The New York Post ran our summary of the effects of school closures at three years — which were every bit the disaster we said they would be from the beginning: educationally, economically, and socially. The silver lining? A resurgent school choice movement.
A good estimate for the lifetime earning and wealth losses to today’s children is provided by the chart below. These percentage losses equate to trillions of dollars of lost income over time.
Percent Change in Labor Income and Wealth for Current Primary and Secondary School Students due to Learning Loss from School Closures
Regular hotline readers know that we at CTUP are pushing a return to work requirements for welfare. Few states punish work and reward welfare as much as California. Max Ghenis of the liberal group Policy Engine finds that if a single parent of two in California earns $10k, they take home $38k. If they earn $50k, they take home $49k. That's a 73% marginal tax rate over a $40,000 earnings range. And that's without childcare and housing subsidies!
4) How Many Biden Regulators Does It Take To Screw In A Lightbulb?
Starting last Christmas, the Biden Department of Energy has been on a tear to punish Americans for having almost the entire contents of a middle-class home, including gas stoves, ovens, clothes washers, refrigerators, and air conditioners. All are being made less useful under mandates designed to limit climate change.
Last week the Biden climate change policy adopted new rules ending the sale of most new incandescent bulbs — the pear-shaped orbs with glowing wire centers — along with most fluorescent light bulbs. Americans will now have to buy light-emitting (LED) bulbs. It’s a big cultural shift — fewer than half of households currently report using mostly or exclusively LEDs.
The mandate requiring LEDs will hit the poor most. While more than half of households with an income of more than $100,000 per year use LEDs, just 39 percent of households with an income of $20,000 or less use them.
A coalition lead by The Competitive Enterprise Institute reports: “While LEDs are more efficient and generally longer-lasting....they currently cost more than incandescent bulbs and are inferior for certain functions such as dimming."
The impact on global CO2 emissions of forcing Americans to buy lightbulbs they don’t want is de minimus compared to a policy of getting China to clean up its air pollution – but Beijing is too busy trying to buy up the world to care about global warming.
5) An Easy Way To Defeat OPEC And Lower Gas Prices
The OPEC countries just announced a 1.2 million barrels a day reduction in their oil output. The price of oil quickly leaped $5 a barrel back up above $80 after the announcement.
But a recent CTUP study shows we could be producing at least two million barrels more a day if we had simply stuck with the Trump pro-drilling energy strategy. And we’d be back to somewhere close to the $2.59 a gallon Trump gas price, not the $4 a gallon motorists in many states will now start paying.
