(FREE) PAINE IN THE MORNING: What you need to know this Thursday – August 18, 2022

Here’s what you need to know today, Thursday – August 18, 2022.

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Biden and congressional Democrats have spent about $3.8 trillion on their agenda since Inauguration Day – Democrats passed about $3.8 trillion in spending on their top agenda items since President Biden took office — something they believe will help them in the 2022 midterms, but that Republicans say is the usual tax-and-spend legislation that will harm the economy.

“Democrats, even in this tough situation — polarized 50-50 — can actually get things done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after Democrats passed their Inflation Reduction Act this month. “They’re going to see Democrats are actually getting things done that matter to them, mainstream things that matter to folks.” – READ MORE

Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act “Secretly” Brought To You By Bill Gates – The Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” – which according to the Congressional Budget Office will raise taxes on the middle class to the tune of $20 billion – not to mention unleash an army of IRS agents on working class Americans over the next decade, was made possible by Bill Gates and (in smaller part) Larry Summers, who have been known to hang out together.

The bill, of course, was signed yesterday. – READ MORE

Walmart CEO: Inflation Will Be ‘With Us Basically Forever’ At ‘Some Level’ – Walmart CEO Doug McMillon predicted on Tuesday that wage inflation will be “with us basically forever” and detailed how higher price levels are impacting the grocery giant.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5% year-over-year as of July, according to a report released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an interview with CNBC anchor Courtney Reagan, McMillon explained that Walmart is gaining more consumers as wealthier families struggle to contend with inflation. – READ MORE

COVID-19 Gutted College Attendance. Now, a Solid Labor Market Is Convincing More High School Grads To Skip It. – According to NBC News, there are 4 million fewer students enrolled in college than there were 10 years ago, and there has been a 7 percent drop in college attendance from 2016 to 2020.

“With the exception of wartime, the United States has never been through a period of declining educational attainment like this,” Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University’s business school, told The Hechinger Report, an education nonprofit. – READ MORE

America’s cotton shortage might take the shirt off your back – Intense drought has forced cotton farmers to abandon millions of acres that have produced so little cotton that they are no longer worth harvesting, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Farmers will harvest an estimated 7.13 million acres, abandoning approximately 5.35 million acres due to an ongoing drought hammering southern U.S. states, representing an estimated abandonment rate of 42.87%, according to the National Cotton Council of America, who based their analysis on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. This represents the smallest harvest by area since 1868, The Wall Street Journal reported. – READ MORE

Leftist Calls For A ‘Meat Tax’ Reach Fever Pitch –  As President Joe Biden signs the largest climate package in American history, some leftist’s are bothered by policymakers’ hesitance to create a tax on meat.

Democratic lawmakers have long claimed that excrement produced by livestock and poultry farming — “farting cows,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) once put it — have an outsized impact on global temperatures. Discussion about crafting new disincentives for meat consumption resurfaced as the Inflation Reduction Act advanced through Congress after months of gridlock. – READ MORE

Biden’s HHS Hints It Will Extend COVID Public Health Emergency Past October Deadline –  The masks are off in most parts of the nation, but it appears as though the Biden administration will extend the COVID public health emergency declaration past the current mid-October deadline.

The White House said in January 2021 that if and when it opts to terminate the public health emergency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would provide states with 60 days’ notice before doing so. – READ MORE

Purported Free Speech Champion Elon Musk Writes Article for Chinese Censorship Bureau Magazine – Tesla billionaire Elon Musk wrote an article for a magazine produced by the chief censorship bureau of Communist China, despite being a self-described “free speech absolutist.”

The world’s richest man penned an article in the July issue of China Cyberspace, a magazine produced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the top internet regulator, responsible for enacting the strict censorship apparatus of the regime in Beijing – READ MORE

‘Woking Dead’ Author: Gen Z Struggling to Be ‘Authentically Human’ amid Me Too, Lockdowns, Digital Overload – A.J. Rice, president of Publius PR and author of The Woking Dead: How Society’s Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture, said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that Generation Z — commonly known as zoomers — are having their human authenticity undermined by a combination of the “Me Too” campaign, lockdowns ostensibly issued to reduce coronavirus transmission, and excessive involvement in the digital world.

“The Me Too movement is one of these sort of cultural revolutions,” Rice stated. He warned of interpersonal skills being eroded by manufactured misunderstandings sowed between men and women via the “Me Too” narrative and displacement of face-to-face, in-person communication via inferior technological substitute mediums. – READ MORE

Google’s Epic Failure in Toronto Might Kill the ‘Smart City’ Concept Forever –Earlier this year, Toronto announced the development of a new development in the “quayside” area in the heart of the city. The announcement marks the final nail in the coffin of Google and its Sidewalk Labs division’s plans to turn the neighborhood into a “smart city” full of surveillance technology to track residents’ every move.

MIT Technology Review reports that in February, the city of Toronto announced plans for a new development along its waterfront. The development would consist of 800 affordable apartments, a two-acre forest, a rooftop farm, a new arts venue, and a pledge to be zero-carbon. But Sidewalk Labs, the smart city division of Google, had already made claim to the same 12-acre plot known as Quayside that Toronto planned to use for the new green development. Google had plans to build a “smart city” along the waterfront area, and its proposal was accepted by Waterfront Toronto, a governmental organization overseeing the redevelopment of 2,000 acres along the lake shore, in October 2017. – READ MORE

Beware of Big Bathroom Brother – Nine years ago, I warned readers about “eyelock biometric readers” adopted by Florida schools to track them on buses.

Under the guise of fighting guns and vaping, countless schools this year are now installing surveillance sensors in bathrooms that can spy and record students’ alleged “aggression” and red-flag “spoken key words.” – READ MORE