Yellen Warns ‘Constitutional Crisis’ Could Come Next Month

By Jack Phillips  May 7, 2023

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she will not rule out the possibility of declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional if Congress cannot resolve its standoff over the debt ceiling, but said there are “no good options” on the table. “There is no way to protect our financial system in our economy other than Congress doing its job and raising the debt ceiling and enabling us to pay our bills. And we should not get to the point where we need to consider whether the president can go on issuing debt,” Yellen told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. She was responding to a question about whether the Treasury could use the 14th Amendment to declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional. It reads, in part, that the “validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” But the U.S. Constitution also gives Congress the power of the purse. If Yellen invoked the amendment, it would trigger a “constitutional crisis,” she told ABC News..............To Read More...

My Take - So, is this a threat? Sounds like a threat! It certainly sounds like she's telling the world the Biden administration is going to take the power of the purse away from Congress if they don't give him what he wants, in total violation of the Constitution and the rule of law, which will clearly trigger a Constitutional crisis.  

Note, the only way there will be a Constitutional crisis over the budget is if the Biden administration make a attempt to ignore the Constitution and impose a dictatorship.  Which is the goal of the Democrat party, so she's warning the Congress you better get in line or else.  Well, I don't think that's going to work, and I'm inclined to think this is going to really tick off the conservative members of Congress. 

Assessing the Biden Economy

September 14, 2022 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

According to polling data, President Biden is not getting good grades for economic policy.

Part of that is because of inflation, though I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the blame belongs with the Federal Reserve rather than Biden. And the big mistake from the Fed took place before Biden even took office.

 

Unfortunately, the President is not trying to make things better. His appointments to the Fed suggest he doesn’t understand the need for good monetary policy.

And all of his major legislative initiatives (the so-called stimulus, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the pork-filled infrastructure legislation, and the cronyist handouts to the semiconductor industry) have increased the size and scope of government.

For what it’s worth, I think Biden’s big challenge – both politically and economically – is that Americans are losing ground. Simply stated, prices are increasing faster than incomes.

But that isn’t stopping the Administration from trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported a few days ago that the Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is claiming that Bdenomics is a big success.

…the Biden administration is pivoting to recast its stewardship of the U.S. economy as a singular achievement. …The case was reinforced on Thursday by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen… Ms. Yellen said the legislation that Mr. Biden signed this year to promote infrastructure investment, expand the domestic semiconductor industry and support the transition to electric vehicles represented what she called “modern supply-side economics.” …After months of being on the defensive in the face of criticism from Republicans who say Democrats fueled inflation by overstimulating the economy, the Biden administration is fully embracing the fruits of initiatives such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021.

The editors at the Wall Street Journal are not impressed.

Janet Yellen…tenure as Treasury Secretary hasn’t enhanced her reputation. …the White House is rolling her out in election season to portray the U.S. economy as a Valhalla of growth, fairness and optimism. …If you’re in a green business the White House likes, you’re in clover. If not, you’ll endure the costs of more regulation and taxes. In the Biden era, big government and big business are in political business together. …Ms. Yellen’s whoppers, …including a claim that “the causes of inflation are largely global.” …U.S. inflation has been substantially home-grown. …The Federal Reserve kept the money spigots open for too long, in part to finance the borrowing needed for all of the spending. …Ms. Yellen is also at pains to stress how much fairer the economy is since Mr. Biden took office… She fails to mention that the U.S. economy contracted by about 1% of GDP in the first six months of this year, even as real wages were falling. Real average hourly earnings declined 3% over the 12 months through July, and average weekly earnings by 3.6%. They’ve fallen 4.2% since Mr. Biden took office.

Meanwhile, the latest inflation data has not strengthened Biden’s case.

Jim Tankersley of the New York Times wrote about the issue yesterday.

Hotter-than-expected inflation in August was unwelcome news for President Biden, who has sought to defuse Republican attacks over rising prices in the run-up to November’s midterm elections. …Mr. Biden has claimed progress in the fight against inflation, including with the signing last month of an energy, health care and tax bill that Democrats called the Inflation Reduction Act. …But polls continue to show inflation is hurting Mr. Biden and his party… Mr. Biden threw a belated celebration at the White House on Tuesday to mark his signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. …But the country’s economic reality remains more muddled, as the inflation report underscored. Food prices are continuing to spike, straining lower-income families in particular. …Most importantly — and perhaps most damaging for Mr. Biden and Democrats — Americans’ wages have struggled to keep pace with fast-rising prices, an uncomfortable truth for a president who promised to make real wage gains a centerpiece of his economic program.

Let’s close with this chart, which shows what has happened to inflation-adjusted weekly earnings since Biden took office.

Yes, there was one recent month with good data, but that doesn’t seem like a big cause for celebration.

P.S. Paul Krugman’s defense of Bidenomics is just as weak as Janet Yellen’s (and his criticisms of good presidents are equally weak).

 

Cartoon of the Day

The Pick of the Left's Litter

November 7, 2021 By Rick Fuentes

The cascade of unforced domestic and international policy errors of the current administration, each more damaging to our economic well-being and national security than any fabricated misstep of the Trump presidency, has not dissuaded most Republican senators from allowing radical ideologues to assume positions of power. Juxtapose that to the mistreatment of Trump nominees, when Democrats flashed a middle finger across the aisle at those who had previously anointed the way for Obama’s cabinet picks.

In the catbird seat, Biden seems more a cat’s paw president, a career politician who upended mathematics and political history by winning more votes than voters after a bumbling basement campaign that sparked little public interest.  He has brought both sympathy and worrisome attention to the cognitive plight of the elderly.  Reflexively, he rubber-stamps executive orders that appear out of nowhere and level a wrecking ball at the American economy.  Without White House meddling, the legacy economy would have sailed out of the COVID storm.  Instead, the concurrence of inoculation mandates, supply gridlock, needless energy dependency, putting the unvaxxed labor force on the breadline, and government alms that encourage unemployment in a favorable job market papered over with Help Wanted signs, all have the economy circling the drain.

Biden is most troublesome when he wanders away from the teleprompter and the country.  Recently, he jetted off to Glasgow with an entourage of 13 cabinet members and hundreds of staffers.  Along the way, he took a convoy of gas guzzlers to the See of Rome to charm the papacy with his devoutness to climate change. Biden was blessed to feast on the Lord’s host, a sure sign that Marxist kinship trumps the sanctity of life and values expected of all good Catholics...........To Read More....

 

Treasury Secretary on European Wind Drought: “Energy Storage … Can Be Deployed”

By Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; If Energy Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has calculated how much must be spent on energy storage to stabilise a 100% renewable grid, she does not seem keen to share.

Why Treasury Secretary Yellen testified that climate change ‘must be addressed’, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen recently reiterated her stance that climate change poses a threat to the U.S. economy.  “Climate change is an existential threat, and it is a very high priority of President Biden’s and of mine to address it,” Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee last week. …Yellen also responded to a question about the Biden administration’s plans to shift U.S. energy to be reliant on renewable sources by 2035.

“I don’t believe that the president’s program is going to lead to increases in the cost of energy,” Yellen said, referring to the fuel shortage and high gas prices in the UK and Europe more broadly. 

She added that “in the case of the UK, there’s a question of what to do if the sun isn’t out and the wind doesn’t blow, and I believe there is storage technologies that can be deployed and, you know, other means to address that, and of course that has to be part of a plan to switch to renewables and address climate change.”..........To Read More....

 My Take - This is what happens when highly educated smart people allow ideology to make them stupid. 

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Winners and Losers from a Global Tax Cartel

July 14, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I critiqued Biden’s proposal for a global corporate tax cartel as part of a recent discussion with South Africa’s Free Market Foundation.  Here’s the segment where I explain why it would be bad for developing nations.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Joe Biden is pushing this policy because he wants more tax revenue to fund his misguided plan for a bigger welfare state in the United States. And the same is true for politicians in other big nations such as France, Japan, and Germany. 

So as negotiations continue and rules are decided, rest assured that those countries will look after themselves and politicians from developing nations will be lucky to get a few crumbs from the table.  This discussion gives me a good excuse to put together this list of the potential winners and losers from a global tax cartel.

Since I slapped this together in five minutes, I won’t pretend it’s comprehensive.  But it’s hopefully more complete than a simple statement that politicians are the winners and people in the private sector are the losers.

Speaking of losers, my list includes “Nations with sensible tax policy,” and that’s a good reason to share this story from the New York Times. It’s about Janet Yellen’s efforts to convince Irish politicians to sacrifice their nation’s economic advantage.

The United States is hopeful that Ireland will drop its resistance to joining the global tax agreement… The agreement, which gained the support of the Group of 20 nations on Saturday, would usher in a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent. It would also change how taxing rights were allocated, allowing countries to collect levies from large, profitable multinational firms based on where their goods and services were sold. …Ms. Yellen held high-stakes meetings in Brussels this week with Paschal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister… She needs Mr. Donohoe’s support because the European Union requires unanimity among its members to formally join the deal.

So you may be wondering what Ms. Yellen said? Did she have some clever and insightful argument of how Ireland would benefit (or at least not be hurt) if politicians create a global tax cartel?

Nope. The best she could come up with is that Ireland’s tax system wouldn’t be as bad as the one she wants for the United States.

Ms. Yellen told her Irish counterpart that Ireland’s economic model would not be upended if it increased its tax rate from 12.5 percent…it would still have a large gap between its rate and the 21 percent tax rate on foreign earnings that the Biden administration has proposed.

And her weak argument is even weaker when you consider that she’s already pushing for a much-higher minimum tax.

The bottom line is that Ireland has reaped enormous benefits from its decision to enact a low corporate tax rate. But if a global tax cartel is imposed, it would simply be a matter of time before that country gets relegated to being an economic backwater on the periphery of Europe.

P.S. Part of the discussion in the video was about developing nations having the right to copy the economic model (no income tax and no welfare state) that enabled North American and Western Europe to become rich in the 1800s. Sadly, I don’t think many politicians in the developing world are interested in that approach nowadays, but rich nations shouldn’t make it impossible.

Global Taxes Are the Latest Ploy to Destroy Sovereignty

The battle of the decade is now between popular sovereignty and globalism. It will have far-reaching political, economic, and social consequences, even for taxation.

 

By Theodore Roosevelt Malloch April 12, 2021

The Biden Administration has discovered a new issue for its vast globalist ambitions. It might surprise many, but it shouldn’t. Taxation is ripe for a global takeover so the whole world can suffer from the highest tax rates, collected and administered by a world government agency like the United Nations.

None other than Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Biden’s siren Wall Street mistress of finance, announced the plan last week. Like her boss, Yellen wants to do away with differences in tax structures, rates, and regimes not only between states but among all countries. This is the biggest socialist grab since 1917.  As economist Stephen Moore suggests, “For the last four decades, the left has sworn on a stack of Bibles that taxes don’t influence behavior and that high tax rates are no disincentive to growth. In fact, Biden’s gang of economists argue no negative impact from raising tax rates to their highest level since the 1970s.”

This is obviously untrue and absurd, and even the Left doesn’t believe it anymore. Does any thinking person really believe that the ongoing and real exodus from New York to Florida isn’t driven by 13 percent income tax in one place and zero income tax in the other? The same could be said for California and Texas. The numbers prove the point and people, like firms, are voting with their feet.......To Read More....