Month: March 2021

As organized groups of social justice activists pressure US companies to oppose Georgia’s new election law, CEOs of major corporations are now coming out against the GOP-sponsored overhaul.

On Wednesday, 72 black executives – led by former American Express CEO Ken Chenault and outgoing Merck CEO Ken Frazier – signed an open letter demanding that corporate America fight the Georgia legislation. “Fundamentally, if you can’t oppose this legislation — that’s the lifeblood for black Americans, the right to vote. We can’t be silent, and corporate America can’t be silent. And if they can’t speak out on this issue, what can they speak out on?” Chenault said during an appearance on CNBC.

“there’s no middle ground here. You’re either for more people voting or you want to suppress the vote,” he added.

“We’re asking Corporate America to publicly and directly oppose any discriminatory legislation.”

— Former American Express CEO Ken Chenault, who is leading an effort among Black executives to get companies to help roll back new voting laws pic.twitter.com/GyoVwjq0MT

— The Recount (@therecount) March 31, 2021

“The campaign appears to be the first time that so many powerful Black executives have organized to directly call out their peers for failing to stand up for racial justice,” wrote the New York Times.

The changes via Axios:

• Cut the time period voters have to request absentee ballots and impose new identification requirements.

• Make it easier for state officials to take over local elections boards.

• Limit the use of ballot drop boxes.

• Allow challenges to voting eligibility.

• Criminalize any attempt to approach voters in line.

• “[R]eplace the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed [former President] Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results,” AP writes.

According to civil rights groups, the changes disenfranchise minorities (unlike arguably harder to obtain vaccine passports, for some reason).

Joining Chenault and the black executives are Atlanta-based Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who called Georgia’s new election law “unacceptable” in a memo circulated to staff, adding that the “entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie” about election fraud in the 2020 election. “After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”

Also ‘concerned’ over Georgia’s election law is Microsoft, which will press the state to change the ‘unfair’ law over provisions the company says “unfairly restrict the rights of people to vote legally, securely, and safely,” according to president Brad Smith in a statement posted to the company’s website. Smith notes the company’s significant investments in Atlanta, adding “we should all work together to oppose legislation in other states that would undermine the right to vote conveniently, securely, and safely.”

Lastly, Coca-Cola North American President Alfredo Rivera issued a Wednesday statement during Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ State of the City Address, saying “I, along with my colleagues at The Coca-Cola Company, have been disappointed in the outcome of Georgia’s voting legislation. We don’t see this as the final chapter, as we will continue to work with many of you.”

Now do vaccine passports…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A reaction to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine caused a severe rash that eventually led to a man’s skin peeling off, doctors and the man said.

“It all just happened so fast. My skin peeled off. It’s still coming off on my hands now,” Richard Terrell, 74, of Virginia, told WRIC.

Terrell received the shot earlier this month but was soon forced to go to the Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Medical Center for treatment.

The issues began appearing four days after the injection. Discomfort turned into an itchy rash that began to swell.

Graphic photographs show how Terrell’s legs and feet turned bright red as swelling intensified.

“It was stinging, burning, and itching,” Terrell said.

“Whenever I bent my arms or legs, like the inside of my knee, it was very painful where the skin was swollen and was rubbing against itself.”

Fnu Nutan, a dermatology hospitalist at VCU, said doctors determined what happened to Terrell was a reaction to the vaccine.

“We ruled out all the viral infections, we ruled out COVID-19 itself, we made sure that his kidneys and liver was okay, and finally we came to the conclusion that it was the vaccine that he had received that was the cause,” Nutan told WRIC.

“Lots of patients come in and say ‘I got the vaccine, here’s what happened, I’m sure it’s the vaccine,’” Nutan added to Fox News. “We’re very careful when we see such patients, we want to make sure we have ruled out the more common causes of the reaction—most commonly it would be antibiotics or something he took, even over-the-counter.”

Tests done on Terrell included ones for viral illnesses, COVID-19, and adenovirus.

Nutan said the reaction, which likely had to do with Terrell’s genetic makeup and the vaccine type, is extremely rare and that she still recommends people get a COVID-19 vaccine.

“If you look at the risk of getting the virus versus the benefit of getting the vaccine, the risk-benefit is still highly in favor of the vaccine,” she said.

Johnson & Johnson, VCU, the Virginia Department of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not respond to requests for comment.

Drug regulators authorized Johnson & Johnson’s shot last month.

As of March 30, 96 million Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. According to the passive reporting Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1,005 reports of skin issues following vaccination have been lodged in the United States. In total, there are 160,137 reports of adverse effects following vaccination.

Federal authorities, including the CDC, say they’re monitoring reports of severe allergic reactions, including by following up on reports from VAERS. Anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction, post-COVID-19 vaccination is rare, occurring in two to five people per million vaccinated in the United States, the CDC says on its website.

“This kind of allergic reaction almost always occurs within 30 minutes after vaccination. Fortunately, vaccination providers have medicines available to effectively and immediately treat patients who experience anaphylaxis following vaccination,” it states.

Following our earlier preview, Goldman’s chief political economist Alec Phillips is out with his own post-mortem of the White House infrastructure bill which he says was “mostly as expected”, proposing around $1.7 trillion/10 years in investment in physical capital and R&D. Another $500bn would go to workforce incentives and Medicaid benefits.

As Phillips continues, the proposed corporate tax increases were also largely as expected and would cover around half of the spending over the next ten years. Goldman believes that the White House will propose increasing capital gains and individual top marginal rates even though these were not in today’s plan, and expects the spending from this plan to take a few years to ramp up, with its forecast already assuming a spending path similar to what we believe would occur under this proposal.

Below we excerpt the key points from the Goldman report:

1. The White House proposes to spend roughly $2.2 trillion over ten years.  The Administration expects most of this spending to be complete after 8 years. This appears to be mostly new money with less double-counting of existing spending than in last year’s $1.5 trillion House bill.  Of the $2 trillion, around $558bn appears to go to traditional heavy infrastructure projects like highways, transit, water, and sewer. Another $374bn would go to high-tech areas, such as broadband, grid modernization and clean energy and storage, and electric vehicle-related spending.$378bn would go to the building and upgrade of residential and non-residential structures. R&D and manufacturing incentives would total $480bn. $500bn would be dedicated to caregiving and workforce development. These numbers all look generally similar to the Biden campaign proposals.

2. The spending from this plan would likely take a few years to ramp up. We have noted before that increases in traditional infrastructure funding often take a few years to reach the higher run rate, with a rule of thumb being that an increase in federal funding of $1 in one year increases federal spending by only about $0.40 the following year. That said, some of the spending could happen more quickly. For example, tax incentives to the private sector to install recharging stations for electric vehicles might spur investment more quickly, as might some of the federal procurement programs.  Taking the White House description at face value, the plan would average around $275bn (1.25% of GDP) over the next 8 years. Using the rule of thumb just noted, this would suggest that it could boost federal spending by a little over $100bn (0.5% of GDP) next year, and perhaps $150-200bn (0.7%) in 2023. This is similar to the additional infrastructure spending we assume in our economic forecast.

3. The types of spending the plan includes indicates which proposals the President believes are most important.  The plans includes mostly investment in physical infrastructure, but also around $500bn in various benefits including a substantial increase in Medicaid spending. This is despite the fact that the White House has already indicated that the President will announce a second proposal in April dealing with “human infrastructure.” To the extent that the White House believes Congress will consider these plans separately, with this plan passed first and the second piece to follow, it suggests that the benefit programs in this proposal are a higher priority than the child care, health care, and education proposals that the President will propose next month.  That said, it will be up to Congress to decide how to pass this proposal and whether to combine it with any other proposals the President might make in April.

4. The plan would be paid for with corporate tax increases that the Administration says would fully offset the 10-year cost after 15 years.  The key elements of the tax proposal are:

• A 28% corporate rate. President Biden proposed this during the presidential campaign. Each percentage point of corporate tax rate increase raises a little over$100bn over ten years in tax revenue, so this proposal would raise between $700-800bn/10 years. We think Congress can raise the rate to 24-25%, but might start to run into resistance among centrist Democrats between 26% and 28%.

• Tightening GILTI. Similar to the Biden campaign proposal, the White House proposes to raise the effective tax rate on Global Intangible Low Tax Income (GILTI) to 21% from an effective rate of 10.5% today, move the system to a country-by-country basis that would keep companies from using tax credits from high tax jurisdictions to offset GILTI earnings in low tax jurisdictions, and rescind the policy that applies the tax to income only above a 10% return on physical capital. This would mean that the GILTI regime would apply to most companies with foreign income rather than just to IP-intensive industries like healthcare and technology, and would likely also raise taxes for companies that currently have little to no GILTI exposure. The Tax Policy Center estimated the campaign proposal would raise $442bn over ten years.

• Other international tax changes. The White House release appears to contemplate replacing the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT), saying that it would replace “an ineffective provision in the 2017 tax law that tried to stop foreign corporations from stripping profits out of the United States.”  It also proposes to eliminate Foreign Derived Intangible Income (FDII), which encouraged US-based companies to hold their IP in the US by setting an effective tax rate on that income similar to the effective tax rate on IP held abroad and taxed through the GILTI regime.

• A minimum tax on book income. The proposal would also establish a 15%minimum tax on corporate book income reported to investors, which would serve as a check against companies that report large profits to shareholders but no profits to the IRS. The campaign proposal would have applied this globally on a country-by-country basis, but the White House release indicates only that it would apply this only to “the very largest corporations.”

• New restrictions on inversions. The White House does not define what this would be, but inversions are likely to play a larger role in tax policy if the rest of the proposal were to pass, as the US would then have a high tax on the foreign earnings of multinationals compared with most other developed countries that rely on mainly territorial tax systems.

5. Capital gains and individual tax changes are absent from this proposal but are likely still coming. This proposal only deals with corporate taxes.  However, we still expect the White House to propose other tax increases, like an increase in the long-term capital gains rate and a higher top marginal rate for individuals.  In theory, these other taxes would go to pay for other forthcoming proposals dealing with child care, health care, and education. However, these other taxes could come into play to offset some of the cost of an infrastructure package, for two reasons. First, it looks likely that Congress will scale back some of the tax proposals the President will outline today, leaving lawmakers looking for other sources of savings. Second, it is unclear whether a third major fiscal package will actually pass, and congressional leaders might ultimately decide to combine today’s proposal with elements of the other package the President plans to propose in April.

6. This proposal is likely to pass through the reconciliation process. This would allow the package to pass with only 51 votes (and probably only Democratic votes) in the Senate. President Biden has emphasized an interest in working with Republicans on this package, but this looks very unlikely as he is also proposing to dismantle nearly all of the biggest piece of legislation that congressional Republicans passed when they had control of Congress.  The only opportunity for bipartisan support we see is the surface transportation component of the package, which might need to be split off from the rest because elements of it might not be able to pass through the reconciliation process. However, this is more of a technicality and Republicans look unlikely to have much influence over the total amount of spending. If Democrats use the reconciliation process to pass President Biden’s fiscal proposals, they will need to decide whether to pass a single reconciliation bill that combines today’s infrastructure proposal with the other proposal Biden looks likely to outline in April, or to leave the two proposals separate and pass infrastructure first, with a separate reconciliation bill following later this year. Either is possible, but we believe it is more likely that Democratic leaders will decide to pass a single reconciliation bill to avoid forcing their members to take two separate votes to raise taxes.

7. Full details in May.  The White House will release additional budget details this week when it submits the discretionary spending portion of the annual budget proposal to Congress. However, the full details of what the White House will propose on fiscal policy are likely to wait until May, when the full budget comes out. From there, two processes could move in parallel. First, the committees with jurisdiction over the various programs involved are likely to write detailed legislation. Second, at some point in May and perhaps not until June, the House and Senate are likely to pass another budget resolution that lays the groundwork for the next fiscal package. Specifically, that resolution will need to instruct the relevant committees to increase or decrease revenues, spending, and/or the deficit by specific amounts. This will set the overall parameters for the legislation, which the individual committees might have in some cases already drafted. In light of this potential schedule, it looks unlikely that the next major fiscal legislation will reach the President’s desk before late July or early August, and there is a good chance it could take until September, after Congress returns from the August recess.  

Appendix: The “American Jobs Plan”

• Traditional transportation infrastructure: The President proposes to spend an extra $447bn on transportation infrastructure. This includes $115bn for highways (a roughly 40% increase over the 10-year baseline), $85bn for transit (70% over the baseline), $80bn for passenger rail (many times the current run rate, though similar to the $60bn proposed in last year’s House Democratic bill), $25bn for airports (a 75% increase), and $17bn for waterways and ports.

• Transportation electrification: The White House proposes $174bn in funding for electric vehicles (EVs). This figure includes point-of-sale consumer rebates and tax incentives to purchase US-made EVs and establish grants for the state and local sector and tax incentives for the private sector to build a network of 500,000 charging stations. This figure also includes the cost of replacing 50k diesel transit vehicles (i.e., buses) and replacing the postal vehicle fleet.

• Clean water: The White House proposes $111bn for clean water initiatives. He proposes $45bn for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, more than the $25bn in last year’s House proposal and substantially more than the roughly $10bn/10yr baseline. $66bn would go to other water improvements, also an increase over the$40bn in last year’s House bill.

• Broadband: The White House proposes $100bn in funding, similar to last year’s House proposal and the Biden Campaign’s proposal. This would provide funding to expand coverage in underserved areas and would prioritize non-profit and government-affiliated providers.

• Electricity modernization: The White House proposes $100bn in funding. Among the proposals are an investment tax credit for high-voltage capacity power lines, and an extension and phase-down of the investment tax credit and production tax credit for clean energy generation and storage.

• Affordable housing: The White House proposes $213bn in spending to build and retrofit affordable housing units. This looks comparable to the $189bn in last year’s House bill ($100bn in spending, $89bn in tax incentives).

• Building schools: The President proposes $100bn to upgrade and build schools, similar to last year’s House proposal and the campaign proposal.  An additional $12bn would go to community college capital projects.

• Health and child care construction: The White House proposes $25bn to upgrade child care facilities, $18bn for VA hospitals, and $10bn for federal buildings. This is slightly more than what House Democrats proposed last year.

• Caregiving incentives: The President proposes $400bn in funding to expand access to home- or community-based care for the elderly and people with disabilities. The Medicaid program would be the primary vehicle for this.

• R&D incentives: The President proposes $180bn in R&D funding, including $50bn for the National Science Foundation (NSF), $30bn in other incentives, and $40bn in federal funding for upgrading research plant and equipment, including computers and networks, and would be allocated to federal research agencies including the Department of Energy.  An additional $30bn would be devoted to climate-related research, and $25bn to research at historically black colleges and universities.

• Manufacturing incentives:  The White House has proposed $300bn in manufacturing incentives, including $50bn to support production of critical goods,$50bn for semiconductor research and manufacturing incentives, $30bn in pandemic preparedness, $46bn in federal procurement of clean power-related products, $52bn to subsidize manufacturers, including bringing back something similar to the Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit, and $31bn for small business credit and R&D assistance.

• Workforce development: The White House proposes $100bn for job training, apprenticeships, and other programs.

The list of respectable liberals and progressives who have urged social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to abandon their prohibition of President Trump includes Bill Gates and Bernie Sanders.

Yet, instead of letting up, social media companies – goaded by Democratic lawmakers during the latest in a series of tedious hearings about “hate speech” (aka speech that liberals find politically unpalatable) – are doubling down.

Fox & Friends on Wednesday slammed Facebook after the company removed an interview with Lara Trump and the former president from Facebook and Instagram. Lara Trump, who just joined Fox News as a paid contributor, posted the conversation with her father-in-law to her social media accounts, only to see it abruptly scrubbed due to the ban on content from the president.

F&F host Brian Kilmeade seethed over the removal: “That’s unbelievable,” Brian Kilmeade said. “Do you realize he is the former president of the United States? You do an interview with him, and it’s not worthy? It’s not allowed to be on your page? That is incredible.”

His co-host, Ainsley Earhardt, took the complaints a step further: “if they can pack the courts, make D.C. and Puerto Rico a state, if they can get all of these illegal immigrants to come in, then they are hoping they will vote for them eventually.”

“They can cancel Donald Trump on social media, so that he can’t have a platform and he can’t speak,” she continued. “If they can bash our network, then they are on their way to controlling our country. And it’s a scary time. It’s a very scary time, and what is this gonna look like for our kids?”

According to media reports, none of this should have come as a surprise: Trump officials were recently sent an email from a Facebook employee, warning that any content posted on Facebook and Instagram “in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).”

Here’s more on that from Fox News:

A group of Trump officials were sent an email from a Facebook employee, warning that any content posted on Facebook and Instagram “in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking)” and warned that it “will be removed if posted, resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”

“This guidance applies to all campaign accounts and Pages, including Team Trump, other campaign messaging vehicles on our platforms, and former surrogates,” the email, posted on Instagram by Trump’s son, Eric Trump, stated.

Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley warned in a blog post that FB’s censorship of Trump is “an obvious attack on free speech, including political speech”. He then offered up this comical scenario to illustrate just how outrageous the ban on Trump can be: “Notably, he could be talking about the Yankees but the posting would be censored because the team was discussed in the voice of Donald Trump. It is not his view but Trump himself that is being canceled by the company. However, presumably, Lara Trump could sit next to Trump and have him whisper his views into her ear. She could then give his views in the voice of Lara rather than Donald Trump.”

Turley then pointed to an exchange between two Democratic senators and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to further illustrate his point. At one point, Dem Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked the CEOS “will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”

The phrase “robust content modification” might have a certain appeal at a surface level, but beyond that, it’s clear what’s really going on: “It is censorship. If our representatives are going to crackdown on free speech, they should admit to being advocates for censorship.”

All of this should have implications for tech companies and protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – protections that President Trump sought (unsuccessfully) to remove.

“Big Tech once fashioned itself as the equivalent of the telephone company, and thus sought protections as neutral suppliers of communication forums allowing people to voluntarily associate and interact. It then started to engage in expanding, conflicting acts of censorship. Yet, it still wants to remain protected as if it were neutral despite actively modifying content. We would never tolerate a telephone company operator cutting into a call to say the company did not approve of a statement that was just made, or cutting the line for those who did not voice approved positions.”

Just some food for thought…

Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms after the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

After more than a year of carrying water for Beijing, the WHO finally delivered its strongest rebuke yet to the CCP earlier this week when Dr. Tedros, the WHO’s director-general, said the “lab leak hypothesis” remained a plausible scenario (even if the WHO report specified that it was the least likely scenario, and that animal-to-human cross-infection seemed more realistic). The report’s release, along with Dr. Tedros’s comments from a press briefing yesterday in Geneva, inspired the US and 13 other countries to demand that Beijing cooperate with further inquiries, which Dr. Tedros said would likely focus on the data allegedly denied to investigators during the team’s trip to Wuhan in January.

Dr. Tedros’s criticisms of the report precipitated a statement from the US and 13 other nations calling on Beijing to cooperate and release the data. But unsurprisingly, the CCP leadership wasn’t having it.

Even though one member of the WHO investigative team denied reports that Beijing had tried to meddle with the final report, the unexpected rebuke in front of the international community has clearly aggravated Beijing. Because on Wednesday, the CCP dispatched Liang Wannian, the most senior Chinese scientist on the WHO-led team that visited Wuhan in January, to deny the WHO’s complaints about being denied access to critical data.

During an official press briefing in Beijing, Wannian explained that while “there was some data that according to Chinese law could not be taken away or photographed but analysis in Wuhan was done together,” Lianan said. That, of course, contradicts claims from other team members and the WHO, who complained that data on potential early COVID cases dating back to September 2019 was withheld, despite promises of transparency and cooperation.

Asked about the prospect for further inquiry, Liang declined to offer any concrete details beyond saying that the details of future research plans had not yet been decided. “The next stage will be to build upon the results of origins research in China to search for the origins on a global scale,” he said.

“There was some data that according to Chinese law could not be taken away or photographed but analysis in Wuhan was done together,” Liang told a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

The Chinese government has carefully managed all inquiries into the virus’s orgins while – as we have reported – pushing an “alternative” theory which claims the virus actually originated outside China.

In addition to the press conference in Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry said it believed that the report had adequately “ruled out” the possibility the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Speculation about laboratory leaks has always existed, but the team of specialists…found no evidence for suspicion,” said Hua Chunying, a top ministry mouthpiece.

Well, that settles that, then. Now, will the WHO continue pushing back against Beijing? Or will this pressure to disclose the requested data simply fizzle in the face of unyielding pressure from the CCP?

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Could you imagine listing your home for sale and having nearly 100 offers in just three days?  This sort of thing is actually happening in hot real estate markets all over America right now.  Even though we are in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, we are witnessing a frenzy of home buying that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  Of course one of the biggest reasons why this is happening is because of the utterly insane economic policies of our leaders.  They have been creating, borrowing and spending money like there is no tomorrow, and that pushed M1 from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars in just 12 months.  All of that money had to go somewhere, and one place where it is showing up is in home prices in desirable rural and suburban locations around the country.

For example, a “fixer-upper” in a desirable suburban community outside of Washington D.C. was listed for sale on a recent Thursday for $275,000.  On Sunday evening, 88 different offers had already been made on that property…

Ellen Coleman had never received so many offers on a house in her 15 years of selling real estate.

She listed a fixer-upper in suburban Washington, DC for $275,000 on a Thursday. By Sunday evening, she had 88 offers.

It eventually sold for $460,000, which was $185,000 above the listing price.

Isn’t that nuts?

The same thing is happening in lots of other parts of the nation too.

Down in the Austin, Texas area, one real estate agent says that “most homes are going for more than 20% over asking price”…

“Nearly every offer my clients make faces competition, and most homes are going for more than 20% over asking price,” said Austin-area Redfin agent April Miller.

She said she recently helped a client with an offer for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home listed at $515,000 and pulled out all the stops. The offer was for $100,000 over the asking price, and they waived appraisal and financing contingencies, yet still came in third out of 38 offers.

In my entire lifetime, I have never seen anything like this.

Overall, the median price of a home in the United States is up a whopping 16 percent compared to this time last year…

The median price of a home has risen 16% from last year, according to the National Association of Realtors, and they have increased even more in some regions of the country like the Northeast and West, which are both up 21% from last year.

Meanwhile, inventory has continued to linger at record lows. In February, the number of available homes for sale was down nearly 30% from a year ago.

Of course prices are not going up everywhere.

In fact, home prices are actually going down in certain core urban communities.

It isn’t just that people are looking to buy homes right now.  Rather, millions of Americans have been choosing to relocate due to fear of the things that have been happening in our world.

For example, the COVID pandemic has been one of the biggest reasons for the mass exodus that we have been witnessing, and our public officials continue to drum up more fear on a daily basis.  On Monday, the head of the CDC actually used the term “impending doom” to describe what she believes is ahead…

The U.S. is facing “impending doom” as daily Covid-19 cases begin to rebound once again, threatening to send more people to the hospital even as vaccinations accelerate nationwide, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.

“When I first started at CDC about two months ago I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a press briefing.

And Joe Biden is begging for mask mandates to be reinstated all over the nation…

Joe Biden pleaded on Monday with Republican governors who ended mask mandates to reinstate the requirements in their states and pause reopenings as the administration goes ahead with expanding vaccine eligibility and inoculation sites.

‘I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor and local leader to reinstate the mask mandate,’ Biden said during remarks on the White House coronavirus response Monday afternoon. ‘Please, this is not politics.’

As long as Americans are afraid of the COVID pandemic, we will continue to see people relocate from urban areas with a high population density to rural and suburban areas that are more spread out.

At the same time, multitudes of Americans are also relocating from core urban areas due to all of the civil unrest that we have witnessed over the past year.

Many believed that the civil unrest would end once Joe Biden entered the White House, but that has not happened.

Instead, we continue to see violence on an almost daily basis.  Here is just one recent example…

Footage captured the demonstrators spraying paint across the windshield of the man’s truck and smashing the tail lights in Salem on Sunday.

The driver, who was wearing an American flag sweatshirt, stepped out of his vehicle as he engaged with the protesters, who then appeared to mace him.

The video then shows him pulling out his gun and pointing it at the anti-fascist protesters.

He could be heard shouting: ‘Get away from me’.

Sadly, the civil unrest in our land is only going to get worse.

So that means that even more people will be fleeing our core urban areas in search of greener pastures.

But now that hyperinflation is hitting housing prices, a lot of middle class and poor people will be priced out of the market.

The wealthy and the ultra-wealthy will have no problem making offers on homes that are way over market price because they have lots of money.

But the vast majority of Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck will find that their options are now greatly limited.

This is why I have always encouraged my readers to do long-term planning well in advance.  When I was growing up, I often heard the phrase “you snooze, you lose”, and today that is more true than ever.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.