Hey, Uncle Sam: Stop Paying People for Not Working By Stephen Moore
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.
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.
Twelve or 13 months from now, the race for the Republican nomination for president -- and the race for the Democratic nomination, if there is one -- will probably be over.
— This piece analyzes recent presidential voting patterns in the Midwest by comparing the big counties that cast roughly half the statewide vote with the smaller counties that cast the rest of the statewide vote.
— In Illinois and Minnesota, more than half of the statewide vote comes from dominant metro areas, and improvements in those areas from 2012 to 2020 allowed Democrats to maintain their strong position in both states.
— The smaller-county halves of Iowa and Ohio have zoomed right, pushing them out of the roster of competitive states.
— The bottom hasn’t dropped out for Democrats in nearly the same way in Michigan and Wisconsin.
President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Amid news that Donald Trump is about to be indicted by a hyperpartisan prosecutor and of his hysterical responses, and prompted by vagrant reading about the War of 1812 and Woodrow Wilson's violations of civil liberties in World War I, a thought occurred to me. America seems to go crazy every 50 years or so.
— The American electorate has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, and a pair of factors — race and education — have driven the changes.
— The electorate has become more diverse and more highly educated. Democrats rely heavily on nonwhite voters and have improved with white college-educated voters, while Republicans have cut deeply into Democratic support with non-college whites.
— Racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones, have fueled Republican gains with the non-college white electorate.
All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion.
Since the early days of Henry Ford, Michigan was the proud symbol of America's industrial might.
As one who has spent pleasant time on Sand Hill Road and the Stanford campus, I'm dismayed by the demands for special treatment coming from the denizens of one of America's most privileged and affluent precincts.
— The fate of Wisconsin’s state supreme court will be decided next month.
— About two-thirds of the states will have supreme court elections next year.
— Key states with supreme court elections to watch in 2024 include Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Ohio.
"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."
Where did COVID-19 come from? Was it a lab leak or from a Chinese wet market? Any scientist or researcher suggesting the former, that COVID-19 originated in or was released from a lab, was ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. The lab in question is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the “largest BSL4 lab in the world” the type of facility where such research would be conducted.
Big city elections provide clues about trends in national politics, the composition and attitudes of Democratic constituency groups, and voters' responses to emerging matters. Recent examples include the March 2019 primary for mayor of Chicago and the June 2021 Democratic contest in New York City.
— The calendar year before the presidential primary voting begins is often defined by winnowing, as contenders emerge and then fade.
— But Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are taking up so much oxygen that we may already have the top contenders, with everyone else who runs essentially an afterthought.
— DeSantis is polling well for a non-candidate, but we need to see how he actually performs before assuming that his support is solid.
— If another candidate supplants DeSantis (or Trump), or at least vaults into their stratosphere, don’t necessarily assume it will be someone who is currently well-known now or has a lot of formal political experience.
Government imposes a million rules. Americans seem to want more!
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?
When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China's Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and with a higher degree of confidence (moderate) than the Energy Department (low).
— If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the U.S. House of Representatives elected in the 2024 election would decide the presidency.
— Republicans are very likely to continue to control enough House delegations to select the GOP nominee as the winner, meaning that 269 is effectively the winning Electoral College number for Republicans, while it’s 270 for Democrats.
— Republicans currently control 26 of the 50 House delegations, the bare majority to win in the House if the Electoral College does not produce a majority winner.