The Patriot Post® · Monday Short Cuts

Insight: “If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure ‘inflation.’” —George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“Critical Race Theory bastardizes the idea of equity by redefining it in terms of outcome. Equity, biblically, refers to the universal application of fairness without sinful bias or prejudice. Equity, in critical race theory, is based on precisely that — sinful bias and prejudice.” —Darrell B. Harrison

“A provision tucked into the House reconciliation bill would let the Internal Revenue Service peer into the bank account of virtually every American. If passed, the rule would require financial institutions to report the cash flows of every account with more than $600 in deposits or transactions. … This is the same IRS that spent two years under the Obama administration targeting the tax-exempt status of conservative nonprofits — imposing burdensome requirements on opposition groups and then illegally disclosing the confidential information of some of those groups to the media. In the aftermath of the scandal, senior IRS official Lois Lerner grew suddenly enamored with the Constitution and invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. If her privacy matters, yours does, too.” —National Review

“I think we now have a gathering storm of inflation. And we’re likely to see some combination of that storm coming to fruition, or the central bank being forced to act to contain inflation with potentially serious financial consequences, or some combination of those two things. We’ve had labor market inflation wages at a seven and a half percent rate in the last month. We’ve had consumer price inflation close to a 6% rate over the last six months. We’ve had houses causing price inflation at over 20% over the last year. And almost none of that has yet been reflected in the price indices. I think they’re very serious reasons for concern.” —former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers

“We have a generation of central bankers who are defining themselves by their wokeness. They’re defining themselves by how socially concerned they are.” —Larry Summers

“[Joe Biden] opposed every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union. He opposed the first Gulf War. That list goes on.” —former Defense Secretary Robert Gates

“I think this is a place where President Trump got it right. He basically awakened Americans, and I would say especially the business community, to a China that — the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong. And the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that’s clearly not going to happen.” —Robert Gates

Baghdad Bob: “And if you think about those images of ships, for example, waiting at anchor on the West Coast, you know, every one of those ships is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying, because demand is up, because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.” —Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Non compos mentis: “A year ago, a lot of us were gathering with loved ones over a screen. It’s gonna be different this year because of the president’s leadership.” —Pete Buttigieg

Hot air I: “The bottom line is, we have to act on climate for the good of our children and, by the way, for the good of our economy. I view this as kind of like a planetary maintenance issue. The longer you take to do something about it, the more it’s going to cost, in livelihoods, as well as lives. We need to act." —Pete Buttigieg

Hot air II: "We can’t just nibble around the edges of the climate crisis. We’ve got to take a big, hard swing at this to save our planet for our kids and grandkids.” —Senator Elizabeth Warren

And last… “It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.” —Thomas Sowell