You want to talk about separating families? Let's talk about Mollie Tibbetts.

John Kass 
Chicago Tribune

Go ahead and play your word games and tell me about the cruelty of borders, the kindness of sanctuary cities and the political wisdom of abolishing ICE.

Tell me about government’s lack of compassion, and of the heartbreak of families separated from each other through broken immigration policy.

Tell me how racist it is, how cruel it is to think that a nation should control its own borders and stop, rather than reward, illegal immigration.

And then tell me about Mollie Tibbetts. 

The 20-year-old University of Iowa student was separated from her family too.

She was separated from those she loved a month ago, when she went jogging near her home near Des Moines. Her accused killer, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, authorities said, was in the country illegally. He worked at a large dairy farm owned by a prominent Iowa Republican.

His lawyers, seeking a gag order in the case, insist Rivera is here legally. The truth will eventually come out, as well as the circumstances of her death, with an autopsy to be performed.

Investigators said her alleged killer stalked her, approached her, then said he blacked out and couldn’t remember much. But he remembered enough to help police find her body in a cornfield.

And ever since, Mollie Tibbetts has been pulled at by politics.

Democrats who want the Latino vote ignore her or they pivot, smoothly, making their pitch for “compassionate” immigration policy and attacking President Donald Trump.

Republicans who are pushing stronger border control use her as an emotional symbol. Republicans whose agribusiness political contributors want cheap labor for their packing houses and their farms avoid her, as if she was never here.

Apparently, they really don’t mind a few dead Americans if they can keep to their political talking points.

And Trump, who rode to the White House by tapping into a real, desperate and bipartisan American desire to stop illegal immigration, disfigures the debate. He exaggerates the threat of crime by those in the country illegally, making it seem as if they’re driving a violent national crime spree when statistics say otherwise.

But victims of violent immigrants here illegally are more than mere statistics or a point from which to pivot and attack.

They’re more than broken eggs in the political policy wars.

They were real people. They lived real lives. They were loved. They were daughters and sons and husbands and wives. And they are dead, the result of immigration policy and partisan politics.

Because if we actually did something about illegal immigration, rather than shout at each other and play politics, Mollie Tibbetts would be alive today.

She’d be alive like so many others would be alive.

Kate Steinle would be alive. She wouldn’t have died while walking along a pier in San Francisco with her father when a habitual criminal here illegally fired a gun. He claimed it was all an accident and was acquitted of murder.

“Help me, Dad,” were her last words.

We don’t know the last words of Dennis McCann of Chicago. But he’d be alive too.

Instead, McCann was dragged to his death under a car driven by a drunk in Chicago in 2012. McCann was hit so hard that his shoes were left on the pavement. The rest of him was pulled a half-mile under the car along Logan Boulevard.

The drunk was jailed and charged, but under an allegedly compassionate policy pushed by Cook County Democrats pandering for Latino votes, the driver, Saul Chavez, was not held for pickup by federal immigration authorities.

He was compassionately allowed to make bail. And once out on the street, Saul Chavez fled back home to Mexico. And there were no real answers for McCann’s horrified and stunned family.

All they were given were vague, political regrets and mind-numbing Democratic Party talk by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle about process and writs. Preckwinkle’s a powerful political boss. McCann is dead. Chavez is gone.

So please, tell me about political cruelty.

Trump vaulted to the top of the Republican presidential pile by targeting illegal immigration. The Republican establishment was not pleased. And Democrats campaigning against Trump use his exaggerations as reason to avoid victims like Tibbetts.

Or step over them quickly, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and presumptive candidate for president, did on CNN the other day.

“I’m so sorry for the family here and I know this is hard not only for her family but for the people in her community, the people throughout Iowa,” Warren said.

Warren will go through Iowa next year and eat corn and talk about close-knit families and demonstrate warmth as she campaigns in what her aides will call “the heartland.” She might pick up a pork chop and pose in farm clothes next to a bale of hay.

But she stepped over Mollie Tibbets and then it was time for her pivot, a pivot that was ruthless as it was obvious in its cynicism.

“Last month, I went down to the border and I saw where children had been taken away from their mothers,” Warren said on CNN. “I met with those mothers — who had been lied to, who didn’t know where their children were, who didn’t have a chance to talk to their children. And there was no plan for how they would be reunified with their children.”

Sen. Warren, isn’t that horrifying, parents not knowing the whereabouts of their children, not having a chance to say goodbye?

Like the parents of Mollie Tibbetts, after their daughter went out for a run, never to come home.

Minimum wage facts and fantasies

Interesting post from Scott Grannis.  Good facts to add to the minimum wage conversation...

Minimum wage facts and fantasies

For years I've had fun at cocktail parties by asking this question: what percent of all the people who work in the U.S. are paid minimum wage or less? Of the hundreds of people I've asked, only one has come even close to the right answer. The great majority of the answers I've received (try it yourself!) range from 10% to as much as 50%. My conclusion: A huge number of Americans hold the fantasy belief that a significant percentage of those who work would benefit from raising the minimum wage.

Fact: only 0.5% of those who work take home minimum wage or less.

The facts can be found in a BLS publication from earlier this year: Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2017.

In 2017, 80.4 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 542,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.3 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.8 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.3 percent of all hourly paid workers.

According to the BLS establishment survey, there were 147 people employed in 2017 (those paid by the hour plus those who received a salary), so the percentage of all the people working who were making minimum wage or less was 1.8 /147 = 1.2%. Furthermore, according to the BLS, some 1.3 million of all those who work in the U.S. made less than the minimum wage. In percentage terms, a bit less than 1% (1.3/147) of those who worked in 2017 made less than minimum wage.

But here's where it gets really interesting: "The industry with the highest percentage of workers earning hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (11 percent). About three-fifths of all workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, almost entirely in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received."

If we assume that the vast majority of those who worked in the restaurant and food service industry (10 million) actually took home at more than the minimum wage (thanks to tips), then in 2017 there effectively were only about 700 thousand people (0.5% of all workers) who actually took home minimum wage or less. Big, under-reported fact: in all likelihood, 99.5% of those who worked in 1017 took home more than the minimum wage for their efforts, and without any help from government fiats. 

So the next time you're at a cocktail party, ask the person next to you to guess the percentage of U.S. workers that earn minimum wage or less. You won't be lying when you tell them it's about ½ of 1%.

Raising the minimum wage would presumably benefit less than 1% of the working population, but it would most likely make it harder for young and inexperienced workers to get a job. It's already hard enough: the unemployment rate for those aged 16-19 is 13.1%, by far the highest unemployment rate for any age cohort. (The unemployment rate across all age groups today is a mere 3.9%.) Politicians should be lobbying to reduce or eliminate the minimum wage, not increase it. The best way for someone to make more than minimum wage is to first get a job, any job, at any wage, then work your way up. 

Is the Earth Warming?

How Do You Tell If The Earth's Climate System "Is Warming"?
August 09, 2018/
Francis Menton

The earth's climate system "is warming." True or false? The answer is that there is no definitive answer. And if someone tells you there is, then that person doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

A more precise answer to the question is that whether the earth's climate system "is warming" or "is cooling" entirely depends on who gets to pick the start date for the analysis. If you are the one who gets to pick the start date, then you can make it so that the system is either warming or cooling, whichever you would like for your purpose of the moment.

But of course, there are many people out there today with a lot invested in the proposition that the climate system "is warming." That proposition is a key tenet of global warming alarmism. To "prove" the point that the system "is warming," advocates use the simple trick of picking a start point to their liking, making for a presentation that appears to support their position. Have you been fooled by this simple trick? The advocates leave it up to you to figure out that if you picked a different start point, you could just as easily make an equally convincing presentation showing that the climate system "is cooling." A lot of seemingly intelligent people can't figure that out, and get taken in by the scam.

I raise this point today because it appears that, as part of the campaign to suppress disfavored political speech, Google has begun within the past few days adding a legend at the bottom of YouTube videos that express politically incorrect views in the field of climate science. For example, here is the legend that they have added to a video made for Prager University by eminent MIT atmospheric physicist and climate skeptic Richard Lindzen:





"Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming."

The quote comes from the first two sentences of this Wikipedia entry with the title "Global warming." Well, Wikipedia says it, so I guess it must be true!

According to this post at BuzzFeed on August 7, others who have been subject to having the same legend affixed to their work include Tony Heller of the Deplorable Climate Science Blog, Mark Morano of Climate Depot, and the Heartland Institute. (So far, nothing comparable has happened to the Manhattan Contrarian; but then, I don't make YouTube videos.)

So let's investigate the question of whether the earth's "climate system" is or is not warming. You could, for example, look at the chart presented by Wikipedia in that entry. Here it is:






That looks rather dramatic. On the other hand, the whole vertical scale of the chart is only about 1.5 deg C; and they picked 1880 as their start date. (The slope here is also greatly accentuated by some very large and questionable "adjustments" that have made earlier years cooler and more recent years warmer. You can read my eighteen part series "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time" for much more detail. But those details are not critical for understanding the current issue.)

Does your skeptical mind possibly think, when they use that phrase "century scale," is that just a bias-free description of the issue at hand, or is it instead a hand-wave to provide a fake justification for picking a preferred start date? Why do we need to go back 138 years when we are considering a question phrased in the present tense -- whether the climate "is" warming? Wouldn't the present tense normally be used to cover a much shorter period, like a year or two or three at most? So you ask, what has the climate system been doing during that time? For the answer, how about looking for temperature data to the far more accurate UAH satellite-based series which provides monthly data points going back to 1979. Here is the latest chart from that source:






This time, you get to pick the start date. To cover the last few years, how about picking early 2016? After all, these last couple of years should be a much better indicator of whether the climate "is" warming or cooling than the entire last 138 years. Really, what do temperatures more than 100 years ago, or even 30 or 40 years ago, have to do with the question of whether the earth's climate "is" warming? So we look at the UAH chart, and we find our answer: since early 2016 temperatures have fallen by more than 0.5 deg C. Thus, once we get to pick our preferred start time, it is obvious that the climate system "is cooling."

Or, you can pick a different start date to your liking. How about 1998? That will give you an entire 20 year run. It's hard to say that the verb "is" should cover a period of more than 20 years. On the UAH series you can see that temperatures have also fallen about 0.4 deg C since early 1998. Again, even on this substantially longer scale, the earth "is cooling." (Note, however, that there is a significant difference between the Wikipedia chart and the UAH satellite series as to what has happened since 1998. On the Wikipedia chart the latest reading (2017?) is up about 0.3 deg C from 1998; while on the UAH series, the latest reading (July 2018) is down about 0.4 deg C from the then-records set in 1998. That's those "adjustments" in the surface temperature record that I was talking about. I would say that there is no credible position that the heavily adjusted surface temperature record that Wikipedia relies on should be used for this purpose over the far more accurate and un-tampered UAH satellite record.)

But how about if we decide that there is something to this "century-scale" thing? Let's agree that we're going to go back many, many decades to determine if the earth "is warming." But if we're going to do that, where do we stop? If you want, you can go back a hundred million years; or even a billion. And if you follow this subject a little, you probably know that the 1700s and 1800s are a very suspect era to start a series like this, because those centuries are a known cold period sometimes referred to as the "Little Ice Age." Picking a date in the "Little Ice Age" as the start point to prove warming is what's called "cheating." Let's pick something more fair. How about going back a nice round millennium? Was that time warmer or cooler than now?

OK, they didn't have networks of thermometers set up around the globe in the 11th century, let alone the highly accurate satellites that we have today. But scores of scientists have done hundreds of studies based on many sorts of "proxies" to determine at least whether it was warmer or cooler at that time than today. It turns out that the evidence is rather overwhelming that it was warmer. Actually, this is what is known as the "Medieval Warm Period." But picking a date in that period as your start date for deciding whether the earth "is warming" is no more fair or unfair than picking a date in the "Little Ice Age."

Here is a compilation of dozens of studies reaching the conclusion that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present: "More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present." Examples:
"Paper finds Medieval Warm Period in Arctic was much warmer than the present."
"Medieval Warming Exceeds Modern Warming, Per New Research Using 120 Proxies."
"Earth was warmer in Roman and Medieval Times say German researchers."

There are literally dozens more, if you follow the links. The conclusion is inescapable: on a centuries-scale basis, the earth's climate system "is cooling."

And by the way, if you want to keep going back farther and farther, you can keep finding time periods that were warmer than the present. Examples: the Roman Warm Period, from around 250 BC to 450 AD; and the Holocene Climate Optimum, about 5000 to 3000 BC.

So here's the real answer to the question of whether the earth's ciimate system "is warming":
If your start date is June 2018, it "is warming."
If your start date is January 2016, it "is cooling."
If your start date is January 1998, it "is cooling."
If your start date is 1880, it "is warming."
If your start date is the year 1000, it "is cooling."
If your start date is the Dark Ages, it "is warming."
If your start date is Roman times, it "is cooling."

In short, the question is completely meaningless.

It's hard to believe that the supposed geniuses at Google could be taken in by a scam so obvious and so transparent. But that's the world we live in.

Stossel - How to Save Social Security

So...Democrats would rather cut benefits or 'tax the rich' (which won't raise enough money and will depress economic growth) than use the long-term benefits of investments to help erase the shortfall.  This 'privatization' is what every pension fund does - without investment, the obligations would be unsustainable.

 

Canada: A High Price for Free Healthcare

  So, to summarize:

• Since care is 'free', patients have no incentive to moderate their use of medical services or shop around to secure the best prices
•  The only way to keep costs down is to ration care, creating long waiting lists and delays
• Canadians face a media wait of 5 months for specialist treatment after referral
• Patients awaiting care suffer lost wages, which are not factored in to cost estimates
• Why would we want this system in the US?  The benefits are clear for those who cannot pay, but it would be unwise to destroy the system to benefit only those who cannot pay. 

  Canadians Pay A High Price For Free Health Care

SALLY C. PIPES
8/14/2018

Senator Bernie Sanders and his army of supporters of government-run health care evidently believe that American workers could use a pay cut.

That's the natural consequence of single-payer health care, as a recent analysis of Canada's healthcare system illustrates.

Last year, Canadian patients forewent $1.9 billion in wages while waiting for medical treatment, according to a report from the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank. Canadian patients face some of the longest waits for care in the industrialized world due to their government-run system's strict rationing.

If progressives successfully install single-payer here in the United States, Americans will pay for the privilege of waiting in line.

In Canada, the government covers the cost of most healthcare services. Patients don't pay directly when they visit doctors or emergency rooms -- though they do indirectly, in the form of high taxes.

But because the cost of their care is hidden, they have no reason to moderate their consumption of medical services or shop around for treatments and providers that provide the best value.

To control spending, the government requires hospitals and clinics to adhere to strict budgets. Doctors and hospital administrators have to ration care to stay under budget. So patients face grueling treatment delays.

Last year, Canadians faced a median wait of more than 21 weeks to receive treatment from specialists after obtaining referrals from their general practitioners. That's double the median wait time of 25 years ago.

Patients in some parts of the country had it far worse. The typical patient from New Brunswick had to confront a median wait of nearly 42 weeks — about ten months. Nationwide, for the first time, more than 1 million Canadians are waiting for treatment.

A recent analysis of health systems in 11 wealthy nations found that Canadians faced the longest wait times — and not just for specialist care. Delays for family care and emergency room treatment were also the longest among peer nations.

These treatment delays can injure or even kill patients. Long wait times were a factor in 44,000 Canadian women's deaths from 1993 to 2009.

Patients waiting for surgeries and other procedures often can't work. They may be in pain or have limited mobility.

Even if they can work, they're generally far less productive and are forced to stay home sick more frequently. According to the Fraser Institute's new analysis, on average, every patient waiting for care lost $1,800 in foregone wages.

And that figure is actually a conservative, charitable estimate of the negative impact of single-payer's waits. It only factors in hours lost during an average workday; it doesn't place any value on the non-work hours that patients spend suffering in pain.

When all hours of the week are accounted for — excluding time for sleep — Canadian patients actually lost a combined $5.8 billion, or almost $5,600 per person, playing the waiting game.

Even that higher estimate doesn't account for the financial burden on friends and family who take time off to care for waiting patients. Nor does it factor in the expenses incurred by roughly 60,000 Canadians who travel to another country — often the United States — to seek non-emergency medical care each year.
Single-Payer: Health Care Fool's Gold

Americans have long opposed Canadian-style health care. But public attitudes are changing. Just over half of Americans support single-payer health care, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll from earlier this year.

Democrats are trying to capitalize on that swing in public opinion. They've introduced no less than a half-dozen plans that would ratchet up government control of the U.S. healthcare system to varying degrees — with the eventual goal of fully socialized medicine.

Senator Bernie Sanders's "Medicare for All" plan is the most radical. He's modeled his scheme on the Canadian system. During a trip to the country last fall, he asked rhetorically, "How is it that here in Canada, they provide quality health care to all people . . . and they do it for half the cost?"

But as the evidence from Canada shows, "free" single-payer health care is actually quite expensive. Americans needn't learn that lesson the hard way.

Pipes is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care" (Encounter). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.

Who Knew That 'Free' Could Cost So Much?

Democratic Socialism: Who Knew That 'Free' Could Cost So Much?

Socialism: Since the Democratic Party took a turn for the worse toward so-called democratic socialism, the party's leading lights have laid the promises on pretty thick. Free Medicare for all! Guaranteed income! Guaranteed jobs! Subsidized housing! Free college! Universal pre-school! Wow, and all for free.

Well, not exactly. In a devastating piece that appeared on the left-of-center web site Vox (to its credit), Manhattan Institute fellow Brian Riedl went through the simple math of what free actually costs. It's a lot.

It's not just the free aspect, but the fact that the democratic socialists have made so many promises that must be paid for that will make it so tough to swallow for most voters.

Riedl looked at the 10-year costs of all the various promises made by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described democratic socialists. He was as generous as could be in his estimates, often accepting the democratic socialists' cost estimate even when it was patently and absurdly too low. It's quite a laundry-list of promises with enormous costs: "Free college" ($807 billion); Social Security expansion ($188 billion); single-payer health care ($32 trillion); guaranteed jobs at $15 per hour plus benefits ($6.8 trillion); infrastructure ($1 trillion); student loan debt forgiveness ($1.4 trillion).

Net cost: about $42.5 trillion over 10 years, give or take a few hundred billion. To paraphrase the late, great Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen: "A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

As it is, current federal estimates expect about $44 trillion in tax revenues over that same period, with a deficit of roughly $12.4 trillion. Remember: All this democratic socialist spending comes on top of what we're already spending.

Long-term, the fiscal picture grows progressively (forgive the term) worse.

"The 30-year projected tab for these programs is even more staggering," wrote Riedl. "New proposals costing $218 trillion, on top of an $84 trillion baseline deficit driven by Social Security, Medicare and the resulting interest costs."

Today, Riedl notes, total federal spending typically swings between 18% and 22% of GDP. But with the democratic socialist agenda in place, it "would immediately soar past 40% of GDP on its way to nearly 50% within three decades." If you include state and local government, the total cost for this federal fantasia would equal 60% of GDP — more than any country in Europe.

Even after massive cuts in other programs, such as slashing defense by half, or adding in phantom savings from supposed cuts in state health spending and anti-poverty programs, you still come up $34 trillion short over 10 years.

To raise $34 trillion, Riedl calculates, would require "seizing roughly 100% of all corporate profits as well as 100% of all family wage income and pass-though business income above the thresholds of $90,000 (single) or $150,000 (married), and absurdly assuming they all continue working."

Or, he said, you could go to a VAT tax — a national sales tax on all goods and services. But it would have to be huge: a tax of 87% on everything you buy. Oh, and by the way, that still doesn't pay for the $12.4 trillion deficit that's already estimated and that we discussed above. So you'd need even more taxes.

Those number are scary enough. But we're not even raising the issues of: a.) massive cost overruns in these programs, which are inevitable; or, b.), whether these programs will work as described or instead end up ruining our free-market economy.

Not surprisingly, in public socialists say they won't ruin free-market capitalism. They'll save it!

Wrong again. As Meagan Day, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, wrote (also in Vox): "Here's the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism. And we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States."

Americans should know that these are the very ideas that have destroyed the economies of the USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua, most of Africa, North Korea and, as we're now seeing, Venezuela. And they're not "democratic" at all. They're just socialism.
Danger: Socialism Ahead

The bigger point is, these utopian ideas are not fiscally sane. And we mean that literally. They are a bizarre fantasy that should be discarded immediately by any reasonable person interested in an economically prosperous future.

That some believe that replacing capitalism with socialism makes you better off shows the profound failure of our nation's education system. Because it's something that has never happened in the history of mankind. And young people, who are among socialism's most ardent fans, don't seem to even know this.

The great economist, social thinker and professor Walter Williams recently summed up the struggle between capitalism and socialism: "Capitalism doesn't do well in popularity polls, despite the fact that it has eliminated many of mankind's worst problems, such as pestilence and gross hunger and poverty."

To vote for socialism is to vote for national bankruptcy, a loss of freedom, a lower standard of living and an end to innovation. And be forewarned: As Venezuelans, Zimbabweans and Nicaraguans are now discovering, once socialists control things, they never give up power peacefully.

Tips + Minimum Wage

To further strengthen Stossel's argument, the minimum wage for restaurant workers is the same as all other workers - if tips don't raise the server's wage to the minimum, the employer must make up the difference.