“This spring, a high school English teacher in Missouri lost her job following parents’ complaints that one of her assignments taught critical race theory.
The teacher had assigned a worksheet titled “How Racially Privileged Are You?” as prep material for reading the school-approved book “Dear Martin,” a novel about a Black high school student who is physically assaulted by a white police officer. But despite the teacher’s insistence that she wasn’t teaching her students critical race theory, an academic legal framework that asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions, the local school board disagreed and determined that the material was objectionable.
The Missouri incident wasn’t an anomaly. In Tennessee, a teacher was reprimanded — and later fired — after telling his class that white privilege is a “fact” and assigning a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay that argued that white racial resentment was responsible for the rise of former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile in Texas, a principal was suspended after parents accused him of promoting critical race theory based on a letter he had written more than a year earlier, calling for the community to come together and defeat systemic racism in the days following the murder of George Floyd. His contract was subsequently not renewed.
In none of these schools was critical race theory actually being taught, but that is largely beside the point. Rather, these fights make up the latest chapter in the GOP-initiated culture war and are more broadly about how teachers should — and shouldn’t — talk about race and racism in America.
Since January 2021, Republican state legislators have introduced nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills in 40 states “
“This more mainstream version of the replacement theory hides behind justifications that the criticism of changing American demographics is about politics and power. It’s a narrative so prevalent on the right that nearly half of Republicans believe that immigrants are being brought to the country for political gains. According to a poll conducted in December by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 47 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”
But those justifications are built on false assumptions about American demographics and immigration: that white people will soon be a minority in this country, that immigrants and non-white voters are all Democrats, and that no longer being the majority group means a loss of power. When those assumptions are torn down, the true justifications for these fears become transparent.
The theory’s first inaccurate assumption is that white Americans will soon become a minority population. But using any nuanced reading of the data, that’s not true. Yes, in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau published a population projection that by the year 2044, non-Hispanic white Americans would no longer be a numerical majority in the country. But not being the majority is not the same as being a minority: Even in that projection, non-Hispanic white Americans would still make up a plurality of the population compared with any other race. And non-Hispanic white Americans are not the only white Americans. When you include American Latinos who identify as solely white, you wind up with “more than 70 percent of the population identifying at least in part as white in 2044 and over two-thirds in 2060,” according to research published last year in the journal “Perspectives on Politics.””
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“The same research showed that presenting the demographic-shifts story as “majority-minority by 2044” prompts white Americans to say they feel more anxious and less hopeful. But when you present the same demographic changes in a more nuanced (and accurate) narrative around a rise in multiculturalism and Americans who identify as more than one race, white Americans’ self-reported anxiety was lower, even compared with a control group presented with basic facts about demographic changes with no narrative framing, according to the same study.
It’s almost like inaccurately framing demographic shifts as a zero-sum game leads to inaccurate perceptions among Americans that can amplify fear and resentment.”
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“Another plot hole in the mainstream replacement narrative is the assumption that immigrants will solely support the Democratic party. Stefanik’s campaign ran a Facebook ad in September that echoed replacement-theory rhetoric. “Radical Democrats” were planning “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” the ad claimed. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
Carlson, too, has repeatedly warned of a so-called Democratic plot to “import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they will never lose again.”
But even he concedes that this narrative is flawed, pointing out in his show last week that many non-white and immigrant voters are, in fact, Republican. In the 2020 election, roughly 2 in 5 Latino voters cast a ballot for then-President Donald Trump. And, as my colleague Alex Samuels has written, messaging about racial grievances might, perhaps counterintuitively, attract some Latino voters to the Republican Party. In fact, the GOP attracts voters from every racial group, and while white voters may be its base, not all nonwhite or immigrant voters are Democrats.”
“Overall, the presence of these coolants in the atmosphere accounts for about 11 percent of the rise in global average temperatures attributed to man-made increases in greenhouse gases.
Negotiations for the Kigali Amendment phasing down the usage of these gases by 85 percent over the next 15 years were completed in 2016 in Rwanda, and it has, so far, been ratified by nearly 130 other countries.
Bipartisan comity over what is essentially a treaty addressing climate change has been largely achieved because American manufacturers are the leading developers and suppliers of replacement coolants with significantly lower GWPs.
“The business community applauds the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for its bipartisan vote approving the Kigali Amendment for consideration by the full Senate,” reads the joint industry press release. “This is an important step in ensuring the U.S. joins this global effort while accessing international markets that will grow American jobs. It is a win for the economy, the environment, and U.S. leadership.”
Ingesting the proverbial grain of salt, a 2018 industry analysis found that implementing the Kigali Amendment would slightly reduce U.S. consumer cooling costs. Since it is estimated that unabated HFCs would add 0.4 degrees C to projected man-made warming by 2100, ratification would be a relatively cheap way to address the problem of climate change.”
“When Great Britain returned control of Hong Kong to China in 1997, a condition of the transfer was that Beijing would allow the territory to maintain its own government until 2047. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never liked this agreement, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided the excuse to all but erase the “one country, two systems” distinction.
The CCP began its authoritarian assimilation of Hong Kong in 2019, when Beijing encouraged CCP loyalists in Hong Kong’s legislature to pass a law allowing extradition of residents to mainland China. That proposal sparked pro-democracy protests and a police crackdown in Hong Kong, which captured the world’s attention.
In June 2020, Beijing responded to the pro-democracy movement by requiring Hong Kong to implement a national security law that “introduc[ed] ambiguously defined crimes such as separatism and collusion that can be used to stifle protest,” as The New York Times put it. But the pandemic provided Beijing with an even bigger opportunity to suppress dissent.
Citing public health concerns, Hong Kong postponed its Legislative Council (LegCo) elections for a year. In the interim, Beijing changed LegCo election rules to reduce the number of directly elected seats and to require that candidates pledge their loyalty to mainland China.
With only Beijing-aligned “patriots” on the ballot, CCP loyalists swept the 2021 LegCo elections. Many leading opposition politicians went into exile, while others were jailed. Voter turnout was a paltry 30 percent—the lowest since the handover in 1997. By comparison, a record 71 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the 2019 district council elections. The high turnout was reportedly driven by opposition to the extradition treaty, and pro-democracy candidates won 85 percent of the available seats.
The pandemic also has facilitated suppression of pro-democracy protests. Every June since 1990, residents of Hong Kong had marched and held a vigil in memory of the Tiananmen Square dead. But in 2020, Hong Kong announced that it would extend social distancing restrictions until June 5, the day after the massacre’s anniversary.
Hong Kong’s COVID-19 rules banned public meetings of more than eight people, with a potential penalty of six months in jail. As a result, only a small vigil was held. Organizers nevertheless were arrested and sentenced to up to 14 months in jail. The sentencing judge remarked that they had “belittled a genuine public health crisis.””
“With the passage of state laws intended to restrict access to abortion, some companies like Bumble, Yelp, and Salesforce have announced programs to assist employees who have to travel to other states in order to obtain the procedure. After the apparent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion which would overturn the right nationwide, Amazon announced that for any employees who have to travel in order to receive an abortion, it would reimburse up to $4,000 annually.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) responded by threatening legislation.
Employees’ health care costs are typically tax deductible as business expenses for their employers. Rubio’s bill, the No Tax Breaks for Radical Corporate Activism Act, would bar a company from deducting the costs of reimbursements not only for abortions but also for gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender children. In a statement accompanying the legislation, Rubio said, “Our tax code should be pro-family and promote a culture of life.”
But directly disincentivizing behavior is a fundamental misuse of the tax code, and it’s unlikely to work anyway.
To be sure, government policies are inherently incentivizing: For example, laws against robbery and murder are intended to keep people from robbing and murdering. Regarding taxes, people with incomes near the top of their tax brackets are disincentivized to increase their income, to avoid paying a higher rate.
But writing specific incentives into the tax code is an inherent market distortion, where politicians choose what products and activities they think people should be buying and partaking in. This can take the form of cronyism when certain types of products are favored. Even something as seemingly benign and beneficial as a tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles can just become a giveaway to favored companies. Additionally, when a benefit exists, it makes it that much easier for a politician to threaten to take it away: Even the health cost deduction Rubio is targeting is, itself, a distortion that incentivizes employer-provided health insurance plans.
Politicians use the tax code to achieve social policy goals because it is typically easier to insert a targeted tax credit than to pass a bill creating a new welfare program. But in practice, these carve-outs make everything more complicated: When the various COVID-19 relief bills apportioned money for stimulus checks, even with funding for additional staffing, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was slammed with calls from people awaiting their payments. When the tax code is the means by which benefits are distributed, then the tax collectors must also function as a social services agency.
Worse, it’s not even apparent that these benefits have their desired effect. A 2014 study of a tax on high calorie foods showed that such a tax can lead to more purchases of high calorie foods. In 1997, Iris Lav of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, told The New York Times, “There’s very scant evidence that the tax code has ever changed people’s behavior.”
Ironically for Rubio, this used to be Republican orthodoxy. In 1964, Ronald Reagan declared, “We cannot have [true tax] reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure.” But since then, Republicans as well as Democrats have used the tax system as a shortcut to achieving their desired policy outcomes. As a result,filing one’s annual taxes is an expensive, grueling process.
To the extent that taxation has any legitimate purpose, it is to fund the basic function of the federal government. Anything further, like incentivizing family or “a culture of life,” is simply government coercion by another name.”
“Compliance costs are high and fines for failing to do so are significant”
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“The working paper’s four writers drilled down into the data and determined that GDPR helped push the exit of a third of available apps and also suppressed the introduction of new apps into the market. New app introductions in the quarters following the launch of GDPR enforcement dropped by half.
“Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation,” the authors note.”
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“a sharp decline in both successful and unsuccessful apps entering the market. It wasn’t just bad or predatory apps being affected by GDPR.”
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” They also calculate that GDPR raises costs to produce apps by more than 30 percent.”
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“The report’s authors conclude that when the quality of a product is unpredictable (like an unknown or not-yet-existent app), the ease of entry into a marketplace is important to help determine its value to consumers. When regulatory barriers like GDPR drive up entry costs, then there can be “substantial [consumer] welfare losses” in the form of stillborn products and services we might want or need but never see.”
“And that’s the catch. In an era of strong wage growth, surging inflation, and record demand for workers, we’re still seeing an unexpectedly slow rate of workers returning to the labor market. The best and fastest solution to the problem would be to rapidly expand immigration opportunities, which have been severely curtailed by pandemic-era policies.
During the pandemic, pundits put forth three main arguments on why people weren’t returning to work: aversion to being exposed to COVID-19, insufficient child care, and overly generous relief programs. These considerations should be in the rearview mirror by now. With readily available vaccines and boosters, the risk of COVID-19 infection for the typical worker has been minimized. Most schools resumed in-person classes by last fall, primary school children have had access to vaccines since November 2021, and schooling interruptions from COVID-19 variants have faded away. Meanwhile, nearly all pandemic relief programs that would reduce a worker’s need for a paycheck have expired.
But there’s still a marginal case for each of these explanations. Around 2.7 percent of the U.S. population (up to 7 million potential workers) is immunocompromised. Because they face a higher risk of severe illness from contracting COVID-19, that threat may still inhibit them (or their household members) from reentering the workforce. Similarly, children under the age of 4 still can’t receive COVID-19 vaccines—causing some parents to keep their children away from group child care services. It’s quite possible that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, where the reduced supply of workers limits the amount of child care a nursery school can provide, thus making it harder for parents to take on a job.
And some pandemic relief programs remain in effect, which may, at the very least, be indirectly reducing the labor supply. The federal Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program still has almost $20 billion out of an initial $46.5 billion to spend. Applicants can receive up to 18 months of rental assistance, including payments for previous and future housing costs. Recipients can also reapply for additional assistance. March data from the Treasury Department show that the program distributed $2.2 billion to anywhere from 305,000 to 514,000 households. Assuming that no household was double dipping in the two rounds of the ERA program, this averages out to a $4,200 payment per household.
Similarly, the number of borrowers seeking loan repayment relief has significantly increased since the onset of the pandemic: The proportion of federal student loan borrowers opting for loan forbearance grew from under 10 percent to over 50 percent in 2020 and has remained there since.
Both rental assistance and loan forbearance would diminish the pressure a worker would feel to return to work, but there hasn’t yet been an estimate of these programs’ effect on labor supply. Perhaps in response to such concerns, the governors of Nebraska and Arkansas have declined most future ERA funding.
However, the larger contributors to the dramatically reduced labor supply are likely the increase in people retiring and the decrease in immigration.”
“Activists have convinced Americans that “organic” food is better—healthier, better-tasting, life-extending.
As a result, poor parents feel guilty if they can’t afford to pay $7 for organic eggs.
This misinformation is spread by people like Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association. She says organic food is clearly better: “The nutrition is a huge difference.”
But it isn’t. Studies find little difference.
If you still want to pay more for what’s called “organic,” that’s your right. But what’s outrageous is that this group of scientifically illiterate people convinced the government to force all of us to pay more.
Congress has ruled that GMOs (genetically modified food) must be labeled. Busybodies from both parties supported the idea.”
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“The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says the GMO labelling will cost from $598 million to $3.5 billion.
“But the public wants GMOs labelled,” say advocates. “Surveys show that.”
Of course they do.
Ask people if DNA in food should be labelled, and most say yes. Yet DNA is in everything.
Polling is a stupid way to make policy.
The idea of modifying a plant’s DNA may sound creepy, but people have cross-bred plants and animals for years.
“The corn we have today, there’s nothing natural about that,” I say to Baden-Mayer in my new video. “What native people ate, we’d find inedible.””
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“In poor parts of the world, half a million people per year go blind due to lack of vitamin A in their diets. Many die.
Scientists have created a new genetically modified rice that contains vitamin A. This “golden rice” could save those people.”
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“Sadly, in some countries, people listen to advocates like her and believe that Americans want to poison them. One group of GMO fearful protesters invaded a golden rice field in the Philippines, ripping up all the plants.”