Well, here we are again, and everyone’s hair is on fire because next Tuesday is comin’ up fast, folks. Should be fun.

Of course, part of the reason people’s hair is on fire is because of the brand spankin’ new SCOTUS justice, Amy Barrett. Because everyone (well, especially those odd, subhuman creatures known as the Twitter Blue Checks) just KNOW what is actually impossible to know — — that she is there to ignore the law completely and vote, should she get the chance, for a Trump Second Term.

(removes tongue from cheek)

Putting the nonsensicality of that above paragraph aside, let’s investigate, shall we, exactly what the Justices MAY have to rule on regarding the election, based on what they have ALREADY ruled on. Because they’re already ruling up a storm. …

A few weeks ago, a dirty, broken down laptop took center stage in American politics. However, I don’t really care about the laptop, and neither should you.

The laptop belonged to Hunter Biden (no one has seriously objected to this as factual), and contained correspondences (which again, nobody has seriously objected as being factual) which suggest, but do not prove, that the then Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, exerted some influence over various international counterparties to obtain some sort of compensation for Hunter, and perhaps himself.

Since this rather innocent (and I mean that, really) paragraph causes many people to lose their minds, I think it requires some unpacking. …

Big article on Marketwatch today about how “young and dumb traders” were driving the market rally, which current has the indices within spitting distance of all time highs despite the COVID reduced recession, and has the market extremely overpriced (meaning, a forward P/E of 22–24, when historically a P/E of 16 is considered to be fully valued).

(I’ll link to the story below, so as not to distract anyone.) :-)

I had to wonder for a moment if that’s actually true or not. Not the part of young and dumb traders, but if the market is actually overpriced.

The traditional market mean of 16–17 is just that; an average. But prices (and earnings) are affected by certain other quantitative variables which are set independently, the most notable of which are interest rates. When the Fed wants to stimulate the economy, which drives earnings up, they lower interest rates. When they want to keep the economy from overheating and crashing, they raise the rates, which puts the brakes on earnings. Prices, of course, move accordingly. …

So, the next time somebody tries to tell you it’s about “social justice” or “health care” or “foreign policy”….

If you’re distraught about the state of the world economy due to COVID-19, spare a thought about what conditions would be like had this all happened 25 years ago, when bandwidth in developed nations was not nearly sufficient to support Zoom, when access to the internet was not ubiquitous, when developing nations had no access at all, and when Amazon didn’t exist.

As an economic conservative, I find myself often interacting with people that demand I defend a point of view that I do not hold — that being that economic conservatives care only about money and not about people.

Evidently there is a caricature of our politics out there that insists that if we *don’t* want to impose punitive taxation on the rich and corporations, and if we *don’t* want to increase social services to Norwegian levels, then we must be OK with people dying in the streets, or some other such nonsense. So, it amuses me when the same people leveling these accusations are caught doing just that. …

(Or, how Bernie Sanders and Grover Norquist are destroying Social Security and Medicare)

As a person who is seeing her 65th summer in 2020, I was more disturbed than you probably were (depending on your age) to see this little gem pop across last night:

Here are the operative tidbits:

Without intervention, “all major trust funds will be out of money in just about a decade,” Marc Goldwein, a budget expert and a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said during a recent briefing. …

Short update today. You’ll love this one:

So, you can see that we now have a month long clearly discernible downwards trend in deaths that has persisted well past the 11–19 days that phased re-opening was expected (by some) to result in a “second wave”.

Put another way: States started their phased re-opens around 5/1. …