money

In 2009, there was a massive email leak from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Supporters of global warming claimed the disclosures were out of context while opponents claimed they showed efforts to manipulate data. One of the quoted emails, Professor Phil Jones, while discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures, says, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” (Emphasis added.) The House of Commons investigated and concluded, “insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to ‘hide the decline’—we consider that there is no case to answer.”

In an April 5 editorial titled “Bill would ruin certificate of need program,” the News Sentinel argued legislation Tennessee lawmakers are considering could make it harder for the poor and Tennesseans living in rural communities to obtain access to high-quality, affordable health care.

It’s generally taken as a given that the American left is in favor of individual freedoms, but when it comes to the First Amendment that seems hardly any longer to be the case. A few examples should suffice. Let’s start with one: what can only be described as the Left’s irrational obsession with attempting to overturn the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which by now has become a virtual plank in the official Democratic Presidential Platform.

Plummeting oil prices, which are largely the result of the U.S. hydraulic fracturing revolution that has nearly doubled oil production in the United States since 2008, have left many oil-exporting nations around the world reeling. The price drops have been particularly hard on nations in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Myriad OPEC governments are now stuck relying on dwindling oil revenues to fund large portions of their important social welfare programs, many of which are essential to maintaining national stability.

The bill was introduced by Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and requires that each NSF grant award be accompanied by a non-technical explanation of how the project serves the national interest. This written justification is intended to affirm NSF’s determination that a project is worthy of taxpayer support. The bill passed the House by a vote of 236 – 178. It now goes to the Senate. As the NSF is a poster child for the sometimes frivolous nature of government-funded science in the U.S., shining a light on NSF’s grant-making is a valuable and necessary thing to do.

Fracking has dramatically lowered the cost of gasoline and natural gas, giving single people more resources to find a potential partner and relieving financial tension for people in established relationships. Who knows how many eHarmony accounts have been funded with cash left over from cheap fill-ups and how many divorce lawyers were never hired when suddenly making ends meet became less of a struggle.

Eighty years go, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics.

After months of delays, the office of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio released a long-awaited “impact study” examining the effect of Uber — a popular “peer-to-peer economy” business connecting drivers and riders — on the city’s traffic-flow patterns.

Once in office, he backed that up with a March 2009, executive order that offered “$2.4 Billion in Funding to Support Next Generation Electric Vehicles” to “help meet the President’s goal of putting one million plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015.” He continued the electric-car drumbeat in his 2011 State of the Union Address: “We can break our dependence on oil…and become the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”

In this episode of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor Jesse Hathaway talks with Manhattan Institute research fellow Jared Meyer about a recent study commissioned by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio on the impact of Uber and other peer-to-peer transportation network companies on the city’s ever-present traffic congestion.

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.

It’s one of our most oft-cited quotes. George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The reason it so regularly recirculates is because we far too often fail its tenet. Which is truly sad. Because if you pay attention to the past – you can make some reasonable, rudimentary predictions about the future. And avoid a whole lot of completely unnecessary errors.

The budget deal recently reached between the White House and Congress dramatically increases spending over the next two years, to the tune of $50 billion and $30 billion, respectively. To “pay” for that spending increase, the deal promises to—wait for it—find significant spending cuts in the future. Where have we heard that before?