Onion Fodder

This article belongs in the Onion.
http://www.thenation.com/article/good-news-on-climate-changeand-bad-news/

I don't know where the start.  Government pledges have nothing to do with climate, they have to do with political maneuvering.  CO2 is yet unproved, and more and more unlikely, to be a greenhouse gas of interest.

This is the language of the government bourgeoise - let's kill all the ways that poor and developing nations can join the rest of us in a reasonable standard of living on the outside bet that the climate change conjecture is real, and that more heat is actually going to cause a rise in ocean levels, and if they have to live poor well .... poor people smile more anyway!

"Studies Show" That Most of Us Fall for Bubble Gum Science

Since that time, the Clean Air Act has repeatedly been challenged as costly and unnecessary. As a fight brews over President Obama’s new use of the law to address global warming, it’s worth re-examining the vast difference the law has already made in the quality of the air we breathe, and in the length of our lives.

Numerous studies have found that the Clean Air Act has substantially improved air quality and averted tens of thousands of premature deaths from heart and respiratory disease. Here, I offer new estimates of the gains in life expectancy due to the improvement in air quality since 1970 — based on observations from the current “smog capital” of the world, China. (To learn more about how this was calculated, click here.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/upshot/the-connection-between-cleaner-air-and-longer-lives.html?_r=1

I hate bubble gum science like this.  It's obvious that normal air quality will make life better, but teasing out causality when so many factors are changing - food, medications, etc, makes predictions like the ones in this article a fool's game.

Some Pigs Are More Equal Than Others, Next Edition

What’s more, the manual has this to say about taking politics into account: Don’t!

"In determining whether to commence or recommend prosecution or take other action against a person, the attorney for the government should not be influenced by: The person’s race, religion, sex, national origin, or political association, activities or beliefs" (emphasis added).

There are, of course, media types — and even some law professors — trying to run interference for Hillary now. But there’s not much in the way of legal basis for not charging her, if the evidence looks as if it will “probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”

Still, it’s easy to understand why our Beltway betters think that law shouldn’t be applied to insiders the same way it’s applied to the rubes out in Dana Loesch's "Flyover Nation." After all, it was TV talking-head David Gregory who was given a pass for a “(clear) violation” of a District of Columbia gun law, by all appearances because he was an insider in good standing with the establishment. Lesser Americans don’t get the same free pass because, well, they’re lesser Americans.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/31/hillary-clinton-emails-media-courtiers-indictment-ron-fournier-column/82420266/

The kind of equality I can get with is the kind where the political class who incites us with talk of equality gets equal treatment before the law.  It's a hopelessly naive wish but I have it.

Not What You Read Every Day

Northern liberals pioneered what scholars now call “colorblind racism.” That’s when racially neutral language makes extreme racial inequalities appear to be the natural outcome of innocent private choices or free-market forces rather than intentional public policies like housing covenants, federal mortgage redlining, public housing segregation, and school zoning.

Democratic lawmakers drafted civil-rights legislation that would challenge Jim Crow laws in the South while leaving de facto segregation in the North intact. When NBC News asked the civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin why many African American communities rioted the summer after the bill passed, he said, “People have to understand that although the civil-rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools…the civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.” 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/exit-left/476190/

It is always fun to find the pieces of the event which are conveniently left out of the mass media narrative.  However, the author's firm belief that more policies are what is needed to bring the disenfranchised minorities into the fold is fantasy.  People are not in need of more laws, they are in need of an unfettered economy where those who work hard and express their life energy gain the benefits that others want.  When the path to success is clear and can be seen, more will choose it.

Business Taxes Are A Sign of Stupid

As free-market economist Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute recently noted, government interest rates were rock bottom in the 1930s. That's because the Fed and most other central banks were way too tight.

Even worse today, having stuffed banks with excess reserves, central banks in Europe and Japan are punishing those banks with negative interest rates. They're also punishing savers. This is not good policy.

What we have now in these uncertain times is not so much a monetary problem as a major fiscal problem. In particular, corporate tax rates must be slashed in the U.S. for large and small businesses. We also need full cash tax expensing for new investment and an end to the double taxation of foreign profits.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/04/01/slash_corporate_taxes_first_then_yellen_can_normalize_130163.html

The case for lower business taxes is just obvious.  One of the many maddening things about US politics is no one's even talking about the potential growth in reducing business taxes and/or the way a 4% growth rate would heal the federal government's death spiral.

Great for the "Job Haves" and Illegals but Nasty for the Have Nots

That 69 percent ratio would be all but unprecedented, in U.S. terms and internationally. The current California minimum wage represents about half the state’s median hourly wage, just as the federal minimum wage averaged 48 percent of the national median between 1960 and 1979, according to a 2014 Brookings Institution paper by economist Arindrajit Dube. (It is currently 38 percent of the national median.) 

Other industrial democracies with statutory minimum wages typically set theirs at half the national median wage, too.

Dube, generally a supporter of minimum wages, recommended that states use 50 percent of the median as their benchmark in the United States. (He told me by email that California’s experiment is worth running and monitoring.)

Krueger has written that a “$15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences,” though he said it might be okay in certain high-wage cities and states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-risks-of-californias-minimum-wage-increase/2016/03/30/6d58cc6a-f68e-11e5-a3ce-f06b5ba21f33_story.html

Sure will incentives barters and employment of those already in violation of the law to be here. Glad that experiment is being done in Cali, none are more deserving of further government inflicted economic mayhem.

Sick but Getting Sicker

But to work, ObamaCare had to also bring in more young and healthy people to offset the costs of the older and sicker and keep insurance premiums down. Otherwise, the market would enter into a “death spiral,” in which higher premiums drive more healthy people out of the market, pushing rates up still further.

That was precisely what happened in several states that had already experimented with ObamaCare-style insurance reforms. And it’s why ObamaCare included an individual mandate and the sizable penalty for not signing up.

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/obamacare-is-sick-and-getting-sicker-report-finds/