Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #46 Written By Stephen Moore
1) Stop Paying People Not to Work, Part 8
We at the Hotline brought to your attention last week a University of Chicago study measuring the imbecilic CARES Act unemployment benefits program – which provides more income from not working than working to as many as two of three workers in America. Here is a brief excerpt from what the economists at the University of Chicago found:
“The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act substantially expanded Unemployment Insurance (UI) in order to help workers losing jobs as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. One provision of the act creates an additional $600 weekly benefit known as the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation. The payment is designed to replace 100 percent of the mean U.S. wage when combined with mean state UI benefits.
“We find that 68% of unemployed workers who are eligible for UI receive benefits which exceed lost earnings. The median replacement rate is 134% [meaning that workers will get a 34% INCREASE in pay for not working], and one out of five eligible unemployed workers receive benefits AT LEAST TWICE as large as their lost earnings (emphasis added). Thus, the CARES Act actually provides income expansion rather than replacement for most unemployed workers.”
We’d bet that the average sixth grader not taught in the public schools could see the problem here. Either the average member of Congress is dumber than a sixth grader… OR this was an intentional scheme to torpedo the Trump economy. Unfortunately, the answer might be all of the above. We at the Hotline were the first to report back in April that the super-benefit scam was not an oversight by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies, but was INTENTIONAL, because the left devised an ingenious way to use a public health scare to redistribute income. (Folks, leftists are not stupid; they know exactly what they are doing.)
President Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t blameless here. They all voted for the CARES Act that created this scam. Now that the economy is in recovery phase with jobs coming back, it is ESSENTIAL that this policy be rescinded.
Pelosi’s bill that passed the House would extend the high benefits through January 31 of next year. The CBO said under Pelosi’s bill: “Roughly five of every six recipients would receive benefits that exceeded the weekly amounts they could expect to earn from work during those six months.”
Republicans would have to be admitted to an asylum if they agreed to continue this “making welfare pay” policy that will undermine recovery.
2) Lockdowns Are the Problem and Have Hit Minorities Hardest
Since everything now revolves around racism in America, the left is now on a hypocritical rampage that the economic lockdowns have hurt minorities the most. Gee, we’ve only been saying that since March. As our co-founder Arthur Laffer reminds us: the poor and minorities are always the first to be fired when the economy goes into recession. This is why growth is so critical to lifting the incomes of those at the bottom.
We went from record low unemployment rates to this:
The lock-heads want to blame skyrocketing unemployment on the virus. But it’s mostly the lockdowns that did it; most of the disease burden is among the very old and sick, with more than half of all deaths among nursing home residents. And the states that are still locked down have much more severe unemployment, according to this analysis by AIER:
Another study from Ohio State economists found that 60% of employment losses were driven by lockdowns, while national factors like the disease itself and public fear accounted for only 40%. And the states that are still locked down are likely still suffering job losses: the study found that “the employment rate fell by about 1.7 percentage points for every extra 10 days that a state experienced a stay-at-home mandate.”
Liberals STILL insist minority businesses can’t reopen and won’t let minority workers earn a paycheck.
3) Quote of the Day: Bill Maher Slams Lockdown Riots
In his HBO show Friday, liberal provocateur Bill Maher scored a bulls-eye when he identified the lockdowns as a key factor in last week’s civil unrest. We don’t often agree with Maher, but when he’s right he has the clarity of a laser beam.
“This lockdown that we’ve been living with… this has a lot to do with the unrest in the streets? That when you coop people up and when they have no hope and no job, that they — why not go out in the streets?
“I feel like this experiment, this reckless experiment in closing down an entire country for months at a time is not going to look good in the future and this is one reason why.”
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/bill-maher-reckless-lockdowns-helped-fuel-riots-could-lead-to-blood-in-the-streets-after-election
4) Poll: Trump Economic Plan Crushes Pelosi’s 60-25
“It just shows how out of touch they are,” McLaughlin said of House Democrats.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trumps-virus-payroll-tax-cut-crushes-pelosi-plan-to-aid-illegal-immigrants
5) Is The Coronavirus Getting Weaker?
One of the enduring mysteries of the 2003 SARS virus crisis is how it eventually burned itself out and became less threatening. Some say it was vigorous hygiene practices such as hand-washing. Others say the high temperature and humidity of the summer months north of the Equator played a role.
It’s too early to tell, but doctors in such countries as Israel, Italy, and Spain are reporting that the coronavirus may also be weakening, growing less potent, and less deadly.
Donald Yealy—the chair of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—claims that “some patterns [of COVID-19] suggest the potency is diminished.” He says fewer people in the Pittsburgh region are getting the disease, and the infections themselves appear weaker.
Yealy said that the risk of being involved in a car crash while traveling across the state on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is greater than the risk of contracting Covid-19 here.
As the news site JustTheNews.com concludes: “In effect, the disease could be opting to become less lethal so that it can spread more easily—a hallmark of evolutionary behavior, and also a boon for anyone who gets infected with the milder strain.’
Our view is that the virus has already inflicted its damage on the most vulnerable population and is now finding less hospitable hosts. Either way, this might explain that while the number of COVID-19 cases in the world is still going up, the number of deaths globally has been falling since mid-April.
6) Quarantine Forever?
Back on May 23, Patricia Zengerle of Reuters sent out a widely retweeted warning about the Memorial Weekend crowds at Ocean City, Maryland:
Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner took the time to examine the photograph and declare it didn’t show what it purported to:
“The boardwalk is 36 feet wide. Multiply 36 feet by the nearly 1,200 feet in length, in this photo, and you’re looking at an acre of wide-open Maryland. Feel free to do a head count and tell me the density. You could say this is four football fields long.”
But regardless of whatever distortion there was in the photo, it’s been two weeks since Memorial Day. In Ocean City’s Worcester County, virus cases are down. In Maryland, cases and positivity rate are down. In nearby Delaware, cases are way down.
Let’s just say that predictions of the need for “quarantine forever” may have been a trifle exaggerated.
7) Defund The Police Isn’t Enough; Liberals Want to End Police TV Shows
The Minneapolis City Council has announced its intention to end the city’s police department and replace it with social workers and medics. Perhaps it will be a new trend sweeping through liberal cities. But ending police departments isn’t enough for the left. They also want to end positive cultural depictions of law enforcement.
Cries for censorship and suppression of speech are everywhere now. Andrew Sullivan, the noted liberal journalist who once edited The New Republic, is not being allowed to write about the riots by his New York magazine editors – presumably because he won’t take a lenient enough approach to them. Last week, Amazon briefly refused to sell a new, self-published book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson.
Now comes Alyssa Rosenberg, a Washington Post opinion writer, who thinks now is the perfect time for Hollywood to “immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.”
Rosenberg acknowledges there are problems with rubbing out an entire TV genre and that “there are always gaps between reality and fiction.” But she contends “given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity.”
8) Anti-Hero of The Day – “Let Them Google Haircut”
Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Governor who has been memorably described as treating her residents like “a combination of Cruella de Ville and Marie Antoinette” during the virus crisis, is in hot water again.
The hapless chief executive had to apologize last week for her explanation of why hair salons and barber shops had to remain closed despite their opening in neighboring Indiana and Ohio. She told residents that if they needed a trim they could Google it and find out how to do it themselves.
The next day the Michigan Supreme Court ruled 7 to 0 that her government’s attempt to close down a 77-year-old barber was unconstitutional. Whitmer had yanked the license of barber Karl Manke, heavily fined him, and then denounced him publicly.
“It is incumbent on the courts to ensure decisions are made according to the rule of law, not hysteria,” Justice David F. Viviano wrote for the court on Friday.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/michigan-supreme-court-unanimously-rules-214308515.html
Manke’s case will now go before a full appeals court on an expedited review.
9) This happens a lot:
