Numerous headlines over the last few days have trumpeted NOAA’s announcement that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States. In my opinion, most of these news stories have left out some important context that betrays a bit of a bias.
Continue reading Missing Context and the Warmest Year On Record
More evidence that ethanol is just awful: it seems to be destroying Guatemala’s food supply. This sounds like a complex event with many factors (food independence isn’t even necessarily desirable for a country when you can have the comparative benefits of globalized trade), but Guatemala doesn’t really seem to be better off here.
I have often wondered if ending the U.S. ethanol mandate would be the single greatest, most achievable, and least controversial policy change that would most benefit the most Americans – and the world as well. Naturally that concept is highly subjective and uncertain (ending the drug war could arguably cause more good, but it is still much more controversial). But it seems that ethanol has become increasingly unfavorable to more and more groups while its costs and lack of benefits have become increasingly obvious.
In reverse order of importance:
Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #26
“The Sandy Hook Shooting – Fully Exposed” is a YouTube video that has quickly garnered over 10 million views questioning the official story about last month’s elementary school massacre. In this post I will prove to you there has been a lot of deception surrounding this Sandy Hook Shooting video. This is a simple, logical post. No aliens, holigrams, rituals, or anything like that. Just facts.
Let’s make the story we have been told clear. According to the video, there were no children who perished at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. People acting sad were unconvincing actors with holes in their stories and mistakes in their actions. The whole thing is a hoax, possibly perpetrated by the government or Illuminati to take away our guns.
If this is true, it is truly one of the most saddening conspiracies ever pulled off in the U.S. And after watching the video, you would have no reason to question it. The clips, the images, the background music, the sans-serif text, the misspelled words. Why would they lie about something like this? How could they pull off something so horrible?
More importantly, who could possibly have something to gain from something like this? Like everyone who watched the video in the last two weeks, I felt a chilling sadness. However, after investigating for myself, my sadness quickly became confusion, frustration, and disbelief, you are about to see why, this is a run-on sentence. Here are some things that show another side to that “Official Hoax Story.”
I’ve seen conservatives arguing that the fiscal cliff deal was a “victory” of sorts because it got the Democrats to support permanent extensions of the Bush tax cuts for almost all income levels.
When the cuts were originally enacted, Democrats opposed them as “tax cuts for the rich.” But when it was time for them to expire, Democrats had to admit that the cuts affected all income levels. (Obama often claimed Republicans were holding the middle-class “hostage” to extend tax rates for the wealthy.) So the Democrats supported extending them, first temporarily for all income levels, and then permanently for all income levels under $400,000.
When Republicans lowered taxes for all Americans, Democrats pretended they didn’t help average Americans – it didn’t fit the Democratic narrative that Republicans don’t care about them. But when Republicans are about to let those taxes go back to the rate they used to be, Democrats get all upset that they’re going to hurt average Americans, even though the only way this “hurts” is that it takes away the “help” they pretended was never there in the first place!
But Democrats aren’t the only ones suffering from Selective Tax Cut Syndrome.
55. Africa’s rapid economic development continues. “64 recent major discoveries of fuel deposits” will help the continent meet its growing energy needs, and connecting more Africans to the electric grid will save millions of lives from the respiratory illnesses caused by “kerosene lanterns and charcoal cookstoves,” among many, many other coming improvements to their standards of living.
56. At the other end of the spectrum, obesity may be declining in children of low-income families in the US.
57. Doctors have restored a man’s sight with adult stem cells.
58. SpaceX has successfully test-launched their reusable Grasshopper rocket at a new record height. It’s pretty cool to watch the rocket defy gravity as it calmly hovers and lands. SpaceX is working on fully reusable launch vehicles with the goal of making space travel dramatically cheaper.
See the latest from Expected Optimism for several more reasons for optimism.
I briefly mentioned the infuriating, market-distorting, rent-seeking tax credits in my previous post on the fiscal cliff deal. I’m glad to see that the issue is getting more attention.
The tireless Tim Carney reveals that the lobbying for these tax credits did not occur in the busy final hours at the turn of the year, but in lobbying for a bill last summer that was copied verbatim into the fiscal cliff bill. Carney claims the Obama administration specifically insisted that these tax credits be shoved into the deal.
Continue reading The Loopholes That Aren’t Available to Most Americans
As I first learned about the fiscal cliff bill and skimmed through the 157-page PDF, I thought it was terrible, and most likely worse than no deal at all.
Continue reading The Fiscal Cliff Deal: Slightly Less Terrible Than I First Thought
