| Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #54 Written by Stephen Moore 1) Stop the Spending! We rolled out our coalition effort to stop another massive spending bill this week and here’s how Bloomberg News summed it up: A group of the Republican Party’s most ardent budget hawks is urging President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to halt new spending for programs designed to help the U.S. recover from the coronavirus. Further relief measures signed by President Donald Trump would put the U.S. on a “road to financial ruin,” according to a letter released Tuesday by some formal and informal advisers to the president. “There is no limit to worthy causes, but there is a limit to other people’s money,” the letter said. “The inside-the-Beltway crowd falsely calls these trillions of dollars a ‘stimulus’ to the economy. But government can only give money to some people, as Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman taught all of us many years ago, by taking money from others.” The letter from the conservatives adds pressure on GOP lawmakers and the White House over another round of stimulus spending under discussion in Congress. Trump administration officials expect to spend up to $1 trillion in the next round of stimulus. The letter is signed by 20 people, including economists Art Laffer and Stephen Moore, former GOP Senator Jim DeMint and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist. Trump awarded Laffer the Medal of Freedom and considered Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox News on Monday that the administration hasn’t made any decisions on a new round of spending. “We are still assessing the whole situation. Everything is pre-decisional right now,” he said, before citing a payroll tax cut, investment incentives and a back-to-work bonus as possibilities. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/conservatives-urge-trump-mcconnell-to-halt-new-virus-spending/ar-BB15z876  2) The Left Has Failed Our Cities We have always thought it a bit odd that the protests over a police officer killing George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota has a focal point outside the White House and so much anger from the crowds has been directed at the president and other conservatives. Minneapolis is a totally liberal-run city. So are most of the other places that have had massive protests and civil unrest. As Tom Bevan points out at RealClearPolitics: “Whatever problems exist today in America’s major cities, and in their respective police forces, they are not bipartisan in nature. Republicans have been shut out of the governing apparatus of these cities and excluded from any serious discussion of policy solutions for decades. Donald Trump spoke to this paradox during the 2016 campaign, asking black voters, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?'” https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/17/a_backlash_against_democratic_control_of_cities__143474.html 3) Air Travel Is Coming Back Great chart sent in by Scott Grannis. Thanks Scott! Still a long way to go but this is an encouraging trend.  4) The Cargo Cult of Lockdowns There appears to be little evidence of increased COVID-19 cases from the mass protests over the killing of George Floyd. While most protestors were relatively young and less susceptible to the virus, Dr. Chris von Scefalvay, a virologist specializing in bat-borne diseases, writes in the Spectator US there’s a bigger explanation. “We have vastly overestimated certain risks from COVID-19, limiting fundamental civil liberties of law-abiding citizens and getting it wrong. It finally took unsanctioned mass protests to prove this point.” Dr. Von Csefalvay says the lockdowns we’ve endured have set a dangerous precedent: “We have accepted public health imperatives, not as the profound truths they are but instead like a cargo cult, as a way to signal or perhaps generate some sorely missing social cohesion, but with no depth and no real understanding of what’s going on. There will be, I’m afraid, a very, very steep bill to pay for that in years (and pandemics) to come.” https://spectator.us/protests-proved-covid-19-risks-vastly-exaggerated/# 5) The “Now You Tell Us” Award for Lockdowns We’ve decided to create a new award for political and medical leaders who originally supported lockdowns or were silent on them but now are rushing to microphones and op-ed pages to decry their excesses and damage. William Hague, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative party and once the country’s Foreign Secretary, writes in Britain’s Telegraph that the lockdowns have been a “disaster for our society.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/15/disastrous-lockdown-can-never-repeated-even-virus-returns/ “Instead of having to rely entirely on widely varying mathematical models and fight an unknown virus in a fog of uncertainty…we can also begin to discern the true cost of a national lockdown, not just in economic but in human terms…. We can now be sure that there will be tens of thousands of undetected cancers. Evidence is mounting that domestic abuse is rising, and mental health deteriorating. Dental standards will have dropped sharply, with lasting consequences. Above all, the education and development of millions of young people has been severely damaged, and they will carry the scars of that for the rest of their long lives.” Better late than never, William. But where were you when we needed your voice? 6) Intelligence Failure Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education has written a perceptive essay comparing the “fog of war” over the coronavirus to the failure to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq War, which claimed the lives of over 100,000 people and cost trillions of dollars. (Sound familiar?) The Robb-Silverman report on the WMD fiasco concluded that “the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had—or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence.” Miltimore writes “it would be difficult to surpass the Iraq blunder, but emerging evidence on COVID-19 suggests the experts—again: lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—may have subjected us to a blunder of equally disastrous proportions.” https://www.fee.org/articles/npr-mounting-evidence-suggests-covid-not-as-deadly-as-thought-did-the-experts-fail-again/ 7) Popular Mechanics Turns Into “Vandal Vogue” For 118 years, Popular Mechanics has been a good source of scientific information for hobbyists and tinkerers. Contributors have included Buzz Aldrin and Elon Musk. But now it is branching out. On Tuesday, it published a piece telling readers how to topple statues “without anyone getting hurt.” “Should you happen to find yourself near a statue that you decide you no longer like, we asked scientists for the best, safest ways to bring it to the ground without anyone getting hurt — except, of course, for the inanimate racist who’s been dead for a century anyway,” writer James Stout begins. (Recent “racists” who have seen their statues toppled include Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus.) So as not to encourage anyone, we won’t go into the details Stout found. But, silly us, we thought Popular Mechanics was supposed to be all about BUILDING things. Perhaps PM will get around suggesting other things to build. Radio talk show host Ben Shapiro wonders what’s next: “An instruction manual on how to assemble a Molotov cocktail?” https://thehill.com/homenews/media/503121-popular-mechanics-publishes-how-to-guide-to-take-down-statues-without-anyone 8) Don’t Know Much About History…Or Common Sense We know that the standards of Political Correctness have shifted dramatically in the last two weeks. It’s such that you just can’t keep up. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, his party’s vice presidential nominee in 2016, gave a bizarre speech on the floor of Congress this week where he claimed that Americans had invented slavery. “The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it,” he said, completely seriously. Kaine apparently skipped the parts of his college classes that discussed slavery in the Roman Empire, the pyramids being built with slave labor and the sale of subjects of the Gold Coast of Africa into slavery. PJ Media couldn’t resist a dig at Kaine, commenting that following his speech he “was rushed to a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery to have his foot removed from his mouth.” https://pjmedia.com/columns/megan-fox/2020/06/16/tim-kaine-claims-america-invented-slavery-roman-empire-and-egyptian-pharaohs-demand-apology-n541239 9) Anti-Heroes of the Day – The Mount Ascutney, Vermont School Board The Mount Ascutney school board in Vermont has suspended Windsor High School Principal Tiffany Riley for Facebook comments she made about Black Lives Matter. Board Chair Elizabeth Burrows said “We do not intend to hire her back […] we wanted to make sure we acted as quickly as we possibly could.” What was her heinous thought crime? She dared to advocate on behalf of law enforcement and “equity for all.” https://www.mychamplainvalley.com/news/local-news/windsor-school-principal-on-administrative-leave-after-social-media-post/ “While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement?” Riley wrote. “What about all others who advocate for and demand equity for all? Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.” The board members wrote they were “uniformly appalled” by the post. “The ignorance, prejudice, and lack of judgement in these statements are utterly contrary to the values we espouse as a school board and district.” District Superintendent David Baker argued that Riley’s comments were “outright racist.” Jared Carter, a law professor at Vermont Law School, said ousting Riley over political commentary is a violation of the First Amendment: “I think there are serious concerns when the state takes action against somebody for what is essentially political commentary.” As we’ve said many times, the Left today supports diversity in all its forms except when it comes to different ideas.  |
