What To Expect If Harris Gets Elected

  • Without doubt, Vice President Kamala Harris has made it as difficult as possible to pin down exactly where she stands on major policy issues.

  • Besides studiously avoiding challenging interviews, she has also made a series of notable reversals of previous policy stances, for example abandoning previous support for banning private health insurance, for banning “fracking” for oil and gas, and for banning internal combustion cars.

  • These are all huge issues. If she has walked away from all of these positions, then how can you tell where she stands on anything?

  • Actually, I would submit that it is easy to figure out how Harris will govern on almost any issue.

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Big Energy Policy Mistake: "All Of The Above"

  • In a post on October 23, I noted that, during this election cycle, “energy realism” has suddenly become a positive electoral issue for Republicans.

  • The positive electoral effect comes from pointing out that a forced energy transition increases consumer costs, limits choice, and destroys jobs. Examples cited included President Trump’s use in his campaign in Michigan of the Biden-Harris regulations restricting combustion vehicles, and his use in Pennsylvania of Harris statements that she would ban fracking.

  • But there is another approach out there to the subject of energy realism, which has been taken up by many Republican candidates and energy think tanks. That approach goes by the name “all of the above.”

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Cuba: The Collapse Accelerates

  • Less than three weeks ago, on October 10, I had a post about Cuba with the headline “What The Hell Is Going On In Cuba?”

  • The post noted that it is difficult to get real information from Cuba, and that there had recently been almost total silence about that island from the mainstream media. But if one researched some out-of-the-way sources, it turned out that there is some sort of sudden economic collapse going on there.

  • Besides economic production declining significantly, and pervasive shortages of basic goods, there was also information from a source in Spain (El Pais) that Cuba’s population had suddenly dropped by close to 20% over just the past two to three years. Moreover, the 20% who had departed were not randomly distributed, but rather were concentrated among those in their prime working years, meaning that Cuba had suddenly lost around a third of its working age population.

  • In the short period since that post, the collapse has accelerated.

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New York Times Runs Huge Free Campaign Ad For Trump

New York Times Runs Huge Free Campaign Ad For Trump
  • I know it’s crazy, but I continue to get the print edition of the New York Times delivered to my front door every day. It’s part of my mission to keep up with what the other side is thinking.

  • I read it (less and less) so that you don’t have to. But even an occasional skim makes it obvious that with every passing year and day they retreat ever more from serious news, and descend ever further into crazed partisan zealotry.

  • So imagine my surprise this morning when the entire central portion of page 1, covering three of six column on the top half of the front page, contains what appears to be a huge free ad for Trump for President.

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Suddenly Energy Realism Is A Winning Political Issue

  • For well over two decades, the linked causes of climate alarmism and energy transition have provided their adherents with a powerful upper hand in American politics. For that matter, supporters of those causes have had just as strong, if not a stronger upper hand in the politics of all the countries with advanced economies, whether in the EU, or Canada, Australia, and others.

  • Here in the U.S., for all this time, almost no politician — even those claiming to advocate generally for smaller government or less regulation — has been willing to push back directly against assertions of “climate crisis,” or against demands for reducing “carbon emissions” or for achieving a “net zero” energy economy via government coercion and massive subsidies. Most Republicans seeking office have been cowed into deflecting and deferring on these issues, if indeed they have not openly gone along with the left’s energy program.

  • I have long said that this situation can’t last. The reason is that the proposed energy transition is infeasible and can’t possibly work; and the effort to achieve the impossible via government mandates and subsidies would inevitably drive up costs and otherwise impact voters directly in ways they would see.

  • At some point the voters would react. But when would that occur?

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The Ongoing Erosion Of Welfare Reform In New York

  • When I started this blog back in 2012, we were just coming to the end of 20 years of Republican, or quasi-Republican, New York City mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg), who also had support from a newly-Republican Congress elected in 1994.

  • One of the great triumphs of that era was welfare reform. The new Republican Congress made reform of welfare a priority, and after their first efforts were vetoed by President Clinton, in August 1996 he signed a compromise bill called the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. Among the reforms contained in that Act were time limits and work requirements for welfare recipients.

  • It’s now nearly 11 years since Bloomberg left office, and the goal of minimizing welfare dependency is long gone and forgotten.

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