The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there’s the threat of a contraction in the economy, they’ll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one.” —Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Observations: “According to AAA, when Biden was elected, the average gasoline price across America was $2.20 a gallon. Since then, the price has risen every month, and on May 15 of this year, the average gas price hit $3.04. Make no mistake: this 84-cent-per-gallon price hike is a highly regressive ‘tax’ on motorists, just as lower gas prices during the Trump administration were the equivalent of a tax cut for consumers. … Biden still has a straight face while saying that no one with an income of less than $400,000 a year will pay higher taxes under his economic plan. Come on, Joe. Get out of the Washington bubble, and go to a gas station. People of all incomes are paying your gas ‘tax.’” —Stephen Moore

Re: Village academic curriculum: “[Critical Race Theory] is just warmed-over Marxism. It is being pushed by leftist professors trying to breathe new life into their failed philosophy. University campuses have long been breeding grounds for leftist looniness, but CRT is the nuttiest idea to come out of the academy in decades. The failure of Marxism in the former Soviet Union, Cuba, Cambodia and, more recently, Venezuela, forced leftists on university campuses to revise their theory. Whereas Marx tried to stir up class warfare, CRT proponents try to incite racial polarization.” —Oliver North and David Goetsch

For the record: “The Palestinians rejected a state of their own five times: Rejection No. 1: In 1937, the British Peel Commission offered the Arabs 80% of the geographical area known as Palestine. The Jews were offered 20%. The Arabs rejected it. Rejection No. 2: In 1947, the Arabs rejected the United Nations partition plan. Rejection No. 3: In 1967, in the course of defeating the attempt by Egypt, Syria and Jordan to destroy Israel, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Most Israelis had no interest in retaining Gaza or almost any part of the West Bank except for East Jerusalem, the Jewish city in which Jews have lived for 3,000 years, from 1,400 years before Muhammad was born. The Palestinians, as the Arabs of Palestine came to be known, and all the Arab states rejected partition and peace. Rejection No. 4: In 2000, at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital. But Arafat rejected the offer. In the words of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Arafat was ‘here 14 days and said no to everything.’ Rejection No. 5: In 2008, Israel tried again. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. The Palestinians said no, again. The reason for all these Palestinian/Arab rejections of a state of their own was that it meant a Jewish state in the Middle East still existed.” —Dennis Prager

Friendly fire: “I’ll say the quiet part out loud; it’s time for ‘progressives’ to start condemning anti-semitism and violent attacks on Jewish people with the same intention and vigor demonstrated in other areas of activism. The silence has been deafening.” —Democrat Congressman Dean Phillips

A blind squirrel finds a nut: “When you make big, overarching statements that we’re going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, there’s an impact to that.” —Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey

Belly laugh of the week: “I can tell you, having traveled with [Biden] a fair amount, sometimes he’s hard to keep up with.” —White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki sugarcoating the president’s fitness

Braying jenny: “I don’t believe that [Republicans] have proven themselves to be a reliable and dependable enough legislative partner to be in the position to be making any demands of the Biden administration."—Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Non compos mentis: "We need to push [Biden]. I believe in full student loan debt cancelation, but we have to push him to at the bare minimum a floor of $50,000 that Senator Warren and Senator Schumer have also advanced.” —AOC

Sexism bait: “Masks are off — which means men will start telling women to ‘Smile!’ again.” —Washington Post headline

And last… “No country that denies religious freedom can ever rightly claim to be good in some other way.” —Mike Pompeo