Political Foibles

Good Riddance Modern Monetary Theory

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

MN Gordon explains the financial debacle in his Economic Prism article Modern Monetary Theory Bites the Dust Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Just a couple of years ago Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was all the rage. But that was before rampant money printing triggered an official consumer price inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), of 9.1 percent.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Yet, sometimes, foresight is 20/20 too. In the case of MMT, practically everyone could see there would be hell to pay…even through broken spectacles.

The future consequences were crystal clear. Printing up money and passing it out around town, thus entitling people to claims on goods and services without commensurate production, is fundamentally foolish, reckless, and outright suicidal.

Only academics and central bankers were blind to the arrival of today’s inflation.

If you recall, as inflation was heating up during the second part of 2021, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told everyone it was transitory. Then, as inflation continued unabated, Powell finally admitted in December 2021 that inflation was no longer transitory and that the word needed to be retired.

Powell and Yellen have their finger prints all over this consumer price inflation mess. Yet they didn’t act alone. Advocates of MMT cheered on their mass money printing with righteous assurances. They said inflation wouldn’t be a problem.

But now that consumer price inflation is raging at a 40 year high, where did the promoters of MMT go? Why aren’t they tackling inflation with the same enthusiasm?

Fanciful schemes offering the more abundant life always yield the unsuspecting and outright gullible to the assurances of dreamers, schemers, theorists, reformers, and scoundrels of all stripes. Promises of something for nothing are too intoxicating to pass up.

For several years Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and other American socialists, served up fresh pitchers of grape Flavor-Aid laced with MMT as a solution to all the downtrodden’s problems. To join the cult all you had to do was drink from their cup.

MMT, as you may have heard, offers booms without busts, and money without limits.

The nuts and bolts of the theory state that a government that creates its own money, like the USA, cannot default on its dollar based debts. Therefore, the USA can print all the money it needs to amplify the economy – debts and deficits be damned.

Should such overt dollar debasement lead to price inflation, MMT has just the solution. Raise taxes and issue bonds to remove the excess money from circulation.

Taxes, you see, are not for funding government spending. Rather, they’re for throttling back the money supply to attain the magical balance of growth and inflation. With MMT, big government statists can hatch boondoggles first, and leave taxation for later.

The whole theory, or lack thereof, is abundantly retarded. Yet in early 2020, something abundantly retarded was precisely what was needed.

When quantitative tightening (QT) was abruptly terminated and reversed in September 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet was $3.7 trillion. Soon after, in the face of the fabricated coronavirus hysteria, the Fed jacked up its balance sheet by $5.2 trillion to a high of $8.9 trillion. A good part of this took place between March and June 2020.

What happened next…

Cult of MMT

At first, the consequences were nonexistent. In February 2021, after nearly a year of monster money printing, the CPI showed an annual rate of inflation of just 1.7 percent. MMT supporters were riding high.

By that point, the U.S. government, and by extension the American people, were fully committed to a program of currency debasement to finance government mandated lockdowns. Washington was also attempting to inflate away its debt burden. The authorities prefer an implicit default via inflation as opposed to missing bond payments to creditors.

Countercyclical stimulus spending. Interest rate suppression. Quantitative easing. Elastic currencies. Money shuffling. Inflation targeting. Smoke and mirrors.

…all so governments, and individuals, can spend well above what they can afford, and then welsh on the debt without consequences.

During the rampant money printing of 2020 and 2021 Stephanie Kelton emerged as the MMT messiah. In June 2020, her book, “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy,” was published.

It quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. And it also received rave reviews from unlikely places. Upon reading the book, gangsta rap pioneer, Ice Cube, for example, tweeted on September 3, 2020, the following means of salvation:

“America loves to cry broke. But in America money does grow on trees.”

“America is a currency creator so there’s no reason for people to live like this. Government and the banks have made a deal to keep the people in debt. They always say if you print money it will cause inflation. They just printed 3 trillion. Little or no inflation.”

Does a 9.1 percent CPI reading, with an unofficial reading of nearly 18 percent,
constitute little or no inflation?

Modern Monetary Theory Bites the Dust

Currently, the Fed’s balance sheet is roughly $8.9 trillion. And consumer price inflation is raging at a 40 year high. What’s more, the Fed is hiking rates with the purpose of containing inflation. But the only way for the Fed to contain inflation is to trigger a massive, 1930s-style depression.

The cult of MMT, like most cults, has proven to be lacking for the general populace. Instead of bringing wealth and abundance to the American worker it has brought wealth and abundance to the elites and central planners who first receive and direct the flow of the newly minted fake money.

Moreover, like most cults, when MMT’s leaders are needed most, they conveniently disappear.

Is Kelton not a true believer in MMT, after all? Because if Kelton was a true believer, wouldn’t she be advocating for higher taxes right now?

That’s how MMT is supposed to work, right? When inflation heats up, taxes are supposed to be raised to remove excess money from circulation? Isn’t that the MMT solution to inflation?

Kelton, however, is not banging the drum for higher taxes. Perhaps, this is because higher taxes are perennially unpopular. Similarly, promoting money printing is much more hip and cool than promoting higher taxes.

Did MMT just bite the dust?

For now, it appears to have. We suspect it will be gone until a massive depression wipes away inflation.

Then it will be resurrected to great folly so the money printers can really get to work.
Background on Magical Money Theory

Pardon me for mixing up acronyms.  Somehow the increasing mention of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) made me think of the classic Beatles trip album.  Perhaps that association was triggered by today’s suddenly fashionable socialists relying on MMT to pay for their “everything free for everybody” political visions.  (Maybe one of the Ms could stand for ‘mushrooms”.)

A primer on what MMT is and is not, is an article by Karl Smith (descendant of Adam?) in National Review The Uses and Abuses of Modern Monetary Theory.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

MMT advocates overlook its flaws.

Newly elected representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) argued on Monday that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ought to be a part of the conversation when it comes to funding major social-policy initiatives, such as her proposed Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, former economic advisor to Bernie Sanders, has likewise insisted that MMT should replace our current thinking about government finance. Yet what is MMT? And is it really as revolutionary as its proponents claim?

At its heart, MMT is a way of describing the federal budget and the Federal Reserve as if they were unified under a single executive authority. In describing the system so, the dangers of federal deficit spending are no longer that it crowds out private investment and slows economic growth, but that it leads potentially to excess inflation.

Yet Modern Monetary Theorists then invariably argue that inflation is not, and indeed could not be, a major problem for the United States. Many hard-core adherents go so far as to propose a job-guarantee program paid for by the federal government, which, they argue, will virtually eliminate both unemployment and the possibility of runaway inflation.

The tenets of MMT should be familiar to an older generation of fiscal conservatives. Before the 1980s, central banks such as the Federal Reserve were controlled far more directly by their governments. As a result, they could — and often did — bail out profligate governments by simply printing more money to cover the government’s debt.

This led to massive currency devaluation, runaway inflation, or both. In the early 1980s, however, central banks in the developed world were granted independence in the hopes that doing so would stop the spiraling inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In the U.S., Fed chairman Paul Volcker was spectacularly successful at this. So were, to varying degrees, most central banks in the developed world. Some holdouts existed, notably in Southern Europe — a situation that would come back to haunt them decades later.

But MMT waves away the significance of these developments, instead focusing attention on several technical facts. First, when the federal government wants to spend money, it does so by having the Treasury issue checks. These checks are processed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). Second, the FRBNY does this literally by marking up the value of digital reserves in an account belonging to the check recipients’ bank and marking down the account of the Treasury by an equal amount.

These two operations are, in theory, separate. There is no technical reason why the FRBNY has to mark down the Treasury account. It only does so because laws require the federal government to meet all of its obligations. Such laws, argue Modern Monetary Theorists, cannot bind Congress, which after all has the power to alter them.

MMT advocates argue that Congress should ask the Treasury to sell Treasury bonds to cover any of its outstanding obligations. This is not, however, because they think it is necessary to fulfill the government’s obligations, but because doing so would help stabilize the macroeconomy.

All well and good. But at some point, won’t the debt become so large that merely paying interest on it will require issuing additional debt? Won’t this process feed on itself until all the borrowing capacity in the economy is soaked up?

No, MMT advocates reply, because the government can simply stop issuing debt — meeting its obligations instead by having the Federal Reserve simply create money on its behalf.

Indeed, this is what distressed governments have traditionally done when their liabilities add up — and the result has typically been hyperinflation. Modern Monetary Theorists argue that this need not be the case. Their exact reasoning differs.

At times, they argue that hyperinflation only occurs in countries that borrow from abroad in debt denominated in a foreign government’s currency. I don’t know enough about every single instance of hyperinflation to verify this claim, but it is true that the worst incidences of hyperinflation are typically associated with borrowing from abroad.

When a country prints money in an attempt to fund the government, the international exchange value of its currency collapses. If the country owes debt denominated in a foreign currency, that debt becomes more difficult to pay down as its own currency falls. Then the country has to print even more money to meet its debt payments, which of course causes the exchange value of its currency to fall further, creating a vicious circle that ends in hyperinflation.

Modern Monetary Theorists argue that this can’t happen to the United States because all of our debt is in the form of Treasury bonds that are denominated in dollars. If the international exchange value of the dollar falls, that does not change the value of our debt.

It does, however, mean that foreigners will be repaid in a currency that will be worth much less to them. Foreign bondholders are not stupid; they would regard this as a type of unofficial default. After experiencing this type of default through currency devaluation, they would be much less willing to buy Treasury bonds or indeed any type of American security again. This is precisely the situation that Italy, Spain, and Greece found themselves in during the 1980s.

Both countries had regularly devalued their currency as a way to get out from underneath foreign debts and were increasingly locked out of international markets. The euro was created, at least in part, in an effort to solve this. It could ultimately be printed only with the authority of the European Central Bank, meaning that neither Italy, Spain, Greece, nor any other member country could avert a debt crisis by devaluing its currency. Instead, they would have to raise taxes to meet their obligations.

That brings us to the second argument MMT advocates invoke when arguing that we should not worry about excessive debt leading to inflation: If inflation becomes a problem, the federal government can simply raise taxes, slowing down the economy which, in turn, will cool inflation.

But there are two problems with this approach. First, it is political suicide. At a time when consumers are facing ever-rising prices, it would seem cruel beyond measure to slap them with a tax increase. Very few governments would have the nerve to do this. If anything, history shows us that governments will instead resort to spending money on subsidies to ease the burden of rapidly rising prices.

Second, committing to this approach would risk an economic calamity. In 1973, OPEC placed an embargo on the United States that resulted in the price of oil quadrupling overnight. The sharply rising price of oil led both to a slowing economy and an increase in inflation — a dangerous mix.

A slowing economy lowers tax revenues, making it more difficult for the government to meet its debt payments. Suppose, at a time when the economy was slowing but inflation was rising, the U.S. government had firmly committed itself to MMT principles and refused to waver. In that case, it would not be able to resort to money printing because inflation was rising. Instead, it would be obligated to raise taxes both to meet its debt payments and to slow the rate of inflation.

Sharp increases in taxes during a recession, however, can be self-defeating. This is exactly the situation that Greece, and to a lesser extent Italy and Spain, found themselves in during the Great Recession. The crises lowered revenue, which worsened their budget deficits.

As a result, the government was forced to raise taxes and lower spending during the recession. This caused the economy to contract further, which caused tax revenue to fall so much that the budget deficit actually rose. In the case of Greece, this self-defeating cycle of higher taxes and lower revenues caused the government to ultimately default on its debts anyway. That, of course, worsened the economic crisis the country was already facing.

In the face of such a calamity, no sovereign government would or perhaps even should refrain from devaluing its currency and inflating away at least some of its debts. For that reason, governments have designed institutions to avoid falling into this trap.

In the United States, that means both making the Federal Reserve independent and not subject to the direct authority of the Treasury, and requiring the Treasury to meet all of its obligations with cash raised from tax revenues or Treasury-bond sales. In effect, we’ve outlawed the methods of Modern Monetary Theory — and with good reason.

KARL SMITH — Karl Smith is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He was previously Assistant Professor of Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Government.

Footnote: (h/t Mark Krebs)

For more on Cortez see Why Cortez Can’t Be Wrong

For more on how MMT plays out when applied in a nation, see a short review of the Brazil experiment:

Western Bankruptcy in Two Ways

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Walter Russell Mead explains in his Hudson Institute article End of the German Idyll.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T John Ray

G7 leaders during a working session at the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau on June 28, 2022 near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau via Pool/Getty Images)

Germany looked normal over the weekend as a genial Chancellor Olaf Scholz welcomed the Group of Seven leaders and their guests to the luxurious Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps. But those appearances are deceiving. Germany is facing its gravest challenges since the foundation of the Federal Republic following World War II.

This is very sudden. As recently as 2020, almost the entire world agreed with the smug German self-assessment that Germany had the world’s most successful economic model, was embarking on the most ambitious—and largely successful—climate initiative in the world, and had perfected a values-based foreign policy that ensured German security and international popularity at extremely low cost.

None of this was true.

  • The German economic model was based on unrealistic assumptions about world politics and is unlikely to survive the current turmoil.
  • German energy policy is a chaotic mess, a shining example to the rest of the world of what not to do.
  • Germany’s reputation for a values-based foreign policy has been severely dented by Berlin’s waffling over aid to Ukraine. And German security experts are coming to terms with a deeply unwelcome truth:
  • Confronted with an aggressive Russia, Germany, like Europe generally, is utterly reliant on the U.S. for its security. At a time when American foreign policy increasingly prioritizes Asia and isolationist sentiment among both Republicans and Democrats appears to be rising, if Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025, German security will depend on his goodwill.

Mr. Scholz and his coalition government have responded to Vladimir Putin ‘s invasion of Ukraine with a series of, by German standards, revolutionary changes. Germany is beginning to rearm. It is, with some false starts, sending weapons to Ukraine. It has taken the first steps toward energy independence from Russia, even at the cost of its ambitious climate agenda. Coal plants will lumber back to life, new gas-processing plants will be built, and Germany is asking Europe to delay decarbonization mandates that no longer seem realistic.

But the real work remains to be done.
Modern Germany was above all an economic project.

The collapse of the Third Reich left Germany morally devastated, physically wrecked and economically bankrupt. From the moment of its foundation in 1949, the country ‘s central goal was economic growth. That growth could:

  • repair the destruction of the war,
  • promote Germany ‘s peaceful integration into Western Europe,
  • blunt the appeal of communism, and
  • build a national identity independent of the malignant fantasies of the Hitler era and the bombast of Wilhelm II.

The hard work of the German people, the pragmatic policies of the political class, the skills and determination of German management, and the favorable international climate resulting from the development of the American-led world order took Germany to economic heights.

In recent years, the German economic miracle depended on a combination of industrial prowess, cheap energy from Russia, and access to global markets, particularly in China. Today every one of those pillars is under threat. German mastery of automobile technology through a century of engineering is challenged by the shift to electric vehicles. The chemicals industry, in which German technology has led the world since the 19th century, is coming under environmental challenges as global competition intensifies.

Those challenges are exacerbated by the loss of cheap and secure Russian natural gas.

Green energy, despite massive German investment, will be unable to supply German industry with reliable and cheap power for a long time. In the meantime, the alternatives to Russian pipeline gas are expensive and controversial. Nuclear power gives Greens the willies; coal is unbearable; liquefied natural gas requires long-term commitments and massive capital expenditures.

Beyond that, Germany ‘s economic relationship with China is changing for the worse. China was long the ideal customer for German products. Its newly affluent middle class fell in love with German luxury cars. Its rapidly growing manufacturing sector voraciously consumed German machine tools and other capital goods. But China ‘s growth is decelerating. Its maturing industrial economy seeks to compete with high-end German producers, often based on tools reverse-engineered from German imports.

Those in the Biden administration who dream that Germany will wholeheartedly join a new global American crusade for values should keep their enthusiasm in check.

Mr. Scholz may agree in the abstract with President Biden about the importance of liberal values and the danger of climate change, but his calculations must reflect the economic facts of German life. This naturally leads to thoughts about how to patch things up with Russia and China.

Mr. Biden ‘s job is not to sing hymns about Western values with Mr. Scholz; it is to make Berlin understand that U.S. security guarantees come at a price. Given the realities of American politics, Germany cannot count on continued American support unless it does more to back the U.S. at a time of grave and growing danger world-wide.

Footnote:

Mead’s essay focused on the challenges of German leader Scholz, but consider the various predicaments self-induced by other members of this G7 gang who can neither talk nor shoot straight.  Mr. Biden increasingly struggles to even read or sign what they write for him, followed by observers noting that it is all lies and mean-spirited malarkey.  UK PM Johnson is a lame duck in political limbo, only in office until his Tory replacement is chosen. President of Italy, 80 yr. old Sergio Mattarella wanted to retire, but agreed to a second term in January when ruling parties couldn’t agree on his successor.  Justin “Fidel” Castreau of Canada has disgraced himself and his office, clinging to power by colluding with the equally unpopular NDP party leader.  Japan’s nation building leader Abe was just assassinated, leaving the current novice Japan PM much lesser known or appreciated by Japanese people.  Macron of France won his personal election, but his party lost bigtime in legislative seats.

Any bets on who has the right stuff to restore and advance Western Civilization?

 

Briggs Schools Justice Kagan on Expertocracy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

William Briggs writes at his blog Elena Kagan’s Blind Love Of The Expertocracy: SCOTUS Slaps The EPA.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that, in effect, without Congressional authorization, the EPA does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide. Justice Elena Kagan dissented.

Kagan opened her dissent thus (whole opinion; with my paragraphification for screen readability):

Climate change’s causes and dangers are no longer subject to serious doubt. Modern science is “unequivocal that human influence”—in particular, the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide—“has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” [Cites IPCC] … The rise in temperatures brings with it “increases in heat-related deaths,” “coastal inundation and erosion,” “more frequent and intense hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events,” “drought,” “destruction of ecosystems,” and “potentially significant disruptions of food production.” [Cites, of all things, a case in which this was quoted.]

If the current rate of emissions continues, children born this year could live to see parts of the Eastern seaboard swallowed by the ocean. See Brief for Climate Scientists as Amici Curiae 6. Rising waters, scorching heat, and other severe weather conditions could force “mass migration events[,] political crises, civil unrest,” and “even state failure.”

So Kagan has bought and believes, seemingly sincerely, the failed predictions of global warming, which she calls “climate change”. This is her adopted opinion, provided her by climate Experts, who claim there is no “serious doubt” about their theories.

We have seen many times that her (or her Experts’) quoted predictions of doom are false. There have not been an increase, but a decrease, in floods. Same for drought. There is no “destruction of ecosystems.” And just last week a paper appeared—a peer-reviewed paper in the regime-approved journal Nature, going by the name “Declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming“—which shows the number of tropical cyclones have been decreasing, not increasing.

Here’s a picture from that paper (ignore the straight and red lines, which are models and not the data):
So Kagan’s suppositions about the dooms of global warming are false, and known to be false with only a little investigation. Which she did not make. Nor did Wise Latina, and nor did the other guy who’s now retired and will be quickly forgotten. Both signed Kagan’s dissent.

Their non-curiosity and blind acceptance of the Expert Consensus is point one. And really is our only point, as we’ll see.

Under the Clean Air Act, as Kagan writes, Congress gave power to the “EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that ’causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution’ and that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.’”

As we know, EPA called carbon dioxide, the basis of almost all life on earth, the very stuff of your breath, the food of plants, “pollution”. And started to regulate it. Scientifically, this is like the American Medical Association saying “not all women have cervixes”, and allowing the AMA to regulate the English language.

Do people forget, or maybe they never knew, that CO2 is plant food? And not only plant food, but the plant flood. Back in olden days, they used to teach photosynthesis. No longer? Remove CO2 and plants die. Then you die.

So what the EPA did in trying to regulate CO2 was ridiculous—unless you really do believe global warming, a.k.a. “climate change”, is an “existential crisis.” As Kagan, Wise Latina, and Gone Guy believe, or say they do. But which all observations show is not so.

Models, on the other hand, show the “existential crisis” is true. And all models only say what they are told to say. So models are told to say that “climate change” is an “existential crisis.” Experts told models to say this.

Experts, therefore, value models over observation. The Deadly Sin of Reification.

The real problem, then, is letting Experts make decisions based on models which are beautiful, to Experts, but which make lousy predictions. Experts are trusted too much.

Even if you think not, and still believe the models, nothing follows from them. That is, no policy is suggested, implied, or necessary because of the models. Not one. It is separately true that all policies, suggested from any source, have consequences, which may be known to greater or lesser extent—their uncertainty in them also are models.

It is scientism, a fallacy, to say Experts who wrote climate models also know what is best to do about the weather. Scientifically, it is like saying the CDC knows what is the best rate to pay for rent during a disease outbreak. Which they did say. And were rebuked for saying. A rebuke which they ignored. Which may happen here with the EPA, too.

Therefore, even if you believe the models, which stink, a fact that requires only minor effort to check, it does not follow the Experts who created those models, including agents in the EPA, know what is best to do about model predictions.

That power should fall to Congress, and to state and local governments, who have that mandate.

In other words, the Expertocracy, which was in part struck down and which Kagan dissented against, is based on two false assumptions. The first is that Expert models have skill. They do not. And the second, which is independent, is scientism, which is that scientists with expertise in one are are equipped with greater senses of good and evil on all subjects, which is absurd.

Kagan, though, embraces the Expertocracy. She said (her emphasis):

Members of Congress often don’t know enough—and know they don’t know enough—to regulate sensibly on an issue. Of course, Members can and do provide overall direction. But then they rely, as all of us rely in our daily lives, on people with greater expertise and experience. Those people are found in agencies. Congress looks to them to make specific judgments about how to achieve its more general objectives. And it does so especially, though by no means exclusively, when an issue has a scientific or technical dimension. Why wouldn’t Congress instruct EPA to select “the best system of emission reduction,” rather than try to choose that system itself?

Second and relatedly, Members of Congress often can’t know enough—and again, know they can’t—to keep regulatory schemes working across time. Congress usually can’t predict the future—can’t anticipate changing circumstances and the way they will affect varied regulatory techniques. Nor can Congress (realistically) keep track of and respond to fast-flowing developments as they occur.

Kagan is quite wrong. For all the reasons we discussed. Congress (as sick as that institution is) does know enough, and it knows vastly more than weather Experts about law. Because it knows, or is supposed to, what laws are, and what laws should do, and what the consequence of laws are. Climate or weather Experts do not. Congress can consult with Experts: “If we pass this law, what are the bounds of uncertainty on this particular weather-effected thing?” That is sensible. But it is rank foolishness to trust weather Experts to decide what laws are best, even if you by subterfuge call those laws “regulations”. And it even more dangerous to trust people who have something to gain, as Experts do, to decide what is “best” to do.

The impetus for the Expertocracy, and the faith in it, is there in Kagan’s words. She reasons, in effect, that Experts know more than anybody else on their subjects of expertise, therefore we have no right to interfere with their decisions on any subject.

It is a bad argument because Experts don’t always know best about their own subjects, as we see now everywhere. And even if Experts do know best about their subjects, they don’t know what is best to do about them.

Democratic Socialists Party Platform

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Everyone can see that a kind of Star Chamber hides in Biden’s shadow and dictates what he says and signs. Over the last year and a half, the game plan has been revealed by the exercise of authority assumed by federal and state Democratic Socialistic party.  The platform below summarizes what we have witnessed from these political operatives.

Establish Wokeism as the new state religion.

Under the guise of “Diversity-Inclusion-Equity, the doctrine is to eliminate pluralism from American Life. Critical Race and Gender Theories, among others, are to be asserted as secular truths, and all other beliefs are to be banned from the public square in the name of separation of church and state.

In the cult of Woke, adherents have a “critical consciousness” and are able to see the “problematics” in everything. This includes in speech, writing, institutions, thoughts, people, systems, knowledge, history, one’s past, and society itself. Society is broken into different groups or classes (social group identity) that are oppressive on one side, oppressed on the other, and in conflict over this. That is, conflict theory is the belief that different social groups in society are always in conflict with one another for power and dominance.  And rather than working together in complex, dynamical ways that can be mutually beneficial, they are at war.

Any criticism or questioning of Woke Doctrine is: racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, imperialistic, hateful, bigoted, unjust, evil, ignorant, wrong, and a crime against humanity.

Purge Public and Private Institutions of customs and symbols adverse to Wokeism.

To facilitate the dominance of Woke doctrine, the heritage of previous widely adopted beliefs must be purged. Thus monuments of past American heroes must be destroyed, and doubt must be cast over the documents and writings of the founders of the American Republic. Rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance or prayers at public events must be replaced with pride rainbows or kneeling to BLM flags.

Persecute and prosecute individuals whose speech and/or actions are contrary to Wokeism, or who are less than enthusiastic.

To achieve Woke totalitarian dominance, dissenters must be reviled as heretics. And if unrepentent, they must be incarcerated or otherwise excommunicated by removing their reputations and employment. Any spokespersons for alternative opinions to Woke views of history and identity politics must be driven out of public awareness and discourse.

Expand the administrative bureaucracy to extend social and economic control and to deepen dependency upon the state.

By declaring states of emergency, a la Covid or Climate, Executive agencies will create more rules regulating enterprises, indeed all employees public and private, constraining personal choices to align with Woke doctrines. Expanding the regulatory authorities will greatly increase numbers on the public payroll, and shift financial power away from the private sector.

Strip the citizenry of firearms to prevent resistance to the force of governmental edicts.

To complete the state’s monopoly of coercion force over the populace, citizens’ right to self-defense must be rendered mute by confiscating guns and ammunition.

Rig the election process so that the Woke party is always returned to power.

In line with Marxist theory, Woke doctrine includes believing that only one political party is legitimate; that is the one representing the victims of oppression. All others are illegitimate, and cannot be allowed to form the government by means of a free and fair election. The illusion of voters choosing will be maintained, but political communication will be slanted to heavily favor the Woke appointed candidates. Also the collecting and counting of ballots will be coordinated to ensure the right outcome.

Neutralize Congress and Supreme Court as checks upon Executive authority.

With the centralizing of governance in the Executive branch. Congress and the Courts must be relegated to advisory roles. Deliberation will occur in the agencies with Executive oversight, while congressional discussions will give the appearance of representation for the electors. The courts will limit themselves to reaffirming Woke doctrine against heresies arising from time to time.

Postscript

I have used satirical images to poke holes in this mistaken political movement, but this is a serious moment in the struggle for the soul and future of the American Republic.  For example, note these statements excerpted from a recent fundraising email from Ron DeSantis, addressing these same points in resolute language. The Appeal of Ron DeSantis

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself.

To destroy America, they go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

With regard to Covid, we listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.

We The People still have a say. We know the truth, you and I, about America and the country she is and can be. We must fight to defeat these false pretenses and predetermined narratives.

I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom. As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up rather than tears it down.

Together we can ensure that our children are raised to know they live in the greatest state in the nation, the greatest country in the world and that they have an opportunity to continue making them even greater.

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

2000 Mules is the Smoking Gun

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Now we know why they avert their eyes from watching the film 2000 Mules.  And why the panel investigating the January 6 protest didn’t dare to screen the documentary.  Because it shows beyond reasonable doubt that election theft activities were coordinated and replicated in multiple states, proving a national criminal enterprise rigged the 2020 US Presidential election.  The smoking gun is there for all to see, and even more, it is only part of the pattern of corruption.

Charlie Johnston explains in his American Thinker article D’Souza’s Mules Left Tracks.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Many conservative commentators have noted that Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2000 Mules, offers compelling evidence of large-scale vote fraud. It offers more than this, though. It provides compelling evidence of a massive, centrally coordinated conspiracy to commit vote fraud. Examining several states with different voter laws while focusing on just one form of fraud, the movie found that the method of fraud was executed identically in each of these states.

That is prima facie evidence of central organization and management.

From the moment counting was stopped in the dead of night in five Democrat-run swing states on election night, Democrats and the media have treated anyone who questioned election integrity in 2020 like a mob boss treats anyone who threatens to testify against him: shut up, or we will cancel you.

Democrats and the media routinely smear anyone who questions the election results as a conspiracy theorist.  They routinely pronounce any evidence that emerges as “debunked.”  For the record, “debunked” does not mean “inconvenient to the leftist narrative.”  It means “thoroughly investigated and proven to be false.”  Almost none of the evidence has been debunked; very little has been officially examined.  Leftists treat actual evidence like how a vampire treats a crucifix.  There is no reasoned discourse, just a lot of hissing and snarling.

From well before he took office, Donald Trump faced an ongoing administrative coup attempt. First was the long-running Russian collusion hoax, mounted by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee and abetted by the FBI and intelligence agencies. Federal employees who were, theoretically, subordinate to Trump gleefully worked to undermine his administration. Two baseless impeachments were mounted against him by Democrats who know nothing other than shrieking partisanship anymore.

The slow-moving coup finally succeeded on the evening of November 3, 2020, when those five states quit counting ballots to give Democrats time to “fortify” the election. The last real hurdle to thwarting election integrity came on December 11, 2020, when the Supreme Court ruled that Texas and 18 other states lacked standing to complain of massive fraud. How states that conduct honest elections lack standing to complain of states that don’t in an election that affects them all is beyond my understanding. It looked like unconditional institutional surrender to massive fraud to me. All hail the barbarians!

D’Souza’s documentary examined only the slice of fraud that involved
organized physical ballot-stuffing.

It did not touch on compromised voting machines and systems or unconstitutional, administrative election law changes. If the single slice that 2000 Mules so effectively biopsied is filled with the cancer of fraud, it is willful ignorance to believe that everything else was clean.

If the election of 2020 had been fundamentally clean, Democrats and the media should have been the loudest advocates for a thorough and bipartisan investigation of the election to put widespread doubts to rest and own the conservatives. (By bipartisan, I do not mean like the J6 committee, where the Democrats unilaterally appointed all members, including a couple of Republican chumps for show.) Instead, the left hisses and snarls at every piece of evidence brought forth, no matter how compelling. A guilty man tries to suppress every bit of evidence at his trial, never knowing which piece will seal his conviction, while an innocent man tries to get every piece into evidence he can, never knowing which piece will exonerate him. To assess credibility on this, look who is trying to suppress evidence and who is trying to get evidence into the public record.

At this stage, it is hard to credit Democratic and media intransigence to anything innocent. If they are not just stupid, they have become co-conspirators in the only actual insurrection America has seen over the last six years. Understand, this coup was not primarily aimed at Trump and conservative Republicans; it is a coup against the very idea of self-government. Alas, many Republicans may disagree with elements of Democratic methods but agree with them that a self-serving elite class should rule the citizen-serfs they think constitute the American people.

The relentless smears, the constant howls, and the shrieking rage of the leftists are not because they are so offended that the right would challenge them. It is because the mud of massive deception is being washed away to reveal the rock of stark fraud the left mounted to steal an American presidential election. That is genuine insurrection. Confession, repentance, and forfeiture of all offices of public honor or trust by the conspirators could begin to establish American honor and liberty anew. That, of course, will never happen. Power is the left’s only god, and pursuit of it by any means its only liturgy.

Republicans will win by unprecedented margins in November. If they hold the left to account for its depredations against the American system of law and systemic attack on the Bill of Rights, we can begin to crawl out of this hole of despotism. If, instead, the Republicans largely choose to let bygones be bygones, as they have done with the Russian collusion conspirators, there is little hope that America can long survive as anything the founders would recognize. Renewal will come. Americans will not forever submit to be ruled by any class of people — and certainly not to this degenerate class of aspiring despots.

However it comes, D’Souza’s documentary is the seminal moment the tide washed away enough mud that, despite their shrieks and howls, the left can no longer hide the ugly truth of what it did.

Massive election fraud in 2020 is a conspiracy, but it is no longer merely a theory.

USA Today Outed for Fictional Fact Checking

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Paul Joseph Watson writes at Summit News Top ‘Fact Checker’ USA Today Forced to Delete Articles Over Fabricated Sources.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Tyler Durden

USA Today, which is used as a ‘fact checker’ by social media platforms, was forced to delete 23 articles from its website after an investigation found one of its reporters had fabricated sources.

Well, this is awkward. 

The news outlet has an entire section of its website dedicated to ‘fact checking’ and is used by Facebook to ‘fact check’ stories published by other outlets, downranking them in algorithms in a form of soft censorship.

However, it appears as though USA Today should have devoted more resources to fact checking itself before publishing articles by its own staff.

“USA Today’s breaking news reporter Gabriela Miranda fabricated sources and misappropriated quotes for stories, the news outlet confirmed on Thursday. The outlet conducted an internal audit after receiving an “external correction request” on one of its published stories,” reports Breitbart.

The 23 articles which were removed for not meeting the paper’s “editorial standards” included pieces on the Texas abortion ban, anti-vaxxer content and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Miranda, who has now resigned from her position, “took steps to deceive investigators by producing false evidence of her news gathering, including recordings of interviews,” according to the New York Times.

“After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda. The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated. The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified. In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.”

As we previously highlighted, USA Today was also forced to hastily delete a series of tweets which critics said were tantamount to the normalization of pedophilia after the newspaper cited “science” to assert that pedophilia was “determined in the womb.”

The newspaper was also lambasted by critics after it ‘fact checked’ as “true” claims that an official Trump 2020 t-shirt features a ‘Nazi symbol’.

In February last year, the news outlet published an op-ed which denounced Tom Brady for refusing to walk back his previous support for Donald Trump and for being “white.”

The newspaper also had to fire their ‘race and inclusion’ editor Hemal Jhaveri after she falsely blamed the Boulder supermarket shooting on white people.

In summary, USA Today has a severe bias problem and shouldn’t be used as a non-partisan ‘fact checker’.

 

Our Childish Leaders

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Donald J. Boudreaux writes at AIER Beware the Allure of Simple ‘Solutions’.  H/T Brownstone Institute.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The attitudes and opinions of today’s so-called “elite” – those public-opinion formers who Deirdre McCloskey calls “the clerisy” – are childish. Most journalists and writers working for most premier media and entertainment companies, along with most professors and public intellectuals, think, talk, and write about society with the insight of kindergartners.

This sad truth is masked by the one feature that does distinguish the clerisy from young children: verbal virtuosity. Yet beneath the fine words, beautiful phrases, arresting metaphors, and affected allusions lies a notable immaturity of thought.

Every social and economic problem is believed to have a solution,
and that solution is almost always superficial.

Unlike children, adults understand that living life well begins with accepting the inescapability of trade-offs. Contrary to what you might have heard, you cannot “have it all.” You cannot have more of this thing unless you’re willing to have less of that other thing. And what’s true for you as an individual is true for any group of individuals. We Americans cannot have our government artificially raise the cost of producing and using carbon fuels unless we are willing to pay higher prices at the pump and, thus, have less income to spend on acquiring other goods and services. We cannot use money creation to ease the pain today of COVID lockdowns without enduring the greater pain tomorrow of inflation.

While children stomp their little feet in protest when confronted with the need to make trade-offs, the necessity of trade-offs is accepted as a matter of course by adults.

No less importantly, adults, unlike children, are not beguiled by the superficial.

Pay close attention to how the clerisy (who are mostly, although not exclusively, Progressives) propose to ‘solve’ almost any problem, real or imaginary. You’ll discover that the proposed ‘solution’ is superficial; it’s rooted in the naïve assumption that social reality beyond what is immediately observable either doesn’t exist or is unaffected by attempts to rearrange surface phenomena. In the clerisy’s view, the only reality that matters is the reality that is easily seen and seemingly easily manipulated with coercion.

The clerisy’s proposed ‘solutions,’ therefore, involve simply rearranging,
or attempting to rearrange, surface phenomena.

♦  Do some people use guns to murder other people? Yes, sadly. The clerisy’s superficial ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw guns.

♦  Do some people have substantially higher net financial worths than other people? Yes. The clerisy’s juvenile ‘solution’ to this fake problem is to heavily tax the rich and transfer the proceeds to the less rich.

♦  Are some workers paid wages that are too low to support a family in modern America? Yes. The clerisy’s simplistic ‘solution’ to this fake problem – “fake” because most workers earning such low wages are not heads of households – is to have government prohibit the payment of wages below some stipulated minimum.

♦  Do some people suffer substantial property damage, or even loss of life, because of hurricanes, droughts, and other bouts of severe weather? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem focuses on changing the weather by reducing the emissions of an element, carbon, that is now (too simplistically) believed to heavily determine the weather.

♦  Do prices of many ‘essential’ goods and services rise significantly in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters? Yes. The clerisy’s counterproductive ‘solution’ to this fake problem, “counterproductive” and “fake” because these high prices accurately reflect and signal underlying economic realities, is to prohibit the charging and payment of these high prices.

♦  When inflationary pressures build up because of excessive monetary growth, are these pressures vented in the form of rising prices? Yes indeed. The clerisy’s infantile ‘solution’ to the very real problem of inflation is to blame it on greed while raising taxes on profits.

♦  Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus contagious and potentially dangerous to humans? Yes. The clerisy’s simple-minded ‘solution’ to this real problem is to forcibly prevent people from mingling with each other.

♦  Do many Americans still not receive K-12 schooling of minimum acceptable quality? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem is to give pay raises to teachers and spend more money on school administrators.

♦  Do some American workers lose jobs when American consumers buy more imports? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ is to obstruct consumers’ ability to buy imports.

♦  Are some people bigoted and beset with irrational dislike or fear of blacks, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw “hate” and to compel bigoted persons to behave as if they aren’t bigoted.

♦  Do many persons who are eligible to vote in political elections refrain from voting? Yes. The ‘solution’ favored by at least some of the clerisy to this fake problem – “fake” because in a free society each person has a right to refrain from participating in politics – is to make voting mandatory.

The above list of simplistic and superficial ‘solutions’ to problems real and imaginary
can easily be expanded.

The clerisy, mistaking words for realities, assumes that success at verbally describing realities more to their liking proves that these imagined realities can be made real by merely rearranging the relevant surface phenomena. Members of the clerisy ignore unintended consequences. And they overlook the fact that many of the social and economic realities that they abhor are the result, not of villainy or of correctible imperfections, but of complex trade-offs made by countless individuals.

Social engineering appears doable only to those persons who, seeing only a relatively few surface phenomena, are blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface to create those surface phenomena. To such persons, social reality appears as it does to a child: simple and easily manipulated to achieve whatever are the desires that motivate the manipulators.

The clerisy’s ranks are filled overwhelmingly with simple-minded people who mistake their felicity with words and their good intentions for serious thinking. They convey to each other, and to the unsuspecting public, the appearance of being deep thinkers while seldom thinking with more sophistication and nuance than is on display daily in every classroom of kindergartners.

Truckers or Trudeau? You Decide, Part 1

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Chapter One of Trucking For Freedom is titled; “How We Got Here”. The objective of this episode is to adequately introduce the political and social climate leading up to the truckers’ convoy through the lens of C19 mandates, news footage, government officials, and views from Canadian citizens. A philosophic analysis of freedoms, rights, and responsibilities is also portrayed along with reenactments and dramatizations to convey the story. The chapter ends on a cliffhanger…leaving the viewer on a precipice as interest in the Freedom Convoy surges.

FERC Aims to Decarbonize, Shoots Down Energy Security

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Marlo Lewis explains the Biden regime push to undermine critical energy supply in pursuit of climate virtue in his CEI article Why FERC’s Greenhouse Gas Regulatory Policy Cannot Pass a Cost-Benefit Test.  Excerpt in italics with my bolds.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed comments on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) proposal to consider climate change impacts in reviews of infrastructure projects under the Natural Gas Act (NGA). The comments were jointly submitted by my CEI colleague Patrick Michaels; Heritage Foundation Chief Statistician, Data Scientist, and Senior Research Fellow Kevin Dayaratna (commenting as an independent scholar rather than as a representative of any organization); and yours truly.

We submitted comments back in January on FERC’s November 2021 technical conference on the same issues. We advised FERC to steer clear of climate policy, for three main reasons.

1.  Decarbonizing Goals Conflict with Natural Gas Act Purpose

First, the Biden administration’s NetZero agenda to decarbonize and degasify the U.S. electric power sector cannot lawfully be aligned with the Natural Gas Act. Biden’s goals conflict with the NGA’s “principal purpose,” which is to:

 “encourage the orderly development of plentiful supplies
of electricity and natural gas at reasonable prices.”

In addition, climate change is not a factor Congress authorized FERC to consider. The words “climate,” “carbon,” “greenhouse,” “global,” “warming,” “mitigate,” or any of their cognates do not occur in the Act.

2.  Infrastructure Emissions Do Not Threaten the Environment

Second, although the direct and indirect emissions of natural gas infrastructure may be “reasonably foreseeable,” the climate effects are not. FERC’s project reviews are governed by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires scrutiny of major federal actions “significantly affecting the human environment.” Even the emissions of the largest natural gas projects are too small to discernibly affect global climate, and no project’s “carbon footprint” is big enough to influence the fate or fortunes of any community, business, or human being anywhere in the world.

3.  Social Cost of Carbon Is Speculative and Subjective

Third, the social cost of carbon (SCC)—an estimate of the present value of the cumulative climate damages of an incremental ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—is too speculative and subjective, and too easily manipulated for political purposes, to be weighed in the same scales with an infrastructure project’s estimated economic benefits. The Biden administration’s SCC estimates are egregiously biased in favor of climate alarm and regulatory ambition, rendering any agency action that relies on them arbitrary and capricious.

Unsurprisingly, FERC did not take our advice, and proceeded in February to adopt an “interim” policy statement on NGA project review and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That stirred up controversy, including pushback by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Ranking Member John Barrasso (R-WY). As a result, FERC in March demoted its GHG policy statement from “interim” to “draft,” and extended the comment period until today, April 25.

Unlike several presenters at FERC’s November 2021 technical conference, the draft GHG policy statement does not advocate requiring SCC analysis in NGA determinations of public convenience and necessity. Neither, however, does FERC disavow an intent to require it in later policy statements. The Commission may simply be waiting for the Biden administration’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) to finalize its interim SCC estimates, or for courts to resolve Louisiana’s challenge to federal agencies’ use of those metrics.

The Commission’s draft GHG policy statement establishes a “rebuttable presumption that proposed projects with 100,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) emissions will be deemed to have a significant impact on climate change.” FERC also implies that it may condition project approval on the sponsor’s plans to “mitigate all or a portion of the project’s climate change impacts.”

The camel’s nose is already under the tent.

It is not hard to guess where this is going if FERC does not quickly reverse course. The usual suspects will pressure the Commission to:

(1) progressively lower climate significance thresholds,
(2) monetize undetectably small project-related climate “impacts” using agenda-driven SCC estimates, and
(3) either reject needed natural gas infrastructure projects outright or impose mitigation requirements that render them uneconomic.

This is bad policy, as Michaels, Dayaratna, and I explained in our January 7 comments. If an infrastructure project is commercially viable and helps ensure plentiful supplies of electricity and natural gas at reasonable prices (the NGA’s principal purpose), the Commission knows in advance that the project’s economic benefits far exceed its climate-related externalities. Therefore, no further investigation of the project’s GHG emissions is required, nor does it make sense to condition the certificate of public convenience and necessity on the project’s adoption of mitigation measures.

Conclusion

New research by Dayaratna (hereafter “Heritage analysis”) further confirms that conclusion. Using the U.S. government’s leading energy and climate policy models, the Heritage analysis demonstrates that banning construction of new U.S. pipelines would have a negligible effect on U.S. annual CO2 emissions through 2050 and, thus, a similarly negligible effect on global temperatures through 2100. The policy implication for FERC is clear. No level of overregulation or prohibition that regulators might apply to the development of U.S. natural gas pipelines could meaningfully affect the Earth’s climate.

Consequently, no regulation or prohibition of new natural gas pipelines could possibly be worth the economic losses imposed on construction companies, natural gas producers, and energy consumers.

See Also Seeking Climate and Energy Security

Elitist Lies About Inflation

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The editors at Issues and Insights reveal false and misleading statements by a leading elitist spokesperson, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.  The article is  See If You Can Follow Yellen’s Bouncing Inflation Ball.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said over the weekend that we’re going to have to “put up with inflation for a while longer,” which means that she has now held just about every possible — and almost always wrong — position on an issue about which she is supposedly an expert. Is it any wonder nobody trusts elites anymore?

Yellen was on CNBC over the weekend and, when asked whether inflation had peaked, said:

“Well, it may have peaked, but … I think the shocks emanating from this unjustified attack on Ukraine will prolong inflationary pressures. So, the outlook is uncertain. As you know, the Fed is taking steps to bring inflation down, but I think we will have to put up with high inflation for a while longer.”

Let’s leave aside Yellen’s dubious claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had any meaningful impact on inflation. Why would it? Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which was far more disruptive to the global oil market, bumped oil prices up for a short period but had no broader inflationary effect.

The Putin-is-to-blame for skyrocketing prices is one of team Biden’s big lies
meant to deflect blame. But the press never calls them on it.

No, what’s really troubling is the fact that Biden’s Treasury secretary has been so utterly clueless about inflation since joining his cabinet.

Let’s look at what Yellen has claimed about inflation since early last year and the actual results. The chart shows what inflation was doing when she made these statements.

  1. February 2021: “I’ve spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation, and I can tell you, we have the tools to deal with that risk if it materializes.”
  2. March 2021: “I don’t think it’s a significant risk. And if it materializes, we’ll certainly monitor for it, but we have tools to address it.”
  3. May 2021: “I don’t think there’s going to be an inflationary problem, but if there is, the Fed can be counted on.”
  4. June 2021: “Supply bottlenecks have developed that have caused inflation. I believe that they’re transitory, but that doesn’t mean they’ll go away over the next several months.”
  5. October 2021: “I don’t think we’re about to lose control of inflation.”
  6. November 2021: “If we want to get inflation down, I think continuing to make progress against the pandemic is the most important thing we can do.”
  7. January 2022: “If we’re successful in controlling the pandemic, I expect inflation to diminish over the course of the year and hopefully revert to normal levels by the end of the year around 2%.”
  8. February 2022: “I think people heard ‘transitory,’ and to them it meant a couple of months. Maybe a better word could have been chosen.”
  9. March 2022: “We’re likely to see another year in which 12-month inflation numbers remain very uncomfortably high.”

Keep in mind who we are talking about here. Yellen has a sterling resume. A doctorate in economics from Yale. Professorships at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. On the faculty of the London School of Economics. President of the Western Economic Association and vice president of the American Economic Association. Head of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve.

So how in the world can her pronouncements about inflation under President Joe Biden be as reliable as the weather forecast? Is her understanding of economics tainted by liberal ideology? Is she just doing the bidding of an incompetent and desperate Biden administration?

Does it matter? Yellen is a shining example of why so many in this country
feel betrayed by the people who claim lordship over them.