UMich Confidence Rebounds In March As Low Income Americans Expect Big Pay Gains

Consumer confidence rebounded in March to 98.4 from last month’s 93.8, slightly above the average of 97.2 recorded in the past 26 months. The March gain in the Sentiment Index was entirely due to households with incomes in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.

Middle and lower income households more frequently reported income gains than last month, although income gains were still widespread among upper income households. Indeed, the last time a larger proportion of households reported income gains was in 1966.

Rising incomes were accompanied by lower expected year-ahead inflation rates, resulting in more favorable real income expectations …

Finally, it should be noted that too few interviews were conducted following the summary release of the Mueller report to have any impact on the March data; if there is any, it may affect the April data. As noted in last week’s special report on the politicization of economic expectations, the divergence between Democrats and Republicans has remained substantial. It is unlikely that the average level of sentiment, however positive, has the same impact on consumer spending given the sharp political differences. Nonetheless, the data do not indicate an emerging recession but point toward slightly lower unit sales of vehicles and homes during the year ahead.

 

 

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New Home Sales Surge In February As Mortgage Rates Tumble

After disappointing pending home sales, February new home sales beat expectations, rising 4.9% MoM after a massively upwardly revised January jump of +8.2% (revised from -6.9% MoM).

The 667k SAAR is the highest since March 2018…

While tumbling mortgage rates helped, we also note that the median sales price fell 3.6% from a year earlier to $315,300.

Purchases of new homes rose in three of four U.S. regions, led by a gain in the Midwest, while transactions in the South, the largest region, climbed to the highest level since 2007. Sales in the West were unchanged.

The supply of homes at the current sales rate decreased to 6.1 months, the lowest since June, from 6.5 months in January.

New-home purchases are seen as a timelier barometer of housing than those of previously owned properties, as they’re calculated when contracts are signed rather than when they close.

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‘They’ve Got Big Problems’: Trump Vows To Hold Officials Behind Collusion ‘Hoax’ Accountable

President Trump told a packed audience in Michigan on Thursday that he’s been fully vindicated by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and those who perpetrated the Russia ‘hoax’ will now be held to account, reports PJ Media.  

Trump called the Russia probe a “sinister effort” to undermine his election victory, and now “The Russia hoax is finally dead,” Trump told the crowd. 

We defeated a very corrupt establishment and we kept our promise to the American people and it is driving them crazy. Today, our movement and our country are thriving. Their fraud has been exposed and the credibility of those who pushed this hoax is forever broken. And they have now got big problems,” said Trump.

“This group of major losers did not just ruthlessly attack me, my family, and everyone who questioned their lies. They tried to divide our country, to poison the national debate, and to tear up the fabric of our great democracy, the greatest anywhere in the world. They did it all because they refused to accept the results of one of the greatest presidential elections, probably number one, in our history.” 

Of note, a four-page summary of Mueller’s report said that the special counsel investigation found no collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign, however it also says that the report “also does not exonerate him.” 

Pencil-neck Schiff

Trump took some time mock Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has the “smallest, thinnest neck I’ve ever seen.” 

“Sick. Sick. These are sick people. And there has to be accountability because it is all lies. And they know it is lies. They know it. They know it is. Jerry Nadler, I have been fighting him for many years. He was the congressman from Manhattan. I built great things in Manhattan. I had to beat him many times and now I have to come here and I have to beat him again. Can you believe it? I want every record in the history of the Trump Organization,” said Trump, mocking Nadler. . “We will find something somewhere along the lines. A mistake must have been made. These people are sick.”

Ridiculous Bullshit

Trump said that Democrats will need to “decide whether they will continue defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit – partisan investigations, or whether they will apologize to the American people.” 

 

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Brett Kavanaugh Explains Why He Voted to Grant Buddhist Inmate’s Stay of Execution

The Supreme Court ruled 7–2 last night to grant a stay of execution to a man scheduled to be put to death in Texas.

Patrick Murphy, whose case I wrote about yesterday, was convicted under Texas’ law of parties in the 2000 murder of a police officer. While he didn’t pull the trigger, Murphy was involved in the robbery that led to his compatriots committing murder.

“I’m not challenging the guilt of the crime,” he told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth this week. “My role was basically really to be the getaway driver.”

Despite not having been directly involved in the murder, various courts have refused to grant him a stay of execution. But Murphy also alleged that his First Amendment right to freedom of religion was being violated. He converted to Buddhism while incarcerated, but the State of Texas would not allow his spiritual adviser to be by his side in the execution chamber, since the Rev. Hui-Yong Shih is not an employee of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

A federal district and circuit court would not grant Murphy a stay, meaning only the U.S. Supreme Court (or executive clemency) could spare his life. The Court came through on Thursday night, ruling:

The State may not carry out Murphy’s execution pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari unless the State permits Murphy’s Buddhist spiritual advisor or another Buddhist reverend of the State’s choosing to accompany Murphy in the execution chamber during the execution.

Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were the only justices who would have denied a stay. While the Court as a whole did not explain its reasoning, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did publish a concurring opinion detailing his own decision.

“In this case, the relevant Texas policy allows a Christian or Muslim inmate to have a state-employed Christian or Muslim religious adviser present either in the execution room or in the adjacent viewing room,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But inmates of other religious denominations—for example, Buddhist inmates such as Murphy—who want their religious adviser to be present can have the religious adviser present only in the viewing room and not in the execution room itself for their executions.”

“In my view, the Constitution prohibits such denominational discrimination,” he said.

There were two possible solutions, he added. The state could let religious advisers of all faiths in the execution chamber, or confine them to the viewing room. The key is equal treatment. The state cannot give preferential treatment to Christian or Muslim inmates over Buddhist prisoners, Kavanaugh said.

The Court’s ruling surprised some observers, because it seemed to rule the opposite way in a similar case in Alabama last month. Dominique Ray, a Muslim inmate, wanted his imam to be by his side before he died. The state would not oblige for security reasons, since it does not employ any Muslim imams. But in that case the Court’s decision didn’t rest on the constitutional question: The justices ruled 5–4 that Ray had waited too long to file a petition for relief.

That did not seem to be an issue in this case, at least for Kavanaugh. The justice wrote in a note at the bottom of his concurring opinion that “Murphy made his request to the State in a sufficiently timely manner, one month before the scheduled execution.”

According to UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh (of Volokh Conspiracy fame), the Court’s most recent ruling may also reflect a backlash “from scholars whose views the justices respect” following their decision in the Ray case. “And of course justices should be open to changing their minds when they are persuaded that they were likely mistaken,” he tells NPR.

Regardless of their reasoning, the ruling is most certainly a positive. As Ilya Somin notes today at The Volokh Conspiracy:

Whatever can be said about the procedural question, it’s a good thing that the justices have taken a major step towards clearing up any confusion over their stance on the substantive one. Whether in death penalty cases or elsewhere, it is indeed impermissible for the government to discriminate on the basis of religion.

Murphy will now go back to death row.

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You’re A Sucker If You Don’t Believe The System Is Rigged

Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Imagine you spent two years completely screwing up at your job, I mean not merely getting every single thing wrong but loudly, proudly getting in everyone else’s face about how right you are. You’d get fired, terminated, 86’d, and Schiff-canned. But not the mainstream media. The media hacks failed for two years-plus, nonstop and without equivocation, but are they ever going to be held to account? No, they’re just going to gather in a big circle and Pulitzer each other.

Imagine you committed a racial hate crime where you falsely accused people who didn’t look or think like you of a horrible atrocity, and that you’d have gladly picked some poor saps with the wrong skin tone out of a line-up and sent them to prison for decades given the chance. Now imagine the two half-wits you hired to help you managed to get caught on video buying their stereotype get-up and spilled it all to the fuzz, though the fact you paid them with a check – because you’re a criminal mastermind – was already enough to get a grand jury to indict your sorry AOC. Now, what are the chances the DA is going to transform your 16 felony counts into a $10K fine and a couple days community servicing? Your chances of said outcome are poor. They are poor because your pals are neither Mrs. Obama or Willie Brown’s gal pal.

Now imagine that you studied really hard while the rich kids partied and smoked dope and splattered water on you by running their BMWs through puddles as you walked home from high school. Imagine your last name is “Chang,” or that your dad is a soldier and not a hedge fund manager, or that your mom is a waitress and not a TV bimbo. Now imagine how you feel when Durwood Richguy IV gets admitted to Harvard when he can’t count past 10 with his Gucci loafers on and you get slotted on a waiting list for Gumbo State.

Imagine you handled classified information and you took it home and put it on your iPad. Do you think the FBI would be super-concerned with your feels about it and give you a pass, like Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit got from Jim Comey, or would you be bunking with Michael Cohen? And speaking of that Looming Doofus, if you lied under oath in front of Congress, do you think you’d be free to wander the country, posting stupid tweets of yourself staring at trees and beaches?

Yeah, sure, that would totally happen.

The American dream has morphed into the American grift. And we normal people are the marks.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop accepting the ruling class’s lies. And let’s stop lying to ourselves. America has changed. There used to be one standard, one set of laws, one set of rules. Now, there are two.

The one set of rules for normal people is designed to jam us up, to keep us down, to ensure that the power of the powerful never gets challenged.

And the one set of rules for the elite can be summed up like this: There are no rules.

The media howls about the rule of law. Democrat poohbahs cry about the rule of law. The Fredocon gimps whimper about the rule of law. But the “rule of law” they aspire to is merely their rule over you. To them, the rule of law is not some transcendent principle. Its purpose is not to ensure equality and fairness in our society. It’s a weapon designed to make sure nothing disrupts their scam.

Why do you think our elite is so eager to pass new laws and regulations? Is it because normal people like you and me are running wild in the streets? No, of course not. They don’t want to regulate political campaigns to make sure elections are fair. They want to regulate them so they will always win and we never will again. They don’t want a Green New Deal because they care about the weather in 2219, but because they want to take our power and our money for themselves. They don’t want to ban our guns because we’re dangerous to other Americans but because, armed and ready to defend our rights, we’re dangerous to their power.

Do you, even for a second, think any of the rules, regulations, statutes or laws they propose are even going to be applied to them? Do you see the DOJ ever indicting some liberal Dem or some pliable submissivecon for “campaign finance violations?” We know the answer to that because Hillary is wandering around the woods, with a goblet of screw-top Chardonnay glass in her withered paw, free as a bird.

Do you see them giving up their SUVs and trudging to work on foot or riding in some greasy, stinky bus? Will they give up their air travel? How about their beef? Tofu veggie burgers are for peasants. And their minions will always have guns even as you are rendered disarmed and defenseless.

Our elite is not elite. Instead, it’s a bunch of bums who somehow got a little money and took the reins of power and are now shaking-down our great nation for every penny they can wring out of it. We owe them nothing – not respect, not gratitude and certainly not obedience.

If you still wonder how we got Trump, just look around you. He’s a cry for help, a scream against the injustice we’re surrounded by. This injustice is poison to our country. This injustice is what makes republics fall apart, when the worthless ruling class pushes its contempt in the people’s collective face so hard and for so long that the population finally screams “The hell with this!”

It can’t continue. It won’t continue.

*  *  *

That’s the essential message of my novels People’s RepublicIndian Country and Wildfire, about an America split apart into red and blue nations and going uphill and way, way downhill, respectively. Check ‘em out so that when the consequences of our failed elite’s venal, stupid decisions arrive, you won’t be surprised.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OvnMD3 Tyler Durden

Busybodies on Both Sides of the Atlantic Are Trying to Kill the Internet: Reason Roundup

Good news for Grindr, bad news for Airbnb, and mixed news for Section 230 in new court rulings. What do U.S. web regulation efforts and the new European Union Copyright Directive have in common? Both are brazenly branded by politicans as one thing while really being about censorship and control.

Kate Andrews of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs notes that intellectual property protections can divide “the classically liberal community.” But the EU’s copyright directive, passed this week, “is in many ways not an issue of copyright law at all,” she writes. “The legal right to protect one’s work is being used as a guise to bring in taxes by stealth and burden online platforms with near impossible standards of conduct.”

As part of this plan, Europe is imposing a “link tax” online that will fundamentally change the relationships between media, search engines, and social platforms. “Far from a copyright protection,” adds Andrews, this is “really an attempt to find something new to tax in one of the few areas of everyday life that hasn’t yet been slapped with a government price tag.” (Read more on these directives from Reason’s Scott Shackford here.)

In the U.S., meanwhile, the assault on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act continues. “Internet companies were once the darlings of Capitol Hill, celebrated by lawmakers as examples of American innovation,” writes Jeff Kosseff in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. “It’s safe to say the honeymoon is over.”

Kosseff—a computer science professor at the Naval Academy and author of an upcoming book in Section 230—explains it like this:

Section 230 was enacted in 1996, but its origins can be traced back to a 1959 U.S. Supreme Court case and, of all things, a Los Angeles bookstore. In 1956, Eleazar Smith, the 72-year-old proprietor of a bookstore that was located on Main Street a few doors down from where the Nickel Diner currently sits, was arrested after a clerk at the store sold a copy of the pulp novel “Sweeter Than Life” by Mark Tryon, considered obscene under city and state law, to a Los Angeles police officer.

At trial, Smith testified that it took him months to read a single book, and therefore that there was no way he could personally review each of the thousands of books in his store. A local judge disagreed and sentenced Smith to 30 days in jail.

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Smith’s conviction, concluding that California law violated the 1st Amendment because the statute penalized Smith even if he had no reason to know of the obscene book. Smith vs. California resulted in 1st Amendment protections for bookstores, newsstands and other content distributors.

Section 230 is basically that, but for the digital sphere.

Kosseff seems to think that digital platforms haven’t been strict enough about censoring content; I disagree. But he makes a good point in noting that there are many voluntary or at least narrower solutions to the perceived problems than to destroy this fundamental provision.

A recent case about the hookup app Grindr affirms the importance of Section 230. This week the Second Ciruit Court of Appeals found that the app was not responsible for a user impersonating his ex and directing men to his former partner’s house. The ex-from-hell can be held legally responsible, but not the platform. Were things otherwise, a small handful of bad actors could topple every social community and app we know.

But a bad omen on 230 comes from a recent Airbnb case before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court dismissed an Airbnb and Homeway challenge to a Santa Monica law that would hold those companies legal liable if users listed Santa Monica rental properties.

“Perhaps this decision may not be as obviously lethal to the Internet as the EU’s passage of the Copyright Directive with Articles 11 and 13, but only because its consequences may, at the moment, be less obvious—not because they stand to be any less harmful,” writes Cathy Gellis at Techdirt. More here.

FREE MINDS

Department of about damn time:

FREE MARKETS

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” which “would make sweeping changes” to the existing Equal Pay Act, according to the National Law Review:

The EPA currently prohibits gender-based pay disparities unless they are based on one of the following four bases: (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by the quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex. The Paycheck Fairness Act would narrow the fourth “catch-all” basis to “a bona fide factor other than sex, such as education, training or experience.” The Paycheck Fairness Act further provides that the “bona fide factor” justifying gender-based pay disparities would only apply where “the employer demonstrates that such factor: (i) is not based upon or derived from a sex-based differential in compensation; (ii) is job-related with respect to the position in question; (iii) is consistent with business necessity; and (iv) accounts for the entire differential in compensation at issue.”

It would also forbid employers from asking about salary history and make the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collect pay data, would make the Labor Department study and disseminate these statistics, and would provide federal funds for salary-negotiation training for women.

QUICK HITS

  • “Because Democrats and their media allies invested so much political capital in the now-discredited Russia collusion theory, they have not only failed to topple Trump, they’ve actually strengthened his hand immeasurably,” suggests Michael Tracey at Fortune. “Democrats have ended up giving the moral, political, and logical high ground to a president who is perhaps the most venal and sleazy individual to ever walk the Earth. Trump is a chronic complainer, often about the pettiest of slights, but Russiagate is the one subject about which his complaints have actually been legitimate. It’s astonishing but true: Democrats and the national media chose to spend three years validating Trump’s one grievance that actually has merit.”
  • An interesting review of self-help books by Jordan Peterson and Amy Alkon, from Australian liberarian Helen Dale.
  • An update on the federal case against Columbus Police Officer Andrew Mitchell:
  • “The Center for Reproductive Rights has expanded their current lawsuit in Mississippi, adding a challenge to the state’s six-week abortion ban recently signed into law,” notes WLBT. “The Center is asking a federal court to block the law before it takes effect on July 1.”
  • “A federal judge ruled today that New York’s notoriously nonsensical law criminalizing ‘gravity knives’—which groups have said for years is used by New York City to selectively prosecute people, especially the working class and minorities, for carrying common folding knives—is unconstitutionally vague,” reports C.J. Ciaramella.
  • The ACLU of Ohio is challenging an Akron-area anti-pandhandling ordinance:

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Twitter Might Start Labeling President Trump’s “Offensive” Tweets

Twitter is considering a new policy that would label tweets from politicians – including President Trump – when they violate the company’s (admittedly nebulous) community standards policy. Put another way, the platform, which has been exposed for discriminating against and shadow-banning conservative voices, is now planning to publicly shame politicians who express conservative views.

Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety, who famously appeared alongside CEO Jack Dorsey during an interview with journalist Tim Pool on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month, said during a Washington Post event on Wednesday that the company might start adding messages to these tweets to explain why they haven’t been removed from the platform, according to the Hill.

Gadde

Vijaya Gadde

Twitter has long held that some posts from public figures should remain up because they are “newsworthy,” even when they violate Twitter guidelines.

“One of the things we’re working really closely on with our product and engineering folks is, ‘How can we label that?'” Gadde said during the Post event.

 “How can we put some context around it so people are aware that that content is actually a violation of our rules and it is serving a particular purpose in remaining on the platform?”

Gadde mentioned the policy, which is under consideration, during a response to a question about whether Trump can say whatever he wants on Twitter. As it stands, Twitter’s public policy states that tweets from politicians are “important” to public debate.

“When we leave that content on the platform there’s no context around that and it just lives on Twitter and people can see it and they just assume that is the type of content or behavior that’s allowed by our rules,” Gadde said.

However, Gadde added that the platform’s “newsworthiness” policy doesn’t offer blanket protection to all tweets from public figures. Violent threats (and, presumably, deadnaming a trans person) would be an exception.

“An example would be a direct violent threat against an individual that we wouldn’t leave on the platform because of the danger it poses to that individual,” Gadde said.

“But there are other types of content that we believe are newsworthy or in the public interest that people may want to have a conversation around,” she added.

We look forward to hearing Twitter’s explanation about why they applied their new scarlet letter to all of the president’s tweets about the migrant crisis at the southern border

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WeWork’s $1.9 Billion Loss Is A Typical Tech Bubble 2.0 Story

Authored by Jesse Colombo via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

On Monday, unicorn WeWork reported that it lost $1.9 billion on $1.8 billion revenue in 2018. WeWork is a company that provides shared workspaces and related services for startups. WeWork can be thought of as a company that sells “picks & shovels” to the startup community and is, therefore, a play on the tech startup bubble that I’m warning about.

Like most other unicorns and the startups that it serves, WeWork is hemorrhaging cash left and right (which is very fitting):

WeWork is attempting to cash in on the explosion of tech startup activity over the past five years (which I’ve explained is a byproduct of the Fed-driven stock market bubble):

The U.S. stock market bubble and the tech startup bubble formed because the Fed and other central banks cut interest rates to ultra-low levels and flooded the world with trillions of dollars worth of liquidity in order to encourage an economic recovery after the Great Recession. There are some worrisome parallels between today’s liquidity-driven tech startup bubble and the early stages of the 1920s German hyperinflation (which started out as a liquidity-driven boom), when the newly printed money found its way into countless businesses that were recently formed (which is what we call “startups” today). It seemed like an innovation boom, but it was just pushing paper around.

The excellent book “Dying of Money” describes this phenomenon well:

Along with the paradoxical wealth and poverty, other characteristics were masked by the boom and less easy to see until after it had destroyed itself. One was the difference between mere feverish activity, which did certainly exist, and real prosperity which appeared, but only appeared, to be the same thing. There was no unemployment, but there was vast spurious employment – activity in unproductive or useless pursuits.The ratio of office and administrative workers to production workers rose out of all control. Paperwork and paperworkers proliferated. Government workers abounded, and heavy restraints against layoffs and discharges kept multitudes of redundant employees ostensibly employed. The incessant labor disputes and collective bargaining consumed great amounts of time and effort. Whole industries of fringe activities, chains of middlemen, and an undergrowth of general economic hangers-on sprang up. Almost any kind of business could make money. Business failures and bankruptcies became few. The boom suspended the normal processes of natural selection by which the nonessential and ineffective otherwise would have been culled out. Practically all of this vanished after the inflation blew itself out.

I believe that a very high percentage of today’s startups are actually malinvestments that only exist due to the false signal created when the Fed and other central banks distorted the financial markets and economy with their aggressive monetary stimulus programs after the global financial crisis. See this definition of malinvestment from the Mises Wiki:

Malinvestment is a mistaken investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the reallocation of resources to more productive uses. “Wrong” in this sense means incorrect or mistaken from the point of view of the real long-term needs and demands of the economy, if those needs and demands were expressed with the correct price signals in the free market. Random, isolated entrepreneurial miscalculations and mistaken investments occur in any market (resulting in standard bankruptcies and business failures) but systematic, simultaneous and widespread investment mistakes can only occur through systematically distorted price signals, and these result in depressions or recessions. Austrians believe systemic malinvestments occur because of unnecessary and counterproductive intervention in the free market, distorting price signals and misleading investors and entrepreneurs. For Austrians, prices are an essential information channel through which market participants communicate their demands and cause resources to be allocated to satisfy those demands appropriately. If the government or banks distort, confuse or mislead investors and market participants by not permitting the price mechanism to work appropriately, unsustainable malinvestment will be the inevitable result.

It’s inevitable that the startup bubble is going to burst and tens of thousands of unprofitable startups around the globe are simply going to close their doors. Companies like WeWork, which sell the “picks & shovels” to the startup bubble, will go down with the ship. If WeWork is hemorrhaging billions of dollars during the best of times, just imagine what will happen when the overall startup bubble bursts?! It’s not a pretty picture. Even if you don’t invest or work in the startup sector, it still affects you and your investments because the U.S. startup bubble is a major driver of economic activity and job creation since the Great Recession.

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US Income, Spending Disappoint As Fed’s Favorite Inflation Signal Weakens

Following the tumble in income (Jan) and spending (Dec) in the last reported month, expectations were for a modest rebound of 0.3% MoM for each, but both underwhelmed.

  • US consumer spending rose just 0.1% MoM in January (well below the +0.3% gain, but still a rebound from the 0.6% MoM drop in Dec)

  • US personal income rose 0.2% MoM in February (missing the 0.3% MoM expectation).

The spending figures, which reflected weaker sales of new autos, signals first-quarter growth faces additional headwinds, though surveys show consumers remain generally upbeat despite projections for slower expansion.

Both income and spending growth year-over-year fell to notable lows…

The spending data add to signs of weakness just ahead of the February retail sales report Monday.

Adjusted for inflation, January spending on goods dropped 0.2% on a monthly basis while purchases of services increased, driven by financial services and insurance.

The most recent month saw a small drop in savings rate from the surging 7.7% in December to 7.5%…

At the same time as spending fell short of projections, inflation also eased, sending an early warning on the economy in the first quarter that may add to concerns about the outlook.

The Fed’s preferred price gauge – tied to consumption – fell 0.1% in January from the previous month and was up 1.4% from a year earlier, matching the annual projection with the slowest reading since late 2016.

Excluding food and energy, so-called core prices rose 0.1%, less than estimated. The index was up 1.8% from January 2018, also below forecasts, after an upwardly revised 2% gain.

All in all, call it some economic justification of the Fed’s patient stance (though that 1.4% headline inflation is of course driven by oil prices.) Chairman Jerome Powell said this month rates could be on hold for “some time” as inflation remains muted and global risks cloud the outlook.

Is this more goldilocks?

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Why Presidential Candidate Arvin Vohra Wants Libertarians to Wage a Culture War

||| Vohra for PresidentBy the time the Libertarian Party gets around to selecting its presidential nominee 14 months from now, it could conceivably be a contest headlined by Rep. Justin Amash (?–Mich.), Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, and some billionaire to be named later.

But if the country’s third-largest political party were making that choice in March 2019 instead of May 2020, one of the bodies on that final debate stage would likely belong to former Libertarian National Committee (LNC) vice chair and 2018 U.S. Senate candidate Arvin Vohra. That may come as a surprise to those unaccustomed to hearing politicians campaign on the “total abolishment of the welfare state” while making social media jokes about shooting up school boards. It would also, not coincidentally, irritate a good number of Libertarians.

With the exit in January of previous vice presidential nominee Bill Weld, Vohra now has undisputed claim of being the most divisive figure within the Libertarian Party (L.P.). His series of intentionally provocative statements about age-of-consent laws, government schools, and the immorality of military service prompted unsuccessful attemps to suspend him from the Libertarian National Committee in February and April last year, with the latter effort falling just one vote short of the required two-thirds majority. Three months later, Vohra was routed by the party writ large in his bid for a third term as LNC veep. Undeterred, the 39-year-old educator promptly announced his presidential candidacy.

||| FacebookSince then, Vohra has finished a distant fourth in Virginia’s race for U.S. Senate, with just 1 percent of the vote (one of the lowest L.P. Senate totals in the country). He is now making the rounds to some of the same state Libertarian conventions that have censured him in the past. I attended one such gathering on Saturday in Hightstown, New Jersey, where Vohra addressed a body that rebuked him in November 2017 by a vote of 21 to 1 (with one abstention).

“I was warned earlier today that three-fourths of you in this room are openly hostile to me,” he began, “and I was honestly surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room where a fourth of the people haven’t made up their mind yet.” From there Vohra launched into an argument about “the necessity of culture war in politics.”

“The fundamental truth,” he asserted, “the absolute unchangeable fundamental truth that we’re facing right now in American politics is this: This culture produced this government. If we knock down this government, if we…fire everybody, we shut down all the departments, we shut down…everything. If we do that today, then this culture will recreate this exact government by tomorrow.”

I caught up with Vohra after his speech to ask him more about how he thinks such messaging can succeed within the Libertarian Party and in American politics as a whole. The conversation ranged from the alt-right to open borders to jury nullification. The following is an edited transcript:

Matt Welch: So the basic question with you, obviously, besides what a monster you are, is: You made this turn, right? You made this decisive turn from being the Libertarian we could take home to Mom to being the Libertarian, my God, we just cannot ever take home to Mom. Since that moment, you’ve got some censure votes, including in New Jersey; disputed ones on L.P. National; lost re-election bid for vice chair; ran for Senate and didn’t do that well comparatively to the field. Are you seeing market signals that your approach is working?

Arvin Vohra: Yes.

Historically, I can at least say that the other approach has backfired. It’s my opinion that if we’d had Dr. [Mary] Ruwart instead of Bob Barr and then Gary Johnson and then Gary Johnson again, we wouldn’t have an alt-right today. Because all of those teenagers who are looking to angrily rebel against what they perceive as an inimical authority would have a different direction to go in, a direction that’s just as upsetting to their parents. Because going off against public schools and going against the income tax, that’s just as upsetting to your parents as all the stuff that they’re saying right now.

And what’s actually happened, instead of people who want to rebel coming to the Libertarian Party, coming to this peaceful idea of voluntarism and anarchism, you have the opposite happening. You have all the people who used to be libertarians and suddenly turned alt-right. That reverse process, to me, is a direct consequence of that let’s make libertarianism as mom-friendly and as harmless as possible [approach]. There are some people who like things that are mom-friendly: moms. There are some people that don’t want things to be mom-friendly: the entire younger generation.

I discuss the very things that Dr Ruwart was attacked for, because I know that as an anarchist, I’m going to be attacked for the same things.

You look at my Senate campaign, and you compare it to Larry Sharpe’s governor campaign. My Senate campaign, I didn’t have time for it, it was a paper campaign, it was basically nothing. Larry Sharpe’s campaign was one of the most organized, one of the best fundraising campaigns ever. His phrasing was friendlier. My phrasing was unfriendly. At the end of it, it didn’t really make that much difference. [Sharpe also finished in fourth place, with 1.6 percent of the vote.]

What that says to me is the biggest issue that we have is, we’re not really getting into the national debate. People will look at most Libertarian candidates—and I certainly used to be a nice, friendly Libertarian candidate—people look at them and say, “Yeah, that guy seems kind of nice. I’m going to go vote for this guy, this other person, because this guy might overlap with me on more of my issues, but he doesn’t have the same chance of getting elected, and he’s not going to speak to my number one issue.” I would say that most voters have one or two issues that on the scales of policy matter more than everything else combined. And that’s why I don’t think they’re stupid when they vote Democrat or Republican. I think they’re making, for the most of them, the logical, rational decision.

And so a lot of what I’m doing is speaking to issues that neither Democrats nor Republicans are talking about. Even though they have some baseline emotional appeal there, they’re not issues that are being discussed. So things like abolishing public schools, things like leaving NATO, things like ceasing to be the world’s police, letting socialist Europe fend for itself, bring the troops home, laying them off, and cutting taxes. These aren’t things that you hear from the other parties. And so that’s where we’re seeing a message that isn’t already out there.

Other types of success are happening at an individual level. I mean, like I said during the speech, if my saving one person from military recruitment—and it was obviously a lot more than one person—but even if it’s just one person, if I’m saving one person from military recruitment, and all I have to do is lose one election as vice chair? It’s an easy decision for me.

Welch: So, some people will hear or read this and say, “Oh, so you want the alt-right vote”—you know, you’re obviously, like, pandering to racists. What’s your response to people who see your kind of heightening-the-contradictions approach as overlapping with that, and then being problematic because of it?

Vohra: Sure. The incorrect solution, for example with the military, is what Gary Johnson did. Which is basically put out billboards outside of military bases, be like, “Military, rah-rah!”

The correct approach to the military is what Larry Sharpe said, which is, “I get why you joined the military. Now leave the military, because it’s not doing that, and come join us.” Converting and pandering are not the same. I’m not trying to pander to the alt-right. I don’t support racists. I mean, you can look at my face and see that I wouldn’t really be interested in a lot of people getting really racist.

Welch: And you threw some shade at [Ludwig von Mises Institute President] Jeff Deist in August 2017, if I’m remembering correctly.

Vohra: So that, to me, is pandering. When you use white nationalist code-phrases like “blood and soil,” then you’re pandering. You’re legitimizing a problematic ideology. My goal is not that. That’s not what I have been doing. That’s not what I will be doing. Even when I went on the Chris Cantwell show, I wasn’t saying, “Yeah, you know, white power’s the best.” I was saying, “We need to end the state. This is not a useful way to do it. I don’t think that racism is the right way to go about it.”

When I reach out to the alt-right now, it’s designed to be conversion, as in: Stop wasting your time on this racist nonsense. Start using your time to defund the state, to get rid of government schools, to make sure that you have just as much of a right to do whatever you want with the fruits of your earnings as we now at least recognize that a woman has the right, or a man has a right, to do with his or her own body. Just as we expect active consent in the sexual sphere, we need to be expecting that in the financial sphere.

Is that going to convert everyone away from the alt-right? Of course not, but it’s going to convert some people. Because some people aren’t there because they’re racist, they’re just acting racist because that’s the requirement for being in the group. And I think that’s a very convertible group. They’re not set in their ways. They’re young. A lot of them were just looking for some rebellion, and I’ve got a much better rebellion here that’s going to actually do something positive for America.

Welch: Now, you have long thought that a convertible group are homeschool parents—

Vohra: Yes.

Welch: —and families and such. They’re still outnumbered by the people who you are equating in a more abrasive moment to welfare queens, people who are sucking up intergenerational welfare. What is your response to, “Hey, look, you are actively alienating 90 percent or 80 percent of a population out there by insulting them”?

Vohra: I’ve converted some people from military service. I’ve converted a lot more people to homeschooling.

I mean, homeschooling is the future of education. Just as 20 years ago, legalization was the future of drug policies, today homeschooling is the future of education. Free-market education is just better. What’s changed now, versus a while ago, is that now we have people who were homeschooled that are now entering their twenties and thirties, having kids, and they’re becoming intergenerational non-welfare recipients. They have a different ethos. And is that number smaller than the number of people in government schools? Absolutely. Is it many times the number of people that voted for Gary Johnson? No question.

So it’s true that some people are going to hear the message and say, you know, “You’re criticizing me.” And people respond two ways to criticism. Some get bent out of shape and get defensive; that’s fine. Some improve. And I’ve been lucky so far that some portion of the people that I have reached out to have improved—they have switched over to homeschooling.

If I’m the nominee, that number is going to be proportionally increased to some extent, because the message of homeschooling—the message that government schools are intergenerational welfare, the idea that parents should provide education for their kids, either through paying for it or if they’re providing it directly—that’s a message most people just haven’t heard. They haven’t had the chance to reject it. And to say that they’re going to reject the arguments before we even make them is an absurdly defeatist political strategy. I mean, we have to at least make the argument, give them the chance to reject it. And if they reject it, then they reject it, but at least let them actually do that.

Welch: But the military thing in particular. A lot of people are in the military, lots and lots of people. Including people [who] are pretty ripe for a libertarian message. So what do you think about the critique that the messaging, the way that you describe their choices, is needlessly repelling people who would otherwise be receptive to libertarianism?

Vohra: You have to get an actual conversion. If you’re not getting a real conversion, if you’re just getting that pandering pseudo-conversion, you’re spelling the end of your own movement.

And here’s what happens, and here’s what we’ve been seeing happening. Which is: People come on board, they don’t actually believe in all the message, because we’ve presented it in a way that could be interpreted as almost anything. And then they predictably either try to change our messaging to something absurd—and having interviewed God knows how many candidates on my own show, I’ve seen that sometimes the messaging isn’t really libertarian. And the result of that has been that we’re not driving our actual message.

When it comes to people in the military, I have two options. I can either say something, or I can say nothing. I can just do what everyone else does: Rah-rah troops, thank you for your service, all that kind of stuff. And in doing that, I’ll do two things. One, I’ll make some people a little bit open, but not actually consider the issue. I’m going to make it much easier to recruit young people, because that’s how young people are recruited—you say rah-rah veterans, that’s like the number one recruiting tool, is praising veterans and active servants. That’s how you get the young people in there. And I’d be basically adding to the problem.

When I started doing this, it was not that long after an LNC member had joined the Marines, had publicly announced it, with support and advice from another LNC member. And the general response from the Libertarian community was just rah-rah military. When I saw that, I could see how deep a cultural problem that we had.

And we do have a cultural problem. My goal is to convert people from their belief in militarism, from their belief that joining the military is a good idea, to a belief that anything else would be a better option. And that is going to be a hard sell. There’s no nice and easy way to do it. There’s no friendly way to lead to that actual conversion.

You can be friendly, and get someone to maybe hear you out or pretend to understand what you’re saying. But what has not happened in the past is that no one’s actually understood the message. At this point, they know what my message is, they disagree with it, and some have stopped disagreeing, some have come around.

Welch: You have an interesting rap about the culture war: that the culture that we have produced the government that we have, and we could throw it away tomorrow and we would just reproduce the government. A lot of libertarians—large-L, small-l alike—kind of have an instinctive sense of wanting to retreat from the culture war, because so much bad stuff happens there: bad thinking, bad argumentation, bad policies. What is your argument for why we should embrace, or at least join, the culture war?

Vohra: You can’t change policy at a deep and fundamental level without changing the culture. If we say, for example, that joining the military is the best thing you can do ever, then it’s a little bit confusing to say that everything the military does is really bad. That is a level of illogic that really rings false in the ears of almost everyone. You can’t say public school teachers are really, really good and the best people ever, but public schools are totally immoral. It doesn’t make any sense to anyone who hears that kind of stuff.

If we’re going to actually change policy in a deep and lasting way—I mean transform policy. I don’t mean these tiny little just insignificant things that we spend so much time on. I mean big things: abolishing government school, abolishing the income tax. That requires a big change in policy, and that needs to have a big change in culture.

To the next step, though, I don’t think that I’ve seen, with the possible exception of Bush Jr., I don’t think I’ve really seen somebody win a presidential election without also winning a cultural war at the same time. Trump won a culture war. Obama won a cultural war. Reagan won a culture war.

You have people who are winning culture wars. You can’t avoid a cultural war and expect to win at the political level. You’ll get people to say that you’re nice, and then they’ll vote for the other guy.

Welch: You mentioned in your talk about how of all the crazy shit that Libertarians say, open borders is one of the hardest sells. Why do you think that is? And what should a Libertarian messaging be, based on that insight?

Vohra: It’s very difficult because people are afraid of outsiders. People in every culture in history, to some extent, have been afraid of outsiders. And the rhetoric coming from the pro-open-borders side makes that problem worse, because they only talk about poor, starving refugees, and everybody here’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to have to feed a poor starving refugee!”

My focus on immigration is now, and has always been, on highly skilled workers. Because I believe that highly skilled workers should be able to go to any country that’s willing to hire highly skilled workers. I believe that keeping them out would be about a stupid as keeping out computers and oil, which is the only two things that are close to as important, although still less important to a business’s success than highly skilled workers.

So I focus on that a lot more. With that opening, you know, if it’s a more involved speech, then I discuss how a lot of the times the people who make the greatest innovations are not necessarily people who have degrees and other credentials. They’re people who are motivated, they are people who are innovative, they’re entrepreneurs.

And so the culmination, to me, really come to this position that we should have totally open borders and no welfare, because all the people who are coming over for opportunities can still do that. And if anybody’s coming over for welfare—and some people say it’s no people and some people say it’s a very small number of people, I think it’s probably a very small number of people—can’t do it. Just shut that part down.

And so I think that to speak to the people who are opposed to open borders, you’re actually better off with a spokesperson like me, who is abrasive and is kind of an a-hole, because they want to hear that, like, the mean, selfish, elitist guy wants open borders, not the bleeding-heart, let-me-give-all-of-your-money-to-the-starving-person guy wants open borders.

Welch: All right, anything else that I should be aware of that you’re doing, looking forward to? What should we be paying attention to?

Vohra: The biggest difference you’re going to see between me and, I think, most other candidates, is not what I’ll do if I win. Because whether I win or whether Justin Amash wins or whether Adam Kokesh wins, probably the first thing that any of us is going to do is pardon a lot of people, probably starting with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht. They might have a different order, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a lot of pardons in the first [months].

The difference is going to be what do we do in the campaign even if we lose. If I’m the nominee and I don’t get elected, here’s what you’re going to see. You’re going to see, through this extensive discussion of pardons and nullification, basically, everybody who heard of Aleppo, that number of people will know about jury nullification. That’s guaranteed.

And that means there’s going to be more jury nullification. Because most people don’t do jury nullification because they don’t know it, they don’t know the history of it. They don’t know that it brought freedom of the press to America. They don’t know that. If they all did that, people would be fired up to be on juries and nullify stupid laws.

You’re going to see a lot more bitcoin use. Why? Because cryptocurrency depends on network effect. A major presidential candidate talking about cryptocurrency can have a major influence.

You’re going to see a lot more homeschooling, because I’m going to be talking about that every chance I get. Abolish public schools; here’s why homeschooling is better. And you’re going to see a lot of people converting to homeschooling.

That’s if I lose, those benefits. That’s the benefits of an Arvin Vohra non-successful run as Libertarian Party nominee. If I win, we know what happens. I fire basically everybody, taxes go to zero, we bring all the troops home, we’re no longer the world’s policeman, and we can live in peace and prosperity.

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