Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #1,001
04/19/2024, 04/20/2024, 04/21/2024
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Blue states have traditionally been the areas where the tech sector has flourished – in part because of their proximity to world-class universities like Stanford and MIT.
Is the tide shifting?
California's once-dominant lead in high-tech jobs has been shrinking in recent years.
A new study from venture capital firm SignalFire looked at tech workers who relocated in the last two years and found that the three biggest loser cities were San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. Surprisingly, New York gained the most – followed by places like Austin, TX, Fort Lauderdale, FL, and Tampa, FL.
Why the departure from the San Francisco Bay Area? As one tech executive told the WSJ: “San Francisco is no longer a livable city.”
Just another example of our CTUP theorem: Progressives eventually destroy everything they touch.
The first two years of Biden's presidency were a catastrophe for real family income, thanks to runaway Bidenflation. Then 2023 showed slight improvement. Bad news: so far in 2024 median earnings are trending down again for the first quarter.
Why? Inflation edged back up and full-time jobs were down as hours worked declined. So far middle-class families have seen their incomes FALL by 3% under Biden's wonderific economy.
3) The Show Me State Is the Latest To Expand School Choice
Missouri is one of the reddest states in the country, but has also been one of the most disappointingly resistant to school choice.
So we note that yesterday the state legislature passed a significant expansion of the state's tax credit scholarship program:
The Missouri Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program, nicknamed MOScholars, launched in 2021, provides tax-credit funded scholarships to low-income students in poorer districts.
SB 727 won’t make the program fully universal, but it raises the fundraising cap from $50 million to $75 million annually and raises the household income cap for participating families from 200% to 300% of the federal poverty level.
This is a far cry from the directly funded, universal ESA programs we've seen adopted in a lot of states less conservative than Missouri, but it's a big step in the right direction.
Democrat Marlene Terry cast the deciding vote:
"I'm proud of my grandson. I only want the best for him. I want the best for every child, and I want them to have the choice to be, whatever school they want to be in. I support teachers, I support children, and I support parents. But I'm going to tell you right now, the vote that I'm going to take for 727 is for Aubrey Jackson, my grandson. This vote is for you, Aubrey. Thank you, Mr. Speaker."
4) Latest Climate Voodoo Prediction – A Global Economic Collapse
One reason it's hard to take climate apocalyptics seriously is that they keep bombarding us with one preposterous prediction after another. Remember when Al Gore said we had less than a decade to save the planet? That was in the late 1990s.
So here's the latest doomsday machine forecast. German scientists have published a paper in the journal Nature that tries to convince us that climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% over the next quarter century, when compared to a fictional non-warming world. The financial losses by the year 2100 could be double that. It won’t surprise you that the poorest people on the planet and those least responsible for carbon emissions will suffer the most.
This is propaganda, not science.
Let us assume for a minute that warming will reduce GDP by this amount. It's probably a good guess that eliminating fossil fuels from 83% of global energy to zero and building windmills would have far more dramatic negative effects on global prosperity than any warming trend.
5) Two of the Three Presidential Candidates Oppose a Government Digital Currency
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently joined Donald J. Trump in strongly denouncing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
His concerns are worth paying attention to and echo our worry that a digital currency run by the government is a great threat to Americans’ financial privacy.
“I’m against central bank digital currencies,” Kennedy says, “because that is the path to getting us where China is today. That’s where they started, that’s where all these other countries started with central bank digital currency, and it’s the end of freedom.” He fears the government will use the technology along with facial recognition to track the activities and purchases of citizens.
“Transactional freedom is as important as freedom of the press,” he insists.
Meanwhile, Biden’s economic team has been trying to lay the initial groundwork for a digital dollar. They sound all too eager to go, go, go – which makes us all the more nervous.
Investment adviser and self-described libertarian Jim Rickards agrees with RFK that CBDCs “can be used to destroy privacy and create a total surveillance state. Biden can combine CBDC ledger information with artificial intelligence to profile and target enemies of the state - i.e., MAGA Republicans.”
These objections from Kennedy and Rickards sound a tad over the top to us, but best to err on the side of caution when it comes to expanding government power.
