Author: Brad Polumbo

Inflation still isn’t letting up, and it’s a top concern for Americans right now. But we just learned of yet another way surging prices are hurting families—leading them into huge amounts of credit card debt. “More Americans are racking up credit card debt as inflation pushes up the cost of food, utilities and other staples,” CBS News reports. “60% of credit card holders have been carrying balances on their cards for at least a year, up 10% from 2021.” “59% of Americans who earn less than $50,000 a year carry a credit card balance from month to month,” the reporting…

There’s an apocryphal quote often misattributed to Ben Franklin that goes something like this: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” While we’re not quite nearing the collapse of our republic, we are actively witnessing the corrosive effect it has when the political power of redistributionism is abused. President Biden is “canceling” (transferring) student debt for millions of Americans and forcing the rest of us to pay for it. His plan “cancels” $10,000 for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 individually or $250,000 for their household. It also includes…

Americans love their fast-food supersized. But supersizing the Internal Revenue Service? Probably not so popular. That’s evidently of little concern to a majority of Congress. Lawmakers are poised to pass a large tax-and-spending bill, which Biden is eager to sign, that would increase IRS funding by an astounding $80 billion. The legislation “provides 14 times as much funding for ‘enforcement’—as in fishing expedition audits—than it does for ‘taxpayer services’ such as answering the phone,” according to Ben Susser of Americans for Tax Reform. The IRS would more than double its workforce under this legislation, Joe Simonson reports for the Washington…

When the government tries to micromanage the everyday habits of millions of people, it doesn’t always go well, to put it mildly. The latest example of nanny-state meddling backfiring comes courtesy of recent tax increases on vaping products—which new research suggests may have had lethal unintended consequences. A study by Yale Professor Abigail Friedman and Georgia State University Professor Michael Pesko examined the impact that tax increases on electronic cigarettes/vaping products had on both e-cigarette usage and traditional smoking, specifically researching the impact on young consumers (ages 18-25). Predictably, it finds that as taxes increase on vaping products, vaping decreases.…

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, even alarmist government officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci have admitted that it’s time to learn to live with the virus rather than disrupt our ordinary lives. In recent months, there has been a concentrated shift among our elected officials and expert class attempting to “move on” from the pandemic—perhaps because the policy decisions they made have aged so terribly. Yet another comprehensive study was just released showing that the drastic lockdowns (“stay-at-home orders”) enacted in many US states did not meaningfully reduce COVID-19 mortality. Economists Casey P. Mulligan, Stephen Moore, and Phil Kerpen ran…

Another day, another alarming inflation metric. We just got the numbers for the Personal Consumption Expenditures index (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s favored inflation metric, and they’re jaw-dropping. The PCE hit a 40-year high in February, with the measured prices rising 6.4% year-over-year. What does this mean in real life? A new Bloomberg analysis sheds some light on this key question. It finds that this year, inflation will cost the typical US household an additional $5,200 just to afford the same goods as last year. That’s $433 a month taken out of the average family’s budget. Why is this happening? Inflation…

We’re into year three of the COVID-19 pandemic. From mask mandates to vaccine passports, government restrictions on our liberties remain in place. But, thankfully, at least in the US, the era of lockdown orders confining Americans’ to their homes to “slow the spread” is over. Unfortunately, a new meta-analysis of studies shows that all the pain and sacrifice we endured from those orders achieved little—despite their tremendous costs. The new research review was led by economist Steve Hanke and published by Johns Hopkins University. It evaluated 24 relevant studies examining lockdown stringency, the impact of stay-at-home orders, and the effectiveness of…

Every holiday season, Senator Rand Paul honors the fictional Seinfeld holiday “Festivus,” an annual airing of grievances, with a report exposing how the federal government wastes taxpayers’ money. The libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican just released his latest report for 2021 and its findings are even worse than expected. And that’s saying something. Senator Paul’s office documents $52.6 billion in waste, which is equivalent to wasting the taxes of 3.43 million Americans! The full 43-page report covers far too many egregious examples of government waste to list in one article. But here are 8 of the most outlandish ways the federal government…

The most widely-used metrics of consumer price inflation are hitting their highest levels in decades, with the Consumer Price Index rising 6.8 percent just from November 2020 to November 2021. These severe price hikes sound abstract—but a new Ivy League analysis shows how the ongoing rise in prices will hurt average households. The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania ran the numbers to analyze what American households will have to spend in 2021 to maintain the same living standard from 2020 or 2019. Their analysis reports that “inflation in 2021 will require the average U.S. household to…

Governments around the world took drastic measures in 2020 in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, in many cases locking down economies and confining people to their homes for months on end. The extent to which these measures actually helped contain the COVID-19 pandemic is highly dubious. But the death toll from the unintended consequences of lockdowns continues to mount. The World Health Organization (WHO) just reported that pandemic measures delayed and disrupted medical care for the global malaria crisis, leading to tens of thousands of additional deaths. An astounding 14 million additional malaria cases were recorded in 2020…

The fate of President Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar social spending agenda, the “Build Back Better” plan, has consumed the political conversation in recent weeks. Amid all the furious attempts at reading political tea leaves, a curious fact has flown under the radar: The latest iteration of Biden’s plan includes one of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s worst ideas. “Happy to announce creation of a US Civilian Climate Corps is now in the Build Back Better Act,” the far-left congresswoman recently tweeted. Referencing the public works “job creation” scheme first proposed as part of the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez claimed the initiative will create 300,000…

With President Biden’s federal vaccine mandate and local government employment mandates looming, the future of countless workers is up in the air. Yet new research undercuts the stated justification for these mandates. Big-government politicians claim that vaccine mandates are necessary because unvaccinated individuals are a danger to not just themselves but society. They argue that choosing to remain unvaccinated exacerbates the spread of the deadly virus. But according to a new study published in the Lancet, this doesn’t appear to be true.  Vaccinated people are just as likely as unvaccinated people to spread the delta variant to contacts in their…

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in American history as one of loss, economic suffering, and social strife. Not only did hundreds of thousands of citizens die of COVID-19, but the sweeping mandates and restrictions governments implemented in the name of slowing the spread had lethal consequences in their own right—the full scope of which won’t be known for decades. Yet new data confirm that fatal drug overdoses hit new highs between March 2020 and 2021, further illuminating the fallout of life under lockdown. An astounding 96,000 Americans died from drug overdoses over that one-year period,…

President Biden and his progressives allies are advancing a historic $4.5+ trillion spending plan that would vastly expand the government’s reach into climate change, welfare policy, and just about everything else in between. To “pay for” their spending ambitions, at least in part, they’ve released a multi-trillion-dollar proposal for tax increases. These tax hikes include everything from higher income taxes to increasing the corporate tax rate to upping taxes on nicotine products. Biden claims this tax-and-spend campaign, if implemented, would “build America back better” and revitalize our economic system. Yet a recent study suggests that it would actually do the…

It’s always frustrating to read about the many ways the federal government wastes our money, from millions spent putting lizards on treadmills to thousands spent on art classes in Kenya. But regular government waste pales in comparison to the appalling reality that the US just left billions in taxpayer-purchased military equipment behind in Afghanistan—to fall right into the hands of the Taliban. The Times of London reports that the US simply abandoned a truly astounding arsenal of military equipment and weapons. This reportedly includes up to 22,174 Humvee vehicles, nearly 1,000 armored vehicles, 64,363 machine guns, and 42,000 pick-up trucks…

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously quipped that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” If only he’d known how apt this would prove during a pandemic. Of course, Friedman didn’t mean to suggest that expansions of government power and control over the economy are never rolled back or repealed. Just that we ought to be wary of promised “temporary” programs or interventions, because there will inevitably be a strong push for their perpetuation. We’re witnessing this phenomenon play out in real-time as politicians in Washington push to—yet again—extend the federal government’s halt on evictions nationwide. The so-called “eviction…

One of the great things about America’s 50-state federal system is that people can vote with their feet in response to different policies. In that sense, California just lost yet another foot-vote referendum.  “The Walt Disney Company is the latest business to plan to move some operations out of California in favor of a lower-taxed state,” Fox Business reports. “Disney will move about 2,000 jobs from its California headquarters to a new campus in Florida.”  BREAKING: When a state punishes success with high taxes and makes doing business difficult… businesses will go elsewhere!https://t.co/M3INyMLkZu— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@brad_polumbo) July 16, 2021 In a letter…

Proponents of big government spending have desperately argued that mounting price inflation is just temporary. But multiple alarming inflation metrics came out for April and May, and examples of rising prices are clear to see from big-box retail stores to the real estate market. Now, yet another metric has come in making the ongoing inflation even more difficult to deny. CNBC reports that the personal consumption expenditures price index, which the Federal Reserve uses to make policy, came in at an annualized 3.4 percent on Friday. This is the largest increase in the metric in nearly 30 years. When factoring…

The picture painted is one of working-class destruction.

With each day that passes, the number of lives lost in COVID-19-related deaths continues to tragically grow. However, in a less noticed but equally important trend, we continue to gain insight into the countless deaths caused by lockdown measures intended to stop the virus’s spread. The latest entry into this tragic account is a new data set showing drug overdose deaths skyrocketed in 2020 amid the height of pandemic lockdowns. “New data shows that more Americans died of drug overdoses in the year leading to September 2020 than any 12-month period since the opioid epidemic began,” Axios reports. “The stubborn…

The Biden administration on Wednesday released a comprehensive $2+ trillion spending proposal ostensibly focused on infrastructure. But there’s much more to this plan than meets the eye. A glance at the proposal reveals many items that appear only tenuously related to infrastructure. In fact, several don’t appear to be related to infrastructure at all. Here are 9 of the most suspect items in Biden’s “infrastructure” proposal, taken directly from a fact-sheet on the plan the White House released. 1. $10 Billion to Create a ‘Civilian Climate Corp’ The Biden administration proposes spending $10 billion to create a “Civilian Climate Corp.”…

President Biden just signed his sweeping $1.9 trillion spending package into law. Once this bill hits the books, total taxpayer expenditure on (ostensibly) COVID relief will hit $6 trillion—which, roughly estimated, comes out to $41,870 in spending per federal taxpayer. Did you see anywhere near that much in benefit? The sheer immensity of this spending is hard to grasp. For context, $6 trillion is more than one-fourth of what the US economy produces in an entire year, according to Fox Business. The COVID spending blowout is at least eight times bigger than the (inflation-adjusted) price tag of President Franklin Delano…

With COVID-19 ravaging the country and government pandemic lockdowns devastating our economy, the national debt has understandably slipped to the back of many Americans’ minds. But the federal government continues to fall deeper into the red at a dramatically accelerating rate. Free-market economists interviewed by FEE warned that we can’t continue like this forever without grave consequences. Even before the potential passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal, the national debt officially exceeded the size of the economy in 2020. This means we will soon owe more than we produce in an entire calendar year. And it’s only going…

A new “Hero Pay” mandate in Long Beach, California has inadvertently cost some frontline grocery workers their jobs. “Ralphs and Food 4 Less, both owned by the parent company Kroger, announced Monday that they will be closing 25% of their stores in Long Beach after the city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour,” local news outlet Fox 11 reports. Two stores in the area will be shut down. A company spokesperson directly cited the city council’s ordinance mandating higher wages as the reason they are closing down. …

President Joe Biden is pushing a federal $15 minimum wage in his sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, and the policy is only gaining steam in progressive circles. But newly released research undercuts the main argument progressive economists make in favor of minimum wage increases. A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveys the body of economic research on minimum wage increases and rebuts the notion that empirical data show no impact of increases in minimum wage hikes. The authors find that of all the available research on the subject they reviewed, there is a “clear…

On Thursday night, Joe Biden rolled out a sweeping proposal for $1.9 trillion more in COVID-19 relief and stimulus spending. “I believe we have a moral obligation,” Biden said during a speech in Delaware announcing the plan. “In this pandemic in America, we cannot let people go hungry, we cannot let people get evicted, we cannot watch nurses, educators and others lose their jobs, we so badly need them. We must act now, and we must act decisively.” It’s a massive proposal, and any final legislative text based upon it would no doubt be hundreds of pages (if not thousands).…