When properly maintained, well-built cars can last an impressive amount of miles.

Consider this 2006 Honda Civic, which hit one million miles on its original engine and transmission. Amusingly, the car’s odometer maxes out at 999,999 miles.

While that case may be an extreme outlier, most modern cars are expected to last 200,000 miles before experiencing some significant failure. That’s roughly double the lifespan of cars from the 1960s and 1970s, which typically lasted about 100,000 miles.

In this infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Ls and Athul Alexander used data from iSeeCars to determine which cars are the most likely to reach⁠— or even surpass⁠—the 200,000 mile benchmark.

Study Methodology & Data

To come up with their rankings, iSeeCars analyzed over 2 million used cars between January and October 2022. The rankings are based on the mileage that the top 1% of cars within each model obtained. Models with less than 10 years of production, such as the Tesla Model 3, were excluded.

The following tables show an expanded list of the longest lasting cars, by model category. Our infographic only includes the top five from each.

Sedans & Hatchbacks

The only non-Japanese model in the top 10 is the Chevrolet Impala, which is one of the most commonly found rental cars in the U.S.

Another interesting takeaway is that Lexus is the only luxury brand in this list. This is likely due to the fact that Lexus and Toyota often share drivetrain components.

SUVs

iSeeCars has a larger top 20 list for the SUV category.

This is a more diverse list, with American and Japanese models seemingly on par. The GM family of SUVs (Tahoe, Suburban, Yukon, and Yukon XL) are narrowly edged out by Toyota’s full size options (Sequoia and Land Cruiser).

The Land Cruiser was discontinued in the U.S. for 2021, but it remains a very popular model in Middle Eastern countries like Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.

Pickup Trucks

Once again, Japanese manufacturers hold the top spots. According to Toyota, the Tundra is the only full-size pickup that is currently being built in Texas.

Despite their marginally higher potential lifespans, sales of Japanese trucks come nowhere close to their American counterparts.

Electric Cars

The last category is EVs, which due to the 10 years of production requirement, only includes the Tesla Model S (133,998 miles) and Nissan LEAF (98,081).

These figures are much lower than the gasoline cars discussed above, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison. We probably won’t be able to judge the long-term reliability of EVs until they’ve been around for at least another decade.

In addition to needing more time, another reason is scale—the Model S and LEAF have been sold in relatively limited numbers. The Tesla Model 3, which is the first EV to sell over one million units, will likely become the first reliable benchmark.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam…

What do all our notable fabricators – George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama – have in common? 

Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages. 

George Santos claimed, apparently in search of a victimized status, that he was an “American Jew” and a “Latino Jew,” and a descendent of Holocaust survivors. 

Joe Biden lied that he went to “shul” as well as that he grew up in a veritable Puerto Rican household and just happened to attend a black college as well as being an honorary Greek.

Elizabeth Warren ended up a laughingstock for claiming her high cheekbones were proof of her Native-American ancestry—a lie she rode all the way to being the “first” Native-American professor on the Harvard Law school faculty. 

Somehow the half-white, prep-schooled Barry Soetoro, who had taken his Indonesian stepfather’s last name, rebooted in the university back to Barack Obama. The latter oddly did not catch his literary agent “misidentifying” him in a book promo as being born in Africa. And only as president, did we learn his “autobiographical” memoir was mostly a concoction.

This fixation with constructing identities is one of the great pathologies of our woke era.

When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.

A Society of Lies

There are warning signs all around us of our fate to come if we do not stop this nihilism: Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council caught on a hot mic of matter-of-fact venting tribalist hatred and mocking of non-Latino tribes—blacks, gays, indigenous people, and whites. Or the Jussie Smollett farce, both the lies he concocted to promote his victimhood, and the lies the Chicago prosecutor office initially promulgated to ensure initial preferential treatment for Smollett based on his race. Read the comments posted below news stories of rampant swarming smash-and-grab, knockout game, or carjacking crimes—and be warned of the venomous and tribalist backlash to venomous tribalism.

In a world in which there are too many oppressed for the static number of oppressors, then it is perfectly logical that an Elizabeth Warren on the one hand would fabricate an advantageous identity for careerist opportunity, and a Jussie Smollett on the other hand would invent mythical white MAGA demons to ensure he was victimized and deserving of careerist reparations for his suffering.

Yet the tribal problem is not just an epidemic of false identities and fraudulent victims. Entire areas of social and political reality are now set off and exempt from rational discussion. We are currently witnessing an upsurge in black-male crime, often descending into disproportionate hate crimes perpetrated against Asians and Jews. Yet any discussion of this violence is taboo, lest one is deemed racist or illiberal.

Questioning the morality of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and to destroy decades of striving for equal female athletics likewise is put off-limits. 

So are discussions about the epidemic of illegitimacy and the negative effects of fatherless families contributing to problems in some minority communities.

Even the national challenge of epidemic obesity is racialized, as if worries about unhealthy weight of all Americans derive somehow from mythical white “body shaming.”

So are inquiries about how the states in tough economic times are to house, feed, care, educate, and instruct 5 million entrants across the southern border, arriving en masse and illegally, all without simple background checks, knowledge of English or a high-school diploma, and in non-diverse fashion. If the first thing an immigrant does is to break U.S. law by illegally crossing the border, and the second thing is illegally residing in the United States, then it is only logical that he concludes further illegal activity will be similarly exempt. Illegal immigration is not a noble endeavor but a crime against its host.

In sum, woke tribalism inevitably turns us into fabricators and society itself becomes a liar. 

Against Meritocracy

The old 1970s cynical canard that racial quotas would not extend to pilot training or neurosurgery is no longer true. Some of the major airlines have announced mandatory non-white acceptance quotas for pilot training, and not predicated on competitive résumés or standardized test scores. Many universities and professional schools are considering adopting pass/fail grading on the theory that affirmative action admissions must become synonymous with guaranteed graduation.

Yet what is the alternative once one travels this pathway? Suppose the idea of quota-based admissions is declared valid and salutary. In that case, grading must likewise be recalibrated along this long chain of anti-meritocracy to continue ensuring equality of results.

Licensing boards are next. If one is admitted to universities on diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns rather than demonstrable achievement as quantifiably determined by competitive grades and test scores and other definable exceptional achievements, and one is further graduated on the assurance that grades either will not be issued or will be inflated, then the logical next step is that licensing exam standards in law or medicine must likewise be relaxed so as not to interrupt the ever-lengthening wokeist chain. 

In other words, soon where one went to medical school, or what one did in medical school, or where one did his residency, or his certification by a medical board of examiners will become rather irrelevant. The point is not to recruit applicants with the most competitive records and to ensure that they all are subject to the same standard of rigorous instruction and assessment to ensure the public can have confidence in the medical profession, but to make sure that profession measures up to some artificial notions about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The relationship between these metrics and health is beside the point.

We forget that what once separated the Western world from the rest was not race, climate, or natural bounty, but its gradual creation of meritocracies replacing the pre-civilizational rule of the clan, the tribe, or the race. The old inherited and stubborn obstacles remained: aristocratic privilege, class chauvinism, and plutocratic clout that warred with qualifications. They were the ancient impediments to merit whose power in the West slowly was also dethroned. 

How ironic in their places, the reactionary Western world has simply created new exemptions and privileges, calibrated on premodern criteria such as race and sex that will set off chain tribal reactions as we degenerate into Hobbesian factionalism.

Anytime perceived merit, or something close to merit, was not the standard, a society either imploded or became impoverished and calcified. The racial, one-drop categories of the Old South or the Third Reich, or the colorized spectrum of the old apartheid South Africa, or the racial chauvinism of the new tribal South Africa, or the commissar system of the Soviet Union, or the religious intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, or the familial gangs and clannish tyranny of prewar Sicily ensured that all were dysfunctional societies, and often much worse than that. Opportunity was instead guaranteed, and excellence defined, by something other than demonstrable talent and achievement. 

There will be no exceptions granted to the United States from these rules of history. There are many talented black women in the corporate world, private sector, and elsewhere who would have made excellent vice presidents given their race was incidental and an afterthought to their achievement and talent.  

The Best We’ve Got?

But Kamala Harris is not among them. She was selected by Biden’s braggadocio not because of any past stellar record as a Bay Area prosecutor, an accomplished senator, an effective orator, or a superb presidential candidate, but because a frightened Joe Biden amid the George Floyd riots announced in advance that he would preselect his running mate exclusively on the basis of race and sex, sort of in the fashion of the white male-dominated world of the past. 

Ditto Pete Buttigieg, who, in his dismal record as a rather inconsequential small city mayor and failed presidential candidate, had never evidenced aptitude for transportation issues—other than occasionally and ostentatiously riding a bike. He was never expected to seriously address problems like spiraling auto fuel prices, the bottlenecks at our harbors, the wild-west train robbing at the port of Los Angeles, the Southwest Airlines implosion, or our clogged freeways. Instead, he was appointed Transportation Secretary because of the diversity of his sexual orientation and his woke rhetoric that almost immediately surfaced in wildly out-of-pocket lectures about “racist” freeways. 

Similarly, upon appointment as press secretary, we were immediately told Karine Jean-Pierre was the nation’s first black, gay press secretary rather than being asked to recognize any prior achievement that earned her such a coveted spot. Few said her appointment reflected a successful record as chief of staff for Kamala Harris’ not-one-delegate presidential campaign, or national megaphone for an ossified Moveon.org, or her stellar work as an MSNBC pundit. 

What will a university like Stanford do when it admits much of its 2026 class largely on the basis of tribal considerations? It does not release who of the admitted opted not to take the now-optional SAT. It seems proud, in fact, that it has rejected in the past 70 percent of those applicants with perfect SAT scores. So why would one believe that Stanford truly deplores its past Jewish exclusionary quotas, when it easily trumps them in the present—and uses the same argument of diversity to excuse prejudice and disqualifying those who, by its own former standards, had earned admission? 

Diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness. Diversity of thought can be helpful, or become chaotic as orthodoxy. Hitler’s 3.7 million soldiers who charged into Russia were especially diverse, but that fact did not make the invaders less murderous.

A multi-religious India is certainly diverse, but is not always calm or humane. Yugoslavia was diverse, and so is current-day Lebanon. Was either country a kinder, gentler, or more successful society than decidedly nondiverse Japan or Poland?

Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam. In all these cases, the emphasis on tribalism is the critical determinative. If a 95 percent Asian or white country defines itself in blood-and-soil terms as did Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s and Germany between 1933 and 1945, then it becomes toxic, unlike a more natural assumption that race is incidental, not essential, even in a racially uniform society.

The same is true of diversity. Accentuate it; sharpen differences; treat individuals as part of tribal collectives—and a descent into violence and anarchy is assured. But consider tribal differences superficial, and human commonality more important than racial difference, then diversity can be enriching through voluntary contributions to the whole in terms of varieties of food, music, art, fashion, and literature. But again, envision diversity as iron-clad calibrations of identity in which the individual cedes to the collective tribe, then a tribally regressive America will be no different from the world elsewhere and our fate is assured.

So, we are headed, dangerously so, into an historically ugly, hateful, and volatile place—all the more so because we lie that it is utopian when it is pre-civilizational and reactionary.

A bill which allows the state of California to punish doctors over ‘false information about Covid-19 vaccinations and treatments’ went into effect on January 1st.

Under the new law (AB 2098) which took effect Jan.1, the state’s Medical Board would categorize dispensing information – such as the effectiveness of Ivermectin, or the Covid-19 vaccine’s rapidly waning efficacy, as unprofessional conduct.

A few days ago, Gavin Newsom signed Bill AB2098 into California law. That means doctors can lose their medical licenses for disagreeing with whatever the state determines as a consensus opinion on a particular topic. pic.twitter.com/2XHWWX4Msa

— Josh Stylman (@jstylman) October 4, 2022

The law was challenged in court by two California doctors, who said that it would restrict their free speech in violation of the first amendment, and that it was “vague” under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

However on December 28th, Biden Nominee Judge Fred Slaughter refused to halt the law, ruling that the law trumps free speech claims, and that it falls “within the longstanding tradition of regulations on the practice of medical treatments.”

Another lawsuit, brought by Physicians for Informed Consent, was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California in early December. The plaintiffs, physician LeTrinh Hoang and Children’s Health Defense, are being represented by Rick Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mary Holland, and argues that the state of California has weaponized the vague phrase “misinformation,” and thereby has illegally targeted physicians who disagree with the government’s public stance on Covid-19.

CA’s horrific☠️doctor-censorship bill #AB2098 is now law and goes into effect on Jan 1, 2023…even though it is unconstitutional to ban speech.👩‍⚖️Want to help? Retweet and support #PICphysicians at https://t.co/FAQPheFy9q. Our lawsuit📄to block this will be heard on 1/17/2023. pic.twitter.com/XDZhzFQRb4

— Physicians for Informed Consent (@picphysicians) December 31, 2022

There are many potentially disastrous consequences of AB2098. https://t.co/jfxhs2hTeM

— Corbin Sabol (@corbinsabol) January 3, 2023

Expert cardiologist and PIC member Sanjay Verma, M.D., has been tracking and cataloging CDC errors in real time. For the case, he has provided what he calls “a detailed declaration exposing the government’s scientific errors and the constitutional dangers of censoring dissent”:

“To demonstrate these points of vagueness and the general unsuitability of using ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ as a disciplinary criterion, I have prepared a detailed overview of public health response to the pandemic broken down into categories such as Masks and Vaccines (transmission, safety, efficacy of natural immunity). I have also included evidence of what [I testify] would be considered misinformation promulgated by the CDC as well as its withholding of information which led to the then ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ eventually being proven wrong.” –KRON4

AB-2098, the “physician misinformation bill” goes into effect as law in California.
Physicians can no longer communicate nuanced risk about mRNA COVID vaccines to their patients without potentially having their licenses revoked.https://t.co/VHbHlKpgar pic.twitter.com/hlMxYJth2H

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) January 2, 2023

Vaccine so bad the state of California will revoke medical licenses from any doctor speaking out about side effects and what they’ve witnessed first hand. This isn’t science and doesn’t follow the Hippocratic Oath. $pfe #pfizer https://t.co/KksrLzgOY2

— Family First 2023 Swan (@TheWuhanClan) January 3, 2023

Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

2022 was the year in which war made a comeback. But Cold War II could become World War III in 2023… with China as the arsenal of autocracy.

War is hell on earth – and if you doubt it, visit Ukraine or watch Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix’s gut-wrenching new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic antiwar novel of 1929.

Even a small war is hellish for those caught up in it, of course. But a world war is the worst thing we humans have ever done to one another. In a memorable essay published last month, Henry Kissinger reflected on “How to Avoid Another World War.” In 1914, “The nations of Europe, insufficiently familiar with how technology had enhanced their respective military forces, proceeded to inflict unprecedented devastation on one another.” Then, after two years of industrialized slaughter, “the principal combatants in the West (Britain, France and Germany) began to explore prospects for ending the carnage.” Even with US intermediation, the effort failed.

Kissinger posed an important question: “Does the world today find itself at a comparable turning point [like the opportunity for peace in 1916] in Ukraine as winter imposes a pause on large-scale military operations there?” This time last year, I predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine. The question one year later is whether there is a way to end this war, or whether it is destined to grow into something much larger.

As Kissinger rightly points out, two nuclear-armed powers are currently contesting the fate of Ukraine. One side, Russia, is directly engaged in conventional warfare. However, the US and its allies are fighting indirectly by providing Ukraine with what Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir Technologies Inc., calls “the power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems.” These are now so potent, he recently told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, that they “equate to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones.” Take a moment to ponder the implications of that.

War is back. Could world war also make a comeback? If so, it will affect all of our lives. In the second interwar era (1991-2019), we lost sight of the role of war in the global economy. Because the wars of that time were small (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq), we forgot that war is history’s favorite driver of inflation, debt defaults — even famines. That is because large-scale war is simultaneously destructive of productive capacity, disruptive of trade, and destabilizing of fiscal and monetary policies.

But war is as much about the mobilization of real resources as it is about finance and money: Every great power needs to be able to feed its population and power its industry. In times of high interdependence (globalization), a great power needs to retain the option to revert to self-sufficiency in time of war. And self-sufficiency makes things more expensive than relying on free trade and comparative advantage.

Throughout history, the principal source of power is technological superiority in armaments, including intelligence and communications. A critical question is therefore: What are the key inputs without which a state-of-the-art military is unattainable?

In 1914, they were coal, iron and the manufacturing capacity to mass-produce artillery and shells, as well as steamships. In 1939, they were oil, steel, aluminum and the manufacturing capacity to mass-produce artillery, ships, submarines, planes and tanks. After 1945 it was all of the above, plus the scientific and technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

Today, the vital inputs are the capacity to mass-produce high-performance semiconductors, satellites, and the algorithmic warfare systems that depend on them.

What were the principal lessons of the 20th-century world wars? First, the American combination of technological and financial leadership, plus abundant natural resources, was impossible to beat. Secondly, however, the dominant Anglophone empires were poor at deterrence. The UK failed twice to dissuade Germany and its allies from gambling on world war. This was mainly because Liberal and Conservative governments alike were unwilling to ask voters for peacetime sacrifices, and they failed at statecraft. The result was two very expensive conflicts that cost much more in life and treasure than effective deterrence would have — and left the UK exhausted and unable to sustain its empire.

The US has been the dominant Anglophone empire since the Suez Crisis of 1956. With the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the US successfully deterred the Soviet Union from advancing its Marxist-Leninist empire in Europe much beyond the rivers Elbe and Danube. But America was relatively unsuccessful at preventing the spread of communism by Soviet-backed organizations and regimes in what was then known as the Third World.

The US is still bad at deterrence. Last year, it failed to deter President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, mainly because it had low confidence in the Ukrainian defense forces it had trained and the Kyiv government that controlled them. The latest objective of American deterrence is Taiwan, a functionally autonomous democracy that China claims as its own. 

In October, President Joe Biden’s administration belatedly published its National Security Strategy. Such documents are always the work of a committee, but internal dissonance shouldn’t be this obvious. “The post-Cold War era is definitively over,” the authors declare, “and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” However, “we do not seek conflict or a new Cold War.” For the major powers have “shared challenges” such as climate change and Covid and other pandemic diseases.

On the other hand, “Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown.” China, meanwhile, is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”

So what will the US do to check these rivals? The answer sounds remarkably similar to what it did in Cold War I:

• “We will assemble the strongest possible coalitions to advance and defend a world that is free, open, prosperous and secure.”

• “We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.”

• “We must ensure strategic competitors cannot exploit foundational American and allied technologies, know-how, or data to undermine American and allied security.”

In other words: form and maintain alliances and try to prevent the other side from catching up technologically. This is a cold war strategy in all but name.

US support for Ukraine since the Feb. 24 invasion has undoubtedly succeeded in weakening Putin’s regime. The Russian military has suffered disastrous losses of trained manpower and equipment. The Russian economy may not have contracted by as much as Washington hoped (a mere 3.4% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund), but Russian imports have crashed due to Western export controls. As Russia’s stock of imported component parts and machinery runs down, Russian industry will face deep disruptions, including in the defense and energy sectors.

Last year, Russia cut off gas exports to Europe that it cannot reroute, as there are no alternative pipelines. Putin thought the gas weapon would allow him to divide the West. So far, it has not worked. Russia also tried choking Black Sea grain exports. But that lever had little strategic value as the biggest losers of the blockade were poor African and Middle Eastern countries.

The net result of Putin’s war thus far has been to reduce Russia to something like an economic appendage of China, its biggest trading partner. And Western sanctions mean that what Russia exports to China is sold at a discount.

There are two obvious problems with US strategy, however. The first is that if algorithmic weapons systems are the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin may eventually be driven to using the latter, as he clearly lacks the former. The second is that the Biden administration appears to have delegated to Kyiv the timing of any peace negotiations — and the preconditions the Ukrainians demand are manifestly unacceptable in Moscow.

The war therefore seems destined, like the Korean War in Cold War I, to drag on until a stalemate is reached, Putin dies and an armistice is agreed that draws a new border between Ukraine and Russia. The problem with protracted wars is that the US and European publics tend to get sick of them well before the enemy does.

China is a much tougher nut to crack than Russia. Whereas a proxy war is driving Russia’s economy and military back into the 1990s, the preferred approach to China is to stunt its technological growth, particularly with respect to — in the words of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan — “computing-related technologies, including microelectronics, quantum information systems and artificial intelligence” and “biotechnologies and biomanufacturing.”

“On export controls,” Sullivan went on, “we have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining ‘relative’ advantages over competitors in certain key technologies.  We previously maintained a ‘sliding scale’ approach that said we need to stay only a couple of generations ahead. That is not the strategic environment we are in today.  Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”

Sanctions on Russia, argued Sullivan, had “demonstrated that technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool.” They can be “a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit.” Meanwhile, the US is going to ramp up its investment in home-produced semiconductors and related hardware.

The experience of Cold War I confirms that such methods can work. Export controls were part of the reason the Soviet economy could not keep pace with the US in information technology. The question is whether this approach can work against China, which is as much the workshop of the world today as America was in the 20th century, with a far broader and deeper industrial economy than the Soviet Union ever achieved.

Readers of the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin will recall that the aliens from the planet Trisolaris use intergalactic surveillance to halt technological advance on Earth while their invasion force makes its way through deep space. Can arresting China’s development really be how the US prevails in Cold War II?

True, recent Commerce Department restrictions — on the transfer of advanced graphics processing units to China, the use of American chips and expertise in Chinese supercomputers, and the export to China of chipmaking technology — pose major problems for Beijing. They essentially cut the People’s Republic off from all high-end semiconductor chips, including those made in Taiwan and Korea, as well as all chip experts who are “US persons,” which includes green-card holders as well as citizens.

It’s also true that there are no quick fixes for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Most of China’s fabrication capacity is at low-tech nodes (larger in size than 16 nanometers). He cannot conjure up overnight a mainland clone of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.,  which leads the world in the sophistication of its chips. Nor can Xi expect that TSMC would conduct business as usual if China launched a successful invasion of Taiwan. The company’s chip fabs would almost certainly be destroyed in a war. Even if they survived, they could not function without TSMC personnel, who might flee, and equipment from the US, Japan and Europe, which would cease to be available.

Yet China has other cards it can play. It is dominant in the processing of minerals that are vital to the modern economy, including copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. In particular, China controls over 70% of rare earth production both in terms of extraction and processing. These are 17 minerals used to make components in devices such as smartphones, electric vehicles, solar panels and semiconductors. An embargo on their export to the US might not be a lethal blow, but it would force the US and its allies to develop other sources in a hurry.

America’s Achilles heel is often seen as its unsustainable fiscal path. At some point in the coming decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the federal debt are likely to exceed defense spending. Meanwhile, it is not immediately obvious who buys all the additional Treasuries issued each year if the Federal Reserve is engaged in quantitative tightening.

Might this give China an opportunity to exert financial pressure on the US? In July, it held $970 billion worth of Treasuries, making it the second-largest foreign holder of US debt. As has often been pointed out, if China chose to dump its Treasuries, it would drive up US bond yields and bring down the dollar, though not without causing considerable pain to itself.

Yet the bigger American vulnerability may be in the realm of resources rather than finance. The US long ago ceased to be a manufacturing economy. It has become a great importer from the rest of the world. As Matthew Suarez, a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, points out in an insightful essay at American Purpose, that makes the nation heavily reliant on the world’s merchant marine. “Setting aside the movement of oil and bulk commodities,” Suarez writes, “most internationally traded goods travel in one of six million containers transported in approximately 61,000 ships. This flow of goods depends on an equally robust parallel flow of digital information.”

The growing dominance of China in both these areas should not be underestimated. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has created infrastructure that reduces Chinese reliance on seaborne trade. Meanwhile, Shanghai Westwell Lab Information Technology Co. is rapidly becoming the leading vendor of the most advanced port-operating systems.

The war in Ukraine has provided a reminder that the disruption of trade is a vital weapon of war. It has also reminded us that a great power must be in a position to mass-produce modern weaponry, with or without access to imports. Both sides in the war have consumed staggering quantities of shells and missiles as well as armored vehicles and drones. The big question raised by any Chinese-American conflict is how long the US could sustain it.

As my Hoover Institution colleague Jackie Schneider has pointed out, just “four months of support to Ukraine … depleted much of the stockpile of such weapons, including a third of the US Javelin arsenal and a quarter of US Stingers.” According to the Royal United Services Institute, the artillery ammunition that the US currently produces in a year would have sufficed for only 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine in the early phase of the war.

A February 2022 Department of Defense report on industrial capacity warned that the US companies producing tactical missiles, fixed-wing aircraft and satellites had reduced their output by more than half.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the US today is in some ways in the situation of the British Empire in the 1930s. If it repeats the mistakes successive UK governments made in that decade, a fiscally overstretched America will fail to deter a nascent Axis-like combination of Russia, Iran and China from risking simultaneous conflict in three theaters: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. The difference is that there will be no sympathetic industrial power to serve as the “arsenal of democracy” — a phrase used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a radio broadcast on Dec. 29, 1940. This time it is the autocracies that have the arsenal.

The Biden administration must be exceedingly careful not to pursue economic warfare against China so aggressively that Beijing finds itself in the position of Japan in 1941, with no better option than to strike early and hope for military success. This would be very dangerous indeed, as China’s position today is much stronger than Japan’s was then.

Kissinger is right to worry about the perils of a world war. The first and second world wars were each preceded by smaller conflicts: the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Sino-Japanese War (1937).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine may seem to be going well for the West right now.

But in a worst-case scenario, it could be a similar harbinger of a much wider war.

Suddenly US involvement on the Korean peninsula is about to potentially ratchet into uncharted territory, as South Korea confirmed on Tuesday it is in talks with Washington to provide a nuclear deterrent presence at a moment Pyongyang is threatening its own nuclear arsenal expansion.

“South Korea confirmed Tuesday that Seoul and Washington are discussing its involvement in U.S. nuclear weapons management in the face of intensifying North Korean nuclear threats, after President Joe Biden denied that the allies were discussing joint nuclear exercises,” The Associated Press reports.

Despite President Joe Biden answering “no” to a reporter’s question after being asked if joint nuclear exercises are on the horizon with Seoul, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s top adviser for press affairs, Kim Eun-hye, explained that the two countries “are discussing an intel-sharing, a joint planning and subsequent joint execution plans over the management of US nuclear assets in response to North Korea’s nuclear (threats).”

President Yoon himself had affirmed something similar in an interview published Monday in a local newspaper. While South Korea has no nuclear weapons of its own, the idea could possibly be for some kind of nuclear sharing arrangement similar to NATO’s inter-alliance sharing agreement. As it stands, the US provides Korea with a “nuclear umbrella” – though this remains too ambiguous for South Korea’s leaders, apparently.

Here’s how the AP paraphrased President Yoon’s Monday statements:

In the Chosun Ilbo interview, Yoon said that while the U.S. nuclear weapons belong to the U.S., planning, intel-sharing and exercises involving them must be jointly conducted with South Korea. He said he finds it difficult to assure his people of a security guarantee with the current levels of U.S. security commitment.

The report indicates that talks on this sensitive topic, given that mere headlines of nuclear-sharing talks could trigger threat escalation out of Pyongyang, could be taking place via unofficial channels.

All of this comes in response to a New Year directive given by the north’s Kim Jong-Un, ordering his forces to embark on an ‘exponential’ expansion of nuclear forces. 

Kim recently said: “They are now keen on isolating and stifling (North Korea), unprecedented in human history,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency. “The prevailing situation calls for making redoubled efforts to overwhelmingly beef up the military muscle.”

In an interview Monday, South Korea’s president said the US+South Korea were in talks on a plan that would effectively amount to nuke-sharing.

Asked just now on the WH lawn about the talks mentioned in the report, Biden indicated they weren’t happening.https://t.co/oWNcFaFUGs

— William Gallo (@GalloVOA) January 2, 2023

Kim then at a meeting of top ministers called for “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal” – and specifically involving the mass production battlefield tactical nuclear weapons with an eye toward South Korea.

Authored by John Tamny via RealClearMarkets.com,

China allegedly faces dark days ahead. Why, you may ask? Because of freedom from coronavirus mandates.  

Who fears too much freedom in China? American reporters and corona-experts.

Supposedly it will lead to death.

You see, the view stateside among experts like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is that while China employed “extreme measures” before finally letting up, these measures limited hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus.

Can the experts truly be serious?

To answer this question it’s useful to return to March of 2020 when locking Americans into their homes was justified for the latter allegedly protecting us from sickness that would overwhelm hospitals, and worse, death. Even libertarians bought into what was absurd, and plainly inimical to our health. The libertarian nailbiters who fell for the crushing of freedom know who they are, while the experts were plain wrong with their insults of the American people.

Regarding the experts, their thorough insult was in assuming that free people would act irresponsibly and engage in activity that would sicken them and kill them. Shame on them.

As for way too many libertarians, missed by the situationally freedom loving was the simple, but crucial truth that force is superfluous when a virus billed to be serious threatens. Really, who needs to be forced inside and away from people if the act of being out and about might result in sickness or death? Which is why the more threatening the virus, the more crucial is the freedom libertarians normally fight for. Better yet, free people produce information. By doing as they wish, we find out from the freedom what activities threaten and what don’t. In hiding behind “there’s no libertarian answer to pandemics,” libertarians chose a horrid taking that blinded the population to the virus answer.

Bringing it all back to China, Emanuel worries about the country’s “Let-It-Rip Covid Reopening.” He starts with the laughable assertion that “China put the world in peril with its coverup and slow response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 three years ago.” Yes, somehow Chinese leadership in the age of smartphones, internet, sophisticated intelligence services, and even more sophisticated equity markets was going to hide a rapidly spreading virus from the rest of the world. Goodness, the Soviets couldn’t even hide Chernobyl in 1986, but the Chinese had the ability to hide a virus that was spreading faster than the flu? No, not remotely serious.

Importantly, Emanuel unwittingly happens upon the shallow nature of his argument in total with his acknowledgement of China’s “slow response to the emergence” of the virus. Which is the point, or should be. Perhaps unknowingly, China already employed a “Let-It-Rip Covid” strategy back in 2019 and early 2020. Did people die en masse amid all this freedom? Of course not. To the latter, some will respond that the Chinese covered up mass death, but what politicians might try to hide markets expose. Never forget that the U.S.’s largest, most valuable companies had and have enormous exposure to the Chinese market. As I point out in my 2021 book about the lockdown tragedy, When Politicians Panicked, if the virus had been a major killer (or even hospital-izer) of the Chinese people, this would have quickly revealed itself through a collapse of U.S. equity shares to reflect a shrinking market in China, and a soon-to-be-shrunk market stateside. Instead, and as a very-much-in-the-news virus spread, U.S. equities reached all-time highs.  

All of which brings us to the present. Emanuel and the lockdown crowd he caucuses with lament that the return of freedom to the Chinese people “could have been done responsibly.” Too much freedom too fast according to Emanuel et al. He writes that rather than gradually giving it back with experts like him fully in charge, “China ended zero Covid in the most dangerous way possible – precipitously.”

Basically, Emanuel is reviving the insulting arguments used by experts and politicians back in March of 2020 in the U.S. The Chinese people, like the American people before them, cannot be trusted with freedom. Emanuel contends that freedom in China “could overwhelm hospitals and could cause a million deaths.”

The above could be true, but it’s near certainly not true given the human instinct to avoid sickness and death. Translated for those who need it, free people will protect themselves much more effectively than governments. Someone should inform Dr. Emanuel of this simple truth, along with an even bigger truth about government power and its much more correct correlation with death.

Coming off of the Sunday attack on a barracks in Makiivka in Russian-controlled Donetsk, which marked what could be the biggest Russian troop loss of the war in a single attack to date, Ukraine is now vowing to strike “deeper and deeper” inside Russian territory.

The alarming words were issued from the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, during a new interview with Australia’s ABC…

Ukrainian Head of Military Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov in an interview with @ABC, said that there will be more strikes on Russian territory and they will be “deeper and deeper”.

Video: ABC News pic.twitter.com/l0vaMVHrbW

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 2, 2023

As the clip from the interview published Monday shows, the military intelligence chief was reluctant to directly confirm whether or not Ukraine recently struck a Russian airbase.

The ABC reporter wanted answers specifically in relation to the series of deadly drone attacks Engels military airfield in the Saratov region. In December, there were reports that the base was hit three times, the most recent instance of which came last week, and killed three Russian military technicians. 

The Ukrainian government has yet to officially own up to these attacks, which Russia says were launched by Ukraine’s forces. But according to Gen. Budanov’s words republished in the UK Telegraph: 

Responding to whether Ukraine was responsible for one of these attacks on an airbase, Kyrylo Budanov said he was “very glad” about it, but maintained Kyiv’s stance of official deniability. 

In an interview with Australia’s ABC, Mr Budanov predicted these attacks will go “deeper and deeper”, along with further attacks on Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Last week three Russian troops died in a drone attack on a Russia’s Engels airfield, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers. 

Crucially, the Engels base is over 600km inside Russia from the Ukrainian border, suggesting that Ukraine’s UAV capabilities are growing. Russia’s military has meanwhile said it is deploying greater anti-air protections around Russian bases and cities. 

As for Washington, it has maintained an official stance of not wanting its Ukrainian partners to conduct attacks inside Russian territory, fearing uncontrollable escalation, but there are indicators that behind the scenes US intelligence could be positively encouraging it – or at least turning a blind eye.

And yet with Sunday’s devastating attack on the Russian barracks in Donetsk, Ukrainian media and officials have boasted that it was done with US-supplied HIMARS missiles. This of course means from the Kremlin’s perspective, Washington’s involvement in the conflict is growing more direct by the day.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

John Corkins, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Kern Community College District Board, has a simple solution for those faculty who question diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs: take them to the slaughterhouse. Corkins has since apologized but the Board conspicuously failed to address other glaring problems with his extreme rhetoric.At the meeting, Corkins responded to students and faculty complaining about a racially hostile environment. Faculty opposed to DEI policies were referenced as part of this threat.

Corkins declared that there are “abusive” faculty that “we have to continue to cull.”

He added:

“Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse. That’s a fact of life with human nature and so forth, I don’t know how to say it any clearer.”

Corkins has since apologized and insisted

“My intent was to emphasize that the individuals who spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting have my full support…several African-American faculty, students and statewide representatives … bravely shared their feelings of fear based on the actions of a small group of faculty members and their feelings of disappointment in the district for allowing these actions to continue.”

Notably, however, the video of the Dec. 13 meeting does not give details on the specific racial incidents. There is reference to an ongoing investigation. However, there are references to faculty who have opposed DEI measures.

That would likely include a  group called the Renegade Institute for Liberty with history Professors Matthew Garrett and Erin Miller, who teach at Bakersfield College. The group filed a federal lawsuit against the district after they were allegedly threatened with termination for questioning the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at their college. They are both tenured.

The opposition to DEI measures has led some to object that the group makes them feel unsafe on campus. That reportedly included calls to terminate faculty who oppose DEI to create a safer environment.

While apologizing for calling for the killing of such faculty, Corkins does not address why faculty should be targeted if they oppose DEI measures. The hearing and the statements made against these faculty members creates a chilling environment for academic freedom. The message is clear that these professors are viewed as a dangerous element on campus.

The Board has an obligation to address this uncertain line. Corkins apologizes for calling for the killing of critics but not why criticism of DEI itself is a matter for action. There may be conduct that is threatening or violent. There is no indication of any criminal complaint, but there is a need to preserve an open and tolerant environment. However, that also includes tolerance for opposing views on issues like DEI.

There is no major campaign to remove Corkins. I am less inclined for such removal as I am interested in greater clarity on the rights of free speech and academic freedom.  Everyone makes dumb comments in unguarded moments. I accept that Corkins was carried away by the emotion of the moment. Moreover, Corkins was referencing “abusive” faculty and not necessarily putting all DEI critics in that category. That is precisely what should be clarified.

However, it would likely be a different story if a board member called for the “culling” of DEI supporters or groups on the left. There remains a double standard in how such controversies are handled in academia.

The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination. This includes blocking academics from speaking on campuses like a recent Classics professor due to their political views. Conservatives and libertarians understand that they have no cushion or protection in any controversy, even if it involves a single, later deleted tweet. At the University of North Carolina (Wilmington) one such campaign led to a professor killing himself a few days before his final day as a professor.

I have defended faculty who have made similarly disturbing comments on the left, including “detonating white people,” abolish white people, denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer,  strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements. I also defended the free speech rights of University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. (Loomis was later made Director of Graduate Studies of History at Rhode Island).

Even when faculty engage in hateful acts on campus, however, there is a notable difference in how universities respond depending on the viewpoint. At the University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

When these controversies arose, faculty rallied behind the free speech rights of the professors. That support was far more muted or absent when conservative faculty have found themselves at the center of controversies. The recent suspension of Ilya Shapiro is a good example. Other faculty have had to go to court to defend their free speech rights. One professor was suspended for being seen at a controversial protest.

The message from this hearing could be viewed by some as affirming  that criticism of DEI is now viewed a threatening language. For conservative, libertarian, or contrarian faculty, it is not clear if such views will now be tolerated or viewed as grounds for termination (or a barrier to hiring).

This comes at a time when many faculties have indeed “culled” their ranks of conservatives. A new survey of 65 departments in various states found that 33 do not have a single registered Republican.

 In a recent column, the editors of the legal site Above the Law mocked those of us who objected to the virtual absence of conservative or libertarian faculty members at law schools. Senior editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” based on the fact that liberal views reflect real law as opposed to junk law.  (Patrice regularly calls those with opposing views “racists,” including Chief Justice John Roberts because of his objection to race-based criteria in admissions as racial discrimination). He explained that hiring a conservative academic was akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism (or that the sun orbits the earth) to teach at a university.

It is that easy. You simply declare that conservative views shared by a majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the population are invalid to be taught.

It is not limited to faculty. Polls now show that 60 percent of students fear sharing their views in class. Various polls have shown the same fear with some showing an even higher percentage of fearful students. There is a growing orthodoxy taking hold on our campuses with growing intolerance for dissenting faculty and students alike.

There are faculty who have raised concerns over DEI initiatives, land acknowledgment, and other policies. Even with the apology, the Board has allowed the underlying threat to linger. It should state why the opposition of faculty members, including filing in court, could be deemed as threatening or unacceptable viewpoints.

Authored by Jackson Elliott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

When a 13-year-old girl said she actually was a boy, teachers at her Maine school allegedly started using male pronouns for her and a counselor gave her a breast binder to wear to create the appearance of a flatter chest.

No one told her mother.

Amber Lavigne said she discovered the device in her daughter’s bedroom. It was then that the child admitted a staff member at the Great Salt Bay Community School had given it to her, as well as changing the name and pronouns she used at school, Lavigne told her community’s school board members during a public meeting on Dec. 14.

The youngster was told to keep it a secret from her parents, which caused her increasing “stress, anxiety, and depression,” Lavigne told the school board of the Central Lincoln County School System (CLCSS) AOS 93. The district serves seven rural communities in mid-coast Maine.

“Utilizing these devices can cause serious side effects,” Lavigne told board members.

Studies suggest breast binders can cause back pain, shortness of breath, chest pain, skin problems, and rib fractures.

When Lavigne expressed concern to school officials for “this heinous act, they expressed grave concern,” she told board members.

Her daughter had turned 13 just a month before.

“She’s a minor child—my minor child!” the mother said, fighting tears throughout her three-minute opportunity to speak at the meeting. “And under no circumstances should she have been provided a chest binder without the knowledge of the parents.”

The school won’t release notes from meetings between the social worker and the child, Lavigne told board members.

A worker “at the school encouraged a student to keep a secret from their parents!” Lavigne said. “This is the very definition of child predatory sexual grooming. Predators work to gain a victim’s trust by driving a wedge between them and their parents.”

Voice quavering, Lavigne demanded that all employees with “knowledge of the secret be immediately terminated from their positions,” and “that our child’s records be released to us. Laws, policies, and parental trust were broken.”

A wedge was driven between the child and her parents, Lavigne continued.

“Consider for a moment if this was your child,” she said. “What would you do? No other parent should have to go through the trauma and distress that this has caused my family.”

Maine parental rights advocate Shawn McBreairty posted the video of Lavigne’s speech to Rumble.

Since the meeting, Lavigne has told The Epoch Times by text message that she plans to file a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission.

Lavigne and her lawyer declined to speak further with The Epoch Times, citing plans to file a lawsuit.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Great Salt Bay Community School, CLCSS AOS 93, and the school board members for comment. Calls and emails were not returned.

Secret Counsel

The staffer who was coaching her daughter’s transition to living publicly as a boy wasn’t alone in the secret, Lavigne said. Other school officials also took part, she alleged, by hiding from her the child’s use of male pronouns at school.

After Lavigne’s story went public, the Great Salt Bay Community School removed its staff directory from its website, according to internet archive the Wayback Machine.

The school also posted a statement on its website, saying some individuals had spread “rumors and allegations” online to “try and divide our community.” The statement never said what issue it addressed.

The Great Salt Bay Community School Board’s statement also claimed it made decisions based on Maine law, but never specified what these decisions were.

“When administrators receive concerns from parents and/or students about potential issues in school, the Board has specific policies and procedures in place that must be followed when addressing those concerns. Those policies comply with Maine law, which protects the right of all students and staff, regardless of gender/gender identity, to have equal access to education, the supports and services available in our public schools, and the student’s right to privacy regardless of age,” the statement reads.

Maine lawmakers now are considering a state educational rule that would allow social workers and school counselors to keep secrets about children from parents.

Chapter 117 of Maine’s Department of Education guidelines would make conversations between school counseling staff and children confidential to parents. Chapter 117 is not yet law.

In November, parental rights activist Alvin Lui predicted to The Epoch Times that Maine could soon allow social workers to provide breast binders to students without parental consent.

What Lavigne says happened to her daughter shows how gender activists can influence children, Lui said. They may lie to parents to get children to commit to permanent body alteration. They may urge pronouns, then binders, then hormones, then surgery, he added.

“All they’re trying to do is to put you off as long as they can, so that it can move your child through the train,” Lui said.

Maine parental rights advocate Shawn McBreairty promoted a fundraiser for Lavigne’s case on Twitter. The GiveSendGo account has raised $1,241 of the $2,000 goal “to help Amber and her family with her initial legal retainer,” he told his audience on Twitter.

Read more here…

In recent weeks, we have seen a burst of unexpected truthiness out of various regional Fed banks, a sharp contrast to the constant barrage of prevarication out of the Federal Reserve.

First, it was the Philadelphia Fed which effectively revised what was according to the BLS a gain of 1.1 million jobs to just 10,500 jobs, meaning that the Fed was looking at erroneously overstated, arguably politicized data, as it unleashed its burst of 75bps rate hikes in June… which happened just as June jobs number turned negative.

Then, a few days later, the Cleveland Fed suggested that the Fed’s entire inflation view is wrong, relying on core CPI (and PCE) data that is woefully, even dangerously, delayed – in some cases lagging market data by up to 12 months, and suggesting that rent inflation – a core component of shelter and OER inflation which is arguably the most important component of “sticky” US service inflation – is actually far lower if measured correctly. Specifically, instead of looking at the “all-tenant repeat rent index” (which looks at a broader, but much more smoothed population sample), the Cleveland Fed argues that what is key is the “New-Tenant Repeat Rent” index, which tracks market indexes such as Zillow and Apartment List far more closely, and thus represents reality much more accurately at key inflection points.

Needless to say, if either  – or both – of these analyses are correct, and the real US jobs market is far weaker than represented, and/or inflation is far lower than what the BLS has represented at a time when the Fed has hiked four times by 75bps, an unprecedented pace of tightening last seen only during the Volcker era in hopes of crushing what is an already stalling economy, the implications will be huge and potentially catastrophic for both the Fed and whichever political party is in charge.

But just in case there wasn’t enough doubt in the Fed’s actions prompted by the Fed’s own regional banks, in yet another controversial report, this time published by the St. Louis Fed, has one-upped both its Philadelphia and Cleveland Fed peers, finding that if one looks at the number of states with negative growth, the US is now officially in a recession (way to throw the political operatives at the NBER under the bus, guys).

Here is what St. Louis Fed researchers Kevin Kliesen and Cassandra Marks found in a report published just days before New Year’s Eve (a time when absolutely nobody would have noticed a shocking admission that the US is in a recession) in a report titled “Are State Economic Conditions a Harbinger of a National Recession.”

Economists view recessions as national events. However, past recessions have shown that some states’ economies continued to expand during a recession—particularly when the national recession was relatively mild. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s state coincident indexes (SCIs) can be used to assess whether recession-like conditions have developed in each of the states. And if so, whether there is a threshold in the number of states that might signal a national recession.

*  *  *

The figure below plots, for each month, the number of states that had negative month-over-month growth based on this index. The figure shows that the series has favorable recession-indicator properties; that is, during national recessions, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the number of states that register negative growth in the SCI increases.

Here are the number of states that had negative SCI growth at the start of these six recessions:

• February 1980: 30 states
• August 1981: 30 states
• August 1990: 26 states
• April 2001: 24 states
• January 2008: 9 states
• March 2020: 35 states
• Average: 26 states

The 2008 recession is clearly an outlier. The likely reason is that it was unclear at the time that the economy had entered a recession. In April 2008, the advance estimate showed that real GDP increased at a 3.2% annual rate in the first quarter of 2008. By the time of the third estimate, released in June 2008, first-quarter growth was revised up to 3.7%. Likewise, the advance estimate for second-quarter real GDP growth was 1.9%, which was subsequently revised to 2.8%. The current estimates that reflect all subsequent revisions of 2008 numbers show that real GDP declined at a 1.6% rate in the first quarter but increased at a 2.3% rate in the fourth quarter.

It was not until the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a sharp decline in equity prices and an economywide plunge in economic activity, that most economists viewed a recession as highly likely. By October 2008, 47 states registered negative SCI growth.

The punchline: as the report authors rhetorically ask in the final section, “Is the U.S. Tipping into a Recession?”…

In sum, a threshold estimate based on this analysis shows that 26 states need to have negative growth in the SCI to have reasonable confidence that the national economy entered into a recession. Excluding the 2008 outlier raises the threshold to 29 states.

So, where are we now? In October 2022, 27 states had negative growth in the SCI. That would exceed the six-recession average of 26 states but would fall short of the outlier-adjusted estimate (excluding 2008) of 29.

Their unstated answer: yes.

Putting it all together, in just the past month we have seen (or rather read) the following:

• Philadelphia Fed admitting over 1 million jobs “created” in Q2 never actually happened
• Cleveland Fed admitting core CPI is far lower than what the BLS reports, and what the Fed feeds into its models.
• And now, the St. Louis Fed effectively saying that based on the number of states with negative growth, the US is effectively in a recession.

While we don’t know if these attacks on the Fed’s credibility by its own economists will be sufficient to force Powell to pivot, they will certainly be used by the Fed’s political enemies (because for the past year, whether he wanted to or not, the Fed has become Biden’s most powerful tool, and one which will now be attacked by Republicans) to seek a full reversal in Fed policies and it is safe to say, that they will get it.