Month: January 2023

We need an immediate investigation into why people are dying suddenly from strokes and cardiac arrest all across the world.

Especially while people are continued to be forced to take #COVID19 vaccines through mandates. https://t.co/RlT8GIx7F1

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 11, 2023

She’s right! Until now, people hardly ever died from strokes and heart attacks. This must be investigated and all vaccines must be blasted into space on Jewish space lasers! (We can’t take the chance of them being released Chinese chain-of-function labs by Dr Fauci…)

But it does have a historical parallel

During the George W. Bush years, as the nation waged the “global war on terror,” there was massive concern among civil libertarians about the government’s indifference, if not hostility, to human rights and civil liberties. While the “Bush Doctrine” held that “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” and professed a commitment to spreading democracy (at the point of a gun) around the globe to defeat them, Vice President Dick Cheney articulated an even darker vision in a “Meet the Press” interview five days after the 9/11 attacks:

We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.

It wasn’t long before it became clear what he meant. Eventually, the press and other investigators uncovered evidence that the government had gone very dark indeed. It had unleashed the FBI on innocent American Muslims, while military units and the CIA were kidnapping and torturing supposed terrorism suspects in secret “black sites” all over the world. There were secret no-fly lists and warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, nearly all of this occurring in total secrecy without oversight by the courts or the Congress.

Many civil libertarian organizations, from the ACLU to the Brennan Center, protested all this blatantly illegal or unconstitutional government activity and those voices grew even louder after the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, which showed the vast scope of these programs. From the beginning there were calls for a “new Church Committee” to investigate the vast overreach of the intelligence community. That was a reference to the semi-legendary committee led by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat (!), in the wake of Watergate, whose unwieldy official name was the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

Although it was associated with Richard Nixon’s scandals, the Church Committee was truly bipartisan — conservative hero Barry Goldwater was among its five Republican members — and examined the excesses and illegal activity of the FBI, CIA and NSA during the entire postwar period, much of which had been revealed in the press during that era of aggressive investigative journalism. That committee, along with the similarly aligned Pike Committee in the House, uncovered information about such programs as COINTELPRO, which involved the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil rights organizations, and Family Jewels, a covert assassination program aimed at removing foreign leaders the U.S. didn’t like. One of the most shocking discoveries was Project MKULTRA in which the government used torture and drugs on unwitting Americans for illegal experiments in mind control. Several other programs were revealed involving a cooperative relationship between Intelligence agencies and the news media to disseminate government propaganda both domestically and overseas.

It may all sound like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but it all actually happened right here in the good old USA. These astonishing revelations led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the (still secret) FISA court, and to the creation of the standing committees on intelligence in both houses of Congress. But while the Church Committee has a historical reputation as having substantially reformed the Intelligence agencies, the truth is that its effect was limited. It wasn’t easy to get any significant reforms through Congress, and it didn’t take long before those changes began to erode.

Nonetheless, the Church Committee stands as a symbol of strong bipartisan investigative oversight and reform of the most powerful and secretive law enforcement and Intelligence agencies. So when civil libertarians called for a “new Church Committee” a decade or more ago, that made sense.

Throughout the post-Church era, the American right has almost entirely been on supportive of government secrecy and the intelligence agencies (as with the notorious Dick Cheney quote cited above), allowing for a handful of self-styled libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul and his dad, former congressman Ron Paul. In fairness, most Democrats have been as well. It has mainly been progressive Democrats (like Rep. Barbara Lee and Sen. Ron Wyden, for instance) who opposed these programs while the rank-and-file right enthusiastically endorsed torture and mass surveillance and asked for more. But ever since Donald Trump and his inexplicably Russia-friendly campaign came on the scene seven years ago — cheering on illegal hacking of his opponents by foreign agents — the right has worked itself into a frenzy about the “deep state” abusing its power by investigating Trump’s suspicious behavior.

The true leader of the new House majority, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, came up with a plan to turn the tables, now that the GOP has subpoena power:

.@TuckerCarlson suggested forming a new “Church Committee.” @GOPLeader is making this happen in the House rules package. I’ll serve on it, and we will go wherever the evidence leads us. pic.twitter.com/86gGvlGD5V

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 7, 2023

The real name of this Republican snipe-hunt committee gives away what this is all about: The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The New York Times reports it will have “access to information on par with the House Intelligence Committee,” and Republicans say they have a mandate “to scrutinize … a concerted effort by the government to silence and punish conservatives at all levels, from protesters at school board meetings to former President Donald J. Trump.” You can see why they’d need the highest security clearances for such important work.

This latest “investigation of the investigators” will specifically go after the law enforcement officials investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and will be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was intimately involved in the attempt to overturn the election results in 2020. In other words, this neo-pseudo-Church Committee has been tasked with investigating the law enforcement agencies that are investigating them.

This bears almost no resemblance to the bipartisan Church Committee, which was established by a nearly unanimous vote in the Senate to look at systematic abuses going back decades under administrations led by both parties. But it does bear great resemblance to some earlier committees that purported to be rooting out abuses in the U.S. government. Ironically enough, the name McCarthy is associated with both of them.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin first made his name in a 1950 speech claiming that he had a list of communist sympathizers in the State Department. He spent the next half decade accusing hundreds of federal employees, including members of the military and the Truman administration, of being Soviet spies or “fellow travelers.” His investigations and public hearings were a cavalcade of lies and spurious accusations. He was coddled and enabled by Republican leaders, all the way up to President Dwight Eisenhower, who were too timid to confront him lest they anger his multitude of online fans. (Joe McCarthy would have been sensational on social media.)

There is no single figure like that McCarthy leading the charge in this new GOP majority. There are dozens of them, and they have no genuine interest in abuses of power or the excesses of the “deep state” (which most certainly have continued under both parties). They simply want to avenge their leader Donald Trump and intimidate the authorities into backing off from any potential prosecution of Trump and his closest allies. So they intend produce a full-blown televised McCarthy-esque spectacle aimed at proving that Trump was the innocent victim of liberal (perhaps communist?) cops and spies within the federal government who seek to ruin everything America stands for.

Joe McCarthy was washed up and dead from alcoholism at the age of 47. These heirs to his legacy will end up clowning on Fox News and fundraising big bucks online from suckers who will themselves into believing it’s all real. As the O.G. commie Karl Marx famously observed, “all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Salon

Budgets are moral documents

The cartoon at the top has stayed with me since I first spotted it. “This is my list of things I don’t want others to have” describes in a dozen words the conservative governing philosophy in a way that might otherwise require a doctoral dissertation.

The entire Jim Crow era was based upon keeping black people from sharing in freedoms, privileges and power white people enjoy. New Jim Crow voting restrictions being passed today are based on it. Every time a conservative utters the phrases “real American” or “real America” they are making a claim to privileged status they believe is their birthright. Others equally American, at least in theory, must prove themselves worthy in a world where conservatives claim a veto over their advancement. Typically, whenever conservatives feel their social status threatened.

Republican budget priorities and fixation on tightening election rules reflect a narrow, exclusionary view of who counts as a citizen and who does not.

Catherine Rampell examines the new rule set House Republicans just passed and finds the same bias towards the right’s kind of people.

Spending programs benefitting the plebs must be paid for. Tax cuts for the wealty and corporations? Nope.

“Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget,” Rampell explains. “They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.”

The GOP has stacked the deck in favor of lowering taxes and against spending anything on those Others.

“There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities,” Rampell writes:

First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts thatdon’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.

Second is who and what they care about.

“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”

As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.

[…]

Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help forthe poor and the middle class.

More important than what Republicans want for Christmas is what they don’t want others to have.

For Democrats, e pluribus unum and “created equal” are more than pretty words.

No shame. But you knew that.

The right is addicted to daily outrage like a meth addict to crank. It is the fuel without which Tucker Carlson has no show and the Matt Gaetzes cannot show out. There is no close-up magic artistry to it. That their daily performances of outrage are strained and obvious is of no more concern than a dope-slap is to fans of the Three Stooges. Subtlety is not part of the shtick. But gas stoves?

The GOP once felt obliged to dog-whistle its prejudices. But that was pre-Trump. Nowadays MAGAs wear their animus on tee shirts or fly it from the back of a white Dodge Ram.

That said, a whispering campaign on the part of the GOP against one of their own almost evokes nostalgia for the Karl Rove-era (Politico):

As Harmeet Dhillon seeks the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, opponents have begun raising concerns about her Sikh faith — a development that has left some members of the committee unsettled.

Two supporters of Dhillon, who is challenging incumbent RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, told POLITICO that McDaniel allies have brought up Dhillon’s religious affiliation with them in recent weeks. One of the two said that a fellow RNC committee member, who is openly supporting McDaniel in the race, brought up concerns about Dhillon’s “Sikh faith” during a recent phone conversation. That person was granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

The topic has become so buzzed about that Dhillon herself has been forced to address it publicly, this week retweeting RNC members who condemned those drawing negative attention to her religious affiliation.

McDaniel is a Mormon and “wholeheartedly condemn[s] religious bigotry in any form.”

The focus on Dhillon’s faith hasn’t just come from people supporting McDaniel. In an email sent to an RNC member on Sunday, a purported supporter of “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell, who is also running for committee chair, brought up Dhillon’s religion as an issue. The copy of the email, which was provided to POLITICO with the sender’s name redacted, urged the recipient to support Lindell, an “ardent Christian conservative.”

“She is an Indian Sikh by birth and heritage, Not of Judeo-Christian worldview,” the emailer wrote of Dhillon. “None of these core character positions aligns with the Republican Party Platform, planks, or conservatism in general.”

Reached for comment, Lindell told POLITICO to “shove it.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Dhillon called it “hurtful to learn that a handful of RNC members, in a close race for RNC chair, have chosen to question my fitness to run the RNC by using my devout Sikh faith as a weapon against me.”

Has Dhillon spent any time with members of her own party? Has she appeared with Carlson and seen how the her allies play? (She has.)

But if there’s something Republicans cannot abide more than people of non-Christian faiths who don’t know their place, it’s a loser. Trump’s star is on the wane and McDaniel’s reelection is in jeopardy.

Chris Horn, a GOP commentator in the state and chair of Alabama’s Tennessee Valley Republican Club, is not on the steering committee but has openly supported McDaniel’s reelection. While acknowledging that Dhillon has the right to practice her faith, he defended Republicans who are seeking information about Dhillon’s religious beliefs. He said he is concerned Dhillon would cut existing RNC programs targeting Protestant, Catholic and Jewish voters — something Dhillon has not proposed doing.

“People aren’t bigots because they ask questions,” Horn said. “That’s a legit question: Is the Republican Party, or even the Democratic Party ready for someone of the Sikh faith?

“If someone from another faith wants to be the leader of our party, then you’re going to be the leader of tens of millions of Christians. And there’s not been any conversation about that at all,” Horn added. “That’s just the fact of the matter.”

Come on, Chris. Just come out and say it.

Closer than we knew

Vanity Fair looks at the 13,000 addendum to the new paperback release of NY Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President featuring a long profile of former Chief of Staff John Kelly:

Last March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump reportedly told a room full of Republican National Committee donors that the US should “put the Chinese flag” on a bunch of military planes and “bomb the shit” out of Russia—and afterward, “we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch.” Maybe you remember this, because it was a fucking insane thing to say. Or maybe you don’t, because Trump has said and done fucking insane things on a near-daily basis for many years now. Either way, it seems that this was not a one-off, and that suggesting the US attack another country and blame it on someone else is reportedly very much the 2024 presidential candidate’s thing.

In a new section of his 2020 book on Trump, as obtained by NBC News, New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt reveals that Trump spent much of 2017 suggesting “behind closed doors in the Oval office” that he wanted to attack North Korea. The then president, Schmidt writes in the soon-to-be released afterword to Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, “cavalierly discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, saying that if he took such an action, the administration could blame someone else for it to absolve itself of responsibility.”

For his part, John Kelly reportedly attempted to explain to his boss why that probably wouldn’t work, noting that “It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” but, of course, the then White House chief of staff was using reason and logic, two things that haven’t typically worked on Trump. Still, according to Schmidt, Kelly tried, bringing in “the military’s top leaders to the White House to brief Trump about how war between the US and North Korea could easily break out, as well as the enormous consequences of such a conflict. But the argument about how many people could be killed had ‘no impact on Trump.’” Nor did the threat of economic blowback; according to the book’s update, informed of why all of this would be a very bad idea, the president would still “turn back to the possibility of war, including at one point raising to Kelly the possibility of launching a preemptive military attack against North Korea.”

Last May, less than two months after the former guy reportedly floated the idea of attacking Russia and blaming it on China, we learned that, according to former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump asked, on at least two occasions, if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” saying, “They don’t have control of their own country.” Told all the various reasons this idea was a no-go, the then president reportedly insisted that they could do it “quietly,” adding: “no one would know it was us.” Informed that, yes, people would know it was the US, Trump apparently responded that he would simply lie and say the US didn’t do it.

Trump released a video last week announcing that he would order the military to take out the cartels if he wins the white house again. So he’s still on it.

I saw Schmidt on MSNBC and he says that when Trump was threatening fire and fury on Kim Jong Un, Kelly managed to get him off of it by suggesting that he make friends with the dictator — something that no one else in history had ever done. It didn’t solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear program but it did keep Trump from launching nuclear war. As we know, he loved his “friendship” with Kim.

And this:

On the news that AG Garland has appointed a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s classified documents here’s Donald Trump’s response:

The DOJ took months to decide to name a Special Counsel for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-lago but it only took a month or so to do it in Biden’s case. I suppose you might think that means the Biden case looks much worse than the Trump case ever did but that would be stupid. Garland did it because of politics and I suppose I don’t really blame him.

It does fry me that they continue to think that naming Republicans (or someone who’s been out of the country for 5 years as Jack Smith has been) would somehow appease Trump and the GOP. They have made it an unofficial rule that only Republicans can be Special Counsels whether the subject is a Democrat or Republican and it hasn’t helped to legitimize these probes on the right one bit. They only care that a Democrat is taken down and if the prosecutor fails to do that they are either liberal symp or incompetent. Look at what they said about rock-ribbed Republicans James Comey and Robert Mueller.

As for Trump, well just look at those posts above. He calls Jack Smith a deranged, criminal, savage thug. So that worked out well.

A dispatch from red America:

Missouri has a lot of problems, but if you were in the statehouse today, you would have thought the biggest one was what female legislators wear.

Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis) shared the news on Twitter, “Debating the house rules on the floor today, and the first amendment offered by a Republican is about making stricter the rules of what women have to wear in here.”

“Yep, the caucus that lost their minds over the suggestion that they should wear masks during a pandemic to respect the safety of other is now spending its time focusing on the fine details of what women have to wear (and specifically how many layers must cover their arms) to show respect in this chamber,” Merideth added. He also clarified that lawmakers “thought a couple women last year didn’t dress nicely enough for their standards.”

I guess there was quite a debate but they ended up compromising by allowing women to wear cardigans to make sure their arms are covered if they didn’t want to wear a jacket. I wonder if they consulted with the Iranian Ayatollahs. They have a lot of experience policing women’s clothing (although it’s causing a bit of a problem these days … )

The good news is that apparently they aren’t requiring women to wear dresses with stockings and high heels so never say they are mired in antediluvian sexism.(And yes, the change was proposed by a Republican woman. What a gal.)

I mentioned the possibility of the Democrats and some swing district Republicans using the discharge petition as a way to get the debt ceiling raised against the will of the GOP House majority. It’s not a very promising route unfortunately. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig explains(subscription only):

The discharge petition may be ill-suited to raise the debt ceiling, which carries a hard deadline before causing economic calamity. The process for forcing a vote is clunky and time-consuming and some experts believe House leadership could throw up additional roadblocks along the way.

“It’s kind of like trying to do open heart surgery with an ax,” Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, told Semafor. “It’s just a very blunt instrument that’s unwieldy and will take a lot of time to accomplish what you’re trying to do.”

The steps to get to a vote are laborious:

-The bill must first sit in committee for 30 days
-Supporters have to gather 218 signatures
-The measure must sit in the discharge calendar for 7 days
-The Speaker then sets a time for the vote within 2 legislative days after a petitioner says they intend to bring up the motion

Complicated budget negotiations typically go to the last minute. So while a discharge petition might be able to get a bill past an unwilling speaker or a conservative-stacked Rules Committee that could otherwise halt it, the journey would require more time than they’re likely to have. And that assumes the Senate has the votes to follow through as well.

Even a brief default on Treasury debt could be an economic disaster, sending the markets into a panic while making it more expensive for Washington to borrow in the future as investors question the dependability of U.S. bonds.

“I would certainly not bet the faith and credit of the United States on that as plan A,” Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., the ranking member of the House Budget panel, told Semafor. He predicted the whole process “from beginning to end will take at least four months.”

Still, a discharge petition could potentially play some role in talks with enough foresight and coordination.

One option Democrats are likely to pursue is submitting “clean” bills early in the debate to raise the debt ceiling temporarily, or by a set amount, as a failsafe option.

Having a clean debt limit bill on deck could give moderate Republicans a way to pressure either side to reach a deal.

In this scenario, some Republican members might initially support their side in budget talks — but warn conservatives that they planned to join the petition if they determined the caucus was no longer working toward a realistic agreement or were keeping proposals with bipartisan backing from the floor.

If just five Republicans followed through on their threat and joined all Democrats, that would then get the petition to 218 signatures, enough to trigger a vote.

Conservatives, for their part, don’t seem too worried about an end-run around them. “It’s a bigger lift than you think on those things,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, one of the Republicans who initially resisted McCarthy, told Semafor.

Here’s Chip Roy on the debt ceiling today:

Roy: I intend to use the debt ceiling to ensure that we get fiscal and structural reforms. pic.twitter.com/5KWS3r6VhI

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 11, 2023

Fasten your seatbelts.

I’m not talking about Prince Harry

Steve Scalise is an unserious, clown-like person. Listen to this stuff. pic.twitter.com/W5HmNEuDHN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 12, 2023

That’s the person the media was touting as the moderate, sober choice to replace Kevin McCarthy if he didn’t get over the line on the speaker vote. He is much more popular in the caucus than McCarthy and you can see why. He’s nuts and so are they.

Here’s an example of Scalise’s rhetoric from December:

“Today’s final report is further proof that Democrats’ sham panel never was about impartial oversight—it was purely about politics. Instead of conducting impartial oversight of the federal government’s pandemic response, Democrats worked overtime to cover up President Biden’s failure to protect Americans. Democrats refused to investigate after we exposed the Biden White House manipulating the science to allow a radical teachers union to rewrite CDC guidance so they could make it easier to shut down schools. They refused to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and efforts by Dr. Fauci to downplay the Wuhan lab leak theory.

Democrats also refused to investigate the Biden Administration sidelining scientists during the booster approval process, and they have failed to hold former Governor Andrew Cuomo and other Democrat governors accountable for their deadly orders forcing COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of seniors. The Biden Administration’s reckless actions denied a proper education to millions of our nation’s young people, placed Americans at risk for future pandemics, and denied grieving families the justice they deserve.

I know you are but what am I?

He’s a mainstream Republican leader. That’s what we’re dealing with now.

Will anyone hear about it?

We’re obsessing today on the Joe Biden documents case hour after hour so I doubt many of you have heard about this. Dean Baker reports:

The December Consumer Price Index (CPI), following a great December jobs report, shows the economy has turned the corner and seems on a path to stable growth with moderate inflation. The CPI showed prices actually fell by 0.1 percent for the month. This brought the annualized rate of inflation over the last three months in the overall index to just 1.8 percent.

With the drop in prices reported in December, the real average hourly wage for all workers is now 0.3 percent above its pre-pandemic level. For production and non-supervisory workers it is 0.8 percent higher. And, for production and non-supervisory workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant sector it is up 5.7 percent.

The overall index for December was held down by a 4.5 percent plunge in energy prices, but the 0.3 percent rise in the core index should not be terribly troubling. The biggest factor pushing the core index higher was a 0.8 percent rise in both the rent proper index and the owners equivalent rent index, which together comprise almost 40 percent of the core index. The core index, excluding shelter, fell by 0.1 percent in December.  

We know the rent indexes will be showing much lower inflation in 2023, and possibly even deflation, based on private indexes of rents in marketed units. Research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that these private indexes lead the CPI rent indexes by six months to a year. With inflation in these indexes having turned downward in the summer, we know that in the not distant future, the inflation rate shown in the CPI rent indexes will fall sharply.

After leading the surge in inflation in 2021 and the first half of this year, due to supply chain problems, most goods are now seeing flat or falling prices. New vehicle prices fell 0.1 percent, the first drop since January of 2021. With demand for vehicles slowing, and most production largely back to normal, we should be seeing more drops in vehicle prices going forward.

Used vehicle prices fell by 2.5 percent in December, continuing a decline that began in July, but with prices still almost 40 percent higher than their pre-pandemic level, they have much further to fall. Prices of other items driven up by supply chain issues, like apparel, furniture, and appliances, were mixed in December, but there is little doubt that the direction in 2023 will be flat or downward.

With goods inflation clearly under control, the Fed has said that it wanted to focus on non-rent services. Here also the picture was largely positive in December. The index for medical services rose just 0.1 percent, although it was held down by an anomalous 3.4 percent decline in the health insurance index. But even pulling this out the picture is mixed at worst. The index for professional medical services rose just 0.1 percent, putting the year over year increase at 3.0 percent. The index for hospital services rose a more concerning 1.5 percent, but that followed declines in the prior two months. It is up 4.6 percent year over year.

The picture in other services is mixed. Recreation services rose 0.3 percent, well below the rates in recent months. The index is up 5.7 percent over the year. College tuition rose 0.3 percent in December, putting the year over year increase at 2.3 percent. Transportation services rose 0.2 percent, but the year over year increase is a still a double-digit 14.6 percent.

A big factor in the year over year rise is a 28.5 percent jump in air fares, which was reversing the decline earlier in the pandemic. Air fares actually fell by 3.1 percent in December.

But there also have been sharp increases in other components of transportation services. Car repairs rose 1.0 percent in December and are up 13.0 percent year over year. The auto insurance index rose 0.6 percent in the month and 14.2 percent over the last year.

These sharp increases show how the supply chain goods problems are intertwined with the service indexes. The index for motor vehicle parts and equipment rose 9.9 percent over the last year. These increases get passed on the price of the services. With the supply chain problems now largely under control, these price pressures will lessen in the months ahead, but some of the price increase in these services is reflecting price hikes in inputs from earlier in the year. As the prices of these inputs level off, or even fall, we should see slower inflation in these services.

This is similar to the story with restaurant prices. These rose 0.4 percent in December and are up 8.3 percent over the last year. Some of this rise is due to the reduction in government subsidies for school lunches, the price of which rose 305.2 percent over the last year. But inflation in the larger category was driven to a substantial extent by an 11.8 percent rise in the price of store-bought food.

We actually got some very good news in that category in December, as grocery prices rose just 0.2 percent, the smallest increase since March of 2021. Chicken prices actually fell by 0.6 percent in the month and milk prices dropped by 1.0 percent, although the indexes for both are still up by double digit amounts year over year.

It is likely that we will see more good news on food prices going forward. The price of many commodities, like wheat, corn, and coffee, have fallen sharply from pandemic peaks. With shipping costs also having reversed the vast majority of their pandemic increases, we should be seeing lower prices for many food items in stores.

We always need caution when looking at a single month’s report, but the good December CPI report follows several months in which inflation has slowed sharply from the pace earlier in the year. All the evidence suggests that the economy is still growing at solid pace. (The latest projection for the fourth quarter from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow is 4.1 percent.)     

It looks like the Fed has largely accomplished its mission of taming inflation, without bringing on a recession. Plenty of things can mess up this picture, like another surge of Covid or an escalation of the war in Ukraine, but for now, the economy is looking very good.

It takes a while for people to absorb these kinds of changes. My observation is that it can actually take a couple of years before people stop talking about inflation or unemployment or whatever economic calamity has already passed as an urgent problem. It become sort of a habit. And unless the media talks about it it’s likely they will take even longer.