The Army wants to rename Fort Hood, Texas, after the late Gen. Richard Cavazos, who served in Korea and Vietnam. A better candidate could be the highest-ranking casualty of a deadly battle fought right on the base.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews measures and studies the impact of regulations issued by the U.S. federal government. Over the past year, Crews has had to become something of a detective because the numbers published in the Federal Register‘s online database weren’t adding up.
Today (November 9, 2022) is World Freedom Day, which began in 2001 to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe.
“Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership,” a White House Twitter post recently proclaimed. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale had a problem with it. The 8.7 percent increase, biggest since 1981, “is not because of any positive Biden leadership.”
When a former Treasury Secretary looks at the U.S. government’s current fiscal policy, what do you suppose keeps them up at night?
Hundreds of millions of Americans suffer the effects of being forced to move the hands of their clocks back or forth by an hour every year. Daylight saving time ends in the wee hours of Sunday, November 6, except for the residents of Arizona, Hawaii, and the outlying U.S. territories, where people avoid the hassle by remaining on standard time year-round.
Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve Bank are doing the right thing by pursuing a tighter monetary policy to fight inflation. They are just a year and a half too late doing it, which allowed inflation to get out of control.
As I’ve noted in many previous blog posts, including this one, the signs of impending inflation were clear long ago. Still, government officials and Fed members from President Biden to Jerome Powell claimed that inflation was transitory and would soon come back down. Move along: nothing to see here.
The events of the past year and a half present a good lesson in monetary politics. I don’t know whether or not that talk about transitory inflation was the sincere belief of those who publically made the claim, or if the assertion was politically motivated. But it seems that if “inflation is transitory” was Biden’s line, those at the Fed would have been creating some friction by disagreeing.
One of the characteristics of a secret ballot is that others can’t tell how you voted. This might protect voters from harassment or intimidation, but it also prevents voters from providing assurance to others about how they voted. A voter might have claimed to have voted a certain way, but the secret ballot means that others can never be sure.
The secret ballot is a barrier to voters selling their votes because the purchaser cannot be certain that the seller voted as promised. Mail-in voting reduces this impediment to selling one’s vote. The purchaser can watch the voter complete the ballot, or even complete the ballot for the seller. Buying votes becomes easier with mail-in ballots.
There are already concerns about ballot harvesting, in which one individual collects ballots from many others to deposit in drop boxes. It’s a small step from collecting ballots from many others and “helping” those voters fill in their ballots. And while ballot harvesting is aimed at ballots turned in to election officials, there is little to stop the ballot harvester from just mailing in those ballots.
On November 8th, Californians will vote up or down on key propositions. Here’s expert analysis from researchers at the Independent Institute, offering what you need to know about these ballot measures:
Prop 1
Proposition 1 Is Perverse Virtue-Signaling
Since abortion is already completely legal in California, why is Prop 1—which will amend the state constitution to guarantee a right to a state-funded abortion—on the ballot, and why are more than $9 million being spent to support its passage? California taxpayers are burdened enough without having to bear the cost of on-demand abortions for anyone, from anywhere, up to full term. READ MORE »
Props 26/27
Propositions 26 and 27 Are More about Protectionism than Gambling
Propositions 26 and 27 are ostensibly about sports betting, but they are rife with objectionable provisions and protectionism for the special interests pushing them. Californians would be better served by ditching both propositions and pressuring lawmakers to remove existing restrictions on gambling. READ MORE »
Covid-19 is likely endemic and will remain with us for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, it is also becoming milder. Some medical research argues that current dominant variants are less deadly than the flu. Hospitalizations have also steeply declined in recent weeks.
Regardless, President Biden recently announced he is extending the Covid-19 public health emergency for another 90 days. This will place the country under a public health emergency for Covid into early 2023. The U.S. is also under a public health state of emergency for monkeypox.
This comes at a surprising time. On October 21st, there were about 7,100 new Covid-19 cases. Ten months prior, data collectors at Johns Hopkins University reported over 1 million new Covid-19 cases. This reduction occurred despite Covid’s continual mutation into more contagious variants and dramatically curtailing of recommended public health guidelines to prevent disease spread.
