Unleash Prosperity Hotline - Weekend Edition
Issue #236
03/05/2021, 03/06/2021, 03/07/2021

1) The Senate's Shame

On Friday the February blockbuster jobs report was released with more than 400,000 private sector jobs created (almost triple what had been expected), big wage gains, a huge rebound in the battered leisure and hospitality industries, and a massive upward revision of the January numbers bring job creation since January up one-half million. The unemployment rate of 6.2% is about half of what most economists thought it would be back in July when Pelosi came up with her $1.9 trillion potion of economic arsenic.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for Pelosi, Schumer and Biden who are hell bent on careening the American economy over a fiscal cliff. What these numbers proved conclusively was that thanks to the Trump operation Warp Speed vaccines, the “stimulus” bill is a Godzillian waste of money. So the Dems pretended the report never happened, or in Biden’s case, disparaged the good news.

Then within 24 hours every Democrat in the United States Senate voted lock step like a parade of robotic Chinese soldiers to approve the $2 trillion Bernie Sanders bill, which we estimate will reduce employment by about 5 million jobs over the next several months.

We noted last week how pathetic the modern-day Democratic party has become that only two of 221 House Democrats voted against this assault against fiscal sanity. Senate Democrats are even worse. Not one broke ranks with Schumer. We don’t know if this was cowardice on the part of the 50 Democrats or mere economic illiteracy. We’re not even sure which explanation is worse.

Here is a link to see how your Senators voted:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=117&session=1&vote=00110

2) It Took Ten Hours to Read the Bill!

Three cheers to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin who believed the monstrosity of the 628-page COVID-19 spending bill deserved some more publicity. So he forced the Senate clerks to read aloud the entire bill. That procedure took 10 hours and 43 minutes.

Senators had 10 hours to listen to the bill being read aloud, before they start the 20 hours of debate time scheduled for the legislation. We doubt a single Democrat listened or has any idea what they voted for. Perhaps they will, in the famous words of Nancy Pelosi after Obamacare passed, find out what’s in it “after we vote for it.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seethed:

“Even liberal experts admit this is far out of proportion to what’s needed now, with vaccines going into arms and the economy already primed to roar back,” he said. “Amazingly, Democrats managed to allocate less than 9 percent of their massive bill to the entire health care response, and less than 1 percent to the vaccinations that will finish this fight.”

3) Cuomo - Just Say I'm Not Leaving

Governor Andrew Cuomo emerged this week from two weeks in hiding to finally answer questions about allegations of sexual harassment and his deadly COVID nursing home policy.

Of course, his real motive for holding a news conference was to road-test his strategy for remaining as governor despite a chorus of voices calling for him to resign.

His first tactic was to make it clear he’s not budging. “I was elected by the people of New York,” he said. “I'm going to do the job the people of the state elected me to do.”

His second ploy was to make a rare-semi apology for his behavior. ”I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,” he said. “It was unintentional.”

Cuomo then played his final card by asking for forgiveness from voters: "I have learned an important lesson.”

Cuomo knows that no one can force him to leave office short of a criminal conviction or impeachment by his own party’s legislators. He can take solace in the strange fate and survival of Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who rode out his “blackface” scandal, which would have crushed any Republican governor.

We can’t help wondering where the outrage is from the voters in one of America’s most liberal and “woke” state. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that by a 55% to 40% margin, New Yorkers don’t want him to resign. But by a 59 percent to 36 percent margin. At least the poll finds that Empire State voters don’t want Cuomo to run for a fourth term in 2022.

So let’s get this straight: liberals in New York supported the impeachment of Donald Trump AFTER he was out of office, but oppose getting rid of their governor whose incompetence led to the deaths of at least 1,000 senior citizens, who then lied about the deaths, then covered up the crime, then bullied legislators, who dared called for him to resign. We hate to say it, but maybe New York liberals deserve Cuomo.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-advisers-altered-report-on-covid-19-nursing-home-deaths-11614910855?mod=djemalertNEWS

UPDATE: now Cuomo faces a fourth accuser of sexual misconduct.

4) Scientific American Says Open the Schools

A year late, but we’ll take it. SciAm published a blistering analysis from two Boston University MD/PhDs:

It is important to remember that the level of safety we adjudge as “safe” is a relative thing, and unknowns remain about the long-term effects of COVID; however, we know that among children ages 5–14, the COVID-19 mortality rate has been reported at around one per million. To put this in perspective, by contrast, transport accidents account for 15 times that mortality rate...One can reasonably surmise that it has been far more dangerous throughout the past year for children to get to school than it has been for them to be in school.

So why has the science failed us; why has this issue been so contentious? Principally we think that we have looked to science for definitive answers, allowing a “follow the science” mantra to take hold in relation to COVID, but not in the context of the harm to younger children from school closures, even though school openings represent a trade-off that science could and should inform.

5) Liberals Are Completely Out of Step With Real America

Democratic data guru David Shor, a veteran of the Obama campaigns, has been a rare voice of caution for his party. He says that while the failure of many highly-educated suburban Republicans to vote for Trump last year is a real problem for the GOP, it is smaller than the problem Democrats have: a loss of about two percent of African-American voters and between eight and nine percent of Hispanic voters away from Joe Biden and towards Donald Trump.

Shor summarizes his findings:

What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.

What we found is that (Hillary) Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues.

We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us…. And Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html

6) The New Normal?

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