By blocking the Nippon deal, President Biden has made America less safe and less prosperous. He has abused the power of his office and weakened the rule of law. He has embraced rank protectionism and succumbed to labor-union pressure.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has done more to politicize science and erode trust in public-health leaders than anyone other than Anthony Fauci. Dr. Murthy was at it again on Friday with a headline-grabbing report that recommends alcohol be distributed with cancer warnings.
The report warns that, for some cancers, “evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.” Note the operative word, may. The link between heavy drinking and throat and mouth cancer is well-established—but not for moderate consumption.
Two weeks earlier the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a congressionally mandated review of the recent evidence on the health effects of moderate drinking, or up to one drink a day for women and two for men. Its more than 200 pages of findings run counter to Dr. Murthy’s 22-page report, though they got scant attention in the press.
The academies found insufficient evidence to support a link between moderate drinking and oral, pharyngeal, esophageal, laryngeal and other cancers. It did find a slightly higher risk of breast cancer with moderate drinking but also a lower risk of death generally and from cardiovascular disease specifically compared with never drinking.
Fareed Zakaria reports on the evident failures of progressive (so-called) “governance.” A slice:
The crisis of democratic government then, is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades — but the results are bad and have been getting worse.
New York, where I live, and Florida, where I often visit, provide an interesting contrast.
They have comparable populations — New York with about 20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state’s budget is more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City’s spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40 percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40 percent better services during that time?
What do New Yorkers get for these vast sums, generated by the highest tax rates in the country? (If you are well off in New York City, you pay nearly as much in income taxes as in London, Paris or Berlin — without free higher education or health care.) New York’s poverty rate is higher than Florida’s. New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per student, New York has educational outcomes — graduation rates, eighth-grade test scores — that are roughly the same as Florida’s.
Here’s the abstract of a 2024 paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres: (HT Scott Sumner)
We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870-2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to USborn whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.
Also writing about the low incarceration rate of immigrants is GMU Econ alum Alex Nowrasteh.
Thomas Hemphill reviews Paul Tice’s The Race to Zero – a warning of the dangers of ESG “investing.” A slice:
His book is not for the faint-hearted. It is technical in nature, utilizing extensive referenced data sources. He opens the book by explaining sustainability theory, discusses climate change, and describes the role the United Nations has played in promoting ESG in the financial sector. Tice explains how a sort of social control network has sprung up under the ESG banner, describes questionable ESG metrics and claims of its returns on investment, criticizes how it uses children and adolescents as “climate warriors” to influence the operations of financial institutions, and discusses how fiduciary duty is being reconfigured to incorporate ESG principles. He concludes the book with a chapter that offers what he cynically describes as ESG’s “race to zero.”
