Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”

The Social Security Trustees just released their annual report on the system’s finances. The news is awful.

The system’s future benefit promises exceed its future payroll tax (FICA) revenues by a terrifying $59.8 trillion, that's over 2.5 times the size of the U.S. economy. 

Unfortunately, Social Security’s fiscal shortfall is just part of our nation’s long-term insolvency. The Congressional Budget Office's long-term fiscal projections of Uncle Sam’s overall fiscal gap — the present value of all projected federal outlays, including interest payments on official debt, less the present value of projected federal receipts is — hold your breath — in excess of 10 years of GDP.

● Read in The Hill

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

Next Monday, the Connecticut legislature will go into special session to vote on whether to approve Gov. Ned Lamont’s request to extend his extraordinary powers by continuing to declare two states of emergencies — one for public health and the other for civic preparedness. The governor declared these emergencies on March 10, 2020. He is asking for another 150 days until Feb. 15, 2022. That’ll be nearly two years of being in dual emergencies.

Thank you, Gov. Lamont, for your service, but I respectfully remind you Connecticut is the Constitution State. It is your role to address real emergencies and to share information as transparently and timely as possible with the people, so that we are equipped with the best and latest information to make our own decisions, which I believe does not require an extension of your emergency powers.

I am doing my job as a state representative to guard the role of the legislature in protecting individual rights. This has nothing to do with partisan politics; it has everything to do with abiding by the structures of government set forth in the Constitution. Any state representative who votes Yes on Monday to extend the governor’s powers for another 150 days is abrogating their constitutional duty to serve as a check on and a balance to executive powers.

● Read in Greenwich Time

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

World War II's totalitarian aggressors could not have been defeated without the war production of the United States and the superior use of the U.S. military, even as the country remained a vigorous democracy.

Bad as the epidemic may seem, there's no reason to let democracy be another one of its victims.

Benign as Governor Lamont has been with his emergency powers, legislators and the public have not yet been full participants in their deliberation, even as the epidemic is not half as serious as governmental and journalistic hysteria makes it seem, what with 99.8% of infected people recovering.

The "positivity" rate, emphasized by news organizations, is of little value. It is just a measure of those who recently chose to be tested, not a measure of the extent of infection in the state.

Deaths and hospitalizations have seemed far more valuable measures. But the death data doesn't show whether people died of the virus or merely with it.

● Read in Journal Inquirer

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

Energy prices are soaring in Europe, and the effects are rippling across the Atlantic. Blame anti-carbon policies of the kind that the Biden Administration wants to impose in the U.S.

Electricity prices in the U.K. this week jumped to a record £354 ($490) per megawatt hour, a 700% increase from the 2010 to 2020 average. Germany’s electricity benchmark has doubled this year. Last month’s 12.3% increase was the largest since 1974 and contributed to the highest inflation reading since 1993.

Other economies are experiencing similar spikes.

● Read in The Wall Street Journal

● Read <and comment here on The Red Line

Senate Republicans cleverly repartitioned president Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s $2 trillion tax-funded American Jobs Plan and his $2 trillion American Families Plan into a no-taxes $500 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that swing-district voters understand and like,

and a $3.5 trillion tax-funded grab-bag of social spending that swing voters don’t understand and hate -- and that Democrat Senator Joe Manchin now opposes, providing cover for moderate House Democrats to oppose as well.

Manchin's opposition and that of moderate House "Manchins" will reduce the scale of the grab-bag, if not scuttle it completely.

● Read on The Red Line

The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future. Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future. I disagree.

● Read in Wall Street Journal

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

President Joe Biden continues to live in an alternate universe in regard to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. As someone put it on Twitter, his message is: "The mission was a complete success" and "it's all my predecessor's fault."

● Read in The Day

● Read and comment here on The Red Line