Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #1045
06/21/2024, 06/22/2024, 06/23/2024
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1) We Bet You Didn’t Know that NATO Is a Jobs Program
NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg at a press conference with Joe Biden last week:
“Across Europe and Canada, NATO Allies are, this year, increasing defense spending by 18%, and 23 allies are going to spend 2% of GDP or more on defense. It is also important for the United States to know that a lot of this money is actually spent here in the United States. Allies are buying more and more equipment from the U.S. So NATO is good for U.S. security, but NATO is also good for U.S. jobs."
So American taxpayers send our money to Europe and they spend some of that money on the U.S. military-industrial complex and we’re supposed to be grateful?
By this logic, if we could just get Putin to invade Hungary or Poland, we could reach full employment here in the U.S.
And by the way, we spend closer to 3.5% of our GDP on defense and the Europeans with the bear right in their own backyard are bragging about 2%?
It wasn’t so long ago that good-government Democrats wanted to stop voter fraud. In 2002, a Democratic Senate and GOP House passed the Help America Vote Act, which Democratic sponsor Senator Chris Dodd said would "make it easy to vote and hard to cheat."
Now Democrats want the first half of that and denounce anything to “make it hard to cheat” as voter suppression.
But cheating – even by the top brass in the Democratic Party is clearly on the rise.
Last week in Bridgeport, Connecticut, city councilman Alfredo Castillo, and Wanda Geter-Pataky, the vice chairwoman of the city's Democratic Party, were charged with ballot fraud and "tampering with a witness."
In 2023 Geter-Pataky and others were caught on surveillance cameras dropping stacks of absentee ballots into drop boxes.
Also last week, Michigan Judge Christopher Yates, who was appointed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, declared that Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson acted unconstitutionally when she told local officials that on mail-in ballots "voter signatures are entitled to an initial presumption of validity." This was a blatant attempt to undermine signature verification requirements.
Now for the good news. Conservatives are making voter integrity a high priority this go around, as reported by The Daily Caller:
"States like Ohio, New Hampshire, and North Carolina have beefed up voter-ID laws and steamrolled their opponents in court. In other states, litigants have secured the integrity of mail-in voting — take Pennsylvania, where officials will finally be enforcing longstanding state law that requires voters to both sign and date their mail-in ballots…..Wisconsin courts have upheld requirements for witness certification on absentee ballots, and an Arizona court has confirmed that voters must rectify unsigned early ballots by 7:00 pm on Election Day."
Further, over 28 states have ended the practice of private foundations donating money to fund election office procedures. In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated over $400 million to such efforts.
It looks to us that we will have a more honest election process in 2024 than in 2020, which the New York Times actually labeled “one of the cleanest elections” in modern times.
CTUP Senior Fellow, John Fund, is featured in the Wall Street Journal today, discussing CNN’s decision to bar Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the stage.
RFK Jr. will be the first major independent candidate to be disallowed participation in a presidential debate in 32 years. CNN disqualified RFK Jr. on a technicality – he failed to meet their conditions for inclusion: he only hit a 15 percent level of support in three rather than the needed four national polls and he hasn’t qualified for the ballot in enough states.
Fund notes that using this criteria would have banned Ross Perot from the debates in 1992. Perot won almost 20% of the vote.
It’s not clear at all whether having RFK Jr. in the race hurts Trump or Biden more. At one point, Trump had said he was fine with having Kennedy in the debate, but the Biden campaign was more insistent that he not be.
It seems to us that excluding him from being on the stage is a danger to democracy.
4) Chart of the Day – Come Work for the Government and Get a 40% Pay Raise
We keep harping on this outrageous scandal of the pay inequity between government and private employees. This taxpayer rip-off has been going on for 40 years and NOTHING happened.
Our CTUP economist, EJ Antoni, notes that taxpayers are paying a 40% premium to state and local government employees over comparable private employees. The data show that taxpayers pay public sector employees 23% higher salaries and a whopping 79% higher benefits than private employers. This doesn’t even include the value of lifetime tenure (i.e. you can’t get fired from a government job no matter how poor your performance).
Earlier this week anti-oil green extremists group, Just Stop the Oil, defaced the famous Stonehenge rock structure in the UK with orange paint. Now, the same group has broken into high-security Stansted Airport (near London), and painted Taylor Swift’s private jet. The problem: Taylor Swift’s plane wasn’t there.
The group instead threw a fresh coat of orange paint over several other private jets and took selfies before they were arrested. It’s a good thing these people aren’t hit men.
But it is true that Taylor is among the many thousands of climate change hypocritical elites. Time’s "Person of the Year" in 2024 pontificates climate change is one of the most “horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now.” But that position didn’t prevent her from traveling 178,000 miles on her two private jets in 2023. Maybe the world’s diva should just stick to the music.
And maybe she could get the climate fanatics off her back if she offered them front-row concert tickets.
