On Sunday, when asked how the incoming administration would handle issues like immigration, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance told a whopper of a lie.
JD Vance: President Biden has left us an absolute dumpster fire… pic.twitter.com/6dwzXsPqSI
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 12, 2025
A dumpster fire? Really?
When it comes to specifics, Vance mentioned depleted FEMA funds, a wide open southern border, rising oil prices, rising bond yields, and the federal deficit. Here are some facts about those issue:
The current tally for billion-dollar extreme weather disasters in the US is hovering around 23 or 24 so far this year, according to Adam Smith, a climatologist with NOAA who helps compile the government’s count of expensive extreme weather disasters. That number is unofficial and likely to change, but it includes hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton, and it could possibly grow to add a separate complex of earlier severe summer storms.
“This is the most open disasters that I have seen with FEMA, and it’s because we’re seeing an increase in the number of events,” Criswell said Wednesday. “We had an incredibly busy tornado season earlier this year. We had catastrophic and historic levels of flooding across many states this spring as well. We’ve had wildfires across much of the West.”
In other words, climate change is turning "weather events" into "billion-dollar extreme weather disasters." While MAGA is content to blame all of that on DEI, government regulation, and Democrats, the toll that will take on FEMA will continue to rise.
The number of migrants arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in December was lower than when President-elect Donald Trump ended his first term in 2020, according to preliminary figures shared with Reuters, a relative calm that Trump could upend with sweeping changes.
Oil extended gains for a third session on Monday, with Brent crude rising above $80 a barrel to its highest in more than four months, driven by wider U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and the expected effects on exports to top buyers India and China.
Those sanctions were just imposed on Friday. Here's the longer-term picture on oil prices:
Find more statistics at Statista
[I]ncreases in long-term rates, like the 10-year Treasury rate, might reflect the horrible, creeping suspicion that Donald Trump actually believes the crazy things he says about economic policy and will act on those beliefs...What does this have to do with interest rates? There’s near-unanimity among economists that Trump’s announced agenda of high tariffs, tax cuts and mass deportations would be highly inflationary.
- for the first time in 24 years, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day,
- murders are way down,
- roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century,
- jobs are up,
- wages are rising,
- domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been,
- the manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush,
- drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years, and
- inflation...has returned to normal.
Here's the question facing Americans: Who are you going to believe? The guy who started the lie about immigrants eating pets, or the facts? The idea that our politics these days comes down to how someone answers that question is enough to drive us all mad.
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