12/23/2024

News

Green Floyd: Roger Waters and the Great Green Chevron Scam

The slow unraveling of the case against Chevron has been eye-opening, not least for the glimpse it offers into the way money moves through the progressive activist world.

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The New Corn Laws: Why Housing Costs Are So High

Land is of course inherently finite, and land in a particular labor market is not only finite but may be scarce. However, that there is only so much land in a metropolitan area does not determine how many people can live on it. A given plot of land can be occupied by a large apartment […]

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Environmentalists Demand Trillions in Lower Returns for Pensions

Apart from being impractical, since four of our nation’s Fortune 500 companies are in the energy industry, divesting from fossil fuels would be a stunningly poor investment strategy, according to a new report conducted by Professor Daniel Fischel of the University of Chicago Law School and economists Christopher Fiore and Todd Kendall. The report found that for eleven of the country’s largest public pension funds, combined losses would be in the trillions of dollars.

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Business-Friendly States Are Growing at the Expense of Those that Tax and Spend

By examining state-by-state migration trends, it is easy to see which states are enacting pro-growth policies. After all, Americans have shown that they are willing to “vote with their feet” for better economic opportunities even if it means leaving their home state. The top-ten states in the 2017 rankings have gained more than 3.75 million residents in the past decade. The bottom-ten states, meanwhile, have lost more than 3.78 million residents over the same period. In addition to experiencing a mass exodus of residents, states with oppressively high tax rates such as New York, Illinois, and California have lost vast economic opportunities and vast amounts of wealth. Job growth over the last ten years was nearly three times higher in the top ten states than it was in the bottom ten.

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Help the Poor Move

Some of the diseases of poverty are individual, but some of them thrive in congregation (gang violence is the obvious example), and the only treatment for these is dilution. A 2000 Brookings study of Jack Kemp’s famous Moving to Opportunity program found “striking” evidence that poor families who moved out of poor communities with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development earned more, enjoyed better health, and saw their children do better in school than did families who stayed behind.

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Less Marriage, More Inequality

The standard portrayals of economic life for ordinary American families paint a picture of stagnancy, even decline, amidst rising economic inequality. But rarely does the public conversation about our changing economy, from the pages of the New York Times to the halls of the Brookings Institution, focus on questions of family structure. This is a major oversight: Though few realize it, the retreat from marriage plays a central role in the changing economic landscape of American families, in race relations in America, and in the deteriorating fortunes of poor boys. In a word, the increasingly “separate and unequal” character of family life in the United States is fueling economic, racial, and gender inequality.

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Can California Be Saved?

The state may be entering the fifth year of a catastrophic drought, but California has not started building any of the new reservoirs that were planned but long ago canceled under the unfinished California Water Project. Water may remain scarce, but legislators — many of whom have their daily water needs met by the ancient reservoirs and canals that their grandparents built — don’t seem overly bothered. They prefer to designate transgender restrooms, ban plastic bags at grocery stores, and prohibit pet dogs from chasing bears and bobcats.

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