Allow us to clear the air: Canada has reported about 3,500 wildfires so far this year, which is in line with recent historical averages. It’s true that many decades of poor land management have resulted in overgrown forests in Canada, but the same goes for the U.S. The Trump Administration might tend to the federal government’s ill-managed forests before throwing stones at Canada.
As for the effects of climate change, a paper in the journal Nature Communications last year reported that fires in recent decades in North America are running far below historical levels (between 1600 and 1880). Even years “with particularly widespread fire during the 1984–2022 period,” the study said, “were not unprecedented in comparison with the active fire regimes of the historical period across most of the study region.”
All of this is too nuanced to fit into social media sound-bites. But maybe America’s political leaders could try to lower the temperature for a change rather than feed public furies.
George Will wants some hard questions about Social Security posed to political candidates. Two slices:
“Saving” Social Security by huge additional borrowing would intensify upward pressure on interest rates, hence downward pressure on economic growth. This could further worsen Social Security’s financing problems.
Recourse to general revenues also would transform the system that was sold to the country in 1935 as a self-financing contributory program. Few will notice, fewer will care. The change will mean another huge amount of borrowing, added to existing debt, which occasioned little and evanescent anxiety when, this year, its size passed that of U.S. gross domestic product.
…..
America’s kakistocracy has produced gerontocracy. Government’s biggest, most beloved program is wealth redistribution masquerading as retirement program. Social Security transfers wealth regressively, upward from today’s labor force to the elderly, who have had a lifetime of accumulation, and have paid off mortgages on homes that have risen in value.
Scott Yenor ponders the fate of sociology.
Jeffrey Miron summarizes the findings of a new study of the effects of protective tariffs.
Brian Arner asks “Which statute grants the president authority to tariff due to smoke?” – to which Scott Lincicome replies “The Soot-Hawley Act, obvs.”
