The Dumbing Of America

Our failing education system is leading us down a dangerous road.

by Larry Sand for American Greatness

America is in the midst of an education crisis, ranging from newborns to college students, and it is ubiquitous. In an under-reported story from August, a study by researchers at five universities found that babies born during the COVID pandemic show reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance.Babies who came into the world before the coronavirus had an IQ score averaging 100, but the test scores of those born during the pandemic fell sharply to around 78.

And those who were already out of the oven when COVID—and our overwrought reaction to it—became a reality are not in great shape either. Researchers from McKinsey found that by the end of the 2020-21 school year, students were, on average, four to five months behind where they have been in the past, and low-income and minority kids were disproportionately harmed in math and reading. Additionally, the latest American Family Survey, released in October, revealed that nearly 20 percent of parents said that their children’s grades worsened during the pandemic and nearly one-third reported declines in learning.

But wait, it gets worse. Even before the pandemic, reading achievement was going downhill. As reported by Hechinger, U.S. fourth graders in 2016 slid seven points on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international reading test. “Then, fourth and eighth graders—particularly eighth graders—posted lower scores on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a benchmark test that is taken every two years by both age groups.”

So, the question becomes, what can we do to right the ship? Sadly, those in charge are clueless, have a political agenda, are greedy, or all the above. One cohort wants to change the way we grade. Joe Feldman, a former teacher and administrator, and now an “educational grading consultant” has written “Grading for Equity.” In the book, Feldman asserts, “Our traditional grading practices have always harmed our traditionally underserved students.” He adds, “But now because the number of students being harmed was so much greater, it got people more aware of it and ready to tackle this issue.”

In other words, we need to grade on factors other than achievement. On cue, this has been picked up by the Los Angeles Unified School District, where guidance now says “academic grades should not be based on attendance, including unexcused absences, late work, engagement or behavior, which can be reflected in separate ‘citizenship’ or ‘work habits’ marks that do not count toward a student’s GPA.”

While some of the new L.A. guidelines are sensible, like letting students retake a test they may have failed the first time, most are quite damaging. Work habits and deadlines matter. Ignoring them or moving them into an amorphous grading area does a great disservice to the student. It certainly doesn’t prepare them for the real world, where lack of attention to these matters can result in job loss.

Perhaps the most glaring area for reform attempts is in math, and California is leading the way. In the proposed 2022 draft revision of the California Department of Education’s “Mathematics Framework,” the chapter on “Teaching for Equity and Engagement” includes this language: “Empowering students with mathematics also includes removing the high stakes of errors and sending the message that learning is always unfinished and that it is safe to take mathematical risks. This mind-set creates the conditions for students to develop a sense of ownership over their mathematical thinking and their right to belong to the discipline of mathematics.” The draft also suggests that math should not be colorblind, and that teachers should use lessons to explore social justice issues—by looking out for gender stereotypes in word problems, applying math concepts to topics like immigration, inequality, etc.

As John McWhorter notes, the above is an artful way of saying that “diverse” kids should not be “saddled with the onerous task of having to get the actual answers.” Accordingly, nearly 1,000 experts in math instruction and application have signed an open letter in which they trash the new proposed framework, maintaining it could devastate learning for the state’s 6 million kids in California’s public schools.

American history is in no better shape. With the advent of a state-mandated Ethnic Studies class in high school, the equity zealots in California are going to town. In an extended piece in the Los Angeles Times, Melissa Gomez details what will be on the menu in many school districts. For example, “Eurocentric history” is on the chopping block. The “insensitive use of their culture for sport team mascots,” the disastrous results of “settler colonialism,” etc., will be part of the curriculum. In keeping with the spirit of the times, one of the article’s featured teachers, Melina Melgoza, a high school teacher at the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles, starts her class with “students completing a social-emotional learning check-in with their feelings.”

The miseducation continues right into college. Researchers have found that while grades and graduation rates are up on college campuses, student test scores do not warrant the increases. They explain that the probable reason for the disparity is quite simply grade inflation. “The recent policy focus on college completion rates seems a likely contributor to increases in average GPAs. As schools and departments face increased scrutiny and, in some cases, increased funding incentives, they may respond by increasing graduation rates. Changing standards of degree receipt is a low-cost way to increase graduation rates. And in fact, graduation rates increased sharply at public four-year schools and community colleges, which rely on tax dollars and can be affected by states’ performance-based funding rules.”

American students have been and continue to be egregiously short-changed due to a hysterical response to COVID, agenda-driven learning, the lowering of standards, and greed. Collectively, we all will suffer greatly for this dysfunctional state unless changes are made in a hurry. If not, our country will be unrecognizable in the not-too-distant future.

X22, And we Know, and more-Nov 23

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news:

Important: https://www.bitchute.com/video/ccx5KvDKhKUY/

Kyle Rittenhouse And Every Able-Bodied Man Had A Moral Obligation To Protect Kenosha

Any able-bodied man over 16 years old had a moral obligation to defend Kenosha against vandals, looters, and arsonists attacking while police stood down.

posted by Evita Duffy at The Federalist

Despite his acquittal, the left continues to smear Kyle Rittenhouse as a bloodthirsty, “Call of Duty”-playing white supremacist. But if you were in the city of Kenosha, as I was, when the riots erupted, you would know that Rittenhouse was hardly a rogue vigilante. He was one of many brave Kenoshan men who took up arms to protect their families, businesses, and beloved city when the government failed to. 

Indeed, despite desperate pleas for help, Gov. Tony Evers refused to deploy adequate numbers of national guardsmen to protect the city from rioters wielding guns and fire. After 24 hours of receiving requests for aid, Evers had still sent fewer troops to Kenosha than he did to Milwaukee during the NBA finals. Local law enforcement was quickly overwhelmed.     

By the second night of rioting, streams of out-of-state professional Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters had flooded into the city. At the time, I wrote that Kenosha looked like “something I had only seen in photographs of war-torn countries.”

Grossly outnumbered, law enforcement had only enough manpower to protect public buildings in the town’s center. “They were so busy down there saving their courthouse, well what about this? I’m a taxpayer, too” said Sam, an Indian immigrant who owns a torched family-run car dealership in downtown Kenosha, two blocks from the courthouse. 

Evers watched thugs and arsonists destroy businesses and terrorize Kenoshans for another 48 hours before he reluctantly agreed to accept help from President Trump and the federal government. He let Kenosha burn because he thought he could blame the unrest on Trump and enhance the political fortunes of the Democrat Party in the 2020 presidential election.  

When the political fire instead turned on him, he finally changed course, but for many residents, it was too late. “Governor Evers has a huge sense of urgency for mask mandates, but when our town is burning to the flippin’ ground, he had zero sense of urgency,” said Kimberly Warner, a single mom who owns two businesses in downtown Kenosha. “He allowed our town to suffer and burn.”

Evers’s inaction resulted in $50 million in property damage that affected 100 businesses, including 40 that were put out of business for good.

It was in the face of all this destruction and turmoil that Rittenhouse decided to defend his community—yes, contrary to what the hacks at MSNBC and CNN want you to believe, Kenosha is Kyle’s community. In the daylight hours of the fateful night that changed his life, Rittenhouse was volunteering to scrub BLM graffiti off a local high school. That night, he told a reporter why he was in Kenosha—to offer medical assistance and be ready to “run[] into harm’s way” to protect people and property. 

Rittenhouse was not alone. When I was in Kenosha, I observed countless men standing with baseball bats, handguns, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns in front of their businesses and homes. In fact, my now-fiancé, who accompanied me while I was reporting, was also armed. You had to be.

Chuck, a tire shop owner, spent every night of the riots on his roof guarding his shop “with guns.” An exhausted yet vigilant Chuck glared into my iPhone camera at the time and said to the rioters, “Come to my shop and I’ll blow your heads off.” 

One of the greatest examples of bravery during the riots was Robert Cobb, a 70-year-old long-time Kenosha man who was viciously beaten by BLM rioters. Cobb saw looters stealing from the 100-year-old Danish Brotherhood and simply could not stand by. 

He tried to keep the horde of criminals at bay with a fire extinguisher, hoping to force them to take their masks off so they could be identified later. Rioters sneak-attacked him, though, leaving Cobb with a jaw broken in three places, a swollen eye, and stitches to a head wound. “He was trying to defend his building and they beat the s–t out of him!” the videographer sobbed in a clip that captured the assault.

Democrats in the corporate media want you to believe that citizens not only shouldn’t arm themselves in defense of their communities but that they cannot legally do so. Make no mistake, this lie is meant to justify Democrats’ continued attack on the American people’s right to bear arms. Under the Second Amendment, the citizens of Kenosha were entirely justified and legally permitted to protect themselves and their hometown, especially because law enforcement could not.  

More importantly, it was Rittenhouse’s moral duty and that of all able-bodied men over the age of 16 to defend Kenosha against the vandals, looters, and arsonists who were destroying the city. 

That is why Democrats and their allies in the media want you to believe that Rittenhouse and other Kenoshans who stood up for themselves are murderous white supremacists. These brave citizens and their “toxic masculinity” represent an existential threat to the left’s authoritarian aims. They simply cannot allow average Americans to believe they can exercise their right to bear arms and protect themselves without the government’s permission. 

Rittenhouse found himself caught in the chaos. Video evidence showed him defending himself with a semi-automatic rifle against angry, gun-wielding, rioting convicted felons and child rapists. Rittenhouse ultimately fatally shot two men and wounded another, in what has now been ruled by a jury an act of self-defense.

“I didn’t intend to kill them. I intended to stop the people who were attacking me,” Rittenhouse said. “I did what I had to do to stop the person who was attacking me.” The truth is, Rittenhouse could have been any of my fellow Wisconsinites that night. The city was in flames and the state had abdicated its responsibility to protect its citizens. In the face of this crisis, Rittenhouse did what he had to do. 

The Kenosha rioting showed America that you don’t have to cower in fear like people in Portland and Chicago. Kenoshans refused to be helpless victims when Marxist and race agitators descended on their city. Men like Rittenhouse tried to defend their hometown. For that, they should be commended as the heroes they are.

“Going Cashless” Isn’t as Easy as It Seems

"Going Cashless" Isn't as Easy as It Seems

Frank Shostak for Mises.org

Many economic commentators are in favor of phasing out cash. They are of the view that cash provides support to the shadow economy and permits tax evasion. It is also held that in times of economic shocks that push the economy into a recession the rising demand for cash exacerbates the downturn—it becomes a factor of instability. Rather than spend money and boost aggregate demand, the increased demand for cash works against this. Consequently, it is argued that individuals’ access to cash should be curtailed in order to minimize the potential negatives that cash can pose to economy’s health.

Furthermore, it is held that in the modern world there is hardly any need for cash since most transactions can be settled by means of electronic money transfer.

The Emergence of Money 

According to mainstream economics, the correct definition of money is not something permanent but flexible. Most economists hold that since the early 1980’s, as a result of financial deregulation, the nature of financial markets has changed and consequently the past definitions of money no longer hold. The past definition of money, it is held, is also likely to be affected by the expected introduction of the cryptocurrency. Is this is however the case?

The purpose of a definition is to present the essence and the distinguishing characteristic of the subject we are trying to identify. The subject matter of a definition is what the fundamentals of a particular entity are.

To establish the definition of money we have to ascertain how a money-using economy came about. Money emerged as a result of the fact that barter could not support the market economy. A butcher who wanted to exchange his meat for fruit might have difficulties finding a fruit farmer who wanted his meat, while the fruit farmer who wanted to exchange his fruit for shoes might not be able to find a shoemaker who wanted his fruit.

The distinguishing characteristic of money is that it is the general medium of exchange. It has evolved from the most marketable commodity.

On this Ludwig von Mises wrote,

There would be an inevitable tendency for the less marketable of the series of goods used as media of exchange to be one by one rejected until at last only a single commodity remained, which was universally employed as a medium of exchange; in a word, money.

Similarly, Murray N. Rothbard wrote that

[j]ust as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media—in almost all exchanges—and these are called money.

Since the general medium of exchange emerged from a wide range of commodities, money must be such a commodity. According to Rothbard,

Money is not an abstract unit of account, divorceable from a concrete good; it is not a useless token only good for exchanging; it is not a “claim on society”; it is not a guarantee of a fixed price level. It is simply a commodity.

Moreover, as Mises notes, “an object cannot be used as money unless, at the moment when its use as money begins, it already possesses an objective exchange value based on some other use.”

Why? Rothbard explains:

In contrast to directly used consumers’ or producers’ goods, money must have pre-existing prices on which to ground a demand. But the only way this can happen is by beginning with a useful commodity under barter, and then adding demand for a medium to the previous demand for direct use (e.g., for ornaments, in the case of gold).

Money is that for which all other goods and services are traded. This fundamental characteristic of money must be contrasted with those of other goods. For instance, food supplies necessary energy to human beings, while capital goods permit the expansion of infrastructure that in turn permits the production of a larger quantity of goods and services.

Through an ongoing selection process over thousands of years, people settled on gold as money. Gold served as the standard money.

In today’s monetary system, the money supply is no longer gold but coins and notes issued by the government and the central bank.

Consequently, coins and notes constitute the standard money, known as cash, that is employed in transactions. But note that the essence of money remains intact, i.e., it is that for which all other goods and services are traded.

Distinction between Claim and Credit Transactions

At any point in time, an individual can keep his money in his wallet, somewhere at home, or deposit the money with a bank. In depositing his money, an individual never relinquishes his ownership over the money. No one else is expected to make use of it.

When Joe deposits his money with a bank, he continues to have an unlimited claim against it and is entitled to take charge of it at any time. Consequently, these deposits, labeled demand deposits, are part of money.

If in an economy individuals hold $10,000 in cash at any point in time, we would say that the money supply in this economy is $10,000.

Now, if some individuals have stored $2,000 in demand deposits, the total money supply will still remain $10,000: $8,000 in cash and $2,000 in demand deposits—that is, $2,000 cash is stored in bank demand deposits. Finally, if individuals deposit their entire stock of cash, the total money supply will remain $10,000, all of it in demand deposits.

This must be contrasted with a credit transaction, in which the lender of money relinquishes his claim over the money for the duration of the loan. As a result, in a credit transaction, money is transferred from a lender to a borrower. A credit transaction does not alter the amount of money. If Bob lends $1,000 to Joe, the money is transferred from Bob’s demand deposits or from Bob’s wallet to Joe’s possession.

Electronic Money Transfer and Money

An electronic money transfer is a particular way of using existing money. For instance, by means of electronic devices Bob can transfer his $1,000 to Joe.

Note that the electronic money transfer can take place because the $1,000 in cash exists. Without the existence of the $1,000 cash, the transfer from Bob’s demand deposits to Joe’s would not be possible. After all, existing cash must be transferred.

This is similar to money transfer by means of a check. When Bob writes a check for $1,000 to Joe, he instructs his bank to transfer the $1,000 to Joe’s demand deposits. Obviously, the transfer of the $1,000 cannot take place if Bob does not have the $1,000 at his bank.

The fact that various electronic money transfers are taking place does not mean that we do not require cash any longer. On the contrary, the fact that the cash exists enables electronic money transfers to take place.

The so-called electronic money is not money as such but a particular way of using existing money. Thus, by means of electronic devices the buyer of goods can transfer money to the seller of goods. At the end of the transaction, the seller of goods knows that the amount of cash in his bank account has risen because of the sale of goods. At any time, he is entitled to take the money out of his demand deposits.

Now, if the central banks work toward the removal of cash, i.e., money, without replacing it with some other form of money which is linked to the present money, this is going to undermine the medium of exchange and the market economy.

Conclusion

So-called electronic money is not money as such, but a particular way of using existing money, which is coin and notes, i.e., cash. The removal of cash, as advised by various experts, is going to undermine the market economy and result in a drastic decline in individuals' well-being.

Observe that those experts that recommend the removal of cash imply that in the modern world we can make electronic transfers of money without the physical existence of money. In the real world, however, to facilitate the transfer of cash, i.e., money, one must have the cash in order to make the transfer. After all, there must be something that can be transferred.

Regardless of how sophisticated the monetary system is, individuals require a medium of exchange in order to facilitate transactions. Regardless of the sophistication of the monetary system, money will remain that for which all other goods and services are traded.

I Watched The Nation’s ‘Top Scientists’ Lie About COVID And Get Away With It

After watching this debacle on TV, I knew full well what was coming later that day. The media would latch on to this and create even more public panic.

posted by Scott Atlas at The Federalist

This is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” which releases December 7

[CDC Director Robert] Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23 immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.

The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.

First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.

Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.

Some antibody totals were pulled from several months earlier, before many of those states had experienced a significant number of cases. It therefore grossly underestimated the number of cases that had already occurred. The data was simply not valid, but you needed to pay attention to the details.

More importantly, Redfield’s basic claim was fundamentally flawed. The conclusion that serum antibody testing revealed the entire population of those protected from COVID was counter to an entire body of published literature and contrary to fundamental knowledge of immunology, including other coronavirus infections.

It was well known that antibody tests showed one cross-section in time—they were transient—even though immune protection can last. From studies on SARS-2 and most other viruses, antibody levels change over a span of months. They typically appear in the first couple of weeks, peak in a few months, and then decrease over a span of several months.

The literature on COVID had already shown these patterns. A month before this press conference, a Nature Reviews Immunology study on COVID-19 explicitly stated, “The absence of specific antibodies in the serum does not necessarily mean an absence of immune memory,” and explained, “memory B-cells and T-cells may be maintained even if there are not measurable levels of serum antibodies.”

Japan’s study demonstrated this dramatically. In their study, antibody levels increased from 5.8 percent to 46.8 percent over the course of the summer. The most dramatic increase occurred in late June and early July, paralleling the rise in daily confirmed cases within Tokyo, which peaked on August 4.

Out of the 350 individuals who completed both offered tests, 21.4 percent of those who tested negative became positive, and 12.2 percent of initially positive participants became negative for antibodies. A striking 81.1 percent of IgM-antibody-positive cases at first testing became negative in only one month. They stated that “[antibody tests] may significantly underestimate previous COVID-19 infections.” It had also been widely reported in several major scientific journals that antibody responses are not necessarily detectable in all COVID patients, especially those with less severe forms.

But the flaws in Redfield’s estimate extended deeper. Even those familiar with first-year college biology know that other components of the immune system, memory B-cell and T-cells, provide protection from virus infections. Some T-cells kill the virus, and they also help antibodies form. T-cells develop and provide protection that lasts far longer, even after antibodies disappear—sometimes for years in other SARS viruses.

T-cells for this virus had already been documented, even in people unexposed to SARS-2, meaning that in these cases, cross-protection was present from T-cells originating in response to other coronaviruses. T-cells had also been found in individuals with completely asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.

NIH Director Francis Collins had highlighted that very data in his Director’s Blog a few weeks earlier, writing, “In fact, immune cells known as memory T cells also play an important role in the ability of our immune systems to protect us against many viral infections, including—it now appears—COVID-19.”

Scientists from some of the top research institutions in the world, like Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, San Diego’s La Jolla Institute, Duke University, Berlin, and others had published this evidence. Karolinska demonstrated T-cell immunity in both asymptomatic and mild cases of COVID—even if antibody-negative.

Singapore researchers had noted robust T-cell responses to this virus, SARS2, from seventeen-year-old SARS1 samples. Since T-cells are obviously not discovered by antibody tests, those individuals were not included in Redfield’s count. Yet he apparently had not considered this essential, indeed fundamental, point as he testified to Congress and made headlines.

After watching this debacle on TV, I knew full well what was coming later that day. The media would latch on to this and create even more public panic. I also knew that the responsibility for clarifying this grossly erroneous statement would be mine. There was no question it would come up at the president’s press conference, and even if it did not, it still needed to be explained.

I rushed over to Derek Lyons’s office to update him and to make sure we would alert the president beforehand. A few others in the West Wing were there, so I summarized to them what had been said to Congress.

The mood ranged from amazement to dejection to frustration. An advisor to the president on legal matters warned me, with a smile on his face, “Scott, don’t just bluntly say, ‘Redfield is wrong!’ Say something softer, like ‘He misstated things.’”

I nodded, knowing that I needed to restrain my words, even though this was the same man who had tried to destroy me in the national press a few days earlier. But this wasn’t personal at all. Clarifying the facts about the pandemic and countering the unending barrage of misinformation and pseudoscience about it, in this case coming from within the administration itself, was one of my most important roles in this national crisis.

During the pre-brief in the Oval Office a few hours later, I outlined the issue to the president. It was decided, as expected, that I would answer the question when it came up. And so it did.

A reporter from ABC News directly asked me if Redfield’s statement that more than 90 percent of Americans remained susceptible to the disease was true. I took the friendly advice I had received earlier in the day.

“I think that Dr. Redfield misstated something there,” I said, and then did my best to calmly explain the problems with outdated information and the contribution of cross-reactive T-cells and T-cell protection that would not have been included in his data. I correctly stated what was widely known and factual—that the protection from the virus “is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies.” During my answer, as I fended off interruptions, I tried to explain in understandable language as best I could.

I also made a serious effort to be somewhat delicate, because I felt extremely uncomfortable about having to correct the director of the CDC on the national stage.

Unfortunately, my disgust with the confrontational mood in that press room prevented me from being more diplomatic when that reporter asked, “Who are we to believe?” My reflexive answer was “You’re supposed to believe in the science, and I am telling you the science.” Then I referred him to several expert scientists by name. However, I had the strong sense that he was not really interested in the facts at all. Rather, it was another attempt to amplify discord.

After exiting the press room, I walked alongside the president. He briefly stopped to check the news coverage on the set of TV monitors outside the briefing room, as he typically chose to do. After some banter between the president and the staff standing in the area, we began walking back toward the Oval Office.

President Trump turned to me on his right, smiling wryly but with a genuinely puzzled look on his face. “Is Redfield political or just stupid?” he asked, subtly shaking his head. I looked right back at the president and hesitated. The answer was obvious to both of us.

Needless to say, the media immediately played up the disagreement between me and Redfield. It fed into their narrative of conflict between me and the other Task Force doctors, one that Redfield personally caused with his offensive and unwarranted remark that everything I said was “false.”

Later, Dr. Fauci appeared on TV and criticized my straightforward attempt to clarify important information as “extraordinarily inappropriate.” I wondered if he was more concerned with protecting his bureaucrat colleague’s reputation and undermining mine than ensuring that correct information was being told to the American public.

Martin Kulldorff, the world-renowned Harvard epidemiologist, posted his reaction on Twitter: “Scott Atlas stated the simple fact that immunity is higher than those with antibodies, whereupon Dr. Fauci criticizes him without contradicting what was actually said. Stating a simple scientific fact is not ‘extraordinarily inappropriate.’ What is going on?”

U.K. Media: Biden’s officials had secret deal to give Kabul to Taliban

 

OAN Newsroom

UPDATED 9:48 AM PT – Tuesday, November 23, 2021

According to a new report, the Biden administration had a secret deal with the Taliban to hand over Kabul to the terrorist group. British investigative outlet The Tortoise said Biden’s officials were talking to the Taliban through a secret back-channel overseen by the CIA.

The communications reportedly took place this past summer during U.S. evacuation of the Afghan capital. The report found the Taliban was supposed to give Joe Biden enough time to evacuate Kabul before it would take over a deadline his administration failed to meet. The report also claimed Biden handed Afghanistan over to Taliban.  

“The message from the Taliban to the Americans was: Take your time, a fortnight or more, we will wait before we enter the capital, we have absolutely no desire to preside over the evacuation,” explained Matthew d’Ancona, an investigative reporter for The Tortoise. “The astonishing response to the Taliban from U.S. was: No thanks, you need to get into Kabul and maintain order now. The Afghan government is a lame duck and NATO certainly isn’t going to take responsibility for the city.”  

Republican lawmakers have raised questions as to why Biden left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban among other questionable aspects of the botched pullout.   

 

https://www.oann.com/u-k-media-bidens-officials-had-secret-deal-to-give-kabul-to-taliban/   

No, Inflation Is Not Good for You

No, Inflation Is Not Good for You

William L. Anderson for Mises.org

With the recent rise in inflation—with subsequent increases in both consumer and producer price levels—one suspects that sooner or later people on the left either would downplay it or find a way to spin the bad news into something positive like an alchemist would want to spin straw into gold. Both accounts have arrived, thanks to the New York Times and the hard-left publication, The Intercept.

The various accounts in the Times hardly are surprising, given the link the paper has to the nation’s political, economic, and academic elites, and given that these are the people that have created the inflation problem in the first place. Not surprisingly, the NYT “experts” (because progressives believe that the “experts” always have the right answers) are playing down the latest spikes as temporary and related to current issues of supply and demand, not any unprecedented increases in the nation’s money supply.

We should not be surprised that the NYT’s resident economic “expert,” Paul Krugman, has debunked any worries of inflation and especially inflation over the long term, instead likening the current price spikes to what happened after World War II ended and the economy moved from one dedicated to total war to one producing capital and consumption goods. Likewise, President Joe Biden is touting an endorsement of his “Build Back Better” initiatives by a number of Nobel economics winners who have claimed the proposed programs included in the legislation would reduce inflation. (One should not forget that while Krugman is a Nobel recipient, his NYT columns go well beyond any economic analysis, establishing him as little more than a partisan political shill.)

There is an important point to be made here: all of these “experts” are willing to say they believe inflation is a problem for most people and the disagreement isn’t so much about the real and potential harm inflation brings, but rather the duration of the current spikes. However, there also exists among radical progressives a belief that inflation actually is a good thing because, in their minds, it transfers wealth from the rich to the poor.

The first time I saw this theme was in an article by the Marxist journalist Alexander Cockburn, who at one time had a regular column in the Wall Street Journal. Writing about the alleged “Hitler Diaries” supposedly unearthed in the early 1980s (and later exposed as forgeries), Cockburn said if one actually could mine Hitler’s thoughts, they would find that he didn’t see the hyperinflation that ravaged Germany in the 1920s as any kind of a threat, and that it actually was good for the economy. (I’m writing from memories, as I have not been able find this column in the WSJ archives.)

Cockburn has been dead for nearly a decade, but the radical publication The Intercept is taking his place when it comes to inflation. In the article “Inflation is Good for You,” we find that inflation is not a nuisance, nor does it do real economic harm. Instead, according to the author, Jon Schwarz, inflation is a good thing because it transfers wealth from creditors to debtors, and debtors fall into the so-called 99 percent. He writes:

And what’s happening is this: The inflation freakout is all about class conflict. In fact, it may be the fundamental class conflict: that between creditors and debtors, a fight that’s been going on since the foundation of the United States.

That’s because inflation is often good for most of us, but it’s terrible for the kinds of people who own corporate news outlets—or, say, founded coal firms.

Schwarz continues:

First, inflation lessens the real value of debt. In 2020, American households had around $14.5 trillion in debt from their mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other sources. Inflation of 6.2 percent means that the real value of that $14.5 trillion is now just $13.65 trillion in last year’s dollars.

In other words, the inflation over the past year has effectively transferred $850 billion in wealth from creditors to debtors. That’s a lot of money.

Most people are a mixture of creditors (e.g., you have a bank account) and debtors (you have a mortgage and student loans). But overall, this $850 billion has generated a big check written by the tippy-top of the income scale to everyone else. And as you’d expect, the people at the tippy-top don’t like this.

Second, inflation generally accompanies economic booms, when the unemployment rate is low and workers have the market power to demand higher pay. That’s what’s happening now: As prices increased 6.2 percent over the past year, wages for regular people went up 5.8 percent. In other words, inflation barely touched their purchasing power. And with almost 300 labor strikes in the U.S. so far this year, workers are leveraging their power to demand better compensation at historic rates. So while inflation can be a significant problem for workers if they don’t get it back in higher paychecks, that seems unlikely today.

Moreover, the median American recently had about $65,000 in debt. And while inflation has reduced the real value of each dollar of wages—in other words, its worth relative to tangible things—it’s done the same to the real value of each dollar of debt. Workers who get raises will have more dollars to pay off the same dollar amount of debt.

Put these two things together—lowered values for their assets and higher wages for workers—and you can understand why the rich people who run the U.S. absolutely detest inflation.

This is what one might call a “Yes, you really did mean that” moment much like readers experienced nearly forty years ago when Cockburn praised Germany’s hyperinflation. For that matter, we can point to the recent examples of hyperinflation in Venezuela and Zimbabwe, neither of which can be reinterpreted as having provided the lower-income masses with anything but lower real incomes. (Surprisingly—or perhaps notsurprisingly—Schwarz does not mention either country.)

On the surface, one might think The Intercept has a valid point. After all, inflation really does deleverage debt that is based upon fixed interest rates, and during the Germany hyperinflation, many debtors were able to dump piles of worthless money upon creditors’ desks, paying off their loans. Furthermore, if the legitimate explanation for what happens with inflation were limited to the quantity theory of money, then inflation would be a good thing for anyone owing money, since under this theory, incomes rise immediately with prices, so at worst, most people are temporarily inconvenienced by rising prices.

Picture this theory as being based upon the imaginary event of someone throwing new money from a helicopter, with each person grabbing an amount of money that increases all incomes simultaneously by the same percent. Someone who earns $20,000 a year grabs $2,000 while someone earning $200,000 grabs $20,000. Such a scenario would result in growing absolute income inequality with each new round of inflation and immediately undermines the leftist claims that inflation “helps” lower-income people, not that leftists ever would admit it. The only other scenario is that everyone catches the same amount of money, so that while everyone sees an increase in their money income, low-income people see their incomes go up by a greater percentage—if that is how inflation really works.

But it is clear inflation does not work like that, but only the Austrians have presented an accurate picture of how incomes rise during bouts of inflation, and there is no helicopter in sight. In Man, Economy, and State Murray N. Rothbard points out that inflation begins with expansion of bank credit through the fractional reserve system and the transmission mechanism determines how incomes will be gained from there. He writes:

Credit expansion has, of course, the same effect as any sort of inflation: prices tend to rise as the money supply increases. Like any inflation, it is a process of redistribution, whereby the inflators, and the part of the economy selling to them, gain at the expense of those who come last in line in the spending process. This is the charm of inflation—for the beneficiaries—and the reason why it has been so popular, particularly since modern banking processes have camouflaged its significance for those losers who are far removed from banking operations. The gains to the inflators are visible and dramatic; the losses to others hidden and unseen, but just as effective for all that. Just as half the economy are taxpayers and half tax-consumers, so half the economy are inflation-payers and the rest inflation-consumers.

He continues:

For the new monetary equilibrium will not simply be the old one multiplied in all relations and quantities by the addition to the money supply. This was an assumption that the old “quantity theory” economists made. The valuations of the individuals making temporary gains and losses will differ. Therefore, each individual will react differently to his gains and losses and alter his relative spending patterns accordingly. Moreover, the new money will form a high ratio to the existing cash balance of some and a low ratio to that of others, and the result will be a variety of changes in spending patterns. Therefore, all prices will not have increased uniformly in the new equilibrium; the purchasing power of the monetary unit has fallen, but not equi-proportionally over the entire array of exchange-values. Since some prices have risen more than others, therefore, some people will be permanent gainers, and some permanent losers, from the inflation.

Particularly hard hit by an inflation, of course, are the relatively “fixed” income groups, who end their losses only after a long period or not at all. Pensioners and annuitants who have contracted for a fixed money income are examples of permanent as well as short-run losers. Life insurance benefits are permanently slashed. Conservative anti-inflationists’ complaints about “the widows and orphans” have often been ridiculed, but they are no laughing matter nevertheless. For it is precisely the widows and orphans who bear a main part of the brunt of inflation. Also suffering losses are creditors who have already extended their loans and find it too late to charge a purchasing-power premium on their interest rates.

As Rothbard notes, the wealth transfers occur when people first in line to receive the new injections of money are able to spend at the old prices, while those who are further back on the receiving chain will be the ones continually falling behind, as they purchase goods at their new prices. Contra Schwarz, one can be assured that lower-income people will be at the bottom of the inflation food chain.

Furthermore, as Henry Hazlitt writes in Economics in One Lesson, the wealthy-as-the-creditors-and-everyone-else-as-debtors story does not stand up to scrutiny. First, and most important, the incessant money pumping from the Federal Reserve System coupled with its suppression of interest rates has benefitted the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. Take billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, for example. The vast amount of the official wealth owned by these men is in Amazon and Microsoft stock, respectively, and we have seen a large increase in stock prices due to Fed policies.

Middle-class people, on the other hand, historically have increased their wealth through saving, whether it be done through bank time deposits, money market certificates, or corporate and municipal bonds, making them creditors. Fed policies have severely limited these options, driving investments into equities, and many middle-class people who are not sophisticated investors find it difficult to navigate the wild swings in stock prices that have come with inflation-driven asset bubbles. These bubbles have wildly inflated stock prices, enriching those whose income is driven by stock price increases and widening the wealth gaps in the economy.

Whatever temporary gains many workers are experiencing with higher wages, the euphoria is not likely to last long. Furthermore, one doubts that this current bout of inflation is as temporary as Paul Krugman recently claimed. The US economy more and more seems to be running on empty and this means that monetary authorities are going to pump even more new money into the system. Don’t count on this being a windfall for anyone but the wealthiest among us.

NBC Thanksgiving Suggestions to Cope With Joe Biden Inflation, Don’t Buy Turkey and Don’t Invite Family

NBC ran an interesting segment on how to cope with the massive inflation and additional costs caused by Joe Biden.  Given the collapsing state of the U.S. economy, and crushing price increases for products created by White House policy, the administration previously suggested we should lower our expectations.

NBC takes the ‘lower expectations‘ theme to entirely new levels.  I’m not sure they thought through the meaning of Thanksgiving prior to the suggestions; however, Biden’s NBC stenographers have a few interesting recommendations.

The first suggestion is don’t buy the Thanksgiving day turkey, it’s too expensive.  The second odd suggestion to save money is do not invite friends of family to dinner.  WATCH: