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Inflation Is “Like Alcoholism.” How Drunk Are We? Our Money Supply Rose 40% in 4 Years

By Selwyn Duke

When asked in a recent ABC interview about how she’d combat higher prices, Kamala Harris had no answer. Instead, the Democratic presidential nominee went on about how she was raised a “middle class” kid (questionable) and, inexplicably, about how people in her neighborhood took pride in their lawns. But there’s a startling fact that Harris, Donald Trump, or anyone tackling this matter could and should mention.

The money supply has been increased more than 40 percent just since 2020.

Question: What happens when more than $6 trillion in extra money is floating around chasing approximately the same number of goods?

We’re “Going Bankrupt,” Warns Musk: In June, 76% of Income Taxes Went to Finance the Debt

By Selwyn Duke

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet. If the U.S. government had taken this age-old advice, we perhaps wouldn’t be in a dire financial situation epitomized by a shocking statistic:

In June, 76 percent of all personal income tax revenue was needed to pay interest on our $35 trillion national debt.

This helps clarify why, with the federal government having become a legalized counterfeiting operation, more than 80 percent of all the dollars in existence have been printed just since 2020. The bottom line?

Feminist Nobel Laureate Economist Says Men Earn More Due to “Greedy Work”

By Selwyn Duke

Asian-descent Americans have long enjoyed notably higher incomes than their white countrymen do. It’s also true that men earn more money than women do. Now, question:

Are both, neither, or just one of these wage gaps seen as a “problem” to be “remedied”?

If you answered “just one” — and know which one it is — then you just may be acquainted with a fashionable modern form of discrimination: treating some inter-group disparities as more equal than others.

Minimal Thinking Kills: California’s Minimum Wage Continues to Destroy Restaurants

By Selwyn Duke

Would you rather have some jobs available at $12 an hour or no jobs available at $20 an hour? The answer may vary depending on whether you’re a business owner or job seeker — or politician or bureaucrat.

Regardless, the opening question, which is of the kind late economist Walter E. Williams often asked, should be pondered with news that California’s new $20 minimum wage is continually claiming victims. The latest is a San Francisco McDonald’s franchisee who’d been in business for 30 years.

This pales in comparison, though, to one of the new minimum wage’s first victims: Rubio’s Coastal Grill. That chain is closing 48 Golden State locations — more than a third of its 134 remaining restaurants across California, Arizona, and Nevada.

Trumping Trump: Political Victory Via Economic Destruction

By Selwyn Duke

Political winds are giving The Donald the Trump bump, with the real-estate mogul taking second place in polls on the 2016 presidential race. But economic winds are a different matter, with the brash businessman becoming the latest American targeted for destruction by the politically correct powers-that-be.

Donald Trump (shown), who officially declared his White House run June 16, recently took second place in national, New Hampshire, and Iowa polling for the GOP nomination (in Iowa he’s tied with renowned physician Ben Carson). But after making comments about the criminal nature of far too many illegal migrants, he has lost a certain place: in the hearts of some business interests. NBC dropped The Apprentice franchise and the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, Spanish-language network Univision has also dropped Miss Universe, Macy’s has kicked his clothing line to the curb, and Mayor “Bolshevik” Bill de Blasio announced that NYC was reviewing its contracts with Trump.

Read the rest here.

Obama Advisor Gruber in 2009: ObamaCare Unaffordable, Rationing (a.k.a. Death Panels) Inevitable

By Selwyn Duke

ObamaCare is technically known as the Affordable Care Act, but it has now been revealed that legislation architect Jonathan Gruber admitted in 2009 that the bill would be anything but affordable. In fact, he said it lacked cost controls and that, inevitably, certain individuals would have to be denied care — all while Barack Obama was telling voters just the opposite.

Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, instantly became one of America’s most disliked elitists early last month when a 2013 video clip was uncovered in which he said that “a lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” had enabled ObamaCare to pass. Now an October 2009 policy brief, presented by the Daily Caller, provides more details of the deception.

Read the rest here.

“Everything is Awesome” in America? So Says Liberal Writer

By Selwyn Duke

“Everything Is Awesome!” is the title of a recent Politico piece on the American economy by liberal Michael Grunwald. And although it’s not followed by LEGO song lyric “Everything is awesome when we're living our dream,” some would say he certainly is dreaming.

Much like the children’s movie Grunwald seems to be quoting, the author opens his piece with what many would say is pure fiction, writing, “Good news! The U.S. economy grew at a rollicking 5 percent rate in the third quarter.” Yes, that’s what the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis now tells us; what it’s not telling us is that the rate is the result of creative accounting. In fact, it’s a cooked figure that was predicted by Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden six months ago.

Read the rest here.

Forget North Korea: Watch Out for Chinese Censorship of Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Pudgy and profligate little Kim Jong-un must be swelling with pride. With the FBI now concluding that North Korea was responsible for the recent computer hacking of Sony Corporation, it appears that Kim has succeeded in projecting power beyond his borders in, essentially, censoring a Western film. That work, of course, is The Interview, the Columbia Pictures action comedy portraying the rotund dictator in a negative light.

Many have castigated Sony — Columbia’s parent company — for capitulation. Pundit Linda Chavez likened the behemoth’s folding to Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, writing that the two of them “are on the same page when it comes to appeasing dictators.” Political maven Newt Gingrich tweeted, “With the Sony collapse America has lost its first cyberwar. This is a very [sic] very dangerous precedent.” And both may be correct. Nonetheless, there is something certainly not unprecedented: Hollywood’s appeasement of dictatorial regimes.

Most movie-goers don’t know it, but many of the films on which they spend American dollars have been filtered by Chinese censors — by Beijing’s powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), to be precise.

Read the rest here.

Obama Advisor Jonathan Gruber: Abortion Saves Government Money

By Selwyn Duke

ObamaCare conspirator Jonathan Gruber has gotten 15 minutes of fame by being America’s most cheeky liar of the moment. Now he’s getting bonus minutes for being, critics say, a cost-benefit-analysis abortionist — and, perhaps, an advocate for euthanasia.

At issue is a 1997 research paper Gruber co-authored entitled “Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the ‘Marginal Child’?” In it, he and his collaborators advance the thesis that abortion saves government money by killing off poor people — though he doesn’t quite put it in those stark terms. Quoting how the paper actually does put it while grilling Gruber during Tuesday’s Committee on Oversight & Government Reform hearing, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said to the MIT economist, “On page 20 you conclude that ‘abortion legalization appears to be associated with an improvement in the average living circumstances and birth outcomes among a birth cohort.’ And on page 26, you state that your research indicates ‘that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare payments through 1994.’” The congressman then asked Gruber, “Is providing more access to abortion, is that a worthy social outcome to achieve cost savings for the government?”

To again put matters in stark terms, Massie was asking if it was good policy to kill certain unborn babies to save money.

Read the rest here.

E-mails Reveal Obama’s Morality Police Are Targeting Lawful Businesses

By Selwyn Duke

It’s an example, in essence, of legislating from the bureaucratic cubicle. A House committee has discovered e-mails showing that officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation schemed to destroy lawful businesses they found morally objectionable.

The vehicle through which this is done is Operation Choke Point; this is an Obama administration effort ostensibly designed to “choke off” access to the U.S. financial system to illegal operations, but it’s also being applied to legal ones that certain ideologues personally dislike. Its primary target is the short-term lending industry, but its other victims include entities such as firearms and ammunition merchants, home-based charities, coin dealers, and purveyors of pharmaceutical drugs — lawful enterprises all.

The e-mails were revealed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (HOGRC), which released a 20-page investigative report on Monday explaining how the FDIC worked hand-in-glove with the Department of Justice to implement Operation Choke Point.

Read the rest here.