Author: Lone Candle
Kinder, Gentler Family Separation?
“It would be a false equivalence to say that all approaches to family separation are equally illiberal. “Obama did absolutely separate children,” Nowrasteh says. “That’s absolutely true, and Biden’s going to do it too. He’s probably already doing it in some cases that are unjust. But the difference was that the Trump administration did it systematically to basically everyone.”
Still, a return to the status quo ante is only an improvement when compared to a policy like zero tolerance. Biden promised he’d be better on immigration—not just better than Trump but also better than his former boss. In many ways, he has yet to deliver on that promise.”
Biden Keeps Another Trump Border Policy in Place
“Biden has continued much of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration: separating families, overfilling detention facilities, and plainly telling people to stay away. One such holdover policy is Title 42.
Invoked by Trump in March 2020, Title 42 is a section of the Public Health Service Act that grants federal health officials broad discretion to enact disease mitigation measures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used it to issue an order barring certain kinds of arrivals to the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada while permitting other forms of international movement to continue. It allows Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials to expel migrants immediately upon arrival.”
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“Migrants expelled from the U.S. under Title 42 face hostile conditions similar to those subjected to another Trump policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Known as “Remain in Mexico,” MPP relegated asylum seekers south of the border while they awaited decisions in their immigration cases. There, many faced murder, rape, and torture. Biden did away with the policy just weeks ago, but his continued operation of Title 42 contradicts his campaign promise to “restore our asylum laws so that they do what they should be designed to do.”
Those dangers to migrants continue under Biden. “These individuals are being pushed back into very dangerous environments in northern Mexico,” says Zak. “Migrants are at very serious risk of being exploited by gangs and traffickers.” He adds that “Human Rights First has documented 492 instances of publicly reported attacks and kidnappings against asylum seekers in Mexico since Biden took office,” many against those expelled under Title 42.
In spite of this harsh approach, Title 42 has likely exacerbated the very issue it sought to tackle: the high volume of asylum seekers crossing the border. Zak says that the recidivism rate—individuals who were apprehended, expelled, and apprehended again by CBP—has “skyrocketed.” That rate “tended to hover around 10 percent” prior to Title 42 and has hit 38 percent as of May 2021. Zak says this is partially because “individuals (particularly single adults) are expelled extremely quickly,” thus encouraging multiple crossings. There is also no formal penalty for repeat crossings under Title 42. With that uptick in mind, the reasons for increased apprehensions at the border become clearer—and Biden’s approach to immigration less so.”
The Etiology of Victimology | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter | The Glenn Show
Chinese Perspective on 1950s American Life // “Materialistic America, I Take My Hat Off To You!”
Panel I: Adversaries: Security in the Age of Liberal Democratic Erosion
Ancient Macedonia before Alexander the Great and Philip II
The falling Chinese space rocket is a policy failure
“Why is it possible for China, or any other space-faring nation, to launch massive rockets and let them fall to earth willy-nilly?
The answer to that is policy failure: Despite regulations on space flight and conduct, the issue of rocket reentry is loosely and poorly regulated, so countries cut corners and take their chances that a falling rocket won’t hit anything major.”
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“In the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and Liability Convention of 1972 are guidelines for how to punish a country that lets one of its rockets cause damage on Earth. Basically, those rules say that the offending state can be held liable by the victim nation. So, in this case, if the Chinese rocket were to land in the middle of New York City (which, again, is extremely unlikely to happen), the Biden administration could ask China to pay for damages and demand other recourse.
In other words, this is a state-to-state issue. “If the rocket lands on my house, I can’t go and sue China,” Northumbria’s Newman told me. That’d be UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s job to call up Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But that’s really it. There’s nothing in international law to stop any nation from letting any of the 900 rockets currently in orbit from falling in an unplanned way. “This isn’t illegal,” Newman said about the current saga of the Chinese rocket. “There is no sort of regulation on an international level on reentry.””
Is Inflation Back for Good?
“On June 10, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) “increased 0.6 percent in May on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 0.8 percent in April,” bringing the year-over-year price increase on all items to 5.0 percent.
“This was the largest 12-month increase since a 5.4-percent increase for the period ending August 2008,” the BLS noted. And when you take out food and energy, the resulting yearly rise of 3.8 percent was “the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1992.””
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“Two main schools of thought contend among those who believe that massive sustained price inflation is either inevitable, or already here: Milton Friedman’s monetarism, and the more bubble-focused analysis associated with the Austrian school of economics.
Friedman’s theory, which was widely accepted in the economics and finance professions decades ago but has been waning since asserts that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” The correlations were indeed observable in the 1960s and 1970s, but the theoretical prediction of increased money supply leading to economy-wide price inflation has been failing to come true for many years now.
Why might that connection between money supply and price be slipping? Theories include the Federal Reserve paying banks interest to just sit on uncirculating money. Another is that the “velocity” of money—the rate at which one dollar is used to purchase goods and services in a given time period—has fallen by nearly half since the beginning of the century.
But America has seen a lot more money lately, with the overall supply of the M1 monetary measure more than quadrupling in just the past 15 months. We have also in COVID times seen government injections of cash into the hands of business and citizens into the trillions, with the Federal Reserve committed to buying as much government debt as the government wants to feed into its spending machine.”
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“Austrians, like monetarists, also see a necessary logical connection between increased money supply and higher prices (adjusted for the amount of goods and services available for the money to buy). But they don’t automatically assume that more money will mechanistically translate into economy wide CPI inflation. Rather, inflation might mostly be expressed in specific sectors, such as stocks, crypto, housing, collectibles, and any other available means to get out of dollars and into something with more perceived promise of holding value.
But those specialized areas where dollars flood into can all too often prove to be bubbles of “malinvestment” which, once popped, can produce economic wreckage and damaging policy reaction, the Austrians warn.”
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“Modern Monetary Theory, the hot modern excuse for the government to spend whatever it wants to spend, posits that as long as any resources of labor or capital in the economy are not currently being used productively, then more money in whatever amount presents no inflationary threat. MMTers will tell you that their hypothesis comports to the reality of the past few decades better than the monetarist insistence that more money equals more (inflationary) problems.
So what’s the MMT and/or governing-Democratic explanation for the recent surge in CPI and sectoral inflation? It’s all about unleashed demand as lockdowns fade and bank accounts swell with federal stimulus bucks, with manufacturers temporarily bidding up prices to make sure they are ready for the pent-up, post-COVID buying spree. After the recovery shakes out, the argument goes, prices will stop noticeably rising.”
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“The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) argued in April that the CPI spike seems scary only because of the “base effect” of rising from very low inflation in the pandemic-scarred year 2020. Fed Governor Lael Brainard assured us last month that we just need to be “patient through the transitory surge.” (Inflation hawks are quick to retort that this is what the Federal Reserve folk insisted back in the 1970s, before our nation’s last big inflationary spree, when for three years, 1979–81, CPI was rising over 10 percent per year.)
The Fed swears it will start tapering off its seemingly endless run of buying Treasury and mortgage-backed securities if the central bank’s inflation target of 2 percent looks poised to be breached long-term. Temporary surges worry the bankers less.
And even if CPI inflation continues to increase like it has this spring, the central bankers are confident they can rein it back in. As Brainard wrote: “If, in the future, inflation rises immoderately or persistently above target, and there is evidence that longer-term inflation expectations are moving above our longer-run goal, I would not hesitate to act and believe we have the tools to carefully guide inflation down to target.””
Why Democrats’ ambitions for health care are shrinking rapidly
“America still has the highest uninsured rate in the developed world and the highest health care costs. So long as the health care industry wields a veto pen over any plan that would cut into its profits to address those problems, little is going to change.”