30 September, 2017

Rights and Government

It's been an interesting week in the news. It seems many (even in the media) need a constitutional refresher.

Claim #1: 
"NFL players have a first amendment right to protest during the national anthem"
Well, yes, and no.  They have a first amendment right to protest without government interference.   Since the government is not taking action against them the first amendment is irrelevant to the NFL protest situation.  And yet we repeatedly hear this as a rationale.

Claim #2:
Recently, Chuck Todd (host of 'Meet the Press' on NBC) said Senate candidate Roy Moore "doesn't appear to believe in the Constitution" because Mr. Moore said our rights come from God.

Here's the clip.

As a political analyst, Chuck Todd should know better.  If he isn't familiar with the basics of our founding documents, he shouldn't serve as an analyst.

Here's the relevant portion of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Note who does the endowing...the Creator.  The Creator is a synonym for God.  This is one of the key points of the document - rights don't come from government and can't be taken away by government.  The founding documents specifically exists to limit the power of government to ensure individual freedom and protected rights can always be expressed without government interference.

It's disappointing that many in the media and public misinterpret these key points  It's even more disappointing that their statements often go unchallenged by those around them.  If are are unfamiliar with the details of our rights, at worst we will under-utilize them and at worse we will lose them altogether. 


Health Care Costs

Why is this not discussed more?  Health Care reform shouldn't be focused only on those who might lose coverage if Obamacare is reversed, but also on those who are suffering if Obamacare is not reversed.  Note the data below regarding health care premiums - shouldn't this negative financial impact also be part of this conversation?

PBS reports that out of pocket costs for consumers have risen and are expected to continue to rise due to the proliferation of high deductible plans. The Department of Health and Human Services also recently released a report that showed that the average individual health insurance premium rose from $2,784 in 2013 to $5,712 in 2017. That is an increase of 105% or $2,928. Average wages have not risen by $2,928 during that time period so the money consumers are paying for health care had to come from spending somewhere else. Indeed, this is why we think there has been broad based weakness in all kinds of retail spending lately. The average person has less than $1000 saved so we can almost be assured that increased spending on health care is being balanced by decreased spending somewhere else.

25 September, 2017

Climate + Science Deniers


Global Warming: Who Are The Deniers Now?

Climate Change: Global warming is "settled science," we hear all the time. Those who reject that idea are "deniers." But as new evidence trickles out from peer-reviewed science studies, the legs beneath the climate change hypothesis — that the earth was doing just fine until carbon-dioxide spewing human beings came along — is increasingly wobbly.

A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience purports to support action by global governments to reduce carbon dioxide output in order to lower potential global warming over the next 100 years or so. But what it really does is undercut virtually every modern argument for taking radical action against warming.

Why? The study admits that the 12 major university and government models that have been used to predict climate warming are faulty.

"We haven't seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models," said Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford and one of the authors of the study. "We haven't seen that in the observations."

And, of course, he's quite right. As we've noted here numerous times, the much-feared "global warming" trend seems to have halted somewhere around 1998. We know this is true because satellite temperature readings — the most accurate temperature gauge since it takes in the entire atmosphere, not just parts of it — show there's been virtually no change.

Based on the U.N.'s models, temperatures should have been shooting up sharply starting in about 1995. By this year, model temperatures show we should have had just under a 1.0 degree centigrade rise in temperature, a significant temperature spike in what is, in geological time, an extremely short period. It was those models that were used to sell the world on the idea that we needed a drastic reordering of our global economic priorities immedialy.

The reality: virtually no change in temperature. Put simply, the models are wrong.

And yet, advocates of the global warming dogma continue to ruin the careers of scientific apostates and hurl insults like calling skeptics "deniers" — which likens those who disagree about global warming science to those who "deny" the existence of the Holocaust — while denying painfully obvious facts about "climate change."

As we noted back in May, we noted that the Sunday Telegraph of Britain had reported that temperatures had dropped sharply early this year following the supposed "hottest year on record" in 2016. How could that be? 2016 was an El Niño year, which are always unusually hot.

"In recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more than 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Niño." Not only that, but despite doom-and-gloom prognostications by global warming's biased, bought-and-paid for "scientist" forecasters, ice in the Arctic and Greenland both grew this year.

Recent revisions of climate data have all been in one direction: Older data have been revised to show cooler temperatures, more recent ones, warmer temperatures. Statistics would suggest that random errors would be not all in one direction.

So it looks suspiciously like scientist-statisticians who are getting big fat checks from governments that have every interest in selling the idea of inevitable and disastrous global warming are, if you will, cooking the books.

This might be merely an academic dispute if not for one thing: To remediate it, the United Nations and a legion of scientists around the world riding the global warming gravy train are seeking to have the world spend 2% of its GDP just to slow climate change.

That's about $1.5 trillion a year, at current levels of world GDP, an enormous amount. And most of it would come from the U.S. and a small handful of other rich nations. A huge tax on you to remedy a phantom threat, in short.

No one doubts the climate is changing. That's why it's called "climate," not "stasis." The scientific knowledge of climate is still in its infancy.

But now that we have further evidence in the form of another peer-reviewed study that shows the global warming models are flawed at best, fraudulent at worse, we do agree with global warming advocates on one thing: We need to take action.

So once again, we call on President Trump to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. That bad deal won't change the climate one bit, but it will hurt the world economy and lower Americans' standard of living.

And we ask: Based on the growing evidence, who are the real deniers?