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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization
Millions of Americans tuned in for President Biden’s State of the Union Address last night. When the president spoke about our nation’s experiences with the COVID crisis and offered optimism for the future, there was a lot about his speech that we can all appreciate. But when Biden turned to policy specifics, particularly economics, he quickly stumbled into misleading territory and, at times, flat-out wrong assertions. 1. Crediting Big Government Policies With Economic Recovery that Was Always Going to Happen; 2. Touting the Merits of ‘Buy American’ Government Policies; 3. False Promises About Not Taxing the Middle Class; 4. Strawman Attacks on ‘Trickle-Down Economics’.
The Atlantic’s prediction on what would happen if Georgia lifted pandemic restrictions was a hot mess. But it can teach us a lot.
It’s official: food inflation has arrived. Food prices soared 3.9 percent in 2020, the Department of Agriculture recently reported.
The company's Chief Financial Officer just explained why a $15 minimum wage would ultimately hit customers in the wallet.
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from Newsweek
LEFT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, American weekly news magazineNobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously quipped that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone should let President Biden in on this bit of wisdom. The president's new $1.8 trillion "American Families Plan," which he touted in Wednesday night's address to a joint session of Congress, includes a proposal to make two years of community college "free" for all Americans. Of course, this really means that taxpayers will pay for your associate's degree, to the tune of $109 billion. As Friedman noted, there's no way to get anything without something in exchange, so we have to weigh any benefits from Biden's proposal against the costs. And the cost-benefit analysis for "free" community college fails. Miserably.
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from Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)
Recent studies of Spinoza’s political theory in a contemporary perspective often place it in one of two categories, depicting him either as a defender of individual free speech and liberal democracy or as a champion of radical democracy and collective popular power. For some, he is something like a liberal supporter of the equal individual rights of all citizens to express whatever is on their mind, an early defender of “free speech.” For others, he is more like a left-wing populist championing the power of the multitude against a state taken hostage by special interests. Either way, Spinoza is seen to give theoretical support to popular resistance to excessive state power. Either way, he potentially or actually provides fodder for populist positions, no matter whether the culpable elite is construed as an entrenched state apparatus surreptitiously seeking to curb individual freedoms (a so-called “deep state”) or as representatives of global corporate interests embedded within the structures of government (as in Negri and Hardt’s conception of “Empire.”)
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from PolitiFact
Some differences of perspective and nuances noted by PolitiFact, but Sen. Scott was factually pretty solid. As opposed to PolitiFact's remarks on President Biden's speech which had a number of "This is exaggerated" and "Lacks context" evaluations.
from Reason Magazine
Magazine in Los Angeles, California
As the Food and Drug Administration looks to start the process of banning the sale and manufacture of menthol cigarettes, the Biden administration is pursuing one of the most significant federal prohibitions in decades. Banning alcohol, drugs, and gambling were all disastrous policies that demonstrated prohibition is not the answer. And the current case for banning menthol cigarettes fails on both public health and broader societal grounds. Here are 10 of the reasons the proposed ban on menthol cigarettes is misguided. 1. The majority of youth smokers don’t use menthol cigarettes. 2. Black youth have lower rates of cigarette smoking than other groups. 3. Black adults smoke at a similar rate to white adults but the preferred products of white smokers aren’t targeted by the ban. 4. States with higher menthol consumption have lower youth smoking rates. 5. Menthol prohibition will create illicit markets and more police interactions, especially in minority communities. 6. Menthol bans have a poor record of actually reducing smoking. 7. Menthol cigarettes are no more dangerous than non-menthol cigarettes. 8. Menthol cigarettes are not more addictive than non-menthol cigarettes. 9. Menthol bans are unnecessary thanks to safer nicotine alternatives like e-cigarettes. 10. Adults should be free to choose which cigarettes they smoke.
from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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On April 21 in Columbus, Ohio, police Officer Nicholas Reardon stepped out of his car and asked “What’s going on here?” A fight spilled across the lawn in front of him, one teenage girl shoving another to the ground at his feet, then pushing another unarmed teenage girl up against a car in the driveway while raising a knife. He faced the most awful decision of any officer’s career. Less than nine seconds after arriving, he had to choose how to exercise his duty to protect and defend. He protected the girl cowering against the car, held there by Ma’Khia Bryant wielding a knife in attack position and announcing “I’m gonna stab the f____ out of you, b_____.” Both girls were Black. Officer Reardon is white. Hesitate to act, and he’s a racist for being slow to protect a Black girl. Use lethal force to stop lethal force and LeBron James tweets out his picture labeled “You’re next. #Accountability.” Police officers are trained in de-escalation. But you know who else has a responsibility to de-escalate? Every single one of us, including LeBron James, Valerie Jarrett and all those who immediately jumped on social media to provocatively accuse a police officer of racism.
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