Economy

Vince McMahon displays a T-Rex skull in his office. It is mounted against blood-colored walls. But is it real? It doesn’t matter, as it’s authentically Vince McMahon to mount such a garish display of masculine bravado on his wall. It’s the kind of over-the-top centerpiece you’d expect from the mogul who built World Wrestling Entertainment into the behemoth it is today. A giant of a man, McMahon has spent four decades laughing maniacally as he feasted on the flesh of his puny competition. “It’s on my wall and symbolic of my voracious appetite for life,” he tweeted. There’s also prophetic symbolism to the dead-dinosaur skull. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the WWE board was investigating a “secret $3 million hush pact by CEO Vince McMahon.

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over. “Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.” Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream.

Cockburn was on one of his regular jaunts through LinkedIn this week, on the lookout for more gainful employment than the Speccie currently offers him. During his perusal, one word kept catching his eye on the profiles of other users: “Rescinded.” Prospective employees are deciding to denote when a company had made them a job offer — and then changed their mind after a change in corporate hiring plans. The cryptocurrency wallet company Coinbase appears to be one of the biggest offenders. Ashutosh, a software engineer, posted the following: After considering several factors, I had chosen to join Coinbase over pursuing a PhD.

Recently The Spectator sent me undercover inside Ron DeSantis’s Disney World. Allow me to explain. Back in April, Florida lawmakers voted to dissolve the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. Reedy Creek, for those unfamiliar with the seamy world of crony capitalism, was a self-governing enclave within Orlando, Florida, run by the Disney corporation. It had been set up to allow Disney World to effectively function as its own nation-state, setting its own rules, levying its own taxes, even administering its own public services. Reedy Creek was established in 1967. It was part of Walt Disney’s original vision for his parks, which was exceedingly ambitious, seeing, for example, EPCOT Center as growing into its own autonomous futuristic city.

The fight for a $15 minimum wage started in 2012 with a bang. Hundreds of Walmart, port, and fast food workers walked off their jobs in protest of low wages. An organization called Fight for $15 formed in 2014 following two national strikes by laborers. Seattle became the first city to require a $15 minimum wage that same year. The White House issued an executive order that required new federal contracts to include a $10.10 minimum wage because legislation had stalled in Congress. The stalled federal push led to more state and local action. California and New York put together slow-rising $15 minimum wage laws in 2016 and 2017. Eight other states, mostly in New England, followed with plans to reach a $15 minimum wage by 2026 at the latest.

There is no shortage of reasons to feel gloomy about the American economy right now. First, there’s inflation. In 2021, the Biden administration claimed that the cost of a summer barbecue had declined by 16 cents from the year before. It probably now wishes it hadn’t made that claim. This summer, the cost of that barbecue is up not 16 cents but 17 percent. Hot dogs are up 37 percent over a year ago. This is the highest inflation in forty years, with the consumer price index up 8.6 percent from a year ago. Some necessities, such as gasoline and food, have risen even more sharply, with gas having gone from $2.18 a gallon when Biden was inaugurated to $5.

As a recession looms, policymakers have predictably turned to entrepreneurs to start new businesses and jumpstart the economy. While this may be a good political talking point, the fact is that new business formation has never shortened a recession or reduced its impact. Some economists have looked to Covid to explain the unprecedented number of new businesses that sought IRS tax IDs during the pandemic. Washington’s touted “surge in entrepreneurship” is proving evanescent, however. Many individuals, facing economic lockdowns and the prospect of extended unemployment, decided to create businesses, often from home. Few of these companies will ever employ anyone except their founders — and rates of new business formation are already falling back to pre-pandemic levels.

Cardi B, the well-known rapper and mixologist, has finally acknowledged the financial reality facing many Americans today. Last week, she tweeted, “When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cockburn notes that such astute words perfectly capture how the Biden administration has raised costs for everyone, from the working class to those who can afford to live in this economy, also known as millionaires. Thankfully, the administration responded to her concerns. Janet Yellen, the secretary of the treasury, replied, “Don’t look to me to announce it. I’m not going to announce it. I don’t think we’re going to have a recession. I expect growth to slow down. We have a very strong economy.

We need a complete and total shutdown of the Washington Post until we can figure out what the hell is going on. Internal drama at the Post has spilled out into the open on Twitter, resulting in the month-long suspension of national reporter Dave Weigel for a retweet of a supposedly “off-color” joke. The charge was spearheaded by politics reporter Felicia Sonmez, who days later remains on her online crusade on Twitter, divulging gossip and musing on newsroom ethics, or lack thereof. Features writer Jose A. Del Real found himself embroiled in the drama as well when he stood up for Weigel and drew Sonmez’s ire. “So I hear the Washington Post is a collegial workplace,” she tweeted, alongside a screenshot showing that Del Real had blocked her.

All is not well with the economy. It’s true that 390,000 jobs were added last month, exceeding estimates, while hourly income is up 5.2 percent since May 2021. However, analysts guessed unemployment would drop a tenth of a percent, which didn’t happen. Gas prices keep rising, as GasBuddy.com reports a 43 cent jump over this time last month. It’s enough of a problem that OPEC has agreed to increase production in July and August. The economy remains stricken by inflation, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issuing a mea maxima culpa earlier this week. “I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take," she told CNN on Tuesday.

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.) Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.

State Farm learned the hard way that you don't come for people's kids. A leaked email released by Consumers Research on Monday revealed that the insurance company planned to mobilize its agents to indoctrinate children as young as five into woke gender theory. State Farm agents in Florida were told by a "corporate responsibility analyst" that the company is partnering with the GenderCool Project, the goal of which is to "increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children 5+." The analyst, who helpfully put his pronouns in his email signature, asked for agents to donate LGBTQ books to local schools, libraries, and community centers.

Cockburn missed the office during the pandemic. After months cooped up, he was eager to return to the hustle and bustle, the gossip, the happy hours, the flirting with married secretaries, the subsequent HR meetings and informal warnings. Thank goodness, therefore, that Cockburn doesn’t work at NPR, the nationwide radio network headquartered right here in DC — as over there they seem much less keen for a return to normalcy. Cast an eye over this memo sent out to NPR employees regarding their in-office mask mandate: https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/1527359877554704392 Station staff are reminded that: masking is still required, unless recording alone in a studio, working alone in an office with the door closed, or actively eating or drinking.

Since its postwar rise, the American conservative movement has staked its reputation on defending the free market as an abiding principle. Conservatives pointed to the liftoff in the American economy caused by the Reagan tax revolution and the deregulation of heavily controlled parts of the economy. Less government and less regulation were better for the American economy. The left disagreed with this fundamental axiom of conservative wisdom. Now, surprisingly, many on the right have joined them. Something obviously changed in the post-Cold War period. China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 2001 resulted in the so-called China Shock, or the loss of 15 to 20 percent of manufacturing jobs in America.