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Connecting today’s news with the research & opinion you need.

Virtue Signaling Doesn’t Cook Your Food

What to Know: Berkeley, California has become the first city to ban cooking with natural gas.

“Berkeley has become the first city in the nation to ban the installation of natural gas lines in new homes,” the San Francisco Gate reports. “The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to ban gas from new low-rise residential buildings starting Jan. 1.”

The TPPF Take: We’ve got some bad news for those Berkeley virtue-signalers.

“Putting aside the fact that everyone knows the best way to make tortillas is over a gas flame, the reality is that in California today, forcing people to purchase electric stoves instead of gas stoves is pointless,” says TPPF’s Jason Isaac. “California still gets 41 percent of its electricity from natural gas, so you’re cooking with gas anyway. And this green push will result in higher costs and less reliability for everyone.”

Ensuring Failure

What to Know: Where have we heard this before?

“At the center of Joe Biden’s health-care proposal is the ‘public option’—a government insurance policy that would compete with private plans,” Scott W. Atlas writes in the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Biden has obviously seen the polling. By 57% to 37%, Americans reject the idea, put forth by some of Mr. Biden’s Democratic rivals, of abolishing private insurance in favor of ‘Medicare for All.’ The public option seems like an attractive alternative—enough so that Mr. Biden, in announcing his plan Monday, revived a discredited Obama slogan: ‘If you like your health-care plan, your employer-based plan, you can keep it.’”

The TPPF Take: A public option would crowd out private insurance—by design.

“The goal of plans with so-called ‘public options’ is to give everyone health care coverage by creating an artificially cheaper option,” says TPPF’s Jennifer Minjarez. “The idea is that if the federal government provides a cheaper option through tax-furnished subsidies and ‘negotiated’ (fixed) drug prices, private insurance will be forced to lower its prices to compete. It doesn’t work; it will only lead to less care and fewer options.”

At A Minimum 

What to Know: Even some Democratic members of Congress know that minimum wage hikes kill jobs.

“The Raise the Wage Act proposed by House Democrats will be up for a vote on Thursday and certain Blue Dog Democrats have expressed concern that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2026 could negatively impact their constituents,” Fox News reports. “The Congressional Budget Office’s report on the effects of such an increase clearly demonstrates that their concerns are justified. CBO’s median estimate is that a federal minimum wage of $15 would result in 1.3 million fewer workers being employed.”

The TPPF Take: Minimum wage hikes destroy jobs and result in lower hours for employees who are left.

“The evidence is clear—the real minimum wage is $0 per hour, for those who lose their jobs or who never get hired because businesses must cut costs,” says TPPF’s Chuck DeVore. “When you increase the cost of something—in this case labor—you get less of it. That’s simple economics.”