An Appeal

Bayer is appealing a District court judgment against it and its Roundup product which has glyphosate as an important ingredient. The judgment is for $25 million, and Bayer thinks it’s a wrong judgment.

The German company’s main argument is that US federal agencies have determined its product is safe and not a carcinogen.

Bayer noted that the

verdict defies both expert regulatory judgment and sound science.

And

Because the EPA has consistently approved the sale of glyphosate without a cancer warning and has stated that including such a warning on the label would render the product misbranded, any state-imposed cancer warning is expressly preempted

Wow. Truth as defense.  What a concept.

Bold Measures

UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, wants the world to rise to the task of protecting refugees across the globe.

At this time of turbulence, the international community must do far more to shoulder this responsibility together. It is a moment to build a more equitable response to refugee crises through a sharing of responsibility.

Absolutely, the international community must, and the time is now.

However.

Taking in refugees ad lib is a fine feel-good measure, but it’s nothing more than virtue-signaling.  All this does is “help” those fortunate enough to escape, while the receiving nations cynically turn their backs on, and abandon, those who cannot escape and remain trapped in what those receiving nations agree—by their acceptance of refugees—are terrible conditions in the originating countries.

No.

If the international community truly wants to help refugees, the constituent nations will attack the problem at the source. They’ll enter refugee-creating nations and help them (or force them) to correct the ills that create such squalid, criminal, and otherwise dangerous conditions that citizens feel constrained to risk their lives trekking across vast deserts with inadequate supplies and security and floating across wide seas in inadequate boats with inadequate supplies to another, any other, nation. They’ll move to eliminate, or vastly mitigate, the need for people to become refugees.

Enter another nation to force changes—what about those nations’ sovereignty? That’s a valid consideration, but we must weigh that against the deprecation of sovereignty caused by accepting—encouraging—the brain drain and the economic drain, such as it is, that is created by encouraging the flight of what’s left of the best of those nations from those nations.

We also must balance those refugee-creating nations’ sovereignty against the sovereignty and human rights of the people themselves left in that squalor and those criminal and otherwise dangerous conditions.

Impeachments

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) having successfully led her caucus into a strictly partisan (tribal, in Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s (D, HI) words), impeachment, she now has said she’ll withhold her Articles of Impeachment until she gets her way on how the Senate will conduct its trial (and because she understands her caucus has no case to present for trial).

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), working in concert with his BFF in the House, is demanding that the Senate call additional witnesses, confessing thereby that the House Progressive-Democrat caucus has not produced sufficient evidence to make its case.

Both are wrong, though.  This is not an Article III or State criminal trial proceeding; it’s a Federal Legislative Branch Impeachment proceeding.  The House investigates and develops the relevant facts.  The Senate conducts a trial based on those facts.

We are not Medieval England where the judges conduct their own investigation.

Even Pelosi and Schumer should understand that.

Another Welfare Cliff Example

A small business owner having direct experience with employees, hiring, and welfare schema, wrote in his Letter in a recent Wall Street Journal:

We are seeing a segment of the workforce, usually single mothers, who want to work but can’t work too many hours because they would lose their federal, state and local subsidies.

This is by the design of the Progressive-Democrats: their goal is to keep these unfortunates trapped in their welfare cage, dependent on Progressive-Democrat politicians’ handouts because…votes.

The letter-writer went on:

Government assistance programs should be designed to allow people to make progress, earning more and building up savings so they can eventually be financially independent. Instead, many of these capable people are locked into a cycle of dependence.

Of course assistance programs should be structured that way rather than locking capable people…into a cycle of dependence. However, letting those people out of the cage would be a reduction of Progressive-Democrat political power.

Minimum Wage Mandate Outcomes

A National Bureau of Economic Research-sponsored Georgia Institute of Technology study by Sudheer Chava, Alexander Oettl, and Manpreet Singh tells a tale.

For each $1 increase in the minimum wage, the authors estimate that loan amounts dropped 9% more in the affected states. The risk of default was 12% higher. The average credit score for small companies in those states showed “a sharp decline.” Business entries fell 4% in the year the minimum wage went up. A year later, business exits rose 5%.
These results, the authors say, hold throughout various statistical analyses, such as while controlling for local economic conditions. The effects are stronger in businesses like restaurants and retail, which rely on low-skilled labor. Smaller and younger companies are more severely affected as well. In short, the authors conclude: “We find that increases in the federal minimum wage worsen the financial health of small businesses in the affected states.”

It’s not only the loss of jobs and harder-to-get loans, though; a minimum wage increase has more broadly reaching outcomes.

It’s also the loss of job opportunity, the loss of entry-level experience as a necessary item for moving up, the loss of spending money and/or a taste of college money for teenagers.

It’s the loss of a second income for a family that needs—or just wants the flexibility of—a second income.

It’s an increase of welfare cost to Federal and State governments as those additional unemployables—now due to Government mandate—are driven out of the labor force and into the welfare force.

But, hey—future votes to be harvested from that last bit’s crop planting.

 

The study can be seen here (paywall for the whole article; the abstract is freely available).