Here Come The Most Stunning Base-Effect Charts Since The Great Depression
In just a few days, US high frequency economic data will lap March 2020 when the US economy literally shut down and sent all economic indicators in freefall to a degree not seen since the Great Depression (and in many cases, more).
When that happens, while March/April economic data will rise only modestly compared to the previous month, it will be a veritable explosion compared to the shutdown a year ago. This is the so-called "base effect" and while many economists will ignore it, especially when it comes to inflation data, the impact for many will be jarring especially when investors see charts that have gone, for lack of a better word, vertical.
To preview the annual change base effect that is coming in everything from retail sales, to income and spending, to housing data, to jobs and unemployment, we have pulled some of the most representative real-time indicators available from JPMorgan and Bank of America, starting with what is perhaps the most illustrative chart of all: JPM’s spending tracker on the bank’s own consumer (debit and credit) cards.
Here the 65% surge in spending is not because of an actual surge in spending March, but because spending last March imploded. Which is why to normalize for the post-March 2020 shock, banks will likely show not just the Y/Y chart, but also a chart comparing to 2-year ago or, better yet, a pre-covid blended trend as JPM has done in the chart above.
Bank of America published a similar chart, showing a huge jump in Y/Y card spending, especially among households who received stimulus payments – and this time on both a 1 and 2 year basis – while household that did not receive stimulus saw a roughly 30% jump in Y/Y spending due to the base effect, and only a modest increase in 2Y spending.
Here are some other charts showing how the 1-Year, but not 2-Year change, has gone vertical:
… And some more.
… And even more…
But nowhere is the base effect more visible than in the 1-year spending on airlines, where we see a very clear "lift off" formation in progress.
The New York Times published a hit piece on popular Trump-supporter Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) saying the Florida Congressman was under investigation for dating a 17-year-old girl.
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.
It was not clear how Mr. Gaetz met the girl, believed to be 17 at the time of encounters about two years ago that investigators are scrutinizing, according to two of the people.
The investigation was opened in the final months of the Trump administration under Attorney General William P. Barr, the two people said. Given Mr. Gaetz’s national profile, senior Justice Department officials in Washington — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — were notified of the investigation, the people said.
The Gateway Pundit spoke with a source close to Matt Gaetz who told us this report is completely false. Gaetz is not the target of the investigation. We were also told none of the women he was seeing were underage.
It’s not a surprise the left is after Gaetz since he is such an effective communicator and staunch Trump supporter.
What he’s saying: “The allegations against me are as searing as they are false,” Gaetz said in a 13-minute phone interview with Axios. “I believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to criminalize my sexual conduct, you know when I was a single guy.”
Axios reported earlier Tuesday that Gaetz has privately told confidants he’s seriously considering not seeking re-election, and possibly leaving Congress early for a job at Newsmax.
The big picture: Gaetz, 38, said the specifics of the allegations are “unclear,” and he said he’s been told “very little.” But the New York Times reported late Tuesday afternoon that the Justice Department is investigating Gaetz “over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.”
“The allegations of sexual misconduct against me are false,” Gaetz told Axios. “They are rooted in an extortion effort against my family for $25 million … in exchange for making this case go away.”
Gaetz sent Axios screenshots of text messages, emails and documents outlining the alleged extortion scheme, which he claimed was being run by a former DOJ employee. The Justice Department declined to comment.
Sounding shaken, Gaetz said that for weeks, he and his father been working with the FBI in the Northern District of Florida on the extortion case. Gaetz said his lawyers were informed by the Justice Department that “I was not a target but a subject of an investigation regarding sexual conduct with women.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter, a man whose program often relies on hyperbole, speculation and selective omitting and reporting, was kept honest on Sunday by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, of all people. Karl joined Stelter on his weekly show, “Reliable Sources,” as did other left-wing reporters, to speak about Biden’s first formal solo media briefing. Stelter…
When Maxine Waters puts willful ignorance on display, she doesn’t go halfway. As a Democratic California congresswoman who now chairs the House Financial Services Committee after 30 years as a federal lawmaker, it might seem Waters would know better than most Americans how much different the country is since the Civil War ended slavery more…
Teachers in San Diego will instruct illegal immigrant children in-person despite the fact that their own students are being denied in-class learning amid the coronavirus pandemic. The San Diego Convention Center has been repurposed as an overflow facility for unaccompanied migrant children flooding the border in response to the Biden administration’s open-borders rhetoric. The operation…
President Joe Biden pleaded with cities and states with no mask mandates to change course on Monday, but a simple look at case data for some states shows Biden’s words were based on no scientific evidence — none. When addressing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky’s fear-mongering sense of “impending doom” over…
On the radio program Tuesday, Glenn Beck reacted to the newly approved curriculum, calling it "the craziest, most terrifying story I have ever had to report."
Glenn read an excerpt from the National Review report describing the curriculum:
Students are to be taught that white Christian settlers committed "theocide" against indigenous tribes when they arrived in the New World by murdering Native American gods and replacing them with the Christian God. According to the curriculum, this replacement ushered in a regime defined by "coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide," and the "explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity." But all is not lost, we are told. For students will learn that they have the power and the responsibility to build a social order defined by "countergenocide," which will eventually supplant the last vestiges of colonial Christianity and pave the way for the "regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity."
Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka — whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism — asking him for the power to be "warriors" for "social justice." Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking "healing epistemologies" and "a revolutionary spirit." Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for "liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization," after which students shout "Panche beh! Panche beh!" in pursuit of ultimate "critical consciousness."
Glenn explained some of the horrifying details of the Aztec worship traditions California’s educators and administrators seek to "regenerate," including human sacrifice by the tens of thousands, cannibalism, and the severe and prolonged torture and sacrifice of children.
"Those are the gods that they [the Board of Education in California] think really need to be worshiped and brought back in our understanding because that whole Christian God was only about ‘oppression’," Glenn said sardonically.
"Gang, we are in biblical-sized trouble," he added. "We are under attack from the forces of darkness unlike anything I’ve ever seen before … because the soul of our nation, and the soul of children, is at stake."
Watch the video clip below to hear more from Glenn:
(Warning: Disturbing content):
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In a warning to teachers around the world, one American teacher opens up about the invasion of woke orthodoxy in the education sector…
I am an American educator who began teaching nearly two decades ago. During that time, I have taught at some of the most prestigious private secondary schools in the United States. Starting about five years ago, these schools began to be consumed by woke ideology.
When I say “consumed by woke ideology” I mean that these schools are obsessed with sophomoric and divisive notions of diversity, equality, and justice; increasingly hostile to freedom of expression; addicted to cancelling anything that offends the woke movement; and prioritising activism over understanding as the goal of education.
I am writing this letter to alert those we may describe as “sleep-wokers”. A sleep-woker is one who has not taken the woke creed to heart, yet nevertheless tacitly complies with the linguistic, pedagogical, political, and moral imperatives of wokeness. Sleep-wokers go through the motions; they are like religious folk who say prayers without thinking, attend worship services without engaging, and perpetuate dogmas without believing. I was a sleep-woker. In some ways, due to a combination of timidity and tiredness, I still am.
Sleep-woking, like sleepwalking, is very dangerous. While sleep-woking, an English teacher can unwittingly help cancel Chaucer, Keats and Conrad in the name of decolonisation. A biology teacher might find herself obliged to deny important differences between the sexes. A football coach will not be able to cheer on a player after a strong tackle, as strength and physical violence smack of toxic masculinity.
Most of my sleep-woking colleagues are good people. Like me, they were lulled into complacency by a woke take-over that was slow and subtle. What’s more, some changes were initially promising and even corrective — of course we should pay more attention to marginalised voices and overlooked narratives, and I am glad that we now do. To bemoan an expanded curriculum is simple chauvinism. In the end, however, wokeness has proven to be oppressive and totalitarian rather than inclusive and liberating.
It is worth noting that I have been a supporter of the left for most of my life. The only political donation I have ever made went to a candidate in the most left-leaning wing of the most left-leaning party in American politics. My objection is to the effect of woke ideology on education, not to liberal politics. My grievance is that teachers are increasingly under pressure to adopt the woke agenda or be ostracised.
I empathise with the difficult situation that top school officials find themselves in. As wokeness takes over American culture, schools face enormous pressure to follow suit. That said, those with the power to stop the degradation of education have a special responsibility to do so, and those of us with less power have a responsibility to remind our superiors of their duty.
Here is some of what wokeness has wrought at top American schools:
Offence in is the Eye of the Offended
Schools openly preach that if one feels offended, one has been offended. For example, if a student or colleague claims to have been offended by your words or actions, it does not matter if you intended no offence. More troubling is the fact that it does not matter if your words and actions were not those that a rational person should find offensive — you are an offender merely by virtue of the fact that someone claims to have been offended.
Schools cannot yet codify this into an official policy. What the schools are starting to do, however, is to change the ethical norms associated with offence. Since legal norms follow ethical norms, if schools (and societies) succeed in changing the ethical norms of speech and offence, they will eventually have a basis upon which to change the legal norms. As soon as they can show that a normal or typical person is offended by certain language or certain ideas, they will be able to argue that a person presenting such language and ideas is failing to abide by the reasonable ethical expectations of school culture. In short, we are training students how to be offended so that their perceived offence can be used to eliminate anti-woke expression.
Elimination of Non-Woke Student Clubs
Any student group that resists woke orthodoxy is likely to be forcibly disbanded or prevented from forming. Student clubs cannot form without faculty sponsors. Since the vast majority of the faculty at these schools are woke (or too afraid to be seen as non-woke), conservative students have trouble officially meeting and inviting speakers. If a non-woke speaker is invited, the wokes mobilise to deny them a platform and they feel righteous for doing so. Few conservative students openly identify as such because they are afraid of repercussions from faculty and from other students. Not only is this unfair, but it is also dangerous. Alienated conservative students are being pushed away from moderate disagreement and towards political extremism.
No Resisting Woke Slogans
Opposing woke slogans or voicing contrary slogans is not tolerated. Since opposing wokeness is thought to be motivated by hate, voicing opposition to woke slogans is tantamount to hate speech. A student who challenges a woke slogan is bullied and harassed by the woke majority. Meanwhile, woke slogans and images are hung in school buildings and cannot be removed.
Cultural Appropriation
White or Western students are told not to participate in cultural traditions of non-white, non-Western people — the oppressors cannot participate in the culture of the oppressed. For example, several white students who wore shirts with African designs were reprimanded and forced to change their clothes. The fact that the shirts were a gift from their teacher, a black African man, made no difference. The students wore the shirts to show affection for their teacher and to honour his gift, but that was still cultural appropriation.
In another instance, a musician was reprimanded for blending a western and non-western musical style into a new artistic expression. The musician was accused of cultural imperialism.
Cancelling Curriculum
Shakespeare, Homer and other canonical authors are being eliminated from the curriculum. In some cases, schools and teachers boast about cancelling these patriarchal racists. Even at schools that do not officially cancel canonical Western texts, the texts are subtly replaced in the name of anti-racism.
Most of my students will go to university never having read Homer or Shakespeare, though they will have been required to read many texts and attend many lectures on intersectionality and gender identity. They can speak at length about toxic masculinity and a panoply of so-called phobias, but they would not recognise the terms “iambic pentameter” and “dactylic hexameter”, let alone recognise actual examples of the meter.
Normalising Fallacies
Ad hominem attacks are presented as the cornerstone of critical thinking rather than as a fallacious form of argumentation. We teach students to evaluate texts and arguments by primarily attending to the author’s race, gender, and sexuality.
Mandatory Training
Students attend mandatory training sessions in which experts teach them how to identify and report microaggressions. And since to a student with a hammer everything looks like a nail, the students begin informing on each other and on their teachers. White teachers are told to attend racial-political re-education workshops in which they strive to overcome their whiteness in the classroom. (It has long been accepted that “whiteness” is a meaningful category.)
If you claim to not be a racist, you are seen as the worst, most unredeemable kind of racist. You are a heretic who will not admit heresy. You are thought to be suffering from something called “white fragility”.
Trigger Warnings
Before introducing a new unit, teachers compile lists of trigger warnings for the material in that unit. A trigger warning serves to alert students to any and all things in the unit that could cause them stress, frustration, anger, or sadness. These lists are shared with students.
Manners and Dress Codes
A side-effect of the woke attack on tradition, authority, and hierarchy has been the revocation of dress codes. So long as their genitals are covered and no profane words are visible, students can and do wear anything they like. Arguably the only rule left in the dining halls and cafeterias is “Don’t throw food.”
Many students eat meals with headphones in their ears while watching videos on their phones. The less respectful students don’t bother with headphones. “Sir” and “Ma’am” have long since disappeared as too authoritarian and gendered. The terms “master” and “headmaster” cannot be used as master might connote slavery.
Elimination of Objective Assessments
Exams are being eliminated for two reasons: first, because exams are apparently inherently racist, sexist, classist, heteronormative, or otherwise unfair; second, because exams cause students stress, and stress makes students feel bad, and feeling bad negatively impacts their well-being. Additionally, some students do poorly on exams, and this has the potential to result in a situation that is inequitable.
Pronouns
Faculty are frequently pressured to identify their pronouns. Failure to identify one’s pronouns is seen as transphobic or cis-centric or both. Students can reassign their own pronouns at will. If a teacher mistakenly does not use the student’s preferred pronoun, the teacher is accused of misgendering. Misgendering a serious offence, even a kind of violence.
* * *
The unchecked advance of wokeness will do two things to your school.
First, you and your students will lose the ability to freely read, write and speak as pupils and teachers. Second, the education that you now provide will become unrecognisably impoverished.
This second effect is probably the hardest to believe, especially for those of you at top academic institutions, but it is the effect of which I am most certain. In place of free-thinking young scholars, you will begin turning out a generation of woke activists who believe that feelings matter more than facts, that perception is reality, and that it is more important to judge a text than to understand it — where “judging” means anachronistically interpreting the author’s words in light of the most recent woke orthodoxy.
Many of my students claim to be proud practitioners of social justice (don’t push them too hard on what that means) yet they have only an elementary command of grammar and geography, struggling to write complete sentences and unable to locate Turkey on a map. Some have begun to ask why we take math so seriously given that math is apparently grounded in Western patriarchal rationalism. Wokeness has been achieved at the expense of education. Reason has been subordinated to passion. Plato’s charioteer has been replaced by the horses he was meant to reign in.
Perhaps some of you are disturbed by some of the woke excesses at your schools and in your communities, even if, like me, you readily support appeals for greater diversity, genuine inclusion, and a multicultural curriculum. Perhaps your instinct has been to dismiss these excesses as isolated incidents. Like me, you might have said “The pendulum will swing back” or “That will never happen at my school.” I am writing to say that the pendulum will not swing back because the woke movement is not a pendulum; it is a steamroller.
I am not claiming any moral high ground. My own failure to push back in the right ways and at the right times makes me part of the problem. Nor am I here trying to convince anyone else to become bothered by the advance of woke culture into education. If what I am reporting does not bother you, ignore me. If wokeness has begun to concern you, however, you now have a glimpse of where your own school may be headed.
One of the canniest bits of woke linguistic manipulation has been appropriation of the term “woke” itself. To not be woke is to be asleep: unconscious or ignorant of what is really going on.
Either one is woke or one is not aware of reality. Or, as I was recently told by a student, if you are not woke, it must be because you are uneducated or hateful — or both.
During the latest episode of Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost provided audience members with an analysis of the “gun control” debate, claiming that Republicans “value guns more than people you don’t know.”
“Well, this week kind of felt like Biden on those stairs,” Jost began, alongside images of Biden falling up the steps of Air Force One. “You thought it had to get better, but it repeatedly got worse.”
“In the wake of the Colorado and Atlanta shootings, President Biden called for universal background checks for gun purchases,” he continued. “And background checks are a great start, but shouldn’t we also do current checks? Like, what are these guys up to now? How much Call of Duty are they playing? Have they recently DMed a girl ‘Hey’ 30 times?”
“Or how about this,” Jost added, moving to the subject of gun control, “if you want a gun, the gun store has to talk to at least five people from your life who agree it’s a good idea for you to have a gun.”
“It’s not really that much to ask,” he said. “You’ve got to list three references on an application to work at Foot Locker.”
“And Republicans, please stop pretending this is a Second Amendment issue and just admit you love guns more than people you don’t know,” showing political advertisements from a handful of Republican figures which include firearms.
“If you actually cared about the Second Amendment, you’d also care about the well-regulated militias part. And I don’t know if you noticed when they almost hung you two months ago, but our militias aren’t super well regulated,” he concluded.
Unsurprisingly, the political analysis from Saturday Night Live is entirely ignorant. Let’s break it down.
Biden called for far more than “universal background checks.”
Jost applied the classic “over simplification” tactic used by the Left when conservatives oppose their policy positions by cherry-picking the least extreme element of broader legislative objectives and presenting them as indicative of their entire position.
In this case, Jost implies that Biden just called for universal background checks, when in fact, Biden’s policy suggestions included far more than the expansion of background checks.
As The Daily Wire reported, “President Joe Biden made a brief statement, Tuesday morning, addressing the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, and pledging to press forward with gun ‘reform’ measures, including a ban on so-called ‘assault weapons,’ and a ban on ‘high capacity magazines.’”
The argument used by Jost is the logical equivalent of a political party rejecting criticism of a national “Cocaine and Ice Cream for Children Day” by accusing their opponents of hating ice cream.
“Current checks” already exist
While Jost used some apparently humorous examples of “current checks” that could be applied, such as “How much Call of Duty are they playing?” and “Have they recently DMed a girl ‘Hey’ 30 times?” he ignored the fact that some form of “current checks” already exist.
Currently, 19 states and the District of Columbia have enacted some form of red-flag law which permits police departments or family members to file for the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger to themselves or others.
These red-flag laws are known as Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) in Oregon, Washington, Maryland, Vermont and Colorado; Extreme Risk Firearm Protection Orders (ERFPO) in New Mexico; Risk Protection Orders in Florida; Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVROs) in California; risk warrants in Connecticut; and Proceedings for the Seizure and Retention of a Firearm in Indiana.
Given that such “current checks” in the form of “red-flag laws” already exist in Colorado — the location of one of the mass shootings discussed by Jost — it seems like his suggestions are redundant.
References for gun purchases
This suggestion is absurd for many reasons. For example, it is obscenely easy to bypass — references could be fabricated, selected based on likelihood to remain supportive, or chosen based on their willingness to lie. It also applies a popularity layer upon an inalienable right — what happens if you don’t have any friends? Are your Constitutional rights invalid?
Republicans care about the Second Amendment and people they don’t know
The argument Jost used — asking Republicans to “please stop pretending this is a Second Amendment issue and just admit you love guns more than people you don’t know” — is more despicable than most will acknowledge. He is implying that Republicans are pretending the debate over gun control has anything to do with the U.S. Constitution, and is instead motivated by a physical love for guns, which are then viewed as more valuable than human beings.
This is absurd. The gun control debate is based entirely on the Second Amendment, without which this “debate” would already have been decided in a similar fashion to the rest of the Western world. Hand-picking a few controversial Republican figures to mischaracterize all conservatives as “gun nuts” is dishonest and cynical, and is designed to dilute the debate down to the “intelligent Left” and the comparatively “unintelligent Right.”
Jost desperately wants to drag the debate away from the Second Amendment because he knows that he can only win in the arena of insult and emotion.
Well-regulated militias
Jost referenced another lazy anti-gun argument when it comes to the Second Amendment, which reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment is divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”) and its operative clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”). The “individual rights” thesis emphasizes the operative clause, while the “states’ rights” thesis focuses on the prefatory clause.
In 2008, the Supreme Court definitively ruled in favor of the “individual rights” theory in District of Columbia v. Heller. According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, “The Court reached this conclusion after a textual analysis of the Amendment, an examination of the historical use of prefatory phrases in statutes, and a detailed exploration of the 18th century meaning of phrases found in the Amendment. Although accepting that the historical and contemporaneous use of the phrase ‘keep and bear Arms’ often arose in connection with military activities, the Court noted that its use was not limited to those contexts.”
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.
The system is set up in states like Washington and cities like Everett where free and fair elections are a thing of the past. Now the Democrats want to replicate this across the nation.
We reported after the 2020 election that the results for governor in Washington state were suspect. Democrat governor Inslee was not well-liked. He handled COVID-19 horribly and he was disrespectful and abusive to President Trump. His policies and governing led Boeing to relocate to South Carolina and cost the state thousands of great-paying jobs. All indications were that the Republican was going to take the governorship but on Election Day, after not campaigning a lick in the state, Inslee was reelected.
The problems are many. First of all, Washington holds universal mail-in elections, meaning that all voters are sent mailballots whether they request one or not. In this system, it is obviously more difficult to ensure the voter mailed in their own ballot. But there are more problems than this.
If there is a recount, and enough money has been paid to perform the recount, there is only so much that can be done. Jovan Hutton Pulitzer has an excellent video below where he describes the exact scenario that could happen in a location like Snohomish County, Washington, where Everett is located. This city next to Seattle has some unique laws that prevent a valid recount if one were paid for.
In recounts, only the number of dots filled in on the ballots provided for review can be counted. The ballots themselves are held behind glass and not made available for review. Ballots could lack folds, which makes no sense because all ballots have to be stuffed into envelopes and mailed in. Ballots could be made from different paper types or filled in by machines, but these items can’t be challenged. The only thing a recount or audit can do is to look at a ballot and either count it or not.
In this scenario, described below, no observable or non-observable variances to standards can be reviewed and audited. These types of fraud are off-limits for review. This results in any audits or recounts being totally worthless.
The Democrats are now trying to make this the standard across the country. HR1 is getting rid of paper ballots altogether. The US will never have fair and free elections again under this new law. These will be a thing of the past.
