Terrorism in Europe is getting more frequent. | Al Gore's carbon footprint got bigger. | Philadelphia's soda tax is failing. | Venezuela becomes a dictatorship.| And more.
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| August 5, 2017 |
The terrorism problem in Europe is getting worse. The United States needs to help Europe get tougher. Global warming doomsayer Al Gore did something about his carbon footprint: He made it bigger. Philadelphia's soda tax after six months: Revenues are lower than expected. Is beer consumption up? Cato and Heritage interns debate libertarianism v. conservatism. Venezuela's socialism turns out to be kind of like Cuba's socialism—bloody and oppressive. Who knew that investigating racial discrimination was something the Civil Rights Division wasn't supposed to do? |
Terrorism is becoming more frequent in Europe not less. A chart from a new report by Robin Simcox: Simcox offers a number of recommendations for U.S. policymakers to help Europe toughen up, including this point: 'ISIS and al-Qaeda represent virulent strains of the political ideology of Islamism. Defeating these groups militarily will not signify the end of the war against Islamism until the entire ideology has been discredited and dismantled, and the failure of the ideology has been communicated to key audiences.' [The Heritage Foundation]
Al Gore said he was going to change his carbon footprint, and he did: He made it bigger. Ten years ago, we learned that Al Gore's Nashville home consumes 20 times what an average family home consumes. Following the revelations from a report published by the Tennessee Center for Public Policy Research, the former Vice President and global warming doomsayer pledged to give his home a green makeover. Drew Johnson (who was the president of the TCPR when the first report on Gore's home was published) reports: "Upon winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Gore stated, 'The only way to solve this [environmental] crisis is for individuals to make changes in their own lives.' "Judging by his own home electricity consumption, Gore is failing to live up to the standards he expects of everyone else. "After the embarrassing revelations that his home wolfed down nearly 20 times more electricity than the average American household, Gore made updates in an effort to make his home more energy efficient. Even those costly measures could not prevent his home energy consumption from rising even higher. "This year, Gore's electricity consumption averages 19,241 kWh per month, or more than 21 times the typical usage in an American home. That is a considerable increase from Gore's 2007 home energy consumption of about 18,400 kWh per month, which spurred a six-figure green renovation of the house. […] "Al Gore has attained a near-mythical status for his frenzied efforts to propagandize global warming. At the same time, Gore has done little to prove his commitment to the cause in his own life. While Gore encourages people throughout the world to reduce their carbon footprint and make drastic changes to cut energy consumption, Gore's own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down." [Internal citations omitted.] [National Center for Public Policy Research]
Philadelphia's soda tax is running into problems. Scott Drenkard reports that the city's revenues from the soda tax were only $39.5 million—15 percent off of the target of $46 million—for the first six months of 2017. Why the discrepancy? People change their behavior in response to a tax. Drenkard: "Soda sales in Philadelphia have also declined since the tax went into effect at the beginning of 2017, threatening the long-run sustainability of the tax. According to some local distributors and retailers, sales have declined by nearly 50 percent. This is likely primarily due to higher prices, which discourage purchasing beverages in the city. Some Philadelphia taxpayers took to Twitter as the tax took effect, noting their plans to shop for groceries outside the city. This kind of tax avoidance is only feasible for consumers with means of transportation, making the tax even more regressive. "Purchases of beer are also now less expensive than nonalcoholic beverages subject to the tax in the city. Empirical evidence from a 2012 journal article suggests that soda taxes can push consumers to alcohol, meaning it is likely the case that consumers are switching to alcoholic beverages as a result of the tax. The paper, aptly titled From Coke to Coors, further shows that switching from soda to beer increases total caloric intake, even as soda taxes are generally aimed at caloric reduction. […] "Concerning public program funding stability, the Philadelphia Beverage Tax website still maintains, '[O]ur revenue projections do account for a significant drop in consumption of these products within Philadelphia. But even with the drop in consumption, our revenue projections still cover the programs.' Nevertheless, the decline in consumption is worse than predicted. Ultimately, the lag in soda tax revenues jeopardizes funding for city programs, especially as soda consumption is falling nationwide as well." [Internal citations omitted.] [Tax Foundation]
It's the socialism, stupid. Ana Quintana on Venezuela's further drift into dictatorship: "On July 30, socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro held a fraudulent and highly unpopular election. As a result, all 545 seats of a new 'Constituent Assembly' are being filled with candidates hand-picked by Maduro's National Socialist Party. "The Constituent Assembly is empowered to rewrite Venezuela's constitution, expel members of the opposition from the current National Assembly, and consolidate all power in the executive branch. "On the day of the election, Maduro's security forces killed 16 innocent demonstrators and bystanders. Videos showed national guardsmen pouring live fire into unarmed crowds and lobbing teargas into hospitals and apartment buildings. "In 121 days of anti-government protests, government forces have killed 130 innocents and detained 3,500 demonstrators. More than 430 protestors remain incarcerated. […] "President Donald Trump has recognized that Maduro crossed an irreversible line. His administration's pivot away from President Barack Obama's failed 'strategic patience' strategy with Maduro has been the proper course of action. "But now, the U.S. must ratchet up the pressure on Maduro more than ever—and we cannot do this alone. It will take a coordinated effort of many nations." [Daily Signal] And James Roberts writes: "Venezuela's score in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index makes it the most corrupt country in the Western Hemisphere, and helped drag the country to the bottom of The Heritage Foundation's annual Index of Economic Freedom, too. "Back home in America, the mainstream media is dutifully reporting on the demonstrations against the government. "Sometimes they mention that Maduro's thugs on motorcycles are randomly beating people up and that Venezuelan government sharpshooters are targeting and killing protesters to terrorize the public and scare them into staying off the streets. "But, in a country where many young people are still enchanted by the Bernie Sanders message of socialism and free stuff, not enough attention has been paid to this simple fact: that in the real world—a world where bad people say good-sounding things to voters and then proceed to steal other people's stuff once they take office—Venezuela is what you get when socialist theories are actually put into practice." [Daily Signal]
Who has the superior political philosophy, libertarians or conservatives? Who has the better intern debaters? Check out the annual Cato Institute-Heritage Foundation intern debate. [Cato Institute]
Who knew that investigating racial discrimination was something the Civil Rights Division wasn't supposed to do? This week, the New York Times published a report from Charlie Savage that lead with this sentence: "The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department's civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times." In fact, as other news outlets subsequently reported, the Justice Department is planning to investigate a complaint from a coalition of 60 Asian-American organizations accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans—a complaint that the Obama administration had ignored. And as David Harsanyi points out, aside from the fact that it is an ugly argument to claim that righting past wrongs requires treating innocent people unfairly, Asian-American students have a valid complaint that the government should take seriously: "We already know that the population of college-aged Asian-Americans has grown in the past decades, and yet their representation in Ivy League schools has declined. Critics of college admission programs argue that this is due to 'holistic' evaluations of applicants that purposefully and disproportionately devalue the academic achievement of Asian-Americans by giving them low marks in nonacademic areas. In many ways, this policy is reminiscent of the Ivy League quotas of the 1920s that discriminated against Jews by evaluating students on various bogus measures of 'character' rather than their academic achievements. The Jews—who, at that time, were also often poor and from urban areas—started their own schools or raised the quality of other schools." [Reason] |
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