During a press briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden has a “different vision” than House Republicans when it comes to preventing a government default. Jean-Pierre said Biden will elaborate more on his idea for tacking the debt ceiling on Wednesday while he visits New York.
In a 1987 briefing, then-Sen. Joe Biden verbally attacked a reporter, stating that he went to Syracuse University on a full academic scholarship, graduated in the top half of his class, was the outstanding political student, earned three degrees and had a much higher IQ than the reporter to whom he was speaking. This interaction is at 2 minutes and 50 seconds into Jesse Watters' Fox program or at one of several other locations.
While Biden's comments were meant to intimidate and belittle the reporter, this did not prevent honest mainstream investigative reporters of 1987 from seeking confirmation of the senator's statements. They determined that Joe did not go to college on a full academic scholarship, did not graduate in the top half of his class, but instead graduated 76 out of 85, which means he was in the bottom half of his class, was not the outstanding political student and did not earn three degrees, but graduated with one. The only thing left to consider is Biden's comment about his IQ, which I think speaks for itself. How could you miss on this many things? Note that this was before he was senile.
Contrary to widespread claims that the U.S. government will default on its debt if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit, federal law and the Constitution require the Treasury to pay the debt, and it has ample tax revenues to do this.
Nor would Social Security benefits be affected by a debt limit stalemate unless President Biden illegally diverts Social Security revenues to other programs.
The debt limit is a valuable tool for transparency, accountability, and giving voters an ongoing say in how their money is spent.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday he saw no new movement from President Biden during a White House meeting on debt limit negotiations, just weeks before the federal government is set to run out of cash to pay its bills by June 1.
"Everybody in this meeting reiterated the positions they were at. I didn't see any new movement," the speaker said. He said nothing has changed for Biden since they met on the same issue on Feb. 1.
McCarthy said the next steps on the issue is for staff-level meetings to take place over the rest of the week, and then hold another meeting between Biden, McCarthy and other congressional leaders.
The Presidential Leadership and National Outlook indexes also show significant declines as financial stress remains high.
The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, a leading national poll on consumer confidence, today revealed that economic optimism has fallen. After three consecutive months of improvement, the May index dropped 12.2% overall, with specific components exhibiting even greater percentage changes. This month’s reading of 41.6 was down from April’s 47.4. The index has now been in negative territory for 21 consecutive months. A reading above 50.0 signals optimism and below 50.0 indicates pessimism on IBD/TIPP indexes.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- With the U.S. facing a deadline to increase the nation’s debt limit and the threat of an economic recession looming, Americans lack confidence in a variety of key U.S. leaders on economic matters. Gallup finds between 34% and 38% of U.S. adults expressing a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence in President Joe Biden, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and congressional leaders in both major parties to do or recommend the right thing for the economy.
Pass a clean debt limit increase, no strings attached. We will not negotiate! That was the line parroted by the president and Democrat lawmakers alike as time ticked away toward the disastrous default they say is coming sometime in early June. But then House Republicans passed a debt limit bill of their own – one with considerable budget cuts and a limit to spending hikes in the future – and the Democrats started singing a slightly different tune.
After months of refusing to discuss the borrowing cap at all short of simply repeating his “clean bill” demand, President Joe Biden on Monday, May 1, called Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) with an invitation to meet up and talk on Tuesday, May 9. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre clarified the next day that the talk was not a sign that Biden would negotiate on the debt limit, and that it was the duty of Congress to raise the cap in order to pay the nation’s debts.
But if there’s nothing to discuss, why ask McCarthy for a meeting?
May 9, 2023
More and more Americans are getting too old to work.
Why it matters: Even if the job market cools off from its current hotness, that could mean labor shortages will be with us for the long term.
State of play: Declining fertility rates, and increasing life expectancy, is expected to lead to a drop in working-age populations across all G20 countries, according to projections cited in a recent report from Moody's Investors Service.
Driving the news: The job market is still going strong, per the latest nonfarm payrolls report from the Labor Department.
That is from September 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023. That's $132.57 Billion per month. With five months left in the fiscal year, which will add approximately another $662.85 billion to the National Debt. A total debt for this fiscal year of $1.591 Trillion. Who needs a debt ceiling?
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed the federal government under President Biden has run a near-$1 trillion federal deficit in the "first seven months of fiscal year 2023."
CBO’s report dropped on Monday, giving lawmakers insight into the current state of the federal deficit.
The nonpartisan agency found that in the first seven months of FY2023 alone, the federal government has racked up $928,000,000,000.
The Biden administration last week proposed or finalized regulations totaling $182 billion in compliance costs while adding 1.8 million yearly paperwork hours, according to a report by the American Action Forum (AAF).
The most expensive rule for consumers was the Environmental Protection Agency ‘s (EPA) strict new tailpipe emissions limits for passenger cars, which would cost businesses roughly $180 billion in “vehicle technology costs” through 2055, the AAF calculated, citing the government’s own publicly available cost-benefit analyses of each regulation. The proposed regulation — which the EPA hopes will push two-thirds of all passenger car sales after 2032 to be all-electric — was initially announced in April alongside comparable regulation for heavy-duty vehicles and was formally proposed on May 5.
Household spending is expected to decrease significantly over the next year, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Monday that reflects downbeat consumer sentiment as well as a potential slowdown for inflation.
The central bank Survey of Consumer Expectations for April showed that the outlook for spending fell by half a percentage point to an annual rate of 5.2%, the lowest level since September 2021.
That came with a corresponding decline of 0.3 percentage point in the overall outlook for inflation over the next year. Respondents expect an inflation rate of about 4.4% in the next 12 months, still well above the three-year outlook for 2.9% and the five-year view of 2.6%.
All of those levels are still above the Fed’s 2% inflation target, though they are drifting closer to the goal.
The article is from a Chinese publication. Please read with a grain of salt.
In recent years, the world has witnessed fierce US-China rivalry, the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on global systems and the fallout from the Ukraine war on supply chains, as well as an acceleration towards multipolarity, where power is more evenly distributed among several advanced economies.
The transformation of China, a trusted economic partner to many countries, into a mediator of global importance is just one example of the move away from a unipolar world. This is coupled with de-dollarisation gaining momentum.
anandaigua and Manhattan’s Chinatown are about as different from each other as two places in the same state can be. One is a small town in the bucolic Finger Lakes region, where almost everyone is a white English-speaker. Chinatown packs nearly ten times as many residents, many of them foreign-born and Chinese-speaking, into a much smaller space. What links them, and many other small towns and neighbourhoods across America, is financial services: both host community banks that cater to local needs.
Some see such institutions, generally defined as having less than $10bn in assets, as inefficient historical relics. They account for as much as 97% of the total number of America’s banks, but less than 14% of assets and deposits.
Remember when drinking Bud Light wasn’t a heavy topic? Now, one of the anchor products for Budweiser is dragging down an entire company.
Just the other day, video surfaced of fans lined up to get beer in Boston’s renown Fenway Park. Lined up at every concession stand but one – the one selling Budweiser and, especially Bud Light.
This is no longer about a boycott. This is about executive survival, which matters far more to CEOs and the people they pay. As Mel Brooks’ Gov. William J. Le Petomane memorably declared, "We’ve gotta protect our phony, baloney jobs, gentlemen!"
Janet Yellen has been screaming this warning for six months. The Left wants to pressure the GOP to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts or restrictions. Richard Medlock
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday said that failure to raise the debt ceiling will cause a “steep economic downturn” in the U.S., and she reiterated her warning that the Treasury Department may run out of measures to pay its debt obligations by June.
“Our current projection is that in early June, a day will come when we’re unable to pay our bills unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, and it’s something I strongly urge Congress to do,” Yellen told ABC’s “This Week.”
Biden is a very delusional man. He reads what's in front of him and that's it. He does not live anywhere near the real world. This is all a lie, and they know it along with all of America.
While speaking at a meeting with the White House Investing in America Cabinet on Friday, President Joe Biden praised the downward trend in recent inflation. Biden said the last nine months had seen inflation drop by 40%.
In February of last year, the tanker Catalunya Spirit berthed next to a power plant on Puerto Rico’s southern coast and began discharging its cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG). That’s not unusual. LNG tankers regularly arrive in Puerto Rico to provide the natural gas used to generate over 40 percent of the territory’s electricity. What is unusual, however, is where the Catalunya Spirit’s cargo originated: Russia. The same month that tensions were ratcheting up with Moscow over its aggression toward Ukraine—culminating with its February 24th invasion—Puerto Rico was importing $29 million worth of Russian gas.
Leaving geopolitical optics aside, the sourcing decision appears puzzling from both a geographic and efficiency perspective. Why would the island import natural gas that originated in distant Russia rather than the much closer U.S. mainland—one of the world’s top exporters of LNG?
A large part of the answer almost certainly lies in U.S. maritime protectionism.
Greed is good, so long as it is wanting more and more of something that is beneficial to you in context. In other words, food is good for you, but if you eat too much, you become fat and nearly immovable. Greed for money is good, so long as you earned it all and didn’t steal it. Money is a means of exchange for goods and services, and in the context of your personal life having more of that is good, so long as you traded value for value to get it. Greed basically just means wanting more of something, and that is not bad if it enhances your life rationally. If you want to read a book that goes into details of the benefits of greed, then I would recommend Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. She outlines a new and objective morality based on man’s nature as a rational animal. And she points out that so long as your greed does not harm you (like eating too much or drinking too much water or breathing too deeply and repetitively (hyperventilate) and other things like that). Greed could be understood as wanting the best life can offer, and that is not bad at all. Here is what Ayn Rand had to say about greed:
“Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.”
May 5, 2023
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is creating a political headache for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) by pushing hard for a vote on a bill to raise the national minimum wage to $17 an hour — a proposal Senate Democrats facing tough reelection races opposed in 2021.
Sanders, who remains very popular with the Democratic Party’s progressive base, warned Thursday there would be “political consequences” for lawmakers who oppose his effort.
“We’re going to push it as quickly and hard as we can,” Sanders told reporters at a Thursday press conference.
“Right now we’re focusing on making sure that we have the votes in the Senate and the House to raise the minimum wage,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a state in the country where people do not believe we should raise the minimum wage. I would hope that every member of Congress understands and there will be political consequences … if they don’t.”
Sanders’s proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour over five years is an updated version of the proposal he pushed in 2021 to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which eight Senate Democrats voted against.
