Politics

[Cackalacky2.0]

Orban is at CPAC. It’s a pretty moderate speech lmao.

 

[TorontoGold]

Orban is at CPAC. It’s a pretty moderate speech lmao.

*checks notes* ah yes the war on....the Left? This is the most important battle.

Hopefully Erdogan makes an appearance!

 

[Cackalacky2.0]

Wow.

 

[Jiggafini19Deux]

Standing ovation for Orban.

 

[IRISHDODGER]

Certainly seems like a self inflicted wound. If everyone knows that it's going to get passed eventually, any proposed amendments have almost zero leverage and were likely to get shot down by the Dems. Meanwhile you take the heat for not caring about the Vets. Seems like it wasn't a very smart choice to handle it the way that they did.

This is where I’m at but admittedly haven’t followed it as thoroughly as the Reps & Dems have. I did see a journalist on Twitter posted that despite the 50/50 split in Senate and the hyper-partisanship across the country that this Congress has passed as many bills as they have.

 

[Cackalacky2.0]

This is where I’m at but admittedly haven’t followed it as thoroughly as the Reps & Dems have. I did see a journalist on Twitter posted that despite the 50/50 split in Senate and the hyper-partisanship across the country that this Congress has passed as many bills as they have.

Let’s go Brandon!

 

[Cackalacky2.0]

These people are weird. Like insane weird.

 

[drayer54]

The lefts push to expand the irs and boost spending is going forward.

 

[Irish#1]

Schumer must be a genius to say all those economists are wrong.

 

[Armyirish47]

Schumer must be a genius to say all those economists are wrong.

Nah, he just has 231 economists whose letters say otherwise!

 

[irishff1014]

I am not sure where to put this but here it is.

We are in Charleston, SC for dance with my daughter and there are numerous parking garages that you can’t park certain hybrid and electric cars due to the ion batteries. I don’t think to take a picture of the cars but there is like 5 on the list.

 

[GATTACA!]

They lefts push to expand the irs and boost spending is going forward.

All of a sudden it's time to listen to experts lol.

 

[drayer54]

I am not sure where to put this but here it is.

We are in Charleston, SC for dance with my daughter and there are numerous parking garages that you can’t park certain hybrid and electric cars due to the ion batteries. I don’t think to take a picture of the cars but there is like 5 on the list.

Americans are increasingly relying on dollar stores to feed their families as inflation has driven grocery store prices up by as much as 12.2%.

Grocery sales at discount stores spiked 71% between October 2021 and June 2022, the analytics firm InMarket found, while sales of the same items in grocery stores dropped 5%.

The shift comes as 61% of Americans are living pay check to pay check, according to a LendingClub report, and affordability-branded chains like Walmart warn prices won't be dropping anytime soon.
Link

Looks like more Americans suffering from Biden’s economy are focusing on putting food on the table than they are complying with the push for electric vehicles. I did finally check one out, not to purchase, but the self-driving part was cool. I couldn’t work with the limited range though.

We did a bourbon night at Sullivan’s Steakhouse in Indy and one couple had a few and relied on that self-driving to help them get home…

 

[irishff1014]

Americans are increasingly relying on dollar stores to feed their families as inflation has driven grocery store prices up by as much as 12.2%.

Grocery sales at discount stores spiked 71% between October 2021 and June 2022, the analytics firm InMarket found, while sales of the same items in grocery stores dropped 5%.

The shift comes as 61% of Americans are living pay check to pay check, according to a LendingClub report, and affordability-branded chains like Walmart warn prices won't be dropping anytime soon.
Link

Looks like more Americans suffering from Biden’s economy are focusing on putting food on the table than they are complying with the push for electric vehicles. I did finally check one out, not to purchase, but the self-driving part was cool. I couldn’t work with the limited range though.

We did a bourbon night at Sullivan’s Steakhouse in Indy and one couple had a few and relied on that self-driving to help them get home…

Ask Amazon about that self driving lol. They have had like 3 trucks destroyed because of it.

 

[Cackalacky2.0]

I am not sure where to put this but here it is.

We are in Charleston, SC for dance with my daughter and there are numerous parking garages that you can’t park certain hybrid and electric cars due to the ion batteries. I don’t think to take a picture of the cars but there is like 5 on the list.

Fire hazard I think. I live here. Enjoy the town. If you need anything let me know.

 

[IRISHDODGER]

Americans are increasingly relying on dollar stores to feed their families as inflation has driven grocery store prices up by as much as 12.2%.

Grocery sales at discount stores spiked 71% between October 2021 and June 2022, the analytics firm InMarket found, while sales of the same items in grocery stores dropped 5%.

The shift comes as 61% of Americans are living pay check to pay check, according to a LendingClub report, and affordability-branded chains like Walmart warn prices won't be dropping anytime soon.
Link

Looks like more Americans suffering from Biden’s economy are focusing on putting food on the table than they are complying with the push for electric vehicles. I did finally check one out, not to purchase, but the self-driving part was cool. I couldn’t work with the limited range though.

We did a bourbon night at Sullivan’s Steakhouse in Indy and one couple had a few and relied on that self-driving to help them get home…

I don’t have anything against electric cars per se but I believe we as a country have a long way to go before they become practical for all Americans. We need the infrastructure of charging stations everywhere first and foremost. They make sense for those who don’t drive much &/or don’t drive very far from home (especially in big cities) but I know some owners have to rent a gas run car for long trips. Some try to map out their vacations based on where charging stations are located but have learned they can’t count on that one charging station being available or not out of order.

My bro-in-law took a trip to Denver for hiking, rafting etc w/ his son & some friends. One of his buddies in Denver owned a Tesla. He said there’s no spare tire but if you get a flat, Tesla will send a service vehicle to fix it provided you are in a 50-mile radius of their service vehicles. That seems very inconvenient but maybe that’s not the case everywhere. Can anyone confirm this? Just curious.

 

[drayer54]

Interesting no vote…

 

[Cackalacky2.0]

Interesting no vote…

Yeah I mean limiting enforcement of the TX code is vote no too

 

[TorontoGold]

Yeah I mean limiting enforcement of the TX code is vote no too

It's a clear inability to understand the tax code. It's always emotion.

 

[GATTACA!]

Ask Amazon about that self driving lol. They have had like 3 trucks destroyed because of it.

There are bound to be lots of crashes as the kinks get ironed out. The long term benefit of having driverless trucks, or mostly driverless, far outweigh 3 vehicles.

 

[GATTACA!]

Exclusive: Trump-backed Michigan attorney general candidate involved in voting-system breach, documents show

The Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general led a team that gained unauthorized access to voting equipment while hunting for evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims, according to a Reuters analysis of court filings and public records.

www.reuters.com

Surprise surprise.

 

[Irish#1]

There are bound to be lots of crashes as the kinks get ironed out. The long term benefit of having driverless trucks, or mostly driverless, far outweigh 3 vehicles.

True, but there's a long way to go before we get there. Amazon, Google and Tesla are three that come to mind that have self driving cars.

A quick google shows there are 1,400 self driving cars on the road and almost 400 crashes within an 11 month period.

Nearly 400 car crashes in 11 months involved automated tech, companies tell regulators

There were five deaths and six serious injuries in the 392 crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 2021 to May 2022. Two-thirds of the crashes involved Teslas.

www.npr.org

Self driving car statistics for 2021| Policy Advice

Self driving car statistics point to AVs as the cars of the future. Look here to discover just how safe they really are, including the latest market trends.

policyadvice.net

 

[Irish#1]

Interesting no vote…

I'm guessing Crapo makes more than $400K. lol

 

[Irish#1]

Exclusive: Trump-backed Michigan attorney general candidate involved in voting-system breach, documents show

The Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general led a team that gained unauthorized access to voting equipment while hunting for evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims, according to a Reuters analysis of court filings and public records.

www.reuters.com

Surprise surprise.

Will be interesting to hear what kind of access he had.

Here's a list of those who committed voter fraud.

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search

 

[drayer54]

Jim Cramer's coverage of the Inflation Reduction (bs) Act was interesting from the market perspective-

If you hate global warming, you got a big win this weekend with the Inflation Reduction Act.

But if you care about the stock market and inflation, then you got a big loss with the Spend Our Way to Oblivion Act, or SOWOA.

In real life, I may be an environmentalist first. But in this other life that says I want to help people make money, this one really is SOWOA — as it’s called by my friend John Ellis, who runs the brilliant News Items newsletter.

The bill is positively Orwellian. I am a huge fan of George Orwell, and while he really only gave us “1984” as an explanation for 2022, you might as well go read “Homage to Catalonia” to get a sense of the nihilistic nature of the Democrats who are actually proud of this bill.

I say that because this is truly a bill of favors and of revenge, a bill against whatever the Republicans believe in. It’s as if there really is only one party and this one party is desperate to spend money we don’t have for nominally cleaning the environment until, perhaps, that party is thrown out of office on the cross of inflation. Now I know that elsewhere on the CNBC site there is terrific—and I mean it—praise for the bill as our most important piece of legislation to control climate change. And I am thrilled if that’s the case.

But that’s not what you come to me for.

Here is what you come to me for: On the surface, it is disastrous for many U.S. stocks. A tax on buybacks that truly does impact the way companies will address their capital, a 15% book tax which hurts companies with net operating losses and may have them raise capital, the Medicare negotiation with drug companies over price, plus all sorts of suspicious gifts to interests that are against the oil and gas lobby. It’s as if the Democrats took a look at what Republicans have given business and shareholders and taken it away from them.

Now we know that ultimately that there will be less than meets the eye here. There will only be ten drugs that Medicare can negotiate prices down beginning in 2026. The market was taking care of many of the provisions against the energy companies. Gifts to electric vehicle makers were extended and there is an actual battery production credit for U.S. companies that will help Ford (F) and General Motors (GM). Watch that one, Ford wants it badly.

The oil and gas companies were doing what the Democrats wanted. Now they will do it faster or with less of their own money. Farmers got the usual gifts—this time methane, which is actually a subsidy for oil companies that sell methane like Chevron (CVX) which has a pilot program for this. Maybe that gets paid for? I think so.

In reality, the one thing it really does is to create precious environmental engineering jobs — or more likely, bid up the price of what these engineers are paid and that is precisely what we don’t want after Friday’s hot employment number. Some environmental advocacy groups are saying it could provide more than 500,000 jobs. That’s great, but we don’t have people to fill those positions, which is how you get the kind of wage inflation that burns the Federal Reserve’s efforts.

It would have been better to say it’s a tax on companies and their shareholders, but less than is needed to cover new spending that the Democrats have been begging for all these years.

The bill will most likely cause the S&P to fall.

Will it cause the drug stocks to get clocked? The drug companies have always felt this Medicare gift was inviolate, so even if it is for show you will get sellers. I will take the other side of the trade on day two or three on Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), AbbVie (ABBV) or Eli Lilly (LLY) — all of which will be impacted in one way or for several years out. Let the dumb money out. I figure some strategist puts out a list or lists of the companies most hurt by the minimum tax and the tax on buybacks. I have seen some reports about what it might cost these companies, but they seem almost too subjective to rely on.

Sadly for shareholders, Sen. Joe Manchin came close to getting a provision that would have streamlined the process of pipeline implementation and made it a possibility to get our natural gas to markets that currently use foreign—formerly Russian—oil, but that failed. The press says that’s next to come, but I don’t believe anything will be passed after this bill — especially something that helps oil and gas.

But let’s get holistic here. This deal is a giveaway for anything that is not Republican and punishing to anything that is. It’s incredibly partisan and — like the Orwellian Spend our Way to Oblivion Act — it’s just one more obstacle to stopping the Fed’s tightening cycle. Now that commodity inflation has peaked, we have to contend with labor inflation, and this bill boosts that kind of inflation in an absurd and obscene way, creating jobs we have no ability to fill other than to take them from the private sector.

That’s what’s really at stake. Every time Fed chair Jerome Powell seems to get a handle on inflation, the government throws him for a loop. This one is a true nightmare because of the title alone. There are good-hearted people all over the country who want the deficit lower and may actually believe the nomenclature. There are environmentalists who knew the market would have taken care of a lot of this. And there are shareholders who are just patsies, slaughtered by a party that is now so anti-capital as to make you believe that not only are there two countries when it comes to Roe v Wade and gun control, there are two when it comes to the stock market; a bull and a bear and the Democrats are bears who live in the North and the West and a couple of places in the Midwest.

Now I really don’t want to write any of this. I hate politics. The market has politics, of course, and I am not condoning or condemning that. I am very pro anything that can slow global warming or reverse it. But I am really here to help you make money and suffice it to say my job—and your rewards—just got tougher again. It’s a recognition that the nation did, alas, go Democratic and what you see is what you got.

Will the markets at all be smart about this? I figure that it’s enough to know that this bill raises wages when the Fed is worried about wage inflation, and whacks shareholders when we are worried about having been whacked.

I would love to tell you everything will be greener and the deficit is being reduced, but I think there will be spots of green, and some areas that truly are going to be more green. Otherwise, it’s just a series of giant giveaways to companies that were already going to do what’s needed without federal funds anyway.

One last word: Stock-owning Democrats should be as appalled as stock-owning Republicans because this bill alone could be worth 150 basis points of tightening. But perhaps the Democrats think that causing inflation is fine as long as it only boosts their interests and hurts others, mainly those of the Republicans, who own much more of the stock market than their party does.

But Powell knows inflation knows no party. It’s just odious and pernicious even as I am sure this will knock off a percent or even two of greenhouse gas emissions.

 

[ACamp1900]

The bolded is basically my view of the current democrat leadership in a nutshell

 

[TorontoGold]

Jim Cramer's coverage of the Inflation Reduction (bs) Act was interesting from the market perspective-

Corporate socialism is how everything got so screwed up in the first place. Letting companies off the hook for terrible financial decisions (Barry's lil bailouts), and not prosecuting any of the high ups for the last recession was criminal.

I like Cramer basically admitting stock market > climate change. Pretty jokes that as long as a significant part of the world believes that we'll just keep destroying the world because yolo money.

Minimum tax is a good thing, part of my day to day job is to ensure these types of companies participate in tax deferral plans because they know the rubes will put in corporate socialism policies that reduce their tax liability. Minimum tax is so that you can't keep kicking it down the road. Literally the bare minimum that a company can do.

Stock buy backs have a causational impact on inflation, you're literally injecting liquidity back into the market. So adding a tax on that to limit it seems intuitive and common sense.

Didn't think corporate socialism would be embraced by some, but some enjoy serfdom.

 

[NorthDakota]

The thing that will be very interesting to see the impact of is the IRS expansion. Nothing makes someone vote for Republicans like a federal tax man breathing down your neck.

Lots of folks in the low six-figure range living in suburbia gonna be pissed.

 

[drayer54]

The thing that will be very interesting to see the impact of is the IRS expansion. Nothing makes someone vote for Republicans like a federal tax man breathing down your neck.

Lots of folks in the low six-figure range living in suburbia gonna be pissed.

I'd say that I hope the Biden sign people catch the audits, but we've seen how democrats weaponize the IRS and DOJ.

 

[GATTACA!]

True, but there's a long way to go before we get there. Amazon, Google and Tesla are three that come to mind that have self driving cars.

A quick google shows there are 1,400 self driving cars on the road and almost 400 crashes within an 11 month period.

Nearly 400 car crashes in 11 months involved automated tech, companies tell regulators

There were five deaths and six serious injuries in the 392 crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 2021 to May 2022. Two-thirds of the crashes involved Teslas.

www.npr.org

Self driving car statistics for 2021| Policy Advice

Self driving car statistics point to AVs as the cars of the future. Look here to discover just how safe they really are, including the latest market trends.

policyadvice.net

Yeah for sure. Even it isn't a consumer product the amount of money someone like Amazon would save from having their trucks go driverless on highways would be insane. Thats why I feel confident there will be a strong push no matter how many accidents we see pop up.