Unleash Prosperity Hotline #984

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #984
03/26/2024
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1) Biden Isn’t Responsible for Inflation… Climate Change Is

The winner of this week’s you can’t make this %#*^ up goes to the political newsletter Axios.

Here’s their “scoop” headline from the other morning:

It may be time to add human-caused climate change to the list of factors likely to worsen inflation, a new study finds.

The data suggests climate change is rippling through entire economies, instead of affecting the availability or price of particular goods.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Communications: Earth and Environment [boy that sounds like a real page-turner] the study shows increasing global average temperatures, more intense and frequent heat waves, and other factors are already driving up the prices of food and other goods worldwide.

These trends are likely to worsen…

Blah, blah, blah.

What’s especially pathetic about this story is first you have a bunch of nitwit academics writing the study. Then you have a supposed “scientific” journal publishing it. Then you have a supposed respected online news outlet reporting it.

Our friend Steve Goreham, a one-man climate-change hysteria watchdog, was equally outraged by this nonsense story and he reminds us that as the planet has slightly warmed over the past few decades, food production has soared – because plants and vegetation grow more rapidly in warm weather. Duh!

Sometimes the HOTLINE just writes itself.

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2) Khan-servatism Is Madness

We're mystified and worried by conservatives who are suddenly charmed by FTC chair Lina Khan. Here’s the WSJ rap sheet on this weird loveseat:

Since being appointed by President Biden three years ago, the 35-year-old Khan has turned the obscure federal agency into a high-profile battleship aimed at the big corporations she says have distorted markets and harmed consumers. Her aggressive actions against Big Tech and other industries have inflamed the business community, and not all have been successful. But in an anomaly in this partisan age, a group of conservatives has cheered her efforts, seeing her as a fellow traveler in the populist cause.

The “Khanservatives,” as they call themselves, tend to be younger and Trumpier, part of the growing ranks of Republicans who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as an adversary to their constituents.

“As the Republican Party becomes more working class, we’re less captive to the neolibertarian view that everything big business does to people is OK,” said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz…His party, he said, “can’t be whores for big business and be the voice of the working class at the same time.”

Why would any free-market conservatives be aiding and abetting a Marxist member of the Clinton regulatory army and her radical trustbusting strategy that empowers politicians and lawyers to stop American firms from becoming too big and too profitable?

(Call us hopelessly naive, but isn’t that the goal of starting a business?)

Khan is trying to break up successful firms, even when they are REDUCING prices to consumers. Talk about a victimless “crime.”

We wish that Matt Gaetz and others who want to hunt down monopolies would aim their fire at what is by far the most destructive monopoly of all: the public school system.

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3) Obamacare Is Making Insurance Companies Rich

We’ve been warning about this since the “Unaffordable Care Act” was first proposed more than a decade ago. Now we have concrete evidence we were right all along.

Recall that the behemoth insurers like United Health pulled off one of the most cynical lobbying double crosses in American history when Obamacare was being debated. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying in favor of Obama's plan under their own trade association's brand, while spending a similar sum through the US Chamber opposing a government-run "public option." The result? They hit the taxpayer-funded jackpot.

Paragon Health Institute reports:

As the Paragon Pic shows, the weighted average of health insurer stock prices are up 1,032 percent from 2010, when the ACA was enacted, and 448 percent from 2013, the year before implementation of the ACA’s key provisions. By comparison, the average respective growth of the most popular S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (ETF) was 251 percent and 139 percent. ETFs are actively-traded funds that own a basket of securities. They often try to track the financial performance of an index, such as the S&P 500 or a specific sector of the economy.

The figure shows the trends over time for the S&P 500 ETF (navy blue), a general health care ETF (light blue), a general insurance ETF (gray), and a market value-weighted group of health insurer stocks compiled by Paragon (orange). Generally, the four industry categories tracked each other closely prior to the ACA taking effect. However, a large divergence appeared once the ACA was implemented, with the health care fund, and particularly the group of health insurer stocks, surging.

The conservatives who are worried about corporate power should set their sights on these guys, who are now functionaries of big government and getting rich off of taxpayers. When Democrats finally pursue their endgame strategy of dealing out the “private” insurance middleman to cut costs, sorry, but we’re not going to lift a finger to defend them.

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4) Voters Want a Divorce From Blue State and City Policies

Last week we reported on the domestic migration data by county.

Our friends at Issues & Insights have performed a great public service by breaking down the same data by how counties voted in 2020.

They found that since Joe Biden took office, nearly four million people have fled from Blue counties to Red counties. That’s the equivalent of nearly the entire population of seven congressional districts. And it’s not just people leaving cities and counties that locked down their schools and businesses during COVID – though that surely contributed to the outmigration. I&I says that a million people made their move in just the last year.

The 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration all voted for Biden in 2020. Eight of the 10 counties with the biggest influx were areas carried by Trump.

The question is whether these blue-county refugees become evangelists for the very blue-county policies they left behind.

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5) The Market Rejected EVs 100 Years Ago and Now the Government’s Forcing Us To Buy Them

Many people have forgotten that when the automobile was invented there was a real race between the internal combustion engine and electric batteries for what would be the primary means of propulsion.

In 1900, electric cars accounted for about a third of all vehicles on the road. They lost the race for dominance in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the Model T, which was a gasoline-powered car at a price of $850 ($26,600 today). Ford's market share surged from 9 percent in 1908 to 61 percent in 1921. The Model T replaced the horse-drawn carriage as the primary means of transport in the United States.

And now we have “back to the future” governmental policies that are forcing us to buy a technology that we’ve known for a century as inferior. This is the opposite of progress. This tweet from our friend, Ken Cuccinelli (a former attorney general of Virginia who is also a mechanical engineer), explains that everything is upside down here:

Next thing you know, these dopes will try to bring back windmills for generating electricity. Oh, never mind.

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6) Here’s One Way Trump Could Get Some Cash to Pay His Bond

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