“Your right to vote is guaranteed. However, it seems voting with your feet is often more effective.”
The familiar Red State–Blue State map is a symbolic means of quickly communicating political preferences. The maps aren’t meant to be predictive of job, economic, or population trends, yet a recent think tank’s report suggests the metaphor may have broader significance.
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research released in February America’s Growth Corridors: The Key to National Revival, which describes the future growth of our economy in terms of “growth corridors.”
The economic and population trends reported look remarkably like the iconic election night map with Blue States (my analogy, not the authors’) defined as strips along the Pacific and Northeast Atlantic coasts and along the shores of the Great Lakes. The Red States are those located along the “Third Coast” bordering the Caribbean, the Intermountain West, the Great Plains, and the Southeast Manufacturing Belt.…
Continue Reading“As the level of scientific understanding is increasing, so too is the level of understanding that global warming probably isn’t going to be overly harmful to our health and welfare. Consider … the Gallup question ‘Do you think that global warming will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime?’ … Since 2008, an increasing percentage of respondents (64% in the latest poll) have answered ‘no’.”
Every so often the pollsters at Gallup gather information about Americans’ feelings about global warming. They have a new release. And while each new set of numbers is perhaps interesting on its own, the real insight comes from seeing how attitudes have changed over time. And from the historical trends, it appears that more and more Americans are becoming global lukewarmers–as they should be, given the evidence.…
Continue Reading“Nothing in the Clean Air Act says EPA needs to promulgate any of these rules. But nothing says it can’t do so. It’s largely discretionary, and this Administration is determined to ‘interpret’ the science and use its executive authority to restrict and penalize hydrocarbon use – and ‘fundamentally transform’ America.”
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations (Heritage Foundation: forthcoming). Many will bring few health or environmental benefits but impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the Administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon (aka anti-industrial-growth) agenda.
The Heritage Foundation has calculated that his EPA’s twenty “major” rulemaking decisions (costing $100 million or more annually) alone could cost the United States over $36 billion per year.
Cleaning Up Clean
The latest example involves a third layer (or tier) of rules that the agency says will clean the nation’s air and save lives, by forcing refineries to remove more sulfur and other impurities from gasoline.…
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