The Left and the media keep charging ahead with this worn-out attack, but it's heavily refuted by the real world evidence of the past three presidencies.
The Census Bureau data show the biggest gains in income and the biggest declines in poverty for Hispanics and blacks happened under Donald J. Trump. Obama and Biden had much worse performances. Hispanic incomes rose slightly more under Obama than Trump, but that was only because Obama was in office for eight years and Trump has had only one term.
Amazingly, blacks gained more income under Trump than under Obama and Biden combined. In politics as in all things in life, you have to judge people on their results.
Maybe not so much to Biden and Kamala and Tim Walz, all of whom approved of using race-based rationing of medicines and treatments during Covid. The policy takes the left's obsession with "fairness" to a whole new level of danger and absurdity.
During some of the most life-threatening periods of Covid, the Biden-Harris administration and Tim Walz moved whites to the end of the line in allocating lifesaving treatment because of their race.
The FDA prohibited this discrimination on the basis of race under Trump. But the Biden-Harris team allowed it starting in May 2021. Governor Walz enthusiastically implemented the policy in 2021.
Perhaps putting whites at the highest risk of being denied medical treatment was a weird form of reparations for slavery.
It’s just another troubling sign that under the left’s rule, we have kept moving farther away from the dream of a color-blind society. Sad.
3) More Evidence that the Inflation Reduction Act Is Gutting Medicare Drug Benefits
We love saying we told you so.
CTUP senior fellow and University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan and his colleague Tomas Philipson said two years ago that the IRA's insurance price controls and "redesign" measures would make it impossible for insurers to finance the previous level of benefits for the 2025 plan year (signups begin this September):
President Biden has accused Republicans of scheming to cut Medicare. In fact it is his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, that will lead to benefit cuts and premium increases for seniors. Medicare's popular drug-coverage program is headed for a painful amputation.
The Brookings Institution claimed that there was nothing to see: "The Inflation Reduction Act won't force [Medicare drug] plans to cut benefits or exit the market" and that the professors suffered from "a misunderstanding of what the law does."
But here we are.
The Biden administration just warned that Medicare's drug program is suddenly under severe financial stress, with insurers to exit the market and seniors to lose coverage unless insurers are bailed out tens of billions of dollars. The "root cause" is the IRA.
Mulligan and Philipson got it exactly right, and now the Biden administration is scrambling to push the bad news past the election with a last-ditch regulatory bailout. Tuesday's Wall Street Journal gives the latest:
CMS usually announces preliminary Part D premiums in July. Not this year. Instead, CMS unveiled a "demonstration project" that would impose "a year-over-year increase limit of $35" for premiums while boosting payments to insurers...
As CMS acknowledges, one goal of shifting costs to insurers in the Part D redesign was to force them to reduce drug spending: "By design, plans will have more liability requiring them to better manage costs." This was a back-door way for Democrats to ration access to costly drugs while shifting the political blame for doing so to insurers.
The gambit backfired as insurers are raising premiums. CMS's intervention is another example of how the IRA will cost far more than Democrats claimed. Nobody knows how much more since CMS isn't doing a normal rule-making that requires a cost analysis.
The teacher unions adopted a multi-million dollar political scheme early this year to target pro-school choice Republicans. The idea was to get scalps on the wall by defeating those who dared put kids ahead of the Union.
So far the plan has flopped. After Missouri dramatically expanded its school choice program so that student scholarships were available to families with incomes up to $166,500 a year, two GOP State House incumbents who opposed choice lost big time in their primaries. Even more importantly, the clear favorite to win the governorship is Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe who pledged to "continue to expand" the existing choice program.
In Tennessee, the legislature narrowly failed to pass a universal school choice law last year despite the backing of GOP Governor Bill Lee.
But Lee and other choice supporters vowed to make next year's legislature more choice-friendly. Two anti-choice incumbents were defeated while the pro-choice incumbents targeted by teacher unions prevailed. Two choice supporters did lose their primaries but for reasons that had little to do with education. There is general agreement that Governor Lee's choice plan now has a better chance of being enacted into law.
We are winning the school choice fight. Today, 24 states have education tax credit scholarship programs, while 20 have education voucher programs. Our 25 by 25 coalition – 25 school choice states by 2025 – is running a head of schedule. We could be up to 27 states with choice by the end of next year. The unions’ only hope is to buy the election for the Left – who staunchly opposes school choice for minority families.
Yesterday we mentioned that natural gas is the fuel of the future. We got some pushback because we left out the second of the “Two Ns” in energy: nuclear power. We like it and it makes far more sense than wind and solar power.
Good news. Support for nuclear power is growing – though Americans still foolishly favor the wind and solar mythology.
Pew reports that "Americans in both parties now see nuclear power more positively" with support among Democrats up 12 points since 2020 to 49 percent, and up 14 points with Republicans during the same period.
As a sign that anti-nuclear hysteria is easing, even Tim Walz, the greenest of governors, lifted Minnesota's moratorium on building nuclear plants. In a country that's polarized on almost every issue, nuclear power may be one issue where we are slowly reaching a new consensus.
