Economy watch: Inflation’s Long-Lasting Pain
When it comes to inflation, “the word transitory started out as a forecast” and has now turned into a “punchline,” snarks Jason Trennert at RealClear Politics. The bill’s “coming due for nearly 13 years of ‘unconventional’ monetary policy” used to fix “a variety of issues, from social justice to rising sea levels, for which it is at best ill-equipped.” Add in “unrestrained deficit-spending to deal with a global pandemic and regulatory policies in the United States and Europe,” and it should be “of little surprise that the CPI has been running at levels of greater than 5% for six months.” Saddest of all is that there’s “no more regressive tax” and “no more potentially destabilizing political force” than inflation. “In the end, the poor always pay more.” And “once started, expansionary fiscal and monetary policies are very hard to stop without economic pain. Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you want, but you can never really leave.”
Researchers: Parents Are Key to 2022 Midterms
“School closures are persisting, and not just because of Covid-19,” observe Michael Hartney & Renu Mukherjee at City Journal — and their research shows that “could be devastating for Democrats” in the 2022 midterms. In a Virginia focus group after that state’s recent gubernatorial race, participants “cited school closures as their main motivation” for backing Republican Glenn Youngkin. And in Virginia’s 132 school districts, in which they compared Youngkin’s performance to Donald Trump’s in 2020, “closures were associated with significant movement toward the Republican”: Where schools were open for less than a month of in-person learning, “Youngkin outperformed Trump by nearly 2 percentage points.” Nor will parental frustrations abate soon. Neither party can afford to ignore “families who want to return to the pre-pandemic normal” — “brick-and-mortar school buildings functioning again in the old way.”
From the right: Humiliated by Jussie Smollett
“Now that Jussie Smollett has been found guilty of faking an anti-gay, racist hate crime against himself,” recall “how the left rushed to judgment” about his “absurd claim” because it was ideologically convenient, snipes PJ Media’s Matt Margolis. President Biden demanded “we no longer give this hate safe harbor.” Vice President Kamala Harris called the attack a “modern-day lynching,” while Sen. Cory Booker “suggested the incident was proof that Congress needed to pass an anti-lynching bill.” Democrats want “to believe the worst of this country and the worst of [Donald] Trump and his supporters.” But “will they now admit Jussie Smollett made them look like fools?”
Libertarian: Musk Gets Government Right
Tesla CEO Elon Musk “may have unseated free speech-loving warlock Jack Dorsey as America’s richest, staunchest government skeptic,” quips Reason’s Liz Wolfe. Musk thinks it would be better not to pass President Biden’s Build Back Better Bill, calling the federal budget deficit “insane” and opposing subsidies. Yet, while it’s good to hear him question government intervention, Musk has benefited handsomely from subsidies himself, “so this looks a bit like he’s pulling the ladder up behind him to stymie encroaching competitors.” Indeed, his business thrives on handouts, mandates and regulations. Still, Musk’s “suspect motivations” for ending subsidies “don’t make the substance of his comments less true.” When he says things like “the government is simply the biggest corporation,” it shows he’s thinking correctly.
Legal beat: Biden’s Vax Mandate Loses Again
A fourth federal court has ruled against one of President Biden’s vaccine mandates, notes Jonathan Turley at Fox News, this time finding he’d “exceeded his authority in mandating the vaccine for all federal contractors.” Expect a “showdown in the Supreme Court, where three justices have already expressed skepticism over the mandates.” White House confidence of victory in the end “remains an exercise of hope over experience in such litigation.” In all, as those three justices put it, “if human nature and history teach us anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Page
