1) Blinders On

We’ve shown conclusively that most all the economists’ predictions last year of slow growth and doom and gloom could hardly have been more erroneous.  

But economist Alan Blinder, who writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, can’t even get the facts straight AFTER the fact. Last week, he wrote a column claiming Biden’s economic performance beats Trump’s. Steve Moore’s Letter to the Editor today in the WSJ takes Blinder to task.

Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Blinder attacks Mr. Trump on the Federal Reserve, while describing Joe Biden’s monetary policy as “excellent” because “he left the Fed alone.”

How did that work out? Inflation soared to 9.1% after Biden’s first year—the highest price rise since Jimmy Carter was in office. The Biden four year total price rise of 21% was the root cause of today’s middle class affordability crisis. In Mr. Trump’s first year inflation was 2.7%, and that number is coming down.

This chart compares the two presidents on controlling inflation. You decide whose policy was “excellent.”

2) Minnesota Has Only the Second Most Fraudulent Welfare System

Dr. Mehmet Oz runs the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He just sent out this social media post:

The biggest fraud in LA involves some 100 fake hospice providers who convinced some 100,000 patients that they were dying in order to enroll them in their care with taxpayer dollars.

Oz says this is both cruel and a danger to life:

"If you're put into hospice, you actually give up the rest of your healthcare protection, and you don't have access to regular Medicare anymore…. People are dying because they can't get care because they were falsely tricked into being on hospice.”

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, says many hospices were reporting survival rates of 100% for facilities that were meant to be for the end of life. They should be called “Lazarus Centers.”

Who’s at fault? Essayli blames Governor Gavin Newsom: "He has reigned over more fraud than I think we've ever seen in American history. He is the fraud king."

3) $600 Million for Alumni Pork

Our friends at Open the Books reported on this utterly shameless feature of the massive bipartisan pork-barrel bill making its way through Congress:

Three senators sent their own colleges over $50 million of taxpayer money:

• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville
  Seven earmark requests worth $164.9 million

  
  

• Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV)
  Marshall University
  Nine earmark requests worth $57.5 million

  
  

• Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
  Washington State University
  Two earmark requests worth $50.9 million

4) Jamie Dimon on Why Tax and Spend Never Works

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon unleashed an epic rant against the modern welfare state at the Davos summit. It's worth quoting at length.  

If you said raise taxes and directly give it to the people who need it, I'd do it. That doesn't happen.  It goes to all these interest groups, and they give it to their friends… which is why the people consider it a swamp.

It is kind of a swamp. There's 17,000 lobbying groups. Companies are guilty, too. They're just fighting for their one self-interest as opposed to what's good for my country. But that's what happens in Congress…

The Chips Act was a good idea (sic) until it had to be union, it had to be a place-based, childcare, diapers. What the hell are we doing? We do it over and over, and then it fails, and then we spend more money because the problem is we didn't spend enough.

5) The One Thing Europe Does Really Well

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