Europe Takes a Bite Out of America's Apple

Stephen Moore  |  Jan 15, 2025  

Editor's Note:  Some years ago I met Stephen Moore and asked for permission to publish his articles and he agreed.  This appeared at Townhall.com  RK

Envy is an ugly thing -- one of the seven deadly sins.

Europeans have long been dripping with jealousy that American firms dominate the tech sector -- cellphones, search engines, social media platforms, artificial intelligence and robotics. Our "magnificent seven" tech companies -- including Google, Nvidia, Apple and Amazon -- saw massive stocks market gains in 2024. Meanwhile, Europe has flatlined.

One reason for this success: The United States innovates while Europe regulates. Instead of fixing their economies, the European Union bureaucrats want to kneecap America's tech success stories with lawsuits and regulatory barbed wire fences to keep American firms from competing on a level playing field.

Their first target was Google, with a rash of expensive antitrust lawsuits against search engines.

Even worse, the EU bureaucrats are waging war against Apple with the "Digital Markets Act" -- a law that requires "contestable and fair markets in the digital sector."

They are also demanding of Apple something called "interoperability," which absurdly requires Apple to hand over access to its private operating systems to its competitors and will require iPhones to offer competitors' applications. This makes as much sense as requiring McDonald's to offer Burger King fries with their Happy Meals.

The iPhone's amenities and apps are part of a package deal that have made these devices the most popular in the world, with billions of customers. This hardly sounds like monopolistic behavior. If people don't like Apple's apps, there are many other cellphone products (such as the Galaxy) made by Samsung, Google or other companies, including some in China, that consumers can turn to.

For all the talk about Apple's monopoly, it now controls slightly less than 20% of the global cellphone market.

What is especially dangerous about interoperability is what it means for security and privacy. If third parties are given unfettered access to the Apple platform, this shield of privacy will be pierced.

Apple warns that outsiders could "read on a user's device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords, and more."

But the biggest danger of these kinds of raids on successful companies that spend billions of dollars innovating is that the incentive to innovate at all is stifled -- in which case everyone loses. Sharing patented information with competitors in the name of "fairness" is a socialist idea that has rusted the Eurozone economy.

If Europe wants to get back in the tech game, EU bureaucrats should focus on what made these companies so successful in the first place -- and then try to create a public policy environment that will foster innovative companies that can compete and win -- rather than run to the courts for protection. Punishing the winners is a good way to keep producing losers.

In the meantime, let's hope the incoming Trump regulators at the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department defend American companies against aggressive and hostile lawsuits to hobble our made-in-America companies. In other words, put America first, and don't let Europe take a bite out of our Apple.

The Case for Draining the Swamp Is Stronger Than Ever

Stephen Moore Jul 09, 2024 @ Townhall.com

Editor's Note:  In case anyone is wondering, I met Stephen years ago and he gave me permission to publish his work.  RK

The latest official employment report finds once again that the federal government and state-local hiring spree is still in full gear. Over the past year, health care and government hiring has outpaced every private sector industry. It isn't just the IRS bringing on thousands of new workers. The bloat is everywhere.

So even though there are a lot more government workers, good luck finding them or getting them on the phone.

This is because so few of them are actually physically on the job.

What's happening in the federal government ("Club Fed") these days borders on the absurd -- or should I say the obscene. A recent Federal News Network survey of federal workers finds only 6% are working full time in the office. Thirty percent are full-time remote. Washington office buildings have become city block-long zombies. Especially on Fridays.

While exact comparisons between public and private employees are tricky and inexact, best estimates are that in 2023 roughly 30% of private workers were working from home or remotely either some or all the time. In the private sector, the percentage of employees working from home has actually declined from about 50% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This means that, according to FNN, federal employees are THREE TIMES more likely to be working remotely either some or all the time.

Full-Time Remote

 -- Federal Government: 30%
 -- Private Workers: 12%

Full-Time or Hybrid Remote

-- Federal Government: 94%
-- Private Workers: 30%

I'm all for employees working remotely a few days a week. I do it myself, and it's likely to become more common in the information and digital age.

But one has to wonder how many of these workers are really necessary. And how many of these remote government workers, who can almost never get fired for bad performance, are putting in an honest day's work? My suspicion is very few.

The irony is that three years ago the federal government issued an order for federal employees to return to work post-COVID-19. Many thousands have blatantly ignored the order.

Remember, government workers have some of the cushiest and least stressful jobs on the planet. And they get paid roughly 30% to 40% more than comparably skilled private workers -- when taking into account exorbitant benefits.

Here is my solution: Uncle Sam is losing almost $2 trillion a year. STOP HIRING NEW PEOPLE. Every federal agency, including the biggest bureaucracy in the world, the Pentagon, should impose a hiring freeze -- except for extraordinary circumstances -- until the budget is balanced. Then impose, across the board, a 30% reduction in force.

Finally, if the government needs more revenues, start by selling federal buildings that are less than half-occupied. Many buildings are less than 20% occupied.

Former President Donald Trump's most popular rallying cry in 2016 was to "drain the swamp." But today the swamp is deeper than ever, and the deep state swamp creatures are even more numerous after four years of Biden-Harris. If Trump wins, he and Republicans should get draining.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles ... and Trucks

Stephen Moore  Apr 03, 2024

The Biden administration has announced in recent weeks new stringent emissions requirements for virtually the entire American transportation system.

The Environmental Protection Agency will mandate by the year 2035 that virtually every car made and sold in America must be an EV. No more gas cars. The New York Times comically declared that motorists don't have to worry because this "is not a ban on gasoline-powered vehicles." Sure it isn't.

Today less than 2% of cars use the electric power grid for fuel. So soon we will see 50 times more demand for electricity from autos.

Then the EPA announced new rules for trains in California to go electric -- even as the Association of American Railroads has declared the mandate infeasible.

But wait. The climate change lobby is just getting started. There is now a new scheme to mandate that the long-haul trucking industry convert to electric battery operation from diesel fuel.

This is a technological and financial nightmare for our trucking industry. A 10-ton long-haul truck is going to carry cargo across the country on an electric battery? Really?

Planes haven't been mandated by the climate lobby to stop using fossil fuels. But stick around.

Even if the technology existed to meet these mandates, this added strain on the electric grid system comes at a time when power production is already in short supply. The Wall Street Journal reports that power demands are expected to double over the next decade due to artificial intelligence and other technologies that use multiple times more energy than does the internet.

It also comes at a time when the Left has insisted that more than a dozen coal and gas plants need to be shuttered. Nuclear plants continue to get shuttered, too. Locally, greens also have started a movement to stop transmission lines and pipelines from being built.

What is the likely outcome of vastly expanding electric power demand at the same time the Biden administration is reducing supply? An energy calamity. Prices could as much as double. In California, which is at the forefront of the go-green movement, residents pay electric bills 29% higher than the U.S. average.

California is also second in the nation in power outages, with 221 from 2019 to 2023, according to Payless Power. This leaves schools, hospitals and millions of homes without electricity.

Some of the more honest green groups concede that a power shortage is coming as a result of their radical "decarbonization" agenda. Their solution is rationing energy. The government will tell you how much power you can use and when you can use it. There is also a move afoot to conserve energy by abolishing air conditioners and "nonessential" air travel -- as well as gas stoves and power lawnmowers.

Energy is the master resource. Everything we have is derivative of cheap and reliable energy. The more energy a country uses, the richer it is. If you want to disrupt a nation's progress, take away its energy sources.

This is usually a tactic that nations use against their enemies when they are at war. We are foolishly and self-destructively turning the lights off on ourselves.

America's Top National Security Threat Is Our Runaway Debt

Stephen Moore October 24, 2023 @ Townhall.com

After spending $6 trillion on social welfare and a Green New Deal spending spree and running our national debt up to $33 trillion, President Joe Biden is asking to whip out the federal credit card yet again for $100 billion more in military assistance for Ukraine and Israel and "humanitarian" aid.

Yes, it certainly is a dangerous world, and more so every day. But Biden has a lot of nerve proclaiming that he's 100% committed to the defense of Ukraine and Israel when his own policies have contributed directly to the hostilities.

The most impactful way to repel our enemies -- China, Russia, Middle East terrorists -- is to defund them by producing every ounce of oil, gas and coal here at home. Biden's war on American energy has cost the U.S. economy more than $200 billion in lost domestic energy output from the Trump pro-drilling trend. At least $40 billion of that has gone to the Iranians. You can buy a lot of rockets with that kind of money.

Meanwhile, the Russian war machine is almost entirely funded with petrodollars. They love that the heart of the Biden climate policy is to produce 3 million barrels a day less than we could and should be.

Biden misses a larger point about our national security. Right now, our debt is the nation's most urgent, clear and present danger -- not just to our economic prosperity but to our national security. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump believed rightly that when America is strong at home with an economy firing on all cylinders, we are strong, respected and feared abroad.

It's painful to say, but right now, America is far weaker militarily and economically than we were four years ago. The most important geopolitical power today is economic and technological superiority.

You don't achieve and retain that status by becoming the world's premier debtor nation.

Americans are starting to feel in the pocketbook the corrosive effect of a hemorrhaging $6 trillion budget. Everything we buy is 17% more expensive as the government effectively prints and borrows money to pay its bills. Mortgage rates are surging, with a 30-year mortgage interest rate at 8%, up from 3% when since Trump left office.

This means that on an average-priced house with a 30-year mortgage, buyers will pay $1,500 a month more in payments. This will put homeownership out of reach for millions of Americans.

Then, there is the impact of skyrocketing federal interest payments on the debt. This year, for the first time, federal interest expenses exceed our entire national defense budget. With lower interest rate debt now turning over every day and having to be refinanced by issuing 5% and 6% Treasury bills, we're facing a death spiral of red ink.

Borrowing more money now would make all these problems much worse and make America less of a superpower going forward. Republicans should be insisting on three conditions for any more debt spending packages.

First, it has to be much smaller -- cut at least by half -- than $100 billion. This isn't Monopoly money we are talking about.

Second, any release of new funds must be accompanied by a pro-drilling strategy here at home to divert money away from our enemies.

And third, every penny must be paid for dollar-for-dollar with other spending cuts. This isn't a heavy lift. We simply slash the $380 billion green energy slush fund and other wasteful programs.

If Biden and Congress don't believe they can find and eliminate tens of billions of dollars of waste in the federal budget (about 1% of total spending), this is prima facie evidence that we need a new president and a new Congress.

Maybe a Temporary Government Lockdown Is Necessary. The Alternative May Be Worse.

Stephen Moore Sep 12, 2023 @ Townhall.com

What's worse? When politicians shut down the government, or when they lock down businesses, stores, schools, churches and restaurants -- and nearly all private commerce in America?   If you haven't heard, the media and congressional Democrats are near cardiac arrest over the prospect of a government shutdown later this year. They may need smelling salts. How dare Congress shut down our vital government services when they are deadlocked on the budget?

But we didn't hear these kinds of drama queen histrionics when Congress, governors and mayors locked down nearly every private business during COVID in 2020. That effectively brought our economy to a standstill for six months.

Almost overnight, millions of Americans were out of their jobs. Small business revenues collapsed, and tens of thousands of men and women who had put their whole life into their businesses were thrown into bankruptcy due to government lockdown edicts.

Some liberals want to empower the government to shut down the private economy from time to time to combat climate change.

Apparently, the new rules are: You can close the doors of every small business in America, but don't you dare shut down the Department of Education or Interior or National Public Radio for one day or there will be blood in the streets, senior citizens won't get their meals on wheels and disabled children won't have access to social services.

I'm NOT in favor of a government shutdown. But they aren't the end of the world. The Congressional Research Service reports there have been at least 20 government shutdowns since Jimmy Carter was president. Did anyone outside of Washington really notice that the Federal Trade Commission or the Commodities Future Trading Commission couldn't meet?

By the way, only "nonessential" programs would be temporarily closed if there were a budget impasse, which raises the question of why a government $2 trillion a year in debt is spending so much money on nonessential anything.

The joke used to be that if you asked a New Yorker to draw a map of the country, they would put a line down the middle of the U.S. and declare everything on the eastern half of the U.S. New York. They had an inflated sense of self-importance.

Now that arrogance characterizes Washington -- those who live in "the swamp." THEY are essential, and the work the rest of us do is trivial. They've forgotten that they work for us, not the other way around.

Rather than a government shutdown, wouldn't it be a joyous occasion if the two parties would pass a financially responsible budget that cuts wasteful spending and at least makes a pretense of trying to reach balance in the next five or eight or 10 years?

The fact that the U.S. government now spends and consumes $7 trillion, nearly one-quarter of our entire GDP, is a depressing state of affairs. Cut it to 20% and we get close to a balanced budget.

Some things are worth fighting for. The Democrats' alternative to a partial shutdown would be to continue to borrow $2 trillion a year from now into infinity. Did you know that the fastest growing component of our debt is the interest payments on the $33 trillion negative balance on the credit card?

This is the real clear and present danger. This trend line of debt spending could plunge the economy into a deep recession, with millions of Americans plunged into poverty and unemployment lines.

Never again should we allow government to shut down our private economy. The shutdowns during COVID were one of the greatest abuses of power in American history. That's doubly true now that we have solid evidence that lockdowns didn't have any positive health effect.

But if it takes a short-term shutdown of some government agencies to force Congress and the White House to get serious about our fiscal ineptitude, then do it. It's for the children.

Regulatory Octopus Is Strangling Our Economy

Stephen Moore Apr 18, 2023 @ Townhall.com

Every schoolkid knows -- or used to know -- that the United States has three branches of government. At least that's what the textbooks say.

But really, we have four branches of government.

That's because Congress -- the legislative branch -- has for decades delegated lawmaking authority to the unconstitutional fourth branch of the U.S. government: independent regulatory agencies. By some estimates, there are more than 300 of these agencies sticking their nose into every aspect of American life and business, from what kind of car you can buy to the temperature setting on your thermostat to what you can build on your own private property.

Who are these regulatory czars accountable to? Who elected them?

To his credit, former President Donald Trump tried to rein in the regulatory blob. He promised to rescind two regulations for every new regulation enacted while he was president. He actually repealed about five rules for every new one.

But President Joe Biden LOVES to regulate.

On his first day in office, Biden rescinded the Trump policy, and the ratios have been roughly reversed. He also got rid of stringent cost-benefit analysis for new rules. This was to ensure that the regulation wasn't going to have a price tag far exceeding any societal benefit.

Now we are getting a regulatory explosion with private sector costs as high as $2 trillion a year, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The federal government doesn't abide by the Ten Commandments. Now there are more than 10,000. Biden's latest whopper is an Environmental Protection Agency rule that would effectively ban the production of gas-powered cars within 10 years.

Almost all recent presidents left office with more rules and red tape than when they entered. Ronald Reagan and Trump were two exceptions. Richard Nixon created the EPA, even though states were doing a fine job cleaning air and water. It was the George W. Bush administration that passed an energy bill requiring household appliances like home refrigerators and dishwashers to be "energy-efficient," which in practice meant they didn't work very well.

What can be done to trim the tentacles of the regulatory octopus? How about cutting those budgets and their enormous bureaucratic staffs? Over the last 30 years, the budgets of the regulatory agencies have more than tripled after adjusting for inflation from $25 billion to $75 billion. If Biden has his way, next year the regulatory octopus will exceed $100 billion to arm super-regulators like Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has tremendous authority over whether businesses should be able to merge. She's never run even a lemonade stand in her whole life.

Congress still has power over the purse. Cutting the regulatory budgets in half would still ensure safety, financial soundness and a clean environment while saving half a trillion dollars over 10 years. The Republicans should start by ensuring that the snoops at the IRS don't get 87,000 more IRS agents to harass citizens and pry into every private transaction we make.

Yes, we want sound regulation. But it shouldn't cost our families and businesses $2 trillion a year.

Hey, Uncle Sam: Stop paying people for not working

Stephen Moore drubs Biden for ending welfare requirements that worked well during Clinton year

By Stephen Moore April 3, 2023 

A policy question these days that has befuddled federal lawmakers is why so many millions of people have not returned to the workplace in the post-COVID-19 era. The labor force participation rate among employable adults is near a record low today. There are at least 2 million to 4 million employable adults who could and should be working but aren't.............House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and the Republican Congress in 1996 passed a historic bipartisan welfare reform bill that President Bill Clinton signed into law. That law required able-bodied welfare recipients to be in a job or training/education program to qualify for welfare assistance. It also placed time limits on welfare so it would not become a way of life.............Despite these stunning successes, President Joe Biden eviscerated all work requirements during COVID-19, and they haven't returned. The House Ways and Means Committee reports that less than half of Americans collecting welfare benefits today are working. The Biden administration opposes work requirements.............But welfare is supposed to be temporary and a hand-up, not a handout. The goal of welfare was to end poverty, not perpetuate it.................To Read More.....

What If Federal Workers Never Showed Up for Work and No One Missed Them?

Stephen Moore  |  Feb 14, 2023 @ Townhall.com

This is one of the greatest federal government scandals of all time. Many hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been getting a full-time paycheck from Uncle Sam (meaning from all of us) without showing up for work for three ears now. They don't call it Club Fed for nothing.

To be fair, just because an employee is working remotely doesn't mean they aren't working. Only a little more than half of private sector workers are actually in the office these days -- although, with each passing day, private workers are returning to work sites. But in the public sector, the percentage of remote workers remains much higher than that. The Federal Times news outlet reports that at the end of 2022, only about 1 in 3 federal bureaucrats were on the job in the office.

Wait. The COVID scare ended two and a half years ago, and most private businesses have demanded their employees show up for work at least some of the time -- or find a new employer. What's so special and privileged about government workers?

Now, new House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is pushing a bill that would require all federal agencies to reinstitute their telework policies as they existed on Dec. 31, 2019, with expanded remote work only for authorized projects. That bill passed the House on a 221-206 vote. Guess what? All but six House Democrats voted no. Is there any wonder why? Well, more than 90% of PAC donations from federal employee unions go to ... you got it, Democrats.

Who are the Democrats accountable to? Federal employees, or their own taxpayer voters and constituents who pay these workers' salaries? This vote makes the answer to that question crystal clear. So, the rest of America in private sector jobs is back to work, but not the 1.9 million federal employees, who often make $100,000 a year in salaries and benefits. All of this is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer money, but there is a silver lining here. Raise your hand if you've even noticed that federal workers are not showing up at the Department of Energy or Education or Transportation or the State Department or the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Has this disrupted your life in any material way? Not mine.

Maybe we've all learned a valuable lesson here. Maybe these agencies aren't as indispensable as President Joe Biden says they are. We could potentially save billions of dollars and reduce our debt by getting rid of some of these obsolete or irrelevant agencies, departments and bureaus.

A budget impasse between Biden and congressional Republicans may lead to a temporary shutdown of some of these agencies. How could that be Armageddon if we don't even know when the workers are on the job?

Maybe we could cut the federal workforce in half from 2 to 1 million employees. My best guess is nobody would notice, and nobody would care.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Europe

  Stephen Moore  |  Dec 13, 2022 @ Townhall.com

Politico Europe, a publication marinated in green politics, has named Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of its "power players of the year" -- for, in the publication's words, "advancing Europe's green agenda."

"By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not -- clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security," the news outlet explained approvingly.

It went on to note that Putin "invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge."

You would have to be pretty severely afflicted with Climate Change Derangement Syndrome to celebrate a silver lining in Putin's murderous attack on Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Europe has sprinted so far ahead of the United States in its quest to end the use of fossil fuels that many U.S. politicians, environmentalists and media voices look on with envy.

But how is Europe's Green New Deal going now that Putin has given it "a nudge"?

So far, the results are, to say the least, unencouraging. Euroland has been thrust into an epic energy crisis with electricity rationing, power outages, $10 a gallon gas and citizens encouraged by governments to use candles for lights and burning wood for heating purposes. Germany is reopening shuttered nuclear plants to avoid perpetual blackouts. It's a return to the Dark Ages in Europe -- and the climate change lobby is loving the return to chaos and mayhem.

This might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The government in France has now warned of acute energy shortages this winter with drastic steps to conserve. As one publication put it, Paris, the City of Lights, may have to turn off the lights in the weeks and months ahead if it's a cold winter.

Officials in Paris have decreed that local authorities must prepare power outage plans "that would reduce consumption of electricity by up to 38%." Wait, there's more: "The French government said it was working alongside the Ministry of Education to develop plans to close schools in the mornings if the area is to be impacted by rolling blackouts." It sounds to me like climate change is the new COVID-19 for militant lockdowns and curfews.

Germany's energy shortage is so severe that one of the fastest-growing energy sectors is coal. That's because the Germans have declared war on natural gas, so because of the self-inflicted energy crisis, they are forced to use an energy source that emits more greenhouse gases. Wood is also becoming a major source of heating homes. The Dark Ages are back.

Then there is the calamity that is unfolding in Switzerland. This is a country that is anything but a heavy-handed socialist state, but now thanks to the "energy state of emergency," which is the norm in Europe, the Swiss government has announced it will ban the use of electric cars for "nonessential" journeys. At the same time, it is encouraging people to take the train to shop for their groceries, but it has admitted that train service may also be disrupted.

That's not all. The government is also drawing up plans for dealing with blackouts that include reducing store hours by up to two hours per day, heating systems in nightclubs to be turned off and other buildings to be heated to no more than 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Online streaming services and game consoles could be banned. Christmas lights might be turned off, and all sports stadiums and leisure facilities could be closed.

Is Europe turning into a third-world banana republic?

All of this brings us to a stark reality. Europe has gone all-in on wind and solar power, and the experiment has failed miserably. These fringe energy sources don't work and aren't scalable for industrial economies. And the more it doesn't work, the more it requires police state interventions with fascistic controls over the economy and personal behavior. All of these assaults on freedom and prosperity are in the name of saving the planet. One wonders if this is the real endgame objective. The old saying that the greens are the new reds (communists) is proving to be all too true. It's a future that only tyrants like "man of the year" Putin could love.

Worst of all, President Joe Biden's administration and green groups look to Europe as a sterling silver model for America. Biden's climate henchmen even want to move to the left of Europe on climate change controls on our economy. Biden boasted at the climate conference in Egypt last month that he wants the U.S. to sprint ahead of the Europeans on climate controls as if there is virtue in imposing pain and lowing living standards on the public.

In other words, we are speeding over the same cliff of energy poverty, power outages and climate lockdowns that have crashed and burned everywhere else. The calamity is staring in front of us. And the Biden administration is saying faster, faster.

 

The New Global Virus Is Runaway Government Spending and Debt

By Stephen Moore | October 11, 2022 @ CNS News

When new British Prime Minister Liz Truss suggested lowering the United Kingdom's highest tax rate from 45% to 40%, along with a 1% reduction in the income tax rate for all taxpayers, the bond markets and the central bankers around the world went stark raving mad.

The academic pinheads at the International Monetary Fund trashed the tax cut as irresponsible. The bond vigilantes started selling Britain's bonds. And the Bank of England, which had also savaged the tax cut idea, stepped in to buy bonds to stop the bleeding.

The tragedy here is that Truss had the right idea. In an economic calamity as Britain has suffered for the past three years, cutting tax rates to increase investment and production in England is a way to reduce inflation and stave off a recession. It was the same "supply-side" strategy that President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used in the early 1980s to end the stagflation and economic malaise from the 1970s. The "supply-side economics" worked and helped launch a multi-decade economic revival in both countries.

The Left protested that "tax cuts for the rich" would cause even worse debt problems. But this was a fable. The explosion of government debt in the United States, Britain and almost every other developed country across the planet was not caused by tax cuts. There were two reasons debt exploded.

First, central governments catastrophically shut down their economies and businesses during COVID -- even though the health benefits were de minimis. With businesses shut down and workers off the job, tax payments fell off a cliff, thus raising debt levels to unheard-of levels.

Next, the governments of the world compensated for the shutdown of their private sectors by massively increasing government spending on giveaway programs. In the U.S., government spending since COVID has risen by $6 trillion to $7 trillion -- above the normal already obese $5 trillion-a-year budget. Across the planet, government "stimulus" spending in 2020 and 2021 is estimated at -- are you sitting down? -- $21 trillion. Trillions more have been borrowed and spent and paid for with money printing this year.

Government spending in many countries, including the U.S., exceeded 50% of the entire national gross domestic product. In other words, we fought a war against COVID, and socialism won.

Now compare the magnitude of this $21 trillion spending spree with the Truss proposal to cut taxes, which politicos are now saying caused the bond market to go haywire. The total Truss plan had a price tag of about $40 billion. Only about $2 billion of that was the expected revenue loss from the reduction in the top tax rate. In other words, the tax cut was 0.01% of the amount that was spent and borrowed by all of the countries in the world.

It is inconceivable that a tax cut this tiny could cause a financial panic -- or else the world has gone stark raving mad. The real reason that the U.K. is in this economic rut is that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Bank of England kept spending money and printing money at such a reckless pace.

The U.S. is in the same dangerous place that the Brits are in as the world economy teeters on the verge of a sharp and painful economic collapse. President Joe Biden has spent and borrowed $4.1 trillion since he came into office roughly 20 months ago. No president in modern times and maybe ever has been as fiscally reckless as Biden. (Alas, Republicans voted for much of this spending, too, and don't forget that in the last days of the Trump administration, Congress added another trillion dollars of spending.) Our government in the U.S. at all levels is still spending almost 40% of our GDP. This is close to the level of socialist European nations like France.

Incidentally, in the U.S., there is no revenue problem whatsoever. Taxes as a share of our economy are, according to the Congressional Budget Office, at a near-record high. In the current course, tax receipts are expected to continue to rise.

The virus that threatens the world today in almost every nation is runaway government spending and debt. It is the match that has lit the forest fire of runaway inflation. It doesn't matter how much Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell raises interest rates (which he must do to tame inflation). The stagflation of high inflation and slow growth won't end until politicians start taking a chainsaw to their out-of-control budgets.

Government spending has not stimulated (SET ITAL) anything (END ITAL) except more government and less private enterprise. The public sector has to go on a SlimFast diet -- and for a long, long time to drain the excess spending out of the global economy.

What is all sadly ironic is that many of the nations of the world are now practicing Modern Monetary Theory. This is the radical idea that governments like the U.S. can spend and borrow increasing amounts of money at almost no cost because of low interest rates. Whoops. Interest rates in the U.S. have risen on the 10-year bond from less than 1% to more than 3% in just the last 24 months. The 30-year mortgage rate has risen from 2.85% at the end of 2020 to nearly 7% today. Let's just say Modern Monetary Theory can be thrown in the trash bin.

Political leaders across the globe seem to be suffering from a severe case of economic amnesia. Reagan said it best, and it is more appropriate today than ever before: "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." Truer today than ever.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is "Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy."

 

Is Modern Environmentalism a Pagan Religion?

Stephen Moore Aug 23, 2022  @ Townhall.com

The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that "the modern environmentalists worship the created, not the creator." I was reminded of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $369 billion to the climate change-industrial complex.

Pelosi (D-CA) claimed the wind, solar and electric subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act would placate an "angry" planet. "Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of that," the speaker said.

This is a highly revealing statement. Do Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues really believe that spending $369 billion on Tesla subsidies (with batteries made in China), windmills (made in China) and solar panels (made in China) is going to save the planet, stop the rise of the oceans and lower the global temperature?

This is the same gang in Congress that can't stop the daily drive-by shootings in our cities, can't secure the U.S.-Mexico border, can't come anywhere near balancing the budget and can't provide the resources our military needs for our national security.

Even if this additional $369 billion were to work as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports that the impact on global temperatures in the coming decades would be to lower them by 0.001%. So, instead of the global temperature being an average of 59 F, it will be 58.999 F. Thank God! We are saved from Armageddon.

But as Pelosi's quote makes clear, this is about symbolism. It is about ruining the economy as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. Marc Morano, the journalist who runs ClimateDepot.com, asks: "Will human sacrifices be next to appease the 'angry' Earth gods? Actually, this bill will create human sacrifice by imposing even more suffering from energy deprivation, supply chain issues, good shortages, inflation, debt, and bad science."

He's right. The suffering that will occur from this assault on American energy security and reliability could be profound -- and it will be the lowest-income people who will be hurt the most. Inflation will rise as energy prices soar. The shortages of energy will cause hardship for many consumers, including food shortages. Europe, which got hooked on the green energy fad, is now rationing energy. In Spain, there are new restrictions on using air conditioning to set the temperature of your store or home at less than 80 F -- during a heat spell. It's one of those sacrifices to Mother Earth.

One of the great injustices and ironies of the new law is that it purports to give billions of dollars for "environmental justice" grants to low-income communities and inner cities when it is this group of people who will feel the brunt of the anti-fossil fuel policies. The poor spend much more of their incomes on energy than the rich.

The warmest years in North America are not recent years -- instead, they occurred during the 1930s amid the Dust Bowl era. This was (SET ITAL) before (END ITAL) 80% of the carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere. Back then, thousands of U.S. residents died from extreme weather. But now we have, through modern electric power and technological innovation, major ways to reduce death rates from weather events. The way to save the Earth is through more growth, more innovation and a richer planet.

That is what Mother Earth wants. That is what America wants. Only one out of 20 people rate climate change as the No. 1 problem facing our country. The public wants lower inflation and more prosperity. This law delivers neither.

The God that many of us worship wants us to create peace, prosperity and light. The god of radical environmentalists will deliver darkness, despair and decline.

 

 

The End of the Climate Change Legend

Stephen Moore Mar 22, 2022 @ Townhall.com

For many years now, there has been a spirited debate about whether climate change is science, religion or even perhaps a secret route to socialism. That question remains unanswered, but we've now discovered with certainty that climate change is a political albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.

The Left's spiritual devotion to climate change has been speeding the Democrats over a political cliff this fall with likely unprecedented losses this November. The zero fossil fuels suicide pact was always an economic and political loser. More than 70% of all the energy we produce and consume in America derives from oil, gas and coal. President Joe Biden's war on these fuel sources was sure to cause severe shortages and $5 a gallon gasoline at the pump. Didn't Democrats learn their lesson in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won a landslide election against Jimmy Carter that surging inflation and gas prices is a surefire way to infuriate voters?

While Biden keeps saying he is doing "everything I can to lower gas prices," he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth -- because if your goal is to get people to stop using something, raising its price is a pretty good way to accomplish that. If prices go to $10 or $15 a gallon, you can clear the highways of trucks and cars altogether, and what a wonderful world it will be.

Democrats were so enamored with their Green New Deal delusion that they failed to understand that most people aren't as hyper-obsessed with climate change as they are. A new poll sponsored by my group, Committee to Unleash Prosperity, found that people are much more concerned about inflation and high gas prices than climate change. Moreover, the poll found that respondents' average amount they would be willing to pay for the climate change agenda was $55 a year. Sorry, that's the extra cost we are already spending with two fill-ups at the gas station.

Then there is the increasingly unavoidable reality that the green energy sources they fantasize about are decades away from being technologically feasible to replace old-fashioned oil, gas and coal. Even the Energy Department predicts that even with the trend toward renewable energy, by 2035, we will still be heavily reliant on oil, gas and coal for electricity production, home heating and transportation fuels.

Elon Musk, the leading champion of electric cars, reminded Biden in a recent tweet that in the real world rather than in la-la land, we are going to need oil and gas for many years to come. Today 3% of cars on the road are electric, and 95% use gas or diesel.

This brings us to yet another fatal flaw of the climate change movement. The Biden administration and its radical green allies can't explain why getting our energy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia makes more sense than Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska.

This strategy is especially pinheaded because the war on oil, gas and coal production is a big loser for the environment and increases global greenhouse gas emissions. That is because America has the strictest environmental standards. Shifting oil and gas production to Russia or Iran and shifting coal production to China and India is causing far more air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Chinese President Xi Jinping is busy trying to take over the world economy, and the last thing he or the ruling class in Beijing cares about is climate change.

Finally, Democrats should have learned from the green energy catastrophe of Western Europe. A decade ago, the French, Germans, Italians and others in the European Union moved to a renewable energy future. They slashed much of their oil, gas and coal production, shut down nuclear plants (why?) and subsidized the building of wind turbines and solar panels. It nearly bankrupted Germany as energy prices soared and factories left Europe for America and Asia. A decade later, France is back to building nuclear plants, and Germany is burning more coal than ever before and importing natural gas from Russia. Europe recently redefined natural gas and nuclear power as "clean energy."

Going green wrecked their economies and submerged these countries deeper into the red. Unfortunately, Americans weren't paying any attention to that failed experiment. So now Biden is repeating it. The result is likely to be the same. The Democrats' radical climate change agenda isn't greening the planet, and it is bankrupting our country. Voters know exactly whom to blame.

Free Market Capitalism Is Under Siege – From Capitalists

Stephen Moore Mar 08, 2022  @ Townhall.com

We live in a strange world. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, helped provide the energy that powered the American century beginning in the early 1900s. Today, his grandchildren spend the billions of dollars that he donated to the Rockefeller Foundation to attack the same oil and gas industry that he almost single-handedly built. Likewise, Henry Ford's trust, the Ford Foundation, now spends millions of dollars on climate change -- as if the automobile was a sinister invention.

And now we learn from the Chronicle of Philanthropy that the Hewlett Foundation and a partner foundation will donate some $40 million "to five academic institutions" to "rethink" the benefits of free markets.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were two of America's most outstanding entrepreneurs, co-founding their iconic computer company Hewlett-Packard out of a garage in Northern California.

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the purpose of the foundation grants is to "challenge neoliberalism, an intellectual movement that began in the late 1940s that established broadly accepted principles on the role of markets and governments that became firmly established over decades." 

 Specifically, the grants are meant to discredit "the economic models of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, (whose) policies were to shrink the size of government, reduce government debt, open up trade, and deregulate the market." The Hayek/Friedman model, of course, was adopted under former President Ronald Reagan in the United States and under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

In short, neoliberalism was the intellectual counter assault to the faddish trend in Europe and Asia after World War II toward socialism and communism, two economic models that eventually crashed and burned by the end of the 20th century, when the Berlin Wall came down and China abandoned Maoism.

Now the trustees at the Hewlett Foundation appear to have remarkably concluded that the wrong side won in the fight against big government totalitarianism.

It raises the question of why anyone today would look back on these reforms and conclude they were a mistake. The Hayek, Friedman, Reagan and Thatcher eras reestablished the supremacy of free market capitalism, free trade, privatization and lower tax rates. It launched the most significant period of wealth creation, poverty reduction and technological progress in human history. The World Bank and others had concluded that over the period when free markets regained their foothold (1980-2020), close to 2 billion people on the planet, almost half living in China and India, were moved out of severe poverty due to the triumph of liberalization and the collapse of central government planning. The median incomes in the U.S. and the U.K. soared, and the planet's wealth tripled.

A strong case could be made that free trade alone has done more to reduce global poverty than every government welfare program invented. Even 100 Hewlett and Ford foundations couldn't reduce human deprivation more than free trade, lower tax rates and deregulation. The Brookings Institution has shown that deregulation, which began under former President Jimmy Carter and then Reagan, lowered costs to consumers by roughly one-third in the industries where price controls and other government interferences were lifted.

Larry Kramer, the president of the Hewlett Foundation, said the goal of the grants is to overcome the mantra that "government is bad, markets are good." Ironically, he said this in the immediate wake of the big government debacle of COVID-19, when politicians made decisions that crushed local economies and small businesses, got the "science" of the virus repeatedly wrong, increased government debt burdens by trillions of dollars and made more than $500 billion of fraudulent unemployment, health care and business revival payments.

These are the government officials we should entrust with more power over the economy?

The saddest part of this saga is how foundation trustees recklessly disregard the original donors' intent, which in each case is to make the world a more livable and prosperous place for all. One wonders whether it has even dawned on those running these trusts that without the free market system they want to disassemble, there would never have been a Standard Oil, a Ford Motor Company or a Hewlett-Packard. And indeed, there wouldn't be billions of dollars in the coffers of these giant tax-free foundations.

Ed Crane, the founder of the libertarian Cato Institute, noted that free markets have created $100 trillion of wealth in America. Yet not even one-tenth of 1% of that wealth is used to defend the economic system that made that wealth and prosperity possible. But as the Hewlett Foundation donations remind us, it is much worse than that. Instead, much of the inherited money goes to tear down capitalism and freedom institutions.

The big question now is: What great American capitalist who has gotten rich off our free enterprise system will put up $40 million to defend the infrastructure of economic liberalization?

 

In the End, Sweden Did It Right

Stephen Moore Feb 22, 2022 @ Townhall.com

What if the government did what it has done every time we were confronted with a deadly virus, such as the Spanish flu or polio? Instead of locking down our schools, churches and businesses, the government could have simply informed citizens of the risks of getting sick and urged people to be extra careful about hygiene, stay out of crowded places and protect the vulnerable.

It turns out there was one country that mostly rejected lockdowns and let life go on as normal as possible under dire circumstances. That country was Sweden.

There were some restrictions and temporary lockdowns, but they were minimal.

The hero of this story is Anders Tegnell, Sweden's chief epidemiologist. He was Sweden's Anthony Fauci, but unlike the now-widely discredited Fauci, Tegnell eschewed lockdowns. The international media pilloried him for not following "the science." At first, it seemed the Swedish live-and-let-live strategy was a miserable failure. Death rates soared higher than in other European nations.

But to their credit, the Swedes ignored the "mad modelers" such as Britain's Imperial College team, which predicted multiple times that the number of deaths around the world would be more than actually occurred.

Sweden made some mistakes at the beginning. Like many states in the United States, the Swedes failed to protect elderly nursing home residents adequately, which was a significant reason that deaths in Sweden were higher than in neighboring Norway or Denmark. But Tegnell argued that the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do on a society-wide basis. He was proven right.

Two years later, Sweden's COVID-19 death rate is 1,614 per million people -- much lower than Britain (2,335) or the U.S. (2,836), which both had much more stringent lockdowns.

Sweden appears to have achieved herd immunity much more swiftly and thoroughly than other nations. Deaths were higher at the start of the pandemic but fell much lower than other lockdown nations in succeeding months.

What is clear today is that the Swedes saved their economy. This year, it's projected to be 5% larger than before the pandemic, compared to a 2% gain for Germany and a 1% gain for Britain. Moreover, the extra debt Sweden has had to take on is a fraction of that of lockdown countries. So it will not have to spend decades paying for the costs of lockdowns.

Swedish schools stayed open with no face masks. Test scores are up, and there is no talk in Sweden about "lost" years of education.

What is sadly ironic about the Sweden story is this should have been the U.S. We're the land of the free, not Sweden. We are the nation of rugged individualism, not Sweden, with its more socialist economy and collectivist mindset. We have more solid constitutional protections to guarantee citizen rights against heavy-handed government.

But the politicians from local health officials and mayors all the way up to the top federal medical experts and lawmakers opted for deadly decisions to shut down the engines of our economy and lock people in their homes. Those policies did irreparable harm that will be felt for many years to come. Those who supported this great mistake need to be held accountable.

Sweden's successful response strategy reminds us that we must never again shut down our businesses and schools. I just pray we have all learned that enduring lesson before another virus wave arrives.

 

The Greatest Government Failure in American History

Stephen Moore| Feb 01, 2022

The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly?

Two years later, it is time for an honest assessment. Could things have worsened for the country if the government had spent nothing and done nothing? What would have happened if we had not shut down our businesses? Our churches, schools and restaurants. Our parks, basketball courts and playgrounds.

Would the public have made worse decisions regarding protecting its health and the health of its families and its employees than the politicians have made?

The left believes that it was government intervention that saved millions of lives. But even with all the federal spending, some 879,000 (and counting) have perished from the virus. It was politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose awful decision-making contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors exposed to infected patients in nursing homes. In addition, politicians didn't shut down the New York subway system for many weeks into the virus, costing thousands more avoidable deaths.

Suppose the government is here to save us. How do we explain the shameful malfeasance of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and other government medical agencies and programs that spend roughly half a trillion dollars each year to keep us healthy? All of that money couldn't stop a virus from wreaking havoc on the country for two years and counting.

Why was the CDC caught entirely unprepared to fight this virus? It would be like a town spending millions of dollars a year on fire protection, and the first time there is a significant fire, the firefighters are all napping, no one slides down the poles and the fire engines won't start. So, what were Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the experts at the CDC doing with the tens of billions of dollars we give them each year? They studied the health effects of liberal obsessions such as climate change, racism and gun violence. What they weren't ready to do was their job: preparing for infectious diseases.

Then there is the question of what Washington did with all the money. At least $2 trillion was given to workers and businesses to compensate them for the lockdowns that the government itself imposed. We now have pretty conclusive evidence from dozens of country and state studies that lockdowns were a highly ineffective way to combat the virus. Lockdowns may have saved some lives, but this response was the equivalent of trying to remove a tumor with a sledgehammer. Age-adjusted death rates were no lower in states that shut down their economies than states that stayed open.

The rest of the money went to pay school districts even though the school doors were locked shut, to fund states and cities that closed their businesses, to fund mass transit trains and buses that operated nearly empty, and worst of all, to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare programs, such as expanded unemployment benefits, that paid workers to stay off the job. And millions of workers still haven't come back.

The one program that did work was President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed. But the heart of that program was to find ways to pull end-runs around drug and vaccine regulations that hold up lifesaving medicines for many years. As a result, private companies such as Pfizer invented the vaccines in record time because the government stayed out of the way.

We are still paying a high price for President Joe Biden's screw-ups as we deal with the less deadly omicron variant. Late last year, Biden's Department of Health and Human Services stopped all shipments of an effective COVID-19 treatment by Regeneron because a CDC model concluded wrongly that the delta variant had disappeared. Thanks to that blunder, many thousands died or were hospitalized because the government denied them treatment. Other promising therapies, such as by GlaxoSmithKline, have run into regulatory hurdles preventing or delaying their use.

Wouldn't it have been more competent and more humane to let doctors and patients make these decisions rather than Washington bureaucrats and politicians?

There have been a multitude of other snafus by the government that only validate the utter incompetence of big government. Some $300 billion was stolen by fraudsters who ripped off the Medicaid and unemployment benefits programs.

Now here we are, two years from the start of COVID-19, closing in on 1 million dead and $5 trillion more in debt. Millions of children have suffered, perhaps irreparably, from a loss of schooling (some of which still goes on in some districts). There are some 50,000 to 100,000 deaths of despair caused by the lockdowns. And the virus is still out there, though thankfully in retreat.

Big government didn't save us. On the contrary, big government has left us weaker as a nation in every way, and we will spend decades cursing the fact that we panicked and handed over so much power to so many incompetent people in Washington.

Union Bosses Against Union Jobs

Stephen Moore Jan 04, 2022 @ Townhall.com

Why don't the union bosses in America represent their union members anymore? Could it be because the union leadership has become more beholden to the Democratic politicians in Washington than the rank-and-file workers who pay the dues?

We saw an example of this betrayal of the workers not long ago when the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters brass endorsed Joe Biden for president -- even though Biden openly opposed all fossil fuels and wanted to end the building of pipelines.

Talk about selling the rope to the hangman. The union bosses acted surprised that Biden's first act as president was to kill several thousand union jobs by killing the Keystone XL pipeline. And in recent months, the Biden officials have been on a crusade to shutdown Midwest pipelines that carry natural gas to the midwestern states.

More recently, we witnessed one of the dumbest union leadership campaigns in American history. The United Mine Workers Association endorsed the Build Back Better bill, which is stuffed with $550 billion of subsidies for green energy projects and energy mandates explicitly designed to kill America's coal production. Wipe coal and coal miners right out of existence.

Then, UMWA President Cecil Roberts wrote an extraordinary letter to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), admonishing him for opposing the bill. "We are disappointed that the bill will not pass," Roberts said. "We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working." Manchin was standing up for the coal miners in his state. Why wouldn't the union do the same?

I've been to Charleston, West Virginia, and talked to many of the coal miners. They hate the Biden bill and know that their jobs are in jeopardy. They remember that Hillary Clinton came to West Virginia in 2016 and told the coal miners that under her plan, these workers could build wind panels instead. They laughed at her arrogance and fantasy.

The UMWA wants more funding for victims of black lung and other benefits for laid-off coal miners. That's fine. But if Build Back Better passes, there won't be any miners left working in states like West Virginia, and the UMWA will be defunct.

What's next, the Steelworkers union coming out against steel production?

Even the United Auto Workers union is putting at risk tens of thousands of union jobs by backing Biden's risky plan to divert production of gasoline-powered cars toward electric vehicles. More than 90% of the car sales in the U.S. are still traditional cars. If they are not made in the U.S., they will be made in Japan, Korea and Germany. How does that create union jobs?

The union bosses haven't caught on to the reality that the green movement they are partnering up with is essentially supporting an agenda that will deindustrialize America. There is no way that we can have a $22 trillion economy that makes everything from steel to cars to pipelines to buildings and airplanes and technology and corn and cotton without affordable energy. My question for the union bosses is: How do we create jobs in America if our energy comes from wind turbines and solar panels ... made in China?

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: "Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy."

Stephen Moore: Will All of America Go on Strike?

By Stephen Moore | October 26, 2021 @ CNSNews

If you think the supply chain problems, empty shelves in stores, and higher inflation are problems now, wait a few weeks; they are likely to get worse. And this isn't a result of hurricanes, the pandemic, or other acts of nature. It's all due to political incompetence that starts in the Oval Office.

Here's one prominent reason the supply shortage of goods from fruits and vegetables to gasoline to toys for Christmas will go from a headache to a crisis.

We are now witnessing the end of four decades of labor peace in America. Two prominent companies, Kellogg's and John Deere, face strikes with thousands of workers walking off the job. The United Auto Workers strike against John Deere is the first labor unrest at the large Illinois plant since the mid-1980s. Kellogg's last had a work stoppage in 1972.

We already have nearly 11 million unfilled jobs thanks to super-generous welfare benefits. The shortage of dockworkers, truckers, and factory workers is inciting higher inflation due to shortages. Now, if thousands of more workers in critical industries go on strike, havoc could prevail.

The worker shortages only give more leverage to the unions to walk off the job for higher pay and benefits. The John Deere workers balked at a proposed 5 percent raise — and not without cause. With inflation running closer to 6 percent, a 5 percent raise could mean a loss in real income to the rank-and-file workers.

Here's the vicious cycle we could be looking at in due time. Inflation means higher prices at the stores, which means workers want higher pay, which means companies have higher costs, which means the firms have to raise their prices further. And the process repeats. Six percent inflation could snowball into 8 percent to 10 percent inflation by the end of the year. Yikes.

History proves that mismanagement of the money supply and a dollar that loses value causes convulsions in the labor market. E.J. Antoni, an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recently ran the numbers. Annual inflation spiked to 7.9 percent for 1951, and a record 470 strikes occurred the following year. In the late 1960s, inflation rose to 5.4 percent, and the number of strikes rose above 400 in a single year.

But as price volatility moderated starting in the Ronald Reagan years, so did strikes. A stable dollar that was "as good as gold" retained its value and allowed labor and management to reach mutually agreeable contracts on wage increases.

From 1947 to 1982, a period of many strikes, inflation rose and fell wildly, with the annual rate changing as much as 8.7 percentage points in a single year and having a 14.5 percentage point range from -1 percent to 13.5 percent.

Suddenly, it feels as though we are in a "Back to the Future" sequel with Michael J. Fox. Rising prices and a slowdown in the economy — the worst of all worlds.

I predict that there will be many more strikes in the months ahead. Unions will flex their muscles in part because they have Joe Biden in the White House, who genuflects in front of the union bosses who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on his campaign. Reagan famously fired illegally striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Does anyone believe Biden would ever have the backbone to do that?

Bottlenecks now squeeze a supply chain that was once the hallmark of American economic efficiency at every turn. It's getting worse, and the unions and their rank-and-file workers paying higher bills aren't happy. Nor should they be.

History shows that strikes are a form of mutually assured destruction. Both sides generally lose in the long term from work stoppages — and so does America.

The best way for Washington to ensure long-term worker gains, for union or nonunion workers, is to get inflation, which is a de facto wage tax, under control. It would help if Congress would cease and desist from spending and borrowing trillions of dollars we don't have because this could ignite even faster inflation.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks. He is also a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a Washington Examiner columnist.

In Biden's America, Everyone is Entitled to Everything

Stephen Moore July 20, 2021

Despite its liberal tendencies, The Washington Post editorial board once acknowledged that in a democracy, "everyone can't be entitled to everyone else's money."

Well, it may have had that wrong because President Joe Biden is supersizing the entitlement state of America at a pace that makes President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society initiatives seem like a fiscal bargain. By the way, that was the infamous War on Poverty that spent more than $5 trillion over the next 25 years, and as the old saying goes: We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.

But here we go again. Biden already has spent $1.9 trillion on social welfare programs -- including unemployment benefits, free health care, more generous food stamps, rental assistance, and more money for schools and state governments. Now he wants to add to that a $3.5 trillion "social infrastructure bill" -- this is the new term for "welfare" -- that includes all sorts of new entitlements, such as universal and fully subsidized day care, prekindergarten, free community college and student loan forgiveness for children who went to Harvard University. Democrats are also debating whether to make the weekly $300 "temporary" bonus unemployment benefits permanent. That way, no one will ever have to work.

Most dangerous of all is the planned expansions of Medicare and Medicaid. According to the watchdog group Truth in Accounting, these programs already have a long-term deficit of more than $55 trillion.

So, naturally, Biden and the Democrats want to put more passengers on this fiscal Titanic.

The Medicare plan would provide a whole array of new benefits, such as vision, hearing and dental care, all paid for by taxpayers. It is at a time when Medicare trustees warn that Medicare Part A's "trust fund" is likely to run dry by about 2026 and possibly as early as 2024. Seniors should be up in arms over this raid on the Medicare trust fund.

By the way, Congress already dipped into Medicare's reserves to help fund the COVID-19 bailout efforts this spring.

David Jonas, a former staffer for Barack Obama, recently spilled the beans in a tweet about the Democrats' scheme. He said that "the politics ... are near perfect" because "Medicare expansions are forever." He's right, of course. Once you start giving people free things, it's a near political impossibility to take them away. It is the insidious nature of the entitlement cancer cells.

The Democrats also want to provide new bribes to citizens of red states to sign up for free Medicaid benefits. This program, too, is financially flimsy, and so when the Affordable Care Act was created, many red states wisely refused to take the bribe of free money from Washington because they saw the new programs would puncture holes in their state budgets. So now Democrats in Congress want to offer new subsidies under Medicaid for residents of the 12 states, including Florida, Georgia and Missouri, that opted not to widen their Medicaid benefits. They are calling these "Medicaid look-alike programs" to be administered by the federal authorities.

Readers may be amazed that we have to continue to expand Medicare, Medicaid, "Obamacare" subsidies and the like because 12 years ago, we were told that the trillion-dollar Affordable Care Act was going to provide universal coverage for everyone. But we keep spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars, and all we hear is how many millions of people continue to lack health care coverage. Maybe that is because all the money the authorities spend on health care makes the whole system way more expensive.

If all of this isn't enough, starting this month, people of a certain income will receive checks of $3,000 on an annual basis per child. That is on top of the $2,000 per person we sent out earlier this year.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and I recently published a study sponsored by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Thanks to Biden's new welfare state expansions, families can get up to $100,000 in government benefits (tax-free) without anyone working a single hour all year!

The government will feed you; pay your rent; educate you; take care of your children and your grandparents; pay for your college and day care; pay you if you aren't working; and pay for your health care, your toothbrush, your internet service and, soon, free iPhones (that should be an entitlement, shouldn't it?).

The real mystery about this new cradle-to-grave entitlement state is why people still bother to work at all.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy." To find out more about Stephen Moore and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

 

Biden's Green Energy Plan Declares War on American Energy

Stephen Moore Apr 13, 2021 @ Townhall.com

Am I the only one who finds it head-scratching that President Joe Biden, who wants to spend $2 trillion of taxpayer money on "infrastructure," is the same president whose first act in the White House was to kill a multibillion-dollar oil and gas pipeline that would create some 15,000 jobs? The Keystone pipeline that he canceled was vital to our energy infrastructure and wasn't going to cost taxpayers a penny.

The Biden infrastructure plan is a head fake. The agenda here isn't about creating "millions of new jobs." It's a declaration of war against one of the largest sources of new jobs in the United States: our domestic energy producers.  Some 80 percent of our energy today comes from fossil fuels, and well more than half of it comes from oil and natural gas.

I wonder if Joe Biden -- or anyone on his energy team -- knows that. Do they know that in the last week of 2020, during President Donald Trump's final weeks in office, the United States imported zero barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia for the first time in 35 years?

America became the world's largest energy exporter under Trump, and it wasn't because of big conglomerates such as Exxon Mobil Corp. or BP, who do a lot of their drilling outside of the U.S. It was "wildcatters," with their hydraulic fracturing operations entirely situated within the United States, that nearly doubled domestic drilling. Such smaller enterprises don't have complex "global footprints."

As a White House economics adviser, I used to discuss energy policy with Trump. I would tell him that we should strive to make America "energy-independent." But he would chastise me and insist, "I want to make America energy-dominant."

This saved the country more than $200 billion a year -- money that used to flow to the Saudis, Iran and OPEC nations, many of whom hate us. Trump wanted our oil and gas to come from Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he consulted regularly with on-the-ground experts such as Harold Hamm, the president of Continental Resources and the largest driller of the Bakken shale in energy-rich North Dakota.

When America eliminated its dependency on foreign producers, it also lowered energy prices for the poorest Americans, with gas prices in many states falling to below $2 a gallon. As I write, the gas prices are hitting $4 a gallon in many states.

The quest for energy dominance also yielded massive job gains. The number of Americans directly employed by oil and gas producers hit 800,000 last year. The domestic oil and gas industry accounted for a larger share of all new jobs created in the first five years coming out of the 2008 financial crisis than any other industry. Many truckers and drillers in the oil patch make $100,000 a year or more -- far more than workers installing solar panels.

Biden and his media and technocratic allies view domestic energy production as a villain to vanquish. They are prepared to sacrifice the industry and its workers on the altar of climate and "sustainability." The left sees job losses in this industry as a small price to achieve its -- unreachable -- goal of zero carbon emissions by 2035.

As a presidential candidate, Biden promised he wouldn't push those workers into unemployment, and he even went so far as to endorse fracking. Now he's banning drilling on federal lands in many states, even though we have tens of trillions of dollars of energy resources.

Let's have a grown-up discussion on energy policy. The U.S. is going to continue to use oil and gas for decades to come. Today, only 10.7 percent of our energy comes from wind and solar power. Approximately 2% of the cars on the road are electric vehicles. Even if that were to rise by tenfold over the next decade, we will still have 80% of cars using good old gasoline. If we don't produce the oil and gas here, we are going to fill our tanks with oil and gas from the Middle East or Russia.

Biden must put jobs first and stop treating our domestic oil and gas producers as the enemies of progress. Oil and natural gas power our computers, our cars and trucks, our factories, our furnaces, our cellphones -- and all that our $22 trillion industrial economy encompasses. To "build back better," let those producers be part of an "all-of-the-above" clean, cheap and reliable all-America energy policy.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."

Stephen Moore: Here's How Red States Can Fight the 'Blue-State Bailout'

By Stephen Moore | March 9, 2021 @CNSNews

Congressional Democrats are a runaway train with a drunk-on-power conductor in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No matter how much evidence pours in that the economy doesn't need $1.9 trillion more in debt spending, the Pelosi locomotive keeps crashing down the track toward the financial cliff. Generations will have to pay for the joyride.

One of the worst features of the bill is the "blue-state bailout." Twenty-one Republican governors and one Democrat are protesting the "biased" formula for allocating some $400 billion to the states. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster complained that the bill "punishes" states that did the right thing by keeping their economies and businesses open during the pandemic.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the bill "loots" the red states to pay for Democratic governors who have locked down their economies.

DeSantis has good reason to complain. Florida has a slightly higher population than New York, but New York gets $2,799 per person, or twice as much money as the $1,355 per person that Florida receives. In other words: Floridians are paying for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's incompetence. That is precisely what is happening because the main factor in determining how much money each state gets is not its population but how high its unemployment rate has risen.

The three states that get the most significant share of the money are New York, California, and New Jersey. These are three of the most liberal states with Democratic governors. That's not a coincidence.

Blue Pennsylvania gets more per person than red Ohio. Blue Massachusetts and red Tennessee are about the same size, but somehow, Massachusetts receives $1.5 billion more in handouts. Connecticut gets twice as much bailout money as Utah, despite the fact that they are about the same size in population.

The governors' joint statement declares: "A state's ability to keep businesses open and people employed should not be a penalizing factor when distributing funds. If Congress is going to provide aid to states, it should be on an equitable population basis."

But it isn't. The way Congress passes out money is akin to assigning the highest performing students an F and the lowest performers an A. Maybe this is what the left means by "equity." The last shall be first.

Most red states have already balanced their budgets. So how will Republican governors use their free money?

Here's a better idea: Rather than squander the money with more bureaucratic spending and the risk of inflating a financial bubble in their state budgets in the years ahead, devote every penny of these funds to finance tax reform and relief. Eight states have no state income tax. Those states are Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, Florida, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas.

It would be rough justice for the blue-state bailout. If Democrats take the red states' money, Republican governors should make their states income-tax-free havens and steal the blue states' families and businesses. The states without income taxes create twice as many jobs as the high-tax blue states.

If you think California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York are melting down now, wait until they have to compete against regions of the country in the South and the mountain states with no income taxes.

Will the last person in New York please turn out the lights?

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."