Notes on the Way
Economics as magical thinking, red flags at half-mast, polls in the hole and more
Do you believe in magic? When it comes to economics, Joe Biden does! I mean, come on, here he is berating the owners of service stations, demanding that they lower their pump prices. This is where he ended up after trying to pin the blame for soaring gasoline prices on V. Putin, evil energy companies, owners of refineries, etc., and so forth. For our dim-bulb president’s information, there are some 100,000 service stations in the United States, most of them independently owned and operated, and the high price of crude oil hurts them just as much as it hurts their customers. Yet he expects those small-business owners to shave away their already slender profit margin on sales of gasoline to help him boost his dismal approval rating (see below). And if they go broke in the process—hey, whatever! So finally, can we all agree that Joe Biden is a total ignoramus?
And while we’re being so agreeable, can we also get together on the uselessness of red flag laws as an antidote to mass shootings? Putting such laws on the books seems futile if they’re not going to be enforced. And as recent mass shootings have shown, enforcement is problematical. The July 4 Highland Park shooter was festooned with red flags, he’d come to the attention of the police, his social media profile was lunatic—but nothing was done, even though Illinois has a red flag law in place. To be clear, I don’t oppose such laws in principle. But they’re only as good as the bureaucracy that administers them, and that’s not an encouraging thought.
Things may be bad, but they can always get worse: That’s the lesson of the Biden presidency. His approval rating has been on the slide since The Greatest Airlift in History, otherwise known as Joe’s Afghanistan Skedaddle, and the bottom’s not yet in sight. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has him at 38% approval, 57% disapproval. The latest Monmouth poll is even worse—36% approval, 59% disapproval—and it also has 88% of respondents saying that the country is on the wrong track. That makes Joe Biden a breakfast special: He’s toast. With butter and jam...
So Simone Biles, who bailed on her Olympic teammates in 2020, and Megan Rapinoe, who just threw her fellow female athletes under the bus for the sake of transgender ideology, will be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House tomorrow. I’d be envious but hey, I’ve got four Army Achievement Medals.
California Governor Gavin Newsom—the Peter Pan of American politics—has done it again. Having slapped a ban on official state travel to Montana as punishment for the Treasure State’s supposed hostility to the LGBLTQ+&# community, he just doubled down by…taking his vacation there. Way to lead by example, Gavin! In case you didn’t know, California bans official travel to twenty-two of its forty-nine sister states. Taxpayers in the Golden State certainly get a lot of virtue signaling for their money, don’t they?