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The federal government’s insatiable appetite for spending has left politicians casting about for untapped revenue sources. Enter President Biden’s tax plan, which contains a death tax on the middle class dressed up as a capital gains tax on the rich. Having squeezed from the rich about as much as they are likely to get, politicians are now gunning for the rest of us.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren get good headlines when they call for taxing billionaires’ wealth. But, even if a wealth tax were constitutional (it isn’t), and even if politicians taxed 100% of US billionaires’ wealth (they won’t), and even if the billionaires could sell trillions of dollars in assets for full market value (they can’t), politicians still wouldn’t collect enough to fund their profligate spending. US billionaires’ combined $4.2 trillion wealth would fund the federal government’s 2021 budget for less than eight months. And at the end of that eight months, there’d be no more US billionaires.

What politicians know, but won’t say, is that the middle classes are the great untapped revenue source. What the middle classes lack in income, they more than make up for in numbers. Before taxes and transfers, the average household in the middle income quintile earned $77,000 and the average household in the upper middle quintile earned $117,000. Combined, those households earned $4.8 trillion in 2018. That’s twice what the top 1% earned. Meanwhile, the top 1% paid an average effective federal tax rate of 30.2 percent, versus 12.8 percent for middle income and 16.7 percent for upper middle income households.

The President emphasizes that his plan closes an arcane loophole, “stepped-up basis,” that has allowed billionaires to get away with paying less taxes. He and his supporters keep saying “capital gains,” and “billionaires,” but the fact is that the proposal for closing that loophole will hit middle class homes, farms, and businesses.

Under long-established law, an heir owes capital gains taxes when the heir sells, not inherits, assets. So, a family home, farm, or business, passed down from generation to generation, only creates a tax liability when the heir at the end of the line finally sells it. Even then, the heir pays tax on the increase in value from when the heir inherited the asset to when it was sold. This is “stepped-up basis,” and it partially compensates for the fact that capital gains taxes don’t adjust for inflation. For example, under current law, a home purchased for $50,000 in 1980 and sold for $150,000 in 2021 could be subject to more than $20,000 in capital gains taxes even though, adjusted for inflation, the home was sold at a loss. Stepped-up basis attempts to eliminate this inflation bias by resetting the clock on the asset’s value at inheritance.

Biden’s plan would remove the stepped-up basis, meaning that heirs would pay tax on the increase in value from when the ancestor purchased the asset to when the heir sold the asset. For businesses passed down through multiple generations, this can significantly magnify the tax bill. And in a one-two punch, Biden’s plan also requires that heirs pay the tax when they inherit assets, not when they sell them. So rather than the family home, farm, or business being taxed when the last heir finally sells it, it would be taxed each time it moved from one generation to the next.

The President insists on calling this a “capital gains tax,” but the combination of these two pieces – removal of stepped-up basis and pay-at-inheritance – causes the tax to behave exactly like a death tax. It is a death tax aimed squarely at the middle classes.

To mollify farmers, the President has said that heirs can delay paying the tax provided they continue to work the farm. This is scant help as the heirs will still be subject to the increased tax. The plan merely allows them to pay later. To throw a bone to family businesses and people who have lived frugally to save for their children, Biden’s plan offers a $1 million exemption.

But passing this new tax plan will be much harder than ratcheting that $1 million exemption down after the law is passed. Once the new plan is in place, expect that $1 million exemption to start shrinking until the new tax hits everyone. For evidence, look at the history of the federal income tax, which politicians at the time promised would apply only to “the rich.” Once instituted, it took less than a decade for politicians to extend the federal income tax all the way down to the poor.

The President’s tax plan is a death tax on the working class dressed up as a capital gains tax on the rich. Say what they will about using the tax code to reduce income inequality, the fact is that multi-trillion dollar deficits have made politicians desperate for new sources of tax revenue. And, having eaten the rich, they’re now turning their eyes to the middle class.

If you were reading my blog back around the election you know I’m a big fan of audits. They keep things honest. Auditing internal systems and looking for fraud and getting companies through 3rd party and government audits was a big part of my old career.

So like most of you I was really interested in seeing how this Arizona audit shook out. Leading up to it the democrats fought this audit every step of the way, in court, logistically, and by just being noncompliant pains in the asses (as companies which have nothing to hide often do!) My favorite part was when the democrats were freaking out about how the auditors weren’t certified by the governing body which doesn’t provide certifications to do this process there’s no certifications for. Good times.

When I googled the results on Friday, there were literally hundreds of news articles all sharing the same exact message. “Biden won. Cope losers. The audit was a sham put on by grifters, but simultaneously its recount proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that Biden totally won. If you ever thought there was any fraud in the election you are a stupid gullible idiot who believes conspiracy theories, and now shut up forever. Also it cost 6 million whole dollars and for the first time ever democrats care about fiscal responsibility. Orange Man Bad. etc.”

As I scrolled through dozens of these, I realized that none of them actually said what was in the audit report. Nor were there any links to the actual audit report. As a guy who used to write audit reports I’d rather read the actual document than take some journalism major’s take on it.

https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

And sure enough, as usual, the narrative was designed for maximum spin.

It turns out the audit findings are a lot more complicated that portrayed by the narrative. Shocker. Basically the headlines are all coming off of the executive summary, section 2. And note, they’re only taking the very first part, and then quit reporting as soon as they get to “based on our other findings, however” –

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_a91b5cd3655445b498f9acc63db35afd.pdf

To break this down, the first part, the recount/canvass matches what was there before, and the only differences are statistically insignificant. News media goes Yay! Biden won by even more votes! Cope! Cope! Cope!

Except, the second part they aren’t talking about is… are those votes all actual legal votes? And the answer is possibly not (why possibly? I’ll get to that). Then see all those bullet points of problems, weirdness, and fuckery. Which comes down to there being about five times as many questionable votes as Biden’s margin of victory (for the state, in this one county).

This is where it gets sticky. Here is the breakdown of the findings.

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_d36cb5eaca56435d84171b4fe7ee6919.pdf

Section 4 is the tally results. That’s what the media is talking about. Section 5 is the problems. That’s what they are studiously avoiding talking about.

They are divided into 13 types of problems, ranging from critical to inconsequential. Statistically, it’s the first few that are the big ones, and each of those gets their own breakdown in 5.3 and 5.4. Go read through those.

On some of these types you’ll be thinking, why didn’t the auditors take these problematic ballots and track them back even further to see if the signatures match the actual human being who supposedly cast the vote? Sorry. I believe the democrats blocked them from doing that in court. (which is totally not suspicious at all from people who have absolutely nothing to hide!)

Auditors go through the available data looking for problems. They can only take it as far as they are allowed by the system they are working in. In this kind of case, to go beyond these steps would require the law to step in. Will that happen? Beats me. I don’t know jack about Arizona politics.

Auditors aren’t cops (usually, unless you’re getting audited by certain government agencies, but you get my drift). They simply investigate and then provide a report to the body which makes actual decisions based upon their recommendations.

The rest of the report is about the systems and controls, and how they should be improved. This part is really telling. Basically the Arizona election system is easily manipulated trash, with crap controls, and if any private company I ever worked at got caught with this many holes in it, they’d fire all the accountants and half the managers.

Now, for the idiot brigade that is crowing about how this proves whatever they want it to prove about the election and how everybody else should shut up forever, here’s some stuff that’s not in this report to think about.

This was the audit of one county, in one of the questionable states. Back in the aftermath of the election, I found Arizona to be the least interesting of those questionable states. Other counties had way more fuckery afoot. Atlanta and Detroit were way crazier than Phoenix on election night. No audits there.

And even in Arizona, this is one county. I don’t know the area that well so I’m just going off of what friends of mine who live there say, but Maricopa is usually the red county. Pima (2nd biggest) is the blue county. And they still found 5x the margin of victory in questionable votes in the red county. I’m sure next door was totally clean.

So basically, of the handful of problematic places, we took a sample of one of the least problematic ones, and still found a bunch of problems… ergo, the narrative is that everything everywhere is fine, and you are stupid if you question it.

The media is just as smart and honest about how audits work as they are about how to ride horses.

Both sides are claiming victory based on what the report says. Only one side owns the media and big tech, so that’s going to be the prevailing narrative (and interestingly enough, that narrative was determined before the final report was given). What it says is what it actually says. So I’d recommend reading it for yourself to draw your own conclusions, rather than letting some pundit decide for you.

Never a dull moment in New York City: Apparently people have been using their vans as illegal Airbnb rental units, and the New York City Sheriff's Office made a strike team-style coordinated bust on the whole ring this week.

UM…: Chernobyl’s Blown Up Reactor 4 Just Woke Up. “Scientists don’t understand why.”

A letter signed by more than 40 trade associations calls on Congress to reject the proposal, saying it violates customer privacy and would create an incredibly expensive and elaborate reporting requirement for banks.

BEIJING IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: China’s Xinjiang Crackdown Reaps Millions of Dollars in Assets for the State.

Chinese authorities have seized and sold at auction tens of millions of dollars in assets owned by jailed Uyghur business owners amid a broad government campaign to assimilate ethnic minorities in the country’s northwest Xinjiang region.

Since 2019, Xinjiang courts have put at least 150 assets—ranging from home appliances to real estate and company shares—belonging to at least 21 people and valued at a total $84.8 million up for auction on e-commerce sites.

OLD AND BUSTED: Destroying Statues.

The New Hotness? Destroying Industrial Infrastructure. The New Yorker asks: Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?

Here’s a May New Republic article on Malm: The Climate Case for Property Destruction. Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” urges activists to turn to tougher tactics:

What, then, is to be done? The main argument of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is simple: The climate movement should itself enact, through direct action, that prohibition on new fossil fuel infrastructure, and that dismantling of existing pipelines and power plants, which governments have so far refused to take on. Only if such equipment is damaged often and badly enough as to make its continued operation unprofitable does the stabilization of the climate stand a chance. For climate activists to confine themselves to peaceful protest is meanwhile to watch the earth become less and less hospitable to human life. Plenty of readers will react (as I did) with a sort of instinctive skepticism to Malm’s case that only widespread property destruction can forestall civilizational suicide, but his case deserves a hearing.

Emphasis mine. Note that this is the same leftist media that went all-out to blame Sarah Palin’s clip art for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, but they’ll all look the other way about their role in egging on domestic terrorism, if there is an attack on a refinery.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in response to then-Vice President Biden calling the Tea Party “terrorists” eight months after all of the new civility language that Obama and the DNC-MSM pumped out that January in response to the Giffords shooting: To Hell with You People.

Flashback: Biden Land Management nominee ‘collaborated with eco-terrorists,’ traded testimony for immunity.

UPDATE: The Media is Whitewashing and Mainstreaming a Call to Terrorism. “The media’s response to How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Swedish Marxist author Andreas Malm has been a master class in the use of vague evasive academic language to make it seem harmless and courageous, the destruction of a paradigm, rather than people’s lives.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THEY TOLD US THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Food myths busted: dairy, salt and steak may be good for you after all.

Over the past 70 years the public health establishment in Anglophone countries has issued a number of diet rules, their common thread being that the natural ingredients populations all around the world have eaten for millennia – meat, dairy, eggs and more – and certain components of these foods, notably saturated fat, are dangerous for human health.

The consequences of these diet ordinances are all around us: 60% of Britons are now overweight or obese, and the country’s metabolic health has never been worse.

Government-led lack of trust in the healthfulness of whole foods in their natural forms encouraged us to buy foods that have been physically and chemically modified, such as salt-reduced cheese and skimmed milk, supposedly to make them healthier for us.

No wonder that more than 50% of the food we eat in the UK is now ultra-processed.

The grave effects of this relatively recent departure from time-honoured eating habits comes as no surprise to those of us who never swallowed government “healthy eating” advice in the first place, largely on evolutionary grounds.

Is mother nature a psychopath? Why would she design foods to shorten the lifespan of the human race?

And time is vindicating. This bankrupt postwar nutrition paradigm is being knocked for six, time and again, by up-to-date, high quality research evidence that reasserts how healthy traditional ingredients and eating habits are.

Will there be any accountability for the experts, who with preening hauteur instructed everyone in how to eat, and claimed that those who disagreed were practically murderers?

Haha, I crack myself up.

Related (From Ed): LBJ The Egg Czar & Other Gov’t ‘Heroes.’ “In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits – supply and demand – and Johnson’s agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the US surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs. “

HMM: Radiation therapy reprograms heart muscle cells to younger state.

Research of the Week

Swearing makes you stronger.

The aging (and young, for that matter) brain needs social interactions.

Full-fat dairy wins again.

There is very little evidence in favor of “as low as possible” salt intakes, and yet that’s what most health authorities recommend.

Too many omega-6 fats, increased risk of peripheral nerve pain.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 521: Dr. Elizabeth Rodgers: Host Elle Russ Dr. Rodgers back to the podcast.

Episode 522: April King: Host Elle Russ chats with April King, founder of Better Than Provisions, a food company providing high quality food that’s also convenient.

Health Coach Radio: Allison Tenney wants you to bet on yourself. I do too.

 

Media, Schmedia

Good.

Lab grown meat is anything but inevitable.

Interesting Blog Posts

Are eggs good or bad for metabolic health?

With antibiotics, less is more.

Social Notes

A rare encounter.

Let your freak flag fly.

Everything Else

The answer is “no.”

Let’s hope this works.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

Things get older and older: Evidence of humans in North America 21000 years ago.

This is how you use technology to enhance the ecosystem: 3D printing fake coral for real coral to live on and grow.

Many examples abound: Fit but unhealthy.

Expect more of this: Extreme disruption.

Expect more of this, too: Rising meat prices.

Question I’m Asking

When are the “experts” going to stop talking about the “dairy paradox?” When will they accept that full-fat dairy is simply the healthiest type?

Recipe Corner

• Italian meat balls without the bread crumbs.
• Now this is a salad I can get behind.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Sep 18 – Sep 24)

• Parental Burnout: What to Do if You Feel Overwhelmed as a Parent — Happens to the best of us.
• Beyond Pumpkin Spice: The Benefits of Cinnamon for Blood Sugar, Infections, and More— Respect the spice.

Comment of the Week

“While I love the idea of bringing back the mammoth (and eating a mammoth steak), I must side against it.

This isn’t like repopulating Yellowstone with timber wolves. Mammoths have been gone for 4,000 years (and closer to 10,000 on the mainland). Their native habitats have changed considerably in that time, and adapted to new regional homeostases. Bringing back the mammoth would not be repopulation, it would be the introduction of an invasive species. It’s more analogous to horses returning to American grazing lands.

Yes, the agendas behind such an initiative are largely noble – whether it is to redirect climate change or simply to advance our understanding of genetics -but there are far too many known and unknown variables. We know that invasive species can quickly upset the delicate balance of an ecosystem, and we don’t know what will happen when we take an already-intelligent and dangerous animal and make it bigger… then hope it will simply act as we want it to.”

-Good point, hate_me.

The post New and Noteworthy: What I Read This Week—Edition 147 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

SO MUCH IS: By The Left’s Standards, The Pro-Fat Movement Is Institutional Racism.

“[Seventy-eight percent] of hospitalizations due to COVID are Obese and Overweight people,” Neman wrote in an Aug. 31 deleted LinkedIn post citing March data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Is there an underlying problem that perhaps we have not given enough attention to? Is there another way to think about how we tackle ‘healthcare’ by addressing the root cause?”

While the root cause Newman indicted as the underlying culprit in the COVID crisis was obesity, Newman’s own diagnosis of the problem is fertilized by the proliferation of a cultural movement to both normalize obesity and demonize its opposition as “fat-phobic.” Newman himself became the latest target of the left’s nefarious feel-good crusade for daring to raise alarm over the nation’s ballooning crisis, while obesity triples an individual’s risk to hospitalization with COVID-19.

“This post is disgusting,” one LinkedIn user wrote back, according to Business Insider.

“Yikes, this is incredibly fat-phobic,” wrote another. “Have you considered how our healthcare system systematically underserves people who are considered to be in those groups?”

Has the race-obsessed left considered that its pro-fat movement systemically promotes obesity to the very people it claims to champion?

Read the whole thing.

I’d just add that so much of what the Left does — everything the Left does? — harms the very people they purport to champion.

ANOTHER REASON TO BE FOND OF POLICE BODYCAMS: Antifa Activist Sues Portland Police for Livestreaming and Showing Faces of Rioters.

RALPH THE WONDER LLAMA YIELDS RESULTS: Llama antibodies may fight COVID-19 in humans, researchers say.

BOOM: Evergrande crashes as China dumps ‘build, build, build’ playbook.

Evergrande is proving to be the first big victim. As the company falters, its undoing raises a fundamental question for the world’s second-largest economy: has China’s property-driven growth model – the global economy’s most powerful locomotive – run out of road?

Yes, says Leland Miller, chief executive of China Beige Book, a consultancy that analyses the economy through proprietary data. “The leadership in Beijing has been more worried about Chinese growth than anyone in the West.

“There is a recognition that the old build, build, build playbook does not work any more and that it is actually getting dangerous. The leadership now appears to be thinking that it can’t wait any longer to change the growth model,” Miller says.

Ting Lu, chief China economist at investment bank Nomura, says he does not expect Evergrande’s woes to trigger an economic collapse. But he believes Beijing’s attempts to transition from one growth model to another could significantly depress annual growth in coming years.

Two thoughts come to mind.

The first is that the post-Tiananmen deal was that mainland Chinese would trade any hopes of political reform in exchange for ever-increasing prosperity.

The second is that authoritarian regimes often look invincible until shortly before they unravel.

Update: More here from Battleswarm Blog.

Not only is Evergrande possibly facing complete liquidation, but word came down that the company might make payments on Chinese-owned debt, but stiff foreign debt holders.

But the word this morning is that the Chinese government is now telling them to avoid default on dollar-denominated bonds. After all, if investors worldwide decided that all Chinese debt was potentially toxic, that would leave connected Chinese communists in a world of hurt.

What’s that old Chinese curse about interesting times?

NEW HUNTER BIDEN EMAILS: Hunter Biden emails boast ties to White House and China.

Hunter Biden’s business contacts touted his access to his father, “State, Treasury,” his relationship with then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, as well as his ties to the “highest level” in China, as they weighed whether to work with him on a potential Libya deal in 2015, newly uncovered emails show.

The two emails — published by Insider on Thursday — date back to 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, and reference getting Hunter’s help on a deal regarding billions in Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration.

The emails are unrelated to Hunter’s infamous laptop.

I’m sure journalists will be right on it.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! We need to talk about Joe Biden:

After his speech to the UNGA, he still had a bilateral meeting with Boris Johnson at the White House. As such, Biden’s staff made sure he was armed with a laminated notecard for the meeting, which contained commands like ‘sit’, ‘stay’ and ‘roll over’.

Not really, but the notes snapped by an eagle-eyed press photographer did remind the President to welcome Johnson to the White House and speak positively about the relationship between the UK and the US. An easy thing to forget for a president, apparently.

The most shameful portion of the sit-down, however, came when the leaders began to interact with the press in the room. Biden derisively replied ‘good luck’ when Johnson suggested the pair take questions from the pool reporters then refused to call on any members of the American media.

Once Johnson had taken questions from the British press, Biden’s wranglers cut the British PM off mid-sentence, yelling at the media to leave the room. Biden eventually appeared prepared to respond to a question about the border from CBS’s Ed O’Keefe, but the wranglers continued to shout so that reporters could not hear the President’s answer.

More here: White House Reporters File ‘Formal Complaint’ Against Biden After Aides Shout Them out of Oval Office.

LOW-FAT DAIRY IS OVERRATED: Sticking to low-fat dairy may not be the only heart healthy option, study shows. “New research amongst the world’s biggest consumers of dairy foods has shown that those with higher intakes of dairy fat—measured by levels of fatty acids in the blood—had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those with low intakes. Higher intakes of dairy fat were not associated with an increased risk of death.”

They told us the dietary science was settled.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Men caught smuggling KFC into lockdown-hit Auckland.

Via Jesse Kelly who tweets, “I can’t tell you how much this story has rocked me. I had such cool plans for the black market. I was gonna be a gun runner or an ocean smuggler. (I’ve read enough pirate books. Pretty much an expert.) But now, I think I need to be the guy who can get you fried chicken.”

The post Top Adviser to CCP-Affiliated Think Tanks Says Chinese Takeover of Taiwan Imminent appeared first on The Bongino Report.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A year of committed exercise in middle age reversed worrisome heart stiffness.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Maspeth HS diplomas ‘not worth the paper’ they’re printed on.

Maspeth High School created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — “even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,” an explosive investigative report charges.

Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.

“I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45 — it’s your job to give that kid credit,” the principal is quoted as telling a teacher.

Abdul-Mutakabbir told the teacher he would give the lagging student a diploma “not worth the paper on which it was printed” and let him “have fun working at Taco Bell,” the report says.

The teacher “felt threatened and changed each student’s failing grade to a passing one.”

The SCI report confirms a series of Post exposes in 2019 describing a culture of cheating in which students could skip classes and do little or no work, but still pass.

We’re really seeing just how little public schools have to do with learning. And how little they care.

The post Fauci Lies Again, Falsely Claims More Kids Have Died From COVID Than the Flu appeared first on The Bongino Report.

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Students Protesting Severe Bullying, Suicides Hit With Mass Retaliation by New York School District. “Students walked out of class on Friday and held a protest in support of students who are facing cyberbullying and other incidents of bullying in school, including by teachers, they say. The district locked the children out of the school and refused to allow them transportation home, leading parents to scramble to find them safe rides home.”

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

UNEXPECTEDLY: The Biden presidency is in free-fall.

This is not a joke. It’s not an overreaction. It’s not about Biden’s opponents pouncing or seizing. Biden’s presidency has a very real chance of completely foundering within its first year. After a promising start where he inherited a vaccination process that was already in progress, albeit briefly, under Trump, his vaccine strategy has stalled to the point of him now demanding mandates on private businesses, a step he assured the electorate he would not take. Last Friday, an FDA panel bucked Biden’s booster rollout program, which was slated to begin this week.

That was one of many self-inflicted wounds that Biden suffered at the end of last week as he took off for the Delaware coast for a long weekend of bike-riding and ignoring reporters. In the span of that single afternoon, the Pentagon also revealed that a retaliatory drone strike for the deaths of 13 US service-members at Kabul airport did not kill any Isis-K terrorists, as Biden and his State Department had claimed, but instead killed an innocent US-linked aid worker, as well as seven children. Neither Biden nor his press secretary Jen Psaki have answered questions on this matter. Their strategic silence is all we need to evaluate how they think this looks – and they are correct.

Along with the self-imposed Afghanistan debacle, which has created an enormous refugee crisis in a foreign region, Biden has caused another one on our southern border. Drone footage and photos splashed all over social media this weekend showed thousands of migrants, some believed to be Haitian, crossing the Rio Grande river into Del Rio, Texas, unabated. They had to be corralled under the Del Rio Bridge, with several even crafting makeshift tents and shelters.

How bad is the Biden (p)residency right now? It’s come to this: Poll: Biden Underwater By 19 Points in Texas…Among Hispanics.

Perhaps America’s Newspaper of Record offers an explanation as to how we’ve gotten here: 4D Chess: Trump Reveals He Let Biden Win So His Presidency Would Look Amazing By Comparison.

 

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: To bail out or not to bail out: China’s Evergrande dilemma.

The Evergrande Group, one of China’s biggest real-estate developers, owes more than $300 billion to a number of lenders. Its interest liabilities are rising by an average of $28 million daily. On Thursday, Sep. 23, alone, the company needs to pay around $120 million as interest payments to bondholders.

If Evergrande begins to default, it will present the Chinese government with a dilemma. Should the company be bailed out, or should it be allowed to fail?

The markets are worried about the contagion effect that an Evergrande collapse will have on the economy; comparisons to the 2008 insolvency of Lehman Brothers, and the financial meltdown that ensued, have already been aired. There’s no good time for an economic crisis, but a particularly bad time for one is when the world is already in the grip of a pandemic.

If Evergrande does go into a bankruptcy court and has its debt restructured, its investors will all take significant haircuts on what they’re owed. But according to the so-called “seniority waterfall”—the pecking order in which creditors get paid—the Chinese government itself makes money first, since state-owned banks are among Evergrande’s biggest creditors.

Developing…

SOMEHOW NOT THE BEE: The Taliban is now riding in swan boats with rocket launchers.

The squad-member says Biden and Schumer should disregard the recommendation with which they do not agree

OH, CANADA: The enactment of Bill C-16, passed under the Trudeau government, allows males who self-identify as females to transfer into women’s prisons—no hormones, surgery, or attempt to appear female required.

The post Britain May Revert to Imperial System as Part of Its Exit From the European Union appeared first on The Bongino Report.