Aug 27
Trusters of government often claim that government-imposed minimum wages help the poor.
But research has shown that minimum wage laws harm the poor by completely locking them out of the bottom rungs of the economy.
Minimum wage laws cause unemployment rates to increase, especially among the poorest and most desperate Americans.
Only 19 percent of the wage gains from minimum wage increases accrue to families in poverty.
Aug 27
To put numbers in perspective, the entire state budget of Montana is less than $5 billion annually. Many other states operate on annual budgets of less than $5 or $10 annually.
A study by the Mercatus Center has recently found that Americans spend $67 billion to
$378 billion in annual accounting costs in the process of filing their tax returns.
Aug 24
The heroic data analyst Tony Heller will someday be seen as the man who almost singlehandedly brought down the government’s apocalyptic-manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 hoax.
Heller painstakingly combs through temp data provided from government agencies such as N.O.A.A., and shows how the government’s adjustments tend to be designed to bolster the government’s climate claims.
Now Heller has found that N.O.A.A. “scientists” declared that the 1990 data from a weather station near Flagstaff, Arizona was missing. They then replaced the “missing” data with higher-than-normal temperature readings.
But the data was not missing at all. Heller has discovered that “NOAA declared two thirds of the recorded daily data at Fort Valley, Arizona from 1990 to be missing, and replaced them with fake higher temperatures.”
Such data manipulation by N.O.A.A. appears to have been done in other places as well.
Aug 24
Whenever government expands, people become impoverished, dependent, sick, weak, diseased, trapped, and less mobile in every sense.
CBS Moneywatch has released a report indicating that “[a]lmost 8 out of 10 American workers say they live paycheck to paycheck.”
Government taxes, regulations and central banking savagely punish savers, so most Americans save little or nothing.
Studies show that Social Security alone makes America some 3 to 4 percent poorer. Other government programs incentivize people to be sick, poor, weak and disabled.
“A year ago, about 75 percent of U.S. workers said they were living from payday to payday, a number that has grown to 78 percent this year.”
“About 18 percent of workers said they cut back on their 401k contributions or personal savings in the last year, and more than one-third don’t put away money for retirement, the survey found.”
Aug 23
Government programs and policies allegedly aimed at keeping Americans healthy achieve the very opposite result.
Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare all subsidize demand without increasing supply, causing prices to rise. The result is that health care has become absurdly expensive.
Consequently, almost no one is able to purchase health goods or services as needs arise. So many purchase health “insurance.” And now government forces people to buy health “insurance.”
But a new study by Bernard Black and colleagues finds that the uninsured consume fewer healthcare services but have no more deteriorating health than the insured.
Moreover, people without health insurance “do not die significantly faster than the insured.” See here.
Aug 19
U.S. taxpayers have been forced to subsidize government “alternative energy” schemes on a truly massive scale.
Tesla and its overpaid CEO Elon Musk have milked taxpayers already for almost a billion dollars.
Tesla manufactures expensive electric cars–sold primarily to the super rich–with the massive support of U.S. tax dollars. One could say the program is a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
The stated goal of such subsidies is to fight manmade global warming by reducing Americans’ carbon footprint.
But the manufacture of one Tesla lithium battery alone produces more CO2 than an average gas car produces in 8 years. See here.
And now a new Morgan Stanley report finds that the operation of an average electric car requires the production of more CO2 than the operation of an average gas car. This is because the electricity to power a Tesla generally comes from coal or gas power plants. See here.
Aug 19
The daily stink and stain of life under near-total government has made America LESS mobile.
Here is an astounding report indicating that since 2000, “short haul [air] traffic” has “Decline[d] in the US” by $34 billion.
Government “security” policies imposed since 9/11/2001 have made Americans increasingly use alternative surface transportation. (The regulations almost certainly do very little to make air travel secure.)
The $34 billion figure is only a small component of total losses to the U.S. economy. Fewer short flights mean that America is a less dynamic society, and that goods and services take longer to transport from one location to another. Total losses to American economic vibrancy, innovation and dynamism are likely in the hundreds of billions.
America has become less competitive.
Aug 16
The streets of Philippinnes cities turned red with blood in the past week as Philippine “police” unleashed a torrent of violent raids upon the population.
Shockingly Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is urging police to kill dozens of drug suspects every day, as he praised officers who shot dead 32 people this week in “shock and awe” raids.
“Police have killed 3,450 people in similar drug raids since Duterte came to office.”
The government repeatedly claims that the killings are in “self defense.”
Aug 15
According to economist Stephen Moore, Obamacare has fueled an industry of “charities” who promote ever-more regulation of health care and ever-more tax dollars. These lobby groups include the American Medical Association, the AARP, the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association. “If you are donating money to any of these groups, you might want to think again.”
This year the best estimate is that Obamacare will need at least $10 billion more to keep the system solvent. The death spiral in the program is intensifying with every passing month, so it’s highly predictable these costs will reach $20 billion next year and more in the years that follow.
Aug 13
Government-funded “climate science” is a domain of shoddy, politicized research and claims, mostly aimed at helping governments build their cases for demanding more power, money and control.
Here is a recent lecture about the astounding revelations by retiring N.O.A.A. whistleblower Dr. John Bates.
Bates had a 40-year career in meteorology & climate science at NOAA, retiring in 2016. Bates blew the whistle on his colleagues for releasing a study based on manipulated data (which has now been destroyed), just before the UN climate conference in 2015.
The government study helped U.S. President Obama (whose agencies funded the study) promote the climate accords.
According to Bates, the flawed N.O.A.A. study tripled the warming trend in ocean data (and favored ship intake data over buoy measurements) and ignored satellite measurements.
