Repealing Amendments; Exploiting Ian; & Hosting Insect Cocktail Parties

Michael Walsh is thinking big in his Editor’s Column this week:

To Save America, Repeal the 16th Amendment

The U.S. hit twin milestones recently : federal tax collections set a record for siphoning money out of your pockets, while in the meantime the national debt set a record as well. Oh yes, and inflation—so recently brought to heel by the Democrats via the Inflation Reduction Act!—is soaring as well. Let's look at the numbers. First taxes:

The federal government collected a record $4,408,452,000,000 in total taxes in the first eleven months of fiscal 2022 (October through August), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. That was up $525,658,170,000—or 13.5 percent--from the then-record $3,882,793,830,000 (in constant August 2022 dollars) that the federal government collected in the first eleven months of fiscal 2021. The record $4,408,452,000,000 in total taxes that the federal government collected in the first eleven months of this fiscal year, included a record $2,404,419,000,000 in individual income taxes.

Now, have a look at the national debt. Please do not confuse this with the deficit, which is how much Washington goes into additional hock each year even as it is mugging you. This, rather, is the total of all the deficits in our nation's history:

America’s gross national debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, a grim financial milestone that arrived just as the nation’s long-term fiscal picture has darkened amid rising interest rates. The breach of the threshold, which was revealed in a Treasury Department report, comes at an inopportune moment, as historically low interest rates are being replaced with higher borrowing costs as the Federal Reserve tries to combat rapid inflation. While record levels of government borrowing to fight the pandemic and finance tax cuts were once seen by some policymakers as affordable, those higher rates are making America’s debts more costly over time.

How much is $31 trillion? Written out, that comes to 31,000,000,000,000, or 31 × 1012. A mere one percent of that is $310 billion, which was the federal deficit alone in 2019.

The point is by now beyond obvious: with numbers like these, the Republic cannot continue until it gets its fiscal house in order, which will be never. And why should it? In addition to everything else wrong with the Robinette administration—the Afghanistan disaster, the cratered economy, widespread social unrest including soaring violent crime, the literally insane rush to war against Russia in order to protect Biden Inc.'s corrupt family business in the Ukraine—the financial wizards in Washington are also in the grips of a madness known at Modern Money Theory, which is the fiscal incarnation of the Left's overall embrace of Marxist Frankfurt School Critical Theory ….

This is the current thinking of our government and, when you stop to think about it, has been for decades. One warning sign came early, when the American space program, so proudly having risen to President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, effectively ceased to exist after December of 1972, with Richard Nixon freshly re-elected in one of the greatest electoral landslides in history. (Spoiler alert: he'd be deposed two years later in America's first political coup.)

As the full effects of the various Sixties' revolutions began to take effect, it was deemed more "moral" to direct our money to social goals, including welfare and the various entitlement programs that took root like kudzu in Washington and gradually, in the name of  "helping," choked the life out of the old can-do America and replaced it with gimme America. 

But the real blow to America's fiscal house—and, more important, its commitment to personal liberty—came just over half a century earlier with the 16th Amendment, proposed in 1909 and ratified in 1913. Proposed by the nascent "progressive" movement during the William Howard Taft presidency, and ratified by the states in February 1913, after the election of Woodrow Wilson (in which the GOP split the vote when Teddy Roosevelt, wanting his old job back, ran on the Bull Moose ticket and cost Taft re-election) but prior to Wilson's inauguration. 

"Democratic Party Platforms under the leadership of three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, however, consistently included an income tax plank, and the progressive wing of the Republican Party also espoused the concept," notes the National Archives, but conservatives had always managed to squelch it. Until:

In 1909, progressives in Congress again attached a provision for an income tax to a tariff bill. Conservatives, hoping to kill the idea for good, proposed a constitutional amendment enacting such a tax; they believed an amendment would never receive ratification by three-fourths of the states. Much to their surprise, the amendment was ratified by one state legislature after another, and on February 25, 1913, with the certification by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the 16th amendment took effect. 

Yet in 1913, due to generous exemptions and deductions, less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income.

That was then, this is now.

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Tom Finnerty reported on the decision of OPEC+ to cut production by 2 million barrels per day, which will wreak havoc on an already energy starved west.

OPEC Slashes Production: Dems, Your Wallet Hardest Hit

OPEC+ has agreed to a major cut in oil production. According to CNN, the supercartel -- which includes the 13 member nations of OPEC as well as a loose grouping of ten or eleven other oil producing states like Russia, Mexico, and Kazakhstan -- will slash production by "2 million barrels per day, the biggest cut since the start of the pandemic," a reduction "equivalent to about 2 percent of global oil demand."

Always concerned about the fate of their beloved Democrats, the CNN report makes it a point to mention that this "threatens to push gasoline prices higher just weeks before U.S. midterm elections." No kidding. Of course, for our captured commentariat, the disruption this might cause to their political narrative is a bigger deal than the disruption to people's lives. Gas prices have come down since their summer peak, but they are still outrageously high compared to just a couple of years ago. Americans are already struggling to fuel their cars and handle the soaring price of groceries and other necessities that have been inflated by soaring gas prices.

Still, they're not wrong. Despite some frankly terrible candidate selections on the GOP side, widespread dissatisfaction with Democratic policies have made several midterm races closer than they have any right to be. Oil and gasoline prices trending upwards again, especially just as heating season is getting underway, is likely to tip the balance further to the right.

No wonder Politico reports that Democrats are "seething" at the vote, and are frustrated that the Biden administration's attempts to influence OPEC decision making -- including a presidential visit to Saudi Arabia in July -- were all for naught. While visiting Riyadh, Biden's charm-offensive infamously included a fist-bump for the cameras with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to kick-off their meeting. Maybe he would have gotten better results if Biden hadn't pledged during his presidential campaign to make the Kingdom a "pariah" state. Wanna bet the Crown Prince took exception to those remarks?

Hoping to get out ahead of GOP point-scoring, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), put out a statement saying, “I hope that Republicans will join me in supporting [economic retaliation] rather than wishing high gas prices on the American people so they win an election."

Nice try, but the Democrats are responsible for this mess, and they're going to have to live with the consequences. If they weren't so focused on killing Keystone XL (the original sin of this administration's energy and economic policies); on banning oil and gas leases (and then half-heartedly reintroducing them); on pushing ESG on their big bank cronies at every turn; on backing the closure of U.S. oil refineries, or their conversion into BioFuel processing plants; all while appointing devout Green New Dealers to the cabinet; and generally waging war on the resource sector, we wouldn't be in anything like the mess we're in.

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Rich Trzupek wrote about the foolish attempts to blame Hurricane Ian, and the devastation it wrought, on Republican climate policies.

Another Day, Another 'Climate' Disaster to Exploit

Mechanical engineer Bill Nye has been all over CNN and the internet explaining how climate change affects weather in terms of a mechanical engineer. It’s all about energy transfer for Bill, a direct, proportionally measurable phenomenon that the many and “always reliable” climate models predict with perfect accuracy! Or so he seems to believe. (Side note: if the models are SO accurate why do we have so many of them?)

Weather events are bit more complex than that. That’s why weather models are different beasts than climate models. There is another big difference between weather models and climate models: weather models tend to be right. They tend to be right because they are limited in scope, both in terms of geographical area and in terms of how far into the future they look. They also tend to be right because their accuracy is immediately demonstrable. Climate models, on the other hand, seek to define trends for the entirety of planet Earth decades into the future and beyond. They are largely unproven because the data sets used to attempt to validate them is so poor (remember “hide the decline”) and their scope so terrifically huge.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the alarmist crowd told us that the number of hurricanes and cyclones were increasing in number and intensity because of "global warming." They have largely abandoned that argument for the very good reason that it is demonstrably false. The actual record shows very little variation in the number and intensity of hurricanes between 1980 and the present. It’s difficult to comment on hurricane frequency before 1980 because global weather monitoring by satellite did not exist prior to 1980.

For a while the “proof” became the undeniable fact that the value of insurance claims associated with hurricane damage continues to rise. A-ha! The hurricanes must be getting stronger and causing more damage, and the reason they are getting stronger is because of global warming.

That’s a neat little argument, one that seems to make some sense at first. But somebody checked on the rate of new property development in hurricane-vulnerable locales. Sure enough, the increase in the value of insurance claims pretty well matched the increase in development. So it wasn’t that hurricanes are hitting harder, they are just getting more targets to hit. In terms of intensity, Ian was far below Andrew in 1992 and somewhat below Michael in 2018. Andrew made landfall with a wind speed nearly 150 mph, Michael with a wind speed of about 135 mph, while Ian topped out at around 130 mph.

If it can be shown that we don’t have more hurricanes and a given hurricane’s potential to cause damage hasn’t really changed either, how can alarmists like Nye blame the devastation in Florida on "global warming"? Well, everything is possible if you just use your imagination. Nye parroted the latest party line: the rate at which today’s hurricanes are intensifying is increasing due to "climate change."

That is to say that as Ian came whipping up the Gulf of Mexico it was picking up more heat than it otherwise would have, thus transferring more energy, thus increasing the intensity of Ian beyond what nature intended.

The beauty of this argument is that it is unprovable. It’s an act of faith. If anything is a demonstrable exercise in chaos theory, it’s hurricane behavior. Yes, we can attempt to predict the track and growth of a given hurricane using some meteorological data, but the error bars surrounding those predictions are huge. Nye can no more prove that Ian would have behaved differently in a world with less greenhouse gases than he can disprove my assertion that Ian would have been much smaller in a world with fewer Bill Nyes.

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Clarice Feldman wrote about the European Union’s coming apart at the seams due to the continent’s energy crisis as winter closes in.

The Utter Folly of European 'Climate Policy'

Nothing the West can do changes the fact that during the next quarter century “over 80 percent of all increased global emissions” will occur in Asia. Moreover, for decades to come, “Asia, South America, and Africa “will represent over 90 percent of future increases in energy consumption.” Any effort must be global, not nation-by-nation. It’s simply not a first-world issue, and it’s irrational to pretend otherwise.

Also irrational is the pretense that we can limit energy use. We need it for everything and the demand is growing. It may be a surprise to learn that “Global smart phone production uses 15 percent more energy as the automotive industry.... the Cloud uses twice a much electricity worldwide as all of Japan.” This would surely set back on their heels the anti-fossil fuel crowd gathered everywhere in clothes manufactured from petroleum-based materials and coordinating their activities by iPhones, if only someone told them.

In the meantime, this winter Europeans are getting to see first hand the folly of the "climate change" cult thinking of the European Union and its national leaders. They are already seeing food and energy shortages and the beginning of deindustrialization…. As prices increase, along with scarce food, limited transport options, and winter heating, it’s easy to see why unrest in Europe is growing. The Yellow Vests in France have been demonstrating against, inter alia, rising fuel costs and austerity measures for almost four years. (The most recent French complaint about the emissions mandates involve the E.U.’s ban on an insecticide needed to deal with a beetle that devastates mustard plants.)

In the Netherlands, farmers have been protesting and blocking roads with their tractors for almost three years because of proposals to limit industrial fodder and livestock production to lower emissions from the nitrogen cycle. More recently, protests have against energy shortages have cropped up in Belgium where thousands of people have been protesting against the huge rise in the cost of living, driving “rising food prices, startling energy bills and frustration with politicians and employers.”

And then there’s Italy, where conservative firebrand Giorgia Meloni is poised to occupy the prime minister’s office after the recent elections saw her Brothers of Italy party surge to power. Meloni is more concerned with battling Europe's coming energy crisis than she is with "climate change," and has called for the EU. member states to work together to solve the problem before the problem solves them: "We need a common solution at the European level to help firms and families," she said in a statement. "No member state can offer effective and long term solutions on its own."

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Peter Smith contributed a piece on his native Australia’s fruitless quest to be the world leader in “cheap green hydrogen.”

Dumb and Dumber, To

From discordance to discourse. I was to be at lunch recently with someone who works within the renewable energy industry (everyone has to earn a living) and yet retains a balanced outlook. We discussed hydrogen harmoniously. Why not. He made the logical point that while blue hydrogen made of natural gas, with CO2 sequestrated, must by definition result in more expensive power than using natural gas directly, green hydrogen faces no such inherent limitation. Thus, conceivably, the price per kilowatt hour of electricity generated using green hydrogen could eventually fall below the corresponding price using natural gas. At the same time, he acknowledged the size of the task and the possibility that it might prove to be infeasible. Indeed, it might.

Cheap green hydrogen. That’s the goal of mining billionaire Andrew Forest in Australia. He’s not alone. He’s part of a global pursuit for a stash of loot; akin to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, if you want to strike a movie parallel. In the movie, if you recall, there was the possibility of only one winner, such was the level of avarice among the competitors. There could be more than one winner in the green-hydrogen stakes. But pointedly not all nations can be the leading exporter of green hydrogen and surely only very few can be among leading exporters. I suspect that a fallacy of composition is afoot. The world isn’t big enough. Be that as it may, notwithstanding the geographical limitations of the world, Australia, according to its governing powers, is on track to be a leader, if not the leader.

Yet, unaccountably, when that esteemed body, the World Economic Forum identified six likely leading candidates for producing green hydrogen, Australia was missing. There was China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Come on guys. Where’s Australia? A mere afterthought, as it happens. Appended among Chile, Namibia and Morocco, et al.

But surely, that can’t be right? It was only in September this year that an international conference on green hydrogen was held in Australia’s so-called Sunshine State. Plenty of sun and wide-open spaces in Queensland to plant solar and wind farms in order to power electrolysis; lots of water up north too. Also, I misspoke, pardon my slip. It wasn’t a mere “conference” but a “summit” no less. Hydrogen Connect Summit, it was called. Henry Kissinger comes to mind. There you have it. Australia is surely at the epicentre of the green hydrogen revolution.

Not so fast. I searched. Quickly found summits everywhere; not a conference in sight. The FT [Financial Times] Hydrogen Summit in London in June; the World Hydrogen Energy Summit in India, coming in October; the World Hydrogen Summit in the Netherlands in May; the Asia-Pacific Hydrogen Summit in December 2021; the Hydrogen Shot Summit, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy in August/September 2021. No doubt there’s more.

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And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, hosts an insect-centric cocktail party.

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Hostessing

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Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Steven Hayward, Peter Smith, and Tom Finnerty. And don’t forget to pre-order our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order, to be released on October 18th All this and more this week at The Pipeline!