Radical efforts in moving away from fossil fuels is very risky

May 23, 2023

There has been a lot of talk lately about gas stoves, and the possibility of them being banned.

A story from the January edition of Popular Mechanics magazine quoted Richard Trumpka, Jr., who is a commissioner on the U.S. Consumer Product and Safety Commission, as saying that due to concerns about health conditions such as respiratory illness, cancer, and childhood asthma, the federal government has a ban “on the table” to prohibit gas stoves in homes. “This is a hidden hazard. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” Trumpka said.

Trying to put concerns of a ban to rest, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm assured members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the Biden administration does not seek to ban gas stoves.

“I will say that the Department of Energy is not banning any gas stoves, that we are doing our duty to make sure that appliances are more energy efficient as we are required to do under the Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975,” she told the Committee. “Nobody’s taking my gas stove, nobody will take your gas stove. But in the future, gas stoves that are high-end, which is all that we looked at, can be more efficient.”

Also, at about the same time came news that in order to combat health and climate risks, the state of New York has banned the use of natural gas for cooking and heating in most new residential buildings. And, the Energy Department, “is proposing new efficiency rules for gas stoves that only about half of current models on the market would likely comply with,” The Washington Times reported.

Also, a number of cities in California, Massachusetts and Washington are working to end using natural gas in homes and other buildings.

Burning things like coal, oil, natural gas, kerosene and wood is not good for the environment, as we all know. Burning natural gas in stoves emits nitrogen dioxide (NO2) when it is burned at high temperatures in the presence of nitrogen in the atmosphere. This can irritate human airways and can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems. 

Smoking too much, drinking too much alcohol, and lots of other things are also harmful, but they are not banned, and in some cases not even heavily regulated. The key to this is knowing how harmful to people young and old is it to burn natural gas in homes. 

An article on the Scientific American website notes: “The American Gas Association (AGA), a natural gas industry group, issued a statement pushing back against the December 2022 study that linked gas cooking with asthma. The statement claimed the study authors did not conduct measurements of real-life appliance use and ignored some of the scientific literature on this topic. The AGA cited a separate study that found no evidence of a link between cooking with gas and asthma symptoms of diagnosis.”

While it is true that the AGA has a vested interest in opposing the idea that burning natural gas can potentially cause health issues, the Biden administration also has a vested interest: its mission to kill all fossil fuel use. But since American natural gas is the cleanest on Earth, is our use of it really that harmful to the environment?

And given the way China and India continue to increase their use of fossil fuels, and considering our efforts to make them cleaner, is our using them really a serious problem? Should the U.S. work at a pace to eliminate fossil fuels so fast that it will negatively affect its people, particularly when other nations increase their damage to the environment more than the U.S. reduces it?

Virginian Mark Christie serves on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). He wants people to understand the trouble the nation is headed toward with its current path on energy.

He joined the FERC panel in January 2021, prior to which he was a member and former chairman of the State Corporation Commission, Virginia’s energy regulator, for 17 years.

Appearing before a U.S. Senate committee earlier this month, Christie said that “The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability. The arithmetic doesn’t work,” he said. “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”

Christie bases his warning on problems in the recent past, such as the deadly energy catastrophe Texas experienced two years ago, and the problems in the eastern part of the country last year as Christmas approached.

Three other FERC commissioners joined him in the message to the Senate, and Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin and Dominion Energy Virginia have expressed their concerns, too.

The message they are sending is that eliminating most or all fossil-fuel-produced electricity too rapidly, and replacing it only with wind and solar, is a recipe for failure. 

Wind and solar are nowhere near the point where they can carry the load alone. Solar panels and wind turbines produce nothing most of the time. Fossil fuels work all of the time.

Someday in the future wind and solar will have developed sufficiently through natural development to replace fossil fuels. We don’t need this radical effort to force it on the nation.

Biden’s economy continues to punish already hurting families

May 16, 2023

President Joe Biden’s economy continues to punish Americans, even those who supported him. That punishment comes in the form of high prices on most everything, employers who can’t find enough workers, and a declining standard of living, among other things.

Biden celebrates the recent rise in wages, which is a good thing in a growing economy, which creates an atmosphere where employers are competing for workers to keep up with increasing demand. Today, there are millions more open jobs than there are people looking for a job. 

But this economy is not growing, and wages are increasing now because employers can’t fill their open jobs and have to raise wages to get workers, so they can keep the doors open. This increases costs and results in higher prices. This is not normal, and is a sign of an unhealthy economy. 

What has caused this? During the pandemic, millions of people lost their jobs, and two years after it ended the labor force is still down by 2.8 million workers. Where are these people, and why aren’t they working?

According to Casey Mulligan, an economist at the University of Chicago, in a study titled “Paying Americans Not to Work,” 24 states have unemployment benefits and Obamacare subsidies for an unemployed family of four that are equal to or above the national median household income.

This family of four in three of those states gets $100,000 a year. In 14 other states, the family gets $80,000 or more. That is pretty decent pay for just staying home, so why work? Another question: Why are these benefits still being paid when the pandemic is over and millions of jobs are unfilled?

Another aspect of this situation is that Biden is able to brag about a low unemployment rate because those nearly 3 million people who lost jobs are not counted in the labor force, since they are not working or looking for a job. But when you count those who are being paid not to work as part of the labor force, the unemployment rate is horrible,

By contrast, before the pandemic hit, median family income in 2019 rose to almost $73,000, a $4,600 increase over 2018. Median family income levels rose for every racial group: White Americans, 5.7 percent; Black Americans, 7.9 percent; Hispanic Americans, 7.1 percent, and Asian Americans, 10.6 percent. This resulted in a lowered poverty rate of 10.5 percent, a 60-year low. 

While wages today are growing, the good aspects of higher pay are offset by the increases in the price of goods and services. The effect on workers is actually not more money in their pockets, but effectively less than they had before.

How can we reverse things and get back to those great numbers from 4 years ago? That requires things that Biden and company will not do. Things now are more to Biden’s liking than during the campaign, when he said, “I truly think that if we do this right, we have an incredible opportunity to not just dig out of this crisis, but to fundamentally transform the country.”

Does that sound familiar? Wasn’t it former President Barack Obama who said during a campaign appearance, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America?” Also, back in those days was the idea among Democrats that you “should never let a good crisis go to waste.”

When we compare today’s dismal economy with that of 2019, Biden has kept his promise, where the economy is concerned. And the Covid crisis provided the opportunity.

But not everybody likes the Obama-Biden prescription, and even fewer are doing okay under it, let alone doing much better. And the future does not look like improvement is likely.

Andrew Puzder, a former economic advisor to former President Donald Trump, addressed a National Leadership Seminar audience at Hillsdale College. He said this about what the future may hold. “In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve, 16 predicted a recession in 2023 and two predicted a recession in 2024, while only five predicted we’d have only one-half percent economic growth, well below the 2.1 percent average over the past 20 years and dangerously close to what has traditionally been considered a recession.”

So, if things stay the same, a recession is likely. But sensible action on the part of the administration can fix things. Two things are critical to accomplishing this: energy and labor. 

Many people do not like fossil fuels, but the nation and the world still badly need them. Open the doors to energy production by removing the many obstacles to it, in terms of laws and regulations, some of which are courtesy of Biden.

While keeping government assistance programs for those that actually need them, stop paying people not to work so that the able-bodied will get a job. With a full labor force, production of badly needed goods and services will come back.

When the supply of goods and services is greater than the demand for them, we will not have inflation. And we will have plenty of the things we need and want.

Our education system is failing to prepare our children for their future

May 9, 2023

How good is America’s education system, and how does it stack up against other countries?

“The United States isn't investing as much in human capital as other developed countries and its comparative advantage is falling behind as a result,” The Balance online tells us. “U.S. students' math skills have remained stagnant for decades. The country is falling behind many others which have greatly improved, such as Japan, Poland, and Ireland. U.S. test scores are below the global average.” China did not participate in this evaluation.

Four points are offered to support this claim:

* The U.S. placed 11th out of 79 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2018.

* The top five math-scoring countries in 2018 were all in Asia.

* U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003. Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.

* The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 10th in its 2020 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.

These points tend to show that there were problems in K-12 education prior to the pandemic. School closures, that caused trauma and isolation of young people during the Covid-19 pandemic, brought on some serious problems.

U.S. News and World Report explains in an article from last October that “An overwhelming majority of states saw significant score declines among fourth- and eighth-graders in math and reading between 2019 and 2022, with students posting the largest score declines ever recorded in math, according to new federal data that provides the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the impact of the pandemic on academic achievement.”

The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called “The Nation’s Report Card,” shows the state of student learning after the pandemic. 

“The results reflect what U.S. students in fourth and eighth grade know and can do using a common measure of student achievement across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Schools, Puerto Rico and 26 large urban districts that volunteered to participate in the assessment,” U.S. News reported.

Fourth-graders lost 5 points in math scores and eighth-graders lost 8 points in math, while both grades lost 3 points in reading.

“These mathematics results are historic,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. “They are the largest declines in mathematics that we have observed in the entire history of this assessment.”

Further, the proportion of students in the basic level — the lowest level of achievement — increased in math from 25% of fourth graders, and 38% of eighth graders by 3% each.

Another U.S. News article, this one from last Wednesday, titled “‘A National Concern’: Student Scores Decline on U.S. History and Civics,” explains that while young people are more active in politics than ever, their knowledge of history and government continues to decline.

In U.S. history, eighth-graders continued a decline in scores that has run nearly a decade. They also had their first-ever scores decline on a national civics assessment, as reported the prior week by the NCES.

“These data are of national concern,” said Carr, responding again to the situation. “A well-rounded education includes a grounding in the democratic principles. These assessments challenge students to show their knowledge and skills as they prepare to become engaged citizens in a democracy. Too many students are struggling to understand and explain the impact of civic participation and how our government works and the historical significance of events. This is concerning. Quite honestly, I was shocked.”

She said that the rise in students scoring at or below the basic level on the exam was most troubling: 40% of eighth graders scored below basic compared to 34% in 2018.

“We were shocked to see the first declines ever in math assessments. It's hard to top that,” Carr said. “But for US History I was also very, very concerned because it's a decline that started in 2014, long before we ever thought about COVID. So, this is a decline that’s been on the down for a while.”

A September, 2022 Forbes article titled “Pandemic-Era Policies Caused Dramatic Education Decline” discussed the effects of the responses to the pandemic on education, and the heavily negative results on student learning. 

“Fast-forward to nearly 10 months after the pandemic’s most serious weeks, and the Chicago Teachers union defied the school board’s order to open while hundreds of districts, including Fairfax County, VA, said that even with vaccinations their teachers would not return to school, contradicting the relevant CDC guidance,” the Forbes article said. “Such behavior — which some have called a rolling teachers strike — persisted in some cities for two years.

“This is not the first dire news about the United States’ failure to deliver excellence to every student. That came in 1983, and just about every couple of years since. The question is whether it can be the last. It can be, if we unleash innovation, and give families, not the system, the power to direct the educational path of students,” the article concluded.

Whether the schools are public or private, the parents who pay the bills cannot be excluded.

The Biden administration should focus on the real problems we have

May 2, 2023

The insecure U.S. southern border allows thousands of unknown people to enter the country daily. Mexican cartels continue drug trafficking, human trafficking, and criminal entry into the country. These people kill Americans through direct violence, and through bringing in deadly fentanyl and other drugs. 

“The number of migrants apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities after crossing the Mexican border without authorization increased by 25 percent in March as the Biden administration prepares for a major policy shift next month,” CBS News reported last month. It’s good that apprehensions increased, right?

In February, U.S. Border Patrol recorded 130,000 apprehensions of illegal entries between the official ports of entry. However, in March that number grew to 162,000. We do not know how many entrants escaped capture, but we know that this year’s March apprehension number was less than in March of 2021 and 2022, despite the fact that the number of those trying to get in illegally grows in the spring.

And from the CBS News report, there is this: “Absent any major policy pivot, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing for up to 13,000 migrants to cross the southern border per day, about 400,000 each month, once Title 42 lifts in early May, according to internal projections. The Trump-era order is set to lapse once the national COVID-19 public health emergency expires on May 11.”

As recently as last month Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to claim that the border is secure. “It is my testimony that the border is secure and we are working every day, day and night, to increase security,” he said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on April 18.

However, anyone with eyes and an open mind knows this is profoundly untrue. That includes Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who said basically the exact opposite of Mayorkas. Ortiz has said that five of the nine sectors along the southern boundary were not secure, and neither was one sector of the northern border.

When asked whether he disagreed with Ortiz, his top border expert, Mayorkas said he did: “I respectfully do in that regard,” he said.

The border is not secure, and Mayorkas’ performance is disgraceful, and creates a dangerous and unacceptable situation.

With this horrible and humiliating performance by our government at the borders, the Biden administration has it focus elsewhere.

Rather than strengthen the border with more Border Patrol agents and adding barriers to slow illegal entry, President Joe Biden wants to hire more IRS agents. From Townhall.com: “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to place special gun-carrying agents in all 50 U.S. states.”

“According to the agency’s website, the Criminal Investigation (CI) division is looking for IRS employees authorized by law to carry and use firearms, which are responsible for investigating financial crimes, money laundering, tax-related identity theft, and terrorist financing efforts.

“The ‘major duties’ listed for the position say that agents will be trained to ‘follow the money’ and prosecute any financial crimes.

“’No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation. Because of the expertise required to conduct these complex financial investigations, IRS Special Agents are considered the premier financial investigators for the Federal government,’ the website reads.

“Additionally, agents must carry a gun and be prepared to protect themselves from physical attacks without any warning. The description for the role also cautions that the agent may face life-threatening situations forcing them to use a firearm.”

The IRS seeks to fill 360 positions in 249 locations, with at least one agent in each state, the job posting notes.

“The IRS role is to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share,” according to IRS.gov.

Most of the work of the IRS involves income taxes, both corporate and individual, and collecting taxes owed to the government is obviously an important function.

But is the current state of taxation and taxes collected more important than the number of illegal entrants to the country, and the violence and death to American citizens that occur daily because of the disgraceful situation at our southern border?

And isn’t the primary function of collecting taxes dependent upon agents who help tax payers with questions about their tax returns, and review tax returns for accuracy, as the IRS website states? Does the IRS really need an armed law enforcement division, and 360 new employees?

If there are really problems with tax collections warranting hiring a division of armed agents to deal with them, there is likely a simpler, safer and less expensive way to fix it: Change and simplify the tax code.

The tax code is contained in two volumes totaling 2,652 pages. And it is ridiculously complex. At 450 words per page, the tax code is well over 1 million words.

We need a low and universal tax rate, say 10 to 15 percent, and only a few deductions, for dependents and for charitable and other beneficial donations. And, obviously, some low-income people should not be taxed.