1) Just When We Think You Couldn't Possibly Be Any Dumber…

Our Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels Dumb and Dumber award for the week, the month, maybe the year goes to the Cook County Board of Commissioners for establishing the nation's first permanent Guaranteed Income Program - which is welfare on steroids.

The county provided $500 monthly checks to about 3,000 families from 2022 to 2024 using Bidenbucks under the "American Rescue Plan." (This is on top of all the dozens of other federal and state welfare programs.)  Now, the handouts will be made permanent with county tax dollars.

A county survey of the participants in the experimental program found it made 75% of them feel "more financially secure," "less stressed," and had "a positive impact on their mental health."

Shocking. Give people free money, and they like it.  

We predict this cockamamie idea of handing out free cash will be the start of something big in blue city America. Raise taxes on people who work and produce and give it to people who don't. That'll create prosperity.

Meanwhile, what isn't "less stressed" is the Chicago budget which Mayor Brandon Johnson has announced to be $1.2 billion in the red next year.

2) Hooray! The War on Fossil Fuels Is Over - Maybe

The U.N. climate change global summit ended last week. Our friends at Climate Depot, who were there in Brazil to watch the clownish proceedings, have written this obituary:

Climate campaigners are flying home from Brazil in deep dejection following one of their worst failures ever to exploit a UN climate summit to advance their agendas.

Not only did climate radicals fail to get COP30 to agree to eliminate fossil fuels, but every mention of fossil fuels and the 1.5-degree climate targets was stricken from the COP's "Global Mutirão" outcome document.

The doomsday crowd is in full retreat. Among a few happy summit outcomes:

• A red line on ANY mention of stopping fossil fuels at this UN meeting was drawn by 80 countries.

• The omission of any commitment by industrialized nations to send reparations to poor countries.  The US will no longer surrender to the climate change shakedowns and will no longer send more money to poor countries.

• Thanks to Donald Trump's wise refusal to send a single delegate to this globalist buffoonery, the global warming movement is in dramatic retreat.

For now at least, the planet is safe from the climate change industrial complex, whose mission has been to move us all back into the dark ages.

3) Biden's Drug Price Controls Are Slowing the Race for the Cure

Just as we predicted when the Biden “Inflation Reduction Act” was passed, the drug price controls have slowed medical innovation. UP senior fellow, Tomas Philipson wrote up his latest findings in the WSJ:

Democrats' 2022 Inflation Reduction Act wasn't designed to kill cancer innovation, but new evidence reveals that's what it's doing. The law strongly discourages drug companies from performing the "follow-on" research after initial discoveries that accounts for a disproportionate share of progress in the fight against cancer...

Two weeks ago, a study I conducted with colleagues at the University of Chicago appeared in Health Affairs. It reveals how much these provisions harm cancer research. In reviewing every Food and Drug Administration-approved cancer drug between 2000 and 2024, we found a large part of innovation in cancer treatment takes place after a therapy is first approved. About 42% of the 184 cancer therapies that were initially approved during that period had follow-on approvals--involving new uses or "indications" for an existing drug--such as treating additional cancer types or being used earlier in the disease, when treatment outcomes tend to be better.

We hope President Trump is paying attention to these warnings and will steer clear of drug price controls.  

The full Health Affairs study is available here:

4) Britain's Labour Party Goes All-in on Socialism

This is a sad story: Coming on the heels of the introduction of a national identification number and the possible end to trial by jury, Britain's Labour government has announced its new budget.

It might as well be called “Socialism In Our Time.”

Labour plans on taking taxes to the highest level they've ever been by the end of the current decade. Income tax and national insurance indexing will be frozen, forcing over a million people into higher tax brackets. The windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas remains, deterring investment and eroding one of Britain's few productive energy industries.

At the same time, welfare spending will be so generous that the Centre for Social Justice reports working families would need to earn $94,000 annually (before tax) just to earn the same income as households with three children and no jobs. That's a hammock, not a safety net.

Much of this will be financed with out-of-control debt, which has nearly tripled in the last 25 years.

Even Labour ministers admit that all these burdens will hold growth rates below 1.5% a year for the next decade.

UP co-founder Arthur Laffer, who recently traveled to London to meet with Conservative and Reform Party leaders, has offered an alternative course called "Prosperity Through Growth.” Does Britain ever need that to counter its slow descent into poverty? Lithuania is predicted to overtake the UK in GDP per capita by 2030, with the Czech Republic eclipsing Britain in 2031, and Poland overtaking it in 2034.

As far as we're concerned, Nigel Farage can't get to 10 Downing Street soon enough.  

5) Dow One Million Isn't So Far Off!

In last week's HOTLINE, we showed the spectacular ascent of the U.S. stock market from 1980 to 2025. The Dow was at 1,000 in 1980, and very likely we will reach 50,000 in 2026.

Those numbers inspired this question: if the years and decades to come remain on this bullish course, when will the Dow hit other milestones? Here's the answer:

In 2034, we hit Dow 100,000.

In 2053, we hit Dow 500,000.

In 2061, we hit the unthinkable level of Dow One Million.  

These are unadjusted for inflation, but the lesson here is to save and invest early and often.

6) Politicians Cheat All the Time

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