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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization
Milton Friedman explained how prices are your best friend in an energy crisis.
Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency in North Carolina on Tuesday in response to a cyberattack that has caused the state’s biggest pipeline to temporarily shut down. His declaration triggered a North Carolina law which “prohibits excessive pricing during states of disaster, states of emergency, or abnormal market disruptions.” In a tweet reinforcing this law, Cooper urged Carolinans to “report” price increases. "I have talked today with federal officials including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and we have a full court press to get the Colonial Pipeline back up and fully operating quickly. Report price gouging and please don’t rush to top off your tanks." The state complaint form even includes a special checkbox for reporting gasoline price-gouging. In other words, price controls are in full effect. Yet, in the wake of these measures, residents across the state have been encountering long gas lines and empty stations. Basic economics shows that Cooper’s prohibition of price gouging is largely to blame for the gasoline shortage.
The recent fuel disruptions show the danger in the government's long war on oil pipelines.
The Colonial Pipeline provides nearly half—45 percent—of the fuel consumed on the East Coast. As other astute commentators have noted, “one pipeline network shouldn't be serving half of the East Coast's fuel needs.” The reality is regulatory hurdles have made it all but impossible to build new pipelines, which has placed a great deal of pressure on existing energy infrastructure. And it’s getting worse. Indeed, politicians are now actively scrapping pipelines that are instrumental to meeting future energy needs. One of President Biden’s first initiatives was to scrap, by executive order, the Keystone Pipeline, a 1700-mile pipeline that could have carried roughly 800k barrels of oil each day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. (Instead, the bulk of that fuel will be transported by railways, which are less environmentally friendly and more dangerous.)
If governments really believed in local solutions, they wouldn’t take our money in the first place.
Earlier this year, President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief law known as the American Rescue Plan. As part of the package, $350 billion was set aside for state and local governments, and that money is being delivered starting this week. But while the federal government is promoting this funding as “intentionally broad and flexible” so that local governments can tailor the spending for local needs, the reality is that they have included some major strategic restrictions.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
A Vietnam Retrospective
President Biden has promised that by 2022, the residual American military forces will leave Afghanistan. When that happens, it will complete the trifecta of American failure in its three major wars in the last half century: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Having spent years in Vietnam, when I look back, several causes for our failure there stand out.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
A Vietnam Retrospective
President Biden has promised that by 2022, the residual American military forces will leave Afghanistan. When that happens, it will complete the trifecta of American failure in its three major wars in the last half century: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Having spent years in Vietnam, when I look back, several causes for our failure there stand out.
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from Rolling Stone
Race and White Supremacy in American Policing
Racist strands in policing run deep in American history. “From the beginning there’s been negative relations between police and communities of color,” says Lorenzo Boyd, a police consultant and trainer, and vice president of diversity and inclusion at the University of New Haven. “From slave patrols through the Civil War, Jim Crow period, the civil rights movement, racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and on through the current Black Lives Matter protests.” Two very different uprisings in the past year tell the story. Data from Bellingcat, an open-source intelligence website, lists more than 1,000 instances of police brutality at BLM protests since Floyd’s death. By comparison, this January, law enforcement left the Capitol underdefended against an almost uniformly white mob of Trump supporters that included avowed white supremacists, far-right extremists, neo-Confederates — and off-duty or retired cops and military. Members of the mob erected gallows on the National Mall, overran security, and set off to hang the vice president.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from The Washington Examiner
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, News & Media Website in Washington, DC
Less than two months after jamming through a “temporary” expansion of the Affordable Care Act in the American Rescue Plan, President Joe Biden is asking for $200 billion to make the changes permanent. The law increased subsidies previously available for enrollees on the ACA exchanges and removed the upper income limit on subsidy eligibility for the years 2021-2022. Biden’s proposed American Families Plan continues these ACA augmentations forever — confirming that the original expansion had nothing to do with addressing a COVID-19 pandemic need and everything to do with enlarging and entrenching government’s footprint in healthcare.
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