1) Unleash Prosperity Has Made a Big splash...in London
This front page headline story from the London Times over the weekend has now gone viral all over Britain:
Britain should align itself with the United States on trade rather than pursuing closer ties with the “socialist model” of the European Union, a senior economic adviser to Donald Trump has said…
Stephen Moore, who is supporting Trump as he prepares for government… said the US would be “less interested” in a free trade deal with the UK if it moved into closer alignment with the European Union.
Well, we stand by that statement. The current UK Labour government has moved in exactly the wrong direction by expanding social welfare spending and raising inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, and payroll taxes. That's the European model that has deindustrialized the continent.
As the chart below shows, as recently as 2010 the European Union and U.S.'s GDP were roughly equal. Today, the U.S.'s GDP is roughly 50% larger than that of the EU.
Thanks to our friend Marc Morano from the indispensable Climate Depot for pointing this one out to us.
Grist moans:
The [election] results promise to upend U.S. climate policy: In addition to returning a climate denier to the White House, voters also gave Republicans control of the Senate, laying the groundwork for attacks on everything from electric vehicles to clean energy funding and bolstering support for the fossil fuel industry.
They also warn that Trump will reopen Alaska drilling and again pull the U.S. out of the absurd Paris Climate Accord.
Well, we certainly hope so, and we will be working our tails off to make sure all the radical climate policies are unplugged.
But the story revealed something that worries us. They note that more than $100 billion of the green energy pork projects in the pipeline flow to red states. And we know how much Republicans LOVE earmarks.
Along with us at Unleash Prosperity, Dr. Bhattacharya was a leading voice of reason from the beginning of the COVID pandemic, urging caution of school and business closures and doing the basic science via serosurveys to try to calculate how widely the virus had spread in the months and, by implications, more accurately determine its severity.
He went on to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration calling for a targeted protection approach, which then-NIH director Francis Collins dismissed as "fringe epidemiologists" and directed a "devastating takedown" via a cabal of so-called experts, the media, and after Biden was elected, an official censorship regime.
Jay co-authored a key amicus brief that helped defeat Biden's vaccine mandates at the Supreme Court and is a plaintiff in ongoing First Amendment litigation. And he has been kind enough to frequently review and comment on our own COVID analysis here at Unleash.
Bernie Sanders is seizing on a throwaway line in a Trump speech to suggest legislation permanently capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent.
What Trump actually suggested was a temporary three-month reduced-interest holiday to help consumers dig out from under Bidenomics.
The banks might consider voluntarily adopting the holiday to help usher in a new era of good feelings. But a mandatory rate cap is a bad idea because, like all price controls, it will cause shortages and squeeze millions of poorer people with lower credit scores out of credit card access. They'll be forced to turn to payday loans, loan sharks, or bounced checks in a crunch. Even when flush, they'll have to carry large wads of cash around to pay bills.
This data from Forbes shows that most Americans have credit cards today, but minorities and lower-income Americans have lower access. Price controls will inevitably hit them the hardest.
The solution to rising credit card debt is to get real wages rising again and stop the inflation that caused an explosion of credit card debt under Biden.
Our friend Joel Griffith from Heritage makes the case well in The Hill:
Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel exposes the left’s contradictory rhetoric about the mass middle-class movement toward the policies espoused by Donald Trump:
Last week, he told Bari Weiss of The Free Press:
(There is) an idea,...called a Russell conjugation--two words that are synonyms, but are emotional antonyms: a fink and a whistleblower. Maybe it's the same thing, but a whistleblower is a good person and a fink is a bad person.
I would submit that you can see a Russell conjugation with populism and democracy. Democracy is good; populism is bad. It's democracy when people vote the right way, and it's populism when they vote the wrong way.
.....the problem is we're less of a constitutional republic than we used to be.
It hasn't shifted from the constitutional republic to this mob of voters, but it has shifted from the constitutional republic to this unelected technocratic bureaucracy--the deep state.
