Originally on WhiteHouse.gov but re-printed at BareNakedIslam dot com The list is so long that I had to put a page-break in the list.
From Shirley Ann, a commenter on the article said: "President Trump really did work hard to make America Great Again. Then the Democrat/Communist Party stole the Election from the legally Elected Donald J.Trump.
Now, the OLIGARCHY OF BIDEN & The DEM CONGRESS RULE OVER US FROM INSIDE A BARBWIRE/Barricaded Fence,with Thousands of Armed Guards to Protect them from AMERICANS.
May God Help Us." Amen Shirley
Unprecedented Economic Boom
Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.
America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.
Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.
The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.
Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.
More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.
Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.
The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.
Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.
Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.
Unemployment rates for African
Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans,
veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school
diploma all reached record lows.
Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.
Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.
Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.
Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.
The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.
Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.
African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.
Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.
Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.
Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.
Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.
Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.
The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.
The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.
Rebuilding and investing in rural America.
Signed an Executive Order on
Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology
Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in
American farming and agriculture.
Strengthened America’s rural
economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture
Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband
infrastructure to rural America.
Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.
An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.
During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.
Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.
Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.
Unemployment fell to 6.7
percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April –
beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the
end of 2020.
Under the previous
administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from
10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump
Administration.
Since April, the Hispanic
unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment
by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.
80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.
Small business confidence hit a new high.
Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.
Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.
Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.
Home prices hit an all-time record high.
The United States rejected
crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public
health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.
Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.
Stabilized America’s financial
markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department
supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.
Tax Relief for the Middle Class
Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.
Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.
More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.
A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.
Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.
Doubled the child tax credit.
Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.
Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.
Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.
Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.
Since the passage of tax cuts,
the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has
increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.
Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.
Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.
Lower investment cost and
higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real
wages, and international competitiveness.
Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.
Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.
Opportunity Zone designations
have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an
estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone
residents who own their own home.
Opportunity Zones have
attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment
in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new
jobs.
Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.
Private equity investments
into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than
investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated
Opportunity Zones.
Massive Deregulation
Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.
Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.
Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.
Reduced the direct cost of
regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an
additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.
Removed nearly 25,000 pages
from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous
administration added over 16,000 pages.
Established the Governors’
Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at
the state, local, and tribal levels. (KEEP READING BELOW)
In the latest desperate attempt to prevent Trump from running in 2024,
Congress has created a new witch-hunt – the January 6th insurrection
that justifies Pelosi’s Wall. Congress is deliberately subpoenaing
Trump’s former aids knowing that there is a 200-year history of
Executive Privilege whereby the top aids to the president must be able
to speak frankly to the president in critical situations. One of those
aids is Mark Medows who is still in the White House and may have been
retained for a reason – political of course to target Trump.
Those behind the curtain are absolutely trashing the country, but
they also could care less about the image of Joe Biden. His polls have
gone into a free-fall. Like Bush Jr. will be blamed for the Iraq War
instead of Cheney, they know they can do anything illegal and Biden will
take the blame. After all, they wanted just a figurehead who would sign
whatever executive order they put in front of him and read from the
teleprompter whatever they right without putting two and two together.
In addition, they are instructing him to create a bonfire of the rule
of law much like Hitler had book burnings of anything he did not want
people to read. We have reinstated the Hitler Cancel Culture. They have
social media joining them with false promises that they will be in the
elite circle when this all comes to an end. This new world order they
have promised BigTech with virtual banks thinking they will reap
billions from every transaction in the world is appealing to their
greedy self-interest. Thus, welcome to the new version of Hitler’s
Cancel Culture 2.0.
After having Biden say not to obey the courts, he is allowing Bannon to be indicted
for contempt of court pretending the law must prevail which is exactly
opposite of his own instructions with regard to his mandate. Yet to
prosecute Bannon, Biden has deliberated waive executive privilege that
existed for 200 years. This is fundamentally abandoning even the
separation of powers if Congress can haul in any adviser to the
president and demand to know what was said.
This extends far beyond Trump. This is really unleashing the Bonfire of the Rule of Law
and the Constitution. The people pulling the strings, as I have been
warning, owe no allegiance to the United States. They have already sworn
allegiance to the Great Reset and this globalist agenda of Build Back Better.
The barbarians have broken through the gates. The
Rule of Law no longer means anything. Our long-standing traditions and
honor no longer mean anything. Parents are targeted by the FBI as
domestic terrorists because they object to the brainwashing of their
children. As they did in East Germany, children were taught the state
was your parent and if your biological parent ever spoke against the
state, they should report them. This is the new America these people are
creating.
There are deep concerns that an invasion from the Middle East has
been deliberately encouraged by Soros and his attempt to force political
change in Poland. For months now, in the aftermath of Biden’s
Afghanistan disaster, Poland has been targeted by a wave of Muslims
trying to infiltrate Poland. Estimates are that perhaps tens of
thousands of Muslims are trying to get into Europe by any means
possible.
There is no conspiracy theory here. Soros is behind the mass migration
into the USA as well as Europe. This is all part of his open society
and it is one of the eight objectives of the World Economic Forum. They
are trying to overthrow all conservative governments and Poland has been
targeted as having the Southern Republican state in the USA with the
Biden Administration secretly dumping illegal aliens in Republican
states.
This is a political agenda and they are deliberately sending a massive
hoard of immigrants into the West to overthrow and change the
governmental structures. This is what took place with the fall of Rome.
The barbarians invaded and were then installing puppet emperors. The
barbarians were even striking coins in the name of the Byzantine Emperor
in Europe pretending they were maintaining the Roman traditions.
Thus, these mass migrations are an attempt to have history repeat and
they are encouraging such mass invasions to accomplish the very same
goals – the overthrow of the old to usher in the New World Order – the Great Reset, and their Build Back Better agenda.
It is IMPERATIVE to know who your enemies truly are and their objectives! Look at the short video below to see the crazy worldview of Klaus Schwab and George Soros (Link):
Dr. Youngblood MD. talks quickly about the original Pfizer testing with a group of 44,000 persons divided equally into a placebo group and a vaxxed group.
There results showed great 90% efficacy of reducing severe Covid cases initially. (but later we find out that the protection fades after 6 months and is not as effective with new virus strains, ie., narrow immunity)
However, there was no improvement in mortality between the groups. This means that their vaccine did not reduce Covid deaths. There was no "death benefit."
Adverse events were higher by 2 to 6 times or more in vaccinated group vs. the placebo group.
Alpha spike protein is toxic, binds to ACE 2 receptor sites in the body. The ACE receptors are critical in clotting, blood pressure regulation and immunity regulation. This means that the vaccines are somewhat toxic.
No ethics panel or adverse effects panel under the Pfizer EUA. OSHA removed the requirement by employers to post adverse events to the VAERS program --- very unethical.
There have been 16,000 deaths from the vaccine itself, usually from zero to 40 days after the administration of the dose.
Pfizer was aware of the number and scope of adverse affects from the vaccine, but plowed ahead anyway. Why would they worry? They have ZERO accountability or liability.
Even today, there are no FDA approved vaccine available or being distributed in the US. What is approved is technically legally distinct from the vaccine being used.
In June 2021, studies showed that Covid titres in vaccinated people are just as high or higher than the UN-vaccinated. This was the basis for the call to return of mask wearing for all. The unvaccinated and vaccinated are capable of spreading the virus at the same rate. We have no "Pandemic of the Unvaccinated."
There is no justification of vaccine mandates. The vaccine effectiveness wanes and cannot help against newer mutated strains (like Delta). See the slide below and listen to the short video above:
The Rittenhouse trial is a Petri dish, a microcosm of a world that shows how dangerous the Democrats and the American left truly are, and how far they are willing to go. This
is real world destruction via the sham trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Total Bullshit Reporting from CNN by a Bullshit Reporter--A Minority Dipshit (of Course)
The Rittenhouse trial is a microcosm of our sad world, a Petri dish we all can observe until its predicted end.
The logic, if you can be called that, basically boils down to this (via Ace of Spades):
Rosenbaum only chased you and tried to take your gun.
The guy who kicked you only stomped you in your face.
Huber only hit you in the head with a skateboard used as a club.
And
now: Grosskreutz only pointed a handgun at you. You had an AR-15 and
should have just absorbed all these attacks because it is the only Real
Weapon at the scene.
There are several leading leftist
lights who are even going so far as claiming that all Rittenhouse (or
anyone) had to do was to obey the commands of the ANTIFA/BLM rioters
(who were in the process of burning the downtown of Kenosha down) and
just let the beat him to death and he wouldn’t have wantonly killed
Rosenbaum and Huber.
On Twitter, some rando leftie numbskull proposed this logical and total sand prescription:
“What
people could do with anger about the Rittenhouse trial is advocate for a
law that says that if you bring a weapon to a public place where you
know violence is basically guaranteed, you lose any self defense
grounds.”
Wow. Th idea that you lose grounds for
self-defense if you bring a weapon into a public place where violence is
basically guaranteed - like a fiery but mostly peaceful Black Lives
Matter protest - is a solution looking for a problem. That’s some real
next level thinking there, folks.
Joyless Reid, the Race Lady -
who for some reason gets paid to call people racists on a low rated show
on MSNBC – wants the judge removed because his phone has Lee
Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as a ringtone.
That’s a MAGA thing, you know. He’s a Trump plant. And a racist Proud Boy.
Let’s
review: the left from the leftist thick-browed morons on Twitter and
Facebook all the way to President Dementia have claimed a guy who shot
three white attackers was a white supremacist. They have said he didn’t
need a gun to be in an area where ANTIFA/BLM were burning buildings and
beating people – and where cops were told to stand down. He is a
murderer because he used disproportionate force to stop an attack on is
person – he had an AR when the other attackers only had a 9mm pistol, a
skateboard and were kicking him in the face.
And it is all on video. All of it. The prosecutor is arguing against reality.
The
left believes Rittenhouse is guilty, not because he stopped an attack
on his life, it was because he opposed something the left supported –
the “righteous” rioting and destruction of Kenosha.
This is the manifestation of the Rawlings-Blake Doctrine.
Remember the riots in Baltimore after the 2015 death of Freddy Gray in police custody?
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said:
“I’ve
made it very clear that I work with the police, and instructed them to
do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters could
exercise their right to free speech. It’s a very delicate balancing act
because while we tried to make sure they were protected from the cars
and the other things that were going on, we gave those who wished to
destroy space to do that, as well. And we worked very hard to keep that
balance and to put ourselves in the best position to deescalate. And
that’s what you saw.”
Give ‘em room to destroy.
That’ll teach them. They will eventually get tired and need a nap.
The
Rittenhouse prosecutor is horrible, but that is to be expected since he
never had a case in the first place. This was always a Kafkaesque show
trial, a literal Maoist struggle session. The leftist Democrats need
Rittenhouse to be guilty, so they are squinting their little beady eyes
and wishing as hard as they can on the crystal they got from Gwyneth
Paltrow.
But the important thing to take in is how the left
always, and I mean always, starts first with their desired outcome, and
then creates (or bends to the point of breaking) every fact or piece of
evidence to fit that outcome – and they use the process as punishment.
Five
minutes after the incident in Kenosha, every single Democrat had
declared Kyle Rittenhouse guilty, and he was an obvious white
supremacist killer who went to Kenosha just to randomly shoot righteous,
mostly peaceful black rioters and arsonists.
The only part of that story that was true was that there were rioters and arsonists.
The
Democrat left doesn’t care about facts, evidence, or truth. They only
care about preserving their ideology and eliminating any opposing points
of view. This preservation has reached levels of suppression not seen
since the days of Josef Stalin.
The Rittenhouse trial shows how
dangerous they are. These are people committed to destruction, not just
of an individual but the entire American system of justice.
Excerpts of recent Martin Armstrong posts; here, here and here.
The United States has undergone a political coup.
Biden has no idea what is really going on and calling it his Build
Back Better agenda as if he is the one the came up with this just proves
the United States is now being run by a foreign organization.
Commie Klaus Schwab and his apparatchniks in the EU are in charge of "the Biden Administration." Only Trump was standing in their way, so they cleverly disposed of Trump, and now they are working on a world government for complete control. Schwab is also the one that says "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" which is pure communism
Biden is a placeholder. There is no way he will ever run for election
in 2024. His handlers are doing what they want to do and they could
care less about Biden’s reputation or legacy. They have usurped the
power of the Presidency, imposing vaccine mandates that were never
submitted to Congress proving this is a dictatorship – not a democratic
process.
Historically, this has been the scenario that typically leads to
military interventions to remove such corrupt political influences.
Massive Corruption
Big Pharma has absolute immunity, and since the federal government is mandating vaccines, there is ABSOLUTELY NOBODY
to compensate people seriously injured from these vaccines.
It’s time these politicians stop taking “donations” from Big Pharma or anyone connected with Bill Gates, and just for ONCE
actually represent and protect the people! This is the fate of all
Republics. They always become for sale to the highest bidder.
Influence of the Davos Crowd / Soros / Klaus Schwab Meglomaniacs
The Democrats better wake up because this foreign agenda has usurped
their party. The
vaccines do not save lives, for the Biden Administration is using this
solely to control people, and the long-term goal is to mandate boosters
to retain any right whatsoever. They are bringing this in little by
little, in tiny steps, because their ideas on how to change society
profoundly resemble what Hitler did to Germany
Biden is
so not with it, he did not even know that his “Build Back Better” agenda was drafted at Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum (WEF) and was not his original idea.
Soros has been funding everything he can to overthrow the United States,
and he has supported the Democrats in this effort. Soros supports
defunding the police, which is simply how to usurp the police powers and
replace them with a federal police force that will honor even fewer
rights. It will devolve into all lives matter, not just black, for we
are all the Great Unwashed and the enemy of these people seeking to
recreate the world.
Soros knows that the way to conquer is to divide the people. This is
precisely how Hitler rose to power, and this is what they have done with
this vaccine. We have abandoned the rule of law, the respect for
religion, and the Biden Administration is taking orders from non-US
sources. There is no longer toleration of diversity, no less religion.
Even Christian scientists traditionally do not believe in drugs.
Although they are a minority, their beliefs are to be crushed and ground
into the dust on the external orders of this Build Back Better agenda.
Populism became a dirty word among politicians when Trump won in 2016.
Instead of looking at this objectively, that perhaps the people voted
for him because of all the corruption in Washington, they preferred to
say the people were stupid and this was just a fluke. How dare the people try to overthrow the establishment
is what I encountered in DC. The established political class rules –
not “We the People,” which they did away with a long time ago.
Abandonment of the Rule of Law
The Biden Administration has told businesses to ignore the courts and follow his commands, which in itself is outrageous. This is the complete collapse of the rule of law and one of the major signs that a government is about to fall into that same common grave that all previous governments lie in rest.
The Biden Administration has no respect for the military. If servicemen refuse the vaccine, they will be discharged and denied healthcare
and pensions. This is so unconstitutional and outrageous. One must
realize that the government failing to support the military could risk
the people cheering a military coup to overthrow this administration
that is obviously taking orders from non-American sources. Indeed, the
fate of Western civilization could be very dark if these people continue
to push for their one-world government.
Now the Hassidic Rabbinical Court in New York decreed that mRNA vaccine is “Absolutely Forbidden”
for children, adolescents, young men, and women. This is becoming a
serious First Amendment issue on the freedom of religion.Once upon a
time, the Constitution was all about equal rights to protect minorities.
All of that has been cast aside under this pretense of an emergency in
public health which is a manufactured crisis for political control.
Democratic Party to Split?
I have warned
that the Democrats will end up splitting. The Democrats are desperately
trying to turn the United States into the next Marxist Wonderland. There
are a lot of conservative Democrats who have been just going along with
the party for party’s sake. But there will come a point where they will
wake up and see that Biden is the perfect puppet and that the country
is being run from Geneva.
There will come a time where the vast majority will see the trend for
what it is. No president in the history of this nation has ever told
people to just ignore the courts. This is no longer a nation ruled by
the Constitution.
The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically
reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per
cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died
from COVID rather than with COVID.
Italian newspaper Il Tempo
reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people
who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under
4,000.
“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.
Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths
since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to
the virus alone.
“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and
five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more
than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.
“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being
infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood
pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial
fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer
in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart
failures.”
The Institute’s new definition of a COVID death means that COVID has
killed fewer people in Italy than (whisper it) the average bout of
seasonal flu.
If a similar change were made by other national governments, the
official COVID death toll would be cut by a margin of greater than 90
per cent.
Don’t expect many others to follow suit though, given that
governments have invested so much of their authority in hyping the the
threat posed by the virus.
For example, behavioral psychologists in the UK worked with the state
to deliberately “exaggerate” the threat of COVID via “unethical” and
“totalitarian” methods of propaganda in order to terrify the public into
mass compliance.
And it worked.
A survey
conducted after the first lockdown found that the average Brit thought
100 times more people had died from COVID than the official death toll.
Now we come to understand that the official killed ‘by COVID’ and not
‘with COVID’ figure is less than one tenth what is officially reported
as the total COVID death toll.
Despite the change, Italy may yet take the decision to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, although how such a scheme would be imposed remains unspecified.
When it comes to actions taken to address the Covid-19
threat, hindsight is still very much underway. For your consideration: a
story and outcome you probably aren't hearing much about anywhere else.
It takes place in the heart of Amish country.
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: thousands of families lead lives largely separate from modern America.
The Amish are a Christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the
superficial. They don’t usually drive, use electricity, or have TVs.
And during the Covid-19 outbreak, they became subjects in a massive
social and medical experiment. Here's a transcript of the interview with a Mr. Lapp and Steve Nolt at Attkisson's Full Measure videos:
Sharyl: So, it's safe to say there was a whole different approach
here in this community when coronavirus broke out than many other
places? Link to video
Calvin Lapp: Absolutely.
Calvin Lapp is Amish Mennonite.
Lapp: There’s three things the Amish don't like. And that's
government— they won't get involved in the government, they don't like
the public education system— they won't send their children to
education, and they also don't like the health system. They rip us off.
Those are three things that we feel like we're fighting against all the
time. Well, those three things are all part of what Covid is.
After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that
led to Covid-19 tearing through at warp speed. It began with an
important religious holiday in May.
Lapp: When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and
they take turns to drink out of that cup. So, you go the whole way down
the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup, if one person has
coronavirus, the rest of church is going to get coronavirus. The first
time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.
Lapp says they weren’t denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on.
Lapp: It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more
important than dying. But to shut down and say that we can't go to
church, we can't get together with family, we can't see our old people
in the hospital, we got to quit working? It's going completely against
everything that we believe. You're changing our culture completely to
try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we're not going
to do it.
Steve Nolt is a scholar on Amish and Mennonite culture, and Mennonite
himself. He’s studying Amish news publications to analyze
community-wide trends.
Sharyl: So, are you saying, as of about May of 2020, things kind of went back to normal in the Amish community?
Steve Nolt: For the most part, yeah, by the middle of May, it's sort of like back to a typical behavior again.
That also meant avoiding hospitals.
Nolt: I know of some cases in which Amish people refused to go to the
hospital, even when they were very sick because if they went there,
they wouldn't be able to have visitors. And it was more important to be
sick, even very sick at home and have the ability to have some people
around you than to go to the hospital and be isolated.
Then, last March, remarkable news. The Lancaster County Amish were
reported to be the first community to achieve “herd immunity,” meaning a
large part of a population had been infected with Covid-19 and became
immune.
Some outsiders are skeptical, and solid proof is hard to come by.
Nolt: Even those who believed that they had Covid tended not to get
tested. Their approach tended to be, “I'm sick. I know I'm sick. I don't
have to have someone else telling me I'm sick.” Or a concern that if
they got a positive test, they would then be asked to really
dramatically limit what they were doing in a way that might be
uncomfortable for them. So, we don't have that testing number.
Lapp: We didn't want the numbers to go up, because then they would shut things more. What's the advantage of getting a test?
One thing’s clear: there's no evidence of any more deaths among the
Amish than in places that shut down tight— some claim there were fewer
here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or another important
measure.
Sharyl: Did most of the community, at least the adults, get the Covid-19 vaccine?
Nolt: Again, we don't have data on that, but I think it's pretty clear that in percentage terms, relatively few did.
Lapp: Oh, we're glad all the English people got their Covid vaccines.
That's great. Because now we don't have to wear a mask, we can do what
we want. So good for you. Thank you. We appreciate it. Us? No, we're not
getting vaccines. Of course not. We all got the Covid, so why would you
get a vaccine?
By staying open, the Amish here have one tangible 2020 accomplishment few others can claim.
Lapp: We have this joke: when everybody else started walking, we
started running. We made more money in the last year than we ever did.
It was our best year ever.
Did the Amish really find a magic formula? They say yes. And they don’t care who doubts it.
Lapp: Yeah, all the Amish know we got herd immunity. Of course we got
herd immunity! The whole church gets coronavirus. We know we got
coronavirus. We think we’re smarter than everybody. We shouldn’t be
bragging, but we think we did the right thing.
Sharyl (on-camera): Nolt, the scholar, is publishing a paper on the Amish social response to government mandates and Covid-19.
The drama that played out in upscale Loudoun County, Virginia over the last year or so, and cost Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe the governorship last night, is a book waiting to be written. In fact, if companies like HBO or Netflix have any sense, it will soon be a movie as well, because almost every hot-button issue in American national politics was rolled somewhere in this sprawling, preposterous, rage-filled suburban drama.
I have a longer piece on this coming, and have to return to the area at least once to follow up, so I can’t get into it in depth yet. But as I scan the news from an Amtrak seat, on the way back north after watching last night’s shocking come-from-ahead loss by McAuliffe, a few things are already clear.
McAuliffe’s collapse, and the corresponding underdog win by private equity titan Glenn Youngkin, is already being caricatured nationally using the language of 1980s politics. We’re meant to understand that the Loudoun County story — which is too complex to summarize easily but involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults — was cooked up by Republicans as a cynical dog-whistle campaign.
“The GOP ran a master class on race-based identity politics,” wrote CNN’s Bakari Sellers. “The return of the Lee Atwater playbook. Pretty grim,” is how former Harry Reid chief of staff Adam Jentleson put it. “Hats off to the depraved cynicism and villainy and race baiting. It worked in Virginia,” seethed Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast. Van Jones last night called Youngkin the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”
Just as McAuliffe had no message apart from trying to tie Youngkin to Trump, these commentators seem helpless to do anything but fall back on a cookie-cutter formula for responding to Republican electoral victories in the Trump era. This drive-by commentary misses the weedsy, multi-layered nature of the Loudoun County mess. Some of the parents I interviewed last night, for instance, didn’t agree with Tanner Cross, the Christian gym teacher who spoke out at a school board meeting this past May, saying his religion would prevent him from complying with a proposed transgender policy requiring the use of preferred pronouns. “I’m a teacher, but I serve God first,” he said. However, some were still furious that Cross was suspended after his speech, essentially for violating a rule not yet put in place.
I met people who didn’t care about “Critical Race Theory,” if they even knew what it was, but were still offended by the existence of a closed Facebook group — the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of “racial equity efforts.” Still others were troubled by a controversy involving the process by which an outside consultancy called the Equity Collaborative came to be hired, at a cost of roughly $500,000, to conduct an “equity assessment” based on a report of racial insensitivity at one school.
There is a version of that latter story that is almost too comical to be believed — one reason I have to go back is to nail down those particulars — but it’s undeniable there are Loudoun County parents, many of whom are high-powered professionals working at banks or white shoe law firms, who initially smelled a rat on the finance side and only later worried about the politics.
Also complicating the “Lee Atwater” narrative is the role of Asian and South Asian parents in yesterday’s results. “A lot of immigrant families came here specifically for the school system,” is how one Indian-American parent put it to me yesterday. “When you start messing with that, and say, we don't have a say, that’s when people who’ve always voted Democratic will flip on them.” Reporting about Asian and South Asian families upset about new initiatives to deemphasize admissions criteria like test scores has often been dismissive or caricatured, and that certainly seems to have been the case in Loudoun County, where a significant portion of the people seriously being cast today as dupes answering a dogwhistle are immigrant, minority residents who’ve given Democrats their votes for decades.
One of the biggest stories in electoral politics in the Trump years has been the near-absolute conquest by the Democratic Party of places like Loudoun County, i.e. well-heeled districts with high percentages of college-educated voters. With Trump on the ballot, voting red became all but impossible for residents in these places, not just intellectually and politically, but socially. In certain suburbs, voting Republican while Trump still breathes air is an act that will put you “a notch below child molester” in the community, to use the Woody Allen phrase.
The significance of Youngkin’s win is that it signals Republican competitiveness in those districts again, something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. These white-collar, highly educated voters, the kind of people who get their shots, don’t watch wrestling, and send their kids to Harvard and Princeton, are the Democratic Party’s base. It took something pretty weird and intense to drive them to defection, and don’t trust anyone who tries to explain it in a tweet. This one really is a long story, and a wild one at that.
It’s shameful. Chicago Public School officials want to celebrate a record graduation rate when much of the other data shows they are failing Chicago’s children.
Only 26 percent of CPS 11th-graders can read and do math at grade level, according to the latest Illinois Report Card data, and yet last week the district proudly announced that 84 percent of students graduated from CPS in 2021 – a new record high.
First of all, color us skeptical about that record high rate. Everyone knows that the city’s children were underserved by remote learning – the failures were reported ad nauseum by the press. Announcing record graduation rates is a way for district officials to sweep those failures under the rug.
But there’s a more fundamental
problem: the graduation rate distracts from the fact that CPS officials
are pushing out poorly educated children.
Only 26 percent of Chicago
11th-graders are proficient in English Language Arts and only 27 percent
proficient in math according to 2019 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)
data.
Nearly 83 percent of students in CPS are either black or Hispanic, and, unfortunately, they have the lowest scores.
Just 14 percent of black 11th-graders
are proficient in English Language Arts and just 13 percent are
proficient in math. Hispanics aren’t much better, with just 25
proficient in reading and 27 percent proficient in math.
Pushing students through the system under “social promotion” only sets up thousands of children for failure every year.
“Social promotion” starts early at CPS. Just 30 percent of black children can read at grade level in the third grade, and just 37 percent of Hispanics can. Nevertheless, those students are sent on to the next grade year after year.
And when they do finally graduate, about 60 percent of students that attend community college end up having to take remedial courses.
CPS is in deep trouble, as we’ve documented recently, with more than 100,000 kids having left the district
since 2000. And that’s despite a doubling in per student funding. CPS’
operating spending has risen from $8,000 to $18,000 per student since
2000, a 121 percent increase in per student spending and more than
double the 50 percent increase in inflation.
Unsurprisingly, the farce continues. District officials now say they want to hit a 90 percent graduation rate by 2024.
[Notes from Doug:
The
vast majority of Black and Hispanic kids can't do high school senior-level
work nationwide. The national dropout rates for both groups are >50% even though many states require kids to "attend" high school until 18 (link)
years old. The ones that remain until the 12th grade, only 10 to 15% (blacks) can
perform proficiently in math and reading, but many are graduated and a
surprising number of these kids go to "college" by accepting Government
student loans.
The
students that can't do 12th grade work but still graduate often accept Gov't student loan
debt and go on to "college" for remedial courses.(colleges are cashing-in baby!) Other ones that don't graduate often go into the military (or drug dealing).
Colleges and the military are now
giant government welfare wards for kids that have no other options. Very little of the government student loans to minorities will be repaid.
Because our
economy has been disastrously de-industrialized by the past 5 or 6 administrations BY
GLOBALIZATION (to raise corporate profits), there are very few options for employment FOR EVERYONE
in our country, thus the giant welfare functions of the military and
now "colleges."
There
used to be a path to Black colleges that would accept black kids that
at least "attended" high schools. In fact, before 1964 and de-segregation, most black kids
attended neighborhood (black) high schools and then many went to
Black Colleges. That was a great thing and everyone was happy.
Now, because of the "equality" narrative, the happy path is
largely disrupted by DEMOCRAPS and the Supreme Court (due to "separate but unequal"). But not everyone or every group is academically equal. The "Supremes", the Leftists, Liberals and now Blacks could not/cannot accept this
obvious truth and the entire society is being disrupted as a
consequence. Suddenly, all white people are racist because blacks can't
do high school level work. But it's always been that way and probably will be for 100s of years.
Grading
scandals and Test Score cheating scandals are very common in school
districts with large minority populations. There is great pressure to
keep up the appearance of "equality" but it doesn't really exist.
People are trying hard to hide it, but it's just the way it is.
Vocational
High Schools to teach trades and other job skills are an obvious need. They used to be more widely available. I suspect that they don't exist
now because they would have too many brown and black faces that would
reveal basic racial inequality of intellectual ability and WE CAN'T HAVE THAT! So kids and the nation suffer instead. We can't even talk about it.
The Democrat's Hart Celler Immigration law passed in 1965
has INTENTIONALLY caused US demographics to shift dramatically to brown
and black immigrants taking the US population from about 85% white to
58% today(and dropping rapidly). This has been an intentional effort to create a more
"compliant" and less-skilled workforce. IT IS IN PLACE SO THAT DEMOCRAPS
CAN BUY THE VOTES OF THIS LOWER INTELLIGENCE POPULATION---AND IT'S
WORKED. No one, including Republicans, have the balls to fix this.
It's also the reason no one fixes our unchecked illegal immigration at
our Southern Border. It's part of a larger plan to DUMB DOWN our population with people more likely to vote "Democrat." What's good for our nation is not the concern of Washington DC. Only (false) narratives reign supreme.]
The energy price spike that is being experienced today is a warning that something is very, very wrong. ...the trend toward complexity has gone too far;
the economic system is starting to break down. Sharp changes appear to
be ahead. The world economy is shifting into contraction mode, with more
and more parts of the system failing.
Once energy supplies become constrained, energy prices tend to spike. In the early stages of these price spikes, adding complexity allows the economy to better tolerate higher energy costs. But excessive complexity (work-arounds for too-high energy costs) make the system more brittle and subject to collapse.
...the available energy supply from wind and solar (net
or otherwise) is tiny relative to the total energy required to operate
the world economy. This issue, alone, would disqualify a Great Reset
using wind and solar from truly being a solution for today’s problems.
Instead, plans for a Great Reset tend to act as a temporary cover-up for
collapse.
There are a huge number of people doing energy modeling. In my
opinion, nearly all of them are going astray in their modeling because
they don’t understand how the economy really operates.
The modeling that comes closest to being correct is that which underlies the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth
by Donella Meadows and others. This modeling was based on physical
quantities of resources, with no financial system whatsoever. The base
model, shown here, indicates that limits would be reached a few years
later than we actually seem to be reaching them. The dotted black line
in Figure 1 indicates where I saw the world economy to be in January
2019, based on the limits we already seemed to be reaching at that time.
Figure 1. Base scenario from 1972 Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil,”
with dotted line added corresponding to where I saw the world economy
to be in January 2019, based on how the economy was operating at that
time.
The authors of The Limits to Growth have said that their
model cannot be expected to be correct after limits hit (which is about
now), so even this model is less than perfect. Thus, this model cannot
be relied upon to show that population will continue to rise until after
2050.
Many readers are familiar with Energy Return on Energy Invested
(EROEI) calculations. These are favorites of many people following the
Peak Oil problem. A high ratio of Energy Returned to Energy Invested is
considered favorable, while a low ratio is considered unfavorable.
Energy sources with similar EROEIs are supposedly equivalent. Even these
similarities can be misleading. They make intermittent wind and solar
appear far more helpful than they really are.
Other modeling, such as that by oil companies, is equally wrong.
Their modeling tends to make future fossil fuel supplies look far more
available than they really are.
This is all related to a talk I plan to give to energy researchers
later in February. So far, all that is pinned down is the Summary, which
I reproduce here as Section [1], below.
[1] Summary: The economy is approaching near-term collapse, not peak oil. The result is quite different.
The way a person views the world economy makes a huge difference in
how one models it. A big issue is how connected the various parts of the
economy are. Early researchers assumed that oil was the key energy
product; if it were possible to find suitable substitutes for oil, the
danger of exhaustion of oil resources could be delayed almost
indefinitely.
In fact, the operation of the world economy is controlled by the laws
of physics. All parts are tightly linked. The problem of diminishing
returns affects far more than oil supply; it affects coal, natural gas,
mineral extraction in general, fresh water production and food
production. Based on the work of Joseph Tainter, we also know that added
complexity is also subject to diminishing returns.
When a person models how the system works, it becomes apparent that
as increasing complexity is added to the system, the portion of the
economic output that can be returned to non-elite workers as goods and
services drops dramatically. This leads to rising wage disparity as
increasing complexity is added to the economy. As the economy approaches
limits, rising wage disparity indirectly leads to a tendency toward low
prices for oil and other commodities because a growing number of
non-elite workers are unable to afford homes, cars and even proper
nutrition.
A second effect of added complexity is growing use of long-lasting
goods available through technology. Many of these long-lasting goods are
only affordable with financial time-shifting devices such as loans or
the sale of shares of stock. As non-elite workers (bottom 80% of workers) become increasingly
unable to afford the output of the economy, these time-shifting devices
provide a to raise demand (and thus prices) for commodities of all
types, including oil. These time-shifting devices are subject to
manipulation by central banks, within limits.
Standard calculations of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI)
ignore the fact that added complexity tends to have a very detrimental
impact on the economy because of the diminishing returns it produces. To
correct for this, today’s EROEI calculations should only be used to
compare energy systems with similar complexity. The least complex energy
systems are based on burned biomass and power from animals. Fossil
fuels represent a step upward in complexity, but they still can be
stored until their use is required. Intermittent renewables are far
ahead of fossil fuels in terms complexity: they require sophisticated
systems of storage and distribution and therefore cannot be considered
equivalent to oil or dispatchable electricity.
The lack of understanding of how the economy really works has led to the failure to understand several important points:
(i) Low oil prices rather than high are to be expected as the economy reaches limits,
(ii) Most fossil fuel reserves will be left in the ground because of low prices,
(iii) The economy is experiencing the historical phenomenon of collapse, rather than peak oil, and
(iv) If the economy is not to collapse, we need energy sources
providing a larger quantity of net energy per capita to offset
diminishing returns.
[2] The world’s energy problem, as commonly understood by researchers today
It is my observation that many researchers believe that we humans are
in charge of what happens with future fossil fuel extraction, or with
choosing to substitute intermittent renewables for fossil fuels. They
generally do not see any problem with “running out” in the near future.
If running out were imminent, the problem would likely be announced by
spiking prices.
In the predominant view, the amount of future fossil
fuels available depends upon the quantity of energy resources that can
be extracted with available technology. Thus, a proper estimate of the
resources that can be extracted is needed. Oil seems to be in shortest
supply based on its reserve estimates and the vast benefits it provides
to society. Thus, it is commonly believed that oil production will
“peak” and begin to decline first, before coal and natural gas.
In this view, demand is something that we never need to worry about
because energy, and especially oil, is a necessity. People will choose
energy over other products because they will pay whatever is necessary
to have adequate energy supplies. As a result, oil and other energy
prices will rise almost endlessly, allowing much more to be extracted.
These higher prices will also enable higher cost intermittent
electricity to be substituted for today’s fossil fuels.
A huge amount of additional fossil fuels can be extracted, according
to those who are primarily concerned about loss of biodiversity and
climate change. Those who analyze EROEI tend to believe that falling
EROEI will limit the quantity of future fossil fuels extracted to a
smaller total extracted amount. Because of this, energy from additional
sources, such as intermittent wind and solar, will be required to meet
the total energy demand of society.
The focus of EROEI studies is on whether the EROEI of a given
proposed substitution is, in some sense, high enough to add energy to
the economy. The calculation of EROEI makes no distinction made between
energy available only through highly complex systems and energy
available from less complex systems.
EROEI researchers, or perhaps those who rely on the indications of
EROEI researchers, seem to believe that the energy needs of economies
are flexible within a very wide range. Thus, an economy can shrink its
energy consumption without a particularly dire impact.
[3] The real story seems to be that the adverse outcome we
are reaching is collapse, not peak oil. The economy is a self-organizing
system powered by energy. This makes it behave in very unexpected ways.
[3a] The economy is tightly connected by the laws of physics.
Energy consumption (dissipation) is necessary for every aspect of the
economy. People often understand that making goods and services
requires energy dissipation. What they don’t realize is that almost all
of today’s jobs require energy dissipation, as well. Without
supplemental energy, humans could only gather wild fruits and vegetables
and hunt using the simplest of tools. Or, they could attempt simple
horticulture by using a stick to dig a place in the ground to plant a
seed.
In physics terms, the economy is a dissipative structure, which is a
self-organizing structure that grows over time. Other examples of
dissipative structures include hurricanes, plants and animals of all
types, ecosystems, and star systems. Without a supply of energy to
dissipate (that is, food to eat, in the case of humans), these
dissipative structures would collapse.
We know that the human body has many different systems, such as a
cardiovascular system, digestive system and nervous system. The economy
has many different systems, too, and is just as tightly connected. For
example, the economy cannot get along without a transportation system
any more than a human can get along without a cardiovascular system.
This self-organizing system acts without our direction, just as our
brain or circulatory system acts without our direction. In fact, we have
very little control over these systems.
The self-organizing economy allows common belief systems to arise
that seem to be right but are really based on models with many incorrect
assumptions. People desperately need and want a “happily ever after”
solution. The strong need for a desirable outcome favors the selection
of models that lead to the conclusion that if there is a problem, it is
many years away. Conflicting political views seem to be based on
different, equally wrong, models of how world leaders can solve the
energy predicament that the world is facing.
The real story is that the world’s self-organizing economy will
determine for us what is ahead, and there is virtually nothing we can do
to change the result. Strangely enough, if we look at the long term
pattern, there almost seems to be a guiding hand behind the result.
According to Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee in Rare Earth,
there have been a huge number of seeming coincidences that have allowed
life on earth to take hold and flourish for four billion years. Perhaps
this “luck” will continue.
[3b] As the economy reaches limits, commodities of many types reach diminishing returns simultaneously.
It is indeed true that the economy reaches diminishing returns in oil
supply as it reaches limits. Oil is very valuable because it is energy
dense and easily transported. The oil that can be extracted, refined,
and delivered to needed markets using the least amount of resources
(including human labor) tends to be extracted first. It is later that
deeper wells are built that are farther from markets. Because of these
issues, oil extraction does tend to reach diminishing returns, as more
is extracted.
If this were the only aspect of the economy that was experiencing
diminishing returns, then the models coming from a peak oil perspective
would make sense. We could move away from oil, simply by transferring
oil use to appropriately chosen substitutes.
It becomes clear when a person looks at the situation that
commodities of all kinds reach diminishing returns. Fresh water reaches
diminishing returns. We can add more by using desalination and pumping
water to where it is required, but this approach is hugely expensive. As
population and industrialization grows, the need for fresh water grows,
making diminishing returns for fresh water a real issue.
Minerals of all kinds reach diminishing returns, including uranium,
lithium, copper and phosphate rock (used for fertilizer). The reason
this occurs is because we tend to extract these minerals faster than
they are replaced by the weathering of rocks, including bedrock. In
fact, useable topsoil tends to reach diminishing returns because of
erosion. Also, with increasing population, the amount of food required
keeps increasing, putting further pressure on farmland and making it
harder to retain an acceptable level of topsoil.
[3c] Increased complexity leads to diminishing returns as well.
In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter points out that complexity reaches diminishing returns, just as commodities do.
As an example, it is easy to see that added spending on healthcare reaches diminishing returns. The discovery of antibiotics clearly had a huge impact on healthcare, at relatively little cost. Now, a recent article is entitled, The hunt for antibiotics grows harder as resistance builds.
The dollar payback on other drugs tends to fall as well, as solutions
to the most common diseases are found, and researchers must turn their
attention to diseases affecting only, perhaps, 500 people globally.
Similarly, spending on advanced education reaches diminishing
returns. Continuing the medical example above, educating an increasing
number of researchers, all looking for new antibiotics, may eventually
lead to success in discovering more antibiotics. But the payback with
respect to the education of these researchers will not be nearly as
great as the payback for educating the early researchers who found the
first antibiotics.
[3d] Wages do not rise sufficiently so that all of the
higher costs associated with the many types of diminishing returns can
be recouped simultaneously.
The health care system (at least in the United States) tends to let
its higher costs flow through to consumers. We can see this by looking
at how much higher the Medical Care Consumer Price Index (CPI) rises
compared to the All Items CPI in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Consumer price index for Medical Care versus for All Items, in chart made by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
The high (and rapidly rising) cost of advanced education is another cost
that is being passed on to consumers–the students and their parents. In
this case, loans are used to make the high cost look less problematic.
Of course, if consumers are burdened with higher medical and
educational costs, it makes it difficult to afford the higher cost of
energy products, as well. With these higher costs, young people tend to
live with their parents longer, saving on the energy products needed to
have their own homes and vehicles. Needless to say, the lower net income
for many people, after health care costs and student loan repayments
are deducted, acts to reduce the demand for oil and energy products, and
thus contributes to the problem of continued low oil prices.
[3e] Added complexity tends to increase wage disparities. The
reduced spending by lower income workers tends to hold down fossil fuel
prices, similar to the impact identified in Section [3d].
As the economy becomes more complex, companies tend to become larger
and more hierarchical. Elite workers (ones with more training or with
more supervisory responsibility) earn more than non-elite workers.
Globalization adds to this effect, as workers in high wage countries
increasingly compete with workers in lower wage countries. Even computer
programmers can encounter this difficulty, as programming is
increasingly moved to China and India.
Individuals with low incomes spend a disproportionately large share
of their incomes on commodities because everyone needs to eat
approximately 2,000 calories of food per day. In addition, everyone
needs some kind of shelter, clothing and basic transportation. All of
these types of consumption are commodity intensive. People with very
high incomes tend to buy disproportionately more goods and services that
are not very resource intensive, such as education for their children
at elite universities. They may also use part of their income to buy
shares of stock, hoping their value will rise.
With a shift in the distribution of incomes toward those with high
earnings, the demand for commodities of all types tends to stagnate or
even fall. Fewer people are able to buy new cars, and fewer people can
afford vacations involving travel. Thus, as more complexity is added,
there tends to be downward pressure on the price of oil and other energy
products.
[4] Oil prices have been falling behind those needed by oil producers since 2012.
Figure
4. Figure created by Gail Tverberg using EIA average monthly Brent oil
price data, adjusted for inflation using the CPI Index for All Items for
Urban Consumers.
Back in February 2014, Steven Kopits gave a presentation at Columbia University explaining the state of the oil industry. I wrote a post describing this presentation called, Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending.
Oil companies were reporting that prices had been too low for them to
make an adequate profit for reinvestment, back as early as 2012. In
inflation-adjusted terms, this was when oil prices were about $120 per
barrel.
Even Middle Eastern oil exporting countries need surprisingly high
oil prices because their economies depend on the profits of oil
companies to provide the vast majority of their tax revenue. If oil
prices are too low, adequate taxes cannot be collected. Without funds
for jobs programs and food subsidies, there are likely to be uprisings
by unhappy citizens who cannot maintain an adequate standard of living.
Looking at Figure 4, we see that there has been very little time that
Brent oil prices have been above $120 per barrel. Even with all of the
recent central bank stimulus and deficit spending by economies around
the world, Brent oil prices remain below $60 per barrel.
[5] Interest rates and the amount of debt make a huge difference in oil prices, too.
Based on Figure 4, oil prices are highly irregular. Much of this
irregularity seems to be associated with interest rate and debt level
changes. In fact, in July 2008, what I would call the debt bubble
associated with the subprime housing and credit cards collapsed,
bringing oil prices down from their peak abruptly. In late 2008,
Quantitative Easing (QE), (aimed at bringing interest rates down) was
added just prior to an upturn on prices in 2009 and 2010. Prices fell
again, when the United States discontinued QE in late 2014.
If we think about it, increased debt makes purchases such as cars,
homes and new factories more affordable. In fact, the lower the interest
rate, the more affordable these items become. The number of purchases
of any of these items can be expected to rise with more debt and lower
interest rates. Thus, we would expect oil prices to rise as debt is
added and fall as it is taken away. Now, there are many questions: Why
haven’t oil prices risen more, with all of the stimulus that has been
added? Are we reaching the limits of stimulus? Are interest rates as low
as they can go, and the amount of debt outstanding as high as it can
go?
[6] The growing complexity of the economy is contributing to the huge amount of debt outstanding.
In a very complex economy, a huge number of durable goods and
services are produced. Examples of durable goods would include machines
used in factories and pipelines of all kinds. Durable goods would also
include vehicles of all types, including both vehicles used for
businesses and vehicles used by consumers for their own benefit. As
broadly defined here, durable goods would include buildings of all
types, including factories, schools, offices and homes. It would also
include wind turbines and solar panels.
There would also be durable services produced. For example, a college
degree would have lasting benefit, it is hoped. A computer program
would have value after it is completed. Thus, a consulting service is
able to sell its programs to prospective buyers.
Somehow, there is a need to pay for all of these durable goods. We
can see this most easily for the consumer. A loan that allows durable
goods to be paid for over their expected life will make these goods more
affordable.
Similarly, a manufacturer needs to pay the many workers making all of
the durable goods. Their labor is adding value to the finished
products, but this value will not be realized until the finished
products are put into operation.
Other financing approaches can also be used, including the sale of
bonds or shares of stock. The underlying intent is to provide financial
time-shifting services. Interest rates associated with these financial
time-shifting services are now being manipulated downward by central
banks to make these services more affordable. This is part of what keeps
stock prices high and commodity prices from falling lower than their
current levels.
These loans, bonds and shares of stock are providing a promise of
future value. This value will exist only if there are enough fossil
fuels and other resources to create physical goods and services to
fulfill these promises. Central banks can print money, but they cannot
print actual goods and services. If I am right about collapse being
ahead, the whole debt system seems certain to collapse. Shares of stock
seem certain to lose their value. This is concerning. The end point of
all of the added complexity seems to be financial collapse, unless the
system can truly add the promised goods and services.
[7] Intermittent electricity fits very poorly into just-in-time supply lines.
A complex economy requires long supply lines. Usually, these supply
lines are operated on a just-in-time basis. If one part of a supply line
encounters problems, then manufacturing needs to stop. For example,
automobile manufacturers in many parts of the world are finding that they need to suspend production
because it is impossible to source the necessary semiconductor chips.
If electricity is temporarily unavailable, this is another way of
disrupting the supply chain.
The standard way to work around temporary breaks in supply chains is
to build greater inventory, but this is expensive. Additional inventory
needs to be stored and watched over. It likely needs financing, as well.
[8] The world economy today seems to be near collapse.
The self-organizing economy is now pushing the economy in many
strange ways that indirectly lead to less energy consumption and
eventually collapse. Even prior to COVID-19, the world economy appeared
to be reaching growth limits, as indicated in Figure 1, which was
published in January 2019. For example, recycling of many renewables was
no longer profitable at lower oil prices after 2014. This led China to
discontinue most of its recycling efforts, effective January 1, 2018,
even though this change resulted in the loss of jobs. China’s car sales fell in 2018, 2019, and 2020, a strange pattern for a supposedly rapidly growing country.
The response of world leaders to COVID-19 has pushed the world
economy further in the direction of contraction. Businesses that were
already weak are the ones having the most difficulty in being able to
operate profitably.
Furthermore, debt problems are growing around the world. For example,
it is unclear whether the world will require as many shopping malls or
[ghost cities] and office buildings in the future. A person would logically expect the
value of the unneeded buildings to drop, reducing the value of many of
these properties below their outstanding debt level.
When these issues are combined, it looks likely that the world
economy may not be far from collapse, which is one of my contentions
from Section [1]. It also looks like my other contentions from Section
[1] are true:
(i) Low oil prices rather than high are to be expected as the economy reaches limits,
(ii) Most fossil fuel reserves will be left in the ground because of low prices, and
(iv) If the economy is not to collapse, we need energy sources
providing a larger quantity of net energy per capita to offset
diminishing returns.
Regarding (iv), the available energy supply from wind and solar (net
or otherwise) is tiny relative to the total energy required to operate
the world economy. This issue, alone, would disqualify a Great Reset
using wind and solar from truly being a solution for today’s problems.
Instead, plans for a Great Reset tend to act as a temporary cover-up for
collapse.
