1) Minnea-No Place

Minneapolis has tragically become a Midwest hub for woke social policies and soak-the-rich fiscal scams. The city has, drip by drip, lost 100,000 of its peak 520,000 residents since the 1950s.

Now the city is again running out of money and the latest ingenious scheme by the City Council on a 10-0 vote is to "study" a city income tax on the wealthiest residents to redistribute income. The state of Minnesota already has a high income tax.

Council Member Aurin Chowdhury explained the logic: "We need wealth distribution in our country and our federal government is simply not going to provide for that. It's time that our City Council speak with deep, deep clarity."

Good luck with that.  It's rare for cities to impose income taxes, but the evidence shows that cities that do are losing people and capital at a rapid pace.

Income taxes are a recipe for urban decline.

Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai defends the new policy by saying: "Taxing the rich I don't think is a controversial opinion in Minneapolis."

Except that there won't be too many rich left in the city to tax.  

We've been insisting that the USA must dominate the AI and robotics race - just as we have the Internet age. Glad to see President Trump banging the same drum.

We should learn from the internet revolution that the best way to achieve the goal of tech dominance is to keep the government lawyers, politicians and regulators as far away from the industry as possible.

4) Those "Evil" Air Conditioners Save Lives

This week in HOTLINE we showcased self-righteous leftists who oppose the global spread of air conditioning because it could reduce the "screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire."

A HOTLINE reader points out that far from being a menace, air conditioning has been a boon to humanity. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, called it "one of the signal inventions of history." That's because the increase in productivity and cognitive ability it allows is a big reason sultry Singapore is such an economic success story today.

It has also been a factor in the boom in the southern states in America.

AC also saves lives. Between 2000 and 2019, an average of 83,000 western Europeans lost their lives every year as a result of extreme heat, compared with just 20,000 North Americans. We combat extreme heat by blasting the AC - a luxury many Europeans lacked.

Britain and France still restrict the use of air conditioning.

Just look at the graphs comparing temperatures and deaths between several European and U.S. cities.

The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental group of 44 countries, reports that in 2021, only 15% of the 3.5 billion people in hot climates have air conditioning. It concludes that "Lack of access to indoor cooling puts much of the global population at high risk for heat stress, adversely affecting thermal comfort, labour productivity, and human health."  

Air conditioning saves lives. Climate change fanatics cost lives.  

5) Government Spending IS Taxation

Congress has a chance to cut $9 billion of wasteful federal spending in the rescissions package, which would defund far-left propaganda networks PBS and NPR. We don't need the government running radio stations when there are hundreds upon hundreds to choose from.

As Milton Friedman taught us, the real measure of the cost of government to the economy is how much the government spends.

Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that's the true tax. Every budget is balanced. There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget. You're paying for it. If you're not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing you should keep your eye on is what government spends. The real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income. If you do that, you can stop worrying about the debt.

6) At Least Some People Benefit from Socialism

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