2) Government Has Become a Clear and Present Danger to the Internet
Most progressives and some of our friends on the right, want the federal government to subsidize Internet connections, regulate them, and police what can and can't be said.
But three recent events show the folly of this approach.
First, was the recent Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that wisely halted the FCC's illegal power grab to regulate internet access as a public utility. Our Unleash Prosperity study demonstrated that this approach was a disaster under Obama, and its Trump-era repeal coincided with lower prices and much faster speeds - contrary to hilariously wrong predictions of deregulation-related doom and gloom.
Second, was the recent finding that the Biden-Harris "infrastructure bill," which authorized some $42 billion to expand high-speed connectivity to rural and inner-city areas, has hooked up approximately zero households to broadband service and that connections won't even begin until next year at the earliest.
Finally, was the August 26 letter by Meta/Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, admitting in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration had pressured the company to "censor" COVID-19 content relating to health practices and vaccine safety during the pandemic. In 2021, the Biden administration accused social media platforms of "killing people" for allowing misinformation about COVID.
The Biden administration has failed to apologize for its gross violation of the First Amendment and not one federal employee has been fired for participating in it.
Relying on the government to police the internet is a "danger to democracy," our freedom of speech, and universal access to digital communications.
3) Oregon Voters to Decide on Universal Basic Income
This November, UBI is on the ballot in Oregon under the misleading label of "Oregon People's Rebate." Financed by the contributions of wealthy California progressives, it would give about $1,600 a year to every Oregonian – regardless of age and income – and pay for it with a 3 percent tax on the sales of corporations. You can bet the pressure to hike the giveaway would begin the moment it was enacted.
Washington Post columnist Megan McCardle reports the record of pilot Universal Basic Income-type programs is dismal. Economists who worked with SUPPORTERS of UBI found recipients of medical debt forgiveness, "experienced no improvement in their financial health, their psychological well-being, their cognitive capacity or their physical condition." In another pilot, recipients decreased their work hours and spent most of their extra time on leisure.
Our recent UP inflation study by Casey Mulligan found that if Kamala Harris's proposed pandemic UBI had passed, cumulative inflation during Biden's term would have been not 20% but north of 50%.
Universal Basic Income has been called "a leisure good for the theory class" of Marxist professors, welfare bureaucrats, and high-tech economic illiterates who dreamed it up. The good news is that if it loses big in uber-liberal Oregon, it could set the movement back years nationally.
4) Andrew Cuomo Personally Doctored the Report to Conceal New York Nursing Home Deaths
We at Unleash Prosperity were among the first to report on the first wave of COVID nursing home deaths, and we exposed over a dozen times in these pages that New York's numbers were fake. But we must admit, we assumed then-governor Andrew Cuomo merely directed the coverup to obscure the impact of his disastrous policy of forcing highly infectious patients into nursing homes. No. He literally edited the cover-up report himself, investigators from the House Oversight Committee revealed yesterday:
