I worked hard our entire lives and saved for our retirement as best we could. It sucks to be us (and so many like us).
We got the stimulus checks, didn't need them. Socked them away and used them to pay our taxes to the federal gubmint. (I always underpay cuz I ain't wanting the gubmint to have a free loan of my money throughout the year)
Yes. We got too. So did everybody. I’m talking about the ‘business rescue money’ or whatever they called it. Thousands of dollars. Not 1200.00.
Government passed out thousands willy- nilly. Much fraud and scamming. And cases like the two I referenced. No way of tracking. OUR money. Taxpayer’s money. Not ‘the Government’s’. Makes me so mad.
Not the "Government's"?
Not sure the Congress critters see it that way
Everyone needs to pay their "Fair Share"
One-a the things they did was give money to businesses so they could keep their employees paid during the pandemic. Even if they didn't lay anyone off.
Except that people would have been better off if they were on unemployment, thanks to the unemployment bonuses. I have a friend who is a waitress, and she was in that position. No tips because of no sit-down customers.
Again, I forget. I think we're looking at hundreds of millions of unemployment bonus dollars going to people that were ineligible. But that doesn't count the bazillion people, who got it legally, that made more off-a that than if they worked. Like You "said."
They shouldn't have existed at all. The reality of the government's imposed lockdowns should have been felt right as they happened so that people could judge them accordingly.
Instead, we'll have problems that peak a decade later, creating more than enough cover for media to blame anything but the root cause.
Not that I begrudge fast food workers a decent wage but I thought it was inevitable that the push for $15 wage increase would raise prices. That was even before the stimulus checks. When wages go up prices go up and soon it’s all a wash.
"The more I think about it, the more I realize that the stimulus checks were a disaster. They went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. The unemployment bonuses went to everyone, regardless of their circumstances."
This is true. I read but forgot: I can't recall if we're talkin hundreds of millions or many billions. Probably latter.
Also, the Central Bank, The Fed, went crazy on overkill. They didn't open the siphon. They dropped the ocean on the problem. Stock market didn't stay down for long, IIRC.
The Fed, went crazy on overkill. They didn't open the siphon. They dropped the ocean on the problem. Stock market didn't stay down for long, IIRC.
The Saying on The Street is “Don’t fight the Fed”.
Ron Paul fought the Fed his entire political career. If only people had listened.
From what little I know, The Fed serves a useful function. A buffer when financial disaster strikes. What they did with QE1 (Quantitative Easing) at the start of the Great Recession was great. When they went on to QE2 and QE3, they started pushing us, I believe, step-by-step on the road to the disaster we're lookin at now.
I believe that's the saying and I believe in it. The Fed's all-powerful. All-unelected and all-unaccountable, as well tho.
Not everyone. My husband is a physician and I am a nurse. We both worked through the pandemic and did not receive any stimulus money.
These were the income limits:
$99,000 or higher as a single filer
$136,500 or higher as a head of household filer
$198,000 or higher as a joint filer
Also, you had to be a citizen rather than a resident alien.
It’s despicable that our leadership, so-called, dodges and deflects responsibility for the economic crisis that is largely of their making.
The President in his first month halted all new oil and gas exploration on federal land including the massive Alaskan field, cancelled a major pipeline from Canada that would have offset Russian fuel imports, and sat on new drilling permits. Prices began rising, and rather than reverse course, he doubled down.
Now, cornered, he blames the Russians, the oil companies, and even the gas stations for record high gasoline and diesel. The Transportation Secretary, so-called, recommends we all buy electric vehicles. Never mind that only 434,879 EVs were sold last year in the U.S., 3% of all cars sold, mostly by Tesla—a company that the Biden regime’s DOJ has targeted for criminal investigation amidst Elon Musk’s criticisms of Green New Deal. Biden didn’t even invite Tesla to his EV summit.
Our leadership is controlled by anti-business socialists who don’t mind that small businesses are being squeezed to death. It just creates more dependency that justifies federal spending programs.
I agree 100% with your last statement that "our leadership is controlled by anti-business socialists". People who have worked in a small business or in a manufacturing environment have a very different perspective than most of our federal bureaucrats -- educated in Ivy League schools, careers in government or law, etc. They don't understand the different world in which most Americans live.
I wouldn't call them "educated". Indoctrinated, programmed, brainwashed, ignorant.
All of this is interesting, but it doesn’t deal with the cause of inflation. Climate Change Alarmism is destroying our economy.
You would think we would have had a debate on whether CAGW is a serious threat before we implemented policies that assume that it is. Unfortunately, we haven’t. Instead we use dishonest language like Climate Change (as if the climate has ever not changed) to express our fears.
Assuming that CO2 is a problem (large assumption) the fact of the matter is that nothing the US does about reducing our production of CO2 matters because (a) the atmosphere is well-mixed globally, and (b) increased coal and gas usage in China and India are more than offsetting any reduction by us. Net zero is a pointless exercise unless your point is the destruction of the US economy.
I saw a wonderful documentary series, "Voyage of the Continents." I recommend it to anyone who thinks climate and conditions have never changed.
There is also an excellent documentary about the history of Australia. It has undergone massive climate change over the eons and even into relatively recent times.
No kidding. I sit here on a steamy summer morning, looking out at the skyline of New York and muse that it was once covered with an ice sheet up to the height of the Empire State Building. Just wait til we start back on that cycle......
When I was a child in a NYC public school we were terrified about the coming Ice Age. Our teachers reminded us NYC was once under 2 miles of glacier. The granite boulders the glaciers had pushed ahead of them were visible in all the parks. This new Ice Age would extend down through Virginia.
As a result the new climate change alarmists have no power over me. The climate is always changing and always has. There was a time when the Sahara was a tropical rain forest. There was a time when the atmosphere had 16 times more carbon dioxide than now. (Core samples taken from the ice in Greenland). Somehow life thrived.
Humans have to adapt to climate. It has always been that way. Look at the ruined cities off the coastlines, a victim of the melting ice after the last Ice Age. No one wants to accept that climate CHANGES, no matter what we do.
Apparently this inordinate heat wave the northern hemisphere is experiencing is being caused by solar flares. They have had to reposition the geosynchronous satellites to prevent the flares from frying them. Saw a newspaper from 1921, when they were going through the same thing. It may have also happened during the Dust Bowl.
Watch the WEF crowd jump on this and try to move their agenda forward.
Just imagine if the Dust Bowl occurred today. The shrieks, the hysterics, the rending of garments.....................
Check out Melanie Phillips' Substack on this topic:
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/never-mind-the-facts-just-worship?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The Colorado plateau used to be a huge inland sea. Amazing the changes that occurred naturally - but politicians think they can control nature to ‘save the planet’
The North Sea used to be a warm, humid plains region with elephants and apes we associate with Africa!
Debate about the climate has been deliberately stifled. It has been a broad-based effort. Major media outlets (LA Times, Meet the Press, etc.) have declared as a matter of policy they will not report anything that does not support the alarmist agenda, even factual reports about legitimate research. Most social media will deplatform anyone who departs from the climate "consensus." Realist scientists find it very difficult to get research articles published. Speaking up for real science gets your dissertation rejected, gets you denied tenure, gets you ostracized and disinvited from professional conferences, or outright gets you fired. These tactics have been so successful they are being adopted by the left for all their causes.
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/28/the-academic-blacklist-climate-alarmists-dont-want-you-to-know-about/
https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-bbc-and-climate
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/04/the-climate-propaganda-cabal/
It is a deranged, misguided ideology which will crush and hurt many actual living breathing people.
As anyone outside the Left knows, left-wing people define "conversations" about issues as "we talk, you bend over". As far as the Left is concerned, we have already had the entire "debate" about climate change, and they won it.
I was so pleased to see the shoutout to A.K. Stickle Variety!!
I have been loving that store for years. And wondering how it managed to stay in business. I would cheerfully buy out their entire inventory to KEEP them in business, but there's only so much room for New York State dishtowels and Etch-a-Sketches in my home.
As someone who owned a small business during the last recession (2007-2010), I will say that Biden's COVID-related interventions—specifically his small business loans at low interest rates—seemed a lot more small-business-friendly than Obama's too-big-to-fail bailouts. Obama turned out to be such a mediocre POTUS.
But I don't have a clue what can be done about the current inflationary tide.
And I keep dreaming about wheelbarrows full of worthless paper currency and the Weimar Republic.
They shouldn’t call it Putin’s Price Hike they should call it Greta’s Gas Gouge because this is the result of decades of emotionally-driven imbeciles with minds like children engaging in “environmentalism”. I’ve been saying for a long time that these people are evil and a net detriment to society and now everyone can finally see it.
Up next, now that the fanciful useless cocksuckers from the farmers market have taken over the government, we can have environmentally friendly organic food production mandates which will result in mass starvation. Fucking simpletons.
At least when the ammonia restrictions kick in requiring farmers to use animal waste as fertilizer we will be able to use the nickname Joe Buydung, which is fun.
Welcome back!
Your trenchant insights were missed.
😇😇🥳🥳🥳
I'm happy to blame the entire thing on Biden and his cronies.
I blame everyone except me.
😂😂😂💃🏻💃🏻
I'm guessing as we get closer to the midterms there will be a push to vote by mail...
"Vote by Mail and Save Gas"
Yes that will be the next excuse to scam the election. Actually, I have no problem with solicited absentee voting. It's the unsolicited kind... sending out massive numbers of ballots almost randomly, then making sure to count every single vote for a Democrat no matter how incorrectly filled out the ballots are. They've made a joke and mockery of the U.S. electoral process and caused irreparable damage to our democracy.
I work in a foreign country and have observed the difference in election laws first hand. Everyone has a voter card with their photo, and system tracks the use (no multiple votes from one person). Election Day is a Sunday, and even though this country is probably more religious than the U.S., folks go to church and then to the polls on election day. There is almost no absentee voting, has to be verified and validated to allow a person to submit an absentee ballot. There is also no early voting - Election Day is it.
When I lived in Phoenix, we had voter I.D. cards. It was no big deal, just another card you carried in your wallet and displayed on Election Day. The problem is Covid-19 or Wuhan Virus or whatever you call it. They used it as an excuse to steal the election, purely and simply.
I would not complain in the least if we made Election Day a federal holiday.
I agree and I've always that that'd be a sure winner. That just means it'll prolly never happen.
This began with "You didn't build that." Our leaders ,most of whom have never owned or worked in a real business ,especially a small one where the owners and their families pour their savings and souls into their dreams , pretty much never take any responsibility for their actions and decisions. Let's hope voters now hold them accountable since the notion of personal accountability is not in their lexicon.
I have thought about this often. There are many small businesses in my area and some are my favorite small restaurants. They can't keep printing new menus as their costs go up. Everyone here that I know is aware these businesses are not gouging anyone. Their costs, just as our costs, are going up.
My electricity is supplied by a cooperative. They have raised their fuel adjustment price 3 times since the beginning of the year. The increases have been modest, from $4-6 per so many kilowatts, but they are still increases and with inflation increasing, there will be more. I have adjusted the thermostat higher and have become adjusted to a warmer house.
My grocery shopping has changed. It has become necessities and only real food. Certainly healthier. Many items have become reduced in volume and size by shrinkflation. The 5 lb. bag of cat food I used to purchase is now 3.5 lbs and costs $2/bag more. Glad to get it though because a few months ago the shelves were completely bare.
Now that I am retired I am watching my trips closely. I am trying to make it through the month on one tank of gas. Fortunately I live in a neighborhood where most of the stores I want to go to are within 2 miles of home.
I lived through Jimmy Carter's inflation and it was awful but I was young and working. Not all that difficult to pick up a part time job in addition to my full time job. Now I am retired.
The real worry is the way the Biden administration is destabilizing the country. Inflation, crime, massive illegal immigration, stupid energy and foreign policies that harm the country still spending money hand over fist (Ukraine, anyone).
What happens when several million new immigrants, half of whom speak no English and are not familiar with modern Western civilization, can't get any work, (including the many who have criminal backgrounds), decide to take their piece of the American pie? Looting, home invasion, hold-ups, muggings? It's going to make it look like the Antifa/BLM riots of 2020 were just an outing in the park.
Just as this administration is trying to disarm lawful citizens. Fun times.
I live about two miles from the border....dogs sure are barking a lot more at night than in years past.
And trucks - big, nice 4 wheel drive trucks - are stolen at an alarming rate in and around San Antonio. My younf friend had a Ford stolen at a Spurs gsme and 14 were stolen in a two block radius that night. His truck was trashed with $72,000 in damage but the insurance company refused to total it. They are used to drive through brush and fences because the transporters know the authorities will not chase them off-road. A report surfaced yesterday that "aggressive Border Patrol.policies" contributed to the Uvalde school shooting fiasco because the school had been locked down dozens of times between February and May because of high speed chases resulting in bailouts and thus no one took the shooter lockdown seriously. In essence Border Patrol is being blamed for the invasion. And it is an invasion.
Here locally, the town has really gone out of it's way to show support to the CBP, most of the citizens around here feel the CBP is getting scape-goated by the MSM and the federal gubmint. After the split reins fiasco last year we even had a "Split Reins" trail event to show support to the CBP.
I cross the border daily (work in Mexico), and have noticed over the last year or so the agents at the border crossing seem to be fairly depressed, and the older agents just want to get to their retirement. Very few new agents, whether designed or not.
I cannot like this but I do agree. BP is tasked with an impossible mission.
The button doesn't work or you're just a hater?
(just kidding :))
Plus even the immigrants here for the work send large amounts of money back to their country of origin.
They did before the housing crash in 2007. We had hundreds of central American men here. They would congregate in the Home Depot parking lots and be picked up by contractors as day labor. On Saturdays they crowded to these little bodegas that had a couple of bags of chips but were primarily in business to transfer money. I seem to recall reading an article at the time that all this transfer money was like foreign aid to Mexico and other countries. Mexico was receiving billions from these illegals working in the USA.
When the economy crashed all those men disappeared. I assume they returned home. This time when the economy crashes they are not going to return home. It's not going to be pretty.
I am in Texas. It did not stop here for long, if at all.
How many of the illegal immigrants are sending money back home to help pay off the debt owed to the criminal organization that helped them gain entry into the states? Families take out loans and mortgages to get a family member to the US from the loan shark division of the criminal organization that moves people across the borders. There is so much that is not benign in the trafficking of illegal immigrants and the open border policy funds the worst of the worst.
Many of the illegals are going to be forced into prostitution and crime to make those payments.
The number of minors who are discovered with people other than their parents is troubling, particularly considering that I suspect fewer are identified as such than are actually coming across. The "child friendly" illegal immigration policies make this problem worse, incentivizing the use of children as "grease" on the wheels of illegal immigration; those same children can then be trafficked. It makes me ill.
We should stop using the term "human trafficking". We should call it "the slave trade."
We should, but I think the Woke would pitch a fit.
That's something that no one seems to mention. Immigrant workers create foreign aid on a HUGE scale.
And many of them come for the welfare bennies not for jobs
Many get both. When we lived in Topeka, my friend across the street had an illegal boyfriend. She got welfare benefits for herself and their children (from which he benefited, of course). Meanwhile, he had a good job in a restaurant kitchen, paid under the table, so no taxes and no effect on their welfare benefits.
At one point, he developed extreme jealousy (he couldn't cope if she even said hello to another man), and he threatened to kidnap the children and take them to Mexico to live with his mother. She was terrified of losing her kids. I reported him to ICE, including his threats...and they simply didn't give a damn.
Long ago, in another life, I met a couple living in NYC who were doing much the same thing. She was on welfare for her and her child. He did something under the table. They were not married. If they were to get married she would lose her welfare benefits.
I read the Ford Foundation was giving the illegals $500/month. Soros is heavily involved and other NGO's may be as well. Can you get welfare benefits if you are not a citizen?
They hate us.
I have seen so many people talking about how inflation is bad, but that it and the tight labor market creates the opportunity for those in low wage occupations to demand raises.
With zero comprehension among most that this is the very definition of the inflationary spiral.
All western governments need to be replaced with people that get it, Biden and Trudeau have caused this.