1) Debt Deal Passes the House With More Democrat Votes Than Republican Votes
On the one hand, that’s appropriate given that Biden and the Democrats are the ones whose spending spree blew the $6 trillion hole in the debt – without virtually a single Republican vote.
On the other hand, although we’ve been modest supporters of the McCarthy compromise, this vote makes us a little nervous. What do the crazy Democrats know about what’s REALLY stuffed in this bill with the magic asterisks that we don’t? We’re almost afraid to look.
Are the global warming alarmists even capable of being embarrassed by their hair-raising predictions of doom that are never validated by the facts?
One of the more preposterous predictions is that a warmer planet will REDUCE agricultural output, which probably explains why Greenland and Norway produce so much more food than California.
Here is the latest scare prediction by the Biden EPA, circa December 2022:
But then a few weeks ago the Biden Department of Agriculture put out this release:
There are two possibilities here. 1) A warming planet doesn’t really reduce food production. Or 2) the earth isn’t warming. Either way, they lose.
Thanks to our friends at Climate Depot for calling these charts to our attention.
A story earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal perpetuates a myth and the Democrat narrative about the Trump tax cuts blowing a $2 trillion hole in the debt. We need to set the record straight in part because, after all, our CTUP founders had a big hand in crafting these pro-growth rate cuts.
Our senior fellow David Simon has shown that federal revenues ROSE to higher levels than had been predicted without the tax cut. There is no revenue shortfall. There is a multi-trillion dollar spending overage that unfortunately the debt bill doesn’t do much about.
Comparing these projected federal tax revenues with the actual federal tax revenues that were collected between 2018 and 2022 shows more revenue not less:
Greg Ip does get one thing right in the article: “Republicans don’t really have a beef with government debt. Their beef is with the size and nature of government spending.” True. Milton Friedman once famously put it: “I’d rather have a larger debt with lower government spending than the opposite. The true cost of government is how much it spends."
4) Trump Ad Is Dead Wrong: DeSantis Did a Much Better Job Than Cuomo on COVID
We are profoundly disappointed in the latest Trump PAC ad falsely attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his handling of COVID.
Trump seized on the old Data Tracker on the CDC website, which showed Florida with more total COVID deaths than New York, probably because New York did not include probable deaths and Florida did.
We always preferred the death certificate count, which is now the only one CDC publishes. That count actually shows slightly higher total COVID deaths in New York than in Florida. More significantly, on a per capita basis, Florida had lower COVID deaths than New York. With age-adjustment, much lower.
Nationally, the age-adjusted COVID death rate is 283, making New York's 312 higher than average and the 17th highest state, while Florida at 245 is well below average and ranks 36th.
But more importantly, Cuomo destroyed the New York economy and a generation of school children with strict lockdowns while Florida remained open for business and the sunshine state has been about the economically hottest place on the planet. We like what DeSantis has always said about Covid: “In Florida, we chose freedom over Fauci.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams’ response to the plague of theft/shoplifting in the city has been anemic: “diversion programs” for non-violent offenders, training retail workers in de-escalation, and “resource kiosks” inside stores. The kiosk will direct “community members who are prone to crime like shoplifting” to “critical government resources and social services.” Good luck with that.
It’s right out of the Monty Python sketch on the Spanish Inquisition: “Hit him with the cushy pillow.”
In Seattle, crime became so intolerable that voters elected Republican Ann Davison as City Attorney in late 2021. She found that like in New York, a small group of just 166 troublemakers were each responsible for an average of 6.3 misdemeanor referrals for prosecution. In the last 16 months, she has cracked down and put 142 of Seattle’s 168 top recidivists behind bars at some point. The number of annual misdemeanor referrals from this lot has dropped to 2.7.
Seattle proves that using jail time and enforcing bail requirements works to contain crime and restore civic order. How long will it take for Mayor Adams to realize that “kiosk liberalism” isn’t going to do the job?
