No, Covid Relief Spending Didn’t Lift ‘millions of Americans out of poverty last year.’

The word is circulating that the massive COVID relief spending of the past year and a half has pulled the poverty rate down, lifting millions out of poverty. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports for the Associated Press: 

Massive government relief passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic moved millions of Americans out of poverty last year, even as the official poverty rate increased slightly, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

The official poverty measure rose 1 percentage point in 2020, with 11.4% of Americans living in poverty, or more than 37 million people. It was the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines.

But the Census Bureau’s supplemental measure of poverty, which takes into account government benefit programs and stimulus payments, showed that the share of people in poverty dropped significantly after the aid was factored in.

The supplemental poverty measure was 2.6 percentage points lower than its pre-pandemic level in 2019. Stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty, while expanded unemployment benefits kept 5.5 million from falling into poverty. Social Security continued to be the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program.

And it is being cited by the Democrats as justification for its drive to massively increase and expand the welfare dependency state. The New York Times front page headlines U.S. Poverty Rate Falls To a Record Low as Aid Helps Offset Job Losses. Success of Pandemic Relief Could Bolster Democrats’ Bid for an Expansion.

But how does one define “success?” If it means giving people a temporary financial lifeline after the mostly government-imposed shutdowns crushed their livelihoods, then I guess in that sense one can call that successful. But actually lifting people out of poverty?

True, forced government wealth transfers from people who earned it to people who didn't can create a statistical illusion of alleviating poverty. But so can any common looter. 

And since these transfer programs are funded by seizing earnings from productive people, all they do is pull more people down into poverty, properly defined. As Ayn Rand, in her eloquently understandable way, foresaw in the onset of the welfare state 5 decades ago:

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?).5

My emphasis. The failed history of the 1960s Great Society "War on Poverty" is proof of that. Even by proponents own standards, the welfare state—aka, “social safety net”— has failed. Said Andre Perry, senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Left-leaning Brookings Institution, 

“We haven’t seen a shift like this [Democrats Covid relief bill] since FDR. It’s saying families are too big to fail, children are too big to fail, the elderly are too big to fail. It’s a recognition that the social safety net is not working and was not working prior to the pandemic.” 

My emphasis. If it hasn’t failed, then why, after more than half a century and untold $trillions in welfare spending, is poverty still near the top of the political agenda, especially of the Left. Worse, why do Democrats’ welfare schemes keep climbing the economic ladder, cutting ever deeper into what we once called “the middle class?” If it has failed, then what’s the logic of doubling down on a 55-year failure? 

Why, indeed?

Properly defined, in my view, poverty is the state of not earning enough to provide for one's basic necessities and well-being. The only true way to alleviate poverty is to work your way out of it. Those millions may have been "moved" out of poverty, statistically. But they didn't work their way out. Without continued dependence on those who still produce, they are right back to where they started—poor—because poverty is a state that they never really left.

The greatest champions of the poor are business entrepreneurs and innovators who make the investments in machines and work processes that raise worker productivity. They are the heroes—if I can use that overused word accurately—creating opportunities for people to rise out of poverty with honor and dignity. 

The welfare statists are not interested in alleviating poverty, of course -- if they ever were. If they were, they would expand the opportunities for such innovation by reducing the regulatory burden on business and entrepreneurship and the tax burden on all workers at every income level—including the indirect tax on workers and consumers that is the corporate income tax—thus minimizing the “need” for transfer payments.* 

They won't, because their aim is to expand the permanent welfare poverty class to as many as possible, and keep doing so until dependence poverty swallows up the middle class. As Ayn Rand has observed, “The politicians who implement the welfare state and the intellectuals who advise them are the crucial invisible profiteers on this system, because of the power over others it gives them.

Universal poverty is the only societal state that can result from steadily disincentivizing productive work and expanding parasitism. This, of course, is the economic history of socialism. 

* [“Minimizing” from the welfare state perspective. In fact, forced government wealth transfer, sometimes called “redistribution,” is immoral and never justified by need.]

Related Reading:

From Middle Class to Welfare Class

‘We’ Did Not Create the ‘Mighty Middle Class’: ‘I’ Did

Governor Murphy’s Plan to ‘Make New Jersey Great Again’

From ‘You Didn’t Build That’ to ‘The Nation's Wealth’

Ayn Rand Anticipated Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Outrage

Productivity, Not Labor unions, Created the Middle Class

Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes  

The "Relative" Poverty Gimmick

The "Relative Poverty Gimmick" Revisited

Redefining Poverty to Reignite Big Government Expansion

"Shared Prosperity" Another Name for Failed Policies

Self-described ‘One Percenter’ Should Speak Only for Himself

In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, By supporting Trump's tax cuts, GOP candidates threaten Jersey's way of life, self-described “one percenter”  Eric Schoenberg labeled the Trump tax cuts “reckless” because they must be “paid for” by cutting spending on “a combined $1.3 trillion from Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act,” which he incredibly called “three bedrocks of our healthcare system.”[!]What of the real bedrocks, the producers of healthcare--the doctors, the pharmaceutical and medical device companies, nurses, and other creators--without which the consumers of healthcare, including Schoenberg’s alleged “bedrocks” paid for largely through government spending of our redistributed healthcare dollars would not exist. 

Then Schoenberg goes on to lament potential cuts of “$3 trillion more to other vital public services” that, allegedly, would be cut to “pay” for the tax cuts. To be sure, these “cuts” are phantom. They are in fact reductions in the growth rate of spending, not actual spending cuts. Reductions in spending growth is what passes for spending cuts in today’s political jargon. And I doubt that even these phantom cuts will even happen at all. They’ll just run up the debt, rather than cut spending. That’s the achilles heel of tax cuts.

But let’s leave the spending issue aside. For whatever reason, Schoenberg begs the politicians to take and redistribute more of his money. He even advocates “using the tax system to narrow -- rather than widen -- our society's dangerous wealth gap.” Why the wealth gap is “dangerous” or even relevant he doesn’t say. No one ever does. But for all these reasons, he calls for repeal of the Trump tax cuts. 

I used my comments, which are no longer available online thanks to the Star-Ledger’s elimination of the comments function, to highlight a real danger growing like a cancer in America. My comments have been edited for clarity:

Tax cuts allow more money to remain in the hands of the people that earn it. If anyone doesn’t want to keep it, they are free to give their tax savings to any cause they support, including the government. No one has the right to speak for everyone else.

Yet that is exactly what Schoenberg is doing. Not everyone wants to pay higher taxes for redistribution. He doesn’t like his tax cut, so he would rescind the Trump tax cuts for everyone else. And that highlights what is increasingly wrong with our culture. 

Most people respect others’ rights to live by their own choices and values--until they turn to politics. Then the respect evaporates, and a thug emerges. Freedom is increasingly defined as the right to vote, rather than what freedom really is--the right to live our lives by our own judgement  regardless of anyone else's vote. So more and more, people view politics as a moral escape hatch; a chance to do what they wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do privately--force their values on others at gunpoint. The only difference is in their using the government as the hired gun—not Willie Sutton, but Al Capone. 

And then we wonder why politics is increasingly polarized, making elections in essence a cold civil war. Increasingly, our ability to make our own economic choices with our own money is at the mercy of other people’s votes. Until we reduce the power of government to tax, spend, redistribute, and regulate, the situation will only get worse. And we’re moving in the wrong direction.

The Founding Fathers ended centuries of often violent religious conflict by taking the weapon of government out of the hands of religious factions, leading to peaceful coexistence for all conscientious beliefs. It’s called the separation of church and state. It’s time for the separation of economics and state, in the same way and for the same reasons, to accomplish the same peaceful coexistence in our economic affairs as in our conscientious affairs.

Finally, notice the insulting way this article is headlined. Is it Schoenberg’s contention that our “Jersey way of life” is that of dependence on government? Schoenberg, a former investment banker and current adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, should go back to making money in investment banking and stop preaching dependence and more taxes to the rest of us.

Related Reading:

What Accounts for Americans’ Widespread Jekyll/Hyde Morality?

Sterba’s ‘Liberty’ to Steal: Marxian Evil by Any Other Name . . .

What does it Mean to Say: "We'll Have to Agree to Disagree?"

Is It Now ‘Respectable’ to be a Moocher?

Justice, not Need, is the Proper Standard for Government Tax Policy

Are We Now a Nation of Moochers and Thieves?

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

This is another installment of my examples of the racism of the Anti-Racist movement. All emphasis in the following excerpts from Black leaders call for an anti-racist state budget by New Jersey Star-Ledger Guest Columnist Brandon McKoy are added by me.

 

The year 2020 has presented several moments of reckoning and reflection for the nation, as the simultaneous crises of COVID-19, a disparate recession, and the fight against systemic racism roil our streets from coast to coast. These moments have laid bare, with great clarity, the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy foisted upon Black Americans since before the dawning of the country.

 

Right off the bat, the focus is on history. Why?

 

New Jersey is no different. We need an anti-racist budget that invests in communities of color that have been ignored and harmed for far too long, especially during economic downturns like what we are currently experiencing. 

 

A budget that specifically “invests in communities of color” is the very definition of racism. Government spending, to be just--that is, color-blind--should be neutral in regard to the race of the recipients. 

 

For a state with vast riches and access to the most consequential and beneficial resources in the United States, these incredible advantages are not equitably shared or enjoyed.

 

There you have it. The heart of the Anti-Racist agenda; egalitarian criminal socialism. Socialism and racism have a common root; collectivism--the supremacy of the group. The only alternative to collectivism, and thus racism, is individualism. Individualism is the root of capitalism and, more broadly, Americanism. You can’t graft socialism onto an individualist base. Hence, the drive to remainstream racism in American society and law is to lay the groundwork for socialism. If you are anti-socialist, you are a racist. 

 

This is why we must fight for individualism, the only genuine anti-racist creed. These black socialist leaders don’t want the focus on the individual. That would require providing genuine proof of racism or white supremacism individually, the individual being the only human entity and thus the only focus of justice. Eliminate genuine injustice, and you eliminate oppressed groups.

 

The state doesn’t have “vast riches” that it can “equitably share.” These riches are earned by productive individuals who work, voluntary cooperate, and trade. These “riches” belong first and foremost, morally and economically, to the individuals who earn it, and only the individual can rightly share what he has earned. Any legitimate “sharing” is voluntary; any “sharing” of the “riches” of NJ residents by force, including by the state budget, is the action of a criminal. The state may tax it away, and redistribute it. But it does not have a first claim on it. 

 

The Anti-Racists have to ignore this fact of nature--”you didn’t build that”--in order to rationalize away the injustice they advocate; that the government-imposed “equitable sharing” they want is crime by legal means, with a twist of racial favoritism. Collectivism is the moral escape hatch that enables them to evade this truth; if people are judged as parts of groups, rather than on personal individual factors, then anything goes.

 

No matter how outcomes are measured, whether it be household wealth, educational attainment, homeownership, or personal health, Black New Jerseyans lag far behind their white neighbors due to centuries of discriminatory policy choices.

 

Here they turn to statistical disparities. Statistics are interesting, but they don’t tell you anything about individuals, where actual evidence could be found. For example, they talk of “educational attainment” in the context of funding. But educational outcomes in places like Newark have improved dramatically due to the individual parental school choice policies of Governor Chris Christie’s charter school expansion, not more state funding. Even the Leftist Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran credits Christie for this improvement. Yet the only mention of Christie by McKoy is to criticize the “Christie-era tax breaks for wealthy families and big corporations.” Yet they want taxpayer money to perpetuate the traditional monopolist school establishment that thousands of Newark parents, mostly black, seek to escape. No matter. Statistics “say” otherwise. Statistics, of course, are the last refuge of “damned liars”.

 

McKoy gets down to defining “systemic racism”. Quoting Murphy, whose budget they criticize, McKoy writes:

 

When Governor Murphy recently addressed the parishioners of Friendship Baptist Church in Trenton, he said, “I did not decide that Black Lives Matter last week – this has been a lifelong commitment… We cannot escape the fact that systemic racism – not the outward racism of hate groups, but the silent racism of complacency – has bled into nearly facet of our society.”

 

What is meant by “complacency”? Systemic racism has been redefined. It no longer means legal segregation or other race-based law. It now means failure to support the re-systemization of racism according to a socialist agenda. If you are an individualist; if you support equality before the law; if you are not “outward” racist; if you judge and treat people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that is not enough. If you are white, and “complacent”--no matter how thoroughly you live by individualism--you are “systemically racist” because you’re white, and don’t support race-tinged socialist schemes. That, people, is textbook racism--your moral standing is determined by factors outside of your control, such as your body chemistry or actions of long-dead ancestors (“the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy foisted upon Black Americans since before the dawning of the country”). What about your personal convictions and actions? Not relevant, according to the collectivists--just support our socialist schemes.

 

Cuts to public education alone will be devastating — more than half a million dollars in funding has been taken from critical programs like the Amistad Commission and Restorative Justice in Education pilot program, initiatives meant to reduce racial disparities and dismantle structural racism. Budget decisions that prioritize austerity over constructive investments are proven to fail; and history has shown Black people are routinely the biggest victims of such tactics.

 

The “tactics” that have victimized black people is precisely the race-based law they now advocate. Didn’t we learn anything from the Jim Crow era? That was structural racism. McKoy and his ilk want to re-introduce structural racism, apparently believing it’s acceptable as long as white people are the victims. But that is just as wrong as Jim Crow. The very idea of correcting  “the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy” by imposing racist policies on current people who had nothing to do with the original injustice is itself racist: The very idea that guilt passes down through the chemistry of skin color is textbook racism. This hideous premise ignores the fact that resurrecting the principle of race-based law can be reversed by future politicians, and pave the way for a new Jim Crow era, or something worse.

 

Murphy’s budget proposal doesn’t incorporate the racial coloring the black leaders advocate, yet. Let’s hope he doesn’t cave in to their demands. If bias against “communities of color” have happened, the answer is to objectively and fairly apply standards going forward; i.e., impose the same anti-pollution controls on all industrial plants equally.

 

True, there are lingering negative effects of the systemic racism of Jim Crow laws and the like, such as zoning and government-imposed redlining on the banks. But re-racializing the law is regressive, not progressive. Expanding school choice, restricting the power of zoning boards, and eliminating occupational licensing, in addition to cutting taxes on productive citizens, are some of the steps that should be taken. Statistical equality is not an ideal. It is unjust. “First, do no harm.” Protect individual achievement. Take the 14th Amendment seriously. And above all, protect the inalienable individual rights of all, equally, at all times. The individual is the smallest minority. Defending the rights of minority groups begins with individual rights.

 

Related Reading:

 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. 

 

Although I don’t agree with some of Rothstein’s proposals, his basic message is that private racism alone--that is,absent government force--could not have segregated America, and that lawmakers’ failure to adhere to the United States Constitution, not the Constitution itself, is to blame.

 

Harriet Tubman Was a Hero for Individual Rights, Not ‘Social Justice’

 

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?--Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

 

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

 

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics

QUORA: ‘Could someone explain America’s debt system to an idiot? How can we be in debt with ourselves?’

QUORA: ‘Could someone explain America’s debt system to an idiot? How can we be in debt with ourselves?’

I posted this answer:

The term “America’s debt system” is vague. Let’s define the terms. By “America’s debt system” I’ll assume the question refers to government debt. 

Government debt is not being “in debt to ourselves”. The government is a distinct entity in and of itself. There is no “we” and no “ourselves”. When the government takes on debt, it borrows money from lenders who supply the cash in good faith that they will be paid back. The debt (bonds) is held by private pension funds, mutual funds, individuals, and sometimes other governmental entities. These lenders’ financial health depends on the soundness of the debt, known as the “full faith and credit of the United States government.” 

The issue is complicated at the federal level by the fact that the federal government has an institution that can print money, the Federal Reserve. The government can borrow from the Federal Reserve, which then holds the debt in its own account. This creates the illusion that the government owes money to itself. But it’s just that--an illusion--because the Federal Reserve ultimately sells the bonds to investors. So the lender is still a separate agent who expects to be paid back. 

When the government takes on debt, we are not in debt to ourselves. There is a debtor, and there are the creditors. Those who claim otherwise are rationalizing away the moral and legal obligation the government owes to its lenders to honor its promise to pay them back.

Related Reading:

Massive Inflation May Be Coming, Because the US Government Has Cornered Itself into a Fiscal End Game by Antony Davies James R. Harrigan for FEE

 

For years, we have warned that continued deficit spending would paint the Federal Reserve into a corner wherein monetary policy would become a slave to fiscal policy. To avoid government default, confiscatory taxes, government shutdown, or a combination of all three, the Federal Reserve has reached a point wherein it has little choice but to monetize federal deficits. Sooner or later, we will all pay the price in the form of massive inflation.

Bond giant Gundlach blasts ‘failed’ and ‘broken’ Federal Reserve by CHRIS SLOLEY

 

The Federal Reserve is presently acting in blatant non-compliance with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. An institution violating the rules of its own charter is de facto admitting that said institution has failed and is fundamentally broken.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central by John Tamny

Federal Spending Cuts vs. the Divine Right of the Welfare State

A correspondent posted an image on the Thomas Sowell Foundation Facebook page listing 28 federal programs, with the preamble:

A lot of people out there don’t believe the Trump cut the U.S. Pandemic Response Team. For those who might not be aware, he also gutted:

Of the 28 programs supposedly “gutted,” the correspondent queried 

My leftist cousin posted this, and I don't know how much of it is true, and wouldn't know how to check it out. If any of you have specific knowledge of any particular parts, please give me your thoughts.

I posted these comments, slightly edited:

I don’t know about these agencies and I don’t intend to waste time fact-checking these claims. What I do know is that Trump is a big spender who has overseen the biggest deficits in history, prior to COVID-19.

That said, the American Left has never met a domestic spending cut they would view as justified. Any and every government agency is sacrosanct. Any and every dollar that is cut is framed as “gutting,” even if it is merely cutting the growth in the agency’s budget. They are statists. Their view of government is a reincarnation of the “Divine Right of Kings” applied to the regulatory welfare state. The state can do no wrong, except to not tax, redistribute, and regulate enough. Government officials are omniscient and infallible. If a government agency exists, that very fact is unchallengeable, and thus so is its budget. They have no respect for peoples’ wallets or individual liberties. This “leftist cousin” views these alleged Trump “guttings” through the lense of the Divine Right of the Regulatory Welfare State. S-He is trying to frame the issue on that premise. 

I reject that premise outright. If any of these alleged “guttings” are true, I don’t view them as ipso facto wrong. The very fact that such a long list of “Acts” that most people have never heard of exists is alarming from the standpoint of supposedly constitutionally limited government. 

Some questions that need to be answered are; What do these functions spend our tax dollars on? What power do they have to control our lives and property? Are they necessary to secure our rights to life, liberty, and property, as is the government's proper function? If so, how effective are they at it? Are they wasteful, in which case they should be cut, consolidated, or eliminated? Or do they violate rights, in which case they should be gutted and or eliminated? It’s time to put the entire regulatory welfare state under review, and start gutting, gutting, gutting all acts and agencies and bureaucracies that are contrary the the government’s primary purpose, which is to secure and protect individual rights. 

Related Reading:

EPA Cuts in the Climate Change ‘Fight’ Means More Money to Mitigate Real Pollution

Our Pick-Pocket Nation

Is Ted Cruz a Hypocrite on Federal Disaster Aid?

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

Basic Cancer Research Funding: Don’t Forget Pharma

The New Jersey Star-Ledger ran a guest column by Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, the executive director of the political activist group New Jersey Citizen Action, titled “N.J. needs to fund critical research.” (The piece ran on May 13, 2018. As of this writing, it has not been published online.)

Salowe-Kaye opens her article with:

Four years ago, I shared my story about how our family, like nearly every other family in New Jersey, has been touched by cancer. My mother had lung cancer, my father had bladder cancer, and three of my four grandparents died of cancer. My husband of over 40 years has leukemia.

In 1985, I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer usually found in the extremities of black males over 50. I was a 38-year-old white woman, and the malignant fibro sarcoma was growing in my head. It still is. And then in 1998, I got breast cancer from a completely different tumor.

So in our house, we definitely care about cancer research. But we’re not unique, as this issue is personal for everyone and there are thousands of stories that can be told.

She then goes on to complain about state government cuts to funding for the New Jersey Commission for Cancer Research (NJCCR). Former governor Chris Christie had previously cut $10 million, subsequently restored. But current governor Phil Murphy cut state funding altogether.

Salowe-Kaye’s article coincided with President Trump’s announcement of new federal policies designed to bring down prescription drug prices. (See The Trump Plan To Reduce Prescription Drug Prices Will Have A Major Impact and President Trump's Plan to Lower Drug Prices Spares Pharma Industry for different takes on the plan.) Trump had previously smeared the pharmaceutical industry as “getting away with murder” and called for federal price controls on drugs masquerading as “direct price negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies.”

If I could leave a comment on the article, this is what I would have said:

Anyone concerned about basic cancer research funding should be very concerned about the pharma-bashing going on in Washington. As Ayn Rand has observed, “

The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence.

The pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies are the field agents of the cancer research scientists. Basic research is a vital starting point, but in and of itself does nothing for cancer patients. The pharma companies do the years-long investment, risk-taking, and work to transform the research into real cancer treatments. Remember that the Scientific Revolution led by Isaac Newton didn’t begin to yield benefits to consumers until the rise of the entrepreneurial businessman under capitalism a century later.

The threat of price controls coming to America, as well as damaging patent attacks, threaten these companies’ ability to fund their vital work. Unlike government grants, private companies must get their funding from prior products sold in the voluntary market. They can’t simply seize it through taxes. Problems in the pricing system exist, to be sure--thanks to all of the market infringements imposed by the regulatory welfare state (such as the existence of government programs like Medicare, which drives a wedge between the producers of medical products and the consumers, thus short-circuiting the crucial function of free markets). But the worst “solution” is to blame the pharma companies, especially in view of the price controls imposed in most other countries.

The pharma companies have a moral right to price their products, and take advantage of their limited patent protection, according to their own judgement. As observed, we’re all touched by cancer. At 69 years, I’ve had my share of personal encounters with cancer. We just lost a close friend after a 3-month battle. As such, I believe anyone concerned with basic research funding should be doubly concerned about the vital link between this research knowledge and the patients--the pharmaceutical,biotech companies--and the growing political attacks on this vital industry.
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On the issue of allowing Medicare to “directly negotiate drug prices,” the idea is a sham. Medicare is a coercive monopsony. A monopsony is the buyer's equivalent of a monopoly. Medicare, having taken over the market for drugs for the senior market, has a dominance not achievable in a free market., It’s enormous buying power was achieved at the point of a gun, via its taxing powers and forced conscription of every American into the program. Having commandeered its enormous monopsony power, it is disingenuous, to be polite, to claim that you can have genuine negotiations between Medicare and private companies.

In effect, Medicare would be able to dictate prices. Allowing “direct negotiations” is back-door price controls, an immoral and economically destructive abuse of government power. True, private companies can say no if Medicare demands too low of a price. But then, where would the companies sell their products, given Medicare’s takeover of such a large segment of the drug-makers’ market? What repercussions would be forthcoming from other powerful government agencies, such as the antitrust, FDA, or IRS branches of government--not to mention the wrath of business-hating political statists in Washington--in reprisal for saying “no” to Medicare’s pricing demands? It would be like “negotiating” with a Mafia boss.

Related Reading:

On Mylan’s EpiPen Pricing Controversy

Merck- Villain or Victim?

Time to End All Government-Funded Climate Change Research

When President Trump cut funding for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the climate catastrophists went nuts—literally. The New Jersey Star-Ledger editorialized, Deranged man attacks climate change funding with budget ax. The editors profess concern for controlling pollution. But its main concern revolves around climate change.

Donald Trump's effort to kill nearly one-third of the federal Environmental Protection Agency's budget, including climate research, and all climate funds to the United Nations leaves no doubt about where we, as a nation, stand.

My emphasis.

It’s becoming easier and easier for anyone who values facts over public opinion to discover how mild and manageable global warming/climate change actually is. Much if not most of climate change—the jury is still “out” on this—is not related to human activity Decades of failed predictions of increasing weather extremes is based on pure speculation, not demonstrated science. We humans are much safer from climate dangers than ever before. Living on Earth has dramatically improved during the very time when catastrophe was supposed to strike, thanks to the reliable, economical, increasingly clean “frenetic pace” of burning of fossil fuels. Increasing CO2 levels have many benefits. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on “alternative energy” subsidies, fossil fuels are still the most vital to human flourishing.

Yet, as more and more people come to understand the truth that the climate change catastrophist scenario is hogwash, the climate fanatics get more hysterical. Now, dissenters are not merely “climate deniers.” Now we can add a new pejorative, “deranged.” As the climate catastrophists’ case thins out, their insults get heavier.

The Star-Ledger seems most concerned with Trump’s cuts in climate change research funding. It worries that “This is a White House that lifts its talking points straight from ExxonMobil.” But this begs the question, why should we trust research generated by government?

Government funding of science is by definition politicized—the funding must come through politicians, after all—and EPA climate science research is probably the most politicized of all, thanks to the Left statists. The cabal of government funded scientists becomes “The Establishment,” which is then self-servingly peddled as the “The Final Authority.” Climate catastrophists question the work of dissenters if even one dollar of their funding comes from the fossil fuel industry. Fair enough. But if fossil fuel industry funded research is questionable, shouldn't research funded by politicians be even more vigorously questioned? At least the industry funding is voluntary, not taken by force from taxpayers.

It’s about time the Climate Establishment got completely cut off from taxpayer funding. The Star-Ledger claims that “A solid majority of Americans believe the effects of climate change are already occurring, and are driven by human activities,” implying that climate change is a major concern for these Americans. Let the Star-Ledger and its ilk set up a GoFundMe page and make up the EPA cuts with voluntary contributions. That will be a much better measure of the American public’s concern about climate change than any vaguely worded public opinion poll. It would be much more objective if the EPA relied strictly on privately funded research in the same manner as climate catastrophe dissenters do, giving equal consideration to all research. Then it could get a better cross section of informed opinions than it can by continuing to pit its EPA established “Establishment” against dissenters it brushes aside as “deniers” and “deranged.”

As MIT Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences Richard Lindzen observes in a letter to President Trump, “Calls to limit carbon dioxide emissions are even less persuasive today than 25 years ago. Future research should focus on dispassionate, high-quality climate science, not on efforts to prop up an increasingly frayed narrative of ‘carbon pollution.’ Until scientific research is unfettered from the constraints of the policy-driven UNFCCC, the research community will fail in its obligation to the public that pays the bills.” I submit that this will not happen until the public stops being forced, through taxes, to pay the bills. It’s time all climate research is evaluated on a level, unbiased, un-politicized playing field.

Related Reading:

Bill Gates, Capitalism, Socialism, and Climate Change

Full MIT Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences Richard Lindzen’s Letter to Trump Urging Withdrawal from the IPCC

Powerline Blog on Lindzen’s Credentials