Why does America keep winning?

X:

Yes. But also, America's abundance of natural resources and history of fortuitous developments kinda seems like God shed His grace on thee.

Capitalism and divine providence are like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Inflation is always and everywhere a progressive phenomenon

Excerpt from a text conversation with a young "democratic socialist":

DS: Every time the US has become progressive, the right wing and the “centrists“ said the policies were too unrealistic, but the civil rights movement still passed, and FDR is currently looked at as one of the best presidents of the past hundred years


WC: Some times the right wing and the centrists are right. LBJ's Great Society has trapped millions in multigenerational welfare dependency. Obamacare has made health care unaffordable and is bankrupting both families and the US government

LBJ's Great Society (and the Vietnam War) was what forced the US government to break the gold standard under Nixon, leading to all subsequent inflation crises. Inflation and all the recent unaffordability issues are entirely a progressive creation.

Progressives always think everything is "affordable" to the government because we can just print more or tax it from some place we haven't done the math on. So you get what we have here today.

Progressives have a very short-term view. They always want government to do more, more, more right now without having any idea about the long-term consequences.

Incidentally, income and wealth inequality is also a direct result of asset inflation caused by that same thing, US having to create inflation in order to fund progressive spending.

Capitalism was working great for the middle class before 70's, and especially before the 2000's.

What changed? Deficit spending and inflation.

Consider this

There are already 25 times more millionaires in the US than people who will ever be able to own one Bitcoin.

How do I love SPBC? Let me count the ways

 

SPBC is the Simplify US Equity Plus Bitcoin ETF. Simplify is stock market genius Michael Green's (@profplum99) place of business.

SPBC was launched in 2021, near a Bitcoin peak with $100 million in assets. in the ensuing Bitcoin winter, SPBC was largely forgotten and dwindled down to a few million in assets. But it shouldn't have been. SPBC has outperformed just about every asset class except gold (by a nose) since its launch.

The concept is simple and beautifully elegant. It's designed to give you 100% of the return of the S&P 500, plus 10% of Bitcoin. I love Bitcoin, and I love stocks. But like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, this is two great tastes that taste great together. 

The kicker is in the quarterly rebalancing. I love rebalancing. Any time Bitcoin goes on a monster run, the fund will take some profits and reallocate to stocks. And any time Bitcoin goes down hard, the fund will buy the dip. With a volatile asset like Bitcoin, that rebalancing is pure magic!

I was being a bit facetious with that tweet above. Everybody should be highly diversified of course. But SPBC is an easy, set-it-and-forget-it way for average folks to smartly get exposure to two great assets.

Happy government shutdown day!

 

 

It's looking like the best shutdown ever!

The Vought memo orders agencies to identify all programs that depend on discretionary funding (which lapses next week) and don’t align with the president’s priorities. Employees who administer those disfavored programs or projects won’t be furloughed. They will be fired.

For small-government advocates, the beauty of this is its reset potential. When government reopens, the Trump team will hire back the fewest possible statutorily required employees at programs it already wanted to cut. For a starter list, see the more than 45 Mr. Trump’s recent budget asked Congress to eliminate—among them the Economic Development Administration, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Legal Services Corp. And then there’s the Education Department.

The Democrats created Trump

Holman Jenkins, in the Wall Street Journal:

Nancy Pelosi, who said impeachment shouldn’t be a partisan stunt, launched a partisan stunt in 2019 by putting in charge Adam Schiff, whom the country knew as a collusion liar. This was a mistake.

Kamala Harris scrapes the larger mystery in her new memoir. Democrats essentially promoted Mr. Trump as a foil. They thought he was their ticket to enact policies Americans otherwise never would support and even most Democrats in office didn’t support, from unenforced borders to extending Joe Biden’s senile incumbency. This was a mistake.

On Aug. 8, 2016, the New York Times made its signal contribution with a front-page directive to the nation’s press to abandon objectivity and adopt an “oppositional” stance toward the GOP nominee. Has an idea ever proved more shortsighted? The spectacle of press lying over the next three years was the single biggest factor in turning Mr. Trump into the political Hercules he’s become.

It's different this time

No, really. It is.

Depopulation

I meet a lot of very cool 30-ish people who don’t seem to be on the path to having kids. Huge mistake. Kids are awesome.

It’s the circle of life. It’s meant to be. Whether you believe in God or not, nature wants you to have kids.

All your ancestors had children. You’re going to end a family tradition of millions of years because it’s inconvenient for your current lifestyle?

Inauguration Day

 Joe Biden right now listening to Trump talk about ending government censorship and the weaponization of justice:

Who made who?

ChatGPT caught lying to developers to save itself from being shut down. 

All is proceeding as Stephen King, AC/DC, and Emilio Estevez have foretold:

 

UPDATE: The Google Bot Overlords do not like this post.

Nailed it!

July 5:

QE has permanently ruined bonds for investors

You used to earn an interest rate roughly inline with nominal GDP growth, even slightly better.

Since the Fed started manipulating interest rates with QE, you're behind nominal GDP growth by 2.4% per year.

"Democracy" may not be on the ballot, but freedom of speech certainly is

This idiot was actually a high school teacher, indoctrinating kids with these Orwellian lies:

Walz making an alarming and false claim: "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."

Walz is wrong, of course: The First Amendment, which vigorously protects Americans' free speech rights, does not distinguish between good information and misinformation. Moreover, so-called hate speech—an arbitrary category, as different people find different sorts of speech to be hateful—is quite obviously protected.

Combine that with the Biden-Harris administration's long record of brutal censorship (see disinformation czar Nina Jankowitz, Twitter Files...), the First Amendment is on the ballot, and on life support.

Nailed it

Twitter (X):

To be fair, though, I thought they'd come up with someone more appealing than Cackles Harris.

Strange days indeed

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but look at what the security agencies did to create and promote the Russia collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden laptop Russia disinformation hoax. They're clearly heavily invested in preventing a Trump presidency and have zero care about legality or ethics.

You have to wonder if assassination is beyond them.

The disinformation and election interference is coming from inside the house

The FBI just admitted in court that Hunter Biden's laptop is real.

Here are 20 minutes of Joe Biden, U.S. intelligence officials, and the American media claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation."

The FBI has had possession of Hunter's laptop since… pic.twitter.com/5lzQaXitwq

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 5, 2024

Happy Super Tuesday!

CalPERS Fail

Despite the awesome bull market this year, CalPERS again missed its return target, earning only 5.8% vs. its required 6.8%.

CalPERS has missed its return targets for the trailing 1-, 3-, 5-, 15-, and 20-year periods.

When CalPERS fails to make its' required returns, California taxpayers are liable for making up the difference for California's uber-generous public pensions.

Maybe teaching racial division and hatred wasn't such a good idea after all

Doctor cycling in California run down, stabbed by driver screaming about ‘white privilege’:

A doctor cycling along the Pacific Coast Highway in California was mowed down by a driver who then got out of his vehicle and stabbed the cyclist to death while screaming ‘white privilege’ slurs.

Dr. Michael Mammone, 58, of Laguna Beach, was on his bike in Dana Point when he was struck by the driver of a white Lexus.

The driver allegedly sped through a red light at an intersection before running over Mammone on Wednesday afternoon, KABC reported.

He then jumped out of his vehicle and stabbed the victim multiple times in the back before bystanders tackled him to stop the attack.

Mmmkay....

President who usurped Congressional spending authority to issue an executive order handing out hundreds of billions of dollars right before an election will lecture nation on "threats to democracy."