Sep 15
It couldn’t be worse timing for the upcoming UN conference on manmade global warming. NASA’s website now admits that the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is at THE HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE RECORDS HAVE BEEN KEPT.
The NASA website is here. Read how the NASA public relations staff seek to explain away this problem while continuing to cling to the government’s manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 claims. It makes for fascinating entertainment.
Sep 15
Writer and economist Stephen Moore, a native Illinoisan, writes that:
* Nearly one of three state tax dollars in Illinois now goes to paying pensions for retired municipal and state employees.
* The Illinois government recently announced that its treasury had insufficient funds to pay off the State’s lottery winners.
* Illinois was the home of such iconic mega-employers as Caterpillar, Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But today, “the rich” are fleeing for Florida, Arizona and Texas.
* The City of Chicago is now at “junk bond” status with regard to further credit.
See Moore’s column here.
Sep 14
An astounding op-ed “review” appeared in yesterday’s (Sunday, Sept. 12, 2015) edition of the New York Times. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, wrote what is apparently a summary of his new book: “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.”
The review is here. The Amazon link to the book is here.
In a snapshot of outrageously inaccurate interpretation of world history and events, Snyder claims that “deniers” (he means the inquisitive or skeptics) of the government’s manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 theory are leading the world toward global genocide in the same manner as the Nazis in Germany and the Hutus in Rwanda led their societies toward genocide.
Snyder gets so many facts wrong in such a short essay that one can only marvel at the selection process at work in the Yale University History Department. Yale, like most other government-supported universities, practices widescale discrimination and repression of individualist, antigovernment thought. See here.
Snyder claims the Nazis’ antagonism toward Jews was somehow related to Nazi desires for more land and the Nazi government’s suspicion that Jews were somehow in the way of such land expansion.
Snyder claims the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s was mostly attributable to squabbles over farmland.
The New York Times piece illustrates the sad state of scholarship and reporting in America’s once-proud institutions of letters and journalism.
The manmade-global-warming scare is mostly a product of socialist ideology, modeling by government-supported climate scientists, and government “adjustments” of past temperature records to make the past seem colder than thermometers actually recorded. See here.
Sep 14
CNBC reports on the relatively new phenomenon of tax exiles who flee America’s current high tax rates. The U.S. currently has the world’s highest corporate tax rates and substantially higher-than-average personal income taxes. See our earlier report here.
See the CNBC story here.
The urge to renounce U.S. citizenship is increasingly strong among high-earners who produce income overseas as well as domestically. In recent years, the U.S. government has been aggressively taxing Americans who hold money in foreign bank accounts.
“More Americans renounced their citizenship and terminated their long-term residency in the first three months of the year than ever before, courtesy of the crackdown in foreign tax rules.”
Sep 12
Supporters of minimum wage laws are often hopelessly illiterate regarding basic laws of economics.
In recent election cycles, however, advocates of minimum-wage hikes have won some huge “victories” in such cities as Seattle and San Francisco. The Seattle City Council, for example, imposed a $15-per-hour minimum wage on all employers in the city last year.
Now there is sufficient data to show that these big hikes in the minimum wage have cost thousands of people their jobs. See here.
And it is a myth that minimum wage earners elsewhere in the United States are generally struggling to survive and need government to force their employers to provide a “living wage.”
· Only 11.3 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage live in households officially defined as poor.
· A whopping 63.2 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage are second or even third earners, living in households with incomes equal to twice the poverty line or more.
Sep 12
For decades, the act of driving a cab has been preposterously overregulated. Government hacks in almost every jurisdiction have enacted stupid laws and policies requiring government licensing and approval of all cab companies. In many states, cab companies are ridiculously regulated as “public utilities” like water and electricity. Cab companies, in turn, have paid off politicians to keep these corrupt systems going and to keep out competition.
The ubiquity of handheld devices such as I-Phones, however, has spurred innovation. People seeking a ride can simply punch into an “app” and contact other people who happen to be driving a car in the same direction. It is known as “ridesharing.”
Now, after just a couple years of widescale ridesharing in some cities–and the rise of ridesharing companies such as Uber–we have enough data to compare such ridesharing operations with traditional government-licensed-and-approved cab companies. See here.
1) Uber is serving poor neighborhoods better than government-approved taxis, providing more rides than taxis to people from neighborhoods with lower-than-average-household-incomes.
2) It is safer for drivers to work for a ridesharing company compared to a taxi company. Taxi drivers carry cash and are attractive targets for robberies; Uber drivers are paid electronically through the “app,” and do not engage in cash transactions.
3) Uber and other ridesharing firms also cut down on drunk driving, and thus save lives. They provide additional options for people seeking rides after drinking at bars and restaurants. See this report.
Despite this growing data, government-licensed cab companies are presently lobbying heavily to get their uncle government to ban ridesharing.
Sep 09
Numerous manmade-global-warming alarmists predicted a decade ago that Arctic sea ice would disappear by 2015. Yet climatologist Steven Goddard says “The Arctic has gained hundreds of miles of ice over the past three years, much of which is thick, multi-year ice.” See here.
Goddard’s post also provides links to headlines and “news stories” in which prominent “experts” and “leaders” predicted Arctic ice would disappear during summer by 2015.
Sep 09
According to Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, “for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.” See here.
Small business startups are being choked off by mountains of taxes and regulations. “Believe it or not, when measured in per-capita terms, socialist countries such as Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden now have more startups than [Americans] do,” according to Tom Purcell.
“So does Hungary, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, as well as Italy, which hasn’t had many successes in the economic prosperity column since before the Roman Empire collapsed.”
As recently as 2008, American business startups outpaced shuttered businesses by 100,000.
Sep 08
The brilliant economist John C. Goodman is out with another brilliant column. This one about the foolishness of minimum wage laws. See here. :
To summarize: a firm that pays workers more than they are worth cannot survive because it cannot match the prices and the rate of return to investors of its rivals. A firm that pays workers less than what they are worth, cannot survive because it will not be able to retain its employees. Competition in the marketplace tends to determine wages; there is a definite logic to what people are paid; and it has nothing to do with miserliness or generosity.
Sep 08
Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama was on an Alaska propaganda trip, designed to promote government’s “climate-change” socialism agenda. Give government vastly greater power, says Obama (and hundreds of other U.S. government officials) or everyone is doomed.
To illustrate the government’s hysterical claims, Obama spoke at Alaska’s Exit Glacier, claiming the Glacier is melting rapidly due to manmade CO2 in the atmosphere. Tellingly, Obama claimed the melting of the Exit Glacier is “as good a signpost of Climate Change as anything.”
The problem is that the glacier has been receding since 1815, according to the National Park Service. See here.
And there are other Alaska glaciers that have been growing in recent years! The Hubbard Glacier, the largest calving glacier on the North American Continent (25 percent larger than Rhode Island), has been growing steadily. See here.
