Police Slowly Escort White Hearse Containing O.J. Simpson

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows.

Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.

The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity/Equity/Inclusion conglomerate.

Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.

During the disastrous C****-** lockdown, California governor Gavin Newsom pontificated about leveraging the quarantine to ensure greater e******y: “There is opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it [relates] to capitalism…We see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

Meanwhile, Newsom did not seem very “progressive” when he was caught in one of California’s most expensive restaurants dining with sidekick lobbyists while violating the very mask and social distancing rules he had mandated for 40 million others.

Newsom also bragged about social equity when he signed a new California law mandating $20 an hour for fast-food workers—while many of his own employees at his various company-controlled eateries made only $16 an hour.

And he allegedly gave a unique exemption from his wage law to one particular bakery/restaurant chain, Panera, whose owner is an old friend and major campaign contributor.

Newsom apparently feels that the more progressively he postures, the less he’ll be called out for his own hypocrisy and self-interested agendas.

In another egregious case, the now-imprisoned felon, Sam Bankman-Fried, may have been the greatest con artist in American history. He siphoned billions of dollars from his cryptocurrency company, destroying the fortunes of thousands when his multi-billion-dollar Ponzi empire collapsed.

How did Sam and his two Stanford law-professor parents manage to accumulate millions of dollars in resort properties and perks without getting caught until after their empire collapsed?

Answer: Sam showered millions of dollars on left-wing politicians to advance their progressive crusades. His parents justified this family giving as a form of “effective altruism.”

That catchy phrase masked the reality that his crusade for social justice was just an incredibly effective get-rich-quick scheme.

The Bankman-Fried family apparently reasoned that their devotion to this woke form of “altruism” would t***slate into riches for themselves, albeit bankruptcies for investors.

Another example: in Georgia’s Fulton County, District Attorney Fani Willis ran for office, promising to indict supposed right-wing monster Donald Trump.

She raised campaign money on her woke credentials. Often, when challenged, she played the race victim card.

Meanwhile, Willis hired as a special prosecutor her secret paramour, the incompetent Nathan Wade, although he had never tried a single felony or even criminal case.

She and Wade then went on expensive junkets. She claimed that she reimbursed him with cash that was, of course, unverifiable.

Given their woke ideology, both assumed they were entitled to splurge at taxpayers’ expense, offer likely-false testimony under oath, and violate canons of professional behavior for lawyers.

She wasn’t alone in her corruption. After the death of G****e F***d, the founders of the left-wing Black L***s M****r movement went on a house-buying rampage. The more corporations filled their coffers with millions, either from guilt or as protection money, the more new homes the directors purchased.

One co-founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a self-described Marxist, splurged by spending $3.2 million in B*M money to buy herself four upscale residences.

And the most radical Democratic members of Congress—the so-called Squad—apparently feel that the more they level accusations of r****m, the more they can profit without fearing any consequences for their wrongdoing.

One squad member, Rep. Ilhan Omar, redirected $2.8 million of her office’s allotted government money to her husband’s political consulting company.

Still another member, the radical l*****t Rep. Cori Bush, often harangued the country to defund the police. Now the FBI is investigating her for stealthily paying tens of thousands of campaign dollars to her own husband for “security.”

Woke and DEI activists may not necessarily be any more innately mediocre, corrupt, or conniving than other politicians and activists.

But they seem so, because they loudly broadcast that they are for “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion”—and thus assume themselves to be exempt from all scrutiny and free to profit in any way they please.

The woke/DEI project is enticing thousands of shysters, careerists, and mediocrities, all keen to enrich themselves on the premise that they are noble fighters for social justice who deserve immunity from any scrutiny.

How odd it is that America is wasting billions of dollars hiring DEI czars and electing woke politicians who so often accuse others of a multitude of sins, largely as a way of enriching themselves, hiding their own culpability, and making a mockery of the law.

11 WAYS BIDEN AND HIS HANDLERS ARE HELL-BENT ON DESTROYING AMERICA:

Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it? If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?

1. Wipe out a 2,000-mile border. Allow 10 million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal i*********n l*ws. Let in toxic drugs that k**l 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support to those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as r****ts and xenophobes.

2. Run up $35 trillion in national debt. Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.

3. Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China. Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without adequate response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to l*****t governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the U.N., ICC and WHO to atone for past American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.

4. In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation. Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Reboot all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion and commendation.

5. Recalibrate violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent k**ler and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if they are slain police officers.

6. Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, g****r, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation. Deliberately impugn as r****ts and i**********nists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population—so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their commander-in-chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.

7. Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents. Use b****t removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than e******ns to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court justices, and attack them personally by name.

8. Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electronic media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship and coercion. Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.

9. Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas. Substitute inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices nearly bankrupt the middle class.

10. Marry late, but preferably not at all. Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered. Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.

11. Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers.Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissar bloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate comparative high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.

Why could those controlling the president be doing all of the above?

1. They are delusional and think their socialist and g*******t agendas are working and will save us.

2. They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.

3. They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.

4. They have no agenda. They are aimless fools and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.

5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.

There is cause for hope among this nihilist remaking of America: the people are fed up and will demand an accounting in the fall.—Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1926

How Monetary Policy Got behind the Curve—and How to Get Back
Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and John B. Taylor
Published: Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2023
Pages: xxvi, 398
Reviewed by: Thomas L. Hogan; American Institute for Economic Research


It is now widely accepted that the Federal Reserve’s overly expansionary monetary policy was a primary cause of a******lly high inflation in 2021–2023. Many questions, however, remain unanswered: Why was the Fed so wrong? Was fiscal policy also to blame? Can we prevent such mistakes in the future?

A book of essays edited by Michael Bordo, John Cochrane, and John Taylor considers these important questions. The book, which I will refer to as Behind the Curve, is a compilation of papers from a 2023 conference at the Hoover Institution. It provides a valuable combination of perspectives from academics and Fed officials. Rather than summarizing each of the fourteen chapters, I will discuss the main themes of the book with references to specific chapters.

Be warned: this is a book for academics. Though a few chapters are general public policy discussions, many are filled with equations or assume a sophisticated understanding of macroeconomic models. That said, the main themes can be understood without getting into the math. Hoover previously hosted a debate on what John Taylor dubbed the “r-star wars.” If you get that joke, you’ll probably be fine.

What caused the high inflation of 2021–2023? While the media obsesses over supply-chain problems and “greed-flation,” these topics are little covered in Behind the Curve. Most chapters simply assume the problem was monetary in nature. Ricardo Reis discusses how Fed officials’ misinterpretation of supply shocks early in the recovery caused them to keep monetary policy “extremely loose” (p. 224) as well as other factors such as their belief that inflation expectations would stay anchored, loss of credibility, and faulty assumptions about changes in r-star, which refers to “an equilibrium between savings and investment in the overall economy” (p. 221). Even former Fed Vice-Chair Richard Clarida admits that, while supply-side factors were evident in early 2021, the monetary factors should have been clear by late in the year.

One interesting question is whether and to what degree fiscal policy played a role in creating inflation. Lawrence Summers has consistently blamed fiscal policy for high inflation. He was a notable critic of the Biden administration’s spending programs, which he argued would drive up the price level. Cochrane, a proponent of the fiscal theory of the price level, explains with simple models how misinterpreting expectations could have misled Fed officials regarding the origins and persistence of inflation. He then turns to what he sees as its main cause: “the $5 trillion fiscal helicopter drop of 2020–21” (p.112). Tyler Goodspeed labels fiscal expansion as the “essential” causal component of inflation. Monetary policy, he says, could not have been the primary cause, although his short chapter does not thoroughly explore the monetary counterfactual. George Hall and Thomas Sargent assess the magnitude of C***d-era fiscal expansion relative to World Wars I and II, although Ellen McGrattan points out that recent spending mostly came in the form of t***sfer payments and subsidies.

Are t***sfer payments “monetary” policy if the debt issued to support them is monetized by the Fed? Cochrane describes this as fiscal policy because of the federal government’s role in distributing the funds. Monetarists might say it was a monetary injection that caused inflation, but the fiscal action of directing funds straight into peoples’ bank accounts made the distribution more effective, working as a “helicopter drop” in Milton Friedman’s famous metaphor. The distinction is important not only for how we understand the economy and study it in our economic models but also in how we assign authority for economic policy to the central bank or federal government. I hope to see more research on this topic. How, for example, would the price level and economy have been affected if fiscal spending had been distributed by other means, such as tax breaks, or if the Fed had not monetized the majority of the debt issued to support these fiscal expansions?

Was the Fed “behind the curve” with its slow response to high inflation? Most authors agree it was. Clarida, Summers, and Taylor all argue the Fed should have acted sooner. Michael Bordo and Mickey Levy document that the Fed’s response was slower than to other periods of inflation but was comparable to the 1970s. Cochrane, while attributing the source of inflation to fiscal policy, maintains that a monetary response was warranted, even if its effects would have been muted by fiscal expansion. The Fed, he notes, was clearly behind the curve since even as late as March 2022, the Summary of Economic Projections shows that Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members still believed that “inflation will almost entirely disappear on its own, without the need for any period of high interest rates to bring down inflation” (p. 71, emphasis in original).

Despite this evidence, some Fed officials say the Fed was not behind the curve. James Bullard and Christopher Waller, who at the time of writing were respectively the President of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a Governor of the Federal Reserve System, independently argue that the Fed took action as early as September of 2021 by undertaking forward guidance to set market expectations of its future interest rate policy. Bullard (p. 324) shows that interest rates on two-year Treasuries began rising in October of 2021, which, he says, “increased substantially in advance of tangible Fed action.” Waller says (p. 340) that the FOMC’s September 2021 statement “indicated tapering was coming soon.” Including forward guidance, he argues, we should view rate hikes as “effectively beginning in September 2021.”

These arguments would be more convincing if forward guidance had indeed prevented inflation. It did not. If “behind the curve” means only that the Fed was doing something in late 2021, then perhaps these Fed officials’ arguments make sense. But the claim that the Fed was “behind the curve” is commonly understood to mean it was not doing enough to prevent high inflation. Since their policies failed to prevent high inflation, it seems obvious that the Fed was, indeed, behind the curve.

Randal Quarles, former Fed Vice-Chair of Supervision, has a different take. He agrees with Clarida that the FOMC should have raised interest rates sooner, in September or November of 2021. He emphasizes, however, that this was not an error of the Fed’s monetary policy framework. If properly implemented, the Fed’s flexible average inflation targeting framework “would not simply have allowed the Fed to move in September, it would have required it” (p. 330, emphasis in original). Quarles attributes the Fed’s error to “a good faith misapplication” due to “the sequencing of balance sheet and interest rate policy” (p. 330). The Fed had already committed to slowing its asset purchases at a pace that would continue until March of 2022. It was therefore, according to Quarles, unable to raise interest rates before that time so as not to implement contradictory policies.

This argument rings hollow for two reasons. First, the FOMC could simply have ended its asset purchases sooner than planned. Fed Chair Jerome Powell was hesitant to curtail asset purchases since he had promised “ample warning” before a change in policy. However, breaking this promise by tightening policy would likely have made the Fed appear more credible in the eyes of the public, not less. Second, Quarles prefers the Fed retain discretion in its asymmetric target rather than a “poindexterish” over-specification of monetary rules by “folks in their lab coats” (p. 327). While I, too, am skeptical of the “scientism,” to use Hayek’s term, of over-specified rules, I find Quarles’s position ironic given that he cites the Fed’s deviation from its stated policy as the main mistake that led to high inflation. He blames inflation on the Fed’s discretionary actions while also arguing it should maintain discretion.

If the Fed was behind the curve, would monetary rules effectively prevent such mistakes in the future? To no surprise, Taylor (p. 50) argues that “[c]entral banks should start now with rules the market understands.” Summers favors “resoluteness” over rules, citing the failure of flexible average inflation target as an example of explicit rules becoming “problematic” (p. 60). Monika Piazzesi similarly emphasizes the need for Fed credibility (p. 366) and acknowledges that a Taylor rule would accomplish this goal (p. 368). Bordo and Leavy (p. 176) recommend striking the “asymmetric” aspect of the Fed’s average inflation target, while Burns (p. 181) chides Fed officials for their “glib confidence” in their discretionary actions.

I enjoyed Behind the Curve both for the analytical discussions and the insider perspectives from Fed officials. It is a useful resource that I will cite in my own work. I hope others will find it a helpful starting point for future research.

Thomas L. Hogan
American Institute for Economic Research

Too much free time on your hands. I like insulting snarky and snarly people because they are honest. There are a lot of insulting people on OPP. So what!

Hi Lon,

Hope you are well.

That's why I don't live in Houston or New York. But no one in their right mind is moving to New York. Especially after State AG James and NY DA Bragg have declared open war on the wealthy.

This means you have owned the home for some time instead of paying 1% of the current assessed value. You can thank CA Proposition 13 for that, which the l*****ts have been trying to dismantle piece by piece for 46 years. Prop 13 came into being because of the inflationary 1970s, Jimmy Carter, and Jerry Brown. I watched counties erode the savings over the years on property taxes with all kinds of new fees and surcharges meant to circumvent Prop 13.
The Democrat demagogues in CA have been incrementally whittling away at Prop 13 for decades because they never met a tax they didn't like as long as other people are paying it. If you are so concerned with equity, pay the full 1% on your next tax bill to be on par with your new neighbors who have just purchased a home in your neighborhood. That's the liberal/l*****t thing to do!

Oh, and CA has an income tax rate that tops out at 14%. But 50% of the state pays no state income tax. CA has the highest % of homeless, more than 1/3 of all homeless people, and more i*****l a***ns than any state. These are the people who rely on lots of free services provided by local, state, and federal governments. These aren't the 1%ers who pay 50% of the revenue collected by the state, and who, by the way, are leaving the state. How much income tax do you pay in CA? I'll venture a guess and say none.

Anyway, you are trying to defend the indefensible. The tax system is inherently unfair to rich and poor alike. The problem is that the government thinks taxpayers are a blank check to provide as much as they want to spend and to attract v**es for their party.

https://rumble.com/v4ol3y3-how-democrats-are-cooking-the-books-on-crime.html

L*****t
will
believe
anything
except
the
t***h.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill

A lie gets halfway around the world before the t***h has a chance to get its pants on.
Winston Churchill

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-93bc5-1e274aca

StupidPOS

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of "The End of Everything,” to discuss Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee claiming the moon is made of gas, her confusion about planets and stars, our embarrassing elected officials, plus(the new a******n ruling in Arizona, Democrats making a******n a major issue in 2024, the radical a******n comments from l*****t politicians and celebrities, ignorant arguments we're seeing on the right about Christians and Israel, why America has an interest to support Israel, how Ukraine and Israel are totally different conflicts, rise of crime and inflation in America, President Biden claiming democracy is in danger, VP Harris agreeing this may be the last e******n ever, the comparison between the J****** 6th r**t and the 2020 B*M r**ts, and more.)