Michigan Is Headed Back to Rust Belt Poverty
- By Stephen Moore
Since the early days of Henry Ford, Michigan was the proud symbol of America's industrial might.
But then, starting in the 1970s, things went south -- in part because of the might of the unions that ran the state's political machine. That's when Michigan transitioned into the sad symbol of closed factories: the American "Rust Belt." Flint, Michigan, became a ghost town.
Honey, Joe Biden Just Shrunk Our Pension
- By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.
Why should you care? Because Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company's ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they decide where to invest the money.
Death Taxes Are Immoral. Even Worse, They Don't Work.
- By Stephen Moore
"I have no respect for the passion of equality," Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of America's great jurists, once declared, "which seems to me merely idealizing envy."
But envy, and its sister vice, greed, are very much back in fashion today when it comes to the progressive Left. Just listen to President Joe Biden, who wants $2 trillion of new taxes, mostly paid by millionaires, so that the rich will "pay their fair share." In seven blue states, including California, Illinois and New York, new wealth taxes and higher income tax rates on people such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Taylor Swift have been proposed by liberal lawmakers.
America's $100 Billion Climate Change Flop
- By Stephen Moore
For at least the last 20 years, politicians in Washington, at the behest of green energy groups, have spent some $100 billion of taxpayer money to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going for us so far?
A recent Associated Press story, based on the latest data on global carbon emissions, provides a pretty accurate report card: "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached a Record High in 2022."
The article tells us: "Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power. Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)"
Scholars Rank Biggest Spending Presidents as the Greatest
- By Stephen Moore
Before President Joe Biden entered the White House, he consulted with several prominent historians about how to be a great commander in chief. Their answer: Grow government. Spend, spend, spend. Don't worry about blowing up the debt.
It was the worst possible advice, and that meeting no doubt contributed to our economic calamity.
So, I wasn't surprised to read about a poll of more than 100 of America's most prominent academic historians who rated the greatest and the worst presidents. This is a farcical popularity contest that the Siena College Research Institute conducts every few years.
It's Now or Never for School Choice Everywhere
- By Stephen Moore
This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested "proficient in math."
Can we all agree these are schools that aren't proficient in teaching math -- or just about any course, for that matter?
A Fox News investigation calculated that Baltimore spends an average of $21,000 per student. How could the teachers unions possibly spend that much money and accomplish almost no learning?
What if Federal Workers Never Showed Up for Work and No One Missed Them?
- By Stephen Moore
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 years 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.
End the COVID-19 'Emergency' -- Now
- By Stephen Moore
Almost every decision that has been made in Washington and in the states that deals with COVID-19 has been about politics and money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and not about public health.
COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has killed over a million Americans -- almost all over the age of 65. But from day one, the overreaction and misinformation from politicians and the public health industrial complex was a campaign to embarrass and discredit then-President Donald Trump. It became an excuse to get Trump out of office.
Proposed Airline Merger Would Bring More Competition and Lower Fares
- By Stephen Moore
If you want to see a classic case of how President Joe Biden's regulatory tendencies are strangling the U.S. economy and raising prices, look no further than the latest Justice Department efforts to kill an airline merger that is pro-consumer.
JetBlue has its sights on merging with a smaller and financially ailing airline, Spirit.
JetBlue's management believes the synergies between the two airlines will save over $300 million in costs. Spirit's shareholders (i.e., the airline's owners) have voted to approve the merger.
It's Official: Trump's Tax Cuts Paid for Themselves
- By Stephen Moore
How many times have you heard President Joe Biden or Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) berate the Trump tax cuts as "a giveaway to the rich"?
Biden and congressional Democrats now want to let expire major planks of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, former President Donald Trump's signature domestic achievement, particularly the incentives for American businesses to invest more here at home.
Biden's ESG Investment Rules Threaten Your Retirement Savings
- By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden's Labor Department recently announced a new rule that will permit money managers to play politics with trillions of dollars of people's retirement savings.
The administration is pushing environmental, social and governance investing, which allows retirement fund managers to select stocks of companies based on their positions on social and environmental issues.
Put simply, retirement savings will be used as leverage to force companies to reduce their carbon emissions and establish racial and gender quotas and other social justice fads completely unrelated to securing a high return on workers' lifetime savings.
US Big Three Auto Companies Commit to Making Cars That People Don't Want
- By Stephen Moore
I grew up in a household with parents who were of the Greatest Generation. They lived and shouldered through the Great Depression, and then their lives and families were thrown into turmoil on Dec. 7, 1941. My grandfather worked for the War Department in Washington, D.C., and during World War II, my father served in the Pacific Theater.
Both my mother and father made a solemn vow that as long as they lived, they would never buy a German or a Japanese car. No matter how well they were made. They were the enemies. They were the ones who killed nearly half a million Americans. Period.
Republicans Should Just Say No to Any Budget That Funds 87,000 New IRS Agents
- By Stephen Moore
One of the biggest promises by Republicans in the 2022 election season was that if they won a majority in the House, they would defund the $80 billion that Biden wants to hire 87,000 new IRS agents.
But now they are about to agree to a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending deal with President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year. That includes the full funding for the IRS expansion.
Even Republicans Are All in on Washington's End-of-Year Spending Spree
- By Stephen Moore
The federal government is running annual $1 trillion to $2 trillion budget deficits, which is more than the entire gross domestic product of most nations. But if you believed that Republicans would take a chainsaw to the budget (figuratively) and slash the waste from the federal budget, then to paraphrase the "Oliver Twist" character of Fagin, the miser, "I think you had better think it out again."
So far, since the midterm elections, the Republicans in Congress seem to be doing just the opposite. The first decision by House Republicans when they learned they had won a slim majority of 222 to 213 was to bring back earmarks. These are bridges to nowhere, peanut subsidies and sports arenas for local professional teams paid for by federal taxpayers.
The Night the Lights Went Out in Europe
- By Stephen Moore
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.
No, America Does Not Owe the World Climate 'Reparations'
- By Stephen Moore
I've made the case in previous columns that the climate change movement is mostly a climate change hustle. Let's be real. None of this is about changing the temperature of the Earth. Even the most naive environmental activist can't really believe that building windmills and driving Teslas is going to cool the planet.
This is all about money. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of government handouts.
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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." 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.
